Rebecca Lee - Bobcat and other stories

So much did I like and admire this collection on my two previous passes-through that it's no surprise that it not only holds up, but maybe even improves, on a third read.

This time I noticed how much desire is a through-line in these stories, the way that landscapes and worlds tend to rise behind (and as if from) people when they're looked at, Lee's unafraidness of posing a poetic image or sharply-edged observation about people quite straightforwardly and explicitly, and perhaps similarly her willingness to plant what seems to be an obvious plot turn early in a story and later follow through with that exact development (in a way that nonetheless feels profound), and the humour in many of the little insightful asides:

"You can have both those thoughts at the same time," I said. "You can feel very critical of a man even as you're sleeping with him," I said. David Booth laughed a little at this, a gesture that was enough to keep me interested in him for another few years.

I was struck again by how wonderful her sentences are, for the most part in their simplicity (There was a tropical storm on its way that evening, and it was already quite windy, and the girls' hair, all curly and brown, was flying around in the shifty air.) and sometimes in extended, wending yet still unfailingly clean lines:

It's true there are large turning structures - Ferris wheels - that will carry people high into the air above the ocean, that is true, and then around the next corner there are funhouses, those are great, and then there are just ordinary playgrounds on every corner, and there are things not even for children that are for children, like church spires that look like weather vanes, and there is one downtown that actually spins, a little spinning cross, an image that would live in the child's mind maybe forever, gathering ideas to it, spinning madly but also stable there, and in tonight's wind it wouldn't even be a cross, it would be distorted into maybe a little question mark, and standing for all the children in town as a kind of fervent lasting joyful little thing they always know.

As of now, my favourites are the first two, "Bobcat" and "The Banks of the Vistula", which both seem to me like basically perfect short stories. And this time it seemed clearer in "Fialta" that when the narrator left Fialta, that was the end with Sands, not the beginning, and somehow, that even though that wasn't why he felt hardly any grief at all at the time, lying on the hay as the cows watched on, remembering human love, still, perhaps it never could have been any other way (how can I blame her, being what she was and Fialta being what it is?).

(first impression; second impression)

CDs - a last shakeout for now

Okay, this really is the end of it (surely) - the final squeeze of my collection for now. Two excellent but maybe not truly essential albums by artists who are certainly essential, and three others for which the calculus of personal associations and meaning and present day enjoyment doesn't quite make keeping them necessary. (earlier this month: 1, 2, 3)

The Sixth Sense

I can't remember whether I already knew the twist when I first watched this film, however many years ago (it wouldn't have been too long after it was released), but inevitably that was uppermost in my mind on this long-delayed second viewing, brought on by my current interest in ghosts - in which vein, the solution of listening to what they have to say was resonant. This is a good movie; there's a reason why it's become so much a part of the culture.

"Greater Together" (ACCA)

It turns out I wasn't in the right kind of mode to really engage with this today, so it may be one for a return visit, as today only two penetrated, and even then really on the level of their monumentality: Bik Van der Pol's "Letters to the Land" and Goldin + Senneby's "Standard Length of a Miracle" (dominated by the installed oak tree at its centre, although the piece itself is in fact part performative and not simply static). In a little trace, too, I noticed that one of the people with whom artist Celine Condorelli is in conversation in the book that's part of her 'reading room' installation is Avery Gordon, whose Ghostly Matters impressed me recently.

"Fast Fashion: The dark side of fashion" (RMIT Gallery)

About the very detrimental effects of 'fast fashion', particularly for the (primarily developing world) labour force and the environment, and more generally the global textile chain associated with clothing production, sale and discarding.

The Beguiled

As lushly beautiful a film as any that Coppola has made, which is saying something; despite the 1860s, Civil War-era Virginia setting, the one to which it most harks back is The Virgin Suicides. A mistiness hangs over everything, from the forest of the opening scene to the many still shots of the grand southern house and gardens in which all of the rest of the action takes place (lending extra weight to the intrusion of Colin Farrell's wounded soldier's presence and the interactions with other outsiders at the ornate gate, as well as the slow zoom-in past his body and the tied blue ribbon that closes the film), and the atmosphere is charged and intense with a heaviness that is almost gothic by around the mid section - an air that's added to by the (deliberate, I'm sure) unreadability of all of the adult principals (Farrell, Kidman, Dunst; Elle Fanning also sound).

It's not just a mood piece, but rather turns out to be interestingly difficult to parse in terms of what it has to say about its characters' motivations, choices and limitations, with the characters' actions and the turns of the plot emerging in a way that seems straightforward but is, at the same time, somewhat cryptic in that very simplicity, making it hard to know how we should feel about it all. Coppola is, along with Wong Kar Wai, comfortably the most iconic film director active today for me, and The Beguiled is an intriguing addition to her catalogue.

(w/ Kelly)

Haley Reinhart - Listen Up!

A rather middling pop album, leaning a touch soul and jazz-wards, which has a bit of personality but doesn't capture the flair of those Idol performances still living on via youtube, with the lack probably being equal parts songwriting and translation of Reinhart's vocals on to record.

Frankenstein (Lally Katz; Theatreworks)

An enjoyable blast, chopped up into a series of mini-scenes telling the familiar tale refracted through a lens that includes 80s music, talking animals, significant camp and an expressively sympathetic monster.

(w/ Jon)

Okja

Well the super-pig is pretty great. And so is this whole film, both somewhat despite and thanks to how pointedly polemical it is (those scenes at the end in the factory farm are brutal).

Directed by Bong Joon-ho, also responsible for the memorable Snowpiercer (and The Host, which I still haven't seen) and while he does have a pretty unique vision, I realised earlier today that the style isn't a million miles away from Jeunet's (still high praise after all these years).

Pratchett

Another large part of my history being set free as part of the current divesting of objects (see, e.g.).

Baby Driver

Tremendous fun, from the get go where it throws its cards on the table with an actually exciting car chase (a rarity in my books); the larger-than-life cinema-romantic flourishes are a nice touch, and Jon Hamm gives good deranged, with all of the principals sharp in their roles (and, importantly, all looking the part) even though some of the characters are pretty thin and their decisions sometimes implausible. And of course the drive (ha ha) provided by the music doesn't hurt. Oh and I never realised that it was the same director (Edgar Wright) behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim! All of his films that I've seen, including this one, sure have a pep to them.

"The Fifth Estate: Politics and Public Policy" (Wheeler Centre)

Geoff Gallop and Peter Hartcher in conversation with Sally Warhaft. Quite interesting. I liked their answers to her question about naming a 'perfect policy' (Hartcher: NDIS, GST; Gallop: safe injecting clinic in Kings Cross, Sydney). Also reminded me how in some ways particular my own perspective on 'politics and public policy' is (through the lens of the public service).

CDs - a final whittle (for now)

A last few as part of the huge cull I've been doing, bringing the total that has gone out the door over the past fortnight or so to about 850.

(the other rounds: 1, 2)

Kate Atkinson - A God in Ruins

There are both similarities and differences when compared to Life After Life, to which A God in Ruins is a 'companion' piece rather than a sequel as such, although it does take up a version of Teddy Todd's life and flesh it out forwards through time from his return from the POW camp at the end of the ultimate story from Life After Life, with Ursula slipping in and out, many others from the previous book in the margins (including Teddy's aunt Izzie in a crucial framing role), and Sylvie and Nancy prominent, along with two new generations through Viola, Bertie and Sunny.

I liked the way it represented time and consciousness, slipping easily between time horizons - past and future - and between points of view within the spaces of paragraphs and lines. More than a formal trick, it felt true - a reflection of how lives, histories and worlds really are experienced, and consonant with Atkinson's perspective on all of the above. And I think it added to, rather than detracting from, the emotional effects - quiet and more dramatic - of the little sadnesses and incompletenesses, as well as the moments of kindness and connection, of all of the characters' lives - including the final formal turn when the 'last flight' in 1944 is revisited at the end. Atkinson has always been a writer who could make me feel both happy and sad at once, who seemed able to capture something of what it is to be anything at all, and her gift has only matured over time.

Noises Off (MTC)

A farce about the staging of a farce whose production turns into farce. Cleverly structured, deceptively straightforward in its humour, and handsomely mounted - enjoyable.

(w/ Laura F)

CDs - the big cull

Last week I did an initial cull of my cds - the easy ones, once I'd gotten used to the idea of discarding any at all after so long collecting them - which turned out to be pretty much an even 200 albums (including compilations and a few eps), plus a heap more singles, samplers and old IMP mix cds.

Anyway, having got the ball rolling - and, probably more to the point, having got into the right frame of mind - over the last few days I've cut a lot more deeply, with another 620 or so more now going out the door, again plus singles and miscellaneous. It feels not so much like the end of an era, as catching up to something that passed some time ago now. For the record (albums etc only):

The Lone Bellow - Then Came The Morning

The Lone Bellow know their lane - buildingly anthemic, impassionedly harmonies-filled rock with a country/folk flavour - and when they're in it, they're convincing. The difficulty is that, after several in a row, as makes up more or less the first half of Then Came The Morning (amongst which I reckon "Marietta" is probably my favourite), it starts to sound just a little bit familiar, and they're not as compelling when they explore a slightly broader musical range. Even still, this is good.

(The Lone Bellow)

Goldfrapp - Silver Eye

A steady record, but a bit familiar-feeling by Goldfrapp's standards; best is the second-last track, "Moon in Your Mouth". Also, not a propos of anything but the cover art makes me think of the terrifying monster from Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Okkervil River - Away

A different type of Okkervil River album, heavy on the 'conversational, raggedly pretty and sad' end of the band's repertoire and completely lacking in any electric guitar storminess. It's not bad for what it is, but I miss the rock bits (the livelier "Judey On A Street", dead in the middle of the album, is a welcome change-up, even though it's more than 7 minutes of build-up with no release).

The Panics - Hole in Your Pocket

I came to this Melbourne-from-Perth band via their cover of "Wide Open Road" and that turns out to be fitting, as Hole in Your Pocket is nine tracks of expansive, contemporarily Australian-feeling rock-pop that does feel like it has a bit of the Triffids' DNA in it. Didn't set my world on fire, but a solid record.

CDs

In days gone by, my musical tastes and collection were an important part of how I defined myself, so even lightly culling my cd collection is no small decision, but yesterday I made a start - the first time, in many years of accumulating, that the collection is shrinking rather than growing.

Reasons, all relevant but from least to most important: (1) they take up space and are a pain to move, and I neither physically play nor display them (no space, or at least not enough space to prioritise cds), so they've just been sitting in boxes for years, lugged from rental to rental, all 10 archive boxes worth; (2) it's all on my computer/ipod nowadays, and plus thanks to the iTunes store, public libraries and more, my music 'collection' extends beyond the actual cds I own anyway; and (3) I guess these days my musical taste, or at least its expression through a collection, just isn't that big a part of my identity any more (wow).

Unlike books, which I'm always trying to whittle from my shelves, and for which I've developed a decent rubric about what merits hanging on to, I wasn't that sure where to draw the line and so I've wound up getting rid of really just the lowest-hanging fruit for now. Maybe a bolder scour is in the future; the really large move would be to get rid of the majority of the remaining ones and maybe only hold on to a hundred or so (maybe 200...) that have particular significance, but I'm not sure I'll ever get that far - mainly, at this stage, because I like the insurance of still having the physical copies in case something catastrophic ever happens to my hard drive rather than because I'm sentimental about the majority of them as physical artifacts - but who knows?

Anyway, for posterity:

The Great Wall

Splashy and colourful, with a few nice flourishes from Zhang Yimou. Pity that the story-telling is so pedestrian.

"John Young: None Living Knows" (Arc One) / "John Beaton: Wabi/Sabi" (fortyfivedownstairs)

The John Young paintings didn't make a huge impression (although they had a certain dreaminess) but John Beaton's photographs captured something - I liked both the ones from around Asia and Europe (especially the Hakone photos, which had the charge of recognition for me) and the Yosemite ones.

Adrian Tomine - Sleepwalk and other stories

These ones didn't quite grab me, although Tomine is highly touted; their slices of urban alienation and the struggle to be happy are deftly sketched but, with a handful of exceptions, not substantial enough to resonate (the overall air is more than a tad Clowes-ian).

Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others

Extremely elegant idea-driven science fiction. Turns out I'd read several of these before - "Story of Your Life" after seeing Arrival, but longer ago also "Division by Zero" (a mathematician proves that arithmetic as a formal system is inconsistent, with an existential cost for her and a human one with her husband), "Hell Is the Absence of God" (what loving God would mean in a world in which His existence was incontrovertibly manifest, visitations of angels, souls visibly departing for Heaven or Hell upon death, even glimpses of Hell itself through regular turning transparent of the ground) and "Liking What You See: A Documentary" (a scientific procedure is developed which can prevent people from perceiving or responding to physical appearance and beauty) - but all of them, both previously read and new, reward careful attention.

Mariko and Jillian Tamaki - This One Summer

A fairly lovely 'one summer' story, main characters and inseparable summer cottage friends Rose and Windy both on the verge of teenagehood, although there are hints that Rose's additional 18 months of age are beginning to tell. The adult characters are rendered with some sophistication too, the town's older teens less so. There are plenty of little details to savour, some quite subtle - one recurring one that I enjoyed was the attentiveness to sound throughout - but the highlight is Jillian Tamaki's illustration work (they're cousins, writer and artist), dark blue on white and evocative.

Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul

I can't work out just what it is that's missing from this one - a multi-party collaboration from 2009/2010 with quite the line-up (Wayne Coyne, Frank Black, Iggy Pop, Julian Casablancas, Nina Persson and more). Most of the individual songs seem quite good, and the genre spectrum is broad in a post-millennial indie-rocky kind of way while held together particularly by Mark Linkous's musical sensibility, yet - at least for me - it's never all that exciting. Just one of those things.

triple j's Like A Version 10

A predictably mixed bag, and probably particularly given that I'm not particularly up with what triple j plays these days, so many of the tracks are by artists I don't know performing songs whose originals I haven't heard.

Best: First Aid Kit with a woodsy country-folk tune (at least in their doing) called "Love Interruption" (originally Jack White), one James Vincent McMorrow falsettoing up Lana Del Rey's "West Coast", a band called Saskwatch's version of a song called "Let Her Go" (Jagwar Ma), and Asgeir on a moody pop number called "Stolen Dance" (Milky Chance).

Also: Illy's "Ausmusic Month Medley" contrives to fuse "Tomorrow", "To Her Door", "My Happiness", "The Nosebleed Section" and "On Top" by Flume and it's surprisingly good.

A Dangerous Method

This time, I was particularly struck by the way that A Dangerous Method registers primarily as a film about psychoanalysis, rather than as either a romance between Jung and Sabina Spielrein (plus domestic element added by his relationship with his wife and their children) or a drama of conflict between Jung and his father-figure Freud, both of which are depicted in enough detail to have allowed them to take such a focus in a different film - an effect that Cronenberg achieves through a very formal and intellectual, even chilly, approach, which feels apt given the subject and period. Also - Vincent Cassel is enjoyable as the wolfish hedonist Otto Gross.

(last time)

Avery Gordon - Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Some of my favourite passages below, dutifully typed out in the course of a read-through seeking poetic ways of thinking about hauntings; Gordon's approach is politically-minded but also lends itself readily to individual and personal experience. 

Via close readings of psychoanalysis ("sociology needs a way of grappling with what it represses, haunting, and psychoanalysis needs a way of grappling with what it represses, society") by way of Sabina Spielrein (familiar to me from A Dangerous Method), Luisa Valenzuela's He Who Searches and Toni Morrison's Beloved, with quality time spent with Freud (especially "The Uncanny"), Benjamin, Barthes ("Camera Lucida") and Raymond Williams along the way.  

***

If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (8)

… the method here involves producing case studies of haunting and adjudicating their consequences. What kind of case is a case of a ghost? It is a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the ghost - that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present - into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world. … It is often a case of inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and screen memories, of spiralling affects, of more than one story at a time, of the traffic in domains of experience that are anything but transparent and referential ... (24)

… uncanny experiences are “qualities of feeling” … haunting experiences. There is something there and you “feel” it strongly. It has a shape, an electric empiricity, but the evidence is barely visible, or highly symbolised. [Something familiar] has transmuted into an unsettling spectre. … We are haunted by somethings we have been involved in, even if they appear foreign, alien, far away, doubly other. (50-51)

… the ghost imports a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting, thus unsettling the … lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge. … the ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. … the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. (63-64)

… the ghost is a living force. It may reside elsewhere in an otherworldly domain but it is never intrinsically Other. It has a life world … of its own. And it carries this life world with all its sweet things, its nastiness, and its yearnings into ours as it makes its haunting entry, making itself a phenomenological reality. There is no question that when a ghost haunts, that haunting is real. The ghost has an agency on the people it is haunting and we can call that agency desire, motivation or standpoint. And so its desires must be broached and we have to talk to it. The ghost’s desire, even if it is nothing more than a potent and conjectural fiction, must be recognised …[but] haunting makes its only social meaning in contact with the living’s time of the now … the need of the dead to be remembered and accommodated … is inseparable from the needs of the living. In other words, the ghost is nothing without you. (179)

… the ghost cannot be simply tracked back to an individual loss or trauma. The ghost has its own desires … the force of the ghost’s desire is not just negative … [The ghost is] pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had. (183)

Profane illumination … the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in everyday things … the emphasis on phenomenal forms, or habitual relation to them, and their capacity, upon a certain kind of contact, to shatter habit … crossroads where ghostly signals flash … until that one day when they become animated by the immense forces of atmosphere concealed in them. These illuminations can be frightening and threatening … the profane illumination is a discerning moment. … when thought presses close to its object, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself. The profane illumination captures the medium by which we have a different kind of access to the density of experience … [it] captures just that experience of the ghostly matter … [it] is a kind of conjuring that initiates because it is telling us something important we had not known; because it is leading us somewhere, or elsewhere. (204-205, quoting Benjamin and Adorno)

To experience a profane illumination is to experience the sensate quality of a knowledge meaningfully affecting you. … a way of encountering the ghostly presence, the lingering past, the luminous presence of the seemingly invisible … when you know in a way you did not know before, then you have been notified of your involvement. You are already involved, implicated, in one way or another, and this is why, if you don’t banish it, or kill it, or reduce it to something you can already manage, when it appears to you, the ghost will inaugurate the necessity of doing something about it. (205-206)