Ben Lerner - The Topeka School

The Topeka School takes on, at a minimum, three very important and interesting topics, but none of which I would have started off assuming would draw me into a novel - language's loss of meaning in the face of its recent debasement in its public form, socio-economically privileged white masculinity (dealt with in a nuanced and often sympathetic way), and the challenges of raising children (especially boys) well amidst that.

In fact, it's remarkably successful in how it brings them all together, also weaving in a meaningful account of the operation of history at both a personal (familial) and social level, with its multiple generations of damaged individuals, all themselves shaped by macro forces of war, economics and the unconscious, and events and perspectives knitted together out of order.

I haven't landed on how I feel about the Darren Eberheart thread; I guess it illustrates the violence enacted by those same systems on those at the margins, while also rendering them especially susceptible to magical thinking and likely to become enmeshed in a cycle of violence themselves. It also develops real tension by its end, so that the closing pages which follow Adam and his family - with Natalia, after all - have genuine stakes. A very impressive novel.

Previously: Leaving the Atocha Station, which has stayed with me - including literally, in surviving the severe culling I've done over the last few years - and not just for its memorable first scene in the art gallery.

Shadow

Zhang Yimou's latest is practically gothic in its chiaroscuro palette and general moodiness. It's slow going for its first half - I read a review which describes that first half as basically a series of people walking into rooms and explaining how they're related to each other - and while the action, once it starts, is exciting enough, it didn't add up to a satisfying whole for me ... even with the philosophical aspects taken into account.

The National - I Am Easy To Find

A slow build even by the National's standards; I've noticed before that their albums often take me quite a while to really fall into. I'm not yet there with I Am Easy To Find but I'm sure, still, that it's a good one, and the introduction of female vocals and other more subtle mixings-up of their formula is welcome.

Soccer Mommy - Color Theory

Very enjoyable 90s-throwback sulky-sounding singer-songwriter alternative rock-pop record. I read her saying she was inspired by songs like "Torn", "If It Makes You Happy" (or maybe another Sheryl Crow song in similar vein) and "Complicated" and it shows, in a good way. Early faves: "Circle the Drain", "Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes".

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

'Si vis pacem, para bellum' - it's a faux-epic reference but, like everything surrounding it, is sold by the film's all-round tightness, like this 'third chapter''s predecessors. Kind of obvious to say this but Keanu is essential to the film working, which it does.

Susan Choi - Trust Exercise

I finished Trust Exercise a few days ago, and with that distance from its tricky, sinuous structure and its unexpected ending, my appreciation of it continues to increase. A novel that engages in the kinds of perspective shifts, reversals and ambiguities that this one does needs to earn those elements, and I think Trust Exercise does, through how well they're executed and how well they serve the book's concerns - about power, abuse, trauma and story-telling.

Each of the three sections is interesting - in its own right and as part of the whole - not only for how they contribute to the suspense of what will happen, or has happened, and the answers they provide to those questions, but also equally (if not more so) for what they reveal about the ways in which victims continue to be affected by abuse long after in their lives, and how this works through in the public or private narratives they construct to make sense of their experiences.

I think we're meant to take Claire's account as what 'really' happened; I also think it deliberately leaves unclear the details of that reality, which has the effect of highlighting that in some important ways it doesn't matter exactly what happened, because the outlines are enough that the enduring damage of the abuse at the stories' heart is showed to be inescapable regardless. It's a slippery interplay between specificity and overall theme, and doesn't leave much space for many of the conventional elements of characterisation and the ways they bring readers to recognise characters, let alone sympathise with them. Rather, Sarah, Karen and Claire (and, in a different way, David) are defined by the harm they've suffered and how they've tried to reckon with it - which itself is part of the point that Trust Exercise so sharply and (in its structure) originally makes.

Alice Munro - Runaway

A passing reference - Michelle de Kretser comparing Josephine Rowe's Here Until August to Munro's stories - created a little niggle which grew into a firm wish to re-read Runaway. It's one of those books that had grown in stature in my mind since I first read it, and it didn't disappoint on a revisit.

It's difficult to put into words why the stories in it are so good, but I think it's something to do with their plain-spokenness and directness, and how unforcedly taut they are, so that the characters and their motivations emerge with just the right (lifelike) combination of availability and oblique mystery, and the more dramatic elements of the plots work in service of the stories and what they're about, rather than dominating those stories. In their quiet way, they leave me feeling stirred-up.

She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.

Bendigo Art Gallery

Collection exhibitions: "Talismans for uncertain times" & "The Becoming"

Benjamin Armstrong - "Conjurer III" (2012)

Ilona Nelson - "In-Sanitarium" (2015)

Josh Muir: What's on your mind?

Short multimedia pieces reflecting on (Indigenous) identity.

From the collection

Belinda Fox - "Tilt I" (2018)

Miss Americana

I've liked Taylor Swift's music from quite a way back (though I haven't kept up with it lately) but this documentary made me like her, too. 

The Professor and the Madman

Two main problems for me:

1. I couldn't get past the associations I was bringing to watching Mel Gibson and Sean Penn (especially Gibson), who seem like two of the less agreeable men of Hollywood.
2. Much of the film's critical action wasn't anywhere near sufficiently showed or explained - most glaringly, why Natalie Dormer's character would fall in love with her husband's murderer (and I did not like the him teaching her how to read).

(w/ Kevin)