Samanta Schweblin - Fever Dream

I caught up on this year's Tournament of Books a few days ago, including the intriguing notices that Fever Dream was getting as it made its run (as of today, having just won its semi-final bracket), and got it from the library today and finished it over the course of the afternoon. It's a very short novel, novella length in fact, but the main reason I read it so quickly was that I couldn't stay away from it, despite trying two or three times to put it down and do something else - it's intensely mysterious and dread-inducing, with a strong 'and then what happened?' (which is actually a 'so what's already happened, and what's really going on?') pull, which is reinforced by David's constant warnings that time is short.

Much of the book's unsettling effect arises from its oscillation between plausibly reality-based details and explanations (the suggestions of a toxin in the water supply, Amanda's convincing maternal feelings for Nina, the way Carla often acts entirely like a normal person would in her position, the handful of situational hints that ground Amanda and David's dialogue) and elements which seem to surpass rational explanation and operate in the realm of the unknowable (the happenings in the green house, everything about worms, the uncanny happenings with the children, the underlying causes and logic for what happens and what is important to Amanda's plight), without ever really resolving the dialectic between the two. There are also startling moments of out and out creepiness - especially Amanda's dream about Nina and her mouth.

In the end, there remains something cryptic and unexplained about Fever Dream, but that doesn't make it any less satisfying. I wonder whether this one will linger. I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

"Thinking with Hands - Linda Tegg: A Work in Progress" (Melbourne School of Geography)

Quite enjoyable series of short talks by artist Linda Tegg (who has just completed a year as the 'artist in residence' at the School of Geography at Melbourne Uni, in association with the Potter) and various others from the School and the Potter responding to her work. I didn't engage that much with the art (evening seminar format) but liked "Punchbowl", a 2 minute looping video of some men fishing while a nearly invisible 'absent' figure displaces space around them, including because of Tegg's comment that after a while the rocks began to look like a stage, the ocean like a film set.

(w/ Sara)

Shaun Prescott - The Town

What a very interesting, and very good, novel. Actually, I didn't expect to enjoy it and started reading quite ready to abandon it partway through if it didn't grab me - the bits and pieces I'd read about the book had given me a sense of its high concept (unnamed narrator in an unnamed town where not much happens and absurdity is plentiful and unremarked-upon) and I found it hard to imagine how that could hold my interest over an entire novel. Yet somehow it does, in sentence after sentence of exemplarily plain description and observation, section after section of things not happening, or happening and seeming to indicate something significant but without being treated at all that way, with the barest of through-lines both plot and character-wise.

To me it felt haunted by Borges, Kafka, Calvino (specifically Invisible Cities) and Camus; at the same time Michel's Patisseries, Woolworths, Big W and other stalwarts of (mundane, consumerist) Australian life are integral to its fabric, not to mention pubs, insularity, excessive drinking, McDonald's value meals, and the prospect of being bashed for no reason by a guy called Steve. It sustains its curious register the whole time, and is remarkably easy to read, given the lack of conventional hooks it offers. And of course there are those holes. Great stuff.

A Fantastic Woman

Summary thoughts:

1. It made me identify - at least to the extent possible via watching a film - with Marina, a trans woman, and specifically the constant sense of threat and anxiety she faces, but also the love and loss she feels in relation to her partner. It felt truthful to me, but then what do I know?
2. Re: the above, I'd like to know how the film has been received by members of the trans community. In general, and including the sauna scene.
3. The plotting is a bit stumbly and I'm not really convinced by the various fantasy elements (although the final appearance of Orlando's spectre does pay off).
4. The treatment of grief doesn't rise above the generic, although it's well enough done, and admittedly the situation is not standard, given the number of obstacles and additional emotional hardships she faces in the process.
5. Despite the several reservations above, I'm very glad I saw it, if for no other reason than that it's a story and experience that isn't mine but which should be represented more, and I did think it was sensitively done.

(w/ Hayley)

Kasey Chambers - Dragonfly

I was listening to Carnival the other day and it reminded me how much I like Kasey Chambers, so I thought I should catch up on her a bit, and her latest was this double album that came out last year.

It seems like she's gone on with it; she's still good, and these days grittier and a bit wider-ranging (though she was always eclectic) in her rootsiness. There are a bunch of good songs on this set, and three burn-the-house-down excellent ones in "Ain't No Little Girl", "Summer Pillow" and "You Ain't Worth Suffering For", the two with 'ain't' in the title both bluesy rockers, and the other more of a country-pop anthem (although the pop element is of the Sia kind), strings and all.

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti

I'm not sure, but I don't think I ever got to Physical Graffiti back in the days when I listened to Led Zeppelin. Anyway, it is immense. With more distance from the rock music that dominated my own formative years (which I still, of course, love), it's easier to hear how powerful and great Led Zeppelin were, laying this stuff down before I was born. This is the one with "Kashmir", and a terrific opening one-two of "Custard Pie" and "The Rover" besides.

"Janet Laurence: What Colour is the Sacred?" (Arc One)

Very attractive double-surface mirrored prints and colour installation boxes!

Annihilation

This could have been weirder still and I wouldn't have minded, but even as it is, Annihilation doesn't do badly on that front. For the most part, the threat feels more visceral and bodily (and perhaps psychological) than, as it is in the book, holistically mental and existential, but it comes through powerfully, and the various dangers of the party's journey into the Shimmer (and to the Lighthouse) are all convincing.

As does any film in this terrain, it brought Monsters to mind for me, although it's considerably wilder and more spectacular (and speculative). Also, it almost goes without saying, both Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh excellent; also terrific is Oscar Isaac, and indeed I enjoyed all of the other principals too (Tessa Thompson's physicist, Gina Rodriguez's paramedic and Tuva Novotny's geomorphologist).

Zadie Smith - Swing Time

First things first - I finished Swing Time last night and spent a few minutes browsing for worthwhile takes on it, and came across this passage (here), which is delightful in how it captures my own feelings about Zadie Smith (most recently attempted here).

There is also a sense that we must protect her: we feel her anxiety in her movement among styles, and we sense that she is trying to say the right good thing, and as she holds out her hand, we grip it and carry her on. I am invested in Zadie’s story, susceptible to the Bildung in all this: White Teeth came out the year I went up to Oxford, and became a symbol of all that a nerdy girl from a state school might do under meritocracy; The Autograph Man was given to me by my mother when I was on my year abroad in Paris, and reminded me of the importance of going beyond oneself even at the price of failure; On Beauty appeared the year I came to London and began working for the LRB, and I bought it in hardback and discussed it at a book group and even stole a placard of its very pretty cover from a Booker Prize party I snuck into; NW I read in a proof passed around the LRB office, and I tried out my thoughts on her experimental turn with colleagues in the same tentative way that she played with numbered paragraphs and their juxtaposition. This is just my story, but others of my generation have similar ones, and it’s a problem: we want her to pay back our emotional investment. With each new novel, the hope rises: is this finally the great book that was always coming?

And Swing Time itself? Well, it's (still) not her great novel and indeed is a notch below NW I think, though it has many merits. It's in the first person, very controlled, many commas, no strong sense of the narrator's personality (which is partly the point - she is always in the shadow of others). Smith's craft as a writer only gets better each time at the plate, and her restlessness in continuing to seek out new formal ways of exploring the ideas that have been with her from the beginning - identity, race, connection, meaning, humanity, the stories we tell to become ourselves - is wonderful. Yet, still, I didn't feel fully taken hold of, shaken, by Swing Time. It is fine, very fine even, but that fire within really great fiction, it's not there.

Let the Sunshine In

A quite marvellous 100 minutes of Juliette Binoche having romantic entanglements with a series of unsuitable men, as directed by Claire Denis. I enjoyed the film's frankness about sex, desire, personality (and character), and the banality of miscommunication, and the hints of the metaphysical dotted throughout, especially in the final scene with Gerard Depardieu.

(w/ Sheila and Ash - part of FFF)

New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus

The first time I started reading New American Stories, which I'm pretty sure was more than a year ago, I got about halfway through before being distracted by one thing and another; when I came back to it I decided to start again from the beginning. Which means I've been reading this tome, on and off, for quite some while now, and also that I've read quite a lot of its stories more than once.

Actually, there's a sense in which that was always going to be true, regardless, because what's become clear while reading it is how much of a node the anthology is, planted indeed at the intersection of a lot of what's going on with American short stories today, as well as my own tastes. After all, I picked it up because, amongst its 32 entries, it includes stories by my two reigning favourite short story writers, Rebecca Lee ("Slatland", which isn't one of my favourites of hers but is possibly the most impressively weird thing in the remarkable Bobcat) and Rivka Galchen ("The Lost Order", which is one of my favourites, and maybe the most perfect story in the all round confounding American Innovations).

And, while working through it, I separately came across a couple of others which stunned me when I read them online, before later discovering them also tucked away in the back half of NAS: Rachel B Glaser's hypnotically brilliant and staggeringly unusual "Pee On Water" and Deb Olin Unferth's "Wait Till You See Me Dance", which works the short story magic of seeming to spin off-centre while pulsing forward the whole way through, and ending with an emotional burst that carries its own hard, unforgiving truth inside it.

Plus there was George Saunders's "Home", which I didn't think I liked that much the first time I read it, found had worked its way, from that odd opening line onwards ("Like in the old days, I came out of the dry creek behind the house and did my little tap on the kitchen window."), inside me by my second pass, and then totally bowled me over through repeated reads in Tenth of December.

I was already familiar with many of the other authors, to greater and lesser extents, in some cases from the way, way back (Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo), and in others more recently: Joy Williams, whose "The Country" in NAS is as powerfully metaphysical as any contemporary short story could be, Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories I've been discovering with huge enjoyment over the last few months, represented by the not-a-word-wasted "Men", Kelly Link, Donald Antrim.

Of course there were new discoveries, too; interestingly, the three that stand out are all laced with a dark, squalling humour: Sam Lipsyte's "This Appointment Occurs in the Past", Rebecca Curtis's "The Toast" and Charles Yu's "Standard Loneliness Package", which made me laugh out loud not once but twice on public transport with descriptions that are packed with an existential depth charge of emotion:

I am feeling that feeling. The one that these people get a lot, near the end of a funeral service. These sad and pretty people. It's a big feeling. Different operators have different ways to describe it. For me, it feels something like a huge boot. Huge, like it fills up the whole sky, the whole galaxy, all of space. Some kind of infinite foot. And it's stepping on me. The infinite foot is stepping on my chest.

The funeral ends, and the foot is still on me, and it is hard to breathe. People are getting into black town cars. I also appear to have a town car. I get in. The foot, the foot. So heavy. Here we go, yes, this is familiar, the foot, yes, the foot. It doesn't hurt, exactly. It's not what I would call comfortable, but it's not pain, either. More like pressure. Deepak, who used to be in the next cubicle, once told me that this feeling I call the infinite foot - to him it felt more like a knee - is actually the American experience of the Christian God.

It's only now, typing that out, that I've made the obvious connection to Orwell's vision of the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever. It doesn't matter. Maybe it makes it better.

Laura Marling - Short Movie

Another one. So many good songs; special mention for the Johnny Marr-ish guitars and loping melody, lyrics delivered by Marling with one eyebrow raised throughout, on "Gurdjieff's Daughter". (Most recently - A Creature I Don't Know.)

A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer (Malthouse)

I didn't know anything about this one except that the company behind it, Complicité, did last year's The Encounter, so I was unprepared for what a journey it turned out to be, the meta-theatrical elements which are put in the foreground from the start by writer/performer Bryony Kimmings paying off spectacularly over the work's latter stages, as the 'guide' she thought she was writing is shaped by her own experiences (especially her newborn son's illness) and the relationship she forms with Lara Veitch along the way, and the seeds planted earlier - the experiences of Bryony herself being prominent, the kingdom of the unwell being like a forest, the breaking down of the fourth wall - blossom with real dramatic and emotional force. I haven't seen anything quite like it, and nor have I seen so many tears in a theatre audience ever before.

(w/ Cass)

NGV Triennial (third visit)

A quick visit today - just an hour or so. MVP was Candice Breitz's "Love Story" (2016) - previously retitled "Wilson Must Go", I think, but it's more recently been announced that Wilson is, indeed, gone (as in, no longer the NGV's security services provider).

In the first room, Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin performing extracts from the much longer (three to four hour) accounts, given direct to camera, by six asylum seekers (which appear in the following room): "Sarah Mardini, who escaped war-torn Syria; Jose Maria Joao, a former child soldier from Angola; Mamy Maloba Langa, a survivor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Shabeena Saveri, an Indian transgender activist; Luis Nava Molero, a political dissident from Venezuela; and Farah Abdi Mohamed, a young atheist from Somalia". Wonderful piece of art, reminded me of the importance of hearing people's stories, and of course who gets to tell them.

Breitz is also the artist who did the Madonna (and, I think, Michael Jackson, and maybe others?) singing videos. I like her style.

(first visit; second visit)

Matthew Reilly - The Four Legendary Kingdoms

I've been curious to read one of these for a while, and now I know; the fast pace I expected, the diagrams to make the action easier to visualise and the galactic stakes I didn't! By good luck I chose one that has both of Reilly's main heroes, Jack West Jr and Shane 'Scarecrow' Schofield.

Two is a Family

Fairly charming, but the plot mechanics creaked all too evidently. Also, I didn't like the reliance on stereotype with the gay benefactor (the campness is fine, the lasciviousness considerably less so).

(w/ Erandathie - part of FFF, and selected because the aim was something uplifting and the Nova offerings in that respect were slim!)

Lally Katz - Atlantis

BELLA'S DAUGHTER: The painful and futile grip of desire.
ELECTRA: What do you mean by that?
BELLA'S DAUGHTER: Just something that used to come into my head when I'd hear my mom talking to her clients.

I thought it'd be interesting to read Atlantis on the page after seeing it performed late last year.

Lady Bird

I reckon this one's my favourite film that I've seen in quite a while, probably at least since A Ghost Story or even Personal Shopper, neither of which it has particularly much in common with. It reminded me why I've always sought out films that affect me emotionally, and it manages that familiar, but always still remarkable, trick of evoking both sadness and lightness, optimism and kindness in a sideways kind of way which gives it, in the end, a quality of truthfulness about life. I wouldn't say I went in feeling particularly susceptible but there were not one but two scenes which made me a touch teary (Lady Bird and her ex-boyfriend Danny out back of the cafe; her mum driving alone to the airport).

There's a specificity to its scope (the life of 17-going-on-18 Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson in early 2000s Sacramento) and a universality of experience, with those two in fruitful conversation with each other. (I guess there was something similar going on in Frances Ha.) I liked that it takes the time to invest nearly all of its characters with emotional depth, complexity and back story, including some I wouldn't have expected, and I found the relationship between mother and daughter in particular very moving. Just lovely.

(w/ Hayley)

Ty Segall - Ty Segall (2017)

A melange of modern rock, glam, punk, the occasional Beatles-esque moment, and even a bit of prog. Doesn't do much for me.

Gillian Welch - Boots No.1: The Official Revival Bootleg

These earlier and alternate versions of the songs that made it on to Revival, plus a few similarly unpolished (but not that far off from studio/release-ready, given how plain the actual record is) other songs, is a lovely listen, so it's a mark of the original album's greatness that its biggest effect on me has been to remind me how completely great Revival itself is.

The Children (MTC; Lucy Kirkwood)

The Children is an interesting play, taking place in an unusual register which left me waiting the whole time for it to break into outright surrealism even though it never quite did - mid-play dance sequence interrupted by flood of, erm, brown toilet water notwithstanding - until maybe the end (yoga, waves, the sound of bells underwater). The conversational rhythms are just a touch off, the humour is somehow destabilising, and the mystery around Rose's (Sarah Peirse - terrific) motivations adds to the on-edge feeling, and the plot introduces, then eludes, some very conventional matter (especially the affair between Rose and Robin - William Zappa, just a bit stagey for me) on its way to a much more interesting treatment of generational wants, entitlement and responsibilities.

Having said that, this was one of those that I ended, maybe unfairly, feeling the play as written was maybe stronger than this production (despite a strong, truthful-feeling performance from Pamela Rabe as Hazel and a simple but good set and lighting etc). I couldn't put my finger on what was just a touch off; maybe, in this case, the 'failing' might have been in my own sensitivity, in needing to do more to meet this impressive play on its own terms.

(w/ Cass)

John Allison - Bad Machinery: The Case of the Team Spirit

I have fond memories of Scary Go Round from my (I think) relatively brief but quite intense webcomic-reading days - maybe not that brief, as it looks like it was from at least December '05 to June '06 - and the creator went on to create this follow-up/spin-off series "Bad Machinery". Six kids, detecting. Colourful and sharp, with that quixotic dialogue I remember and love, and unabashed supernatural elements; v.g. (I've also since read the next couple of cases - they are all online.)

"oops" (mix cd)

Julian said when he gave me this one that it was more 'fun' than his usual style and that is correct! And not just because of the (excellent) Charli XCX song ("Boys") nor even the "A Thousand Miles" (as in Vanessa Carlton) / "Back in Black" (as in AC/DC) harangue-y singing voice mashup that follows ("AC/VC" by Neil Cicierega); across XTC, Jane Siberry x2, the Hold Steady and Bob Dylan also x2 (and more), this mix cd hits its marks.

Sarah Blasko - Depth of Field

I've thought for a while that Sarah Blasko is right on the verge of greatness, since around I Awake I reckon, and this latest hasn't shifted me on that; if anything, it makes me feel she's inched even closer.

Depth of Field is a confident-feeling outing, musically outgoing (crisp, often brassy - at least by Blasko's understated standards - arrangements) and lyrically introspective (the words sung clearly and given room to breathe), and there isn't really a one song that stands out for me, though "A Shot" comes closest, and "Everybody Wants To Sin" is notable for the way it channels Goldfrapp (especially in the bridge), "Making It Up" for its anger, and several others for their extreme lusciousness of both sound and melody (e.g. "Savour It", "Read My Mind").

"Teju Cole: Blind Spot" (Wheeler Centre)

Terrific discussion between Cole and Anwen Crawford, who I previously knew only as a music writer (albeit a conspicuously good one). I haven't read Blind Spot cover to cover, but have dipped into its text-photo pairings so had some context. Some ideas from the discussion that struck me:

• Photography as halfway between writing and performance art
• Photography as inherently subjective and embodied, because it always presupposes a perspective from which the photo was taken and a person who took it - this also means that there is an inherent sympathy in the photographic relationship
• Photography very good at conveying a simple message which is why it dominates advertising; the question is how to also activate its depths
• Montage as an idea from cinema, e.g. Tarkovsky, putting two things that are not obviously related side by side, generating a psychological charge
• "Places retain traces of the things that happened in them" - the central conceit of this work and all of Cole's
• Five big themes running through Blind Spot: flight, blindness, walking, the Bible, the Illiad
• Plus another two: tourism, terrorism
• Angels as go-betweens, intermediaries, messengers; and so all who are stragglers, in intermediate zones, are in a sense angels
• When you have a camera, you go around the world looking for what's yours [this applies just as much to writing of course!]
• "What would it be like to be free in writing this?" [the question Cole asks himself, to guide his writing and photography; I'm not sure I've fully grasped what it means, but it feels possibly profound]

(w/ Hayley)

"Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism" (ACCA)

This one was worth seeing but I don't think it was one of ACCA's better exhibitions of recent times, even allowing that the themed ones are probably trickier to nail than the individual artist shows.

Linda Dement - "Feminist methodology machine" (2016)

I think the main problem for me was that 'feminism' is a huge topic and there wasn't any obvious coherence to this exhibition's take on it, although most of the pieces did reflect a reasonably critical engagement with feminism itself. The other thing, I have to say, is that I didn't think many of the individual works were particularly strong. (I wondered if this was a failure of understanding or sympathy on my part, but Cass had the same take.)

Sandra Hill - "Home-maker #9: The hairdresser" (2014)

One aspect that did interest me was the way the various works engaged with aesthetics and conventionally appealing presentation (imagery, colours etc) in conveying their messages - some drawing heavily on forms designed to draw in the viewer (with expectations then sometimes being subverted), others aggressively raw and unappealing to look at.

Clare Rae - untitled action for ACCA (2017)

My two favourites were a series of six of Clare Rae's 'actions', undertaken and photographed at ACCA itself - I really like the NGV ones and these are ace too - and Shevaun Wright's sobering "The rape contract", made up indeed of a several pages of 'rape contract' in very convincing legalese - apt given the power of the law/state in relation to rape and its victims - with invisible ink annotations from a victim's perspective that shows up under the torches accompanying the piece (for that one, 'favourite' probably isn't the word so much as 'most affecting').

Shevaun Wright - "The rape contract" (2016)

Also Linda Dement's three-screen video installation "Feminist methodology machine", which reminded me of Revolt. She Said, Revolt Again and the quasi-surtitles that blared on screens in the transitions between its scenes, and Sandra Hill's simple but piercing 'hairdresser' collage-referencing painting.

(w/ Cass)

Ismael's Ghosts

A couple of days on and I still haven't made up my mind about this one; in fact, trying to recall some of its details I find it slipping away from me.

I think the best things it has going for it are Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg and neither disappoints, even though the film's approach to Cotillard's Carlotta never settles, so that she veers between inscrutable and possibly malign apparition (when seen by others) and a more naturalistic, fleshed-out character (when given her own perspective).

In terms of what else is going on, maybe the problem is there's just too much of it. The core is, I guess, Ismael's haunting by his multiple ghosts (Carlotta, Ivan, others?), and the effects of the associated trauma and absences on him and those around him. And for patches, when it focuses properly on its characters, the film is really quite satisfying. But there are too many loose ends, of too many different types, which dilute the force it could otherwise have had - the headlong leaps into melodrama, the 'perspective in western art' interlude, the whole spy brother sub-plot (there's something interesting in the latter two bits about story telling and its relationship to haunting and loss but it's never properly developed, and the film's form - the sliced up segments - gets in the way more than it illuminates).

So not really a success, I don't think - although it certainly had some kind of effect which continues to niggle ... which isn't nothing.

(w/ Sheila - part of FFF)

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know

I've hopscotched my way through Laura Marling's back catalogue (so far, I Speak Because I Can, Once I Was an Eagle and last year's Semper Femina) and there hasn't been a bad one yet, or even one that's been merely okay, and A Creature I Don't Know is filled with the interesting melodies and rhythms, distinctive perspective and occasional surprising directness that run through her others.

Her version of folk feels at once timeless and easily contemporary; she has this knack of seeming to be sauntering her way through a song, only for it to take a later turn that then seems like it was always inevitable, like the way "Salinas" turns and builds from about halfway through into something that feels almost like slowed-down classic rock and roll, or the extended swinging outro to "My Friends". 

Three stories from the past

For years I've carried around the memory of reading a story, which I was pretty sure was by Jeffrey Eugenides, in which artichokes were cooked. I couldn't remember anything else about it, and googling "jeffrey eugenides artichoke" didn't help,[*] so that was that, just one of many lacunae.

Then, the other day in Embiggen, I saw a familiar-looking book called Cowboys, Indians and Commuters: The Penguin Book of New American Voices, edited by Jay McInerney. I vaguely recalled having read it before and, looking at its contents page - it was published in 1994, when Sherman Alexie, Donna Tartt, Jennifer Egan, David Foster Wallace and Eugenides himself actually were indeed 'new' - I realised it was here that I'd read that story: "Capricious Gardens".

Tastes change over time. I've just checked extemporanea, just in case, and it turns out that previous time was in 2005,[**] and while the story struck me enough to comment on, I didn't particularly like it then - and likewise, to a lesser degree, for DFW's "Forever Overhead". Since then, both have grown in my mind without my actually re-reading them until now; that single blurry recollection of the artichokes, the vividly image of the teenage boy atop the diving board and the way he indeed embodies and faces towards all that is 'forever overhead'. Though it's funny - I did like "Capricious Gardens" this time round, but admiration rather than flat-out enjoyment was still my dominant response, especially at the way desire weaves its way through all four of the characters' plots. Go figure.

I also re-read the Donna Tartt story, "Sleepytown". It's odder than I realised at the time, told in a kind of floating past tense, and recounting a childhood lived through a codeine haze. It's too filled with a sense of compressed energy to feel like an outtake from a longer piece like a novel, while more expansive and looser-feeling than a typical short story in this kind of more or less realistic - if Gothic-tinged - vein. Reading it, I felt like something a bit wild and untethered was flickering below the surface. So, it's extremely good.

***

[*] This was before his short story collection came out last year, articles about which now point the way.
[**] And if I'd thought to check before, I could've found the story much sooner.

Call Me By Your Name OST

A nicely evocative soundtrack which called (ha ha) to mind both the film itself and the general air of a Sofia Coppola soundtrack, especially Marie Antoinette: moody piano pieces, early 80s synth-pop hits (only smokily, distantly familiar to me: the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way", F R David's "Words", Giorgio Moroder and Joe Esposito's "Lady Lady Lady"; also Loredana Berte's "J'adore Venise" and Franco Battiato's "Radio Varsavia", which are of the same vintage and also both Italian), the two Sufjan Stevens songs I'd already heard, "Mystery of Love" (which I always want to call "Mysteries of Love" because of Blue Velvet) and "Visions of Gideon" and a smattering of others.

Listening to it also led me down the road of thinking about memorable song/scene pairings (obviously a wholly personal list):

• The first that came to mind, no doubt thanks to the 80s connection: "I Ran" in La La Land, a pitch perfect scene, though I think watching it cost me a bit of my heart to Emma Stone
• Enid (that would be Thora Birch) dancing to "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" in her room as Ghost World opens
• Winona Ryder and friends dancing to "My Sharona" in the service station, Reality Bites 
• From the same film, the big dramatic "All I Want Is You"-tracked sequence (the details had blurred before I refreshed my memory with youtube, but the way it made me feel had not)
• Any number from Moulin Rouge, but maybe especially Ewan McGregor singing "Your Song" to Nicole Kidman and its sheer exultant romanticism
• Uma Thurmann in Pulp Fiction to "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" (Urge Overkill) - like many of these, encountered at an impressionable age
• Post-party comedown in Marie Antoinette - "Tommib Help Buss" by Squarepusher
• Joseph Gordon Levitt's triumphant walk to that Hall and Oates song in (500) Days of Summer
• "The Killing Moon" in the first scene, and "Under The Milky Way" at the party, Donnie Darko
• "Kissing You", gazes meeting through the fish tank, Romeo + Juliet
• Not a movie, but "Breathe Me" as Six Feet Under ends, wow
• Then there's the "Wise Up" montage in Magnolia
• "The Lonely Shepherd" and Hattori Hanzo's sword in Kill Bill vol 1 (immediately after "Kaifuku suru kizu" no less, which exists in relation to both that film and the amazing All About Lily Chou-Chou)

Excluding:

• Opening and closing credits songs unless they're part of the film itself (a few that leap to mind: Beck's cover of "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" at the end of Eternal Sunshine, the Greenhornes' "There Is An End" in Broken Flowers, Anna von Hausswolf's "Track of Time" over the closing credits of Personal Shopper).
• Songs that are totally associated with a film as a whole but not, at least for me, any one particular scene (e.g. "California Dreaming" and that cover of the Cranberries' "Dreams" in Chungking Express, "Non, je ne regrette rien" in Inception, "The Blower's Daughter" in Closer).
• Songs that I've learned to associate with particular scenes through sheer force of watching the film over and over and/or listening to the soundtrack (e.g. Heart's "Magic Man" and Trip Fontaine's locker walk in The Virgin Suicides)
• Karaoke versions (ok, there's only one, obvious example here)

I'm sure I've missed plenty, but those are the ones that have proved closest to the surface.

Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

I decided I liked Hot Milk enough to want to own it (unusual for me these days), and took the opportunity to re-read it. It's just as elusive and vivid a second time through, its poetic cadences as sharp, even reading forewarned about the paths it will take.

(first time)

The Shape of Water

What a beautiful film. It reminded me of earlyish (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, Amelie - though that last probably doesn't really count as early any more) Jeunet, especially the opening voiceover-narrated scene and the establishing ones that follow, in its shadowy green-hued palette, fairytale notes and overall structure, and mixing of whimsy, wonder and darkness. (That thought caused me to think about how wonder and longing relate to each other, how our own relationships to both emotions change over time, and how that in turn affects our responses to movies - and other artforms, but especially movies I think.)

I think it's Sally Hawkins' performance - almost entirely voiceless, no less - that really makes it (and the quality of the practical effects creating the aquatic creature), along with del Toro's relative restraint in presenting the story, which allows its emotional high points to land all the more effectively, especially the flooded bathroom. It has an emotional truth and groundedness which meant I never questioned its central fantastic element, or fell into reading it primarily in symbolic terms (although the outsider status shared not only by Elisa but also her friends with the creature is made explicit), and allowed its imaginative force to operate in tandem with an emotional one. I still think Pan's Labyrinth was probably del Toro's high point but this was really good.

The Good Place seasons 1 & 2

I've been a bit under the weather so I caved in and watched this, a show I was sure I'd enjoy given (a) the increasingly ecstatic reviews, (b) it has the same showrunner as the glorious - and gloriously affirmatory - Parks & Rec (Mike Schur), (c) Kristen Bell (always a delight), (d) (to a lesser extent but still) Ted Danson. Also I accidentally ran into a spoiler online the other day, which was a minor pity, but also clued me in that The Good Place is a genuine extended-arc show.

And yes I have very much enjoyed these first two seasons, including the bonuses of all the philosophy (and the show being actually interested in ethics and what it means to be a good person), its willingness to steer straight into the crazy from time to time (eg flying shrimp, unicorn) and the cleverness of the writing (really, all the way through, but the structuring from start to finish of each season, and the zinging opening few episodes of season 2 and its reboots especially stand out). Not sure whether to count the liberal use of cliffhangers at the end of episodes as a bonus, but it certainly adds to the show's propulsiveness, although the amount of plot it crams in would probably have achieved that anyway. And it's nice that it is so sweet-natured and optimistic without ever getting saccharine.

Bell and Danson predictably (but far from boringly) great, in the small gestures (eg Michael's attempt at fist pumping; scores of Eleanor's expressions and intonations) as well as the overall; my favourite of the others would have to be Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Janet (D'Arcy Carden) though they're all strong. The clean, bright, colourful look of the whole helps with its easy consumability, as does the casual diversity of its cast (main and supporting), both of which also befit the Good Place itself.

Eleanor Davis - How to Be Happy

This collection of graphic short stories seems to have had good reviews but it didn't say much to me. The art is good; the stories are rather too insubstantial. I did like "Stick and String", in which a musician strumming what looks like a lute or maybe it's just a guitar - "zum zumm zumm zum zumm zum" and on and on - finds love in the forest.

Tracy Chapman - Greatest Hits

Things I've learned from listening to this compilation:
1. Tracy Chapman has an awful lot in common with 10,000 Maniacs. Obviously this is a good thing but it's also a surprise!
2. She has a number of good songs beyond "Fast Car" and "Talkin' Bout A Revolution". For example, "Telling Stories", "Change", "Bang Bang Bang", and a neat live cover of "Stand By Me".
3. More of a re-learn but "Fast Car" is genuinely great. I reckon when I was first hearing it on the radio as a child, it already carried a nostalgic charge arising from a combination of the song's intrinsic qualities and the feeling it had of having always been there (it was released in 1988), and that's only deepened with time.

Renni Browne and Dave King - Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (2nd ed)

This one was super useful and very much about the mechanics of fiction writing (and self-editing); I've been selective about the 'how to' books I've read, and this is the first I've come across that I felt I could usefully study. I was pleased to see I've learned to look for many of these things in my own writing (sometimes intuitively and without a name for them - e.g. proportion), giving me a better chance of doing them well, not that surprised to spot other habits to which I am prone but which, pointed out by this book, do tend to weaken my stuff (e.g. as and -ing formulations), and delighted to learn a wholly new concept which I think will help me a lot if I can figure it out (narrative distance).

There are useful short checklists at the end of each chapter but here is a list of ideas, terminology and traps especially helpful as an aide memoire for me.

*

Show and Tell

To write exposition at length - describing your characters' pasts or events that happened before the story began or any information your readers might need to understand your plot - is to engage your readers' intellects. What you want to do is engage their emotions. (10)

Narrative summary has its uses, the main one being to vary the rhythm and texture of your writing. Scenes are immediate and engaging, but scene after scene without a break can become relentless and exhausting ... (12)

Characterisation and Exposition

Point of View

If the first person invites intimacy and the omniscient narrator allows for perspective, the third person strikes a balance between the two. ... the third-person point of view as a continuum, running from narrative intimacy to narrative distance. (47)

Allowing your characters' emotions to steep into your descriptions also lets you use description more freely. ... When description also conveys a character's personality or mood, you can use it to vary your pace or add texture without interrupting the flow. ... The emotions have to go somewhere, and the language of your descriptions is a good place for them. (50-51)

Proportion

Fiction writers [today] are much freer to use ellipses, to leave more of the mundane, bridging action up to their readers' imaginations. (68)

Properly proportioned does not mean textureless. There is always room for philosophical asides that reveal the narrator's character, subplots that may resonate with the main plot, forays into odd corners of background that make the fictional world more three-dimensional. The trick is telling the difference between digressions that harmonise with the story (even in odd and mysterious ways) and those that hang on the story like limpets. ... ask yourself what interests you the most, what really comes to life, what involves and intrigues. What moves or fascinates or disturbs or pleases you? ... If most of what you enjoyed doesn't obviously advance your plot, then maybe you need to change your plot. (74-75)

[Y]our viewpoint character's interest at the moment should control the degree of detail you put into your description. (77)

Dialogue Mechanics

Resist the Urge to Explain. (84)

See How It Sounds

[H]ave your characters misunderstand each other once in a while. Have them answer the unspoken question rather than the one asked out loud. Have them talk at cross-purposes. Have them hedge. Disagree. Lie. (104)

Interior Monologue

So what's the right amount of interior monologue? ... The balance you hit depends on what your characters are feeling, how important their feelings are to the story at that point, how you want the scene to flow, and, especially, how evident their feelings are in other ways. (122)

[G]aining control of your narrative distance can open the door for all sorts of effects, and this is even more true when you work interior monologue into the mix. (131)

Easy Beats

[B]eats allow your readers to picture your dialogue taking place. ... Where you want the tension high ... pare the beats down to a bare minimum. (149)

Breaking Up Is Easy to Do

Once Is Usually Enough

Reread your manuscript, keeping in mind what you are trying to do with each paragraph - what character point you're trying to establish, what sort of mood you're trying to create, what background you're trying to suggest. In how many different ways are you accomplishing each of these ends? (188)

Sophistication

Both the as construction and the -ing construction ... take a bit of action ("She pulled off her gloves") and tuck it away into a dependent clause ("Pulling off her gloves ..."). This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant. (193)

[Only use poetic figures of speech where you want to draw the reader's attention. (202)]

Voice

[M]ost of the great stylists have developed their style in service of their stories. (219)

When you take the time and energy to capture precisely a particular state of mind, make sure it's a state of mind that's worth capturing - a turning point in your main character's life, a moment of realisation ... (222)

When you come to a sentence or phrase that gives you a little jab of pleasure, that makes you say, "Ah, yes," that sings ... try to absorb their rhythm or fullness or simplicity or freshness or whatever made them sing to you. What you've been reading aloud will represent, for now, your voice at its most effective. (228)

... those passages that make you wince or that seem to fall flat ... Is the writing flat? Strained? Awkward? Obvious? Pedestrian? Forced? Vague or abstract? (229)

Call Me By Your Name

Quite lovely. If I were to quibble, I'd say the generosity of Elio's parents and his 'girlfriend' Marzia stretches the limits of plausibility but this is a film not to quibble with, but to sink into. I certainly felt it.

(Compare and contrast: Blue is the Warmest Colour)

NGV Triennial (second visit)

This time, went through the rest of the ground floor.

Paulina Olowska's paintings were the clear highlight. It was the joyous splash of colour of "The Lepidopterist" that first caught my eye and the attractive-in-every-way triptych of "Mysteria" which was most directly in my strike zone, but it ended up being the less obvious but beautiful and deep "The Painter" with which I spent the most time, and which I find lingering with me this evening.

I also liked Pascale Marthine Tayou's "Coloured Stones" (2015), referencing social unrest, Shilpa Gupta's black-in-darkness microphone sculpture and sound installation (2012-15) which you could maybe say takes some shortcuts to the sense of immensity and near-sublimity that say Anish Kapoor often achieves but is effective anyway, and David Altmejd's "Mother 1 (Relatives)" (2013), which wins the prize for best curatorial decision, confronting one in all its uncanny, emerging-from-the-subconscious China Mieville-esque weirdness and glory suspended from the ceiling immediately as you turn the corner from Gupta's untitled, echoing piece.

(first visit)

"Dion Horstmans: Particle Fever" & "Richard Blackwell: 0, 0, 0" (Flinders Lane Gallery)

Was passing by FLG so popped in for a quick look.

East West Street: A Song of Good and Evil (Arts Centre - Hamer Hall)

A performance mixing readings from Philippe Sands' book of the same (pre-subtitle) name by Sands himself and a female actor with songs for piano and voice that were somehow meaningful to the figures in the story told in the readings, of the Nuremberg trials - principally Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland, Hersch Lauterpacht, one of the lawyers involved with the British prosecution and originator of the concept of crimes against humanity, and Raphael Lemkin, who advised the American prosecutorial team and pushed the idea of genocide into international law (Lauterpacht and Lemkin both lost nearly their entire families at the hands of Nazi Germany).

There is, of course, an inherent great gravity to its subject matter and these 90 minutes did prompt reflections. In artistic terms, I wouldn't say it was anything to write home about - the story-telling is fine but nothing extraordinary, the stagecraft minimal, the voice acting so-so, the singing maybe not top notch. (The music was varied, including Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Bach and more ... not to mention Leonard Cohen's "Anthem".) But as a story that needs to be told, I didn't fault it.

(w/ Jarrod)

Black Panther

There was a moment early on in Black Panther when I found myself wondering whether superhero stories, and specifically movies, might fill a similar space - in my imagination, psyche, what have you - as the fantasy genre sometimes has for me in the past, and specifically the sense of wonder and other worlds; I think that came partly from the sense of interlocking universes that comes with these 'filmic universes' (on which I have only a shaky grasp even though I've seen a fair number of the individual films across both Marvel and DC) and partly from the set-up of Wakanda itself here. In any case, I thought this movie was great, its engine built equally around action of both the physical (ie fights and explosions) and the political sorts, with good human-sized moments and a very thoughtfully-developed antagonist. (And almost casually filling its ranks with a bunch of excellent female characters incidentally too.)

Margo Price - All American Made

Boy, this is terrific, better even than the itself pretty great Midwest Farmer's Daughter. In its unassuming country lines, humble and almost plain, it reminds me of the way Laura Cantrell's music sneaks up on you, so that by the time you realise how marvellous it is, you're fully enveloped (e.g.). That goes just as much for the relatively more sprightly numbers as the slow ballads which, if I'm honest, do provide my personal highlights: "Learning to Lose", an affecting duet with Willie Nelson, and the more folk-shaded "Loner" (though I did notice that one's the only song not credited to Price herself, but instead written by Jeremy Ivey, who also co-writes with her on about half of the album's other songs).

Jónsi - Go

Considering how much I loved Agaetis Byrjun back in the day, it's a bit surprising that I haven't followed Sigur Rós and the various projects of their bandleader and singer Jónsi more closely. (And, as an aside, these kinds of things are all too easy to observe nowadays, but that album came out nearly 20 years ago (!) - 1999 - and it was about a decade ago that I saw them live, with Ruth, at Festival Hall, and the way I already felt about them by then was pretty much as I still do now.) Anyhow, Go is good - bright, soaring, epic (of course) and with a bit of a pop surge. 

Scarlett Thomas - PopCo & The End of Mr Y

There are the books I think of as my favourites (conveniently recently compiled here) and then there's a subset of those which are most inspiring for my own writing, and PopCo and The End of Mr Y have sat snugly amidst those since I read them in succession now nearly a decade ago. It's both of those capacities that have led me to re-read them back to back over the last few weeks, and what a pleasure to find that they hold up.

Re-reads of favourites can go a few different ways. Sometimes the book's significantly less amazing than it once was, for whatever combination of then/now circumstances and the qualities of the book itself (Brideshead Revisited was like that when I started trying to re-read it a while back), while when it is still great, that can be in ways which have evolved since the last read (for me The Great Gatsby is the clearest example) or in ways that are fundamentally still the same as what draw me to it in the first time - and both of these two of Scarlett Thomas's are very much in that last category.

So here are a few things I remember liking or noticing about them last time which stood out again (in some cases with further observations this time round):

• Both have great openings - exciting in an unusual way that is immersive and makes me want to read more. It's mostly in the voice and perspective, but also in the strongly visual sense of mystery and uncertainty that both create: Alice at the train station at night as her perceptions go a bit wonky in PopCo; Ariel evacuating her office as a nearby building collapses ground and then stumbling across the mysterious book in The End of Mr Y.
• First person present tense. So good! But, I suspect, also a limitation which contributes to Thomas's use of various crutches across both books, especially PopCo: extended exposition (often via interior monologue); dialogue which can be very explain-y (even though that's consistent with the characters' backgrounds); long slabs of back/side-story (pirates etc). There's also the accumulation of often quite banal descriptive detail, but I think that's more a feature than a bug in relation to the books' phenomenological approaches.
• The extended intellectual excursions - about homoeopathy, cryptography/cryptanalysis, mathematics, quantum physics, consciousness, phenomenological existentialism, theories of hyper-reality, the 'linguistic turn' and more - which don't have anything direct to do with story or character (but are important to the whole) are another crutch, but probably not due to 1stPPT. 
• Related to the two points above - part of why the plotting of PopCo is so unusual is that there's not much plotting there ... at least not in the present-day of the book's narrative. (This is one that I only noticed this time, although the line from a review in my edition's inside front has always appealed to me: "No heroine this year was more beguiling than Alice in Scarlett Thomas's PopCo, a character so wayward that she went to bed with her homoeopathic remedies for much of the book until she felt like joining in the plot again.")
• In their different ways, these books are also pretty much about the meaning of life or at least the nature of reality, in a way that's much more overt than most novels allow themselves to be, especially The End of Mr Y. Which is excellent!

And a few other things:

• This time Alice from PopCo and Ariel from The End of Mr Y were more distinct from each other in my mind than last time, even though they definitely have a bunch of similarities in terms of how they perceive the world and their interests and habits they have (generally bad habits stemming from worse impulses beyond their own control but of which they are very aware).
• I don't remember noticing the (obvious) pun in the title of The End of Mr Y before, although maybe I did and just forgot, not least given that Ariel literally uses the phrase "the end of mystery" at one point.
• Their unabashed contemporariness is still something I like about them - the way they are so explicitly located in the modern world, technologically and otherwise. But the world moves at a ferocious rate. Ten years ago in The End of Mr Y, one (older) character finds it remarkably postmodern that his (younger) lover has an ipod; today it feels anachronistic to still use that same device.

Unsurprisingly, the flaws in these two novels stand out a lot more now, I suspect more because I'm a decade older myself than because these have been second reads. The three biggest ones are the tendency towards long, usually ideas/concept-driven explanations of things, the rubberiness of the plot and character trajectories, and (to a lesser extent) the tendency towards thinness in the characterisations in general.

But, just like last time, those are all things that I notice without them particularly detracting from my enjoyment; somehow, both novels feel like they're always racing forward despite their unconventionality. (Her more recent novels are an interesting compare and contrast. I admire both Our Tragic Universe and The Seed Collectors more than I like them - although The Seed Collectors in particular is really excellent - but in both I can really see the way she is deliberately putting pressure on conventional uses of narrative and characterisation towards interesting ends, whereas in PopCo and The End of Mr Y it feels like the unconventionality is more a consequence of the - fascinating - high concepts with which she started.)

So there it is. How I relate to these books has evolved, but they remain as totemic as ever.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Ok this one was actually exciting, and however much of its gravity was earned in its own right as opposed to tapped from the foregoing franchise, it had weight, with both excitement and gravity kicking in from the opening scenes as the rebel forces flee their erstwhile planetary base. I'd forgotten that Rian Johnson directed this instalment, and while who knows how much of a personal stamp he got to put on it, it's tempting to credit him with a fair bit of what makes The Last Jedi effective, including the way its plot and character pieces snap so neatly yet not-overly-deterministically together. Also amidst a cast in which there aren't too many space-fillers, Adam Driver is really terrific, as is Laura Dern.

(lately: The Force Awakens and Rogue One)

Phantom Thread

Partway through Phantom Thread, I remembered that Paul Thomas Anderson also directed The Master, of which this most recent one reminded me a fair bit. I think it's mostly the way that the characters don't lend themselves to easy analysis or understanding, whether through surface or naturalistic expressiveness or easy story-telling, so the psychology of their interactions is revealed much more through their actions ... and doesn't that psychology turn out to have some corkscrews in it! No doubt there is plenty more at work there too - the constant close-ups, eccentric (but terrific) framing, the effect of the music - and it's every inch a PTA film including in its beauty (he really is a great director).

Anyway there are layers to this one and I didn't feel I fully understood it. You can trace back Woodcock's intense - and developmentally arrested - insistence on having everything just so to his relationship with his mother, and the notion of the curse is made just textual (as opposed to sub-textual) enough but not too much, and there is an interesting story with his sister there too (a terrific performance: Lesley Manville), but there's still a lot that doesn't give itself up so easily. We never learn anything meaningful about Alma's background or circumstances, as far as I can remember, which is also interesting and, combined with Woodcock's very male and privileged way of conducting his life also gave me some pause. For me though, ultimately that doesn't detract from the density of its depiction of the central relationship; we do learn a great deal about Alma's character and see her asserting herself and her self-respect all the way through. This feels like a film of weight that will linger.

(w/ Erandathie)

Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm & Ivy Tripp

Names can be misleading. I'd always assumed based on Waxahatchee's that her music would be on the inaccessible side, but that turns out to be 100% wrong, as these two albums - I came to them backwards, 2017's Out in the Storm then 2015's Ivy Tripp - are actually brim full of anthemic power-pop steeped in some of my favourite alternative-y textures from the 90s (and therefore from any period full stop).

Throwing Muses and Belly are huge reference points for me, but also it seems for a whole lot of whatever-indie-music-is-these days artists right now (see eg Honeyblood) and if a dash of Helium's jagged guitar sound finds its way in there too and there's some haunting in moments by Siamese Dream, well so much the better. Out in the Storm is the more densely electric guitared and studio-produced and fuller-tilt of the two, with more prominent woo-ooh-oohs, and so maybe it's not a surprise that it's the one I like more - but on the other hand Ivy Tripp has a bunch of gorgeous fraught quieter songs in the borderlands between Kim Deal and Lisa Germano, so, that's pretty good too.

Also: another realisation of how much Taylor Swift has colonised my brain - I was well-disposed towards "Sparks Fly" just because of its title even before I heard it.

NGV Australia miscellaneous

Images only. 'The Pool' exhibition (good luck to catch the part of the video that was about Fitzroy Pool i.e. Aqua Profonda and all); Louise Paramor - Palace of the Republic (paper and plastic, whee!); Mel O'Callaghan - "Ensemble" (not pictured); Helen Maudsley - Our Knowing and Not Knowing.

Jeff VanderMeer - Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

Good stuff. As VanderMeer's introduction promises, this 'how to' book slants towards imaginative fiction - sci-fi etc - but is applicable to fiction generally (though I mostly skipped the world-building chapter), and the hook of extensive and interesting illustrations is used well. And it was broken up nicely with little pieces from people who (like VanderMeer) ought to know what they're talking about like Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman and George R R Martin.

I picked up plenty from an afternoon's read-browsing, including the idea of the scar or splinter - "some initial irritant, some kind of galvanizing and enduring impulse, [combining] with the need to communicate, to tell stories ... often the memory of a loss, a disappointment, a perceived great wrong that continues to create an agitation, an irritation, or at times an agony."

NGV Triennial

The first of what will be multiple visits, so I felt free to wander without any aim of seeing it all.

Xu Zhen's monumental "Eternity-Buddha in Nirvana, the Dying Gaul, Farnese Hercules" (etc - the full title is extended) (2016-17) was a fine introduction, continuing the NGV's habit of using that large space effectively, and I liked the way the level 2 pieces were installed amidst the permanent collection. I liked Jean Epousteguy's "Death of the Father" (1967-68) and its distorted marble bishop-mitred heads and central crouched (supplicating?) figure, though it turns out it wasn't technically part of the Triennial, also Brodie Neill's "Gyro, table" (2016) (ocean plastic-adorned, and blue of course being the colour of distance, here in a different sense while still referencing water and its expanse).

Ron Mueck's "Mass" (2016-17) struck me as tender and beautiful in the vulnerability of the skulls, their individuality and collectivity and of course all in death; I always find his stuff moving. Guo Pei's fantastic - in multiple senses - dresses from her spring/summer 2017 'Legends' collection were stunning too. And Pae White's untitled 2017 colour room installation (they look like thread but are actually acrylic cord, and the use of painting and mirrors on surfaces adds to the effect) offered both immediate and deeper pleasures, eluding any sense that it had been completely grasped no matter where within it one stood and viewed it from.

(w/ Hayley)

Ryan Adams - Prisoner

Came out last year and the reference points are writ large: eighties heartland rock (not exactly rare in contemporary rock'n'pop but not exactly ever unwelcome either) and Adams's own back catalogue, with the odd bit of Johnny Marr-ish jangle. Nothing blazingly revelatory, but all entirely listenable in that way of melancholy, pretty, medium-build Ryan Adams-esque roots-rock anthems.

"Water + Wisdom: Australia India" (RMIT Gallery)

This would've been good even if it just made me reflect on our relationship with water. The particular focus is on waterways and their management (or stewardship) in Australia and India, with a healthy proportion given over to customary - in Australia, meaning indigenous - practices and knowledge.

My favourites, not unusually for this kind of exhibition, were some of the photographs: Victoria Lautman's evocative Indian stone stepwells, many (all?) in Rajasthan; Clare Arni's b&w photos taken "In the islands of the Sundarbans, lost in the vast muddy estuary of the Ganga", which caused me to have a serious moment of reflection about transience and beauty in there at lunchtime today; and Cop Shiva's documenting of Indian water tanks as decorated by locals ("water tanks are recognised as symbols of cohesion and acceptance by the civic body; once a tank is provided to a slum area, the wellbeing of residents is seen to be acknowledged"). Turns out they're all of India, so possibly my tastes are skewing a bit according to the subjects.

Also fun: the "Augmented Reality Sandbox", a literal sandbox in which you can shape the sand and create 'clouds' by hovering your hands over the landscape, and it craftily updates with coloured contour lines and simulated rain. Yes, I drew my initials in it because evidently I would be a terrible planet-maker (not pictured).

First Aid Kit - Ruins

No surprise that this is a fairly lovely, sunnily plaintive record. Only thing is that it's also on the indistinct side, despite the various interesting little signs of possible new directions (which often register more as loose ends than anything else).

The standouts are the first two singles, "It's A Shame" and "Fireworks", both accompanied by very charming videos (the latter in particular nails it in grafting an 80s high school prom aesthetic on to the 50s-into-60s pop of the song), and moody closer "Nothing Has To Be True"; in between, things tend to be nice but unmemorable, lacking those terrific melodic twists (or, for the most part, hooks in general) that have particularly distinguished their last couple of albums.

(The Big Black & The Blue, The Lion's Roar (and again), Stay Gold)

Marni Jackson - Don't I Know You?

Well of course the premise appealed to me. (From the blurb: Rose McEwan is a struggling writer who keeps having strange encounters with famous people. In this engrossing, original novel-in-stories, we follow her life from age seventeen, when she takes a summer writing course led by a young John Updike; through her first heartbreak, witnessed by Joni Mitchell; through [her] marriage, divorce, and a canoe trip with Taylor Swift, Leonard Cohen and Karl Ove Nausgaard.)

And two parenthetical asides on the first page convinced me I should read it. (First sentence: 'The Doon School of Fine Arts occupied the former summer house of Horatio Walker, a modestly-celebrated (there is no other kind) nineteenth-century Canadian painter.' And start of next paragraph: 'I had just turned seventeen. My parents, eager to encourage my precocious "way with words" and my "flair for art" (I excelled at drawing horses in profile) had signed me up for summer courses - one week of Introductory Oil Painting, followed by a week of Introductory Creative Writing.')

And, well, it's unfailingly fun to meet a new famous person - or two - in each story, and something of a balm, a kindness to the reader, that all are depicted in sympathetic terms which seem consonant with their public personae (even if Bob Dylan does somewhat outstay his welcome at Rose's lakeside holiday cottage). The theme interests me, too, as captured in the author's note that 'Their [the celebrities'] presence in these stories is meant to represent the powerful and intimate roles that famous people sometimes play in our ordinary lives'; as an aside, it amused me to realise that of the smorgasbord who do appear, Taylor Swift is actually the most significant for me, albeit probably only just shading Dylan and Neil Young. And Jackson's prose, especially on a sentence through to scene level, is clean, unobtrusive and occasionally rather lovely.

In the end, though, the novel (or collection of stories) is overwhelmed by the concept. Rose herself is a thin character, emerging as something of a (privileged, white) everywoman but without enough differentiation or strangeness - by which I mean the everyday kind that marks all of us - to convincingly anchor the stories as a whole. And that thinness is characteristic of the story and plotting in general - I didn't get the sense of depths between the lines that really fine fiction produces (exceptions: the first one, with Updike, the last one, with the canoe trip, and to lesser extents the Bill Murray, Charlotte Rampling and Adam Driver ones). So, by no means a bad book, but not a stayer either.

George Saunders - Tenth of December

I was moved to re-read this swiftly on the heels of my first go-through and it's at least as good on a second read. Unsurprisingly, on a second read I noticed some of the details more, or at least more consciously - like another parallel between "Victory Lap" and "Tenth of December" being the way the two main characters in each story (Alison and Kyle, Robin and Don) both save each other, and the contrast to "Puppy" and how that makes the latter heartbreaking, or like also in "Tenth of December" that both Robin and Don are unable to find the right words sometimes and the way the different reasons for that are baked into their characters and stories, or the interestingly large number of child protagonists and characters, or the way Saunders has of finding the perfect gesture (direct yet not too heavy-handed) on which to end each story. More surprisingly, but wonderfully, their effects are just as pronounced on what have now been, for some, multiple re-reads. All of these ten stories have sunk in deep.