Read

When love bites... 

Read. A simple mantra and one of the best. Love the artwork but am wincing at the pain of destroying a book. Found it on BookshelfPorn.

As lovely as ABC

From the 'I-never-knew-I-needed-this-until-I-saw-it' files: 

How beautiful is this alphabet by Canadian designer Nathalie Nahas! Spotted it on Bloesem. My writing room is crying out for it...

Flower(dale) Power

A wonderful story at the Sydney Festival keynote event last week has stuck in my mind. JB Rowley from Storytelling Guild Victoria had the audience at Hope 2011: Stories That Must Be Told hanging onto her every word, relating the story of the Flowerdale Tattoo.
In the aftermath of the Victorian bushfires in 2008, Guild members offered their services to the Black Saturday communities, hosting storytelling dinners in towns in the Murrindindi Shire to give people an opportunity to find healing in sharing their stories.
It was at one of these dinners that Rowley discovered the story of the Flowerdale Tattoo. It began as one woman's personal story of hope - a simple tattoo she had imprinted on her forearm to remind her that out of the ashes new life emerges - and it has grown to be a symbol of hope and courage for the entire town. Now over 80 people bear the Flowerdale Tattoo on various parts of their anatomy, from teenagers to octogenarians.
Rowley is a gifted storyteller and this is a poignant story which will move even the hardest of hearts. Listen to it here.

To the lighthouse

Spectacular summer's day on the harbour in Sydney - a harbour full of lighthouses - including this one at Grotto Point, Middle Harbour. 
Grotto Point? Surely, stood in such becoming surrounds, someone in a rush of inspiration could have come up with a more inspiring name than that.  
Reminds me of a line from Virginia Woolf in her collection of autobiographical essays, Moments of Being:
'One day walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To The Lighthouse, in a great, apparently involuntary rush.'
A whole entire book? I wish it were that easy!

Nabokov's butterflies

Two butterflies today... 
One courtesy of actor John Cusack who posted this image (top) on Twitter of an artwork he created. (Relevance - Cusack starred in the classic flick High Fidelity, adapted for the screen from the novel by Nick Hornby. Which also means he qualifies as a RubyfireWrites literary crush.)
The other, courtesy of Vladimir Nabokov, whose butterfly theory has been proven 65 years after he first posited it. Besides being a writer (Lolita, Pale Fire) Nabokov was a self-taught butterfly expert and curator of lepidoptera at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. So he'd be pretty pleased to know that three decades after his death critics have conceded that his theory on the evolution of Polyomattus blues is valid.
It's all rather technical, so perhaps you'd prefer this anecdote:
Once during a butterfly hunt, Nabokov met a man making his way down a trail in the Rocky Mountains. He asked the man if he'd seen any butterflies up there. No, said the man, no butterflies. Nabokov continued hiking up the same trail and found the mountain to be positively aflutter with butterflies. 
Conclusion: you see what you look for.

Hunter S Thompson

Cracker letter! Hunter S Thompson's cover letter applying for a job at the Vancouver Sun in 1958.
Read it here.
Whether it worked or not, it was a stepping stone in Thompson's legend as reporter, author (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hells Angels) and founder of 'Gonzo journalism' - a subjective style of journalism whereby the writer insinuates himself into the story.
The letter was sent to the editor, Jack Scott, who was famous for spectacular stunts in the newsroom - sending the women's page editor to Cuba to cover the revolution and the sports guy to Formosa to interview the leader of the Republic of China. 
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Scott had a brief but formidable reign...would love to have seen his response to Thompson's letter.

Hope 2011

Expanding on a snippet from the Sydney Festival event tonight, Festival Keynote: Hope 2011 - Stories That Must Be Told. MC Wendy Harmer quoted a line from Emily Dickinson's poem 254, oft referred to as Hope is the thing with feathers. 

Dickinson is a RubyfireWrites favourite, so here it is for you...

'Hope' is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me. 

Upcoming releases 2011

Looking for some goods reads in 2011? The Millions has released its list of new books to look out for this year: The Great 2011 Book Preview. There are 76 recommendations so you should find something of interest among them.
I'm thinking I might venture into Geoff Dyer's Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. I wasn't a huge fan of his much vaunted novel Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi but perhaps this compilation of essays and reviews will restore him in my favour.
Have been wanting to read some David Foster Wallace so his novel The Pale King, to be released posthumously in April, is on my list. After Wallace died in 2008, the fragmented manuscript he'd been working on was pulled together by his editor Michael Pietsch and may go someway towards satisfying the insatiable appetite of Wallace's widespread fan base for previously unseen work. Nice cover art too.
And having devoured Bel Canto when it was first published in 2001, I can't go past Ann Patchett's upcoming novel State of Wonder, set in the heart of the South American jungle and centred around 'an inspiring student-teacher relationship similar to the bond she had with her own writing teachers, Allan Gurganas and the late Grace Paley.'
What are you thinking? 

A handy bag

And now, thanks to one of my Literary Salon-ers, something completely light hearted... and some may say sacrilegious: 
How to turn your book into a handbag. 
Yes. Combining two of my great loves - books and design - I can see the virtue in the idea but am not sure I could bring myself to follow through. (And PS. despite the lovely 'dude's' advice, I doubt glue would be robust enough for the demands of carriage - I'd use an industrial sewing machine and make the stitching a feature.)
But were I to muster the courage to slice into a book, for the purpose of resurrecting it in a new and perennial expression of form - something that would slip effortlessly from day to evening, casual to cocktail - the book I would choose is...
Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye
What would you choose?

Territories of hope

Today I came across the best piece of writing I've read throughout the devastating floods in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria - and let's not forget the Gascoyne region of West Australia before Christmas - and it was written not in relation to our apocalypse, but on a world scale that pertains to all of us.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of many essays and books, including her 2009 volume A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster, written amid the rubble of Hurricane Katrina and examining human bravery in the face of natural disasters.
With respect to the quality journalists who unfortunately number among the minority, forget the garbage that's been spewing ad nauseum from the mouths of hack reporters on our commercial TV stations since the rivers broke their banks. 
Read this instead. 
In her piece for the website TomDispatch, Solnit talks about her hopes for humanity in 2011 and it illustrates beautifully what we're seeing in our communities during and in the aftermath of the floodtide.
A couple of excerpts:
'When I studied disasters past, what amazed me was not just that people behaved so beautifully, but that, in doing so, they found such joy. It seems that something in their natures, starved in ordinary times, was fed by the opportunity, under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected; and when this appetite was fulfilled, the joy shone out, even amid the ruins.'
And this:
'....These individuals and organisations are putting together the proof that not only is another world possible, but it's been here all along...'
Go on, read it through to the end.

People power

Love this story from a Buckinghamshire village in the UK. 
The people of Stony Stratford have spoken - emptying the town's library of all 16,000 of its volumes in protest against the miserly Milton Keynes Council's intention to close the library down.
In a Facebook campaign, each library user was urged to borrow their entitlement of 15 books, with the aim of emptying every single shelf by Saturday. So great was the response that the last book was borrowed 24 hours ahead of the target time.
Book lovers of Stony Stratford say the empty shelves represent the gaping void the closure of the library would leave in their community.
Until now, the town has only been famous for its two pubs - the Cock and the Bull - from which it is said the phrase 'a cock and bull story' originates.
Let's hope the bullying Milton Keynes Council admits its dastardly plan to shut the lending house is indeed a cock and bull story.

From the pen of JFK

An unfinished novel by JFK caught my attention when the John F Kennedy Presidential Library this week released an immense collection of digitised archives. In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of his inauguration, the material includes 300 museum artefacts, 300 reels of audio tape, 72 reels of film footage, over 1200 individual recordings of telephone conversations and 1500 photos.
Among the 200,000 pages you can trawl through is this piece of writing by a school boy JFK, included in a letter to his father, Joseph Kennedy Snr. Titled 'A Plea for a Raise' it begins: 
'Chapter One
My recent allowance is 40¢. This I used for aeroplanes and other playthings of childhood but now I am a scout and I put away my childish things. When I am a scout I have to buy canteens, haversacks, blankets, searchlights poncho things that will last for years and I can always use it while I can't use a chocolate marshmallow sunday with vanilla ice cream and so I put in a plea for a raise of thirty cents for me to buy scout things and pay my own way more...'
Hardly Pulitzer Prize material but, as all wannabee writers will appreciate, one must begin somewhere.
Among the more quirky pieces, a congratulatory telegram from Harpo Marx on JFK's 1960 election win, and a crib sheet from a 1963 speech in Berlin with phonetic spelling of Ich bin ein Berliner.
Wow... a head of government with a healthy respect for pronunciation. We in the Antipodes can only wish...

New order

Dilemma: there are books everywhere. EVERYWHERE. 
I know, lucky me :) So how do I organise +-800 books across seven bookcases in different rooms in my house? 
Alphabetically yes, but that's not enough. Fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction. Classics, poetry, art, philosophy, biography, music, aviation, travel, reference. Journals, periodicals, coffee table books, children's books, miniature books.
Then there's shelf size to consider. One bookcase might perfectly house poetry, for example, but what happens when a volume doesn't fit on the shelf in which it is alphabetically required to reside? Does one start an A-Z shelf just for the big books?
And aesthetics. The books in my loungeroom are, for the sake of form over function, arranged in blocks of colour. (Which to a purist would be akin to filing a Mills & Boon in between Madame Bovary and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Horrors!) Clearly, an alphabetised system will mess with my interior design palette - although I'm prepared to concede on this particular point.
But you can see from the images above (courtesy of Bookshelf Porn) how form is vital to function when it comes to books and decorating. Cool huh!...perhaps I should experiment with some book art at home.
How do you organise your books? Does anyone have an ingenious system that I need to know about??

11.1.11

In acknowledgement of today's palindromic date - 11/1/11 - I give you a palindromic poem. Listen all the way to the end to see how the poem reverses on itself and ends where it began. Super clever!

Word geeks

This is kinda fun for word geeks like me. Vote now for the Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year 2010. Heard of 'precycling'? 'Blink kissing'? Know what a 'mamil' is? Been doing any 'binge listening' lately? Check out the new vernacular and cast your vote.

Expect away!

Have you seen this man? 

Dropped in to a secondhand bookstore I don't usually frequent on the beaches this week and thought for a moment I'd stepped right into an episode of Black Books. I swear the cantankerous git (who also happens to be the owner) behind the counter was Bernard Black in disguise and on a working-holiday at a bookstore in Australia...

Check out his form here on You Tube and you'll see what I mean!

One paper's pick

Those ernest and well-read scribes over at The Guardian have put together their pick of 'five of the best lines from fiction in 2010'. I give you theirs below - what do you think of them? 
The Will Self line is a cracker, I'm still thinking of what my others would be.... What are yours?

'A precocious anarchist, at 13 Sherman told me he was going to strip naked, except for a skullcap and an attaché case, then stump into Grodzinski's, the Jewish bakery in Golders Green. When challenged he would say only this – in a thick mittel-European accent: "Can you tell me the way to Grods?"'

- Will Self Walking To Hollywood

'I find now that I can more or less acquit myself from any charge of having desired Martin carnally. (My looks, by then, had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.)'

- Christopher Hitchens Hitch-22

'This is a complete story called: "Idea for a Short Documentary Film": Representatives of different food product manufacturers try to open their own packaging.'

- Lydia Davis Collected Stories

'There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.'

- Jonathan Franzen Freedom

'There was something exquisite to Treslove in the presentiment of a woman he loved dying in his arms. On occasion he died in hers, but her dying in his was better. It was how he knew he was in love: no presentiment of her expiry, no proposal.'

- Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question

Zeitoun

Not because I have a crush on Dave Eggers, but because this book looks completely absorbing, Zeitoun is jostling for top spot among a pile of books on my 'next read' list.
It's not a new book, it came out in 2009, but having just seen this excellent review in the London Review of Books I have to read it. Eggers spent three years writing and researching to bring the real life story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun into the public arena.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the aftermath of the devastation he paddled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and rescuing at least ten people. But on September 6 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared, seized on his own property by police who refused to tell him why he was being arrested and would not allow him even a phone call to contact relatives or a lawyer.
Eggers’ book explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy (an American who converted to Islam), their children, and the surreal atmosphere in New Orleans and the United States in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun became possible. 
Proceeds from sales of Zeitoun are distributed to the Zeitoun Foundation, which aids in the rebuilding and ongoing health of the city of New Orleans.
Luckily for me Santa Claus left a very generous bookstore voucher in my Christmas stocking...so my donation comes all the way from the North Pole.

A cuppa with Orwell and Wilde

Public holiday today....perfect for sitting down with a great book and a cup of tea George Orwell style. Came across this article written by he of Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and the rest, published in the Evening Standard, 12 January 1946: A Nice Cup of Tea. 
As a confirmed herbal tea drinker, Orwell's advice should come in handy next time I'm called upon to make a cuppa for the discerning and traditional drinker...
His rules and rites of serving tea made me think of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, a man who frequently used tea ceremonies as a battleground for serious frivolity. Take this scene from The Importance of Being Ernest...:

Cecily: May I offer you some tea, Miss Fairfax?

Gwendolyn [With elaborate politeness]: Thank you. [Aside.] Detestable girl! But I require tea!

Cecily [Sweetly]: Sugar?

Gwendolyn [Superciliously]: No thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. 

[Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup.]

Cecily [Severely]: Cake or bread and butter?

Gwendolyn [In a bored manner]: Bread and butter, please. Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.

Cecily [Cuts a very large slice of cake and puts it on the tray]: Hand that to Miss Fairfax.

Merriman and the footman serve and leave. Gwendolyn drinks the tea and makes a grimace. Puts down the cup at once, reaches out her hand to the bread and butter, looks at it, and finds it is cake. Rises in indignation.

Gwendolyn:  You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far. 

Cecily [Rising]: To save my poor, innocent trusting boy from the machinations of any other girl there are no lengths to which I would not go. 

Delicious!