A Lady of letters
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Friday, April 6, 2012
Condensation
A Fraction of the Whole
Won’t it just be safer and wiser to avoid contemporary events all together? Just zip lock your novel with timeless references to avoid becoming an irrelevant pile of paper. For debut author, Steve Totlz, there is no safe option. Toltz grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck, pulls them into a hotted up car and drives full pelt into modern Australia.
However it was 2008 when the novel hit the shelves
with great aplomb, would it still be “devastatingly funny” when read today?
The short answer is – hells yeah it’s funny.
Essentially a story about a Father raising his son. While the Father takes his role as an educator very seriously, his advice and childrearing techniques aren’t quite run of the mill. With the family motto “there’s safety in looking crazy”. These bizarre thoughts flow forth from the “My Father the philosopher – he couldn’t even give a simple haircut without reflecting on it”.
The father and son relationship is more reminiscent of “Dad and Dave” than the Mr. Brady and Greg. Full of inappropriate jokes and naff notions “Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge or murder my Father.” The characters are so well fleshed out they have everything but a pulse.
Between all the bombastic, batty thoughts and tangents, there are some real gems of insight “there seems to be no passion for life, only for lifestyle.” Yet for all the navel gazing and bar stool philosophizing, the story has an unrelenting pace.
The novel is brimming with ideas, pulsating with energy, without feeling like we’re furrowing through the dregs of every last creative writing task Toltz has ever attempted.
In fact Toltz is a tidy writer - reining the plot with more skill than a cowboy born and breed in Wyomy, when it could have easily veered off the cliff into a sea of crashing absurdity (much like this metaphor of Toltz being a cowboy cum pirate).
Totlz captures contemporary Australia without resorting to cheap sucker-punch of stereotypes of a homogenous Home and Away society of surfer bums lounging at the local corner store.
Other books which will wrinkle your brain with wonderfully bizarre characters include:
And of course Catch 22, which has hidden itself somewhere in my bookcase...
Thursday, April 5, 2012
My Home
Square bottomed with two entrance points, it looked cozy and hobbit-hole like. It boasted that it could comfortably house two people. Two people with desirable BMI's, no luggage and possibly a foot shorter than the norm.
I found a video clip of the tent being tested. It stood pegged on a golf standard green in the middle of a warehouse. Suddenly, out of a network of overhead pipes, reams of water started pelting the tent. Wind machines ticked over, emitting shrill shrieks as they spun, plummeting the tent in all directions. It was a fabulously high tech and carefully engineered mini cyclone. The tent stayed stoutly secured to the ground. The interior bone dry. Yes, that would do just fine I thought to myself.
The clincher of the decision lay in the tent's ridiculously reduced sale price. I didn't for a moment question why the company would be drastically cutting prices and selling this style of tent to clear. I was more focused on picking a colour. The green fly of my tent was such a fabulously fluorescent it could have only be camouflaged if pitched in a discothèque celebrating a St Paddy's inspired Mardi Gras. Not exactly the colour for concealment. If anything it was more like a beacon in the night, herding nefarious types to our campsites.
Once on the road and with a fistful of bent and broken aluminum tent pegs, I realized that this camping malarkey would be hard work. During preparations I had anticipated that next six months would amount to an adventure of Enid Blyton proportions - endless rays of sunshine, snugly woodland creatures, lashings of ginger beer and sugary cakes.
My Enid Blyton vision of life on the road
Not imagining for a minute the possibilities of tent eating ants, thistles and thorns. The discomfort of pitching on concrete or in quarries. Or the dangers of getting trampled by herds of cows or goats, suckled by millions of mosquitoes,enquiring machine-gunned militia or bone-chilling temperatures.
Despite looking lush and green, thistles are in terrifyingly plentiful portions (Germany)
Exercise #1 Home
I’ve been reading Carmel Bird’s writing book ‘Writing the story of your life’ with keen delight. It sounds awfully dull, but she has such a gentle turn of phrase that she makes everything sound so lovely, lively and achievable. Interspersed are quotes from a range of people who have written memoirs, as well as tips and advice.
Inspired by the following discussion of a quote
“Colette, in her autobiography, Earthly Paradise, wrote of returning to her childhood home out of a ‘desire to observe the exact relation of memory to sites which shaped it.’ And she found many things still ‘fitted faithfully beneath the tracing which I always carry with me’. “
I came to the swift realization that I hadn’t made any real mention of my home for the last six months. So this week’s writing exercise has been writing about my beloved fluorescent green tent. I'll post up what I came up with.
