janet frame 'to the is-land'

"i remember a grey day when i stood by the gate and listened to the wind in the telegraph wires. i had my first conscious feeling of an outside sadness, or it seemed to come from outside, from the sound of the wind moaning in the wires. i looked up and down the white dusty road and saw no one. the wind was blowing from place to place past us, and i was there, in between, listening. i felt a burden of sadness and loneliness as if something had happened or begun and i knew about it. i don't think i had yet thought of myself as a person looking out at the world; until then, i felt i was the world."

some book reviews

everything was fine until whatever by chelsea martin

this is a collection of poems & short stories that crispin loaned me. this book was funny a lot but also sad a lot. i liked how there were sort of normal stories interspersed with quite odd things. what i mean is that there were sort of real introspective things about people and relationships then something sort of unpretentious and hilarious at the end of a paragraph maybe. maybe this was unintentional but it makes the stories seem warmer or something and like endearing. also there was good fine print. and the book has a good title so it seems like you are an interesting person if you read it on the train. 

follow me down by kio stark

did i already write about this here? this book was really nice. it was short but compelling about this girl who gets mailed an old photo in an envelope then she tries to find out who the person is in the picture. i think it was just really nice prose about a city really, all her attempts to find it, meeting people around her neighbourhood and in different parts of the city. the protagonist was also a redhaired babe who used that to her advantage to find out things and i sort of liked that she was unashamed of using her looks in that way, but unusually i didn't end up hating her because of this. 

instructions... etc by tim key

also loaned to me by crispin. this book was good to read at work because i could easily read a thing while waiting for somebody to pick up the phone and answer questions to me. it is real funny in an earnest way, like quite verbose but hilariously so. a good use of parentheses. one of my supervisors thumbed it at some point and seemed intrigued by it. i think it made me seem 'interesting' because actually yes a lot of the things in the book are weird instructions.  

wind up bird chronicle by murakami

the second haruki murakami book i have read. i liked a lot of it but towards the end i felt like i just wanted toru to stop meeting different people. i felt sometimes like the women in the books were too sexually available, or that's the way they were written which also bothered me. perhaps it was just masculine and i'm not used to that. i liked this thing that toru says about kumiko "I just want you to keep one thing in mind: anything of yours - anything at all, as long as it belongs to you, I will accept as my own. That is one thing you will never have to worry about". generally what i like about this book and the other murakami book i have read (sputnik sweetheart) is the way that really odd things seem to happen, like just going to sit in a well then somehow going into dream states that aren't really dreams or spending every day of the week just looking at people, then mysteriously meeting a wealthy benefactor, meeting women who can somehow heal other women of their pain - these things that 'seem strange' are written about not without curiosity but without surprise. i liked this, because it seems like the things we do in life like get up and go get a train somewhere, make eggs, do our jobs.. they are all done as routinely as you like. who's to say going to sit in the bottom of a well shouldn't be just as normal. i don't know, i'm not explaining that very well. but my overall sense was that peculiar things seemed to be more usual and i enjoyed that. perhaps it was the japanese sensibility of the book coming through. 

richard yates by tao lin

i didn't really like richard yates very much. i mean there were some things that i enjoyed at the start but increasingly i despaired at the way that haley joel osment treated dakota fanning who was clearly vulnerable and young and probably not obese. and i also didn't feel like haley was being reasonable towards the adults in the book but was portrayed as being a reasonable person. however crispin mentioned this good thing during a discussion of this book with some other people a month back, that it sort of showed how truly shitty things get between some people and how sometimes things are really truly fucked. or he said something better than that which i can't remember right now but maybe that was the gist of it. 

the sending by isobelle carmody

what can i say, this was the latest book in the obernewtyn series and i freaking loved it, but only because i'm a xxcore ten year fan of obernewtyn and even though it's quite a weird sort of series i'm going to keep reading it until it's finished. i had to leave my copy of this (along with richard yates) at my hostel in new york though because i needed to cut off some dead weight. 

the tiger's wife by téa obreht

got this for xmas. it was an interesting read. it seemed to sort of have echoes of things in murakami, but work in a similar way to 'everything is illuminated' actually, in the sense that there was a protag, then a sort of person who told stories, then a separate narrator of these things. it made me think more about stuff happening in the balkans and weird folklore. the murakami echo was this character who simply couldn't die just because he'd had an aunt who said 'you won't be able to die now' or something of that nature. it was a pretty good read actually and i thought it was written pretty beautifully. 

um next i am probably going to read 'there is no year' by blake butler but it is an unusually shaped book and hard to take on the train sort of. currently reading a bill bryson book though which keeps weirdly intersecting with my real life in an informative manner

Pale Marble Movie

http://soundcloud.com/staceteague/pale-marble-movie

found a new reading nook in my room, real good

Unbearable lightness/Saturday

Unbearable lightness by staceteague

'review' of ben brooks - grow up

On Thursday 21 of July I woke up at 7am and went to the Melbourne airport to get a plane to New Zealand. I cried for the first half hour of the flight, then watched a movie with Bradley Cooper in it. James Duncan and Stacey Teague met me at the airport. I gave Stacey a hug and started to feel nervous while I was hugging her so I held her a bit tighter and nearly made her fall over. I hugged James Duncan. He smelt like coffee. He was holding a coffee cup in the front pocket of his jacket. I said "you smell like coffee, that's nice" then I felt weird.

Stacey drove us into town where we had plans to get dinner with Jackson Nieuwland. Stacey and I gabbed away in the front of the car and I tried to calm down. On the stereo there was a CD playing Coldplay, Fleetwood Mac, the Shlohmo remix of 'im da shit' by Gucci Mane that James Duncan introduced us to weeks earlier, plus some other music that was mutually accepted as 'good'.

We spent some time waiting on the corner of Krd and Queen street looking out for Jackson Nieuwland. Jackson is a very tall person, he measures around 6'7". I felt jittery. I think we were all anticipating his arrival. We had dinner at Renkon. Jackson's pupils looked huge. There was talk of super foods.

We drove back to the shack where Stacey lives with Huna. James had brought over a copy of Grow Up by Ben Brooks. I think he said he read most of it on the plane. I promptly began to read it with vigour. Reading this book was a very good distraction from having to ask where I would be sleeping that evening.

Grow Up is about Jasper who is a teenager doing high school. He seems to have a frank personality and the way he thought about things reminded me of Christopher from 'Curious incident of the dog' sometimes. Jasper frequently got up early. He listened to one of Avril Lavigne's earlier albums to feel safe or nostalgic maybe, which is what I have done with the album 'Let Go' in the past. He was trying very hard to comfort his nice friend Tenaya a lot of the time because she was sad. I thought the way they drank tea together was very sweet and sort of middle aged. It reminded me how one of my friends always requests that I pop the kettle on before she comes over.

It made me remember a lot of things about being a teenager and made me realise that a lot of those things that I felt then are still with me today, although I think most of my friends have stopped doing self harm.

One of my favourite parts was when Jasper is hanging out with Tenaya and he asks if they can watch episodes of Gilmore Girls. There were a lot of pleasing pop culture references. The friendship Jasper and Tenaya had seemed like the kind of friendship you have where time seems like it is very still, you could do just about anything together and want to do just about anything, but probably end up doing nothing and that seems okay and not like a waste of time usually.

I found Grow Up really easy to read and read most of it that first night that I arrived. It seemed like a good distraction from 'everything that was going on', plus I felt proud that I was reading something very quickly.

Before I read this book I read the review that was written about it on the Guardian website. When I read it I thought about another article I read on the Guardian website about electronic poetry, which was about how when you write about something as if it is literature, you are in doing so acknowledging its place among literature.

I think that it evoked some other feelings in me that were ~profound but because the book belongs to James I cannot refer back to it at the present moment in time.

book review: eat when you feel sad

On Friday last week I was trying to pump up my tyres in the front yard. This is an activity I cannot complete without lots of swearing, because I am stupid and I always forget how to use my bike pump. As I was uttering 'cunt' into the spokes of my back wheel, someone called to me over the fence. Lo, but it was the postie. "Having bike trouble?" he enquired.
"HAHAHAHAHA YES" I panted, standing up, feigning competence.
Taking out a package from his bike's swaddle, he said "I'll just pass this over then.."
I accepted the package from him. Immediately I brightened up. "Oh, this is for me! Thanks"
"Hope you get your bike working", the postie man said, with a wave.
"Thanks!" I hopped around with excitement. I hopped around with excitement and tore open the package. It was 'Eat When You Feel Sad' (henceforth will abbreviate this to EWYFS) by Zachary German. I pumped my bike tyres up and went to get my concession card made up at Clifton Hill train station.

After that I got the train to the city. I read the book on the train feeling pretty good about things. Last year sometime I read an excerpt of EWYFS on this site called Bear Parade. I remember liking it a lot, which is why I took the trouble to purchase it months later, despite overwhelming poverty.

The book is frankly a lot of 'Robert thinks', 'Robert eats', 'Broken Social Scene is playing', 'Lil Wayne is playing', 'they smoke cigarettes', 'Robert orders chinese food'. Robert seemed pretty bummed and like he didn't know what he really wanted to do with himself, or maybe I wasn't reading properly. One thing that I remembered from it as something to remember (yeah) is this quote after he 'breaks up with' Kelly: 'I don't like her clothes and I don't think she's--I don't want to introduce her to my friends, the ones who I don't have yet but who will be more like me, vain and judgemental and stuff' He thinks 'I need to stop being like this.' He thinks 'Run into traffic.' He thinks 'It's not going fast enough to kill me probably'

I really liked how Robert addressed his cat by saying 'hey baby' because it seemed really american and cute. I liked to imagine Robert as being a pretty cute indie boy vegan type. I think that Robert is a good character because it is a representation of how lonely life can be for young people in a big city or something. I don't know, I just vividly knew what he was like and had experienced the stuff he went through. I guess what I'm trying to say right now is that I'm listening to Broken Social Scene.

Two books I just read

It's weird, in hindsight, that I read these two books simultaneously. In 'Loneliness as a Way of Life', the main theme surrounds how we can exist as a single entity and how loneliness is not necessarily a bad thing.

p26: "Loneliness is deeply entangled in all paths of life because it reveals in sharp profile some of the most important limits of who we are and how we are with each other. It may be said that loneliness is fundamental to the very constitution of ourselves."

'A General Theory of Love' on the other hand says that we are physiologically dependent on one another for happiness. They describe love as a "simultaneous mutual regulation". Couples who take care of each other with concurrent reciprocity are more likely to feel whole, centered and alive.

Don't know how the book about love made me feel more depressed than the book about loneliness. Jesus.

A General Theory of Love was a better read overall, and as it is a very psychology heavy book, as well biology-based, it kind of validated everything I've learned in the past 2 years. Also learned a lot of cool stuff about brains. Thought the triune brain hypothesis was pretty cool. Tried to sum it up below.

The triune brain consists of the reptilian, limbic and neocortical parts of the brain. It has a lot to do with evolution, as each part of the brain evolved at different points in time, with the neocortex forming and growing larger in mammals over time.

The reptilian brain is all about automatic processes like breathing, swallowing and heart rate. We need this part of the brain to function physically, but not emotionally. If we only had a reptilian brain, we would function, but basically be "brain-dead". For example, if you shot yourself in the head and damaged the neocortex, you wouldn't necessarily die, you may just be unable to experience emotion or rationalize. However, if you shot yourself in the reptilian brain you would die instantly (not a suicide tip).

Next to evolve is the limbic brain, or the "emotional" brain. This brings the ability to love and experience emotion, along with the ability to play and recognise social order. We share this part of the brain with other mammals. The limbic brain consists of the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus and thalamus. You know, all the good stuff.

The neocortical brain is the folded squishy outer layer of the brain which only evolved in mammals roughly 30 million years ago. We have the largest neocortex of any living thing. The neocortex gives us the ability to think abstractly, problem solve, be aware of ourselves and our surroundings, write, speak and reason. Basically, it's awesome. In the book they described it as 'a warehouse of secrets', which I quite liked the sound of.

Loneliness as a Way of Life is divided into four sections: being, loving, grieving and writing. I really liked the first chapter, and in this he explores what it means to be alone in every sense. I didn't really dig 'loving' at all, he mostly just refers to other works such as King Lear, Moby Dick and Death of a Salesman. It seemed really impersonal and dull. In 'grieving', he talks about his own personal experience of loneliness via grief by talking about his wife dying of cancer. I really loved 'writing', it is about how writing as a "process of discovery" can create an awareness of ourselves, and thus help us to work our way through our despair (or, loneliness).

So that's that. I'm looking forward to reading some sweet fiction now.

book review: the gourmet

The Gourmet is written by Muriel Barbery. I received this book as a gift for my 21st birthday. It is about a very famous food critic who is dying. He is trying to remember the best flavour he ever ate, then he thinks he will be able to die in peace. Most of the chapters are reflections about the different things he has eaten throughout his life, but every second chapter is from the perspective of someone in his life. It is revealed through these chapters that he is a terrible bastard and nobody really likes him at all.

the book is written with very descriptive language. at times I found it too dense to enjoy, which is another reason I think it took me so long to read. I read another book by Muriel Barbery last year called The Elegance of the Hedgehog and this was a book I enjoyed. It was more philosophical and contemplative, although similarly crafted. I found that I 'connected with it' more. I was amused to learn that she used the same apartment building setting in both books.

at the end of the book there are questions for discussion which I thought was interesting and unusual. One of the questions is "how significant is the theme of self deception in this story"? I have been trying to work out how that theme fits into the story because frankly that didn't seem to be a prevalent theme at all. Then I thought maybe that I did not read the book properly and wondered if the fact that it took me over a month to read a ~100 page book meant I forgot some of the details about self deception.

old and new books

These are the books and other things I can remember reading in 2010.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Purchased in Glastonbury, UK. One of those books that make you think 'oh god, fuck' about life but also make you feel okay about it

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
a reread, one night in February

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
pretty excellent book loaned to me by my boss/dear friend. pretty French and has an annoyingly precocious protagonist but really nice. actually overall a bit precocious

Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel
Pretty sure I reread this to see if I liked it as much now as I did when I originally read it. I did.

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido
loaned and then given to me by a former colleague/dear friend. coming of age-y, wordy, girly.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
another reread. same quotes stuck out to me second time round: "I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way"

Our Father Who Wasn't There by David Carlin
David Carlin is a lecturer at my university and I read this book for an assignment in class. It is about how his father committed suicide when he was a few months old. I felt akin to him in some ways and found it difficult to write an emotionally removed review, got a poor mark.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Helen Garner is a famous Australian author. This book is mostly autobiographical, though she 'controversially' labelled it fiction. It is about a friend of hers with incurable cancer who came to visit her, seeking treatment that would save her. It didn't. Also read for university.

Sleep it off Lady by Jean Rhys
A collection of short stories, loosely autobiographical (if you know anything about Jean Rhys), certainly wonderful.

The Collected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen
This sounds like a science book and it is meant to. TS Spivet is a 13 year old cartographer. There are little maps, diagrams and drawings on each of the pages in this book. He makes maps of everything and wins a prize to give a speech at the Guggenheim. He does not tell his parents that he is going. It is a road trip book. The ending was more farcical than the plot I have already told you.

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
I began loving this book. I wrote down these quotes
"her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. she felt like she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her" p79
"nothing felt like any more than what it actually was. everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness" p80
The end was not as wonderful, though I don't remember it now. I feel like it just ended.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
I have discovered that I like to read books about the Vietnam war. This book was really good and taught me more about the war than the other media I have ingested about it. I liked it a lot and it was quick and easy to read. Americans say Graham like gram and it weirds me out.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch
This book was intoxicating. Stacey loaned it to me a while back but I didn't want to read it because I saw the film a few years ago and worried that would ruin it. The book was very good anyway. People teased me because on the front of the book it says 'selected for Oprah's book club'.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My friend Shu Shu told me to read this because it is her favourite book of all time and she collects different versions of it obsessively. I thought it quite interesting and was proud of myself for reading something about dystopia because I still have not read 1984.

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
I love Jean Rhys a lot, cannot explain how glad I am that she wrote this.

Eat When You Feel Sad by Zachary German
After I read this, I remember feeling feelings like the protagonist was feeling

How a Moth Becomes a Boat by Josephine Rowe
Josephine Rowe is a writer/poet who lives in Melbourne. This book is a collection of her short stories. Most of them are lovely, some of them I could tell they were meant to move me though and that upset me. I liked one about a fox the most.

I also read lots of poetry for Voiceworks and in other places like New Wave Vomit, some Tao Lin poetry and watched other videos of poetry online.

Most of the books that I want to read over the summer are ones that I was given/have to finish reading from last year, I guess I would like to read them all by March but I spend too much time thinking about what I could blog but here they are

Ideas by Peter Watson *
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
In the Aeroplane Over The Sea by Kim Cooper
The Shadow of Sirius by WS Merwin
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart *
The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery *
Literary Miscellaney by some guy
The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morris
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf *
The 13 and 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

The ones marked with * I have already begun (this is not interesting to anyone but me huh)

my summer reading list

i feel like summer is a good time for me to get back into good reading habits. here is a list of books i aim to read over the summer:

a general theory of love / thomas lewis, fari amini, and richard lannon (currently reading) (bought from unity books)
loneliness as a way of life / thomas dumm (currently reading) (bought from readings in melbourne)
seeing further: the story of science and the royal society / edited by bill bryson (borrowing from brad) (currently reading)
the fry chronicles / stephen fry (xmas present from sam)
heart of darkness / joseph conrad (bought from jasons books)
how we are hungry / dave eggers (bought from borders)
brother of the more famous jack / barbara trapido (borrowing from susie)
love is a dog from hell / charles bukowski (borrowing from oxana)
good morning, midnight / jean rhys (bought from jason's books)
junky / william s. burroughs (borrowing from kiki)
nuncle and other stories / john wain (borrowing from ali)

weirdly enough, i don't ask to borrow these books, people always seem to give them to me in a 'i just thought you would like this' kind of way, which is nice.

doubt I will read all of these, but I am ever hopeful.

very belated 'books I am reading' video

Doing video posts when my housemate is home/awake is awkward because in my flat you can hear pretty much everything the other is saying (she has to keep her door open so the kitties can use the litter tray in the hallway). So that's why it sounds like I am... all husky-like. I also apologise for my weird teeth and the faces pulled.



I have been reading Ideas for a few years now, since I got it for Christmas in 2006, but have recently decided that I should give it a real go. When I say "it's about when people started thinking about stuff" it really is. He starts from when man went from being whatevertheyweres (homonids? cannot remember) to sentient beings, when the idea of using fire was initiated, when people started hunting and so on. I'm only up to when religion began. It's unusual but nice for me to read something nonfiction. By Grand Central Station.. on the other hand is almost too poetic for me to read, despite its distinctly smaller size. I have been taking it around in my bag, attempting to read it on the train but as my train journey is only 12-15 (20 on a bad day) minutes, one does not have much time to invest in the intricate recount of the affair Elizabeth Smart had with some poet back in the day.

Also in recent book news I finally read Josephine Rowe's How a Moth Becomes a Boat and I would probably recommend it to most people because, even though there was only one that made my heart go "oh" in a contemplative way, I think that people who are interested in how we write here would really connect with it on that level too.

Finally, if you're viewing this post in a reader, why don't you visit the blog site, we've updated the layout! Leave us a comment and tell us what you're reading. Or whether the layout is too girly.