CONNIKA

THE PRODIGAL'S SISTER

Bought a beautiful book at the weekend.  It's called THE PRODIGAL'S SISTER and has gorgeous artwork by Robert Doares.  The story is written in the form of a poem.

"...His face was streaked where sweat ran through the pollen dust, and met his tangled beard.  The garments that he wore for working stank.  And at the middle of his fingers there were blisters on both hands.  Despair Seemed written on his frozen face.  "In vain," he thought.  "He said the race and pace were all in vain.  The hours, the years, the sweat, the plans, my pow'rs - for naught.  Bequests don't come that way."  Then Hahyaneta kissed the gray and brownish coating on his cheek, and said, "Hi, Manny.  You look weak.  Can I get you a drink?"  He shook his head, "No thanks."  "Manon, it took your breath away, what Father said.  I think I understand.  The dread you feel right now - that all your sweat has been in vain - it's true.  And yet it is a gift to know bequests are free, and loaded treasure chests of grace, all hidden in the ground, are never earned, but only found.  And dancing doesn't come that way, and happy parties are not pay.  Day labor is of no avail, the gift of joy is not for sale.  You've labored hard to shun what's bad and now it's hard to just be glad. 

But, Manny, look.  Your Father and the servants and your brother stand inside the door and bid you come.  And listen to the children drum!"  She took his hand: "Come, all is well."  And thus the fetters broke and fell.  He waked as from a life-long trance, and said, "May I please have this dance?"

I DIDN'T KNOW THAT

 
In order to try to understand why our financial system is in the state it's in, I've been reading this book.  I heard the author being interviewed by Margaret Throsby and immediately contacted Mr Amazon and ordered it.  Now...did you know this?

"...In the 1890's the issue of gold became central to the US presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan.  Southern farmers in the USA borrowed from north-eastern bankers to finance their farms, equipment and crops.  The debt had to be repaid in gold.  As gold prices rose and the price of farm produce fell, the farmers' earnings fell and their debt repayments grew, fuelling resentment.  The farmers wanted more money in circulation and advocated silver as well as gold currency - know as bimetallism.

At the 1896 Democratic Convention, Bryan spoke passionately:  'You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.  You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.'  Bryan was defeated in the 1896 and 1900 election by William McKinley and the USA adopted the gold standard in 1900.

The bimetallism debate spawned Frank Baum's satire on the currency debate, the WIZARD OF OZ (actually the WIZARD OF OUNCE - of gold).  Dorothy, the Kansas farm girl, represented rural America.  The Scarecrow, Tinman and cowardly Lion represented farmers, factory workers and Bryan respectively.  Dorothy and her companions' journey down the gold road is the 1894 Coxey march of unemployed men (named after its leader Jacob Coxey) to secure another public issue of $500 million of paper money and to obtain employment.  Baum's plot has Dorothy and her companions exposing the fraud of evil wizards and witches, representing bankers and politicians, and establishing a new monetary order based on gold and silver.  Dorothy returns to Kansas City courtesy of her magic silver slippers.  In the film, Dorothy's slippers are red rather than silver, a concession to Hollywood cinematogoraphy."

SYDNEY WRITERS' WALK

 

 

Emma, Michael and the boys took themselves off to Sydney for a few days last week.  While there, they went on the Sydney Writers' Walk which consists of plaques on the street.  Each plaque has information about the writer and a quotation from one of the writer's works. Here is the quotation from the Kylie Tennant plaque. 

To be born is to be lucky.  Later, life may prove a failure or success, depending on the outlook of whoever is living it;  but that life is there should be a matter of congratulation daily renewed...

                                                                           Ride on Stranger

The photograph above is of the hut she worked in.

A WEEK IN DECEMBER

Just finished reading this book which is set in London the week before Christmas 2007.  Major characters are a derivatives trader who sets out to put big bucks into his bank account and in the process bring a bank and parts of Africa to its knees, his son who spends his days watching reality TV, between ordering pizza and overdosing on 'skunk', an underground train driver, a book reviewer whose primary purpose is that his own 'voice' is THE most important subject in his reviews, a barrister who has little work and too much time on his hands and a Muslim extremist, born and brought up in Glasgow.  Is that 7?  Anyway I'm sure you get the idea.

The book particularly drives home the dehumanizing effects of the electronic age.

Took me a while to get through - partly due to the busyness of the Christmas period.  Once I got going though I couldn't put it down.  Would the secretary phone the 'scribbled' option order through correctly or not?!  

A bit of trivia from the book.  A million pounds in 100 bills, tightly layered on top of each other would reach four and a half inches.  One trillion pounds would reach 71 miles.

A FLUFFY PINK GRENADE

 

We were down at Emma and Michael's over the weekend - babysitting Hamish and Angus while their parents flew off to Sydney for a wedding.  When we arrived Emma had a wee collection of stuff that I've left or she's borrowed over the past few weeks.  In amongst the collection she had popped in this book that she's recently read.  Am half-way through - great read.  Here's the blurb..."Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee.  He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six.  She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside."  If you're looking for a wee read, here's a good one.

IMPERSONATION OF A STAR

I'm in the middle of reading this book.  Have just finished the chapter ROCKET SCIENCE.  Here's an excerpt after the launch of Ariane at which Mr Botton was present:

For thousands of years, it had been nature - and its supposed creator - that had had a monopoly on awe.  It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.

But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar.  Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature.  We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelators.  We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.

Nature, meanwhile, had become an object of concern and pity, like a former foe arrived at one's gates, bleeding to death.  No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpassed us, the natural landscape instead everywhere bore the scars of our quixotic powers.  We could look up at the diminishing snows of Kilimanjaro and reflect on the ill effects of our turbines.  We could fly over denuded stretches of the Amazon and perceive the rain forest to be no more robust than a single flower in our hands.  We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

...A little more than a week after my return home, the Lockheed Martin satellite successfully entered its orbit, joining the hundreds of others which necklace the earth.  It now beams down images of WOWOW TV's programmes across Japan, from where it can sometimes be seen on a clear night, impersonating one of nature's stars.

 

WALKING BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS

Tania Kindersley and Sarah Vine at www.taniakindersley.blogspot.com (walking backwards in high heels) have just published a new book BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS - the Impossible Art of Being Female.  This marvelous quote just about sums up the book.  "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did - only she did it backwards and in high heels."

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO

This book has been on my TO READ list and has now been read.  I just popped in to a review by Robert Dessaix of The Sydney Morning Herald.

"Such a nice, restrained, civic-minded sort of country, Sweden, where everyone rides a bicycle and everything smells of coffee.  So blond, as Malcolm Bradbury once pointed out in a scurrilously accurate attack on it...In keeping with recent Swedish fiction in this genre, Larsson has lacerating comments to make about contemporary Swedish society.  His favourite targets are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital, the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away beneath all that shiny Swedish fairness.

Even more daringly, he broaches the touchy subject of how responsible a criminal is for his or her crimes.  Once upon a time we blamed inborn rottenness of some kind.  Nowadays we tend to blame poverty, social injustice, parental abuse, a difficult childhood, anything and anyone except the criminal.  As Salander says (The Girl With....) it's as if we no longer believe anyone has a will of their own..."

Go...read...

THE SLAP

   Finished this book which is about the fall-out after a child is slapped (by someone who is not his parent) at a barbeque.

Didn't enjoy - as Emma said "It could have been a great book."  As it was, it threw every "agenda" in your face and the lack of subtlty felt insulting.  In this community of people - family and friends, there was not one relationship that could have been described as - (trying to think of a policially correct term here) - give up -  normal, happy... 

For those who haven't read it, here's an extract from the review by  George Megalogenis in The Australian Literary Review (1 July 2009).

"...A nation's identity is the sum of its dreams divided by its fears.  Apply this formula to Australia in the first decade of the 21st century and there is no raging debate, just a shrug.  The dream is acquisition, the fear is the debt that comes with it.  McMansion divided by the mortgage.  Plasma television divided by the credit card.

Australia as a place is easy to caricature.  It's big, fortunate and fearful of the silliest things.  The value that binds the nation is capital gain.  But Australia as a people is an elusive concept......THE SLAP and THE MARRIAGE CLUB should be read back-to-back because together they describe Australia in all its painful contradictions;  prosperous yet exceedingly anxious.  The characters tolerate one another.  Tsiolkas's inner-city suburbs are big enough to house the nation's tribes;  Legge's inner-city mansion is big enough to accommodate a couple of strangers.  The nation these people live in, though, is intolerant.  It is fixated with consumption and celebrity, devoid of any shared sense of community...The dissonance...has very Anglo origins.  It is the outrage of talkback radio, the banality of fame, the vicous certainty of the blogosphere..."

So, there you go.  I'll be interested to hear if anyone else has read the book and what they think of it.  Can't believe it was nominated for the Miles Franklin Award.  Em's finished BREATH by Tim Winton.  It won the award and she said it was wonderful.  Will put on my list when I get the book.

GILEAD, HOME AND EMMA

Emma has just finished reading Home the sequel to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  She was so moved by the book, she has written an essay which you can download here Download Home - essay.

"...And then, there is the dying father, watching his son's suffering and unable to prevent it.  He says, "I can't enjoy the thought of heaven like I should, leaving so much unattended to here, I know it's wrong to think your mother's going to ask me about it...I was hoping I would be able to tell her Jack has come home."  Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it.  Finally, (Jack) said, whispered, "I hope you will give her my love."  The old man nodded.  "Yes.  I will certainly do that."

And perhaps, this is, at its core the only certain thing - love, and that home is not a temporal thing where a parent protects a child from harm, but a psychological one;  where the child and the parent look at each other, despite their differences, frailties and failings with compassion and love.  This, in fact, is where we find grace, our destiny and finally, 'home'.  and this may be what Robinson wants the reader to understand about the nature of God's grace:  it is more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all words that might describe it."