Take the first line of The Art of Dying. The 1997 original, which I put back in the Mad Ancestor beta version:

“Mona Skye, the duellist and poet of tragic fame, lay in a fold of angular limbs on tasselled brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking-room beneath the Amber Tree café.”

I have two problems with this. It’s unwieldy (too many adjectives, clunky rhythm), and what does “lay in a fold of angular limbs” mean? I know it means she is angular and she is folded up, but I don’t think it’s that well expressed.

Skipping over a version or two, the first line in the New Weird version goes:

“Mona Skye, the duellist and poet of lately tragic fame, lay where her friends had placed her, on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking room beneath the Amber Tree café.”

Losing “tasselled” helps. We don’t need to know that much about the cushions, and the word is a messy lump of consonants. I’m not sure about “lately”. It adds context to the situation and a more distant tone to the narrative voice, a hint of irony or impending irony — but it weakens the phrase as adverbs are wont to do. “Lay where her friends had placed her” — I don’t mind that, although Vali is her lover, and perhaps it’s a bit odd to refer to a lover as a friend. Swap “friends” for “companions” and you have extra syllables and a weaker word. The thesaurus doesn’t help.

Recent ideas: “lay in angular disarray/disarrangement” (hmmm…); “lay folded in her mink coat” (few words, handy visual, means what it says, might be a goer — I don’t love “mink” and “brocade” so close together, it makes me think of a home furnishings catalogue, but it does go with the decadent vibe); “lay in mink-wrapped ruin” (gah, no); “lay in a place not entirely of dishonour” (stop it, KJ — I might like the line, but the aim is to renovate, not rewrite, so let’s not drag the sentence in any new directions).

I’m trying this: “Mona Skye, the duellist and poet of tragic fame, lay in her mink coat, folded and frail, on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking-room beneath the Amber Tree café.”

Rhythm’s ok. Has visuals. “Folded and frail” separates “mink” and “brocade”. I’ll have to change the later “wasted towards frailty”, but that’s ok. “Wasted towards debility” would work.

And that’s just the first damn sentence.

As I’ve said to myself before, I need to stick to a plan of changing it as little as possible, and using as much of the original as possible, since I did like it and so did other people. However, there are additions in the New Weird version that I’m fond of, e.g. “Illness, allowed to run rampant, had repaid the favour with curious gifts.” On the other hand, that line tells the reader right away that Mona has allowed herself to get so sick, spoiling the surprise in the flashback. Between the nice line and the surprise, I think the surprise is more important.

Talking it out like this is helpful, actually. And it’s not like I have these problems with every line in everything I write (ok, I do, but… no, really, I don’t. Just most lines…) — but when a line isn’t working, I can get very stuck. I should have a routine checklist: Meaning, relation to rest of story, structure, rhythm, strength, tone. Of course, improving one element can muck up another. Sometimes I like to screw with meaning — let the words take a detour around meaning, or make a strange jump — so there’s also the question of where I can get away with doing that. (Not in a first sentence.)

I have less of this sort of trouble when I use first-person POV, I suppose because the POV character limits the options for what can be written, so that there are fewer decisions to make.

I feel moody and jittery. Both times things went pear-shaped in my head, it was this time of year. I don’t feel like that’s going to happen again, but I recognise the sensations of unfocused worry, pessimism and aggression — butterflies in the stomach, the sense that all is not well. They talk about “going troppo”, and I wonder if this is it — something to do with air pressure, maybe? It can’t be the heat itself, as the aircon takes care of that.

Or it could be as simple as the fact that not going out in the sun, and keeping blinds shut much of the day = not getting vitamin D. Must remember to take vitamin pills.

I did leave the house for long enough to buy a slow cooker. I’ve made a tagine and meatballs. Both turned out ok, but lacked a certain richness and flavour, even though I added more garlic than the feeble online recipes indicated. The beef I made the meatballs with probably didn’t contain enough fat, as the shop didn’t have actual minced beef, so they minced up some beef that they did have — which looked very lean. I probably should have bought some lard and stirred that into the mix. And I used chicken breast for the tagine, thinking that the slow cooker might moisten it, but it was still dry, so I’ll use thigh pieces next time.

Nonetheless, given that my usual idea of cooking is fried eggs on toast, I’m quite proud that I followed recipes and made actual meals, without burning them.

Milan Bauer’s website.

When I was in Prague I got the impression that the Czech Republic has a strong tradition of fantastical art. Maybe I just homed in on what I like, but Prague is the only place I’ve ever gone on a spending spree in an art gallery. There seemed to be an abundance of artists working in an oneiric/imaginative vein.

I found I was peeved at the omission.

I’m asking myself, why do I think Puberty Blues is such an important Australian book? Well, it’s a book by suburban girls, about suburban girls. It rang true for me, a few years after its publication in 1979, in a different city. What rang true? The culture that casts a girl as a sex object and an appendage to boys. The pressure to have sex before you’re really interested, or with someone who doesn’t turn you on. The difficulty of rising above a flat culture in which liberating ideas are conspicuous by their absence.

Puberty Blues is well-written in teenage vernacular. Its brilliance is in the clear, photographic depiction of its characters’ stunted and sometimes squalid lives. It’s a completely frank book, both comic and tragic, and entirely without self-pity .

Here’s the synopsis of For Love Alone by Christina Stead (1902 – 1983), which did make the list:

“High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment: ‘Thou shalt love’. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfilment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection on the first possible object, the egotistical Jonathan Crow, a poverty-stricken tutor who coaches her in Latin. It is only through another man – her ebullient and warm-hearted employer James Quick – that Teresa comes to understand her power as a woman, and emerges from obsession to a real consciousness of sexuality and love.”

My bolding. Ok, that’s one kind of female experience. But what I love about Puberty Blues is that the girls finally turn their back on the toxic culture dominated by the boys and go off and do their own thing. A woman may yearn for a man, but when the men (or boys) aren’t much chop, one’s “power as a woman” is one’s power to get outta Dodge and be self-sufficient. And I don’t think we hear that story enough.

In Puberty Blues, the story isn’t just told, it’s told by girls themselves. The authors were still in their teens when they wrote it. How often do the voices of young women from ordinary backgrounds get heard?

I’m not saying the book’s important just because young women wrote it. I’m suggesting it’s important because it’s so truthful.

It isn’t epic. It isn’t about big-picture Australia, or iconic Australians, or social problems that greatly occupy the public mind. But it shines a valuable light upon two of Australia’s most chronic, unexamined and untreated ailments — namely an embrace of mediocrity, and a lack of interest in what women do, say and think.

It deserves to be in Australia’s literary canon (our quasi-canon that exists at odd moments when we remember it’s there?) not banished to the chick-lit bin.

Also — lest this all sound too serious — nothing on the list by Chopper Read…?

Please smite all the people with boom cars. You know you can do it.

Thanks & amen,

Kirsten

Went to see The Avengers the other day. Thought it was a load of by-the-numbers silly fun, easy to watch, and Loki is my kind of evil, despite the silly headgear.

Just wanted to mention one strange thing, though. Loki, in a pissed off state, calls Natasha/Black Widow a “mewling quim.”

My sainted aunt, I thought, how did that get past the censors? Quim is a good old-fashioned word for another good old-fashioned word. “Mewling quim”  = “whining cunt”.

Now, I thought it was a funny moment. Just for a second, we phased out of the Land of Sanitised Ultraviolence and Sexless Sexiness into a slightly more interesting place. Segue to fantasies of Black Widow teaching Loki respect in sundry wicked ways.

But — that’s a hell of a thing to call a woman. Natasha deserved an equally pungent comeback line. Next time, can we have a full-on slanging match of dirty archaic insults?

‘Alastair’ was the nom-de-guerre of Hans Henning von Voigt. Though born of nobility, ‘Baron’ was a later addition to his name. As well as an artist, he was a pianist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator. He claimed to be a changeling.

As Coilhouse (whence the above info) says, Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke are obvious influences — sometimes very obvious — but I agree on the whole with the article writer that Alastair’s illustrations are distinctly his own.

Caresse Crosby recalled him thus: ‘He lived in a sort of Fall of usher House, you know, with bleak, hideous trees drooping around the doors and the windows… a blackamoor ushered us into a room where there was a black piano with a single candle burning on it. Soon Alastair himself appeared in the doorway in a white satin suit; he bowed, did a flying split and slid across the polished floor to stop at my feet, where he looked up and said, “Ah, Mrs. Crosby!” ‘

Links to his work here.

It’s hot. If April is the cruellest month, I think of May as April’s eagerly thuggish henchman. Dim Sim was around yesterday — nice to know he hasn’t forgotten me, or rather, the food with which he associates me.

***

Seen only by the cat that slept beneath the shrine at the street’s end, the god of the street flowed out of her abode—a vermilion box, adorned with auspicious sayings in gilded characters, well-provided with offerings of food and drink, and bedecked in the beauty of jasmine flowers—and assumed a warrior’s shape, a curved broadsword in her hand, ready to battle any ghost or fiend of hell.

All over the city, wherever the people still kept shrines, the gods of the streets did thus, night after night.

In the olden days they had been sea gods. Their people had brought them off the boats that would never turn home, in their shrines–for where a shrine goes, a god goes–and implored them to guard the families in the new land.

Here, they were gods of streets.

Here, in this humid and hot country, where all manner of evil and rotting spirits collected in the steamy air, they had learned how to fight.

(closeups on several god vs. ghost duels, then zoom out to epic top-view scene of hundreds of such battles…in an alternative life, I make this movie!)