is it on...The List?

My brain is working so fast and so hard at the moment, that when I stop working, it can’t handle changing gear. I daren’t read a book, because I start racing through it for The Point and forget to actually read it (“yeah, all right, Winton, surfing surfing blah blah blah. Step it up already.”) I daren’t knit, because my brain in hard-and-fast gear isn’t up to method, or patience, or allowing a thing to unfold.

My brain needs absolutely off, now.

It’s a great pity, then, that what my brain needs isn’t available here in Canada.

What it needs is The Rich List.

You will not have seen the popular New Zealand tv show The Rich List. It hasn’t travelled.

Let me attempt to recreate for you a tiny piece of its magic, so you will understand.

On The Rich List, two sets of randomly-paired people who have never met sit in big oval transparent space-pods on either side of a Plexiglass Podium of Neon, upon which stands one Jason Gunn. The whole procedure kicks off when Jason Gunn announces to the pod people a Subject.

Jason’s Subjects are wide-ranging and bizarre. He knows when he has a good’un. You can tell by his face. He cannot wait to make known to us the level of sheer wackitude his researchers have risen to this week. The pod people busily discuss the Subject. For they will have to Name as many examples of it as they can possibly imagine.

After sustaining the tension for a couple of glacial ages, Jason Gunn asks them to decide how many Test Cricketers Of The Seventies Whose Mothers Were Named Mary they think they can name.

Next, with his Soundproofing Plunger of Doom, Jason Gunn masterfully soundproofs one or other of the Space Pods. The first team confides in Jason its number. Jason unPlunges the one pair, and Plunges the other, and then immediately blurts out the secret to the previously-soundproofed pod: the first pod thinks it can name three. The second pod, alight with its new auditory function, counters that it thinks, Jason, it could name four test cricketers.

There is then Plunging and unPlunging a-plenty, as the slowest bidding auction in the history of the earth goes on between the two sets of pod people and their interpreter. Finally, the will of one pod is broken, and the people fall to their knees, sobbing, “Jason, we ask the other pod to Name…The List.”

The camera swoops up close to Jason’s Illuminated Dais of Interlocution in a way that resembles the spaceship out of Flight of the Navigator, when its big spherical eye-on-a-hydraulic-arm whizzes up to the kid’s face and goes “COMPLIANCE!!”. Jason Gunn, having almost been toppled from his Mighty Throne of Plexiglass, straightens his giganta-knotted tie, and unPlunges the soundproofed pod for the final time. He announces to the pod people their fate: “They say…Name….The List!” and everyone applauds wildly.

So the pod people proceed to name ninety-four test cricketers of the seventies whose mothers were named Mary. Every time they suggest one, Jason has a handy factoid ready: ("Played for the West Indies in (any year) when they battered England; played for Australia in (any year) when they battered England...") and finishes up with "but is he on...The List???" And then he either is or he isn't, so the pod people either win or they don't.

It’s a dramatic best-of-three scenario. So once the pod people have got through the test cricketers, the whole business starts again with naming Yarn Colours in the Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Range, or Australian Lakes That Contain More Than Five Million Litres Of Water, or Famous Percussionists Born in Whangarei.

This part of the competition determines who gets to go on and try to win Some Money. The prize for knocking out the other pod, is to (waaaait for iiiiit) do the exact same thing again. This time, though, it’s not just any old list, but…The Rich List. The procedure is identical, only for this one they can win literally pence for naming Julie Andrews’s Favourite Things.

The final thrilling climax of the whole event comes when the successful pair gets the opportunity to…are you sitting down?…go back to the Space Pod and Name some More Lists.

The whole thing takes an entire hour, all told, because of the swooping Flight of the Navigator camera and the Plunging and the unPlunging and the formula with which the pod people have been indoctrinated to speak (“We’d like to add ‘Raindrops on Roses’ to the List, please, Jason.”)

It is a programme that, if you were not doing something else at the same time – such as learning the bagpipes or drafting the federal budget – would inspire you to commit some violence upon yourself to relieve the agonising boredom.

It is exactly what I need for completely rewiring the settings and becoming half-normal again.

Can anyone suggest an equivalent band-aid, before my brain does itself an injury?

Dear Large Publishing House

Dear Large Publishing House,

Editors work for you, right?

Then you will forgive me for losing a little bit of respect for you when you have grammatical errors in a catalogue advertising books intended to help children learn to read.

I can let typos go. It’s an awfully big catalogue. I am also ok with a few mistyped ISBNs. When you’re listing 900 or so books, typing in 13 digits for each one, a zero per cent error rate is unrealistic. There’s bound to be a slip of the finger somewhere.

But entire grammatical dogs’ breakfasts, when the people you employ are editors?

Most people may neither know nor care about dangling participles. But it’s an editor’s job to know and care. Getting it right would have the sentence in front of me saying the book is ‘packed with bright, full-colour photographs’. With its merrily dangling participle, at the moment the sentence tells me the young readers are packed with those very photographs.

It’s not only confusing, but it sounds deeply uncomfortable.

Sincerely,

Amber

I don't like them

No, I don’t like them at all.

I don’t like the colour and I don’t like the holes.

But they’re not for me, so it’s all right.

It’s fun sometimes to knit things you don’t like, because otherwise you’d never do anything different. The person these are for picked the yarn and will like the pattern. And this pattern was just the right amount of complicated – not boring, but not ripping it back and weeping every row

because of my inability to count to five repeatedly. It’s sort of pretty, in the sense that I wouldn’t want to wear it.

The black behind the holes, by the way, is not part of the sock; it’s just so you can see the hole pattern. It turns out, after spending November to February emphatically not kicking around New Zealand in Birkenstocks, my feet revert to the pallid blue-ish colour of, well, these socks, so you can’t tell what’s sock and what’s hole.

Ugly socks done with, can you have a look at this for me?:

Purple, meet orange.
Was this a huge mistake?


It’s going to be a bag. But is it the sort of bag I might have knocked around travelling with, say, ten years ago? Should I have grown out of purple and orange by now?

this book wot I loved

I read about Diamond Dove over at Matilda and wanted to read it from Middlemiss’s post of an interview with Adrian Hyland. And it wasn’t straightforward, because you cannot get Diamond Dove here. It turns out you will be able to get it, soon, but the English Branch had to come through for me on this one. And hooray that they did.

I was put off by the phrase “An Emily Tempest Mystery” on the cover, because 1) I’m not a big fan of The Mystery Genre when it’s purposely identified as a genre, and 2) I just hate that construct on a book cover. You might as well put “A Pigeonholeable Sort Of Mystery”. Y’know? Which it isn’t.

So. I’m not a marker-up of books. Yet here it sits, bristling with yellow stickynotes at the many bits I loved. Almost all of them turns of phrase and dialogue. Hyland rocks at dialogue. You’d want to talk to every single character in the book (or have them talk to you, endlessly. Even the bad guys. Especially the bad guys). Everyone’s a collection of images (miner dad Jack’s a rock-hard torso and piercing blue eyes), fleshed out in how he or she talks.

This is not a quiet novel; it’s big and messy and noisy and seedy. Everyone shouts; everything’s filthy and held together with number eight wire. It’s a great yarn, no doubt. A murder mystery with a good cast of suspects, tangled up in land rights and geology and dreaming and drinking and dangerous dogs.

But I was secondarily interested in the story (partly because I’m so incurious about whodunthings; like I said, not a Mystery fan). I’d have read a year-in-the-life of these people just to be around the characters in the places in which they find themselves.

Ok…not quite true. There’s a bit where it gets mired in relationshippiness and leaves alone the mystery, and although the narrator makes a point of telling us she got distracted, I found it…distracting. I was not so taken with the grown man in a red beanie (that is where the Canadian word for it, toque, should come in, because it sounds like at least a half-grown up item of clothing; o gods, could the beanie be the whole reason I was not on board with the sex in this book? I think it was).

But. That was truly the only point at which my wild enthusiasm for every single thing in this novel dipped even slightly.

I’m sad I won’t run into these characters again. (Apparently there’ll be three books in this series, but Hyland reckons he’s aiming Emily off to far-flung places for the next ones, or something.) I will miss them. I already do miss them, since I finished the book. You can’t go about being spoilery and ruining endings, but I was especially keen on minor heroism from an unexpected quarter at the end. I should like to see more from that quarter. And Emily’s dad had better be around again. When Motor Jack starts “marshalling his narrative forces” there are very few people I’d rather listen to.

today's post is brought to you by the word 'disposed' (and some prefixes)

I read a book. It was an advance copy from a publisher, and it didn’t look like my kinda book. But the pub said it wasn’t her kinda book either, but she read it and was delighted and laughed like a drain. And, you know, sometimes it’s good to read not your kinda books.

Tell you the truth, I didn’t find it the best I’ve ever read. But it wasn’t at all bad. The pub was right; I laughed. The protag is an old guy who is smart and funny, and I am totally pre-disposed to get behind smart, funny old guys. But. Oh, but.

The protag is always talking about how he has a full head of hair.

Wow. Did I ever not like that. First, as we all know, old boys should be bald. There are very few exceptions to this rule. If they are unlucky enough not to be bald, they can slink away until they are grown-up enough to become bald, or maybe even get out the razor. Full-head-of-hair-as-important-characteristic is not likeable. There I was, reading along, laughing, and suddenly, he'd make a point of the hair thing again, and I would feel all cross and ill-disposed. (Also, this is a protag we are supposed to like. He’s no anti-hero. The hair thing isn’t an authorial conceit to show the protag’s, well, conceit. We’re meant to approve of the hair).

Then I checked out the author bio. He has, says his blurb, a multi-million-dollar business. Like that. Multi-million dollar.

I liked the book less.

Lots of people have talked about separating author from work – can you like the book if you know the author is a raging homophobe, that kind of thing (I made a typo there initially, and wrote ‘homophone’. Man, how eye hate their two bee homophones. Ewe?) But those are often things you learn about authors by really looking, not things they put in their bio on the back cover. But here is an author a) whose protag goes on about what a tremendously fetching and important thing his hair is, and b) who wants it noted in his bio that he has a multi-million dollar business.

So, the truth. I would’ve liked this book better if its author had not been someone who wanted me to know about his multi-million dollar business. It’s not the fact of having the multi-millions, but the wanting it to be part of the selected information people know about you, that turns me off it.

And the other truth. I would have been better-disposed to like it if I knew it had been written by, say, Carl Nixon. Nick Earls. Tim Winton. And maybe that’s the thing of it. I don’t know if Carl Nixon and Nick Earls and Tim Winton have multi-million-dollar businesses. Why? Because they don’t go on about it in their bios.


I don’t mean I would have done an about-face on a book I wasn’t all that keen on if the author had been a granola-munching pinko whale-saving do-gooder in Birkenstocks. It still wouldn’t be my kinda book. I would emphatically not have suddenly seen the light and realized it was in fact the greatest novel ever written, and the hair thing would still have got right on my wick. It doesn’t even mean I automatically like anything and everything Carl Nixon or Nick Earls or Tim Winton comes out with.

But I am pre-disposed to like it - yes, mostly because a)I know I have liked their other novels, but also because b)I am not put off by what they want readers to know about them.

I feel smaller and more confused as I go along. Help me out. Has reading what the author wanted you to know about him/her ever put you off reading the book? Are you brave enough to admit when you don’t like your favourite author’s latest? And, most importantly, what is up with these men and their hair? It’s that important? Really?

lord of the dance

My mum and dad are out dancing at a ceilidh.

My dad heads off for drinks after twirling my mother through something relatively strenuous.

My dad says to a woman nearby, “I’m getting too old for this.”

The woman nearby says, “Oh, no. Look at that man over there dancing. And he’s seventy.”

My dad makes international phone calls to his daughters to tell them a complete stranger thinks he’s younger than seventy.

Yes, really.

We may never hear the end of this one.