Last summer Sophie Cunningham and I had an excellent conversation in the fresh air of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens about reading whilst travelling and how it influences your travels. We thought a series of short writings on the subject would be wonderful. She had a post she’d prepared earlier, but it’s taken me this long to cook something up. More thoughts and writings from you are encouraged on this theme — maybe this could be a summer project for Sars and its readers?

When I travel I choose books to read without much thought to the impact they may have on the travelling. Maybe they have been saved for holiday reading because of their lightness of being, perhaps they are next on the bedside pile, sometimes they are bought along the way when there is nothing else to do. I didn’t mean to take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with me to Tasmania; I’d already read it, a year before, and had lent it to my sister-in-law. She returned it just before we left and I hadn’t removed it from my daypack.

Reading on holiday is part of the holiday, and I read things that I feel like reading rather than things I should be reading. According to my reading ledger (a small Moleskine notebook listing everything I’ve read since July 2000 when I got tired of keeping a diary and decided to record only the things I wanted to remember), I was reading the Philip Pullman trilogy on the boat across the Tasman and the days after our arrival, enjoying the differences between Northern Lights and The Golden Compass. Pure escapism mixed with daily dreaminess: so far, the perfect holiday.

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Guest post by Tom Cho. Tom Cho’s collection of short stories, Look Who’s Morphing, will be published by Giramondo in May 2009. His short stories have been published widely, with more recent publications in the Best Australian Stories series, HEAT magazine, The Age, and Meanjin. Visit him at www.tomcho.com

The poet Dorothy Porter died yesterday morning from complications from breast cancer.

I only met Dorothy once or twice, and very briefly - although I was fortunate to appear on the same bill as her earlier this year, for a reading and panel. (At one stage, I had a little bit more contact with her partner, the writer Andrea Goldsmith, who gave me some valuable encouragement earlier in my career.) Whether I met Dorothy in person or not barely matters anyway; the flesh and blood author is usually incapable of living up to our image of them. Perhaps they are also often incapable of living up to our hopes that they might in some illuminating way ’supplement’ the revelatory experiences we have when we read their works. I generally prefer to know writers through their works, and Dorothy used language with such originality and wit and economy and sensuality… well, what a way to know someone. She was also an excellent reader of her work - in fact, she seemed to pay more attention to the rhythms of language than any other writer I’ve seen giving a reading.This blog post is no obituary and, in some inexplicable way, I feel like there is so little I can say to describe Dorothy’s impact on literature (and my own career trajectory back in the late 90s), and how I feel about her dying. I wish I could write more and write better of such things.

So I will end this post not even with some of Dorothy’s poetry (which I strongly encourage you to seek out and read). Instead, I will end this post with some sentences that Dorothy wrote in her editor’s introduction to The Best Australian Poems 2006 and my own comforting thought that many poets are going to be honouring Dorothy in the “magical and incantatory” ways that she deserves:

The poetry community, despite its reputation for petty squabbles and bitter feuds, is actually marvellously good at honouring its dead. Poets know how to do a wake. I’ve always felt that a poet’s words, participating in an ancient, magical and incantatory tradition, keep that poet alive forever.

Cross-posted at tomcho.com

Image Credit: Brisbane Writers’ Festival 2007 Action Shots: Authors and Participants
For more blog tributes to Dorothy Porter:

Vale Dorothy Porter at Alien Onion

Dorothy Porter 1954 - 2008 at Susan Johnson’s Blog

In desperate need of a fast, relaxing read, I picked up a copy of Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight on the way home yesterday. Vampire romances are so hot right now! For those who haven’t read Meyer’s novels yet, or absorbed them through osmosis, they follow the relationship between two high schoolers in a small American town. Bella Swan is the new girl who is convinced of her ordinariness, and Edward Cullen is…a VAMPIRE. Bella is really a very likeable narrator: smart, self-deprecating and awkward. But I most enjoyed the breathy, romantic tone of the novel, which had me revisiting passionate adolescence in all its glory.

To spread the love, I tried out some of the lines from the novel on my boyfriend as we ate tuna pasta in front of the TV. Like so:

Your perfect musculature…your cold, marble lips. I can’t think straight in your presence!

Or later:

Me: You’re doing it again.
Him: Huh?
Me: Stop it!
Him: What?
Me: You’re dazzling me…

And again:

This is dangerous. I love you too much.

Heh. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed this game more than he did. It’s such pure romance! Meyer is a Mormon, and the novel is one extended call for abstinence - if Bella and Edward become too close he will “lose control” and “break” her. She’s so vulnerable. He’s so powerful. Sigh. Faint. Swoon.

That was last night - this morning, I can remember almost nothing about the book, even though I read nearly 300 pages. And yet I feel curiously refreshed! I thoroughly recommend it for burnout reading.

Got a tune stuck in your head and you just have to get rid of it? The Girl From Ipanema. It wipes the music part of your brain and then fades away. Works every time.

I recommend track 21 on that linked page.

(Crossposted at Boring Like A Drill.)

I have a number of abiding memories from reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows as a child and young teenager. Some strong themes stand out for me, in particular the spirits of discovery, adventure, fun and camaraderie that imbue the book, its critique of the excesses of wealth, and its celebration of idyllic country-river life.

Of course, as a teenager I also had a strong desire to one day be able to ‘muck about in boats’. It was only much later as an adult did I realise the extent that food was also a strong theme running both through the book and my experience of it. With this year being the centenary of the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s most famous and enduring work, I thought it worth while to revisit this theme in Grahame’s book.

In a writing class some years ago, we were all asked to bring some food with a literary theme to share, and to select and read in class a scene involving food from a pice of literature, to celebrate the final class of the year. One of my classmates (Hi, Heather!) read from a scene in the opening chapter of the book where Rat takes Mole on a picnic on the river bank in what is Mole’s first ever – and defining – experience of the River. She also brought every single food item listed by Rat to be in the picnic hamper to share at the party.

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It looks like the future of Australian political comics is in very good hands if the results of the 2008 Drawing the Lines competition is any measure.

Runner Up, Best Student Cartoon, Primary Schools: ‘Rudd taping up the world’, Rebecca Willis, Year 6P, St Brigid’s Primary School, Raymond Terrace, NSW.

The annual national political cartooning competition for schools is administered by the Education program at the National Museum of Australia Canberra and the winners, runners-up, and the highly-commended were announced in an awards ceremony at the Museum by the Federal Arts Minister, Peter Garrett.

Winner, Best Student Cartoon, Secondary Schools: ‘Free Tibet!’, Brodi Grant, Year 7, Castlemaine Secondary College, Castlemaine VIC

According to the press release from the Arts Minister:

The competition complements the Behind the Lines: The Year’s Best Cartoons 2008 exhibition, which was opened by the Minister today.

It traces the major events of the year including the Government’s first year in office, the apology to the stolen generations, the 2020 summit, global warming and the world financial crisis. The exhibition is on display at the National Museum of Australia from December 2, 2008 to February 1, 2009

Last night, I saw Ausralia. What can I say about this latest offering from Baz Luhrmann and great white hope of an ailing Australian film industry? Its story is, in short (if it’s possible): an Aboriginal boy finds himself adopted by possibly the most annoying Australian actress of all time who attempts to protect him against the Forces of Antagonism represented in the main by a cattle-thieving David Wenham (much more handsome as a baddie than a gourmet-cooking SNAG) who makes various attempts to frame the boy’s grandfather as a murderer, send the boy to the mission, and so forth. Our Nic realises she is her own antagonist (spoiler alert) and that she must release the boy to Go Walkabout and Learn the Ways of his People. Basically, like Jedda, but less tragic.

Set in the assimilationist period, Australia depicts the various forms of racism that beseige Aboriginal people in the Territory (then and now), especially the impact of the policy of removing children of mixed descent from their parents. Within this milieu, the station is depicted as a potential haven in a heartless world for Aboriginal people — if in the right hands. On another level, the station is all about nation-building. In a journey not dissimilar to Jean Paget’s in A Town Like Alice, Our Nic travels from the Old Country to discover that Australia is a Land of Opportunity in which one can blur class divisions by joining forces with a Drover to make portions of it ripe for colonial and entrepreneurial endeavours. Ultimately, Our Nic proves herself to be a bonza sheila, losing her uptight, aristocratic trappings to become windswept, sweaty and More Able with Horses.

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