Couldda been called...

Okay this blog is a bit derivative.  I will disclose my source. The late lamented Chritstopher Hitchens mentioned in an interview with our own beloved Jennifer Byrne that he and Salman Rushdie used to play a game of thinking up  names that authors might have given the first drafts of their  famous novels. Names that would probably have assured their obscurity. Hitchens said that is how he got the idea of calling his autobiography Hitch 22.  Here are a few titles we came up with Chez Alice:

Loves Labours Misplaced

1983

Black Horse

The Old Convenience Store

The Grapes of Rolf

The Lion, the Witch and the Washing Machine

Catcher in the Paspalum

The Ladies Room

Moderately Fortunate Jim

Room At the Back

They’re an Eccentric Group

Doctor Straightlove

A Tale of One City

Pride & Tolerance

The Old Man and the Pond

A Farwell to Legs

The Prince and the Pawpaw

Uncle Tom’s Condo

Rubbery Underarms

Puberty Reds

Summer of the First Doll

My Dull Career

Schindler’s Lifts

The Ordinary Pudding

The Slip Slop Slap

Eat, Pray, Defecate

The Ordinary Nearby Tree

The Well Known Five

The Seven Year Rash

All’s OK That Ends OK

Winnie the Turd

Hey, you 3 followers, any more not quite there yet names for manuscripts to suggest?

Sharp as a Blade Runner - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I could be considered a pop culture retard. I only really appreciated Michael Jackson's enormous talent when  his work saturated the airwaves in the wake of his death and I only got around to seeing the movie Blade Runner after my son  studied it for his HSC last year. Of course I adored it - the 'neo-noir' world it creates, the quirky characters and perfect casting, the disconcerting themes. I hunted down its inspiration, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, on eBay and have just finished reading it.

While much is recognisable, much is different too. Philip K. Dick,  prescient enough in 1968 to predict the extinction of species, the climatic effects of warfare and pollution,  regulation of mood (not by Prozac but by the 'mood organ') and to countenance interplanetary colonization, remained convinced that a mystical 'opiate of the masses' would remain a major dimension of our lives. So whereas in Blade Runner protagonist, Rick Deckard has fantastical dreams with images of unicorns which can mysteriously be shared or apprehended by others, in the novel Dick posits 'Mercerism', a religion of empathy and perpetual striving against the slings and arrows or literally the rocks, of outrageous fortune.

One of the most whimsical and fascinating aspects of the book which features less prominently in the film is the proliferation of simulated animals. Rick Deckard owns the electric sheep of the  title and keeps it in a pen on his rooftop, others in his apartment block own robotic cats and ducks. One has a live pony and is the envy of his neighbours. Real animals are the ultimate status symbol* and Rick squanders his bounty-hunting fee on a beautiful black goat only to have vengeful android, Rachael Rosen push it off the roof to its doom. Animals stand as reminders of  a natural  life  long ago eclipsed by atomic fallout from World War Terminus. The owls - symbolic of wisdom - were the first to die but most species are extinct in Rick's world hence the cachet of owning one.

In Blade Runner Rachael Rosen would never murder Rick's pet goat, in fact they become romantically attached (Rick and Rachael, not Rachael and the goat), his wife conveniently not making it to the screenplay. Most of the characters in the book have undergone radical transformations in the film. For example, in the book John Isadore is a 'special' (or pejoratively a 'chicken head') someone who has mental degeneration caused by radioactive dust and is only capable of a very basic existence. In Blade Runner this character is J.F. Sebastian,  a bright technician suffering from premature ageing who, though socially awkward, is clever enough to play chess with the head of the Rosen Association which manufactures androids (as they're known in the book, they're replicants in the movie). And so it goes... Others have written about how the narratives and themes of the film and book differ. It don't intend to go into any more detail here.

What I did want to remark on was how apposite many of the novel's themes and images felt to me personally. A friend of mine used to say that there is a time in your life that is just right for you to read a particular book and that seems to have been the case with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

When the book arrived our family had just acquired Android mobile phones. I collect owl figurines and am nicknamed Owly by one of my sisters. Goats and rabbits have a special folklore in our household. Cruelty towards - or unthinking experimentation on - any creature repels me and the maiming of a spider late in the novel reminded me of my adolescent anguish at accidentally killing a moth whilst sweeping the floor in our bookshop - it so affected me that I wrote a poem about it at the time. Which all leads me to the double-edged sword of empathy in the book. Under a Mercerist creed, humanity experiences transformative rapture when empathy is maximised via the mood organ but creeping empathy towards androids is almost Rick's undoing. This really resonated with me - I have strong empathic responses to the feelings and situations of others and sometimes  this is a very positive thing for example, in my work and as a parent, however, for as long as I can remember people have advised me to get a thicker skin. One downside of seeing where others are coming from and what they are feeling is falling into the trap of thinking that it is reciprocated. Sometimes it isn't and your goat gets chucked off the roof!

* When Rick asks the price of a pair of rabbits, the animal salesman advises him, "The thing about rabbits, sir, is that everybody has one. I'd like to see you step up to the goat-class where I feel you belong. Frankly you look more like a goat man to me."

Reasons to be writing - Part 1

I think I have bloggers' block or at least chronic lack of originality. The only ideas I've had have in the past couple of weeks have already been comprehensively covered by someone else. One, influenced by the unveiling of the newly cleaned Central Station clock tower, was to be about clocks on public buildings. David Marr wrote on this subject in his article Their Number's Up in the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 January particularly looking at stopped clocks and their effect on those who may rely on them.

The other was  to be about the ludicrous way menstruation is treated by advertisers. However two highly enjoyable blogs I found while surfing the crimson topic on the net, Ayshfi and Southern Belle Feminist, already have good, comprehensive posts about menstruation - I recommend them. Gruen Planet (nee Transfer) has had lots of good stuff on absurd adverts for 'sanitary products', as tampons and pads are euphemistically known, and I'm sure will revisit the topic if only for some gorgeous Jane Caro eye rolling or withering looks to use in the promos.

I did find lots of  great imagery and links to funny videos on the 'net, including, on YouTube, a clip from  that wonderful episode of Red Dwarf when Kryten enjoins Kochanski to Have a Fantastic Period.

The 'angle' I had intended to take on the subject was the love/hate attitude society's have had, and still have, to this aspect of  'womanliness', assigning to menstruating women  magical powers or judging them unclean and not fit to worship or take part in other social activities. What got me thinking about the subject this time was a friend posting on Facebook a link to a Sydney Morning Herald article Drag Queen Tampon Ad is 'Transphobic'  about outrage at a  Libra tampon commercial that contrasts the 'manufactured' femininity of a drag queen/ tranny with the 'real' article, a tampon wielding young woman! I suppose it turns penis envy on its head but I think we did that while ago, didn't we?

Of course menstruation does preoccupy most women quite regularly  and ironically, contraception, while liberating us from serial pregnancies has condemned us to a lifetime of more periods than all our foresisters! The folklore and superstition around periods just goes on evolving, in India in some sects women wear a red neckerchief when they're having a period and in the 1990s western women were encouraged to wear all white outfits or swimsuits and frolic around a lot! At school in the 1970s an 'educational' booklet (published by Tampax I think) was distributed that told us (seriously) to avoid washing our hair when we were menstruating! Any way the fact I have now filled 3 paragraphs about how I'm not going to write about menstruation shows what an all but inexhaustible subject it is (to me at any rate).

All creative writing classes though, remind us to 'write what you know'. So maybe if I want to avoid being derivative or gazumped I should stick to writing about stuff  that is unique to me and my world. In which case watch this space for:

1. My precocious acting brilliance as manifested in my accurate impressions of a cat and Cliff Richard at childhood birthday parties.
2. Visiting service centres on the M6 motorway in the 1960s and why I associate them with chicken manure.
3. Developments in Sydney suburban retail in the 1970s and 80s with a particular focus on commercial cake types available in Caringbah, Pru Acton and Pot-O-Gloss cosmetics and cheese shops run by Christians/sporting legends.
4. Footwear & underwear - the sensible vs  fashionable dilemma - my own lived tragi-farce.
5. Why although Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso are acknowledged geniuses and creatively (including genetically) prolific I don't actually like very much of their work.
6. People I wish had been my father, or at least an uncle, including Eric Morecombe, Michael Gambon and Peter Sallis.
7. Where are they now? Ursula Andress, George Lazenby, Clive Robertson, Jimmy Carter and Muffin the Mule.
8. My own experiences of pareidolia* contrasted with those of Pooh and Christopher Robin and examples offered for sale on eBay.
9. My answer to Dr John Clarke's best seller, 'Working with Monsters' which is about psycopaths in organisations, 'Working with Saddos' a history of working with peculiar people in the public sector.
10. The collected doggerel verse and song parodies of my family over 5 decades including 'The Lagamorph School Song', 'The Lovely Dog/Schöner Hund Song' and 'The Essex Carol' (that sounds only a bit like the theme music from Softly, Softly') - they're really very good, truly!

*seeing faces in things

Fickle finger of farce

I had a digital mishap this week. On Monday morning at 11 am I plunged into Roselands outdoor pool without remembering to take a ring off my right ring finger. In the chilly water it immediately started wobbling about and threatening to descend to the floor of the pool. Surrounded by approximately 700 primary school kids either learning to swim or consuming their morning tea on the bleachers, I decided not to risk putting it on the edge of the pool and quickly transferred it to my middle (or 'rude' as the kiddies are wont to say) finger. I did my aqua class with the usual verve, grace and energy and thought nothing more about jewellery, except for quickly reinstating my earrings and necklace, before meeting my spouse for lunch in the ambiance-drenched Roselands' food court.

Fast forward to that evening. Oh dear, the ring will not budge. Oh dearie dear, it is stuck. Perhaps a night's sleep will relax its hold. Faster forward to the following morning, the ring is well and truly a fixture below my bulging knuckle. Any amount of baby oil, handcream, sorbolene, soap, cooking oil, Vaseline will not work it loose. Maybe the icy airconditioning at work will deflate the offending swollen digit?

Faster forwarder to that evening, what an attractive indigo colour the middle finger of my right hand has become. Soaking it in iced water does not help loosen the ring or reduce the swelling. Emergency department of Canterbury Hospital here we come...

Main entrance of Canterbury Hospital, Emergency is just to the right.

I was lucky, triage was over in a trice and a lovely African doctor who called me 'my dear' in tones of plushest velvet was attending to me. Off he went to get the ring cutter leaving me time to take in the atmosphere of the treatment room with its wealth of useful drugs, dressings, equipment and reference material, overflowing bins and chocked open fire door.


Reference books in the treatment room. What I thought was 'The Egg Made Easy' is probably 'The ECG Made Easy' - surely a good read either way.

 

Sign says 'Smoke Door - Do Not Keep Open' - the sort of OHS compliance that instills absolute confidence!

Turns out that this initial speediness produced an undue confidence that I would be home in under an hour, or two hours, or yet two and a half. My ebony friend had a fruitless search for the ring cutter. Someone who didn't work there any more had put it somewhere. You know how that happens... My spouse checked out 2 local medical centres - no, neither had a ring cutter. I returned to the waiting room to be distracted from the final pages of Stephen Fry's memoirs by more combinations of leggings, thongs and Supre T-shirts than I realised were possible and examples of maternal behaviour that made the ethical conundrum at the centre of The Slap seem entirely redundant!

I was recalled and Nathan* the senior nurse practitioner took over my case. For the third time I outlined how the ring had come to be stuck. Nathan thought we should not delay in finding another hospital whose emergency department had, and could locate, a ring cutter. He got on the line to St Bodolph's*, got cut off while being transferred to his opposite number there, then asked to be reconnected and finally got to talk to Liz*. Liz is apparently a sarcastic bitch! I had ascertained that from hearing one side of the conversation, but Nathan confirmed it, then quickly apologised for his lack of professionalism, after he hung up. We had a hearty laugh.

Nathan did not think that removing a ring from the finger of a 55 year old woman was a particularly appropriate use of the Fire Service's resources but what choice was he left with? Dialling triple 'O' seemed like overkill. We went to Nathan's office and googled the number for Campsie Fire Station. Nathan got their voicemail. I was glad I wasn't alight.

Nathan recounted an anecdote from his wife's working week. She fills a similar role to him at another hospital. Apparently a patient who breathes using a mask and an oxygen tank snuck out for a cigarette, lit a match and virtually self immolated. His face pretty much melted. What my son would call 'natural selection in action'. We had another hearty laugh.

Nathan said he would give finding the cutter one more try and I was left to take in the atmosphere of his office with its wealth of reference materials, safe practice charts and books, including a human anatomy colouring book which, if completed authentically, would employ a monotonous four colours (so no need for the boxed set of 72 Derwents that was the pride of my childhood for the sons and daughters of medical staff!)


I felt fraudulent not to require any of the 5 Ps but I will definitely try to remember them.

Hallelujah! Nathan checked the plaster room on spec and there was the ring cutter. Some people do not have the ability to look for things properly he said. As the matriarch of my household I could not but agree. I told him he was a hero, a marvel, a wonder, even before he set to work. Approximately ten minutes later we were returning to our car the severed ring in the side pocket of my handbag. My husband thinks he can smooth off the ends and I will still be able to wear it but I am a bit out of love with it at present!

My finger post ring removal (and a lovely view of our loo) imprint of the ring is visible

Well the drama is over and my finger is almost back to normal. Perhaps I am an alarmist. I start a weight loss program the second week in January and no doubt the ring would have fallen off if I just waited until February.

*Not their real names.

Choosing My Religion

The ABC program The Collectors has finished, at least for this year, perhaps for good. I guess there are only so many collections and collectors in the country they can showcase.  The penultimate edition of the program was given over to a tour of MONA, Tasmania's privately owned Museum of Old and New Art. That's the museum I had some difficulty navigating back in June.  The TV coverage made me realise that I had seen only about a fifth of its collection and whetted my appetite to return. It also convinced me I need to practise using iPhone technology a bit before I do.

Gordon Brown interviewed MONA's founder, David Walsh and asked him the 64 thousand dollar (considerably more in his case) question: 'why do people collect?'  His answer was a bit of a revelation to me. He said that surrounding ourselves with objects we invest with significance is a religious act.  I thought of Randolph Hearst's San Simeon,  Philip Adams's Egyptian artefacts, I thought of  the 50s fetishists, the tin toy tragics, the cricket cards of yesteryear collectors and I thought of my own preoccupation in recent years with finding objects that relate to my UK childhood - Sylvac figurines,  postcards of  holiday locations, pieces of Spanish Garden dinnerware that match my first 'grown up' cup and saucer.

I don't know whether Walsh's theory fits every kind of collection/collector, but it certainly has resonance for me. I can see the relationship between what I have been collecting, when I began collecting it and how that has fitted with my journey of identity and belonging.

 Above: 1970s Poole pottery with stylised Alphonse Mucha design - the height of pop art decorative kitsch. I found a  vase  in a bric-a-brac shop in Newtown some 30 years ago and now have 6 pieces.

In the 70s objects, cards, posters, books & clothing featuring the designs of Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Rackham held an overwhelming attraction for me. I had posters of their art on my bedroom wall and even stole a couple of plastic brooches with Mucha's art nouveau maidens on them from Coles. I had no money and  kidded myself that because I knew the work featured I had some sort of entitlement. The slightly overwrought decorativeness of Mucha and the tendency to the grotesque of Rackham and Beardsley  must have put me in touch with a bit of old world decadence sadly missing in the world of tie dye T-shirts and lurid panel van art that was the Sutherland Shire. The day my Sussans Aubrey Beardsley design skirt shrank at the laundrette will forever stand as the end of an era for me.

Above: Japanese Marutomoware with Kookaburra & Gumnut design - vintage Australiana from the 1930 - 50s. Again I started collecting when these were considered junk, they are now highly collectible.

 In the 80s when we started our life as a couple and had our little gallery in Newtown all was gum leaves and native animals and appropriated Aboriginal imagery. My wedding ring is two gum leaves entwined.  I started buying pottery with eucalyptus and kookaburra motifs, I tried my hand at screen printing, my designs either pinched from indigenous culture or heavily influenced by Margaret Preston woodcuts. I was embracing the Australian side of my identity.

 Above: Richard Clements hand blown perfume bottles, these are the Powerhouse's, not mine, timelessly beautiful.

As I seldom discard objets d'art and pictures from previous eras, by the 1990s our environment was becoming pretty eclectic. Framed prints of Lautrec, Cezanne and Klimt adorned our walls and still do. We have also acquired a few original etchings.  William Morris fabrics covered our lounge suite and windows until they wore out and our budget didn't keep pace with Liberty's rising prices. Working at Craft Australia for 8 years I discovered the glass of Richard Clements and Setsuko Ogishi, the textiles of Barbara Rogers and Vivien Haley and the ceramic decoration of Stephen Bower and Jana Ferris. Some modest representation of these artists' work joined our burgeoning collection!

Above:  William Morris textiles, not one design is less than gorgeous. Our first sofa and armchairs were covered in Agapanthus.

 Above: Sylvac bunnies. I remember that my great grandmother had these on her sideboard and television set in the 1950s. Later a collector cheated her out of them for a few pounds.

Unlike most of the collectors featured on The Collectors my focus ranges widely.  I haven't even touched on owls which I have collected on and off since I was a teenager or on my passion for virtually anything connected with Alice In Wonderland. When I arrived in Australia from Britain in the late 1960s I put all my childhood postcards into 3 albums which I still have. They comprise chocolate boxy animal photos, Molly Brett woodland scenes, cutesy images by Mabel Lucie Attwell (and her imitators) and traditional souvenir views.  I still buy and send postcards when I am on holiday or in those shops you need to pass through at the end of art gallery exhibitions, but it only recently occurred to me that I could look online for postcards of my childhood haunts. Of course they exist and now I've bought 5!

In fact the focus of my collecting over the past few years has been making concrete and communicable my childhood memories. Many of the treasured things that didn't make their way out here with the family or which were lost in the mists of time even before we made the trip can and have been restored to me through eBay. Bugger the holy grail,  replacing my Midwinter cup and saucer was a transcendental experience for me!

Midwinter's Spanish Garden design. The shapes were designed by the Marquis of Queensbury , not the one who brought down Oscar Wilde, his grandson, and pattern is by Jessie Tait. Mum bought the cup and suacer to be exclusively for my use in about 1967.

You 'avin a laugh?

I've probably expressed my affection for British telly from the 60's & 70s more than once in my blog. At a recent press conference, John Cleese, in Sydney for the Just For Laughs festival (which I sadly missed because of study, disorganisation and poverty, though not necessarily in that order) damned the current state of British television as a sharp decline from its status as the 'least worse television in the world between to the 50s and the 90s'.

The UK TV of my childhood certainly provided a nourishing diet. I cut my comedy appreciating teeth on The Frost Report, The Worker, At Last the 1948 Show, The Likely Lads and Steptoe and Son. I was also, much to my mother's horror, a stalwart fan of the Carry On series of films. I must have seen them on telly as I can't imagine being taken to the cinema to see such coarse, crass entertainment unless my maternal grandmother became my enabler for this 'ever so common' form of entertainment as she did for seaside amusement parks and panto.

Somehow I recently became aware that the BBC had produced a series of tributes to the stars of this era, Legends of Comedy, and quickly adapted my online buying skills, usually dedicated to clothes and china, to tracking down the DVDs. The search became particularly tantalising when I discovered that its highest rating dramatisation, The Curse of Steptoe, had been withdrawn from sale because of a successful defamation action by the family of Harry H. Corbett's second wife.

Well Amazon came through for me, at least I found second hand copies of the DVDs on their site, but then there was some palaver about not being prepared to ship them to Oz. The tyranny of distance had not impressed itself so strongly upon me since 1969 when we arrived and it took 2 -3 weeks to receive an aerogramme and you couldn't buy Callard & Bowsers butterscotch or Branston Pickle for love or money.

The long suffering Harold Steptoe, Harry H. Corbett with a brindle pup that
looks uncommonly like our Stella.

Kind friends in the UK took delivery of the parcel and re-directed it to me here so I have now watched 'Hattie', a biopic of Hattie Jacques starring Gavin and Stacey's/Little Britain's Ruth Jones, 'Rather You Than Me', featuring David Walliams as Frankie Howerd and 'The Curse of Steptoe' with its inspired casting of Jason Isaacs as Harry H. Corbett and Phil Davis as Wilfrid Brambell. This review from The Guardian captures its tragic magic better than I could. If I have one tiny qualm it is that their lives look so unrelentingly miserable. They must have had one or two moments of fun being in the best written and acted comedy of the day and earning all that money. Maybe not, they certainly both seemed to have been lugging huge, mortifying albatrosses around with them!

The real Hattie Jacques and the divine Ruth Jones who recreates her with stunning aplomb in 'Hattie'.

Less depressing and a must-see is 'Hattie'. Behind the smirkiness and stereotypes of her Carry On roles Hattie was one classy, sensual broad who had the bittersweet fortune to fall passionately in love/lust with her driver (played by the delectable Aidan Turner from 'Being Human') while still in an affectionate but lacklustre marriage to John Le Mesurier. Ruth Jones strikes just the right note - mixing the excitement of newly realised sexuality with a thoroughly kind and admirable desire to harm no-one and see that everyone is looked after. Too tall an order of course. Your heart breaks for her and Le Mesurier trying to be civilised while living in the most unorthodox of domestic situations.

All the performances are great and the recreation of scenes from Carry On Cabbie, with a subtle commentary on the appalling limitations placed on roles for women, be they 'lookers' or matrons, work beautifully!

Must track down Eric and Ernie next.

ROFL (well, chuckle with) Roiphe

Just finished reading Katie Roiphe's Uncommon Arrangements - Seven Portraits of Married Life 1910-39. I can honestly say I romped through this book, my interest in what made these people and their relationships tick never flagged. Amongst the unions caught in Roiphe's amber are Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry, Jane, H.G. Wells & Rebecca West and Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge & Evgenia Souline. All her studies reveal exceptional, creative early 20thC minds consciously reshaping or replacing the institution of marriage. H.G. Wells was as much the charming complete bastard I had been led to believe, Radclyffe Hall was one controlling, tory mother f*cker and Vanessa Bell was a surprisingly coy boheme. The relationships that most challenged my received knowledge were those Vera Brittain had with her brother Edward, fiance Roland Leighton, husband George Catlin and long time companion Winifred Holtby.


My understanding of Vera Brittain's suffering in love, emerging pacifism and feminist pioneering came straight from the 1979 BBC television dramatisation of her book Testament of Youth in which the delightful Cheryl Campbell created her as the most disarming of heroines. While there was lots to like and admire about the real life Vera Brittain, Roiphe, as she does with all the personalities examined in this book, paints a thoughtful, psychologically credible and drily amusing portrait of a complex human being. It is by no means always flattering but we certainly glimpse the myth making, compromises and to some extent, the self obsession, that can go into becoming a literary and political icon.

I thoroughly recommend Roiphe's book to anyone fascinated by the Edwardian era and the emergence of modernism in British society. You will enjoy hobnobbing with DH Lawrence, Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, discovering their noble and nastier traits and maybe Roiphe's dry humour will make you ROFL or at least enjoy a wry inner chuckle.

Here is a bit of light verse I dashed off after reading Roiphe's portrayal of Vera Brittain:

In youth Vera Brittain was terribly smitten

With brooding, bright Roland who died in the war

From his death, her brother’s and (implied) many others

She created catharsis

In her Testaments - one, two, three and four

(Last unfinished)

Passion less rattling she found with George Catlin

But privately thought him a great bloody bore

A new minted text she preferred much to sex

And domestication she came to abhor

Spared it thanks to Winifred Holtby

Vera’s fuelled tragic jollity

Gave her a persona the UK could adore

Freed from love’s dreary fetters, this left lady of letters

While a true self made woman, slightly chills at the core!