April 25

ANZAC Day dot points

* Because I still have my Sydney Morning Herald weekly book reviewing gig, I am still reading a minimum of four novels a week. In several different ways it's the most wonderful education, and I think most people would be astonished to learn how many contemporary novels are, one way or another, about one or both of the two World Wars. In particular, the effects and after-effects of World War 2, like bruises from some gigantic, crushing injury, are still coming up and out and showing in lurid colours on the surface of contemporary consciousness, especially, but not exclusively, in Europe.

But the Great War gets its share of attention from novelists too, and I read another one only recently. That wasn't long after I'd sat down and figured out the details of what my paternal grandfather's battalion, the Tenth, had actually been doing during the war while he was in it, from 1915: too late for ANZAC Cove but in plenty of time for the Western Front.

They were shunted back and forth between two of the worst places, Ypres and the Somme, for around three years. Three years of wading through mud, disintegrating body parts and large well-fed rats. Apart from anything else, I can't help wondering what he was thinking as he watched his only son -- his only child -- set off at seventeen to join the Navy in 1944.

* If I read one more inane blog post, tweet (is there no-one who will save this woman from herself?) or op ed about ANZAC Day and its construction and commemoration written by someone who's never heard of either C.E.W. Bean or Alan Seymour but isn't letting their total ignorance of (1) the single fundamental fact about the creation of the 'ANZAC Legend' or (2) the first real challenge to it in Australian culture (New Zealand may have its literary or historical equivalent) get in the way of a good self-righteous rant, I'm going to break something valuable and then throw up on the shattered fragments. Yes some people glorify war. No others don't. Yes it's used to sell papers and get TV ratings. No that's not actually ANZAC Day's fault, you morons.

And yes, some of us have soldiers, sailors and air(wo)men in the family history and no we don't want to forget about what they endured. I habitually get through the worst times in my own life by thinking about what some of my ancestors had to go through. They are a massive well of strength to draw on.

* I think I've pretty much exhausted my own archival material in former ANZAC Day posts, which can be found here, here and here.

* The biscuits, they rock. My grandfather, famous for his approach to food (and why wouldn't you be, after three years in the trenches), was wont to say to my mother as he reached for whatever was left on any given serving plate or bowl: "I'll just clean this up for you, Kerrie." To this day my sisters and I say this whenever anyone reaches for the last cupcake or the dregs of the champagne, and then fall about shrieking. He would have eaten the whole tray and come back for seconds.

Some anniversaries are more ambiguous than others

It's 24 years today -- and yes yes, I know what the date is; how apt -- since I rolled and wrecked a brand-new car with my father in the passenger seat at the 110k speed limit just west of Bordertown, on a sinister traffic-eating stretch of the Duke's Highway, notorious for the number of single-vehicle accidents there, and came within millimetres of breaking my neck. Where other people have a smoothly curved cervical spine, I have an S-bend at C4 and C5.

How we both walked away without needing any first aid or going into shock I really do not know, but it's those sorts of times that prompt me to make a sacrifical offering of some kind to the tough-as-nails pioneering ancestors.

Now excuse me while I go and re-heat this wheat bag and take some Nurofen Plus.

Putting away the ornaments

As we approach the end of the first week of January I've been thinking about how often the last week of January has, for me, brought with it some life-changing, life-enhancing or life-summarising event, for better or worse, and have been bracing myself for what, if anything, this January might bring.

By far the most traumatic of these was the sudden collapse of my mother in 1999 from the brain haemorrhage of whose effects she was to die a few days later. Every year, Christmas is bracketed by two little bittersweet moments, mother-wise: once when I unpack the decorations to put on the Christmas tree and again when I pack them up to put them away. A number of them are decorations I originally brought from interstate and overseas when I came home for Christmas and gave to her to put on the family tree, as one by one the old ornaments were broken or got too old and shabby to use.

If you are lucky enough still to have a mother, try to appreciate her as much as you can, even if she is not ideal as mothers go, because you just don't know. Mine proved to be more fragile than her own handwriting on the tissue paper that has now outlived her by eleven years and counting.

Apparently it's National Cat Day

'Dejected but not hopeless', or, Are you absolutely sure you want to be a writer??

Over the last week I've had two emails marking literary anniversaries and quoting bright stars in the literary firmament. September 18 was the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth, September 23 the 120th anniversary of Wilkie Collins' death.

A member of VICTORIA, a longstanding Victorian Studies email discussion list I've belonged to for many years, posted this on September 23:

On this day 120 years ago 23 September 1889 Wilkie Collins died. He wrote his last letter just two days earlier to his doctor. "I am dying old friend. WC." and on the other side of the paper "They are driving me mad forbidding the [hypodermic]. Come for God's sake. I am too wretched to write."

Five days earlier on September 18, an old friend, an academic and regular reader of this blog, sent me this, and has very kindly given me permission to quote the email he circulated round his department on that day:

Subject: Happy birthday Dr J

Today is Dr Johnson’s 300th birthday. I feel a bit sad that a Department which once boasted a very impressive 18th-century research output, including John Wiltshire’s wonderful work on Johnson, now doesn’t teach him any more. Just thought you would like to know. Don’t break out into congratulatory whoops, though, as Dr J spent most birthdays regretting his sins and vowing to do better the next year. For example, I rather like this one, given that I’ll turn 56 this year:

Sept. 18, 1764, about 6 evening.
This is my fifty-sixth birth-day, the day on which I have concluded fifty five years.

I have outlived many friends. I have felt many sorrows. I have made few improvements. Since my resolution formed last Easter I have made no advancement in knowledge or in goodness; nor do I recollect that I have endeavoured it. I am dejected but not hopeless.

O God for Jesus Christ's Christ's sake have mercy upon me.

Three dates

1915





1917

See also here.



1935



My dad, aged 8, with his parents. On the back of this little photograph my grandfather has written, in his forceful, beautiful capitals,

HELL FIRE CORNER.
YPRES MENIN ROAD.

One can only imagine what is going through his mind under that Menziesesque hat. And I suppose a few trees would grow back in eighteen years, not to mention the grass.

If you click on the photo to enlarge it you'll see one word on the stone: HIER. Hier means, as you'd expect, 'here', as in 'He is not missing. He is here.' But it's also the French word for 'yesterday'.

In Memoriam

Today is the tenth anniversary of my mother's death, which seems absurd; even this far down the track I am shocked by how vividly present she seems, as though her death were much less big a deal than we thought.

This is my favourite photo of her; judging by the length of her hair she can't be any older than seventeen, but her stance and expression and the way she's holding that unidentified child all suggest the confidence and maturity of a woman twice that age.

That wild hair is blazing dark-copper red, and she had it cut when she joined the WAAAF RAAF at eighteen in 1945. So if I'm right about the date of this photo, it's 1944 and she's already seen a Depression childhood, three years in the workforce and five years of world war. They grew up fast in those days.

UPDATE -- well well, I find she wasn't in the WAAAF at all -- she was a fully fledged Aircraftwoman in the RAAF. And you think you know them!

Blogiversary post

It's three years today since I first found Blogger and worked out what to do with it.

Perversely, I'm going to celebrate -- perhaps 'mark' would be a more accurate word -- this anniversary by mentioning what is for me the single biggest downside of blogging.

I'm what I think of as a sociable blogger, that is, one who reads and comments at lots of other people's blogs - there are at least 20 that I read regularly, and by regularly I mean often daily. A few of these blogs are written and run by small or large teams of bloggers and have large readerships and long, active comments threads. I spend a great deal more time reading other people's blogs than I do writing my own (and this in itself is, I think, a mistake).

Still, thanks to blogging I'm far better and more widely informed about current affairs and the debates around them than I have ever been before. Blogging has given me an astonishing education about what other people and their lives are like. Most of us gravitate to people like ourselves, reinforcing our belief that our own standards and values are the norm from which everything else is a deviation.

Blogging is a truly wonderful corrective to this. I get great satisfaction, pleasure and relief, for example, from seeing the state of other people's kitchen floors. I thought it was just me.

I have had far more contact with lots of different men, with mothers of young kids, with people a generation older and people a generation younger than me than I ever get in real life. From what I've seen, I have very, very high hopes of the people who are currently in their 20s. (Though I do worry in a maternal sort of way about how much they seem to drink. I put away a fair amount in my own 20s, often more out of absent-mindedness than anything else, and it was usually not a very good idea at all.)

But here's the downside. The nature of moral and ideological conviction being what it is, when you see someone expressing opinions you find repugnant then the natural impulse is to take them on. And thus it is that the blogger, or at least the social blogger, finds herself wasting hours and hours of her precious time in pointless engagement with people she would in real life cross the street, possibly the suburb and in some cases the entire country, to avoid.

Examples: those who appear to the blogger be mad or drunk or on drugs. Those who take delight in deceptive trolling, baiting and sock-puppeteering. Those who are unable to communicate without being aggressive, insulting and cruel. Those she finds ignorant, or vicious, or stupid. Those who are incapable of either producing or comprehending rational argument. Those who don't know the difference between opinion and analysis, or that between belief and fact. Those she would never engage with in real life in a million years, and whose opinions are, in her own view, worth less than a bucket of warm spit, which could at least be put on the garden.

For reasons I don't understand, I waste a lot of time reading the badly written effusions of these people. (Fellow bloggers, especially those who have ever smoked, gambled, drunk to excess, done drugs or had food issues, will know that time spent online is highly conducive to addictive behaviours and quickly leads to sitting up half the night like that little man in the XKCD cartoon.)

Like that little man, I waste a lot of time and emotional energy either in engaging with the awful stuff they write, in making the effort not to engage with it, or in dealing with the emotional effects of the hatred expressed by, in particular, a certain kind of man with a vicious, all-consuming and monomaniacal grudge against a certain kind of woman. Of which I'm.

Being hated does you harm. Especially when it comes from someone you've never even met.

One of the other really alarming effects this is having is that I can feel it gradually dumbing me down. One sure way to blunt the edge of your intellect is to use it hacking away at drongoes.

And I could be spending that time

-- listening to music
-- working
-- doing non-work reading
-- playing with the cats
-- gardening
-- calling/visiting/writing to beloveds
-- doing house and yard maintenance
-- sitting at the piano wrestling that Satie to the deck, damn it
-- sewing some cool cotton bumming-around retro-hippie dresses for summer
-- taking photographs
-- writing my novel
-- walking along the beach watching dogs and kids
-- singing

So that's my third blogiversary resolution. Put a time limit on blog activity, as though you were your own parent dealing with your own recalcitrant adolescent offspring. Refine the parameters. Engage only with the bloggers and commenters you like and admire. (I didn't say 'agree with', I said 'admire'.) Save your blogwriting energy for your own posts, not for enraged answers to nasty, stupid, aggressive, sexist, racist, masculine-supremacist and/or barking swine.

Blogging -- and by 'blogging' I mean reading and commenting as well as writing -- is a wonderful thing, and its powers should be used only for good. Today, here at Still Life With Cat, I resolve to lift my standards.

Memory

Yesterday a dear friend who lost her husband in August held a quiet afternoon-tea-shaped gathering at her home, a 'one month's mind' to remember him in a less fraught and more reflective setting than any funeral or wake can be. I'd heard of the 'one year's mind' from friends in Austria, but the idea of a month was new to me. It's a wonderful idea though. Forty or so people fronted up yesterday with assorted drinks, lovely food and carefully chosen flowers to sit about for a few hours, catch up, reminisce.

Four large albums of family photos had been stacked up for people to look through, and much looking through did indeed take place. I looked at all of them, and there were quite a few there that I actually took myself. Among them, and on reflection I can't think why this gave me such a shock, were several images of my darling ma, who died nearly ten years ago.

There was one particularly sweet shot of her holding baby M -- who's now 21 and was very much present yesterday, dancing around getting people drinks and making skilful conversation -- on her knee, a picture that knocked me sideways for complicated reasons I am still trying to untangle. It's something about the unexpected conjunction of two people who are very dear to you, which is complicated enough even without the added long-time factor. Some weird triangulation takes place. But in this case it was more a sort of pentangulation, a party of five: M and me looking at the photo; my mum in life; M-as-baby; and the me of 20 years ago to whom that sight was sufficiently meaningful and moving to frame it in my camera lens and take a photo of it.

It strikes me that this is what novelists do, or rather what novelists are for: to write of interwoven webs of intimacy over time, with an awareness of the long view. And the long view isn't usually part of people's daily lives until some emblem of it appears, with the turn of a page, and shockingly, before our eyes.