In which Papa Cat seizes the day. Again.

Any long-time readers might remember this post from five years ago, when my dad, having blown out the candles on his 80th birthday cake, said 'Right: now I'm striking out for 85.'

Today's the day.

I spoke to him on the phone earlier: he was looking forward to a fancy lunch out with his daughters, followed my garbled account of my not-yet-written conference paper and asked a couple of pertinent questions, reassured me that I would get everything done, asked me what was coming up for Writers' Week, and gave me a thorough and lively description of Lleyton Hewitt's commentating skills as demonstrated during the Australian Open men's final ('I mean, I can't stand the little bastard, but he did a fantastic job') and a quick rundown on the latest in Adelaide's bikie wars. Still driving; stayed up with me last week till after 1 am watching the tennis, with no ill effects the next day; blood pressure 120/70 and the cardiologist doesn't want to see him for another twelve months.

Here he is, with the dog of the moment, 65 years ago.

Ten more legendary bad girls of literature

One knows, of course, that sequels never play like the original any more than backlash does, but the original Bad Girls of Literature post here last week seems to have had such a positive and widespread response here and elsewhere that I thought I'd post another ten.

Please note that these are in no way the B team. The original post was in response to a 'Ten Bad Boys' article and I was simply riffing off that, writing down names as I happened to think of them. Same with these. Like the first ten, they are names that came to mind readily without having to be thought about. I have, however, been offered a couple of inspired suggestions that chimed with my own taste (Carter, Clift, Wollstonecraft) and I've added them here AS YOU WILL SEE ...  

Simone de Beauvoir

'The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.' 

Angela Carter

'Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.'

Charmian Clift

'At night, the water slides over your body warm and silky, a mysterious element, unresistant, flowing, yet incredibly buoyant. In the dark you slip through it, unquestionably accepting the night's mood of grace and silence, a little drugged with wine, a little spellbound with the night, your body mysterious and pale and silent in the mysterious water, and at your slowly moving feet and hands streaming trails of phosphorescence, like streaming trails of stars. Still streaming stars you climb the dark ladder to the dark rock, shaking showers of stars from your very fingertips, most marvellously and mysteriously renewed and whole again.'

Sylvia Plath

'And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.'

Dorothy Parker

'There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind ... There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.'

Dorothy Porter

'Brooding from the reflective fastness of middle age, I wonder if some of the most deeply passionate experiences of my life have happened between the covers of a book.'

Jean Rhys

'....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. "The house I was living in when I read that book," you think, or "This colour reminds me of that book."'

Marguerite Duras

'Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.'

 Anaïs Nin

'I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.'

Mary Wollstonecraft

 

  'Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.'

Ten legendary bad girls of literature

Publishers Random House have just posted to Facebook a link to an article called '10 Legendary Bad Boys of Literature', which features such little charmers as Amis père et fils, the oddly unattractive Michel Houellebecq, and a stomach-churning shot of Norman Mailer in his favourite legs-spread pose, which would have obviated the need for his tailor ever to ask which side he dressed.

Personally I think the Bad Girls of Literature were infinitely more charming without being in any way less talented or less Bad. I'm sure there were more, especially in other cultures and literatures, but here's a list for starters.

Germaine Greer

'I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn.'

George Sand

'The trade of authorship is a violent and indestructible obsession.'

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

'Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity, though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses... it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.'

Aphra Behn

'Fantastic fortune, thou deceitful light,

That cheats the weary traveller by night,

Though on a precipice each step you tread,

I am resolved to follow where you lead.'

Rebecca West

'I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.'

Katherine Mansfield

 'Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.'

Jane Bowles

'I am so wily and feminine that I could live by your side for a lifetime and deceive you afresh each day.'

Gertrude Stein

'When I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, How can I combine career and family?'

Emily Bronte

'I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.'

Colette

'When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.'

Love, music, sex and death

Never having heard of this delightful young woman, though I sure as hell have now, I was mesmerised by this song on the car radio this afternoon, on Adelaide's local ABC.

I used to listen to, and perform, a lot of folk music when I was in my teens and twenties. But I didn't have the analytical skills I have since acquired, in 35 years of reading and thinking about literature and society, to think about these kinds of songs in a way that any educated young woman would automatically think about them now. If someone held a gun to my head and said 'Write a 3,000 word feminist analysis of this song and its narrative structure in the next three hours or you will be shot,' there is no doubt that I would get out of it alive.

But never mind that for the moment -- and you will get the gist at a visceral level anyway. Just have a listen to Sarah Calderwood's filigree musicianship and this haunting tale of commerce and nemesis, impossible to tell convincingly in any but a minor key.

You can't buy publicity like that

Especially not in the most widely-read column of the Sunday paper in your home town.

Dr Max Nicholls, 1927-2011: a good start in life

When people say 'So-And-So had a good start in life,' they usually mean that she or he was born equipped with silver spoon. I can't claim that, though I do remember being very struck by the words of the great South Australian activist, novelist and parliamentary reformer Catherine Helen Spence, on the first page of her autobiography: 'I count myself well-born, for my father and my mother loved each other.'

My sisters and I had that: they loved us too, and we had a country childhood, and there was enough money (though farming is a tough and jumpy-making gig, whatever townies may think).

And as I now know, as of today, I had the good fortune to be delivered by a very distinguished man.

My earliest memory is of gorgeous red and purple rhomboids and lozenges of light, reflected in the polished boards of the hallway, from the stained glass in the front door of the building I was born in. The Curramulka Hospital had been built on land donated by my great-grandmother (I do so love the enlightenment implicit in that sentence); she laid the foundation stone with the silver trowel presented to her by the contractor for the purpose, and then they all went across the road to the Institute for ice cream and a fund-raising fox-trot competition. Oh, it was all go in Curramulka in 1927.

In February of that year, my dad and a man called Edward Maxwell Nicholls were born within eight days of each other, country boys in different country towns. After an eventful education, Max Nicholls arrived in Curramulka with his young wife in 1951, and stayed long enough to escort me into the world two years later at the age of 26 (him not me) before moving on to Mannum later the same year.

Both of my parents always spoke highly and warmly of him. But I knew nothing about his life as a pioneering geneticist in the wake of that early stint as a country GP until today, when my older sister handed me a clipping she'd saved for me: a content-rich obituary by his daughter Christine Nicholls, herself a distinguished scholar with an international reputation. I particularly like these bits.

... he topped the state in mathematics in his Leaving Honours year. Although he wanted to study pure mathematics, his father urged him to follow a vocational pathway so Max accepted a full scholarship at the University of Adelaide where, in 1944, he enrolled in medicine, boarding as a secular student at Wesley Theological College with his brother, Les. At Wesley, Nicholls's relationship with the authorities was uneasy and his stay was punctuated by constant arguments with resident theologues. He also organised a dance - at a time when dancing was frowned upon by hardline Methodists - and came close to being expelled from the college.

*

After graduating in 1949, he was a resident medical officer at the Royal Adelaide Hospital before joining the Royal Darwin Hospital. As a flying doctor in the service's early days, Nicholls visited remote Aboriginal communities and leprosariums and delivered babies. As a 23-year-old, he briefly found himself in charge of the entire Northern Territory Medical Service when his senior medical officer announced, at a day's notice, that he would be taking annual leave interstate.

*

In 1953, the family moved to Mannum on the Murray River ... He attended many serious boating and drowning accidents and regularly visited the large Aboriginal settlement near Swan Reach, where he co-operated with the indigenous midwife to deliver babies.

He did postgraduate study in genetics in Mannum -- picture the scene: postgrad studies by correspondence in a South Australian country town while managing a large general practice and a growing family -- and not long afterwards was offered a university job, where his research made a significant contribution to what we know about genetics. Read the whole thing here.

Someone give that woman a special cookie

Book reviews: 3 down, 1 to go.

Honours theses: 9 down, 7 to go.

Words about Adelaide: 25,159 down, 24,841 to go.

Gonna stop now, have a whisky, and finish my new Ruth Rendell.