Of research and vaudeville

The item on top of the work pile at the moment is a now very battered advance proof copy of a novel called The Little Shadows by the Canadian writer Marina Endicott, published in Canada last year and due for release in Australia in February. It's about a family in vaudeville, working the circuits along the border of the US and Canada; set from 1912-1917, it shows how their lives are affected by the forces of history.

With my curiosity piqued about vaudeville and its history in Australia -- obviously such an 'American' thing was going to make its way to Canada, but did it have a substantial history here? -- I went looking in the astounding new(ish) resource provided by the National Library, Trove, which -- well, go over there and have a look.

I spent many happy hours on this site last year and the year before when I was researching Adelaide and found, among other things, a great deal of family history buried among Family Notices and roundups from 'The Country', where the ferocious rivalry between my Scottish grandma and her bossy sister-in-law regarding the organisation of fund-raisers for the War Effort in Curramulka can be seen between the lines of often profoundly corrupted text.

Apropos of which, I decided early on that since this magical resource had been provided to me then the very least I could do was take an active part in the way it works: crowdsourcing to correct the scanned text, since obviously the resources don't exist for it to be done professionally. I decided that I would correct every article I used. There's no measuring this, but my guess is that, as with Wikipedia, the longer it goes on the more accurate it will be, as more and more people use it and contribute.

Anyway, vaudeville. Oh yes indeed. There's a thesis in this topic alone: 'Racism in the content and language of journalistic reportage of vaudeville in Adelaide, 1920-1940.' Here, for example, is a paragraph from The Advertiser of September 30, 1926:

CELEBRITY VAUDEVILLE. 

Special interest is attached to the Southern Revue Company, which will be appearing for the first time in Adelaide at the Theatre Royal next Saturday, under the J. C. Williamson management. Many of the members of Joe Sheftell's revue are even blacker than negroes are usually painted, but this is not true about the chorus girls, who are much fairer than their men folk. One of the members of the company remarked while in Sydney "how mighty good every one has been to us." This is the first impression gained of Australia by one of the darkest of the members. He also explained that in the Land of Liberty "culled" folk have to travel in their own special "Jim Crow" railway carriages, and are segregated in special hotels and restaurants. This company includes many talented performers, who have been a great success in both Melbourne and Sydney — Minta Cato, the colored soprano; Joe Sheftell, the producer; Bob Williams, the comedian; McConn, Saunders, and Williams, the nifty steppers, and the chorus girls.

Did you blanch over that word 'culled'? Language is a wonderful thing when it come to the return of the repressed. It took me a few seconds to work out that it was merely an attempt at phonetic approximation of the accent of the unnamed  'dark member' (oh dear, it just gets worse and worse) and his pronunciation of the word 'colored' (interesting that the Advertiser was using American spelling in 1926).  I also enjoyed the snide reference to the Land of Liberty, implying that we in Australia have no such unenlightened attitudes, oh my wordy lordy no.

And as for the forces of history, I couldn't help noticing the tour dates on this one, from The Advertiser of September 21, 1929:

VAUDEVILLE PERFORMANCE 

Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher, announces that the annual concert to be given by her students will be held in the Thebarton Town Hall on October 22. The programme will contain several spectacular ballets, solo dances, and vaudeville acts.

(And for anyone looking for ideas for fiction, there's a whole novel for you right there in the phrase 'Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher.') Unbeknownst to either the journalist or Miss Trixie, the 1929 Wall Street Crash was imminent: Black Thursday was October 24th, two days after the concert.

Vaudeville was a notoriously unstable and insecure profession even at the best of times, as Endicott's book makes clear, with acts being sacked and theatres closing down and impresarios going broke left and right. I wonder what happened to everyone in the wake of Black Thursday: to Miss Trixie, whose pupils' parents must have hurriedly reassessed whether the budget could stand ballet lessons? To those 'culled' troupers from three years before? To all vaudeville everywhere: the performers, the backers, the managers, the theatre owners, and the audiences, many of whom may have abruptly decided that going to the vaudeville was a luxury they could definitely do without? What happened to the nifty steppers, the Men of Mirth, the chorus girls, the acrobatic violinists and the 'Gypsy' dancers, in the wake of October 24th, 1929? Whatever did they do? Wherever did they go?

Speaking lovingly of that with which we work

The inimitable Alexander McCall Smith is as we speak in the South Australian outback mining town of Coober Pedy. At this very moment -- and since he's getting a signal I guess he's come up out of his underground motel -- he's tweeting about the town and the opal miners he's meeting there:

Here in this remote mining town I met a miner who loves her job. Laconic, but amusing, she loves using dynamite. Loves opals too. ... We can all speak lovingly of that with which we work: the grain of wood, the thrill of figures; my miner: rocks and explosives. 

 

Blessings. I has them.

Okay, so a lot in life is currently awry if not completely cactus, but every time I go out into the back yard, the smell of the jasmine all down the side fence wafts over to me in sweet little gusts.

The whole back yard smells like flowers.

And there are other less heady but equally climby and spilly things further down the back.

Given that one of the things getting me down is the treacherous weather, reverting to grey and wet and windy and freezing after that glorious brief breath of spring, it's hard to believe that half an hour ago when I took these photos, the sky looked like this.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The Good:

NewSouth Books who have just sent me my advance author copies of Adelaide,

which were waiting for me tonight when I got home from my brush with death (see The Ugly).

French brandy.

My dad.

The Stella Prize.

My friend Stephanie, aca and entrepreneuse extraordinaire.

The lovely Garry Disher's Challis and Destry books.

The bathroom scales (never thought I'd say that).


The Bad:

Centrelink.

The South Australian government and its treatment of employees and citizens. On the other hand, Premier-In-Waiting Jay Weatherill belongs under The Good, at least for now. (NB the Neanderthal mindless macho bullshit rhetoric of the Opposition here.)

Otherwise intelligent anti-feminist women setting the cause back 50 years. Not that I have anyone in particular in mind or anything.


The Ugly

Idiot drivers who come barging out of side streets straight into the oncoming heavy traffic, in the dark, in the rain.

Supermarket white bread.

Great big slugs.

The cat litter tray.

Please feel free to add to these lists.

Random

Edit edit type type think think think.

Except when I go out with friends, I'm living on rabbit food and microscopic servings of lean protein, and have now lost two of the three kilos I put on over the summer while I was finishing the Adelaide book, so it's not like it's not working, but oh my goodness how I hate dieting. It makes me want to maim and kill.

Madam has just managed to somehow take her collar off over her head. The collar she's been wearing for, like, ten years. No, I don't know how she did it either.

Far too late in the process of hanging out the washing a little while ago, I discovered a redback in the peg bag. I found a much bigger one in the laundry the other night (this is a very old and, erm, unreconstructed house, and the laundry is a shed out the back) so sprayed about half a can of Baygon in there and shut the door for a day or two. When I put my hand in the peg bag today to grab out a couple of pegs to hang out some washing with, I thought, Gosh, I hope there's not a redback in there, har har, better check (for I was once frightened nearly to death by a three-inch gecko that suddenly scuttled out of there and over my hand), so I had a quick look and saw nothing. But then, after I'd rummaged around in there a few more times for more pegs, I accidentally dropped the whole thing on the ground, and out staggered this rather little but unmistakably scarlet-blobbed critter who had obvs been affected by the spraying and had crawled into the bag for protection -- clearly with some success, for it must by then have been the only living insect, yes yes all right arachnid, in the laundry. Lucky for me it seemed too sick to want to sink its fangs into anything much. I put it out of its misery sharpish, which helped a bit with the whole maiming and killing thing. But anyone who touches either of the humungous pet Golden Orb Weavers who have taken over my little front garden, or either of their even more humungous Golden Orbs, is going to be in very big trouble. (Maim, kill etc.)

Edit edit edit read read read.

One of the many horrid side effects of all the rain is that there are now at least half a dozen hitherto unsighted species of weeds in the back yard, as if it wasn't already bad enough.

Now that I'm at the stage of answering my editor's queries about the manuscript, I can see that yet another trip to the sodding library is inevitable, in order to re-borrow some of the books I finally took back.

I thought the movie of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest was much better than people have been saying. Much much better.

Type type, work work work.

Now excuse me while I chew off my own thumb and eat it.

On crying

I hate crying. Not only am I one of those people unable to cry prettily (red-eyed, blotchy etc) but it doesn't even help, as it is popularly supposed to do; on the contrary, it makes me feel exhausted, headachy and stupid. One of my favourite 19th century characters (he was a real person), one Reverend J. Haweis, is quoted somewhere as saying -- to me quite unforgettably, so I don't need to look it up -- 'A good play on the piano has not infrequently taken the place of a good cry upstairs.' Give me a good play on the piano any day.

Here in the second half of my fifties I'm horrified to find that if anything I cry more instead of less. I remind myself more and more of Waker, the emotional twin in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters -- 'Tell Waker it looks like rain and his eyes all fill up.'

It never takes much, and the minute it starts I feel split in two as neatly as an apple, with one half blubbing away and the other, cool and scornful, observing this intemperate creature and thinking Oh for God's sake, what is it this time? It's usually not about 'being upset', more something that seems both glancing and visceral, like being accidentally knifed by someone who wasn't even aiming for you. It reminds me, in fact, of that great line of Dorothy Dunnett's: 'Music, the knife without a hilt.'

It is indeed most often something to do with either music or animals, which brings me to my real point, which is that one of the reasons I'll feel very pleased to have finished this book about Adelaide is that I might stop crying so much; not only is the writing of it an unexpectedly emotional exercise, I think probably closely akin to a form of auto-psychoanalysis, but in the reading for it (yes, I'm almost finished, but one keeps finding new things while checking the old things), I keep coming across stuff that gets me going, like the item about the War Horse Memorial in Simon Cameron's lovely little book about Adelaide's statues, Silent Witnesses.

It's a granite horse trough inscribed WAR HORSE MEMORIAL 1914-1918. Not an actual horse to be seen. On the contrary, what it evokes is the poignant absence of horses. It hasn't always; it was originally situated in Victoria Square and connected to the water mains for the use of the working horses of the Central Market. The memorial was moved to its present site on the south-east corner of North and East Terraces, next to the Light Horse Memorial obelisk, in 1964 when Victoria Square was redesigned. It's got an inscription on it from the Book of Job.

He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength. He goeth on to meet the armed men, he mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted, neither turneth his back from the sword.

He just keeps on living his life

Eighteen years ago, when my parents were mere spring chickens of 65, the most recent in a long line of family moggies padded off to the big litter tray in the sky, and they swore off cats, they said, for good. 'No, no,' my father said when it was suggested they might get another. 'We're too old to start another cat.'

Shortly thereafter my sisters trundled back to my folks' place from the RSPCA with a large and rather scared grey tabby who'd been brought in by a man whose father had died and left his cat, then age 2, to be dealt with. 'Ah,' said my friend D when informed of this new development. 'An adult cat. With habits. And eccentricities.'

Tiger saw my mother through her last six years, and my dad through three bedridden months after he fell off the roof, then widowerhood, then remarriage and finally divorce before he and one of my sisters finally took her off on that last sad trip to the vet a couple of months ago.

I went to visit him today. 'Come and see the Christmas present I bought myself,' he said, and opened the door to his bedroom. A small, lithe kitty, cafe au lait, chocolate and white with bright blue eyes, leapt up off the bed and came to meet us, twining and purring.

Cecil is a rescue cat, who'd been brought in as a stray and had had a hard time before that, brought back to health and condition by the dedicated people at the Animal Welfare League. He's a snowshoe cat. Cecil is seven. My dad will be 84 in February.

Culture, various

Since last Thursday I've seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, gone to hear my friends D and M sing in the Mozart Requiem at St Peter's Cathedral (in Adelaide), and listened to an utterly delightful conversation on the radio between those two stalwarts of Melbourne intellectual life, Professor Stuart Macintyre and Dr Michael Cathcart.

All of these have been snuck into the cracks between the work, and I am determined to blog about all of them. Just as soon as the marking's done.

Home notes

You know you're truly, madly, deeply mired in domesticity when in spite of the fact that you have to meet a weekly deadline, grade and write reports on fifteen Honours theses in the next few weeks, and deliver a completed book manuscript by February 1, your update of the calendar features things like 'It's okay to pull up those poisoned weeds now', 'Car way overdue for service', 'Time to de-flea the cats again: make appointment to sell a kidney so you can afford to buy more of the de-worming and de-fleaing gunk', and 'Oh goodie, it's my turn to have the family for Christmas lunch: find sparkly red and green knives, forks and spoons, and get prescription for Valium.'

Happiness

Finished this week's copy with time to spare; lots of good ideas for the statue-of-Colonel-Light chapter of the Adelaide book that I'll be getting on with writing later this evening; new Kate Atkinson novel to read over dinner and again before the light goes out; positive loving conversations with five different people over the last 48 hours; spaghetti and pesto and a lovely big cold glass of Pike's Riesling for tea.

Oh, and the jasmine's out.

Can't give them away with a pound of tea

I've been trying intermittently to become an official organ donor for nigh on twenty years. Anyone who watched the 7.30 Report last night won't be surprised to hear how difficult and frustrating this has been. Twenty years ago some of my organs might have been worth something, but I doubt it now, although I bet my lungs are in better shape after nearly 21 years off the nicotine.

But apparently now you really can do it online. That is, if you're prepared to register in order to use their online services and wait while they post you your password by snail mail. Which might entail ringing them up to make sure the postal address they have for you is current.

Also, whoever organised that segment managed to time the running of it so that it coincided with a period of maintenance at the Medicare site.

But if you're still interested after all that, the website is here.

Apparently Australia has an unusually low number of organ donors, but my guess is because it's been so hard to register as one. Every time I filled in a card for my wallet or opted to have 'Organ Donor' put on my driver's licence, someone would immediately assure me that it didn't mean a thing. My family has discussed this kind of stuff many times and we are all in furious agreement about the virtues of organ donation, but that decision is one burden I would like them not to have to carry if it came down to it. Hence the online registration.

But I'm wondering if there are other reasons. So by way of novelty I'm going to use Blogger's poll gadget to actually do something useful and get some information on reasons. Do feel free to play.

Listen to your Auntie Pav

Yes, it's Agony Corner. I haven't even been asked a question, I just feel like dispensing some good advice.

I don't know what it is about flower arranging that sets the mind to wandering, but, following a particularly leisurely train of thought as I tried to coax a bunch of curly-stemmed nasturtiums into a champagne flute, it occurred to me that I know not just one but two stories -- both told to me by reliable sources, about people I know personally -- of people being told they are no longer required by their employers. These people have, in a rage, gone straight to the computer and deleted all the records -- in both cases, indispensable, unique and sometimes irreplaceable records -- relevant to their (former) jobs.

In both cases, the dismissal was unexpected, and was not entirely kind or fair. One can understand what prompted the hitting of the red button. It's all very well having internalised excellent life rules like 'Don't slam the door on your way out', but sometimes the red mist simply descends of its own accord and then all bets are off.

But Reader, do not do it. Do not. Ever.

Because if you do, nobody will ever forget it. It's too good a story -- Shakespearean, really: power, drama, revenge, you know the kind of thing -- and you will carry it round your neck like a dead albatross for the rest of your working life. If you have any more working life. Five years, ten years, fifteen years after you do it, people will still be standing at the kitchen sink putting the first nasturtiums of Spring into champagne glasses and thinking Gee, I wonder what happened to whatsis/ername, you know, the one who deleted all the files.

June 24th, 2010

(Photo: AAP via the ABC website)

The good life

One of Joni MItchell's relatively early songs begins like this:

Papa's faith is people
Mama she believes in cleaning
Papa's faith is in people
Mama she's always cleaning

When I first heard this (opening lines of 'Let the Wind Carry Me' on For the Roses), I related to it at once, but on further reflection I think my own version would go

Papa's faith was Mama
Mama she believed in people (also cleaning)

Not only have I not inherited my mother's genius for good housekeeping, which she combined with a firm belief that everyone was Christopher Robin till proven guilty and which provided a husband and three children with clean, quiet, orderly comfort, good meals, clean clothes and good health on a daily basis for quarter of a century, but I have reacted the other way and tend to live in squalor. I haven't yet been dug out from under a pile of garbage like those people in the news yesterday, and care is taken in bathroom and kitchen, but I live a paper life and most of its detritus is in tall, dusty piles around the house. Ma really did believe that cleanliness is next to godliness and I fear that by her standards I am far from being a good person.

The very entertaining Robert Dessaix was talking at Adelaide Writers' Week earlier this year about the way that writers he's written books about -- Turgenev, André Gide -- thought it was important to live a good life. Not the good life, as in wine, women and song, nor yet the 'goodness' of church on Sunday and no sexual irregularities please, but what Robert called a beautiful life, one with depth and content and meaning.

Here at Chez Cat Hair today, a good life would consist of the following:

1) Get weekly copy written and filed ASAP and vow to catch up and stay caught up with proper deadlines.

2) Visit father.

3) Plant tulips.

Finishing and filing the copy is vital. No excuses, no shortcuts, do it now.

If I don't actually visit my father, I will at least be calling him for a long chat as per our weekly routine, which I think suits him more and more as he gets older.

Perhaps I'll put the tulips in the fridge to get properly cold before they go into the temperate Adelaide earth.

Note no mention of vacuuming.

I really want to do the vacuuming. It's just that I think the deadline, the father and the tulips all matter more.

Adelaide Writers' Week, Day 3

On which of course I am at home, preparing for today's chairing gig, a session with Michelle de Kretser late this afternoon which I am expecting, and intending, to enjoy a lot. I have also acquired a new late-breaking 'In Conversation' gig with Robert Dessaix on Thursday.

But yesterday I got briefly to do the things you do at writers' festivals when you're there as a punter: went to a book launch and afterwards caught up with three lovely friends for an impromptu lunch of Cath Kerry's Vietnamese cold rolls (Adelaide Writers' Week does the best food you'll ever find in a tent) in the deep shade under the trees in the rose garden, where we had a fairly scandalous discussion about the SA Labor Party and its prospects for the March 20 election.

We'd just been to the launch of Peter Goldsworthy's new book of short stories, Gravel, being launched by J. M. Coetzee, who made the kind of speech that you take away with you and turn over and over in your pocket, a perfectly-judged book-launch speech in that it used the book as a starting point for more general observations about the world and lifted the occasion effortlessly above discussion of a particular thing to an abstract yet razor-sharp reflection on the way we live our lives.

Peter's stories, he said, were partly about life as a moral education, and moral education as a painful process by which we learn how to live good lives by processes of trial and error, and cause and effect, along the lines (my words now, not his) of 'Oh God look what hurt I've caused / how ashamed I feel / what a mess I've made: I'll never do that again.'

As has already happened several times this Writers' Week, I later felt a strong connection to something another of the writers was saying; talking late last night on the phone to Robert Dessaix as we discussed how his Thursday session might go and what sorts of things we might talk about, still mulling over what John Coetzee had said that afternoon, I was startled to hear Robert saying 'I'm interested in the question of what a good life is, and what we have to do to have one.' What I heard, when he used the word 'good', was a seamless meshing of meanings, both as in 'living the good life' and as in 'being a good person'. Some people might argue that these two things are mutually exclusive but not, I think, Robert. Something to ask him in the session.

One might be forgiven for imagining that the Dessaix conception of a 'good life' could be very different from the Coetzee conception of it, but maybe not, so much. They have a great deal in common: born only four years apart, happily settled in small Australian cities, much-travelled polyglot fellow-Aquarians, citizens of the world.

To Do list on this Blue Moon New Year's Eve

TO DO (in order of importance)

Pull oneself together

Accept the fact that it's going to be 41 degrees today and suck it up; everybody's hot

Finish and file weekly book reviews column

Make Eton Mess for fourteen (go out in the heat and buy more eggs because one is an idiot and forgot; make meringues; hull, slice and Kirsch-macerate strawberries; whip cream)

Work out appropriate bowls and plastic containers for transportation and serving of said Mess

Run a load of washing including half of tonight's outfit

Check the rest of tonight's outfit, bearing in mind that there's going to be a cool change in the middle of the event which may involve the hand-washing of a pashmina, and do necessary ironing etc

Cover up the lemon tree or all the lemons and leaves will get scorched

Call father for weekly yarn

Wonder, given the full-on car park rage hissy fit at 8.23 am (see 'forgot eggs', above), what sort of state one will be in by the end of tonight's six-hour* dinner
*well, it was last year


Meditate on art, age and womanhood. Here's Joni Mitchell at around 50, no backup (and almost no makeup), singing about a blue moon, which is what it is tonight: the second full moon in a single calendar month. 'Night Ride Home' is a happy love song, which for Joni is a blue moon event. Look at the length of her fingers, and the expression on the face of the little dude watching her right at the end.

And a very happy New Year to all.

Arithmetic, or is it algebra, in chronological order

1 horrible old neck injury (high-speed highway rollover, 1986: C4 and C5) x too much housework and gardening (yesterday) x general stress (ongoing) = shoulder, neck and scalp muscles in spasm = extreme nausea + plenty of hyoscine hydrobromide + too much codeine + 1 moving, upsetting funeral of a 60-year-old woman you've known since you were born + several hours with your father & sisters + far too many brandies (today) + 2 x really crucial deadlines that matter a lot to a lot of other people (imminent) = X, where X is how you'll feel at 8 am when the alarm goes off.

On the other hand, it's 20 years today (3.30 am, November 26th 1989) since I had my last cigarette: cold turkey from 40-50 a day. CP, if you're reading this, thanks from the heart.

Where's Bruce Springsteen when you need him?

As I pulled up round the corner from the late-night supermarket, they were standing across the road in a little car park. Both in their twenties with dark hair, her with a pixie haircut and a dark brown pencil skirt to the knee.

He was leaning in towards her and holding her gently in his arms with his hands on her shoulderblades. She was standing straight, with her hands clasped low behind her back.

The natural thing would have been for her to embrace him back, but she wasn't. She was exactly the right height to rest her chin on his shoulder, but she wasn't.

When I came out of the supermarket ten minutes later they were still standing in the car park in exactly the same positions they had been in before. I turned on the ignition and let out the handbrake and as I looked up to check the traffic I saw him back away from her, take a handkerchief out of his pocket, wipe his eyes and blow his nose. She wasn't saying anything.

Round the corner and down the street, the white wedding-cake Palais building on the foreshore was lit up with electric blue. On the beach and in the park you could have barely moved for grateful bodies, out in the cool change, eating ice-creams and chips. Norfolk Island pines and wheeling chip-scrounging seagulls were silhouetted against the sky. Kids in bathers begged to be allowed another funfair ride and bad little boys tried to climb over the barrier blocking off the storm-wrecked jetty. Shreds of pale pink in the sky showed where the sun had sunk into the sea; they looked like faint reflections of the red tail-lights lined up along the esplanade. It was just light enough to see, but not to read, the signs in the sand dunes that warn the unwary beachgoer of snakes.

Brothers, sisters and anthologies : oh the irony

So when I got home this afternoon from fifteen rounds with a sibling -- the ferocious upfront one, all teeth and claws all the time, and no backing down until one of you dies -- so stratospherically stressed out that my eyeballs and teeth were aching and there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth that no amount of medicinal chocolate would shift, I found two things in the mail.

One was a copy, kindly sent by Allen & Unwin, of Charlotte Wood's new themed anthology of specially-commissioned stories by Australian writers about siblings, entitled Brothers and Sisters. The other was my copy of the current Australian Book Review, in which critic Peter Craven continues his attack on the team of scholars of Australian literature (of which he is not one) who edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, including moi, that he began in his magisterially and savagely opinionated review of the anthology in the previous issue.

I've been a fan of Charlotte Wood's since I read her novel The Children, in which she shows great interest in the sibling dynamic and great skill in representing it, an impression further borne out by the brilliant, funny, moving introduction to this new book. And after reading the ABR correspondence pages I'm considering the possibility that one way to understand the shifting, endlessly complex dynamics of the literary scene and all its tortured interrelationships is to think of it in terms of sibling relations, where the keynote is intensity for better or worse, and where endless fights for territory, dominance, independence, sentimental vases and Mummy and Daddy's approval all take place in the hothouse arena of shared interests and common experience.

At the very least, I find that thinking about these things anthropologically and psychoanalytically helps me to get some distance on them, to back away from the rage. It's that or the bottle shop, and I have too much work to do tonight for the bottle shop to be an option. Besides, I want to be fully alert when Germaine takes on Planet Janet on Q&A.


Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

Some random

Random blog posts I would write if only [insert excuse here]

• One about the common motivation behind nearly all of the negative reactions I've seen so far to The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, which have included 'I'm not in it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'I wasn't invited to edit it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'My husband / wife / SO /BFF / offspring isn't in it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'My own genre isn't adequately represented! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' and 'It hasn't got enough of the things that I think are really good in it! I'm personally insulted! This book is bad!' Etc. Spot the common element here.

• One about natural disasters and the reporting of natural disasters, with specific reference to headlines like '2 Australians Missing After Volcano Eruption' when in fact 5,000 Sicilians have also been engulfed by molten lava, a fact that appears somewhere in the fourth paragraph if you're lucky.

Random reasons to be cheerful

• I've just had a nice drive up to the Adelaide Hills to hang out with my best mate.

• The book I'm reading for work is quite adequately gripping.

• There are prawns dipped in leftover guacamole for dinner.

Random whining

• I'm still not at all sure about this haircut.

• My back hurts.

• The deplorably illiterate "sneak peak", which I'm seeing more and more frequently, has just turned up on the website of one of the country's major newspapers. Don't people think about the meaning of the words they write and misspell at all any more? It's a peek, people. (And no, 'sneek' is not acceptable either, in fact that's worse, because it isn't any kind of word at all.) A peak is the pointy bit at the high end of a mountain or a soft-serve cone. A peek is a little baby look.