HEAT Heat

I'm seeing a lot of complaining from east of the border about how hot it is. Now the Victorians just aren't used to sunshine and you have to feel sorry for the poor sausages, but can I just say that since Sunday the maximum temperatures in Adelaide have been 35, 37, 37 and 39, with today, tomorrow and both days on the weekend forecast to go to or above 39. Which will make it by far the longest November heatwave in Adelaide on record. How Emergency Services plan to deploy themselves for the several hours on Saturday morning when the iconic John Martin's Christmas Pageant and the International Three-Day-Event are both on is anybody's guess. Organisers have refused to cancel either event and it could end up a Guernica of dead horses and passed-out Santas FATHER CHRISTMASES DAMMIT.

If the SA Government had actually done something decisive and productive about water catchment and management seven years ago when they first got into office, and if the Eastern States had not conspired to kill the river out of greed, and if we hadn't watched gigalitres of rainfall go to waste all winter, and if one out of two Adelaideans were not openly flouting the water restrictions and admitting as much to journalists from the Advertiser, I might feel less enraged about watching the garden die.

If we're getting February weather in early November, it's likely that February will be beyond endurance. I thought last year, around the time of the fires when the temps got up to 47 degrees, that we were in unchartered waters, but it looks as if this summer is going to be, like, unchartereder.

If cats really were as intelligent as they are supposed to be, then there would not be two tortoiseshells stretched out with feline expressions of reproachful suffering on the hottest room in the house, where there is no aircon and no insulation in that part of the roof, instead of hot-pawing it to the study or the bedroom and bunking down there for the duration.

And if it's just going to stay at 39 degrees for the rest of my life, then I'm not at all sure how long the rest of my life is going to be.

Unbloggability

Sometimes it's because someone else will be hurt, sometimes it's because someone else will be humiliated, sometimes it's because someone else will be enraged, sometimes it's because you'll permanently alienate at least three people important to you, sometimes it's because you don't trust your own motives, sometimes it's because you'll get done like a dinner for defamation and sometimes it's because it's against all the rules of civilised life to tell what you know.

But oh dearie me, I don't think it's ever been all of those at once before. No wonder I can't concentrate.

Some thoughts on crime fiction: 1

I've just finished reading the latest Patricia Cornwell. Its title is The Scarpetta Factor, which considering that the previous one was just called Scarpetta suggests to me that Cornwell has utterly lost any interest she may once have had in decently clothing her obsessions.

Cornwell has always been obsessed with Scarpetta, for reasons not far to seek -- compare the physical descriptions of the character with the jacket photos of the author and draw your own conclusions -- but in the early books she was at least as interested in the baddies as she was in the goodies. It's been a long time, at least five or six novels, since Scarpetta's paranoid narcissism became the clear raison d'être of the books and the books became repetitive chants about Scarpetta and her circle and the awful people who keep trying to upset and hurt them, chants in which we the readers are still expected to be enchanted by Scarpetta's repulsive niece Lucy and the only believable character is the flawed Pete Marino and often not him either, with occasional brief, bored mentions of the bad guys.

Why then, you ask, did I pick up a copy from the stack in K-Mart that I happened to be walking past, and, having done so, read it through to the end, which is more than I have been able to manage with the new Ian Rankin? And reader, well may you ask. I don't know the answer either. But it's told me something useful that I'd not consciously realised before about what makes good crime fiction.

What makes good crime fiction is the constant interaction between the criminal and the decoder -- whether private detective, police detective, forensic pathologist or whatever -- and the way those forces are balanced, not only in the abstract moral narrative but within the telling of the tale. Cornwell has lost interest, if she ever had any real interest, in the criminal and the crime; her criminals are crudely grotesque and overblown, like the hairy French freak who turns up again in this new book, and she is far more interested in her little Scarpetta circle and the way they interact with each other, with particular reference -- wholly unironic -- to money, status, brand names and big toys. I don't think there can be another successful novelist on the planet who makes such frequent and earnest use of brand names as a mode of characterisation -- which in turn makes you wonder about the product placement aspect.

Balanced interaction and interchange of point of view is what makes crime fiction worth reading: fiction in which Good v Evil is a struggle that is (a) evenly matched, (b) real and (c) morally complicated within that dichotomy. It's (c) that makes for really exceptional crime fiction, as with the flawed-detective model (Peter Temple has produced an absolute blinder in this respect with Truth), with the sympathy-for-the-criminal's-seriously-horrible-background (Val McDermid is the mistress of this variant) or, most of all, as with Thomas Harris's truly exceptional first two Hannibal Lecter books, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, where the narrative turns with delicate precision on the moral and psychological complications and manipulations of readerly sympathy and empathy for two major characters: Will Graham of Red Dragon, with his troubled and near-uncanny feel for the mind and heart of the bad guy, and, of course, Hannibal Lecter himself.

Crime fiction, like comedy (as in Shakespeare, not as in standup), is essentially a conservative genre, one in which the narrative trajectory is to do with the restoration of social order but, within that, privileges the individual psyche and individual freedoms. Most literary private detective heroes are by nature libertarians, and most tales of crime are about the way the individual psyche became deranged in the first place, though many (again like Peter Temple) are also acutely conscious of the social forces that set up the conditions for such derangements. It's not a simple thing. Really exceptional crime writers understand all of that, and factor all of it in.

The cake is in the oven

As threatened, I have made Deborah Strange Land's family's traditional Christmas cake, and it is in the oven.

Deborah has beautiful photos of hers here so I didn't take bother to take any pictures of mine (particularly since my brown-paper wrapping on the cake tin looks like the work of a drunken three-year-old) except right at the beginning when the raisins, currants, sultanas, dates and glacé cherries were marinating in the brandy in the big red pottery bowl that S and P gave me one Christmas (I think) after I had admired theirs.




It's an essential part of the recipe at this in-the-oven point that you contact your female nearest and dearest to say that your Christmas cake is in the oven and you are thinking of them. And so, dear girly blogfriends, I am. (And any of the blokes what are interested, too; this may not be a permissible variant, but I'm fairly sure that at least half the men who read this blog are better cooks than I am, apart from anything else.)

Yesterday there was a good omen when I grabbed up a pair of very cheap loose light white cotton trousers from India via K-Mart, not even bothering to try them on, on a whim on my way to the checkout (the single hardest-to-find item in the whole Christmas cake shopping list? Brown wrapping paper), only to discover, when I arrived home, two things:

(1) We in Adders are set for the worst November heatwave on record, starting at 35 degrees on Sunday and up to 37 on Monday, which will last all week and possibly go on longer than that, and the white trousers (which fit perfectly and don't even need to be taken up) are the perfect garment for lying round the house whingeing and moaning in; and

(2) an acceptable alternative to almond paste/marzipan, which is the traditional undercoat for Christmas cake decoration but which makes many people gag, is a thing called Rolled Fondant that I found in Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Cake Bible, the instructions for which include a directive to wear all-white clothes while you're making it, because a single stray thread can discolour the fondant.

So, double serendipity. Sweet.

There is one thing very wrong with this recipe, though. Either Grandma Strange Land or Deborah herself has inexplicably left the kitteh hair out of the list of ingredients.

That has been remedied.

Code for 'we don't care'

When I first saw this article about Publishers Weekly and its all-male-author Best Books of 2009 (ah yes, it's that time of year again), it took me a minute to work out the title: 'Why Weren't Any Women Invited to Publishers Weekly's Weenie Roast?' I'd always thought 'wienie' as in 'wiener' as in 'frankfurter' was spelt with an 'ie' not an 'ee', and it's not clear whether 'weenie' is used here as a variant or a disparaging pun (though I'd like to think the latter), but either way it is, in this context, American for what we in Australia call a sausage fest. Boys' Own, if you like.

It was only yesterday that I was looking around the nation's various literary-cultural-political mags, blogs and websites and noticing with growing dismay that the general ratio of male to female writers represented -- both the people writing for the journals and blogs and magazines and the people being written about -- seems to have nose-dived*, even just since the beginning of this year, back to the good old days where 'male' meant the norm and 'female' meant some lesser variant; yet again I was reminded of the great Simone de Beauvoir, than whom nobody has ever described this phenomenon better. 'There are two kinds of people: human beings and women.'

And it was only last night that an otherwise apparently intelligent commenter on a literary blog referred disparagingly to 'the worst kind of 80s PC', apparently meaning that all that silly nonsense about considering the presence in the world of female people and black people and gay people that we used to have to bend the knee to is merely a memory of a now-despised fad , like satin jumpsuits and big hair, and it's über-cool in 2009 to have sunk right back into our straight white male supremacist good ole boy ways, as into a comfy yet manly chair, clutching the remote in one hand and a stubby in the other. (I'm sorry, I would have liked to have put that another way.)

And then up will go the passionate cry of 'But never mind all this gender nonsense, isn't it just about literary merit??', and back will echo faintly for the nine millionth time from a chorus of exhausted feminists that 'literary merit' is not an exact science, but is rather assessed by the values of the dominant culture, and if the dominant culture is a sausage fest, then, well, you know.

(Though one must look on the bright side: that list of ten books by blokes may ignore the fact that Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro have both had books out this year, but at least it doesn't include the most overrated writer and sausage fest ornament of the 20th century, Philip Roth.)

I wrote here earlier this year about how gobsmacking it was that the Miles Franklin Literary Award judges didn't notice that they'd come up with an all-male shortlist in a year when there were at least five realistic female contenders for the prize, and apparently this kind of 'human beings and women' thinking is once more rife in the US as well. After pondering last night with such disquiet on the turn things seemed to be taking, I wasn't as surprised as I wish I had been this morning to see a feminist Facebook Friend linking that post about the Publishers Weekly list. Here's that post's hook, a line strongly recommended as the default comeback next time some bloke -- or rogue girl trawling for the boys' approval -- accuses you dismissively of being 'just PC':

So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that.

* It is however a relief to see that the November issue of Australian Book Review, which arrived today and which I just finished reading, does honourably buck this trend a bit: writers/reviewers include an Alison, an Andrea, a Belinda, a Claudia, a Gay, a Jacqueline, a Jane, two Judiths, two Kates, a Kylie, a Melinda, a Rosaleen (the lead article), a Sarah and a Stephanie, while the written-about include an Anna, an Emily, a Jan, a Jeanette, a Jenny, a Jeri, a Mandy and a Ruth.

The Prime Minister's Literary Awards ...

... were announced today. Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann shared the nonfiction prize with Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake's Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, while Nam Le's The Boat, to no-one's surprise despite the quality of the shortlist, won the fiction prize outright.

There's something unusually coherent about this set of winners; together, qua winners, they have about them the feel of a viewpoint new in Australian literary prizegiving, a strong whiff of post-nationalist awareness. Drawing the Global Colour Line is, as its title suggests, global in the scope of its analysis, while The Boat has been widely praised for its cosmopolitanism and its range, containing stories set in several countries. House of Exile is a 'group biography' of author and activist Heinrich Mann, his partner Nelly Kroeger and their several overlapping circles of acquaintances and friends, including Virginia Woolf (about whom there are some beautiful and surprising stories) and Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, who despised and looked down on Nelly as a schreckliche Trulle which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

So congrats to the 2009 nonfiction judges Phillip Adams, Peter Rose and Joan Beaumont, and fiction judges Peter Pierce, Lyn Gallacher and John Hay, for taking the long, broad view of what, within its official brief, an Australian literary award might encompass. Especially a Prime Minister's literary award, the judging process for which one might have expected to be somehow more rah-rah but is glad it wasn't. This is not for a moment to disparage more nationally focused awards, which have an important place, but only to be pleased that there's also room for books like these to rise to the top of the pile.

I've owned all three for yonks but to my shame haven't read any of them yet, except for Nam Le's story 'Halflead Bay' for a review of Mandy Sayer's anthology The Australian Long Story. It's not quite a question of not having the time. It's more that books of this quality demand an answering quality of mind in their readers, a sharpness of focus and subtlety of attention that it can be very hard to bring to non-work reading when reading is what you do for a living. Because you need to be in a particularly alert and receptive state of mind to do any of these books proper justice as reading-for-pleasure.

'This new work took on fresh urgency with the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany in the 1930s and the pitiless application of eugenic principles and racial technologies -- many of which had been rehearsed under colonial regimes -- in the heartland of Europe, the results of which were to finally scarify the conscience of the world.'

'Keep a straight back, Mrs Sasaki says. Wipe the floor with your spirit.'

'But the party was in full swing, the atmosphere rippling with anecdotes and laughter, so much so that a button popped off the decolletage of Nelly's red velvet dress to reveal the splendid contours of her lacy bra. I like to think that the little red velvet button described a perfect arc across the table and landed right on top of Thomas Mann's Charlotte surprise.'

Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

Making Deborah Strange Land's Grandmother's Traditional Christmas Cake ...

... the recipe for which is here.


Stage 1: Shopping



Scary, innit. I've never made a Christmas cake before in my life, but there is a first time for everything.

Stay tuned.

Apparently it's National Cat Day

Spider love

It's been nearly eleven years since I moved into this house and over those years I have found redback spiders in a number of places: tucked into grooves in door frames, peeping coyly out from drainpipes, neatly hidden in the inside-underside moulding of plastic garden chairs. (!)

So you'd think, given what a haven my place seems to be for them and given the way that their amazing beauty and elegance lures me close enough often enough to make it very likely that one day I will get bitten on the nose and die a horrible death, that I would know a bit more about their habits, personalities and tastes. But no. None of the following, which I have just found at a perfectly respectable news site, has ever been visible from where I was standing:

It's long been known that the female redback who is roughly twice the size of her male counterpart, regularly eats a number of her male courtiers, although exactly what determines who gets eaten has been unclear.

New Canadian research suggests that it depends on whether the female has been satisfied by the duration of the stimulatory courtship, which entails the male vibrating the female's web for approximately 100 minutes.

I'm not sayin' nothin'.

The Kiss

Last night I went to the premiere screening of a new short film by young local filmmakers Sonya Humphrey (producer) and Ashlee Page (writer-director). Adelaide's Mercury Cinema was filled to capacity, no mean feat at 6.30 on a warm Tuesday evening, by a crowd that included some well-known faces.

The film is an adaptation of Peter Goldsworthy's short story of the same name, 'The Kiss', a story I know very well because I chose it to include in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aust Lit and have therefore read it about eleven times, if you count repeated proofreadings. Not to be giving away the whole plot, but it's a chilling tale in which two teenage boys, the worse for drink, decide to go for a swim in an isolated underground tank and realise only after they have jumped in that the water level is too low for them to be able to reach the ladder.

Considering that in Page's screenplay the characters are girls instead of boys, which you'd think was a pretty substantial change and a most disconcerting one at first, the film is actually one of the closest and cleverest adaptations of a piece of fiction that I think I've ever seen. Page gets a couple of extraordinary performances out of her two young actors, and a lot of mileage out of the look of rural Australia at night, simultaneously sinister and glorious.

What I've always admired most about Peter Goldsworthy's work (NB if you're wondering, he may or may not be a distant cousin, so this is nepotism five times removed if it is nepotism at all), in any genre, is his ruthlessness in following the logic of the body to its often bitter end; to me at least, all of his best work is firmly grounded in his experience as a GP over several decades, pitting the detailed abstractions of moral dilemmas against the stark, simple, unrelenting clarity of the body and its processes and frailties. The film is very faithful to this particular take on the mind-body problem. One of the most interesting things about watching it was that although I was all too familiar with the story's events and therefore knew what was coming, I still felt chilled and wired by it -- tense muscles, racing heart -- which makes you wonder about the nature of suspense. Another kind of mind-body problem.

Two things I've learned already today and it's not even lunchtime yet

(1) If you're trying to think through/develop/write a complicated argument about Aboriginal writing and its relationship to ideas about 'literary merit', a 180-word book review being written to deadline is not the place to do it, and anyway you're far better off waiting for your dear friend L, co-author of Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, to arrive tomorrow to give her seminar at Adelaide U so that you can pick her brains about the current state, if any, of academic debates around this question and her own ideas about it.

(2) Work really does expand to fill the time available.

Faine daining: to tip or not to tip

Ploughing sadly through the various horrors of the Adelaide news this morning, I came across an altogether more frivolous item about SA people being the meanest tippers in the country.

What do people think about tipping in restaurants? Do you do it? How much? Why?

Typo schmypo

It's been a long and painful process and even now I occasionally succumb to temptation, but I've learned over four years of blogging that there are certain fora in which you can be as rude, abusive and profane as you like, but the moment that -- having finally snapped at some online wanker's rudeness, aggression or abuse -- you mock someone's grammar, spelling, transcription, typing skills, or any other manifestation of ignorance or carelessness with language, you will be roundly abused for pointing out a 'typo'.

In the book of netiquette, mockery of a so-called 'typo' is somewhere well beyond defamation in the catalogue of sins and even further beyond plagiarism, which isn't considered a sin at all. The word 'typo' is short for 'typographical error' which (while technically a misnomer since it harks back to the days of lead type) is, or used to be, used in media and publishing to refer to any alphabetical or other character misplaced by mechanical accident, formerly as when one misplaced the little metal letters and now as when one tingles up one's fangers in the typing process. But the netizens to whom I refer here, who clearly don't know this and don't care, use 'typo' to mean all manner of error committed through ignorance and carelessness.

They are welcome, of course, but it is sad for them that, since they are not alert to these things, they miss so much unintended online humour. Like this most wonderful comment, comment #3, at this excellent piece on Julie & Julia: 'Stop trying to analize everything.'

That, folks, is not a 'typo'. That is a truly magnificent spelling error and an even more magnificent, if entirely unintentional, pun. It's the sort of thing that makes you hope there's an afterlife, just so that Freud can have a giggle.

Hey hey, who dunnit?

Here's what I want to know: who was it who watched the Jackson Jive act on old Hey Hey footage from decades ago, when the participants were all young medical students, and decided that it would be a good, funny and appropriate thing to do to invite them back? Who thought that was a good idea? Surely this can be tracked down to a single name. But I bet we never hear it.

Unless it was Daryl Somers himself, of course. He certainly appears to be living in the past in every other way.

For the record I think (a) that when it comes to humour, context is everything, especially with parody and satire, but (b) that blackface, whose origins lie in open mockery (and badly-concealed fear and loathing) of African-Americans, is not appropriate, at all, in any context, ever. (And I did enjoy Germaine Greer's comments on Q&A last night comparing the Hey Hey fallout with women's tolerance of men in drag. I've always taken it for granted, especially after seeing Priscilla, that theatrical drag -- as distinct from private or non-performative cross-dressing, which is about something else -- is grounded in ferocious hatred of and contempt for women, but that is true of so many other things, like The Footy Show, that one has to acknowledge it as a norm.)

Part of the context for the Jackson Jive fiasco, of course, was that one of the judges was a guest from the American South. So whoever set the whole thing up either was too ignorant and dim to realise, or did it deliberately. I'm not sure which is worse.

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

NUMB3RS

So, will my Visitor stats hit 60,000 today? And if they do, will I get a special cookie?

UPDATE, 6.30 pm: Yes! All ur numberz are belong to us!

Good news for aspiring writers!

Because these days, apparently, you can get any old crap published. Any old offensive, outrageous, barking, evil crap at all.

A taste, if you can stomach it. My emphasis. Note the interesting elision from 'polygamy' in the headline to 'polygyny' in the article, and ponder on whether it was a nodding sub or a deliberate way to make this bilge look more palatable, or what. NOW READ ON ...

Yes, polygyny may lead to jealousy. We are all human. But ... the ultimate in giving is for a woman to give a fraction of her husband's time and affection to another woman who is willing to share with her. It is a spiritually rewarding experience that allows women to grow while the husband toils to provide for more than one partner.

... Many men in Western society complain about their mother-in-law or a “nagging” wife. If his wife and in-laws were difficult, would he seek more of the same? The willingness of a man to take on another wife is in fact a form of praise to his first wife.

While Islam sanctions polygyny, it does not condone threesomes. Islam also does not permit polyandry, a form of relationship in which a wife takes more than one husband. There are many reasons for this. Some are medical, some relate to paternity. Others pertain to the sexual proclivities of the different genders.

Yeah, see, you need to know who the father is. Because that's the most important question in the world. And everyone knows women don't like sex. And 'medical' -- hey, enough said. (It must be enough; he doesn't elaborate.)

Now re-read this article swapping the roles. Try to think of any man you have ever met or heard of who would accept that being one of several men in any woman's life would be a spiritual experience that would allow him to grow, or that he should look on it as a song of praise for him.

I know the blogosphere is particularly scone-hot on free speech so I take my life in my hands here. But this kind of stuff ought not to be allowed to poison our reading air. Speech is action, and some actions are not to be condoned.

Blogiversary post: in praise of blokes

It's four years ago today since I tentatively followed the 2005 Blogger step-by-step instructions and eventually, to my own astonishment, set up my first blog Pavlov's Cat. (I have recently attempted with Blogger's much more sophisticated 2009 machinery to incorporate t'old blog in t'new blog, but I nearly broke my internets and have not been game to try again.)

By the time you get to your fourth blogiversary you need to think a bit in order not to start repeating yourself, so, looking back over the year's posts, I decided on a bit of linkage in celebration of the dudely side of life. As a woman, a blogger and a feminist, if not quite a 'feminist blogger' within the meaning of the act, not only am I often quite rude about blokes (though only when they deserve it) but I tend to write about women's work and women's lives, my own and other people's, public and private, on a weekly and sometimes even a daily basis, with the default focus on the female, as you might expect.

But this year some exceptional men have provided me with some exceptional moments (I'm sorry, I would have liked to have put that another way) and some hi-qual blog fodder. They include:

Leonard
Cohen

Barack Obama

Jon Stewart (I hope you can see this; I know some people can't)

Daniel Craig

Grandfather Goldsworthy

Roger Woodward and Johann Sebastian Bach

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Trip trap, trip trap

Sorry folks, I have a new troll -- some free-market worshipper behaving the way such types usually behave online, with the emphasis on anonymous, gratuitous, aggressive pig-rudeness to total strangers -- and therefore comment moderation has been enabled until she or he gets bored and goes away. I know it's annoying, but it won't be for long.

For some reason, every blogiversary I've ever had (4th tomorrow) seems to be marked by some unpleasantness of this nature. Perhaps it is merely the blog gods reminding one that blogging is not all Veuve Clicquot and free kittens.

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.