Six figures!

Some time in the last few hours, the visitor stats here (not unique visits, of course -- my freebie basic-level counter doesn't do anything that sophisticated) went over 100,000, counting since I started this blog on September 13th, 2008, as you can see if you scroll right down to the bottom of the page. I don't pay all that much attention to stats, but I do think 100,000 is a nice number. If only it were my income.

Get off my lawn

No specifics, for reasons that will be obvious to frequent users of the interwebs, but various little events recently have reminded me how much I dislike it when people I've never met or heard of try, with varying degrees of blatancy and barefacedness, to use my and others' blogs to publicise their own, or to publicise or advertise other things.

This is not okay behaviour.

Not even when the material isn't obscene/illiterate/ideologically unsound.

That is all.

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.

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

All above is azure bright, usually*

Recent events have inspired me to have another go at reviving my dedicated Aust Lit blog, Australian Literature Diary, which has been lying dormant (or, as my mum would have said, lying doggo) since I began this one in September last year. There is a place for such a blog, and a potential readership for it, and many uses for it. So I've prettied it up a bit and cross-posted all the posts from here that belong there as well, and have several posts in mind for it over the next few days.

*I do believe that in some states the Song of Australia isn't very well known, but most South Australians would have preferred it as a national anthem to Advance Australia Fair. At coffee this morning we were trying to remember when Australia's national anthem moved on from God Save the Queen; I thought under Hawke, but D said Fraser, while M, who wasn't born till 1987, just looked bemused. I had a vague memory that what everyone really wanted was Waltzing Matilda but couldn't remember why, if that was the case, it didn't get up. I seem to remember someone pointing out that it was a song about a sheep-stealing suicide and an incompetent police force and as such a tad inappropriate for a national anthem, but I may be making that up. Does anybody know?

Literary prizes revisited: a simple case of misidentification

Thanks to some up-to-the-minute Facebooking by Judith Ridge of Misrule, I have just seen the shortlist for the 2009 NSW Premier's Prize for Fiction, the Christina Stead Award. It consists of five of the six books I predicted, utterly wrongly, would make the shortlist of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, plus one extra: Helen Garner's The Spare Room, Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant, Julia Leigh's Disquiet, Joan London's The Good Parents, Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole and Tim Winton's Breath. The one I did not predict is the Julia Leigh; the one I was wrong about in the other direction was Murray Bail's The Pages.

I feel that at least a little of my shattered cred has been restored. They were the right books -- I merely backed them for the wrong prize. Hmf, details.

Wanted: good homes for Adelaide cat and kits

Commenter BS has taken me up on my offer to help find Adelaide volunteers to give any one or more of these three kittens and their mum a good home. The text won't fit at a readable size but all the information is below.

BS found them under the car in the driveway. Apparently this has happened to the BS household before so they already have seven cats and can't keep this lot.

The mother cat is domesticated and BS says she is only a baby herself, maybe a year old, and a beautiful cat, as the photo bears out.

There are three kittens, one male (Mr Smoochy -- tummyrub addict) and two female, one of whom has been dubbed the Fearless Trailblazer. They will be six weeks old come the weekend. They are weaned and litterbox trained. The BS household is willing to pay for desexing if that is any inducement.

If you're interested contact BS directly: neddles(at)gmail(dot)com

More pix here.

Blogger gets gong, friend not surprised

And not just any blogger but my dear friend Stephanie of Humanities Researcher, who feels that her blog played no small part in winning one of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council's 2008 Australian Awards for University Teaching, as announced in today's Australian HES.

US election: public event in Adelaide

For interested Adders readers, the Flinders University Library and Australian Book Review are hosting a free, no-bookings-necessary event in the city on Friday afternoon. Here's the media release:

United States Elections under Expert Scrutiny

On Friday 19 September at 5.30pm, in the State Library Lecture Theatre, Professor Don DeBats will present the next in Flinders University Library’s popular ‘Fridays at the Library’ series. His subject is ‘Beyond the Spin: Making Sense of the 2008 US Elections’.

Don DeBats is Professor of American Studies and Professor of Politics and International Studies at Flinders, and has been specialising in United States history and politics for more than thirty years. His main research interest is United States politics, past and present.

His publications cover a wide range of topics, including university reform, US and Canadian political history, and the Australian–US free trade agreement.

Four years ago Professor DeBats spoke at the University Library and made a remarkably accurate prediction of the results of the 2004 elections. With the poll due to take place on Tuesday 4 November, this will be a timely opportunity to hear an expert assessment of this world-shaping event.

The public is welcome to attend this free event in the State Library Lecture Theatre, corner Kintore Avenue and North Terrace. Light refreshments will be served.

For enquiries please contact Gillian Dooley, Special Collections Librarian, on 8201 5238.