J: I read Overclocked.

R: Mmm?

J: Really liked it except for one story.

R: “When Sysadmins.”

J: Exactly.

R: I had to stop reading it after the baby died.

In unison: I wonder if he could write it now?

LATER. In a tacqueria. There are TACOS. R beats J for no apparent reason.

J: Ow.

R: My ovaries hurt.

J: And?

R: It’s your fault.

J: How?

R: You are the patriarchy. If it weren’t for you we’d all be living in the woods in a big happy lesbian commune, and my ovaries wouldn’t hurt. Isn’t that right, Jamey?

Jamey: Your ovaries would still hurt, but we’d have a drum circle about it.

WE ALL start to DRUM on the tacqueria table. JULIA stares for a moment, then DANCES.

Great newses! First up, massive man-love between my Viable Paradise crushees Cory and Leonard. Second, much-wanted and hoped-for twins, born on April Fool’s! Small siblings to big sister born on Halloween! It is all very cheering.

ETA: BABY OWLS.

I don’t know why I even make these promises when I can’t keep them. Pathetic gestures in the direction of follow-through:

• I have always greatly admired Robert Hughes for his awesome and world-shaking The Fatal Shore. Sundry folks will attest that it is the book I recommend to anyone who is curious about Australia; besides, you know you’re doing something right when Patrick O’Brien thanks you in the acknowledgements to The Nutmeg of Consolation. But Hughes wrote Shore when he was about twelve, so my adoration was greatly mixed with terror and humility. Things I Didn’t Know is the book that makes me get over that, like Hughes very much and wish I could buy him a bottle of excellent red. A recommendation from Grant, who is seldom wrong about these things.

  Things is very touching on the dilemma of Australianness; you stay or leave, and both options are awkward and involve loss.

• I read The Human Stain after having several conversations about passing, and here’s a concept I lack the sociological skillzors to be able to unpack. You have to realize that while Australia has race politics of its own, and even its own lamentable history of slave trading, it’s all very different from the African American experience so I’m coming at this stuff pretty raw. I’m not sure Roth helped much. While I greatly admire both his techniques and what he is trying to pull off, I don’t like him much as a writer.

  Stain does a lot of things I find impressive. It brings multiple voices to life and gives them all internal consistency and dignity. But they are all given these monologues that go on for pages and pages and there’s something about, I’m ashamed to say it but it’s the diction, that rings false to me. They all say plausible things but they all sound like a celebrated establishment novelist while they’re saying them. (Larry’s Party, another recommendation from Grant, has something of the same artificial, po-faced inner voice. Where’s the irreverence? Where are the jokes?)

  Bound to be more my fault than Roth’s. Stain did have one very striking effect on me: I read Flash For Freedom! shortly after it; it’s the Flash book about slaving. The stuff about the crossing is well-researched and accurate and didn’t upset me too badly except, you know, in its substance, but when Flashy starts mucking about with a woman trying to escape up the Underground Railroad it made me physically ill, and I had to skim ahead to make sure she escaped. I always start Flashy books loving him for his, yes, irreverence and wit, and loathing him at the end for being, well, Flashy.

• Shadow Unit is what the plain people of fandom like to call cracktastic: that is, a completely addictive treat, with chewy well-realized characters and thoroughly angstig, wholly-believable jeopardy. It’s a sort of made-up fandom that skips the boring TV series part and cuts straight to the brilliant stuff people make up about it on the Net. It’s gotten me hooked on a fictional Livejournal, for the love of ponies. Mad props to evil genii Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, Sarah Monette and Will Shetterly.

Okay, I guess that wasn’t as half-hearted as I thought it was going to be. No more promises though, I’ll just come out and SAY that Connie Willis and Sarah Caudwell are now on my all-time top ten list, and that I am very very annoyed with Sarah Caudwell for dying young. I guess I get to read the rest of her books in heaven, too.

Passages from Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World that made me want to scrawl in the margin of the library book the words “IT’S SO TRUE!” (but I did not):

“He cared (though not crucially) about the opinion of his colleagues and acquaintances, and would send out a stream of self-castigation in order, he hoped, to nip their condemnation in the bud. His intention was to arrive at his own condemnation fast and first. It was a kind of exculpation. No one condemned him; no one paid much attention. My father had, as far as I could see, no friends.”

(Oh and Dad, that’s true of me, not you.)

“I had dreamt of Gothic arches and the worn flagstones of old libraries – where such a grand yearning came from, I hardly knew. Unaccountably, my heart was set on Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr; I imagined afternoon teas, and white gloves, and burning lips (mine, perhaps) murmuring out of a book. But that was all wistfulness – there was no money for such romantic hopes…”

(Me again…)

“My suitcases held only the sparest handful of the books I valued, since it had always been my habit – privately I felt it to be an ecstasy – to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself … had cradled and cherished. In my mind – I suppose in my isolation – I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me – as phantom companions and secret friends.”

(Aaand me.)

Our beloved Bernal branch of the San Francisco Public Library has closed for renovation, so I redirected my hold requests to the Mission branch. It’s half a block from BART, and it’s open till 9pm every weeknight.

I dropped by on my way home from work this evening, picked my books off the open shelves, checked myself out and caught the next bus home. The whole process could not possibly be any cooler or more convenient. Hurrah!

Dear Robert Smith,

I don’t normally write to celebrities; I’m not big with the fangirl, unless the object of fandom is a friend or friend-of-friend who writes excellent SF or fantasy and has a LiveJournal. It’s nothing personal – quite the opposite: I soured on corporate rock after waking up from a bad infatuation with an Irish rock quartet I won’t name here, out of pocket for five albums I haven’t listened to voluntarily in fifteen years and with a nasty taste in my mouth. And that was years before I covered the Napster trial and got to know the record labels and their business practices better than anyone ever should. These days I listen to lots of mashups and nerdcore. I hope you understand.

My point is, I got the shiny new Sandman collection from Jeremy for my birthday, and it’s hard to write an interesting review of something that everyone else already read ages ago, and loved, and told me that I would love. I mean, what: Newsflash! Sandman genuinely terrific! Major influence on all the other graphic novels I love! Stop the frickin’ presses. No.

So I got thinking instead about how Morpheus reminds me of you, dancin’ around in those early Cure videos, Lovecats and Why Can’t I Be You (the sideways lips! So funny and wicked) and my favourite, Just Like Heaven. You with your spiky black hair and eyeliner and white high tops. How iconic you were! And how well those old songs have aged, how well they evoke those confused and crazy and complicated years. And I remembered the story about you, and realized that would make a way better blog post than Yet Another Sandman Endorsement, Yawn.

I bet you don’t even remember that particular concert in Sydney, Australia, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, I don’t even remember exactly when. You came out of the stage door and signed programs for everyone, and at the end there were three young Australian men left, and you. You chatted for a while – it must have been close to midnight – and then you said “Wanna go for a drink?” Now THEY were diehard fans. They’d loved you and dressed like you since they were twelve. You blew them away.

That would have been kind enough – beers and a couple of hours chewing the fat with these guys. They were nobody really, just fans; no one would have blamed you if you’d shrugged them off. But when the bar on Oxford Street closed, you said “Hey, I have keys to a studio near here – wanna come listen to me lay down some tracks?” Could they have jumped at the offer any more eagerly? When the sun rose they were still there listening to you noodling around on your guitar.

Two of those guys were friends of mine, and the third is my big brother Al. He’s a fantastic brother and I love him to the moon and back, and he’s never in his life had one quarter of the luck he deserved. I wish I could say that night changed his luck for ever. It didn’t. But it was an incontrovertible good thing, a shining adventure, something he can still look back on and grin. Thank you for that. It was extraordinarily decent of you.

I was going to say that under the circumstances I could make an exception for you, and sign myself your undying fangirl in spite of the whole unfortunate corporate rock thing. And then I realized I don’t even have to do that. I already outlined the personal acquaintance exemption above, and so I can go ahead and be the undying fangirl of your great songs and human kindness, because you are, after all, a friend of my brother’s.

Lots of love,
R

When my brilliant and beloved mother-in-law discovered to her astonishment that I hadn’t already read Pat Barker’s WW1 novels, she promptly gave me all three for my birthday. I started reading them on the flight back from Australia and about three sentences in, made myself slow down so that the experience of reading these books for the first time would last longer. That’s exactly how to-my-taste they are.

Light from the window behind Rivers’s desk fell directly on to Sassoon’s face. Pale skin, purple shadows under the eye. Apart from that, no obvious signs of nervous disorder. No twitches, jerks, blinks, no repeated ducking to avoid a long-exploded shell. His hands, doing complicated things with cup, saucer, plate, sandwiches, cake, sugar tongs and spoon, were perfectly steady. Rivers raised his own cup to his lips and smiled. One of the nice things about serving an afternoon tea to newly arrived patients was that it made so many neurological tests redundant.

Note that I didn’t particularly remember this passage, and when I went back to Regeneration to find something to quote, I just flipped over a page or two before I found this. And now look how much work this paragraph is doing. It sets two scenes – not only the cozy tea-time, but also the hell from which Sassoon has recently arrived. It begins to stage what will be an immensely complicated and morally charged relationship between Sassoon and his doctor, and in doing so it indicates the extent to which Rivers is already unusual, preferring informal exchanges with his patients to tests that reinforce the hierarchical distance between tester and subject. Rivers is exceptionally humane – he is, we’ll discover, a very good anthropologist as well as a psychoanalyst. And Sassoon is, in fact, a deathless poet. The power distance between doctor and patient is unusually small; and it’s only going to get smaller.

And if that reference to sugar tongs is not a deliberate evocation of Wilde, I will eat my hat.

Cecily. [Sweetly.] Sugar?

Gwendolen. [Superciliously.] No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup.]

I could have picked any paragraph. They’re all that good. And the prose is all that translucent: simple, beautiful declarative sentences, layered each on the next until you are no longer reading but hovering over Rivers’s shoulder, watching. And Barker respects the intelligence of her characters, and gives them room to breathe and think.

There’s a lot of thematic overlap between this trilogy and my last two reviews, as it happens. (Well, it’s not exactly startling, since I make several fairly strict demands of narrative and can’t be bothered with it otherwise. Anyway.) Regeneration tackles madness – Sassoon isn’t, as it happens. Book two, The Eye in the Door, examines sex and class and will make you grieve for its innocent monster. The last book in the series, The Ghost Road, looks into the face of death, and it includes some of Barker’s finest use of the source materials, Rivers’s books on the societies of the Solomon Islands. (The heat and singing reminded me of Ten Canoes.) I keep going back to Google Books to read the originals and try to figure it out. That was awesome. How did she make that work? How can I do that?

“Tobias Smollet thus became Europe’s tubercule; the infectious agent coursing the continental arteries.”

This, in case you were wondering, was the money shot for an essay I wrote for my English honours exams in 1992. My brain finally presented it, thus polished… this morning.