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The Epershand Epistle
My overheated yet undercooked thoughts for this week.
Vellum & Purple:
I am reading Terry Pratchett's 'Night Watch' and the book has me mesmerised with each page, above and beyond Pratchett's usual ability to ensorcel his reader, because the theme of this book caresses every bruise on my heart. Night Watch has our hero, Sam Vimes, now the Commander of Ankh-Morpork's Night Watch, thrown back in time to take up the role of mentor and inspiration to his younger and greener self during his first days enlisted in the Night Watch.
Pratchett is a visceral writer, his jokes are so good your appreciation rises from inside you to meet the humour streaming into your brain and the humanity of his characters is enveloping. Vimes especially is driven by a bone-deep understanding of humans and their frailties, so when you read a novel about Vimes, you find the endless permutations of your life reflected on the page.
'Night Watch' is Vimes given the chance to BE the person that shaped his younger self, to BE the person that sees all the characters of his future life moving inevitably towards the people he knows they will be. It is a bittersweet read for me because it is like I have gone back in time also, coming back to my place of two years ago and finding myself trying to unpick the impression I left behind and resew myself, as I am now, into the fabric. At first, I did this with aggressive slices and steel staples, but now I am trying to do it with little nicks and invisible silken stitches.
It is a difficult read for me also because I have stepped back into family life and been lucky, or unlucky, enough to be the new broom that has been able to sweep some nasty things out of the family closet. Each time Vimes tries to toughen up his younger self, teach him to be tougher so he can survive to become the man he is supposed to be, I think of my forceful manhandling of my parents and my siblings so they have to look at the mess they created in the last two years, trying to drag them through the eye-opening thought processes that travelling forced me into.
Once again, Pratchett has written a book that will, I suspect, mean almost too much to me.
Glockenspiel & Gallery:
I have been listening to a mix CD that Kate gave me when I left London, and particularly enjoying a song about coffee and cigarettes. The coffee shops of Perth are the only social perk that I missed in London, but now that I live in the middle of one of the nicest coffee strips in Perth, I find that coffees (well, hot chocolate for me) should be accompanied by fine conversation, and fine conversation is something I have a serious shortage of at the moment!
The learned conservation of my London friends can easily be aligned with the image of cigarettes. Cigarettes (and far-ranging topics of conversation) are discouraged or banned from most Australian clubs and pubs, are regarded as anti-social and detrimental to your (social) health, are habits that most travellers from Europe come back with and are cultivated by only the most dedicated of 'cool' people back home.
Thus I sit in a coffee shop, nursing my sinful iced-chocolate-double-ice-cream-no-ice and I wish I could share this little slice of conversation-inducing heaven with a hard-smoking Cockney Sparrow, my favourite Evangelical, or any of the other invigorating (and not necessarily chain-smoking) friends that live in the Town with No Coffee Shops.
Take & Cut:
If you haven't yet seen Elizabethtown and were intending to see it, don't. If you want to see how good the movie could have been, watch the trailer! It was trying to be Garden State, but it was scratched from the race barely 20 minutes in. It isn't even tragically bad, it is just a pretty, floppy-haired nothing, and that was just Orlando and Kirsten. There were no engaging characters AT ALL and even Susan Sarandon couldn't save the movie, though she nearly tried. No, I can't quite believe I have spent any time writing about it; I really should have stopped at the first sentence.
The only good thing about seeing the movie? The quote 'I'm going to miss your lips, and everything attached to them.' Cute, but not cute enough I'm afraid.
The movie I did enjoy was 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill', which was so good the theatre was sniffling and clearing their throats at the plights of parrots!
Philglass & Swigott:
I spent the last week on an incredibly indulgent run of End to End Eating Engagements, of which the majority of the dining was conducted at the superb restaurant on Cottesloe Beach, The Blue Duck. The Blue Duck is situated a mere 20m from the breaking waves and sits next to the Cottesloe Surf Club, so my three hour Saturday breakfast and my four hour Sunday lunch was spent inhaling fabulous food at not inconsiderable prices while dreamily letting my sunglasses track the bronzed bodies of the male surf lifesavers bustle around the beach in front of us.
Saturday breakfast was especially enjoyable as it was graced by genuine top totty in 'The Body', a young man who stopped the conversation of the entire balcony as he went past, and so entranced our table at the end closest to the surf club, that the lifesaver on duty started laughing at our stunned ogling. Quite embarrassing that!
Eighty & Daze:
I have an MSN friend, Jakob, a frighteningly intelligent 19-year-old Croatian who constantly humbles me with his wide-ranging world political knowledge. Our first conversation was such a success because he was able to tell me more about the treatment of Australian Aborigines than I had learnt at an Australian University.
The other day he recommended me the New Perspectives Quarterly to read, and I am here to recommend it to you … read, learn, and marvel!
http://digitalnpq.org/
And if you don't trust Jakob and I, trust the peer reviews …
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0893-7850&site=1
Old & New & Borrowed & Blue:
I have always been a very lucky little girl, which meant I was always relentlessly optimistic, I had a grand total of 30 seconds depression a year and I cried maybe twice a year if I was lucky, usually at the end of a favourite book. The world just never gave me reason to cry …
The other day I discovered an endless supply of ready-to-shed bitter tears, and they appeared because I started researching what charity work my company could be involved with. I started looking at the websites of all the charities I could find and as tales of abuse followed tales of sickness followed tales of disaster, the screen started blurring as I lost control of my usually sunny emotions and I just started crying at my desk. And the tears lasted for hours and even days now as I try to continue to do the research I needed to do.
I puzzled over this strange loss of control on the part of my more light-hearted side and finally came to the conclusion that my experience of poverty, sickness and helplessness has changed drastically since I left Perth. Firstly it is the irrefutable fact that I have seen hardship and suffering close up now, from the local beggars in London to the slums of Istanbul. I have seen it with my own eyes and now when I read about problems, it is personal for me.
Even more importantly I have seen just how bloody big the world is and how difficult it is to change and stuck a million miles from anywhere in Perth I fully understand how little I can do to help things along. When you are in the centre of it you can make a decision to do small things that help immediately. When you are far away you can only do things that rarely ever show you a tangible result.
I wait ... :)
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