Books, Bags and Barnaby Rudge

I was going past the Library yesterday, heading towards the Moray Place post office (crowded as usual, now that two post offices I used to use have been closed) when I found myself walking alongside the librarian who does the Interloans.   She commented that I hadn't used the Interloan service in a while, and I had to admit I hadn't.  (I used to be always ordering books through Interloan when I was in my last job.)  I said I was tending to read the Kindle mostly, at which she tutted a little (rightly so for one whose trade is in real live books), and that I was carrying my library of books in my pocket at the moment.

For many years I carried a backpack with me pretty much wherever I went, and there would always be at least one book inside, if not two.   I was reminded of this because the people who sell Jansport mesh backpacks have one style of backpack called the Book Pack.  I think basically it's just a backpack for school kids to carry their books and such in, but I've never owned a Book Pack, and am rather tickled by the idea of it.

When I went to Sydney a couple of weekends ago I didn't take a single book with me.  In the past I would always have had at least two or three - even for a weekend.  In fact, I don't know that I took any books to the States with me when we went over for my son's wedding - although I did bring one back.   Instead of paper books, I've been carrying the Kindle.  One of its many advantages is that if you find you're not enjoying one of the books you've got on it, you can easily switch to something else you haven't yet read that's sitting in your 'library' of books.  Or you can even dip again into something you've already read.

And another advantage I'm finding (and found on the dimly lit airplanes) is that you can crank up the font size until it's comfortable for your eyes.  At night I often read with a bigger font size than in the daytime - it overcomes the issue of older eyes struggling to focus on smaller print.

And a third advantage is that you don't have to hold a tightly bound book open against itself.   I'm slowly reading my way through one of Les Murray's poetry collections (The Vernacular Republic) at the moment, and apart from the print being too small (though not unreadable) the binding is very tight.  It can't be forced open too far otherwise it'll split - another disadvantage of tight binding.  However, the not inconsiderable advantage of real books is that you can take them in the bath without trepidation  -though I've never dropped a book in the bath yet.  I'm a lot more wary about taking the Kindle in the bath, though I have tried it.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I finished reading Ivanhoe recently.  It was the first Walter Scott book I'd read, and while some of it was quite gripping, some of it was rather turgid in style.   Since it's Dickens' bicentenary this year, I thought I should catch up on that writer again, and am now reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the few Dickens titles I've never read.   What a glorious difference!  Occasionally the more upper class characters ponce on a bit in their language, and Barnaby himself (a person with some intellectual disability, as we'd say now) has a tendency to the rhapsodic, but for the rest it's like a wholesome meal, or a dip in a cool stream on a hot day, or going to the circus after listening to a whole CD of serial music by Webern.  Dickens' prose is so alive, and his characters so delightfully drawn - and furthermore they speak in their own inimitable Dickensian way, a style that no other writer has ever quite achieved.  Many of them have that joyously bubbling humour in their speech even when they're at their most serious.  As you can see, I'm thoroughly enjoying this book.  (Sorry, Sir Walter!)

Sydney, birds and loans

I've just been in Sydney, as I noted in my last post, and the area I was in - St Mary's - consisted of a shopping centre, some housing...and a lot of parkland.  The first thing that struck me was the amount of open space near where we were staying: wide streets and lots of parkland with hundreds of trees. And birds making a kind of Naaaah noise. It sounded at first like a baby crying, or a young child protesting.  But it was the distinctive sound of these birds. One morning, before I got up, a tribe of them got together and did a chorus: one would start - Naaaah - another couple would respond - Naaaah - and then gradually a bunch of them added their voices to the song (if that's what you'd call it), until all the Naaaahs - became one big protesting Naaaah.  

Anyway, on the Saturday morning I got up before the other two people I was staying with and went for a bit of a wander along the main street. Most things were closed at that hour, but I bought a Sydney Morning Herald weekend edition (which turned out to have a huge chunk of real estate stuff, and business advertising, and not a great deal else...including no crosswords!)  I was struck by one particular thing in the shopping area: the number of places that offered instant cash loans. I was just reminded about this through seeing Blue Global Media on the Net. They offer similar quick loans, especially those kinds of loans that you get to tide you over until your next payday: payday loan affiliate programs and the like. In fact, with BGM, as you might guess from the last link, you can become an affiliate to their programs, and make money yourself by becoming part of their payday affiliate network 

I'm sure BGM is a perfectly legitimate business, and offer very good deals. I just have some qualms about tiding myself over till the next payday by borrowing. It means that in effect your next pay is already being eaten into, which will mean more borrowing and so on. We already have some sense of this in terms of our pension income not being quite enough to come and go on some weeks - especially if big bills arrive - and so we in effect have to 'borrow' from ourselves to keep ourselves afloat (borrowing from our savings account, that is). This isn't ideal, but it's necessary. And there plenty of people who aren't as well off as us, even, who get into similar difficulties, and find that these sorts of loan places are necessary to their survival.  

A win...and a loss

I've been in Sydney over the weekend, playing for a brass band soloist at a competition called the Ern Keller International Soloist of the Year - the details in the link relate to last year.  Obviously they'll be updated soon, and show that the person I played for (and who took me to Sydney specially to do so!) - John Lewis - won.  Great excitement.   John was the Champion of Champions in the brass competitions for 2011, a title which made him eligible for an invitation to the Ern Keller.

The competition was held in St Mary's suburb in Sydney, where the St Mary's Brass Band has a club that functions all the year round with concerts and a casino and pokies and restaurants and much more.  It's the sort of thing most brass bands probably dream of, because it brings in income that assists the band to function.  Our motel was just across the road - literally.

The weather was much hotter than I'm used to, so it was good that the competition was held indoors in an air conditioned hall, one that's obviously used for other functions where drinks and nibbles are readily available.  The piano was a bit of a disappointment: it seemed muted somehow.  I could only just get it to come to life and no more.  Never mind, in spite of that, the trip was most worthwhile.  And we managed to get away on the plane yesterday in spite of the fact that the terrific storm the night before (with lightning and thunder every few seconds) flooded parts of the Sydney airport, and a good deal of other places.

This is a photo taken around the time
I knew Elizabeth

That's the win.  While I was there, I heard about the loss.  I've mentioned before on this blog that back in the late sixties I was briefly engaged to the opera singer Elizabeth Connell, who was at that time studying at the London Opera Centre; I'd been studying there the year before on the repetiteur's course.  It would have been an interesting marriage, if it had gone ahead: after a difficult start in the operatic world, Elizabeth made a name for herself as singer of roles that required considerable stamina and vocal technique.  She excelled in some of the Wagnerian roles, for instance, and in Turandot, one of the most difficult soprano roles in the repertoire.   When I knew her she was a mezzo-soprano, but she later took time off to lift her voice into the soprano range.   She was briefly married to another singer, but this marriage was later dissolved.

I hadn't heard from her in years, until she wrote to me out of the blue in the early 2000s.  We corresponded a little and I tried to get her email address via her agent so that we could write more directly, but I never heard back from them.   She came out here to judge one of the Lexus aria contest, and we thought about going to the Dunedin concert that came after the event, and then decided against it at the last minute.  Which meant we missed catching up with Elizabeth.

When I was in Sydney this weekend, my wife phoned to say that Elizabeth had died; somewhat suddenly, although she'd been ill with cancer on and off for some time.  She would have been 66 this year.  Even though it's been a long time since we had any real contact, it's still a quite unsettling loss.  I guess people you didn't get married to linger on in the background of your life.  Certainly, on hearing of her death, Elizabeth proved that she had lingered more than a little...

PS: There's a news report about John's win in the Otago Daily Times.

The Playmaker

There's no doubt about it, when it comes to the world of books, not all of them are certified diamonds. I finally gave up on Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope. Its meandering pace, its lack of focus in the characters, who seemed to all be doing their own thing without relation to one another, and in particular, the dreary heroine whom we were supposed to forgive, I assume, all conspired to make me put the book down and not be in a hurry to pick it up again.

On the other hand, I picked a book off my shelves recently that I'd had for a while, and have read it fairly speedily. This was The Playmaker, by Thomas Kenneally, the Australian author. His books can be quite uneven, (I read, but loathed, The People's Train - one reviewer said it combines a fluency of narrative with woodenness of thought, and enjoyed a much less well-known book called A Victim of the Aurora). He's best known for Schindler's Ark, and tends to write books that include real historical people.

In spite of its readability, The Playmaker is odd. It's situated in Sydney when the place was still nothing more than a site for deported criminals and the Marines who guarded them. The Playmaker is one of the officers and has been 'commanded' to put on a play in celebration of the King's birthday (whether the King is actually still alive is something they have no knowledge of). He - Ralph - chooses Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, and casts a bunch of the felons (or 'lags' and 'she-lags' as they're know throughout the book) to play the parts. The book works its way backwards and forwards in time, starting later rather than earlier, and we see the play progressing, and the lives of the various 'immigrants' interacting with each other, and with the ab origines (as Kenneally insists on writing it, no doubt to give some authentic flavour to the look of the words.)

Ralph and his cast were all real people, and at the end of the book Kenneally tells what happened to each one...as far as he's able to. Some of them led extraordinary lives after we leave them.

Kenneally is a brilliant researcher (or has brilliant researchers working for him). He's able to weave together historical reality and fictional episodes with a good deal of skill, and to be imaginative when it comes to filling in the gaps, or recreating the period, or adding to what little is known. However, I'm not sure that he's a great storyteller, at least in terms of structuring his books. As I've posted on more than a few occasions, storytelling structure and I are not the best of bedfellows. Nevertheless I can still see when a book hasn't hit the mark in terms of structure, even though I'm not always able to put my finger on what would have worked better.

The Playmaker's climax is weak, for instance. After a long haul through the book, the two intersecting events that mark the end of it don't gel. They're just annoying in the way they're put together. The climax should be the fact that the play has got off the ground and has hit the mark with its audience. But Kenneally chooses to add in the capture of one of the lags who has been on the run, and has been stealing food from the community. He's brought into the barracks where the play is being presented and his presence interrupts the whole mood, not only of the play, but of the book. As does the unexpected death of one of the other characters.

Equally, the shifting back and forth in time doesn't really seem to contribute greatly to the impetus of the book, although it's less of a flaw than the seemingly-botched climax. (The People's Train is infinitely worse - it has no climax whatsoever.)

Presumably it was intentional that the book should be brutal in its descriptions: not only of the various hangings and beatings that take place (not just of lags, but of criminal Marines as well), but also of the sexual encounters most of the characters have at some point. Sex pervades the book; I thought of putting it aside more than once, because of the way everything is coloured by sex. There are occasional oddities: for example, when a supply ship finally arrives, Kenneally tells us that a sudden storm strikes it as it enters the harbour. This is done in about one sentence, and then things carry on as though this had really made little difference to the crew or the people waiting for the supplies.

In spite of all the above, there are some great passages of writing in the book. The expedition to find the aborigines in order to get a cure for one of their number who has fallen sick is strikingly done, and the way in which Ralph experiences his increasing sense of creating something that comes alive through his criminal cast is also good.

Many years ago I read Kenneally's Three Cheers for the Paraclete, a book that's a lot less turgid than some of his later work (Wikipedia describes it as a comic novel), and which was generally a lot more enjoyable. His later books, however, seem to thrive on frequent obscurities that leave the reader struggling. Maybe it's a result of winning the Man Booker prize once too often.

Auckland and Vancouver tie

You may not believe it if you're a Mainlander (that's people from the South Island for those who aren't familiar with the expression) but Auckland comes fourth equal with Vancouver in Mercer 2009 Quality of Living survey, which covered 215 cities and was based on criteria including political, social, economic and environmental factors. Even more amazing - to Australians at least - is that Sydney only came in 10th.

Here are the 10 Best Cities:

1. Vienna (Austria)
2. Zurich (Switzerland)
3. Geneva (Switzerland)
4. Auckland (New Zealand) and Vancouver (Canada)
6. Dusseldorf (Germany)
7. Munich (Germany
8. Frankfurt (Germany)
9. Bern (Switzerland)
10. Sydney (Australia)

And here are the 10 worst, most of which will hardly surprise you:

1. Baghdad (Iraq)
2. Bangui (Central African Republic)
3. Ndjamena (Chad)
4. Brazzaville (Congo)
5. Khartoum (Sudan)
6. Sanaa (Yemen Arab Republic)
7. Pointe Noire (Congo)
8. Nouakchott (Mauritania)
9. Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
10. Port au Prince (Haiti)

Who is Fred Blanks?

I mentioned Fred Blanks a couple of posts ago, which made me curious to know who he is/was.

He's an 83-year-old who lives in Sydney. He's a retired scientist with an Honours degree from the University of Sydney, specialising in organic chemistry research and management. But he's also a major music critic and adult education lecturer - a profession that began as a hobby. English is not his first language, in spite of his English-sounding name; he came to Australia as an immigrant.

He's obviously very involved in the music scene in Australia; check him out on Google and you'll only find references to music, not to science.

But there doesn't seem to be any readily available bio of him. Maybe one will turn up somewhere when I'm not looking.

Travelling in Asia - for those who do

Last week, my boss and I spent a good couple of hours trying to book hotels online. These were in Sydney and Brisbane, and though we found the ideal place in Sydney, we couldn’t for the life of us get it to go right through to completion stage. It kept telling us we were spending more than forty minutes on the site, and that was too long. We must be some kind of bug/virus/bot or whathaveyou.
I was reminded of this just now, because of looking at sites advertising Cheap Hotels in Singapore, Cheap Hotels in Bangkok and Cheap Hotels in Kuala Lumpur. Bear with me if I seem to be repeating myself here! It’s the leftover result of struggling to book Cheap Hotels in Brisbane or Cheap Hotels in Sydney.
Booking hotels online has its ups and downs. When we were in Europe we had to book hotels and hostels as we went. The result was that we got a very mixed bag of accommodation, as I’ve said in my Travel blog. In Barcelona we had to climb five flights of stairs to get to our room, even though there was a lift in the building. The lift, however, was reserved for permanent residents. Good grief.
In Rome we paid a fortune for a very ordinary hotel. Not only that, but it was a long bus ride from any of the tourist spots.
In Hamburg, the shower wasn’t just en suite, it was literally built into the room! In Heidelberg there was absolutely nothing in the room except the bed and a hatstand.
On the other hand, in Valencia, where we stand for a week, we had two wonderful apartments; in Florence we were within spitting distance of all the tourist places and could walk comfortably to them; in Cologne we paid about half the price of the Rome room for exactly the same kind of accommodation. The luck of the draw, obviously.
It would be interesting to have a go at doing the same thing for Asia - if I ever get a chance to go there!

The various photos of come from Flickr.com, and were taken by
MsAnthea: Bangkok
Storm Crypt: KL (Note that this is the building Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones hung between in the film, Entrapment.
Christopher Chan: Singapore

Meeting in the one place

The worst thing about Auckland is that people keep moving there. People like Brent Read, the young tenor, or worse, my daughter and her two children. Worse still, it costs more to fly from Dunedin to Auckland than it does to fly from Dunedin to most Eastern Australian cities, cities like Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Maybe it would be more economical for my daughter to meet us in Sydney, where we can find really cheap accommodation for all of us. Apparently you can even get serviced apartments in places like Bondi, Manly (those oh-so-familiar-beach-names) or overlooking the Darling Harbour. I think a serviced apartment might suit us all better than a cheap hotel (although apparently there are plenty of Sydney hotels that are super economical, especially in the off-season, and that provide extras - like breakfast), because then my grandchildren wouldn‘t be quite so constricted. Constricted is not a state of well-being they enjoy.
Of course there are Melbourne hotels and Brisbane hotels too, but I think Sydney would probably be the pick of the places for a Crowl family rendezvous. Maybe I could persuade all of the kids and their children to get together over there. Not!

Promote Yourself! Now!

I’ve talked about the late Lindsay Crooks before in this blog. Apart from being an artist of high calibre, he also thoroughly enjoyed surfing. At this funeral it was a surprise, I think, to the arty people, to find that the church also contained a large number of (ageing) surfies.
But something else was special about Lindsay. He was one of the few artists I know who had marketing ability. I guess Grahame Sydney is another; certainly his work is available in many reproductions and books, but Lindsay seemed to do it with a certain ease. We first met when he walked into my shop one day saying he’d met my wife up at the Health Centre and she’d suggested coming to see me. What he was doing was hiring out his unsold paintings at a very reasonable price for three months at a time. It provided Lindsay with an audience for the works, and the hirer with a certain thrill in ‘owning’ something special for a time, and the opportunity to have a change of picture regularly. All, as I said, for a very reasonable price. In fact the price was ridiculous, but the value of it was that it made Lindsay known. We would never have come across him personally in any other way. As it was, after that we would look out for his work, or go and see it in galleries – eventually we even bought a piece, something unheard of for us.
Artists aren’t, in general, good at self-promotion. Like builders and carpenters and other tradesmen who work for themselves, they won’t to get on with the job. Selling your skills and products is another ‘job’ altogether and many tradesmen and artists don’t have that ability. We have some other friends, husband and wife Wally Crossman and Rosalie Gillies, who are excellent artists. But neither of them is good at promotion, and it’s only in the last few years that they’ve had the recognition they deserve because others have promoted them.
I’ve come across a site that seeks to rectify this issue for artists. It focuses on fine art marketing, and is presented in the form of a blog (like this one). One post offers the following suggestions as kind of marketing resolutions for 2007:

Do read an inspiring book from a great direct marketer. Find out what kind of results other people get from good marketing and sales tactics, and get excited about the subject.
Don’t read books about "brand marketing" if you’re a solo or small business. Brand management is for the big guys.
Do make a note of just one or two new marketing activities you will put into action in the first quarter of 2007.
Don’t spend your money on printed promotional material unless you know exactly where it’s needed (for example, at a trade show)
Do sign up for our free mini-course at the top of this page, if you haven’t
already.

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