I have read all of David Malouf’s novels, I thought. Each year I give the undergraduate intern with whom I work a David Malouf novel as a thank you. These interns are international students, and I reason that a Malouf novel gives them a little more of Australia to take home. I also think that they should read novels, and that having one in hand before a long flight home to Sweden, Germany, Poland, or the United States might be read. One lives in hope for there is no other way to live.
In july 2012 when I purchased the annual Malouf novel for the intern, I noticed that among the list of his novels there was an early one which I had not read, Fly Away Peter (1982).
I put it on my Amazon Wish List and sure enough, Santa gave it to me for Christmas, in the person of daughter Julie.
Teaching and Learning
I recently published a piece titled ‘Approaches to Learning and Teaching: Some Observations,’ in Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, Volume 33 (2012), pp: 65-71.
To have a look: select, copy, and past the link below into a browser, and click enter.
http://www.viterbo.edu/uploadedFiles/academics/letters/philosophy/atp/Jackson-WIP.pdf
The tools for underlining and hyperlinking remain off-line.
Krimie Travelogue
James McClure, The Steam Pig (1971). This series is now being reprinted. They are of their time and place, the Republic of South Africa in the 1960s, replete with institutionalized racism, colour coding of one and all, English-Boer hostility, and casual brutality. Sergeant Tromp Kramer, a Boer, and his Bantu assistant Mickey Zondi get on with the police procedural, leaving the moralizing to the reader.
I do know about underlining title but once again the tools for underlining and hyperlinking are not available.
The World According to Murdoch
News Flash! This just in from Pox TV News:
Rupert Murdoch jets to New York City later today to swear in Mitt Romney as president of the United States. Romney has named his cabinet as Sarah Palin as Secretary of State, Mike Huckabee as Secretary for Regulating Private Life as God Wants, Newt Gringrich as Secretary for Fox, Karl Rove will be Secretary for Truth, and Athena Starwomen Secretary of the Treasury. After the ceremony on Wall Street with a small and select audience of yes-sayers, a random selection of workers’ pension funds will be divided among the guests. Trickle-up is the new administration’s chief policy.
President Romney’s first act will be to visit England and pardon all Murdochs of everything, past, present, and future.
Of course the lackeys of the liberal media have made the usual carping noises, e.g., New York City is not the capital of the United States, pension funds should not stolen, an astrologer might not be the best choice for cabinet, and the US President has no authority in England, which is the United Kingdom. Oh, and the biased allegation that Romney did not win the election. Typical!
The end of the Staggerford Chronicles.
The sad day dawned when I read the last volume of the Staggerford Chronicles. In the sequence of the novels, the final one is The New Woman (2005). But I got them out of order and the last one I read was the Staggerford Flood (2002). 
Recommended for adults.
Miss Agatha McGhee does it again. The waters rise and so does she, rising to the occasion in ways that surprise even her. I am sorry to say that this ends my Hassler reading, having completed all of his eleven novels. I heard Garrison Keillor mention him on the Writer’s Almanac podcast years ago and sought out his work. Found it and loved it.
I have learned a lot about forbearance, patience, pain, charity, purpose, self-edification, and more from Fredrick, Simon, Miles, Larry, Beverly, Janet, Lillian, Leland, Lolly, Imogene, Frank, and of course, most of all, from that new woman, Agatha: never give up, never surrender. By Grapthor’s hammer!
When I read the list of his novels, they come alive with the characters: The sullen grocery store clerk, the lost delinquent, the two hunters, the anti-IRA Irish priest, the zombie dean, the ebullient radio talk show host, the empty alcoholic artist, the would-be novelist, the destructive teenager, the numbed Vietnam veteran, the broken woman … The list goes, on and on. Quite a crew in this world Hassler’s created.
In Hassler’s hands Staggerford is as large as life.
Here are the Staggerford Chronicles.
Staggerford (1977)
Simon’s Night (1979)
The Love Hunter (1981)
A Green Journey (1985)
Grand Opening (1987)
North of Hope (1990)
Dear James (1993)
Rookery Blues (1995)
The Dean’s List (1998)
The Staggerford Flood (2002)
The Staggerford Murders (2004)
The New Woman (2005)
The only one I do not recommend is The Staggerford Murders. They do not have to be read in order. Some characters recur but not all of them, and some titles, like Grand Opening, stand alone.
Tasmania reading
Christopher Koch, The Boys in the Island (1958).
This is a novel set largely in Hobart Tasmania with later chapters in Melbourne. It is a coming of age story about Francis Cullen. His boyish desire to fit in with other boys, his first girlfriend, his efforts to conform to the crowd, his mistakes. It is low key, no great dramas, but many small ones – such is life. The prose is attractive, perhaps forced now and again. But the descriptions of place are effective, and there is truth in the characters.
Francis falls under the spell of Lewie, he of massive self-confidence and little intelligence. Lewie’s ambition is a life of crime, but he is not capable of it. Instead he bullies his friends, steals pound notes from cripples, and dreams of the big time. The game of mutual malicious teasing seemed familiar to me from my boyhood though I left it behind, but not these lads.
Koch calls it ‘The Game:’ Francis ‘found himself, as the weeks passed, drawn into a game, the Melbourne game of double-cross which the girl Keeva had apparently invented, and which Lewie was fast learning, her ardent pupil.…… It was the game, to set traps, to hurt. You did not say what you were thinking. You did not let one another know what you were doing. You found ways of making fools of one another at every opportunity’ (p. 115).
Likewise, Lewie’s philosophy that everyone else is dumb, the proof being that they work, had a familiar ring from fellows I knew, and I am glad I know them no more.
The intrusion of the boy Shane, a much more intelligent and mature peer, seems forced and his final destruction is a distraction from the downward spiral Francis has committed himself to as the only means to escape… Escape what? He always says the Island, hence the title. But is seems that ‘the island’ stands for the small town life that awaits him. Though he never aspires to the life of crime he dutifully, though not always happily, follows Lewie. In Francis we see perhaps the perfect follower.
The aside when Francis worked in a factory and though but a boy himself took under his wing the deficient Athol was nicely done but contributed nothing to either plot or character that I could see.
It is out of print and I read a library copy.
I read it in anticipation of going to Hobart for the APSA conference 2012. I also read Peter Timms, In Search of Hobart (2009) which is not recommended.
Richard Ford, novelist, Sydney Writers’ Festival
Thanks to the suggestion of a friend I went to Richard Ford’s session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I have read two of his novels: Independence Day and The Sportswriter. I found them easy to read but, for some reason, I was not engaged enough to want to read more. Indeed there was a ten year gap between reading these two.
http://www.swf.org.au/
However I found Ford an engaging character on the stage, and I liked his literal-mindedness: What I mean is what I say; What I say [write] is what I mean. Do not go looking for symbols or signs. Wonderful.
Likewise the host did a fine job in bringing out what Ford had to say, and the talking heads were punctuated with Ford doing some short readings from his most recent novel Canada.
Ford said in passing early in the discussion that, literal though he was, he did write with a ‘higher purpose’ and I was glad that the first question from the floor took him back to that passing aside. He explained that this higher purpose was to renew in the reader emotions and thoughts of the complete person. I have not got his words quite right, for I was not taking notes, but that is the gist. I found that explanation to be both simple and compelling. But imagine what the Derridaistas would make of that. The heavy artillery of cant and ideology, disguised as scholarship, would rumble.
Having never attended a Sydney Writers’ Festival event before I enjoyed it and just might do it again. The only false note came from the host who made a gratuitous and deprecating reference to Des Moines, Iowa. I know people make these kinds of quips without thinking, and indeed that is the point and the problem. It betrays an enduring mindset.
Here is the web description of Ford’s talk:
Richard Ford: – 15 July, City Recital Hall
One of the masters of American fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford comes to Sydney for an exclusive event presented by Sydney Writers’ Festival. Ford visits Australia on the heels of the publication of Canada, hailed by John Banville as “an extraordinary, overwhelming book”.
With one of the most finely tuned ears in contemporary fiction Ford explores the big issues of our time with a disarming use of the vernacular. Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, Richard Ford is the author of six novels and four collections of stories. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the first time the same book won both prizes.
He talks to Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival, Chip Rolley.
Nicholas Nicastro, Antigone’s Wake: A Novel of Imperial Athens (2007).
There is a lot to like about it. The contrast between the public admiration of Sophocles as a playwright and then as a general contrasted to his inner doubts, confusions, and inconsistencies is nicely done, and ironic, because it makes him like a character in a play by his great rival, the upstart Euripides.
Very nice portrayal of Pericles as a wily politician who proceeds by halfs, temporizes, and stalls to see how things go. The author is ingenious in showing the immorality of the war of Greek (Athens) against Greek (Samos) – the weapons that kill women and children, torture of prisoners, treason, etc.
Loved the ending when at the Funeral Oration Sophocles’s daughter very daintily insults Pericles in public for murdering allies. ‘Noble Pericles, you have presented us with many dead citizens today. Not to celebrate the defeat of barbarians, but all to subdue an allied and kindred city [Samos]. Thank you, great general’ (p. 201-202). While Sophocles agrees with her he rebukes and punishes her, such is his inconsistent and confused nature.
Brasidas, the unSpartan Spartan
Jon Edward Martin, The Shade of Artemis: A Novel of Ancient Greece and the Spartan Brasidas (2005). This is an historical novel. I gave it five stars on Amazon USA.
A terse, focussed, well-grounded, imaginative, and at times moving account of the life and times of Brasidas, the most unSpartan of the Spartans. Brasidas emerges from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesean War as larger than life but also obscure. If we know so much about the Athenian Alcibiades, what he drunk (too much), who he screwed (everyone), how he carried on (endlessly), we know next to nothing about Brasidas who nearly won the war single-handed. Martin offers a rounded picture of the complete man, his first love, his difficult relationship with a demanding father, a wife whom he did not love and children whom he did, the interaction with those lesser beings: helots, and the mutual perspective of Athenians and Spartans.
The story is drawn along several fault lines in Brasidas’s personal and political life and offers insights into the inner workings of the Spartan society and oligarchy paralleled to the all too public workings of Athenian democracy. For history buffs, the novel cuts away too soon from some of the major events like Mytilene but that is necessary to keep the focus on Brasidas.
I am going to read another of Jon Edward Martin’s books, and I hope he writes more.
It is very well written, no superfluous asides to pad the pages, no convoluted passages that cry out for that vanishing breed – the sub-editor, no unusual word choices that bespeak dictionary English rather than spoken English. It is certainly the equal of Nicholas Nicastro, Isle of Stone (2005) and Peter Carnahan, Pharnabazus sits on the ground with the Spartan Captains (2002). These two cover some of the same historical events. It fleshes out some of the information from Timothy Shutt’s A History of Ancient Sparta (Audible 2009) without the ponderous didacticism.