my brother's play thing

My brother Michael did a radio play thing when he was in Britain, it must have been quite a while ago now, and I finally figured out a way to listen to the CD he lent me over a month ago (it was scratched and it jumped everywhere - it took me weeks to realise I should just make a copy of it). It's hilarious, especially after having listened to Oscar Wilde a few days earlier. I can totally see where he's coming from although the fact that it appears to be set in Melbourne and almost all the actors have Yorkshirish accents is a slight impediment to comprehension, but I guess, what else could he do? I hope he takes this further as it's pretty brilliant. I would quote some here but it might not look so good.

I also dropped into Latrobe U this morning en route to work to borrow another book from the De Garis Publishing House, The Lost Valley I think it's called by someone called Walsh. I am definitely headed for a great journal article on the books published by CJ in the early 20s but I am frightened I might have to do some newspaper research in the 1920s which is totally absorbing of course but very time-consuming. I was surprised, I must say, while looking through The Age in the early 30s how much space is dedicated to Australian art, literature and so on. We are always led to believe that what little Australian art, literature etc there was back then was totally minimised if not ghettoised and artists were virtually put in lunatic asylums, not discussed in the press like they were legitimate. Maybe I have just happened on a little window, and it is admittedly just one newspaper, but still, still...

I sent off another article on Monday and since that time have been going over its inadequacies in my mind... on one level I don't mind if it's crap because I need the time away from it anyway, so if they get back to me in six months to tell me why it's crap that's fine, I'm kind of using a free service. On the other hand everyone has a finite life and it seems a bit unfair to insist some poor sucker spend time reading my garbled nonsense. Oh well. I guess I can always console myself that, if they hadn't been reading my article, they might have decided to take an ill-advised walk down a street and been stabbed by an escaped lunatic artist from the 1930s.

We have free tix to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but won't be able to go until at least Friday. Damn it! I saw The Wedding Crashers on Sunday with Philippa who had been keen to see it since it came out. It was pretty poor basically but there were one or two funny moments. I didn't like how it so hedged its bets between being a chix movie and a bloxe movie. The gay son reminded me a lot of Eliot Fish, which was confusing too.

I have just been sent a copy of the reprint of Inner City Sound. It even smells great.