not quite cancelled

 

A thing I love about op shops is that you can be destroyed everywhere else, and for good reason, but op shops don't care, in fact they are more or less charged not to care, that is their mission, about the shit they have on offer. It really doesn't matter to them how Pete Evans ('Australian chef, conspiracy theorist, restaurateur, author, and television presenter') is regarded in the rest of the world if you're willing to take his book - which is probably no better or worse than most mainstream cookbooks, I wouldn't know - off their shelf and give them $4 or whatever. Indeed, op shops are a great gauge of what kinds of shizzle people don't want in their houses anymore, obviously op shops are riddled with obsolete formats (DVDs, etc) but also the kinds of books you presumably tolerate until something about them becomes beyond the pale, I'm thinking of that cyclist who took performance enhancing drugs, thinking of him, but can't remember his name. Yes I saw him in an op shop recently, very cheap. Actually what I see ho ho are of course his inspirational memoirs which pop up a lot. Op shops don't care if you buy those and fail to follow up with any further information about where old mate went after he published those two or three very successful books about being a world champion cyclist, whatever that actually literally means. 

It's not the same but I am reminded of the Wanda Koolmatrie affair and being reminded of such I went for a little look in library catalogues to see how My Own Sweet Time is being treated e.g. could you borrow this book from a library with no awareness that it is a fake memoir? (I have actually bought this book from an op shop in the past, btw). My own institution's library doesn't have it, and for some reason today the State Library of Victoria's catalogue is offline. The National Library of Australia has two copies, squirrelled away, and while it doesn't actually come out guns blazing with information about its fictitiousness, if you spent a moment looking to the right you'd get good intel: 

Weird extra strangeness that the NLA apparently won't alter the author to give his real name (even in brackets), but they did initially misspell 'Koolmatrie'. 

I'm interested in reading that John Bayley book even if the title is a steal from Austen Tayshus. 

Well, so on top of that and only semi-relatedly, Wikipedia gave me an interesting snippet of information which I suppose is only semi-verified. Apparently Leon Carmen played keyboards in a mildly legendary band of the early 70s in Adelaide, Red Angel Panic (no relation to the Angels, also from Adelaide, except that Chris Bailey played in both, yes, the late Chris Bailey who is no relation to Chris Bailey of the Saints).* Except apparently back then Leon called himself Moses. He is presumably one of these men:

Or, at least, I gather 'Moses Carmen' appears on this record. 

My only other query - and perish the thought that I might be drifting away from whatever original topic I was on - is given that the very talented 'Lo' (Loene) Carmen has a name very similar to Leon Carmen's and was born in Adelaide to parents who worked in the music scene and to a mother who, presumably, had the last name Carmen, I wonder if there is / was a connection? By which I mean a historical connection.

* Or presumably John Bayley

Update, 23/1/21: