can you fillet

don't stand flamboyantly on my head as I will despair

this morning on the train

This morning on the train there were no people reading Jodi Picoult as far as I could see, leading me to believe that I was/am the victim of a hoax to delude me into believing in some kind of picoultzeitgeist when in fact that grotesque book which I heard was the only actual artefact produced under the dread name of Picoult. Although I did see another of hers (another courtroom drama apparently) in Borders Highpoint yesterday. I am still really outraged at Perfect Match from its shabbily-conceived title downwards. The problem with an audio book is that you hear the reader’s interpretation in your head, so the whiny voice of the protagonist typifies that book for me. Also the baby voice of the child.
I was at Highpoint to get a new laptop from Myers. The 2002 Acer laptop I am writing this on and which I never actually paid for (it was a by-product of my first real research project post-PhD) has served me well but it is developing a bunch of unusual lines across the screen (see fig. 1) apart from the fact that the screen itself has long been in shabby shape, because of the way it makes contact with the keyboard when I shut it, it left impressions.

Fig. 1 the computer screen

Hey, it’s March and it’s coming up to my favourite time of year, March. April really. I am on the train going to work and enjoying myself.rambling. I am essentially ready for the first day of teaching and essentially is the state you’d want to be most times isn’t it. I am riding on the train in the dark which is nice. It is a good temperature outside too. It is a big shame that holidays come in summer when we’d all much rather be inside being sheltered from temperature extremes.
The train has stopped at Essendon and many people have got on. They all look wrong, particularly the guy with one of those under-chin smooth demon beards, like facial hair was a fungus found on the part of the face where the sun don’t shine. He also has a slightly gothic (but intensely mainstream) design on his windcheater. Oh no! The next station is Moonee Ponds.
At least The Mentalist is on tonight. I think that show jumped the shark last week, what do you think? When those two characters whose names I can’t remember, said they’d been secretly having a relationship, and everyone said they already knew. I think that’s about it for The Mentalist, which can’t be that great a show anyway because I’m always relieved when it’s not about the murder of a young girl but it often is. I always hated The Bill (haven’t watched it for years though, but that’s not the point) but at least all the crime wasn’t murders of young girls like the plucking of flowers.
Alright it’s true, you forced it out of me. I have nothing to say at this point. I can’t help it. Sometimes people just don’t. It’s like being a fallow field. The promise of future hope or, perhaps, the hope of future promise.
Oh, incidentally though, Mavis’ funeral was last Saturday. It was nicely low-key and as someone said she wouldn’t have been embarrassed by it. My sister Tamsin had a picture of Mavis and her three siblings in about 1916 standing in a row in order of height with their hands on each others’ shoulders, and she got all of Mavis’ great grandchildren (ten of them) to do the same, well, Alice had left a little while earlier so 9/10, and it was very nice and also funny, with little Will the baby of six months or less and looking very grumpy right at the end, behind Florence who is only 1, and Mitchell up the other end, a man.
Thank you to all who have expressed condolences I really appreciate it. I will miss her very much but I know she was tired of being alive. She was an atheist by the way and a St Kilda supporter. I don’t know how firmly she held to either of those beliefs.

jodi picoult's rubbish million-seller perfect match

I am listening to an audio book (my first) of a Jodi Picoult book called Perfect Match. The narrator is very good, but I am uncertain whether I am impatient because when reading normally I just jump around the page or whether it's because Picoult is an incredibly frustratingly drawn-out pain in the arse writer.* I am about half way through and I reckon the priest was a twin and the twin was the abuser, not the priest. I really hope that is the case, because that would be sufficiently subversive to compensate for the hours spent listening to the interior monologues of these appalling people. It does occur to me that the priest should be holding a service while the kids are at sunday school, so how does he come to be abusing little boys in the boiler room at that time? Yet the ghastly protagonist and her self-righteousness leads her to shoot the priest in court and everyone around her is congratulating her over it (as are most of the readers, I guess). Well, even if this is not how it's going to pan out - how could it not though - anyway even if it isn't, I still can't forgive JP for being such a dull and obvious writer. I see people reading her books all the time on the train, which is what piquoed my interest. Now I see they are the novel-reading version of looking straight ahead with a vacant expression. Anyway like so many things (the surprisingly similar and equally execrable We Need to Talk About Kevin, for instance) I can't not keep going with it.

Later: OK I was wrong about twins (maybe twins don't have the same DNA, how the hell would I know) but it was half-brother priests one of whom had given the other bone marrow which apparently gives you the same DNA as your donor. Who knew!? Still the book is completely morally corrupt and revolting, because it's all about killing rock spiders out of revenge. When Nina Frost realises she's killed the wrong priest she is much more upset that the right (i.e. child molesting) priest is still alive, than she is that the wrong one is dead because she killed him so that her son would not have to testify against him (the suggestion seems to be that then going and killing the right priest would make killing the wrong one 'mean something'). I would just love to see brain scans of plebs reading this stuff. I would like to see what patterns their brains light up in when the noxious child Nathaniel - a kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy for today - gives his own perspective, too ('it smells of November' is all I can bear to remember of his testimony) I know, I know, I am turning into a Leavisite. I'm not even that much of a highbrow. I know this trash pushes buttons for me too, just different ones but still every bit as unconscious and stupid, which is why I am persisting with it and afterwards, I feel soiled and cheap, though at least I do not feel dirty like a thousand showers would not clean me and I'd have to scrub my own skin off, which is the experience of a couple of the characters in this foul tome.

Much later: Finally finished this gruelling potboiler. Feels like having come through a minor illness. Still confused about the author's intentions. Does she condone a killing spree en route to 'closure' for her child? (PS obviously in writing that last sentence I confused author and narrator. Picoult must be a genius).

* I keep thinking about Orwell's essay on Frank Richards, which also makes me think about Orwell on Miss Blandish and seaside postcards.

mavis 1909-2010

My grandmother Mavis died yesterday morning after a short illness. Her last words were 'can I go now?'*
I was close to her particularly in the 1960s as she looked after me a lot then the take-home message from those days as relayed to me was her trying to stop me running into everyone's driveway. It is very sad to see her go, but we were certainly all aware that she was hoping to go, with her faculties essentially intact, and not a nuisance to anyone. She did not need glasses to read the paper.

*I'm creating a myth here, or trying to. She said some other things, I've been told, on the same general topic and this encapsulates the sentiment.

time for a strong decision to be made

Come on Rudd! Which is it! Let's make a decision and stick to it!