American psychedelic: adventures in pop archaeology.

This piece of pop perfection, also buried and forgotten under layers of post-twentieth century sonic silt, saw on-air sunshine today for the first time in decades.

From the days when they used to cram the local symphony orchestra into the sound booth.

As one commenter noted: "I had forgotten what a bright and happy world it was in 1969."

Radio station revives dead singer.

FM radio is full of singers who sound like they are about to cough in between notes, or who ululate as if they are gargling gravel while taking part bin a prehistoric mating ritual. I have lived through some grim fashions in music but the current crop takes some beating.

There are small pockets of resistance. Someone who goes by the on-air name of Ghostrider puts out three hours of gold on Mondays featuring acts you should know but most don't. Drowned in a sea of mediocrity, these names surface and then disappear again for decades at a time.

Yesterday's feature artist: Esther Phillips.

Listen and weep.

Or try this link. MDR has the wrong track listing.

Getting on like a house on fire with elderly relatives.

I wasn't sure who had put the gum tree in all those years ago, or the unidentified tree next to it with the long poplar-like trembly leaves on long stringy liana-like branches that hang down and catch your neck as you try to mow under them (despite not much grass surviving down there in the semi-darkness); but he or she must have had the idea of creating some kind of 'indigenous' garden of Eden in which nymphs dance and cavort amidst the native flora; but what they ended up with was untrammelled undergrowth into which sunshine barely penetrates so that while the monster gum tree expands exponentially everything else dies.

I was in the front garden. (I dealt with the back garden quite some time ago.)

Garden aside, there was a new dilemma inside the house. I had, of course, done some work in the house on many occasions, removing piles of old newspapers that had built up on, beside and behind chairs and sofas. I had also removed hundreds of plastic food containers that had clogged up several cupboards, leaving just enough to give the appearance of sufficient containers to hold a year or two of frozen leftovers. I had also helped clean up the great clipped-recipe explosion of 2009. Ten years ago! It seems like yesterday.

This winter she wanted a heater in her bedroom. I brought over a small radiator and went into the room to set it up. I opened the door and froze. You could barely see a square inch of floor space. There were enough books to stock a library lining one wall on double-thickness shelves, double thickness meaning someone at some time had built a second set of shelves out over the originals, shrinking the size of the room significantly. The second wall was the window, loosely covered by several curtains, each from a different set, on two different rails, adding a certain faded-harem charm to the room. The window would not have admitted any light anyway, as it overlooks the jungle of a front garden. The third wall was a built-in wardrobe and the fourth a full-length cupboard, the top of which was covered in old books, yellowing photos, knick-knacks, pens, old coins, items of clothing, rolls of gift-wrap and other items. The little floor space was taken up by two beds. One was hers; the other was another storage opportunity. It was covered with clothing, more gift-wrap - some used and some unused - more books, and some items that looked like they were associated with the wrapping paper - gifts in progress awaiting despatch. There was also a significant scattering of paper department store bags, with more of these on the floor in between the beds along with shoes, more books, some newspapers, store catalogues, and diaries.

There was no room for a radiator. Not even for a wall-mounted one.

Or, rather, there was room for a radiator if you wanted to burn the place down.

So that's what I told her. Not in so many words, but I said that I could not responsibly place an electric radiator amidst a hoarder's paradise.

She objected.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

"The house could burn down. And I could be charged with manslaughter given the state of this room. It would be like throwing a lit match into dry grass in a heatwave."

I picked up a few shopping bags and moved several rolls of gift-wrap and some old empty envelopes and a couple of newspapers. Then I stacked some shoes away in the wardrobe that was already full. She objected strongly. No, the shoes might not be flammable, I told her. But you could trip on them in the night and knock the radiator over.

Then I left and took the radiator with me. I came back the next day with one of those tall, flat convection heaters that take up less floor space and blow warm air out the top instead of radiating heat lower down, where the paper junk is. I set it up flush against the bookshelf where it would be less likely to be stumbled over. Sort of a compromise. But I did insist the room still had to be kept reasonably clear of combustible items.

Conversation in a bar.

BARRY THE BARRISTER: Now Gordon, this Folau business ...

GORDON THE JUDGE: What would you expect of an uneducated Pacific Islander, Barry?

BARRY: That comment is offensive.

GORDON: Only when amplified in public, Barry, where the great unwashed roil around in confected outrage twenty-four hours a day. But here in this comfortable bar where intelligent adults can have a conversation without stamping their feet or throwing a tantrum worthy of a two-year-old, the question is both rhetorical and ingenuous. And therefore by definition, inoffensive. What would you expect of an uneducated Pacific Islander? – or, indeed, Barry, of an educated one? And the answer, my friend, is that you would expect exactly what we have seen.

BARRY: Stop talking in riddles.

GORDON: That, from a barrister!

BARRY (TO THE BARMAN): Another whisky for my loquacious friend here, please, Charles. (TO GORDON) Then get to the point.

GORDON: There's no point. Only a collection of random observations. This distinction is forgotten in today's dialectical atmosphere in which every verbal exchange is a fencing match. Without the protective mask.

BARRY: (LAUGHS) Except people never say touché any more. No acknowledgment of another argument, just the last word every time. Like fishwives at the market shouting each other down.

GORDON: Who's offensive now?

BARRY: Oh, for Christ's sake, Gordon, it's a fucking metaphor.

GORDON: I think you mean simile. Nevertheless, your observation is apt. There is no resolution; so we trudge off to court. Where you will find Rugby Australia will be subject to many questions; whereas Israel Folau's case will essentially rest on one small but cast-iron point. He will win or lose on that. But RA has opened a Pandora's Box.

BARRY: I think Pandora's Box has been unfastened for quite some time. RA just tripped on it. You reap what you sow. Appoint people of the quality now seen on boards everywhere and they will trip every time. They follow each other like lost sheep.

GORDON: Sheep don't have to be lost to follow each other, Barry. But you are right: quality is now second to a candidate's ability to mimic peer opinions dressed up as collegiality. They accuse the legal fraternity of verbosity but seriously, collegiality? But of the case at hand: Folau quoted words from the bible. Is that an opinion?

BARRY: No, it is a 'post' containing a tract with which Folau agrees.

GORDON: But what is a 'post'? Has its meaning ever been tested in court? Is it like a private letter that RA has opened and examined and redacted like wartime censorship from the battlefront? Illegal now, of course. If it is an opinion, separate from its method of transmission, then it is one person's alone and impervious to legal action.

BARRY: I see where you are heading. The key word is 'transmission'.

GORDON: Exactly. RA's claim is 'breach of contract' or 'bringing the game into disrepute' - the phrase itself is highly suspect and susceptible to being shot down in flames – but the point turns on to whom the courts decide the mode of transmission – 'using a carriage service' was once a quaint description of this – belongs.

BARRY: Well, it doesn't belong to anyone. It belongs to the state ... or to everyone ... or no-one ...

GORDON: You're floundering, Barry. I'd have you on toast in court. But never mind. The truth is, no-one knows. And it is complex. It is an opinion, yes. Who owns the opinion?

BARRY: Folau, obviously.

GORDON: No, Barry. You're slow today. RA owns the opinion. Its entire case rests on that supposition. Effectively, it owns all of Folau's opinions. As in, has authority over their content and transmission. It has already claimed that.

BARRY: That is an absurdity.

GORDON: Indeed. It is utterly absurd. What is more absurd is that we have reached this point in a supposedly sane society. Yet the blinkered superciliousness of the hyper-opinionated class cannot recognise its own hypocrisy when rejecting the opinion of one of its own. Orwellian, or just stupid?

(HE SIPS HIS DRINK)

I say stupid, because stupidity shadows the corrugations of political correctness like a jackal shadowing a kill.

BARRY (AS IF TO HIMSELF): Kanakas.

GORDON. Precisely Barry: Kanakas. I wondered when you'd twig. The Shorter Oxford: 'A South Sea Islander, esp. (hist.) one shipped to Queensland, Australia, for forced labour on the sugar plantations'. Take away the sugar and you've got Rugby Australia and its slave class, the players. RA has turned Folau and his Pacific Islander friends and relations into a new Kanaka class, moral slaves to their overlord's views. This was proven dramatically and ridiculously last week by one of RA's timorous little acolyte sponsors, who bullied Folau's wife, purely because she had the nerve to support her husband. Imagine that! (READS FROM A NEWSPAPER)

"We do not support the views of Silver Fern Maria Folau and have made our views known to her employer, Netball New Zealand," (ANZ) spokesman Stefan Herrick told the New Zealand press.

BARRY: So the sin is visited upon the wife.

GORDON: Indeed. See the pattern? The 'employer' is now the new inquisitor. The 'sponsor' is the new avenging angel. Perhaps even the new judiciary. Perhaps even the new God. Sponsor a rugby club – or the entire organisation – and get a league of moral slaves who must agree not to contravene your prescribed set of beliefs: each individual who is 'the property of another or others and is bound to absolute obedience, a human chattel; a servant, worker, or subject ... '

BARRY: Yes, the new God. To paraphrase the words of The Who, meet the new God, same as the old God.

GORDON: Which would be ironic given that this whole thing started with a quote from the Bible.

*

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song.

- Pete Townshend, 1971

Tolkien. Not Theoden, Peregrine Took, or Treebeard.

Having lost his father at three and his mother at twelve, the breach of a close familial circle would always weight heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien. It is the theme of Tolkien, the movie.

The young Tolkien is placed in foster care under a Catholic priest who later bans his girlfriend Edith, insisting the student go up to Oxford. There, Tolkien bonds with three fellow poets, the quartet calling themselves the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS). The scenes of their poetry meetings at the Barrow are realistic and are devoid of the slow-motion filmic tics and posh-Brit characterisations typical of the genre.

War ensues. The company is burst asunder. In scenes of blood and death in the Somme, an injured, fevered Tolkien staggers through mud and gore in a fruitless search for two of the members of TCBS. Delirious, he thinks he hears the voice of one who is already dead calling desperately. As soldiers and horses are cut down and fire burns and blood pools into small dams of red, walled by the dead and dying, a horse momentarily transfigures into a black rider, and a tongue of fire resembles a shadowy dragon, its eyes embers.

But these scenes that fleetingly telegraph Tolkien's fictional characters amidst the fire and the craters of death are too subtle; too little for the film critics, clearly dulled by a hammering popular culture that wants a juvenile heavy-handedness and overt literality that kills any sense of foreboding or anticipation.

Suffering trench fever, Tolkien is repatriated to England, where Edith is waiting. The film ends with Tolkien's pen poised over paper, about to write the words you know he will write:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Herald Sun reviewer Leigh Paatsch, under the headline 'Flawed of the Rings', complains that the cinema patron got " ... no bang for (his) Middle Earth buck ...". He should have noticed that the film's title is Tolkien, not The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, nor The Return of the King. Those films tell those stories.

Dome Karukoki's revelatory direction brings the sense of family and fellowship - we call it mateship - to the fore; the creation of bonds, the loss of them due to chance or evil; the horrors that live alongside human dignity; and at last, the theory as old as humanity itself: that good triumphs over evil.

Usually.

Lunch in a northern town.

The sun was out but a cool late-autumn breeze was just enough to put jackets on the golfers scuttling down out of the green hills and heading greenwards. I locked the cabin and pointed the car south, back alongside the river through shopless Kelso, tiny timber houses either side of the road, and past the dock at Beauty Point where the estuary is still deep enough for a 100-berth marina.

A right turn just before Beaconsfield brought some low mountains into the middle distance. We wandered through high farmland and tree plantations that were partly-logged, leaving mohawks of forest on otherwise bald hills. Then the road went around a high spot and after a long curve, a mountain moved out of the way to reveal the sea down below. A town appeared, crouching on a long low hill that faced the water.

Ulverstone sat in the sun doing nothing as we approached. The road went through several roundabouts full of no cars, and suddenly we were in the main street. Unusually for a coastal town, it wasn't beachfront, but arched instead east to west over a kind of plateau, with a southern backdrop of lurking dark hills, and giving a high view over terraced roads winding down to the sea. I u-turned the car, parked facing east in the shade of the northern verandahs of a row of shops, and looked for somewhere to eat.

*

Growing children don't like smashed avocado on grain bread. The volume just isn't enough. It's a simple matter of fuel. Nor are they satisfied with those rolled-up flat bread things with rocket leaves inside. So we went into a café that looked like it did volume, or something approaching a reasonable return on investment, a term that the inner city stock market investor often forgets when it comes to lunchtime. The waitress had a smoker's voice and an appreciation of customer appetite. She would know: later, after the boys had eaten themselves silly, she told me with a wistful note in her voice that her own boys had grown up, in their twenties now, gone away from home.

The burgers were the size of the plates so the chips had to have their own bowl. A few kinds of sauce bottles were on the table with salt, pepper, vinegar, I forget what else. Toasted sandwiches landed on the table 1980s style, a wicker basket holding eight points yielding red, pink and pale yellow melting middles. Ham, cheese, tomato. There is only one toasted sandwich filling. All the rest are phonies. Scrambled eggs on toast fed about four of us and we ordered something else that I've also forgotten. I had a coffee first, extra strong, the first of the day. It woke me up. I must have got here somehow.

We were at a front table in one corner, overlooking the street. A clutch of Japanese tourists was about three shops away when two scouts shot out, reached the café and stared in. One gazed at the menu inside the window and then the main phalanx arrived and they had a debate. Mid-conference, some dissidents broke away and kept going. The rest crossed the road, except for a middle-aged man wearing a white baseball cap who pushed open the door, took up a seat in a corner, ordered, and dined alone. Close by was an older woman who looked like a regular, conversing throughout with an unseen person behind a screen to the kitchen.

*

The burgers had been followed by 1960s-era sundaes the size of submarines. Later, the teen and two pre-teens slumped in the car, spent. They would doze through the next stage of the journey, moving with the curves like larger versions of the caged love birds on the back seat behind Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor in The Birds.

The road out of Ulverstone swept around for endless afternoon silent miles, dodging more hills. Villages slid past with English names. But they're not English. Northern Tasmania is loggers, farmers, footballers, truck-drivers, miners, grocers.

*

Deloraine is a vision set in middle north forest and farm, a diamond in the pale sun, a country town that used to be farm central and church bells ringing out on Sundays. I drove through it once years ago and the main street that cascades down from west to east was all hay bales and live sheep in the back of utes. These days the road sign at the entrance to the town reads Creative Community.

I rolled down the cascade and pulled into the pocket park at the bottom end, near where the old railway that used to haul logs and hessian bags full of everything crosses the river. The three in the back of the car roused themselves out of post-gluttony sloth, and one of them mentioned snacks while looking into the westering sun, figuring it was around afternoon tea time. He was right. I left them and their mother in the park stretching their legs and wandered back up the hill to where an IGA supermarket was set back behind a butcher shop and an RSL club: '$12 steaks' on a sandwich board out front. Halfway up the hill was a cluster of cafés and new age craft shops. They used to be called haberdasheries, shelves running the length of the store and up to the ceiling holding enough wool to knit jumpers for ten armies. Now they sell aromatic candles and rugs that have already been crocheted and coloured rocks that glow. Inside the cafés the customers frowned at their devices, perfect coffees in front of them, with sharp grey haircuts, geometric earrings and lipstick as red as the Stop Adani signs in the windows.

*

Late in the afternoon, back in Green's Beach, the golfers were going back into their doors in the hill like tired hobbits going home to Hobbiton after a day of fighting orcs.

*

Gloria's Cafe
31 Reibey Street
Ulverstone, Tasmania

Kitchen Hand rating: forget Hungry Jacks, the burgers are better here. Or whatever their slogan is.

GetUp chief self-congratulates.

(GetUp chief lobbyist) Mr Oosting ... said the campaign in Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton's seat of Dickson had been partially successful because the swing to him was weaker than the swing to the Coalition across the rest of Queensland.

The Greens' road trip to re-educate outback Queenslanders also went well:

"The Stop Adani convoy in particular reminded locals about everything that's wrong with elitist politics. ... (they) decided to get in their petrol-fuelled cars and drive thousands of kilometres to a place in central Queensland to tell them they shouldn't have a job."

Well done, everyone.

Green's Beach.

The road had ended in a short curve that wound into itself at the entrance to the caravan park. The only movement we had seen last night in the utter blackness on those last few kilometres had been hundreds of small hopping shadows reflected in the headlights. Some kind of marsupials jumping like abandoned soccer balls in an earth tremor.

I had finished Deliverance some time after midnight on the deck of the cabin under the yellow light of a single globe. This remote place is probably the best place in the world to read the book if you exclude the actual Chattooga River. Far off, a muffled crash of distant surf carried in on the wind. I went inside.

Now it was morning and the sun had jerked the black curtain back to reveal a bay washing onto a shore that curved around to a point at the western end and a lighthouse the other way. Directly in front of the cabin a pathway broke through scrub and led down to the water, probably fifty steps away. The children had stolen out of the cabin earlier and gone that way. Behind the row of cabins, a green swathe stretched across and up a long hill. The hopping pandemelons or potoroos or whatever they were had gone and the place was crawling with golfers.

Further around a bluff hung over the bay. The hill was tumbled with summer houses, mostly white, the kind that was common on the mainland about four decades ago: simple brick and timber with sun decks set in neat unassuming lawns reaching down through the wooded areas to hidden pathways leading to the beach. Some had grander picture windows or two or three stories commanding a higher view but the whole effect was of a village at peace with its own timelessness and simplicity. No reality TV look-at-me renovation madness here. Yet.

Buggies loaded up with golf club bags that looked like giant tool kits in case they broke down were zigzagging down out of the hills towards the green. In the bowl at the end of the street the sole shop had opened and a man was setting up trolleys of goods and A-frame signs and tables and chairs and stands of hats ready for the throngs of beach-goers that wouldn't come at this time of year. After a while the children came back looking like they had discovered another planet, and needed breakfast.

Green's Beach is at the top of Tasmania and the end of the world. A refuge for the overwrought, where doing nothing is productive, where green is a colour that you can see, and where the rumble of the world's most treacherous passage of water steals in your open window at night and the glitter of the stars is so bright you could read Ts and Cs by it. If anybody ever did.

Poet writes story about canoes.

There was once a poet who won the American National Book Award in Poetry, and then got appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. After that, he was hired as poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina. In the end he must have tired of rambling around empty halls of learning like a kept ghost, albeit a scholarly one, while stroking his beard and frowning as if trying to give birth to a sixty verse epic.

So he wrote a book.

He called it Deliverance.

I may be exaggerating a little, but just about the entire world has seen the movie 'Deliverance'; or if they haven't, they know what it is about. But most people have never heard of James Dickey.

My copy is a Pan from its tenth printing in 1976. One of the reviews on the back cover states that it ' ... achieves what it sets out to do ... ' and even the word 'brilliantly' prefixing that snippet doesn't really detract from the quote's air of faint praise. Time called it a ' ... shapely adventure tale.' Shapely? Well, I suppose so. But the word has possibly seen a reduction in its meanings over the last forty years. There is however some modern shapeliness early in the book.

Dickey can't help his background, nor leave it. The novel rolls out like the river it follows, flowing relentlessly down to the end, a disquieting noise in the background punctuated by eerily unlikely metalanguage that nevertheless works. The central character who climbs a cliff to thwart the murderous toothless hillbilly takes from page 141 to 155 to do so, and the progress is not so much described as pschyoanalysed. The book is an experiment in time and scale and a few other dimensions I haven't quite found yet. Yet it's also just a straight tale, if you excuse the 14-page cliff climb. Books like this shoot themselves in the foot. They are too good for their apparent readership (a marketing problem, not a criticism of the popular book audience) but conversely the academics tend to hate them.

If you were anxious for Ed Gentry to get up the cliff, don't hold your breath during the canoe ride.

I waited for the upward revengeful smash of the river, but the nose rode down with an odd softness and into the back-scrolled smashed water at the foot of the rock, quivered straight back through the spine of the canoe into mine and into my brain, where I saw a vision of burning jackstraws or needles, and we were back down on to the bedded river in two almost simultaneous stepdowns.

Most writers would have just said 'saw stars' but 'saw a vision of burning jackstraws’? Dickey was a poet, but he had lived experience with an ability to verbalise it locked together like a freight train and its tender at 100 miles an hour. Lucky man. Apparently he was a pain in the neck on the set of the movie, but you would have to be. Dealing with all those fucking art directors.

Deliverance by James Dickey
Hamish Hamilton 1970

Three-word review: Hemingway with commas.

The cabin.

It was a late afternoon flight – the only one available – and daylight saving had ended the day before. The plane rode cloud cover all the way across Bass Strait and in just under an hour it came down out of the clouds and banked and frail dying orange light came into the plane as the sleety runway rose up and hit the wheels.

We climbed out of the rear of the plane and walked a hundred metres through light warm rain to a square terminal that seemed a lot bigger once you got inside. A trained beagle led by a uniformed customs officer greeted the passengers and pushed into someone's bag and pulled out an apple. No fruit admitted. I've seen this trick several times and every time the perpetrator looks guiltier than a terrorist. For some reason it always seems to be a well-dressed upper middle-class lady who has forgotten about the no-fruit rule. Bailed up by a beagle, hands in the air in dismay. Or just well-bred embarrassment.

I had wanted light so I could see where I was going. They had built new roads since last time I was here. But as we were heading north, I should be OK. No real easts or wests before you make the north/south decision. The airport is south of the city so I pointed the hire car north, across the river, and then north again alongside the river. It was completely dark now; the light had died with the contraband apple.

Next thing to think about was food: either divert into town and waste time looking for something or stay on the highway until about halfway where I knew a food store in the last small town would still be open: if I hurried, and if its website was correct. Closes 8 p.m. Mondays, it said. We'll see. It was seven o'clock. I had an eight year old, a twelve year old and a teenager on board. And two adults, counting me. Food. There would be nothing at our destination except a cabin and a key. If they remembered. I'd called twice, once to make the booking, the second time to confirm, but neither time did they ask for a deposit or a credit card number. I put it down to rural nonchalance, a quality that no longer exists, or at least the word doesn't.

The rain got heavier and the road narrowed as it wound north around hills. The river, a massive estuary, was below us off to the right but all you could see was blackness on that side. Rising away on the left were houses with sleepy yellow windows way up behind the trees. Half an hour of that in violent rain and then the 110 speed sign went down to 80. That was the halfway town approaching. Some lights were on in the main street, including the ones in the supermarket. I pulled over, right out the front.

'Stay here.' I opened the car door, letting in a few bucketfuls of rain, crouch-ran into the supermarket, gathered up some things from the hot bar and some drinks, and ran back to the car after paying the twenty-something behind the counter who could have known me half my life given her friendliness. Lightly freckled calcite skin, swept-back pale straw hair and a smile to launch a thousand small towns. The things you notice in ten seconds.

More hard rain. The windscreen wipers struggled, and the road ahead was a silver ribbon. No lights anywhere now. The river was still somewhere off to the right. It had to be. The car swished through another smaller lightless town, all tucked up for the night. Then another, just the same.

Twenty minutes later, the rain stopped just as the road ended, curving gently around to the right and narrowing down to a gravel bowl, one one side a closed shop and further around, an entrance: 'Green's Beach Caravan Park. Cabins.'

I could smell the sea. I walked around and looked for an office, found one and knocked. No-one home. I looked for a key. No box. Then a crunching sound. A dog emerged out of the darkness, leashed to a figure close behind. Could he help me? the figure asked. Yes, he could, I said. I had booked a cabin. Bit late, he said. Not accusing, just pointing out a fact. I said I'd told the lady on the phone we'd be here around eight. Not defensively, just stating a fact. We stated a few more facts just to be friendly in the darkness and then he said come over to the caretaker's caravan and we'd get his wife out and she'd fix everything. She came out and we had more pleasantries, and then we walked back to the closed office and she opened up and we examined the reservations book as if we were all detectives. She said the other people had gone a week or so ago, and they'd taken over and weren't sure about who was coming and who wasn't. Then she gave me the key and some milk for tea and pointed at cabin no. 1. I was right about that word that doesn't exist any more. It was right here on full display. They were the nicest people you could hope to meet but not a word of gushing city insincerity would ever pass their lips.

It was warm and clean and cosy inside, and the children destroyed the food and the drinks, and we opened the windows and the sea roar came in. They didn't even know how close the sea was, but I did. I'd been here before in a past life or what seemed like it. They would go out early in the morning, and they would run across the broad sand and shriek and climb the rocks and see the Bass Strait surf breaking and dancing on the horizon way out past the gentler waters of the semi-bay.

Comedy festival bans laughter.

The punch-line is that they re-named the award after the bureaucrats themselves.

Now that's funny.

Prescient.

"Why, Rebecca, how can you call him a name like that?" Evelyn exclaimed.
Rebecca laughed, "Oh, come off it, Kansas. You can't pretend you like the son of a bitch."
Evelyn thought very deeply. She had to admit to herself, and then to Rebecca, that she did not.
"Look," Rebecca said, "if there's racial equality, we have the right to hate bores and loud-mouths regardless of what species they are."
Evelyn was a little reluctant to admit she was right. "He is an aggressive fellow, but after all, Becky, any member of a minority is bound to be ..."
"Now that's real prejudice, Evelyn. If you think you have to go around loving all Jews because of what happened in Germany, then you're as guilty as Hitler is, or was. For God's sake, respect us enough to hate us when you feel like it."
"I see," Evelyn said in a small voice that held an enormous new realization. "Yes. Of course I see." But if anyone but a Jew had told her what Rebecca had, she would have labeled the person "a vicious anti-Semite."

*
Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff by William Inge
Little, Brown and Company 1970

The real McCoy.

This 1962 edition of Horace McCoy's No Pockets in a Shroud was clothed in the typically gritty Penguin Crime design sensibility of the time featuring a murky photograph of a newspaper in a monochrome gutter. Oh to have been a fiction cover designer in the early 1960s.

But Penguin often published earlier titles. It's an old game: I start reading and try to pick the original publication date. There are usually plenty of period clues, but sometimes few.

*

Reporter Michael Dolan walks into his managing editor's office to be told his story has been spiked: commercially 'sensitive'. The manager of the baseball team that has deliberately thrown a series has connections. Dolan resigns, sets up his own newspaper, having a list as long as your arm of corruption ready to print: all the stories his former employer refused to run. The corrupt baseball series story is followed by revelation of the death of the husband of the woman with whom Dolan has had an ongoing affair. The heat is on.

A subplot sees Dolan’s amateur theatre company taken over by arts bureaucrats who turn it into an establishment company after its initial glowing notices make it too successful. The bureaucrats freeze out the non-paid amateurs.

Affairs and jealousy abound. Shootings and murders puncture the pages.

Then the big one: Dolan stumbles on an organisation of 'crusaders' peopled by leading citizens who take the law into their own hands. He attends their covert meeting (wearing the group's cape supplied by an sympathetic insider police officer). Dolan witnesses members curiously greeting each other with Nazi salutes. He makes notes of identity, writes the story, publishes.

But no happy ending.

After the headline 'Leading Citizens of Town Head Crusaders' hits the streets, Dolan exits his office late at night heading down an alley to the parking station.

... he smelled the odor of orange rinds and coffee grounds. ... for no reason that he could understand he was frightened ... The point of light that was the alley rushed towards him with terrifying speed, red and roaring and utterly unstoppable. ...

That's it. Last sentence of the book:

The the top of his head flew off, and he fell face downwards across the garbage can, trying to get his fingers up to hold his nose.

No Pockets in a Shroud
by Horace McCoy
Penguin Crime 1962

Originally published by Arthur Barker Publishers, 1937.

(1937? The Nazi salutes are the only real signifier of pre-war unrest. Otherwise the plot could have come straight out of the free-love 1960s.)

How to read your way out of a heatwave.

On the long sweltering days of a late summer I like, if I can find the time, to switch on my internal air conditioning by reading something from another time, another place, another climate.

One of my favourite things to read (we could be talking 'genres' if we were a book club, but we are not) is period fiction and I don't mean regency romances but gritty 1960s British thrillers. Eugene George was a pen-name of Paul Chevalier. (They all seemed to have pen-names - nom de plume to you, Mr Book Club Guy.)

George/Chevalier wrote only a few books and is unknown to the extent that you cannot google him, but I Can See You But You Can't See Me is a masterpiece of the sinister British style. (My short review posted at Neglected Books, a godsend for readers now listed in the sidebar.)

I Can See You But You Can't See Me by Eugene George
Hamish Hamilton, London, 1966