What I Cooked Last Night

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 ...

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 goi...

The punch-line is that they re-named the award after the bureaucrats themselves. Now that's funny.

"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 i...

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 affai...

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

Why don't people throw out ballpoint pens that no longer work? You want to shout at these people. It doesn't work! Throw it out! I was in an office recently and, of nine ballpoint pens sitting in one of those plastic pen caddies given out by print suppliers or pharmaceutical companies, six didn't work*. I've been thinking about this and I have several theories why the pens never get thrown out and end up back in the drawer. Theory 1 A ballpoint pen that has run out of ink doesn't look broken - and people only throw out things that look broken. Theory 2 They are not sure whether the pen has run out of ink. They think it might be that the paper is waxy. The pen gets the benefit of the doubt. Theory 3 My most compelling theory: people are lazy and the waste bin is too far away. Straight back in the drawer. * There's a thesis in this. Maybe a book. Where's my pen? * *I put them back. It was not my office. It wasn't my job to thro...

" ... in the next few years he is ... upset at the injustice and hypocrisy that exist in the world: a world in which some men are athletic stars, James Bonds and millionaires and he is not; he is morally appalled. In his dreams he recreates the world, righting all wrongs, eliminating suffering, redistributing wealth ... ending all wars. He becomes a reincarnation of Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ ... Evil governments topple, corrupt churches collapse, laws are revised, and Truth, written in Xeroxed tablets of stone ... presented to the world." Or on Twitter. Or Facebook. Anyone can take part. The description of the keyboard warrior and his (or her, pedants) delusions of grandeur are well described - in a 1971 novel by George Cockcroft under the pseudonym Luke Rinehart. * The Diceman Luke Rhinehart, Granada, 1971 Kitchen Hand's one-sentence summary: dated parody of psychoanalysis clothed (but often unclothed) in early 1970s post-psychedelic era preoccupations. * (T...

Newspapers are reporting a study that found music lyrics are not as happy as they used to be. I could have told you that twelve years ago .

They impelled themselves in mad arcs, rather than flew, towards the porch light: airborne armadas of brown hard-backed buzzing creatures about half an inch long. But they did not see the wall and they crashed into it. And then they fell on the floor, upside down, and could not right themselves. I put around citronella candles. But they were not deterred. Because they are not mosquitoes. They were attracted. One zeroed in on a candle like a kamikaze pilot at a navy ship, and found itself upside down in molten wax, waving clawed tentacles or legs or whatever an entomologist calls them in the air. I picked him out because I felt pity for such utter stupidity. I threw him into the darkness, away from the porch, but the wax probably solidified in the air and he will end up a fossil to be discovered by some future scientist sixty million light years from now. A beetle embalmed in wax! It was nine o'clock, a warm night with a northerly still blowing straight down from the Queensland...

They shut the Oak Park pool for a year and renovated it. The low curved cream-brick walls topped with white wrought iron detailing are gone, as are the cascading concrete steps and the multi-coloured 1960s seats, and the general retro atmosphere of the place. Now it's angular blocks and steel and seats made from recycled drinks bottles, and an entrance foyer with a revolving glass cylinder door more typical of an office block. But there are still large swathes of lawn, and some trees for shade, and the elephant is still there; but he is no longer pink and water no longer spurts from his trunk. 42 degrees tomorrow. Hemingway is already in the bag by the front door with the towels and sunscreen. Full circle. There was a time when I could read, when the boys were small and stayed in the toddler pool. Then they grew and needed supervision as they leapt into pools, and dived, and tore around the place. So the books stayed at home and I supervised. But now they are old enough to look...

The Herald Sun , among other newspapers , reports on an intergalactic collision: A collision between two massive black holes generated ripples in time and space and formed another black hole, 80 times bigger than the sun, according to a new discovery by Australian and international scientists. When? Yesterday? It doesn't say. But caution is advised: In total, four black hole collisions have been detected ... "These were from four different binary black hole systems smashing together and radiating strong gravitational waves out into space," ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering's Professor Susan Scott said. And I was worried about snakes . But look out, there's more to come: ... a third observational run by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) next year would add to the identification of 10 black-hole mergers and one neutron star collision. Just to be on the safe side, I'm digging a bunker in the backyard this weekend. Meanw...

" ... I for one found NAB chairman Ken Henry's appearance before the royal commission a refreshing surprise - and the almost universal criticism of him unfair and indeed bizarre. And also a telling exercise in the media 'group-think' fawning over the RC. ... essentially damning Henry for not playing by the ritualistic abasement script ...demanded in those appearing." OK, at least someone has balls. Maybe we're getting somewhere: "My only criticism would be that he didn't kick back more strongly." Watch the keening, fawning Twitter tribes were that to happen.

Forget Rowena Orr v. Catherine Livingstone. I wrote the Banking Royal Commission script ten years ago . If the bankers had had any balls at all (and I'm talking about the blokes) the exchanges would have proceeded along the following lines (from the link above): BANKER: Fine. It was a question. Thanks for clearing that up. Now I’ll answer it. Firstly, as I said earlier, I'm no seer. Nor am I a morals crusader, a nanny, a pastor, a household budgetary advisor, a schoolteacher of mathematics, an economics lecturer, a logician or a homespun philosopher. I'm a banker, even if the title is misleading today. Banks used to bank money, now they just it shovel it out the front door to passersby, who sometimes give it back, with interest. Sometimes. Maybe a bit less so lately. But I haven't the time, the inclination, the necessity nor even the legal capability of assessing a borrower's home life, spending habits, financial intentions or any one of a number of other indica...