The Far Side by Gary Larson

Someone used to give my dad  a Far Side calendar for  Christmas every year, one of those desk calendars you flip over every day. I loved reading that calendar all at once. There was something about Gary Larson that was too cool to save for a calendar.

Gary Larson, if you didn’t know, does one-panel cartoons that are often dark, surreal and wildly funny. They’re a great gift for someone with a sense of humour, I think, but they’re also addictive (hence the way I spurned the one-cartoon-a-day calendar format).

Here’s something you might not know (that I discovered on Wikipedia). One of Larson’s cartoons features two chimpanzees groooming each other. One finds a blonde hair on the other and says “ Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodal tramp?” This is typical of Larson’s humour, which often features anthropomorthised animals. The Jane Goodal Institute wanted to sue Larson for this cartoon, but Goodal refused since she found the cartoon funny. She has since praised Larson’s ideas for the way they contrast the way that animals and humans live.

Jane Goodall isn’t the only friend Gary Larson has in the world of zoology, either. He has had a species of butterfly and a species of louse named after him. 

You’ll love Gary Larson if you like smart, surreal, weird and “quirky” humour, if you love animals or pop culture. I think this book would be a great gift for the scientist, office worker or comedy buff in your life. Maybe I’ll give it to my dad as a replacement for the calendar, this year.

Agnes.

Shantaram-a-rama

Joy of joys! Somebody just brought in a copy of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts… which is also on the Top 100 lists. Therefore I simply must read it. I will slowly make my way through it and let y’all know how I go. Its a doozie.

L’Yan

Seen the Movie? Read the Book! (Maugham, The Painted Veil)

The most recent film of The Painted Veil came out in 2006, starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. The vibrant Kitty meets Walter, a quiet but intelligent young doctor. The two marry, but Kitty has an affair and Edward accepts a place as a sort of epidemiologist in China, which is in the middle of a cholera outbreak. The movie is quite stunning visually and the nasty, loveless relationship (at least one one side — as a Facebook user would say, it’s complicated) was reminiscient, at least for me, of another Maugham work, Of Human Bondage  (that one was made into a charming and amusing film with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis).

The book is very… polite. Maugham is very much a product of his era (as all writers are), and in my (not terribly informed) opinion, that might be why his books are often dismissed as overwrought and sentimental. The latter is certainly true, but if you enjoyed the emotional interplay of the movie (which is really quite sophisticated at the same time as it is downright malicious), you’ll like the book.

Maugham’s plain prose was often criticised for being quite lowbrow,  and this is easy to see, especially when you consider that in his time Modernism was first beginning to assert itself. It’s not hard to infer that Maugham was probably confused about his sexuality (for a public man of Maugham’s generation, being openly gay was impossible), and many of the relationships in his books are dysfunctional and overemotional.

If you liked the movie, I’d recommend that you give the book a go, especially if you like reading classics. Even with the subject matter there’s a sort of comforting quaintness in this book that you won’t get in many other writers of Maugham’s vintage.

-Agnes.

You can find this one, and some other Maugham (pronounced “mawm”, by the way) works, on our Classics shelf. We have whole shelf devoted to books that have been turned into films (and vice versa), too.

What do you think of Maugham?

The Dag’s Dictionary by Richard Glover

Excerpt from The Dag’s Dictionary by Richard Glover, published by ABC Books 2004:

Damn!nesia (damn nee’ zee ah) n.

An affliction by which you walk purposefully from one end of the building to the other, but forget mid-trip where you were going.

I suffer from this constantly.

JimmyD’s staff always get a laugh out of this book.  We have a copy in stock right now for $11. But be warned: this book never sticks around very long!

I also like this one:

Liebry (ly’ bree) n.

A pile of unread but fashionable books placed on a coffee table in order to impress visitors.

L’Yan

This copy is now SOLD. Let us know if you are interested and we can putyou on our seeking list!

The Flying Emu and other stories by Sally Morgan

Twenty delightful stories for children about how the world began by the author of the wonderful autobiography ‘My Place’, where she told the story of her aboriginal ancestry and mother and her grandmothers experiences living in Western Australia.
This book is in lovely condition and the stories will delight young ones.

Let’s hear it for the Byronic hero.

Two books I selected from our shelves that contain typical Byronic heroes. Wondering how I linked these together?

You may not know what I’m talking about, but you know the type. That’s the thing with stereoypes, with heroes, with protagonists. We may not have a term for these things, but we all know the type.

The typical Byronic hero is idealised but flawed. Lord Byron, for whom the Byronic hero is named, was the first “modern-style” celebrity, and nowadays he’d be characterised in the media as a rock star. His ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and this is the essence of the Byronic hero.

The Byronic hero is intelligent, cunning, and maybe even criminal. Crucially these more negative characteristics are set off by something negative, perhaps a tendency toward introspection and moodiness, or a streak of cowardice (perhaps just realism) or narcissism. Consider Rhett Butler from Gone With The Wind. He is shunned by his family for being thrown out of West Point, yet is obviously well-educated. He has an adversarial relationship with many characters, and his insight into human nature prevents him from salvaging his love for Scarlett. Cue bitter tears.

The Byronic hero is also intelligent, astute and educated, yet he or she (usually he) struggles with integrity, often bucking convention and suffering for it. Byronic heroes are usually physically attractive and generally in love with someone, but (again, most importantly) often are burdened with a dark secret or source of guilt. Consider Stephen Dedalus from the works of James Joyce. Stephen is considered by his friend Buck Mulligan to be a great poet, but he cannot seem to relate to many people very well. He is extremely guilty over the fact that he could not pray for his mother as she lay on her death bed – his stubborn moral decisions about religion (among other things) prevented him from doing this).

The Byronic hero may be privileged (socially or in terms of money) but will show a disregard for social conventions and their own responsibilities.

The Byronic hero often has an understanding of his of her inner world, but may be overburdened thus. You’re beginning to see a pattern, right? You know a character like this.

To further explore this, I’ll first tell you about some boring literary stuff. Then we’ll talk about some real (fictional) Byronic heroes.

Scholars have traced the tradition of the Byronic hero from the works of John Milton. Milton published the twelve-book version of his epic poem Paradise Lost in 1674. It is heavily concerned with the conflict between God’s foresight and omnipotence and man’s free will.

It wasn’t until the American and French revolutions and the Romantic period that people really began to sympathise with Satanic characters. In 1819 Percy Shelley (a contemporary of Byron) put forth that Milton’s Satan was morally superior to the tyrranical God of the poem. Most crucially, he said that Satan’s greatness of character is flawed (again) by vengefulness and pride. Byron wrote a semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem from 1812 to 1818, called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Many of the elements of the Byronic hero are in this: a world-weary character who searches for enlightenment in foreign lands.

That’s crucial to the characterisation of the Byronic hero. The Byronic hero is flawed, and the “but” in the character’s description is very important. Brilliant BUT self-destructive, moral BUT with a Dark Secret, full of integrity but dark and mysterious, etc etc. Consider Bruce Wayne of Batman.

A few more examples: Rochester in Jane Eyre is a typical Byronic hero. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is also a popular example (a larger than life dark-and-handsome romance who never wavers from his goal), as well as Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. The heroes of many hard-boiled detective novels, as I discussed here, are similarly flawed. Sam Spade is a contemporary example of the Byronic hero, as is Philip Marlowe. You might also consider the titular Doctor House from the TV series House to be a similar hero — he’s brilliant but, as you probably would have guessed by now even if you don’t watch the show, Tragically Flawed in more ways than one. Gothic fiction was bursting with Byronic heroes, as are spaghetti Westerns such as The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Consider also the Phantom of the Opera and the Vampire Lestat. The Modernist era also gave rise to a lot of Byronic heroes

Byronic heroes are a lot more interesting than your regular old white-knight hero, and there’s still usually an element of romance there… the carefully tousled hair, the enigmatic secrets, etc etc.

The Byronic hero fits into the larger genre of the antihero, which we might take a look at next time. The Byronic hero usually has an air of sweeping romance about him or her — their tragic flaws are never so tragic that you don’t adore the character eventually.

A very contemporary example is Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. And now I seem to have linked pop culture with high culture, and so I’ll finish there.

If you got the whole way through that — congratulations!

-Agnes

How Was The Play, Mrs. Lincoln?

2009 is the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. I was reminded of this fact when I recently bought a new copy of Obama’s inaugural address, which contained a copy of both of Lincoln’s inaugurals as well as the Gettysburg Address. Very interesting reading. The bicentennial isn’t the only reason Lincoln is interesting, of course. It might take an event such as this to get Australian readers (apart from Civil War historians and others) interested in him, but he contributed massively to the American national imagination. I enjoyed seeing Obama’s inauguration speech set out on a page, because this way I could see echoes of Lincoln in what he said. I won’t make any more Obama/Lincoln comparisons, since they’ve been done to death.

Even if you’re not as interested in this part of history (and its echoes today) as I am, you’ll enjoy the suspense and real-life-crime aspect of this book. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Abraham Lincoln’s Killer. It’s very exciting, and completely avoids the dry bogging-down in details that some well-researched historical books fall into. Very exciting, a good historical account of an important point in US history. If you’re looking for a book that will make history exciting to anyone, or you’re just interested in US history, this is a book for you.

Art, Class & Cleavage — Ben Watson

This is a rather long review: You can read a short summary here, or scroll down to read the whole shebang.

A very interesting book that challenges (vehemently) the way we think about art and politics. Prepare to have your opinion challenged — what is avante-garde? What is popular art? Read the whole thing, or dip in using the index. Perfect for anyone who likes thinking about culture, but I think it would be especially particularly useful to the “unique post-modern aesthete” that most of us know. $10, a bargain for some meaty summer reading!

An interesting book, this one. You take one look at the cover (picture of the Venus de Milo with a bikini textaed on) and the title and think it’s going to be a pop-culture journey, one of those books that’s all about travelling from the audience of The Price is Right in America to the set of a strange Japanese game show, via a fashionable Kaballah ceremony in Los Angeles and a shopping village in London. Which is fine — I love books like that. They critique culture while they’re immersed in it, and other such fashionable sociological terms. But you only need glance at the subtitle of this book (Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix) and you know this book is… different from that. Is it a parody? Is it a serious, weighty tome? Will the inside be peppered with incomprehensible graphs and even longer made-up words, or with semi-pornographic images in the name of “cultural exploration”)?

I took a gulp of coffee and decided to take a look. First of all I got a bit worried that in my first cursory look I might have overlooked some crucial piece of irony or satire, so I jumped on Google and had a look what some other reviewers (most considerably more informed than I am) had to say.

One reviewer on Amazon.com described the book as “dizzyingly brilliant”. “Okay,” I thought, “As long as I don’t read it while I’m standing up, I’ll be fine”. I wouldn’t want to fall over and hurt something. I ponder exactly what that “dizzyingly” means. Is the book utterly incomprehensible? Or just brilliant?

I further learn that the book is a “treatise on aesthetics”, and further that it is “stridently polemical”. In other words, it’s a book that seeks to be deliberately controversial as it defines aesthetics, our art, our perceptions of beauty. What sort of aesthetics? Does the author try to make sweeping generalizations about culture? At the end of this little research session I’d decided that the book must be quite meaty – but well-researched and probably relevant. No equating Hollywood divorces with the decline of culture or something like that – a dissection of what makes the artistic sensibilities of “our culture” (I put that in inverted commas because there are so many cultures you see mentioned in the news every day) tick. Thusly armed, I opened the book to take a look.

…And then my head exploded. Nah, only kidding.

The first couple of pages aren’t so much incomprehensible as they are “murky”. What is this guy trying to say? The Amazon reviewer I quoted before also mentioned that the book is “…food for difficult thought”. From the first pages, Watson is trying to change the way we think about art. Brian Eno, an artist who many people see as a benchmark of the Avant-Garde, is dismissed as “easy listening”. Dr Dre and Stevie Wonder engage in “materialism of sound”.

In the Introduction Watson explains that “…in today’s rapidly changing world [this is one of my least favourite sentences, but I won’t hold it against Watson since he has much more important things to say], the objective separation of manual and mental labour has resulted in a raw and painful Cleavage between the sciences that deal with Art (aesthetics) and Class (politics)”. Sorry if you read all this way thinking a that the “cleavage” of the title was actual cleavage — it isn’t. It’s metaphorical cleavage, though, which is even cooler. I imagine, (as I think Watson wants the audience to) two statue boobs, one emblazoned with the word “Art”, the other with the word “Class”. Cultural aesthetic, indeed.

This book is really, really interesting stuff, and to say that it is full of hard-to-read overpolitical raves would be to sell it short. Watson has some very important social critiques, and he organizes his thoughts well even if he does trend slightly toward ranting. In fact, I would hazard that most knee-jerk criticisms of the book probably stem from the fact that Watson doesn’t hesitate to shake the foundations of people’s perceptions of art, and it might be a hard (but necessary!) thing to hear that you are not as original or avant-garde as you think you are, that your supposedly apolitical idea of art is anything but. I think aesthetics need to be challenged, and Watson does it well.

You don’t have to attack this book from front to back. I quite enjoyed leafing through the (well-appointed) index and checking on what Watson has to say on certain subjects. And he does have a lot to say. Watson is anti-elitist, so it’s a good idea to look past his initial political ranting and take what he has to say at face value, since it’s very important. He uses a lot of footnotes, but in an entertaining way, as a way to comment on what he’s saying in the text, not supply a dry extension.

I think this book is perfect for anybody who likes to think about pop culture (and art) in an analytical way. And if you’ve got a friend or family member who’s stuck in one of those terrible ruts where they’ve convinced themselves that they’re member of an enlightened post-modern aesthetic of uniqueness, you might want to show this to them, too. It’s a great, audacious book that is meant to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and of our art, instead of back-patting and shoring up snobby opinions. I can’t wait to delve deeper into it, it’s very complicated and I’m sure I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

The book is $10 and you can find it in the shop today! What a bargain for some intellectual summer reading!

-Agnes.

If You Liked… You’ll Like…

If you liked E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, you’ll also like Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital. Turner Hospital is an Australian author, although the book is set in the US. Lowell is traumatised by the hijacking that killed his mother. Samantha survived a hijacking and cannot let go. Together the two investigate a mysterious sports bag crammed with documents and tapes. The book has the sensibility of a thriller but is much more complex emotionally — sort of like Proulx meets Le Carre, really.

The book is very emotionally descriptive and it has the same dreamy quality to the plot that some of Proulx’s stuff has. It’s an absorbing, intelligent book, with just a hint of the dark humour that I loved in The Shipping News. It has a dark tone and doesn’t mind delving into the fear and suspicion of our post-9/11 world.

You really can tell that the author loves words, too. Have a look at this quote from the front page:

Brightness falls from the air, and so do the words, which rush him. They swoop like starlings from the radio hooked to his belt, though before brightness, before Queens have died young and fair, the broadcast was blurred murmur, bits of music, bits of talk, voices heard but not listened to. Now the phrases flock about Lowell and he bats at them, distressed. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye, I am sick, I must die–but no, Lowell thinks, I must not–Lord, have mercy on us, and yes, Lowell prays, Lord have mercy, because in spite of the fact that the reader has a mellow voice, a soothing and expensive poetry-reading voice, an unmistakably National Public Radio voice, what Lowell can hear is his own father in shallow duet, word for word and line for line, and then suddenly, with a sharp change of tone, Forty thousand feet, he hears, severed fuselage… the fatal plunge…

And a little bit later:

He throws himself forward across the steeply pitched roof and lies sprawled there. The tiles beat against his heart like frightened birds.

Most of all I think that both authors share the belief that emotional trauma can be escaped by their characters, but through a slow process of learning and redemption, not through the usual cathartic soap-opera tricks. Very gentle, beautiful writing.

Cute Cats and Cool Cats: Kittens in Japan

I’m not much of a cat lover, but I just had to post about this book that just came in. It’s full of cats and very Japanese, and it’s called Kittens in Japan (unsurprisingly, perhaps).

The dust jacket tells me that the book is a companion volume to “… the ever popular KITTENS ON VACATION…” It seems that some people can never resist a kitten, and after flicking through this book I can see why.

Obviously, it’d be a great gift for a cat lover, or a great desk/coffee table book. And for the more internet-savvy among us, I can imagine that it would be great lolcat fodder.

Take a look! Let the cuteness take over!

We have quite a few catty books in the shop at the moment (including Christmas Carols for Cats and A Curious History of Cats), so come in and take a look.

-Agnes