So very much to blog about, so very little time. Since the last time I posted here, there's been Adelaide Writers' Week, the Adelaide Festival, a very nasty bout of reportable food poisoning, assorted family obblos and a fun quick trip to Melbourne. But the Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist comes out tomorrow, and if anything is guaranteed to get some sort of blog post out of me, it's probably that. Au demain.
Oh dear oh dear, long time no blog. I've been working hard over the summer but hope to be working less hard as of about today and to come back to the blog. Here in the meantime is something I've been meaning to do for a while now.Having only just discovered the LOLcat translation of T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land', a mere 5 years after it was written, I'm reminded that someone once asked me for a similar translation of Sylvia Plath. So here it is.
Any long-time readers might remember this post from five years ago, when my dad, having blown out the candles on his 80th birthday cake, said 'Right: now I'm striking out for 85.'Today's the day.I spoke to him on the phone earlier: he was looking forward to a fancy lunch out with his daughters, followed my garbled account of my not-yet-written conference paper and asked a couple of pertinent questions, reassured me
Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the Sydney Morning Herald (what I'm writing, this week, I mean -- won't be published till early Feb).It's something I think to check from time to time and I'm glad to say that even when I'm not doing it consciously I usually manage, over the course of four book reviews, to mix up genre, gender and nationality pretty evenly.
To the best of my knowledge, the technology doesn't yet exist for blogging smells. So you'll just have to infer the scent of this lovely stuff from the photo, and more specifically from the words Rose sauvage beurre nourrissant pour les mains.
One knows, of course, that sequels never play like the original any more than backlash does, but the original Bad Girls of Literature post here last week seems to have had such a positive and widespread response here and elsewhere that I thought I'd post another ten.Please note that these are in no way the B team. The original post was in response to a 'Ten Bad Boys' article and I was simply riffing off that, writing down names as I happened to think of them. Same with these.
This is the classiest one I've ever seen. I love the bewildered-looking woman at the end, who seems to think she has been bewitched and wonders where all the fairies have suddenly gone. And I wonder how many people missed their trains, and didn't care.
Beit Shemesh Flash MobImagine what would happen to these girls and women, most of whom are identifiable in the video (and no doubt from countless other recordings), under an Israeli government dominated by the ultra-Orthodox who have so much power and influence there already, and who are, in their attitude to women, barely distinguishable from the Taliban.