Follow Friday

Twitter does has this great thing, where you suggest people look at other things.
Have decided I'll have a crack at it here.

First off- Twitter! If you crave, nay, need more inane commentary on the state of my hair, then you should follow me on twitter. The account is "bookimdrinking" and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'm incapable. If you want the latest, groundbreaking news of my play 'Sexy Tales of Paleontology' written with 'Book i'm Drinking' regulars Daniel East and Bridget Lutherborrow, then you should follow "ofPaleontology" on Twitter also. There are quotes and risque pictures of Mathew McConaughey.

Let's get some order into things here:
Many of these blogs and things can be found in my links sidebar, but as a Google Reader user myself, I never look at the actual page of blogs anymore. Ahoy!

Blogs:

Literary Minded- Angela Meyers is the book blog Queen of the internet. Seriously. For smart, interesting and witty reviews, articles and the who's who and what's what of the Australian literary scene, go no further.

Ryan Paine- For an interesting window into youth literature and publishing, he's the man with the answers to the questions that I forgot.

Heathen Scripture- Geoff Lemon, brilliant Australian poet who is currently touring around the South America's. This is how you write a travel blog, people. Hell, this is how you write.

The Great Affairs- Daniel East and Lara Williams are in Korea. FIND OUT WHY.

Augusta Supple- If theatre's your thing, then Gus Supple has all the inside information. She's like a spy, who for some reason is publicising all her findings.

Van Badham- Playwright extroadinaire, Van Badham is releasing a book in September. Here we get a birds eye view on the novel writing process. A weird, internet bird.

The Smell of Books- Joel Blacklock keeps us up to date on those scary new E-book things that are clomping towards us on merciless steel legs. Damn you Skynet!

Semenbeard the pirate- Bridget Lutherborrow is very funny and has a Tumblr where she expels that comedy into pictures.

[parenthetical elements] - Sally Evans is a poet, literary theorist and heart breaker. She's inside your literature, decongesting them. Lulz.

So yeah, now you should NEVER BE BORED AGAIN. I could do more... but linking is time consuming and fiddly.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr just summoned a demon

I have a cold. I'm not good with illness, I am not a stoic person. I stink of garlic and am wearing my 'nostalgic tracksuit collection'- old, disgusting relics of clothes from the 90's that I wear whilst sick. They've probably never been washed either.
The best thing I can do is find something mindless and repetitive, and keep doing it until the phlegm stops flowing.

As I've just come off a massive fantasy binge (about twenty titles all up) I found myself lacking in the reading department. So I decided to dust off the old 90's RPG games, and immerse myself in one of them. And the clear winner is Baldur's Gate 2, Shadows of Amn.

For those of you who haven't played this, it's truly a remarkable game, which actually has a compelling and exciting plot. Furthermore, while there is a critical thread you must follow, the game is so multi-layered and expansive, that it's impossible to play it all in one go. A lot of this has to do with the 'party' you create- basically you discover different characters throughout the game, and you let them join you and you all go and kill things.

Jaheira. If you need a shrill, disapproving and nagging druid to help you fight evil, she's the right choice for you. She's kinda like the fantasy version of a vegan-nazi.

However, I have played this quite a few times now. Many, many times, so I find myself putting a little bit of an extra spin into things. My last party I played with was quite memorable, because I decided I'd be ABSOLUTELY EVIL. It's very hard to spin the game this way- most often you end up doing lots of really noble things for money, rather than for the goodness of it. But I persevered and came away quite surprised and sickened by it all.

I played a necromancer called Pablo Neruda. Yeah, I don't know why. Sometime around the middle of the game, I was strutting around in a suit of human skin, fighting against the law throughout the streets of Athatkla, and getting thoroughly trounced. My henchmen were either dead, confused, or in the case of my dark elf girlfriend "Viconia" turned to stone. I was running away in my little boots of haste, desperately trying to find some way to heal myself, being completely out of potions and the like. All these Cowled wizards and guardsmen thundered behind me, fireballs exploding, people screaming and wandering aimlessly (my reputation was so bad by this point, that I couldn't go into civilised areas without people trying to arrest me) and I was having a great time. I started cackling in an evil, Pablo Neruda way. I got hit by some more arrows. I had the comparative health left of a gerbil. So, in my desperation, I went into a random house, hoping it would be full of doctors or something. Instead there were two children. So I cast "Drain Life" on them, killing them and restoring my health. Utterly evil. Damn fine poet though.



So despite how fun that was, I've been absently thinking, for the past year or so, about my moral responsibilities. Somewhere, in the realms of imagination, a complete and utter fiend named Pablo Neruda has been created by me. This worries me. What if when I die, I turn up in a world, ruthlessly terrified by my own selfish creation?

Thus, come KURT VONNEGUT JR, to the rescue. My new party is filled with irritatingly good clerics and paladins, who have long, windy discussions about how great it is to do good things. KURT VONNEGUT JR, accidentally written in caps, is a wild mage and captain of the do-gooder squad. Vonnegut, I've always felt, has some fairly wacky, but deeply felt morals. Thus a wild mage, who casts spells which often have completely random consequences. For example, casting fireball at a group of kobolds, he accidentally transmogrifies himself into a woman. So far the best party was while battling a bunch of slavers, I accidentally summoned a demon which rampaged around killing everybody in the party. Thus, I am making amends by introducing a force of good (if somewhat unpredictable) to offset Pablo Neruda. Maybe, somewhere outside the rigid strictures of the game, they will meet and fight. Ethically I want KURT VONNEGUT JR to win, but in my heart, I know Pablo Neruda will still be lurking somewhere, powerful, omniscient and overall, Chilean.

KURT VONNEGUT JR confronts his harshest critics.

Hoarding.

You know what my problem is? I'm a hoarder. I mean, I have other problems as well, many urinary in nature, but I have my other blogs to get that off my chest (www.mypeesmellslikedespair.blogspot.com).

Back to the hoarding. I hoard books like i'm a nerdy dragon, sitting on a pile of literary gold. Likewise, my attitude towards blogging has been to save up experiences and then let them all out in one giant, multi-faceted post. The issue I have with this, is because of the sheer speed in which I read, I miss out dozens of books a month because it would be strange to put them together. For example, over July I have read- Frank Moorhouse's "Futility and other animals", Etgar Keret's "The bus driver who wanted to be God" and "Gaza blues" , Kazuo Ishiguro's "A pale view of hills", and Hemingway's "Fiesta". Every single one of these books deserves to be written about, yet I decided maybe I should do a combined post about short story collections (which three of those are). But what about Hemingway!

A while ago, a friend gave me some books to review, which I never got around to reviewing, due to the fact that I decided I'd do a combined post on Australian literature. Enough is enough!

From now on, I'm going to do my darndest to focus on the little guy, to give a bit of face-time to each book. I'm not saying I won't hoard ideas- I will. But this will mean more regular updates, I won't forget as much (for example I have NO RECOLLECTION of what I read in June), and we will all grow as people. I'll also try to do this with wines... but that's a lot harder. I mean, can I really leave a dinner table in between bottles and update? No.

So- to make good on that promise.

Frank Moorhouse Futility and other animals.

Frank Moorhouse just may be my favourite Australian writer. His short stories are generally brilliant and funny. This is the third collection of his that I have read, and definitely my favourite. How it differs from the others, is that each of these short stories are loosely connected narratives, twined around the same few characters and situations.

What got me was the degree of kinship I felt with his characters, who were dispossessed youth in the 1970's. It's nice to know that not much has really changed since then, except for social media and 3d cinema.

The stories are definitely character driven- I couldn't really name much that actually 'happens'. Yet, the danger in such situations is that the arrogant, self obsessed and unlikeable characters actually turn you off the book, which has happened to me several times. Not so much in this, where Moorhouse's clever writing and ever present wit keeps you enthralled.

Just after I finished the book, I had to caption a movie for the ABC 'Monkey Grip' which is based on a 1970's book by Helen Garner. The movie starred a young Noni Hazlehurst, acting in much the same way as characters in "Futility and other animals". Her character, however, I felt none of the same kinship with. That's not to say it wasn't well acted, just that I felt no relation to it. Or it could have been that I was forced to write every word she said within a limited caption time frame. Or that I got weirded out watching her have sex with Colin Friels a lot. Young Noni is definitely a fox, but I grew up watching her on Playschool. I didn't want to think about going through the oval window at that moment.

I was lucky enough to see Frank Moorhouse speak at the This Is Not Art festival in Newcastle, as he was the keynote speaker.
He gave an intelligent and provoking speech on writing and the culture of censorship growing in Australia. It was around the same time as the Bill Henson scandal, so obviously at the forefront of peoples minds.

Next step: read his giant novels.

Ladies and the Tramp

I was going to go with 'Beauties and the Beast' but it reminds me of a terrible show, and I'm way too pretty. On my recent trip to the Southern Highlands in NSW, I guided a large, rambunctious and delightful group around the wine region.

For a while now, whilst drunk usually, I've been banging on about the purpose of this blog - namely to make wine accessible to the people. 'Bringing wine to the people", I usually mutter, gesticulating wildly with my glass at the cringing table of people I've just met. But in reality, it's very hard for me to make the uninitiated sample different wines - whether from time, price or sheer obduracy.

So when I was asked to squire some people around, many of whom didn't particularly like wine, or had never gone wine tasting, I was delighted. I'll bring the people to the wine! I just didn't realise how many people there actually were.

Cellar doors are like snowflakes - they are all different, and mostly delicious. So for the first stop on our tour, I chose a winery I'd been to before, namely Joadja. My reasoning was thus - they have a beautiful set up with basically everything you want from a winery. You are able to wander through the vats and barrels, stroll around the very pretty pastoral grounds and play with the gorgeous old wine dog. Their wines are very cheap for such amazing flavours, and they focus on interesting and exciting varietals. I was particularly interested in getting my hands on some more of their reserve Malbec.

But I was nervous. There were ten of us in the group, which is a fairly terrifying swarm to inflict on any winery. Add to the fact that we are young and strange looking, clearly uni -esque in nature. (Well they were... i'm old and graduated now.) I was worried that the wineries would think we were on an elaborate quest for free booze, drink the place up, smash some tables, not buy a thing and then drive off into the sunset like hooligans. It's usually kosher to book ahead with large groups, but I didn't have the time.

Turns out my fears were groundless in both places we visited. The gentleman at Joadja was friendly and good humoured, and quite happy to discuss the wines with us. Of particular interest was the Cabernet/ Sangiovese which is all the rage in Europe at the moment. He was very enthused about getting us up to date with the latest wine trends and lingo. We found out this wine is apparently called the 'Super Tuscan'. Yeah.

From there we went to Tertini wines, only a short while away. I've been looking forward to visiting this winery for a long time, ever since I read Daniel East's word-licking of it in his article.

Tertini is an absolutely stunning cellar door, which fully capitalises on the 'old wine barrels form our decor' theory. It already had a bunch of people in it, so I fully expected to be sent away. To my surprise, the two proprietors were extraordinarily welcoming and friendly. The group felt comfortable in asking all sorts of questions - from interesting tidbits like the makings of rose', to the mortifying request of "can we take all the leftover wine in the spittoon home". It was noted that it wasn't much different to the ending of a game of Kings, and probably tastes a hell of a lot better because at least it's all wine.

Tertini is a multiple award winning winery - for very good reason. Their wines are consistently good over their entire range. From deliciously tart Riesling to earthy Pinot Noir, each wine was exemplary. More importantly to me, was that in very good humour we were given the biography on each wine. Just interesting facts, snippets of information. Often when younger people go into wineries, people don't bother to engage us in conversation.

Furthermore, Linda Lambrechts, one of the proprietors, took us in hand and took the time to provide some elementary tasting notes. From some of the pamphlets I picked up, it turns out she is a remarkably well educated wine writer and teacher. She enthusiastically asked what we could taste or smell in the wines - turning it into a full experience which I think was very enjoyable. I think everyone else did as well, but I'm not a mind reader.

One of the wines which we were able to taste was the 'Arneis', a white wine varietal which is only grown in a handful of places around the world. The whole thing about Arneis is that it's an incredibly tempestuous and uncontrollable grape. The look of fear and respect that comes across peoples faces can hardly be described. Despite the problems with Arneis - of which there are apparently many, their example is absolutely delicious. Kind of like a softer Gewurztraminer, with none of the sickly sweetness. I would have bought it, except I'd been promising myself that I'd buy and cellar the next good Riesling I tasted.

As we speak I'm drinking the Tertini 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon. The highlands can have difficulties maturing Cab Sav and Shiraz grapes, but when it does happen it's fairly spectacular. This is a winter wine, with a lovely aromatic cigar box smell, and delicious cherry flavours. That whole cigar box aroma thing was baffling to me for so long, but once you have it pointed out, it makes so much sense. It helps that in my last job I had to stock the cigar section... smells like that.

Tip: Never say "mmm, this wine is so... macrobiotic" at a dinner party.

So all in all, a wonderful experience. I believe me and Bridget drank a Joadja Cab/Sangiovese and a Tertini Pinot Noir that very night, and had an excellent night.