Stuck

I'm in the middle of writing a review of Amanda Lohrey's new book Vertigo but I'm finding it heavy going. Not the book, which I really like, but the writing of the review. I'm over 600 words in, which usually means a canter to the finish line, but not this time. And of those 600 words, the only ones I'm really happy with so far are the ones in the two opening sentences:

Vertigo is to dizziness what a migraine is to a headache, or the flu to a cold in the head. You don’t really grasp the difference till you’ve had the nastier one.

Giddy with the difficulties of composition and awed by the responsibilities of reviewing -- I once gave a seminar paper about reviewing that consisted entirely of an amplified list of the many different people (and things) to whom (or which) the responsible reviewer has, erm, responsibilities -- I've come over here where I can say whatever I like however I want, surely one of blogging's main attractions, to consider this health-related factoid a little more.

The older you get, unfortunately, the more likely you are to have experienced the cold/flu, headache/migraine and dizziness/vertigo distinctions for yourself. I knew I was irredeemably middle-aged the day I caught myself having the apparently insane thought 'Oh thank God, how lovely, it's an ordinary headache', but that was nothing to my first experience of vertigo, during which I would have thought 'Oh I do so wish this were just a migraine', except that vertigo renders one incapable of rational thought. It was, thank God, a fixable inner-ear disorder going by the majestic yet hilarious title 'Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo', a condition infinitely more paroxysmal than benign. And if a certain rural mate is reading this, she will laugh herself stupid at these hypochondriacal magnifications of relatively harmless, minor and temporary conditions involving disorientation and neurological brouhaha.

But since I currently don't even have so much as an ordinary headache and the review is now two days overdue, there's no excuse not to get back to work.

*girds loins, not a pretty sight*

(I might be back shortly, though, because the Large Hadron Collider has just given me an idea for a meme.)

Too much information

Darlene's post over at Larvatus Prodeo this morning about the perils of public transport (complete with fetching photo of chocolate sardines, a conceit that always makes me laugh though for the life of me I can never precisely locate teh funny; possibly it's the trompe-l'oeil aspect) has got me thinking about the way people talk on the phone in public.

When mobile phones first began to find their way into common use, anyone talking loudly on one in a public place was probably still suffering from the residual notion that the person on the other end couldn't possibly really hear them and therefore they needed to shout. It quickly became more a matter of 'Look at moy, look at moy, I haz gadjit!'

Since pretty much everyone now has one and is used to the way it works, one would think the loud talking to intimates about private matters -- sex, money, daily-life details that could not possibly be of any interest except to those immediately affected; a malfunctioning toilet, say, or an outbreak of ringworm at kindy -- would be a thing of the past. But it actually seems to have got worse. Darlene tells the story of a young woman yelling in a rage at her mother on the tram and for some reason I found this quite disturbing. The idea that it's perfectly okay to go ballistic in public, assuming you are a person over six years old of normal-range intelligence who is not drunk or on drugs, is one I'm old enough to be still repelled by.

I think the loud-talking-on-the-mobile thing is still something to do with showing off, but has morphed into a kind of exhibitionism about one's emotional life. Look at moy, look at moy, I haz intimates. People self-dramatise and self-expose in Jerry Springer mode on the phone to their friends, lovers, parents and children as a way of advertising, in a tram or train or waiting room full of random strangers -- some holding pen or other of public life -- that they have a life. What I don't understand is the need to do such a thing and force it on the attention of said random strangers, especially at football-stadium pitch.

If people want to conduct their most intimate relationships in public then that's fine as long as I don't have to look at or listen to them. But what always floors me is their oblivion to how appallingly intrusive their conversations are on other people's lives and thoughts and frames of mind. Or is that the point? Is this actually just attention-getting behaviour of the toddler kind?

Friday language whining, various

NUCLEAR

On the SBS News (the SBS News!!) tonight, two different reporters mispronounced the word 'nuclear' in two different ways. One, with an otherwise Australian accent, said 'noo-clee-uh' and the other, with a British accent, managed the classic Bushean 'nukular'.

I think what happens is that they see it coming up and panic, like nervy horses in a showjumping ring.


ASTERISK

This is an asterisk:



This is Asterix:



As you can see, they are not the same.


OMNI-

Just tidying up old emails and came across an exchange with a former academic colleague about the end-of-year marking we were both doing; there is, as any academic will tell you, an occasional email exchange with one's long-suffering fellows of particularly choice essay bloopers, thus:

ME TO HER: 'I can't believe I've never seen this one before: "... the third-person omnipotent narrator ..."'

HER TO ME: 'Ah yes, an oldie but a goodie - in my experience they can express outrage at your pickiness for insisting that omniscient and omnipotent are different.'

Merde: a list

1) Deadline day.

2) Skin cancer treatment (on face, though blessedly hidden by fringe -- sometimes) has now been painful and unsightly for over a month. (Painful and unsightly means it's working, but the longer this goes on, the colder the comfort.)

3) Member of inner circle of beloveds in hospital.

4) Harassment by phone and email from several quarters inc Animal Welfare League whose book of raffle tickets I have lost. Again.

5) House falling down around my ears.

6) Shocking news from bathroom scales.

7) Still no world peace.

So you want to be a book editor?

If you want to be a book editor then one of your jobs will be fact-checking. This includes making sure the writer has not misspelled any proper names, including place names.

For example, 'sienna' is the clay pigment used in oil paints; the colour comes in two varieties, raw and burnt. It is not the name of the beautiful walled city in Tuscany where they make panforte and have the annual medieval horse race. That is called Siena. (NB neither of these is to be confused with senna, which is a naturally-occuring laxative.)

Similarly, the boot-shaped peninsula in South Australia is called Yorke Peninsula, not York Peninsular. 'Peninsular' is an adjective, meaning 'peninsula-like'. Cape York Peninsula, without an 'e', is the big pointy one in Queensland.

These errors should not have made it past a first read-through by the author, much less all the way through successive MS drafts and proofs re-read by the author and two different editors into a finished book and a Penguin book at that.

It is your particularly bad luck if they happen to be two of the book reviewer's favourite places on the entire planet. And I'm only on page 125 out of 450; who knows what sloppy horrors are yet to come.


Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary.

More whining about anachronisms in historical fiction

I could swear, if not quite on a stack of Bibles then certainly on my own personally-annotated, heavily-yellowed, silverfish-filigreed and stinking-of-mothballs copy of The Making of the English Working Class, that the phrase 'health and safety problem', as per its contemporary usage, had no currency in the blue-collar workplace in Brisbane in 1939.

Sayin'.

Still can't blog, still too much work

... so here is a bit of Monday Mogblogging instead.

Can't blog, too much work

Which is like so, so much better than not enough work. But.

However, because I agree with it so very violently and would extend this Loud Denunciation to everyone who chats while there is something happening up the front at a mic or on a stage, I shall now quote the relevant passage from today's post by the wise Amanda from Flop Eared Mule:

I hate chatters at gigs. Were you people raised by wolves? Wolves who hate music? Michael Gudinski, are these people your employees? Because I really think we could get unions onside for a WorkChoices-style exemption allowing such clowns to be sacked on the spot. The "You don't get to work for a record company unless you STFU at intimate acoustic gigs" Fairness (to the rest of us) Test. I'm going to start the Facebook group right now.

I'm there.

Oh. My. God.

What looked like serious cloud in the sky this afternoon turned out to be mostly smoke. Parts of the Adelaide Hills are on fire. Tomorrow it'll be 40 degrees with a northerly wind blowing. Temperatures near, at or over 40 are being forecast until next Wednesday, making a total of two and a half weeks of uninterrupted heatwave conditions.

Oh I know, this is Adelaide, yes. This is what we have, yes. There's a wonderful painting of the reading of the Proclamation of the Colony of South Australia on December 28th 1836, showing a lot of recognisable characters and a lot more unrecognisable ones gathered at the Old Gum Tree in North Glenelg for the historic occasion. They're dressed in full Victorian clobber and apparently it was 104 degrees Fahrenheit that day (not sure what that is in new money, probably more or less 40). But that was December. And I remember Ash Wednesday. But that was February.

I even remember the train journey when I moved to Victoria from South Australia, a night ride through the blazing Adelaide Hills with the bush on fire on both sides of us as we rushed through the darkness, with the cool change following just behind the train, and that was at the end of a two-week heatwave too, as I recall -- but that, too, was February. As it was the week the rainbow lorikeets fell dead from the sky into the back yard when it hit 42 three days in a row. As I said at the time, at least it meant there was something green on the ground.

But this is apocalyptic. We're almost into the third week in March. I'm dreading the crush in Haigh's when the temperature finally drops to 31, as it is forecast to do, two days before Good Friday, and I bet the Haigh's staff are, too. And it's hard to imagine what P and L are thinking as their outdoor wedding approaches. P is a doctor; it's entirely possible that he will have to interrupt his own wedding ceremony to leap into action when some overcome guest faints dead away.

As I lay prostrate and moaning in a darkened room over the weekend with an iced facewasher on my head, it did cross my mind to wonder how many deaths -- of, in particular, the very old, the very young and the very ill -- during this weather are partly or wholly heat-related. Especially when it goes on for two and a half weeks.

Not that the climate is changing, or anything alarmist like that.

Can't blog ...

... over-committed, under-organised (well, not organised at all, really), under the gun, over the top, under the weather and over the limit.

And, as you can see, in an unacceptably whiny frame of mind. Waiter, a nice hot cup of STFU for Pav if you would be so kind.

Normal service will be restored shortly. I hope.

Save it, Oscar

Oscar Wilde once said 'There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.'

Now for the shameless and crazy-brave Oscar this may well have been the case, but we lesser, flawed and vulnerable mortals find it kind of painful. Especially when it's kind of nasty, and kind of secretive, and we know we have indeed said and done some reprehensible things under pressure and probably deserve to be trashed behind our backs, and we also know we can't confront either of the people involved and therefore can't defend ourselves.

One of my all-time favourite TV shows was Northern Exposure, not least for the moment when that fine actor Rob Morrow, playing the besieged Dr Joel Fleischman, says to himself through gritted teeth, 'Suck it up, Fleischman.' I've been saying this to myself periodically ever since, and am saying it to myself again now.

Force Nine Why-ning

* Why, when I decide I really must do a load of washing, does it immediately begin to rain?

* Why does it never rain all the rest of the time?

* Why do people not actually read the emails in which I have taken such trouble to explain as clearly and simply as possible what the problem/issue/question is, thereby creating completely unnecessary confusion and wasting yet more time?

* Why do so many people want things finished and delivered by the end of September?

* Why, on a day when one cat heaves up a gigantic furball on the sofa and the other one escapes out into the street to play with the trucks and the Rottweilers, do they do those things at exactly the same time?

* Why do strangers ring up begging for money just as I have started a complicated sentence, thereby dooming me never to finish it?

* Why do the delivery people think that the small space in my driveway between my car and the gates is an appropriate place to leave a delivery for next door -- a huge, unwieldy parcel three-quarters as tall as I am and almost too heavy and awkward to lift if one heeds the This Way Up sign -- without knocking on my door or leaving any other kind of notification that that is what they have done?

* Why can I never convince my hairdresser that I do actually want my fringe about an inch and a half shorter than that?