Great opening sentences: an occasional series

Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P.H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source.

Not counting a short epigraph about how many pioneers simply failed and were forgotten, and the subheading 'Archie and Rose. 1885', this is the first sentence of 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' from Annie Proulx's new book of short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is.

An alert reader -- and this is the kind of exercise we used to do in university English Departments while they were still called English Departments and before capital-T Theory took hold -- would be able to have a bash at identifying the date of composition and possibly even the writer.

For example, if you were to set this sentence as such an exercise today, any student lucky enough to have read a bit of Proulx already -- especially if she or he knew there were two different mountain ranges in North America called the Sierra Madre (I've just had to Google this, myself) and one of them is in Wyoming, a state closely identified with Proulx and her work, especially after Brokeback Mountain -- might be able to identify the writer from the setting, from the style, or from the detailed, focused attention to landscape and the inextricable relationship of landscape to character.

(In fact, this is precisely the sort of passage that used to be set in exams as a trap for young players who might confidently mis-identify it as having been written in the 19th century. In the Adelaide U Eng Dept in the mid-1970s they used to do this tricksy business a lot, setting us things like a chunk of very early D. H. Lawrence that nobody had ever actually read, from a time when his style was not yet fully formed, or a poem containing the classical name of a major character in one of the four plays in our Shakespeare course but actually written in 1840, which almost everybody fell for and identified as Elizabethan, a mere two and a half centuries out. In Adelaide we called this kind of exercise Practical Criticism; in Melbourne they called it Dating, which South Australians and Americans thought was hilarious.)

Anyway, the one-word answer to 'What makes this a great opening sentence?' is 'Grammar', but talking about grammar always gets me into trouble so let's look at some other things.

It sets the scene by answering the questions Who, When ('staked out a homestead' points to the time frame) and Where. It comes up with names that manage to sound natural and convincing, a problem all writers wrestle with (though this is easier if you're writing about the 19th century and names like Alice, William, Jeremiah and Mary Ann are there for the taking). It subtly predicts the likely fate of Archie and Rose (look what happened to the last guy), and it suggests the sinister but all too likely possibility that P.H. Weed decomposed into the river: a river poisoned at its source, a powerful metaphor for all things that are doomed from the beginning.

About reading

It's 18 months since I began writing weekly short reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald so that means I've read 304 new novels, not counting other reading, since the beginning of last year. They come from everywhere, translated from the French, German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Swedish, you name it. (A lot of the novels out of Asia that find their way to Australia are written in English to begin with and arrive via the big Western publishing houses.)

If what arrives in parcels and boxes on my doorstep is to be believed, the fiction currently being written is mainly either chick lit of wildly varying quality, or novels about some aspect of the Second World War; the quality of the latter is more even and overall much higher. More than sixty years after it ended, WW2 is still coming out of the national and international consciousness of its heroes' and victims' children and grandchildren in the way that a vast, deep bruise will show up and blossom horribly on the surface of your skin over a long time in the wake of the original injury.

And so it was that today I found myself finishing a book I'd read by force of will, holding my nose: a bit of strident Noo Yawk chick lit in sub (very sub) Sex and the City mode. I'd struggled through more than 350 rambling pages peopled with incredibly annoying characters whining about lerve and how hard it was to find and men and how awful they were, all in the rowdy, fake-bright voice of a narrator whose values could only be described as diseased.

With a small prayer of thanksgiving, I put this book down and picked up the next one. 'As for me,' I read on Page 2, a mere handful of paragraphs in,

I don't know yet either that in ten years' time, I will recognise, in a heap of pairs of spectacles almost five metres high at the Auschwitz Memorial, the frames that my father slipped into the top pocket of his jacket, the last time I saw him ...

Post-a-day

Having got off to the worst possible start by not actually putting up a post on the first day of the month, I have nonetheless decided that July will be a blog-every-day month, for no reason other than that I've never tried to do it before. The default topic is Work.

Today's work:

-- read, grade and write an examiner's report on an MA thesis in Gastronomy that looks at the evolution and influence of food blogs

-- write and send invoice for same

-- do a whole heap of filing

-- start in on my tax

-- start reading Zoë Ferraris's (she makes a feature of the diaresis and who am I to muck around with someone else's name) novel The Night of Mi'raj for review. Sample:

Although it was her wedding, she felt a deep need to please her in-laws, or at least not disgust them. A few weeks ago, Nusra had arranged for a professional dressmaker to come to the house, and the woman had arrived with twenty dresses, every one of them gaudy and overpriced, bedizened with sequins and Byzantine embroidery, gold lamé and tassels, heavy layers of satin and lace. Some had real bone corsets and others had monstrous hoop skirts, which made her feel like a roundabout statue, something to gawk at. Worst of all, the colours were appalling -- mustards and hot pinks, chili greens and a hazardous, painful orange.

Thumbs up

In the course of reading any novel there comes a moment when you decide whether it's a good book or not, and if you write book reviews for a living then this is a question of no little importance. If it's basically no good there may yet be many redeeming features, just as there may be some really terrible things about a fundamentally good book. But there's always a kind of tipping point where you decide one way or the other.

In the case of Joanne Fedler's Things Without a Name, this moment came on page 162 where the narrator Faith (who works as a legal counsellor at a feminist organisation called SISTAA, set up to help victims of sexual and/or domestic violence) discovers a p*rn mag in the desk-drawer of her neurotic friend and colleague Carol:

On page 48 'Wet Willow' has a cascade of glorious red hair. ... I appreciate that the reason she has handcuffs on and a rolling pin up her vagina is that she needs the money. People do things they'd probably prefer not to, all things being equal. You can go longer without dignity and self-esteem than three meals a day and somewhere to live ...

She could walk other people's pets. Or become a hair model. I shouldn't care one way or the other. Handcuffs and a rolling pin. I want to believe that no girl grows up with this in mind ...

The way I see it, Wet Willow comes home, plops her bag in the hallway, hangs her keys on the key rack and thinks, I hate my job. And not because she's never going to get promoted to broom handles. But for all I know, she wakes up in the morning and muses over her Weetbix and coffee, I love Thursdays. It's the rolling pin up the fanny day.

Don't mind the worms

My dad, now 81 and fit as a flea apart from his deteriorating hearing, snuck into the Navy in 1944 at 17 and trundled around the Pacific and the Indian Oceans and all the northern waters in between on the corvette HMAS Warrnambool for the best part of two years before he was demobbed in 1946, after which he went home and worked the family farm for 20 years. He was raised in and with an ethos of self-sufficiency that only someone brought up on a farm during the Depression could have so thoroughly internalised as still to have it the best part of a century later.

At my request he's written up some wartime memories for me as a few guest blog posts and they'll be up soon, but in the meantime he's developing his private theory that the solution to escalating food prices is to return to the days of the WW2 'Dig for Victory' campaign, and has asked me to find him whatever I can online about it.

So I Googled 'dig for victory' and this intriguing account is the first site that came up. All I could think of was the sketch in Beyond the Fringe about the imposition of rationing (in which the 'always out in the garden' tag line is a reference to the campaign): 'My woife came oot to me in the garden, her face ashen in hue. "Charrlie," she said to me, "rationin' has been imposed, and all that that entails." "Never you mind, my dear," I said to her, "you put on the kettle, and we'll have a noice steamin' cup o' hot water."'

What made me think of this was the astonishingly therapeutic hour I've just spent out in the garden at the end of a particularly traumatic work week, digging the leaf mould into the sandy soil and wishing my mum was still alive so she could show me how to prune the lemon tree.

Just in case there's anyone out there who hasn't heard this one already

As Comicstriphero would say, I love this joke so much I want to marry it. I'm a farmer's daughter, what can I say. You can take the girl out of Curramulka, etc.

NB dated technology; a skilled cultural historian could tell you when this joke originated, not only to the year but possibly also to the month.


A farmer is attending to a mob of sheep in a remote paddock when suddenly a brand-new BMW advances out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie leans out the window and says "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have here, will you give me one?"

The farmer looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing mob and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the farmer and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep," says the farmer. He watches the yuppie select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the farmer says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a consultant," says the farmer.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required," answered the farmer. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question that I hadn't asked; and you know absolutely nothing about my business. Now give me back my dog."

Still can't blog, still too much work

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

Proofreading. We has it.

302 pages down, 186 to go, lots of queries to be answered, and the whole stack has to be on a desk in Sydney by Wednesday.

Which would be easier if not for the four short book reviews due, also by Wednesday, and the still-unfinished 4,000 word essay which should have been emailed off the day before yesterday. And don't ask me why I didn't do it earlier. I didn't do it earlier because I was, um, working too hard. I've got two as-yet-unpacked green shopping bags of Christmas loot to say I was working too hard, to say nothing of the still-up tree, the untidy bedroom, the ever-growing pile of laundry, the jungle in the back yard and the fallen-down back fence.

What I had forgotten, because -- the electronic age being what it is -- it's been a while since I did any, is that proofreading hard copy the old-fashioned proper way with a ruler and a red pen (or, if you're very lucky, a second person willing to read everything out to you, punctuation and all) is in fact an extremely soothing and calming activity. There is none of the effort and strain and self-torture of writing involved, and none of the endless infuriating double-and triple-checking of names, dates and titles that must be done if the kind of writing you're doing is the imparting of huge amounts of information in the smallest possible space.

But all you have to do when proofreading is to find the errors (most of which leap out at you) and mark them with the correct marks in red pen. Every so often you neatly square the stacks of paper and watch with pride as the Done pile grows steadily higher and the To Do pile proportionately ebbs.

I'm being reminded by this task that one of the many things for which I am grateful to be an academic no longer is the fact that I no longer have to mark essays. I never minded marking one essay; it was marking seventy (at least half of which were about how much the student just lerved Wuthering Heights, though I preferred that to the fundamentalist Christian interpretation of that novel that once turned up in the pile) that used to get me down. Not least because if one marked essays in red pen, as one habitually did for editors and typesetters, the students would get upset, because "red seems angry".

Red, my children, is to make it easier to see. That is all. There is no emotion and no personal transaction involved here. No one is trying to hurt you. The only thing that ever made me angry was painstakingly correcting various errors of logic, understanding, fact, spelling, expression and documentation and explaining how to do it properly, only to see the student, in his or her next essay, make all of the same mistakes all over again. Life is too short to waste it teaching people things they don't want to know. Yet another soothing thing about proofreading is that with every correction you know that the person reading it will know exactly why you did it, and be grateful.

Eleven things I've learned over the last few days

CHRISTMAS EVE

1) Buying a new Christmas tree ornament guarantees that you'll break one of the old ones while you're decorating the tree.

2) The unexpected sight of your mother's handwriting,


also while you're decorating the tree, can still bring tears to your eyes eight years after her death. (I expect this to go on indefinitely.) It says 'Pearly bells & icicles'. You can see a few of the icicles and one or two bells in the tree photo if you look hard enough.

3) Even if you don't put the tree up


till Christmas Eve, you'll still be really glad you did. Especially when you see that for the second year in a row, the presence of a non-organic stylised metal Christmas tree suggestive of Leunig's Mr Curly has excited no interest from the cats at all, and it is therefore still up and uninterfered-with.

4) If you are making custard from eggs and cream and have the heat up any hotter than a small candle while you stir and wait for it to thicken, you will end up with a suspension of scrambled eggs in cream. If you attempt to remedy this with a sieve, you will end up with a suspension of finely pulverised scrambled eggs in cream. I had already learned this and forgotten it several times. New Year's resolution: buy shares in Paul's.

5) I can still remember (as I learn from singing along with the carols from St Paul's on the teeve) the first two lines of Silent Night in German, from lessons at Adelaide Girls' High in 1966.

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht
Alles schläft; einsam wacht ...


CHRISTMAS DAY

6) No matter how much seafood sauce you make to dip the prawns into (homemade mayo + Beerenberg Hahndorf Tomato Sauce + Tabasco), it will be perceived as not enough.

7) In a family fight, presenting the assembled multitudes with a solution to the problem -- even if it is a solution that all of them accept -- is a waste of time. They don't want a solution to the problem. What they want is to go on fighting.

8) If a cat is given a special present by one of her servant's doting sisters,


there's a slim chance that she might accidentally play with it by mistake.


BOXING DAY

9) The alpha tortoiseshell is a mighty hunter before the lord.


She can manage with one swipe of an elegant yet powerful paw what it took the Australian people over eleven years to achieve: rodent extermination.

She didn't eat it; she is pictured here nudging the already quite dead varmint to try to make it get up and run around so she can chase it some more.


THE DAY AFTER BOXING DAY

10) Taking a week off is dangerous. Last week was the first week since Boxing Day last year that I did not read and review four novels, and now I'm having hell's own trouble getting up into fourth gear again.

11) One of the boys I was at school with 40 years ago (a category that includes former Senator Nick Bolkus and Greig Pickhaver aka HG Nelson, among others) has not lost his sense of humour.

I learn this while getting the email up to date and reading the December newsletter of my old school's Old Scholars Association. I've written on this blog and in various other places about the crucial importance to me when I was at school of being surrounded by European fellow-students, particularly my Greek mates, from whom I learned that there was a world beyond the Adelaide suburbs. The aforementioned newsletter contains the text of a speech given by Dr James Katsaros, in 1967 the Head Prefect of Adelaide (then Boys') High and now a distinguished plastic and reconstructive surgeon, and Patron of the Adelaide High School Old Scholars' Association. And I'm fairly sure he won't mind me quoting a bit of his speech to Adelaide's Lord Mayor and the assembled Table Captains at a planning gathering, in the Town Hall, for next April's Adelaide High School Centenary Dinner, at which I have already secured my seat:

"When I read ... that our old scholars hold positions of prominence in business and society in South Australia and Australia, I could not help thinking about the likes of Greig Pickhaver, better known as HG Nelson. I wondered how did he develop that passion for Greco-Roman wrestling which we enjoyed so much during the Sydney Olympics? And the answer is, of course, that he feasted daily on the sight of a seething, brawling mass of boys with names such as Koutsamanis, Kari, Finocchio, Zacharoyiannis and Zinghini."

Wednesday Claytonsblogging

Lest anyone (employers past, present and yet to come, this means you) get the wrong idea, let me begin by saying that late last night as I waited for the beta cat to finish her dinner so I could let the alpha cat out of the bathroom and go to bed -- they have to be fed separately, as alpha-cat bolts but beta-cat eats hers in instalments, three or four dainty snacks stretched over half an hour; if they are fed together, alpha-cat simply eats her own and then bumps beta-cat away from the bowl and eats that as well -- as I waited, I flicked through the current Women's Weekly's massive survey on women's lives deciding what my answers would be if I had the energy to get up off the sofa and get a pen.

There are pages and pages of multiple choice in this quiz and my answer to every other question was NONE OF THE ABOVE, but then I found a question with an answer option that exactly fitted my case:

Q. If you are currently employed, which of the following statements most accurately describe your feelings about work?

A. I love my job; it gives me great personal satisfaction.

It's not exactly a job qua job, since I'm self-employed and much of my work involves regular or one-off tasks of various magnitude. But there is an unprecendented number of said tasks on concurrently at the moment, a situation it's possible to survive only if you work on each one in strict rotation for an hour or two at a time, thereby not getting irretrievably behind with any of them. ('If it's 1 am, this must be the proofreading.')

Which means that blogwise I am resorting to the very last, erm, resort of bloggers (and, before them, columnists) everywhere: write a blog post about why you're not writing any blog posts.

I'd blog about the garden but at the moment I'm not spending any time in it and thinking about two major problems out there gives me panic attacks but there's no time to do anything about it.

I'd blog about politics but I don't have time to read or watch the news.

I'd blog about music or theatre, but I don't have time to go to any.

I'd blog about work, but I'm too busy working.

This Writing Life, or, Someone's trying to tell me something, but I can't quite work out what

Some readers of this blog will be familiar with the work of J.M. Coetzee, and will know that in his novels and essays there is much food for thought on the ethical treatment (or more to the point, the unethical treatment) of animals. The vegetarian Coetzee is known for his literary variations on the theme of human cruelty, and his most straightforward and least complex writing is to do with cruelty to animals and all that that implies.

So as I sat down at the keyboard this morning and was poised to bash out the first word of the last draft of a review of his most recent novel (late, and if my editor is reading this, you are being very nice about it -- the not-being-badgered thing will have its reward when you get this copy later today), wholly concentrating on the keyboard, on the screen, and on the syntax and diction of my opening sentence, the phone began to ring.

And it was nice old Alan from the RSPCA, asking which of their fund-raising lines of merchandise I'd like to buy this time. I don't know why I don't just give them money and tax deduct it, but, for whatever reason, I have amassed an extensive collection of teatowels and chopping boards with wombats and toucans on them. I ordered the 2008 calendars -- Australian Birds and All Creatures Great and Small -- and trudged back to the study.

Begin again from Square One, for the nascent sentence has atomised and blown away. Start from scratch, if I could find it. Ah yes, I was going to say this, and put it together with that, and then I was going to segue to ...

'PRRRRRT?'

Tortoiseshell leaps into lap, kisses my ear, and settles down with her front paws across my right forearm, a position not known for its typing comfort.

Sentence shatters and blows away a second time.

Coetzee would enjoy this scenario, I think, but it's not getting the work done. I'm not game to start again a third time quite yet; I might invoke an elephant, coming trumpeting into this not very big room.

2.02 am ...

... and I've written 3,000 words, about eight different books of fiction, in the last two days. 3,000 down, 260 to go, and then I can go to bed.

Also, this Amberley 2006 Semillon Sauvignon Blanc is very nice. You heard it here.

Speaking of which, ThirdCat, I bought a bottle of that Lake Breeze Bernoota Shiraz (though not the same vintage, of course) when I happened to notice it at Dan Murphy's the other day, in your honour. I have stashed it to keep for a few years, as recommended.

Back to work.

It's not called a deadline for nothing.

Heffernan redux: who's out of touch then?

And in a ripper bit of argument from a particularly juicy Crikey bulletin today, ANU political scientist Norman Abjorensen makes this brilliant and unanswerable riposte to the notion that the childless ought to be barred from politics:

'A glance through the biographical details of the ministry shows a gaggle of relatively autonomous lawyers and other professionals along with self-employed farmers like Senator Heffernan who call their own shots, and the privileged children of family business owners. How many of these have ever been subjected to the petty humiliations and indignities that are common every day to most Australian employees?

How many, if any, of them have ever known the fear and loathing instilled in most of us by the prospect of another day at work in an environment in which we have no say, no control and no power?

If Senator Heffernan and his party wants to go down this track of who is in touch with the majority of the community, then let them try to explain what they know, individually and collectively, of the wholly distasteful experience of work where democracy is unknown and, worse, actively opposed by existing government policy. Then we might find out who is in touch and who is not.'