Catherine McCallum's Blog

“At the moment, I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die and I don’t.”

– From an interview in The Spectator

The thing about Clive James is he’s still around and his poetry just gets better and better. Several profiles have appeared following the publication of his much lauded poem Japanese Maple, first published in The New Yorker last September, including those in The Spectator, The New Republic and The Weekend Australian Magazine. Together they help explain why his star is growing brighter as he (gradually) dies. Despite his long sojourn in England, he’s still one of us and it shows in his writing and his interviews. He never lost his Australian sense of humour, that laconic, dry, self-deprecating humour that means home to me. It’s wonderful to hear it in these interviews, despite the serious tone of his recent poems on death and dying.

Here is the poem that inspired such interest:

Japanese Maple

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

Breath growing short

Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls

On that small tree

And saturates your brick back garden walls,

So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

This glistening illuminates the air.

It never ends.

Whenever the rain comes it will be there,

Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.

Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

What I must do

Is live to see that. That will end the game

For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,

A final flood of colours will live on

As my mind dies,

Burned by my vision of a world that shone

So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

Clive James

Filed under: Australia, Poetry Tagged: Clive James, Japanese Maple, Poetry

Hilarious. Tony Abbot has brought the wrath of Russia upon us in the shape of four warships heading our way – Vladimir Putin’s response to Abbot’s aggro posturing a month ago. We’re all rolling around laughing here, wondering how Abbott will worm his way out of this debacle after strutting the world stage at the APEC summit. Thick as two bricks. Ah well.

Filed under: Uncategorized

We’ve got Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. You can’t argue with that.

Filed under: Australia, Funny Tagged: Australian politics, Tony Abbott

Oh, how I’m going to miss Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of our greatest actors, now dead. One of the best tributes I’ve caught up with is Jason Bailey’s on Flavorwire, who posted this scene from Magnolia, one of the best scenes in one of my favourite movies.

Filed under: Movies & TV Tagged: Magnolia, movies, Philip Seymour Hoffman

In the introduction to his absorbing book of essays on literary fiction, Through the Window, Julian Barnes sums up the value of the novel:

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, how it goes wrong, and how we lose it.

The subject of the first essay, the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in the year 2000 at the age of 83, was one of its greatest practitioners. I had only vaguely heard of Penelope Fitzgerald as a 1979 Booker Prize winner for Offshore, one of a series of novels she wrote when she was in her 60s about events in her own life, and I wasn’t particularly interested in reading her. It wasn’t until I read Barnes’ essay on her work that I started to read her later books and was astonished by her brilliance.

Fitzgerald started writing novels in her 60s, but it was the four historical novels published in her 70s, culminating in her final novel The Blue Flower, published when she was 80, which established her standing as among the greatest of English novelists. There are heaps of online reviews you can look up, but I can tell you The Blue Flower is a slight book that’s as intellectually challenging and daring as any I’ve read.

If you haven’t yet discovered her work, Julian Barnes’ essay stands out as the best reason to seek it out. As well as evoking the books, Barnes offers a warm and compassionate reading of the author herself, an understanding that beneath the slight scattiness and ordinariness of her person, Penelope Fitzgerald was a truly great writer:

Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life she liberated herself into greatness.

 

Filed under: Books & Writing Tagged: Books & Writing, English novelists, Julian Barnes, Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, Through the Window

I love Tasmania! All these beautiful old colonial homesteads. On Sunday we went to Frodsley farm in the Fingal Valley, where a fund-raising picnic was being held for a community organisation. The farm was only 30 minutes from home but we hadn’t visited it before. The homestead was at the end of a long avenue of mature pines with broad paddocks on either side. Our expectations were high, but even so it was a surprise to discover such an enchanting place on the river.

Filed under: Tasmania Tagged: farm, Fingal Valley, Frodsley, picnic, Tasmania

I was so disappointed that TransAtlantic failed to make the Booker shortlist when it clearly deserved to be there. The Guardian calls the 2013 selection ‘the best shortlist in a decade’ and I’m certainly looking forward to reading several of the listed books, particularly NZ author Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (although I didn’t check the page count when I downloaded it – over 800. Yikes! I’ll still be reading it next year).  

Still, despite the quality of the list, I would have placed TransAtlantic ahead of at least two that made it. Maybe it didn’t make the cut because its author is a long-time resident of New York. Anyway, it’s on my own list of favourites. 

TransAtlantic is a wonderful book, full of passages that need to be savoured and characters, real and imagined, whose crossings by air and sea between Europe and America through generations give the book its themes of risk and resistance fading to stoic endurance as the characters age. After reading Colum McCann it always takes me a long time to appreciate the writing of other authors again. He’s a writer whose style is so lyrically idiosyncratic that it makes most contemporary novelists seem part of a herd. Most of all, his evocation of places from Missouri to Ireland is just amazing. I could say more in praise but if you appreciate great literary fiction, read the book.

Filed under: Books & Writing Tagged: Colum McCann, Eleanor Catton, Man Booker, The Luminaries, TransAtlantic

Three episodes remain of Breaking Bad, the riveting series on AMC that tracks the descent of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. The show has accurately been compared to a Shakespearean tragedy, and it’s clear that the Bard’s works have influenced Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator. Perhaps, then, one might turn to the works of Shakespeare to try and divine how Breaking Bad might end—or at least, how Shakespeare would end it.

I’m posting the beginning of this article by D.B. Grady in The Atlantic, because I’m always interested in how the best of pop culture draws on the greatest of our literary figures for inspiration. Check it out for a fascinating overview of the influence of Shakespeare in the brilliant series Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad is one of the best TV series in what many, including Kevin Spacey at last month’s Edinburgh Television Festival, are calling a ‘third golden age’ of television. Spacey cites The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Homeland and Breaking Bad as programs with the time to ‘develop creatively over several series’, thus allowing their writers to chart in considerable depth the tragic decline and fall of heroic, or not so heroic, figures. I agree with the article that of them all, Breaking Bad is the most Shakespearean in taking a ‘good’ man and tracking his inward conflict and downward moral spiral over the course of many seasons. Like all fans of the show, I’m looking forward to seeing what Vince Gilligan does with the ending, specifically whether Walter White gains redemption before he dies (as die he surely must!).

Kevin Spacey’s talk is worth a listen, although it’s quite long!

Filed under: Movies & TV Tagged: Breaking Bad, Kevin Spacey, Vince Gilligan

Catherine McCallum:

Years ago my eldest son introduced me to the work of Hayao Miyazaki and I’ve been a fan ever since. His film Spirited Away seemed the most innovative animated film I’d seen, despite its retro use of traditional 2D techniques at a time when 3D animation had become standard. It was the genius of Miyazaki’s imagination that made it so unforgettable and one of the greatest animated films of all time.

Originally posted on Biblioklept:

This one’s a lot more substantive than the teaser that came out earlier this year.

View original

Filed under: Uncategorized

Reblogged from biblioklept:

This one's a lot more substantive than the teaser that came out earlier this year.

Read more… 4 more words

Years ago my eldest son introduced me to the work of Hayao Miyazaki and I've been a fan ever since. His film Spirited Away seemed the most innovative animated film I'd seen, despite its retro use of traditional 2D techniques at a time when 3D animation had become standard. It was the genius of Miyazaki's imagination that made it so unforgettable and one of the greatest animated films of all time.