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Stuff
A few months after two of his parents had died, Martin Rowson had a dream about the house he grew up in which was crammed with tons and tons of stuff, both physical and emotional. In this book Rowson delves into all that 'stuff'; weaving together dreams, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, advice, history, smells, sounds and sights of the past. The result is a funny, thought-provoking and ultimately moving meditation on families, life, love, disease and the existentialist horrors of clearing out the attic.
224 pages, Paperback
First published July 27, 2007
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About the author
Martin Rowson
54 books26 followersBaptised as Martin George Edmund Rowson. Who's Who lists his interests as "cooking, drinking, ranting, atheism, zoos, collecting taxidermy".
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 31, 2013
I couldn’t find a source for the saying ‘Everybody has a book in them’, though I did find a Christopher Hitchens quote: “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.” Interestingly, my source of quotes in Goodreads did list seven for “Everybody has a book in them” but none actually use those words but instead are brief stories beginning “Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives” (Douglas Coupland), “Everybody has their own America” (Andy Warhol) and variations of the theme.
Fortunately Martin Rowson didn’t heed the Hitchens plea and has written a book that feels as if it has come from within me. The dust cover said he “weaves together dreams, memories, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, parental advice, history, smells, sounds and sights to recreate the lives of his parents, their times and his, and the lives of his other parents, the one who died when he was ten, the one he didn’t know who died when he was in his thirties, and the last one, who maybe never existed at all.” . . . “Stuff is part memoir, part reminiscence, but mostly a funny thought provoking and ultimately moving meditation on families, life, love, disease, death, grief and memory and the existential horrors of clearing out the attic.” Time and again my recall was prompted by something I could have substituted into the Rowson narrative. In effect Rowson has written the book that I have inside me. For instance, “The name Rowson has been a burden to me for most of my life. It’s not that I resent it, or don’t like it, or am embarrassed by it, like it was Hitler or Twatbottom or something like that. In fact, I think it’s a rather good name, slightly out of the ordinary. The problem is entirely practical.” . . . “To put the record straight, the first syllable rhymes with crow, not with cow. It might seem to you to be no big thing and that I’m making too much of a fuss about this, but for nearly five decades I’ve winced inside whenever people get that the wrong way round, and I have to make an instant judgement call on whether I politely correct them or let it go and prepare myself for the next time, the error now compounded beyond reach.” My whole life seems to have been characterised by the same judgement call, correcting with a ‘my name is like the alphabet, C comes before D’ accompanied with a cringe for drawing attention to a flaw in their perfection or to forever hold my peace.
There are so many hooks in this Stuff; George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma kicks off the penultimate chapter entitled The Doctor’s Plot; the Shaw connection probably representing the most prized possession that I inherited via my father from my maternal grandfather, the 1934 Constable publication of Prefaces by Bernard Shaw. I have thought this the most profound book I have ever read and was pleasantly reminded by Google that I had written a review when I finished reading it when I was in a Haiku writing phase:
Decisive thinking
Eloquent writing; history
in the making.
Just as I think the preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma should be required reading for medical students about to become medical practitioners, so I think Rowson’s The Doctor’s Plot should also be required reading for doctors and lawyers alike: “The year my parents died, when we were all quite drunk, I suggested to (colleagues of Rowson’s barrister wife) that, all in all, lawyers had done more good for society in general than doctors had ever done.” . . . “Lawyers know that they’re the scum of the earth, whereas doctors think that they’re God.” One can feel Shaw’s rapier is out and ready to cut God down to size.
I think I bought Stuff on a whim attracted by the dust cover illustration, the title and the publisher’s description on the inside of the dust cover. Most intriguing was the illustration which is loaded with meaning by the time the end is reached from the CCCP clock on the back to the partially obscured sign “Waitem”, which in the final chapter is revealed to be a Maori word “Waitemata”, the name of the harbour that dominated my growing up. And then there was: “As he was getting dressed to go into hospital the morning he died, my step mother asked him what he thought was wrong. Almost the last thing he said to her was: ‘I don’t know, but I think it’s terminal.’” I immediately wanted to record my father’s last words; my mother and I were visiting him in hospital, he was obviously terribly ill and in much pain. My mother’s dementia prevented her taking in what was happening, she knew but didn’t know. As we sat there a nurse arrived with a morphine pump to be set up; our presence stopped her in her tracks and in all kindness spouted forth about how important it was that we talked and shared this time together and much else that was Politically Correct for the conscientious and empathic nurse. She said she would come back to set up the morphine pump, it was that important that we had this time together. Mum had no idea what was happening; the penny dropped for me that Dad was in the terminal phase of his illness, the liver cancer diagnosis confirmed the day before; Dad, exhausted but alert to the end, opened his eyes, took the oxygen mask off his face and said quite clearly glaring at the back of the departing nurse “Don’t they piss you off!” And that was that; the next time I saw him he had died.
The structure of Stuff is akin to Jerome K Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; a chapter title heralds a theme where threads introduced throughout the book are woven into their relationship to this theme. As the dust cover said it is a story of adoption, and the threads and themes advertise the continuity of life, life that doesn’t need religion to explain or justify our existence. Considering Rowson’s humanist leanings I am thinking that in some way Stuff is a book for or about Everyman and parallels his acknowledgement: “It was a wonderful example of the therapeutic power of anecdote”. As Coupland and Warhol capture, the book that we have inside us is autobiographical; anecdotes that have shaped us into who we are that come in all the shades of human virtues and vices. One day I will write something longer than a Haiku:
Stuff: Everybody
has their own anecdote; life
recalled before death.
CJHD
30-May-13
Fortunately Martin Rowson didn’t heed the Hitchens plea and has written a book that feels as if it has come from within me. The dust cover said he “weaves together dreams, memories, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, parental advice, history, smells, sounds and sights to recreate the lives of his parents, their times and his, and the lives of his other parents, the one who died when he was ten, the one he didn’t know who died when he was in his thirties, and the last one, who maybe never existed at all.” . . . “Stuff is part memoir, part reminiscence, but mostly a funny thought provoking and ultimately moving meditation on families, life, love, disease, death, grief and memory and the existential horrors of clearing out the attic.” Time and again my recall was prompted by something I could have substituted into the Rowson narrative. In effect Rowson has written the book that I have inside me. For instance, “The name Rowson has been a burden to me for most of my life. It’s not that I resent it, or don’t like it, or am embarrassed by it, like it was Hitler or Twatbottom or something like that. In fact, I think it’s a rather good name, slightly out of the ordinary. The problem is entirely practical.” . . . “To put the record straight, the first syllable rhymes with crow, not with cow. It might seem to you to be no big thing and that I’m making too much of a fuss about this, but for nearly five decades I’ve winced inside whenever people get that the wrong way round, and I have to make an instant judgement call on whether I politely correct them or let it go and prepare myself for the next time, the error now compounded beyond reach.” My whole life seems to have been characterised by the same judgement call, correcting with a ‘my name is like the alphabet, C comes before D’ accompanied with a cringe for drawing attention to a flaw in their perfection or to forever hold my peace.
There are so many hooks in this Stuff; George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma kicks off the penultimate chapter entitled The Doctor’s Plot; the Shaw connection probably representing the most prized possession that I inherited via my father from my maternal grandfather, the 1934 Constable publication of Prefaces by Bernard Shaw. I have thought this the most profound book I have ever read and was pleasantly reminded by Google that I had written a review when I finished reading it when I was in a Haiku writing phase:
Decisive thinking
Eloquent writing; history
in the making.
Just as I think the preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma should be required reading for medical students about to become medical practitioners, so I think Rowson’s The Doctor’s Plot should also be required reading for doctors and lawyers alike: “The year my parents died, when we were all quite drunk, I suggested to (colleagues of Rowson’s barrister wife) that, all in all, lawyers had done more good for society in general than doctors had ever done.” . . . “Lawyers know that they’re the scum of the earth, whereas doctors think that they’re God.” One can feel Shaw’s rapier is out and ready to cut God down to size.
I think I bought Stuff on a whim attracted by the dust cover illustration, the title and the publisher’s description on the inside of the dust cover. Most intriguing was the illustration which is loaded with meaning by the time the end is reached from the CCCP clock on the back to the partially obscured sign “Waitem”, which in the final chapter is revealed to be a Maori word “Waitemata”, the name of the harbour that dominated my growing up. And then there was: “As he was getting dressed to go into hospital the morning he died, my step mother asked him what he thought was wrong. Almost the last thing he said to her was: ‘I don’t know, but I think it’s terminal.’” I immediately wanted to record my father’s last words; my mother and I were visiting him in hospital, he was obviously terribly ill and in much pain. My mother’s dementia prevented her taking in what was happening, she knew but didn’t know. As we sat there a nurse arrived with a morphine pump to be set up; our presence stopped her in her tracks and in all kindness spouted forth about how important it was that we talked and shared this time together and much else that was Politically Correct for the conscientious and empathic nurse. She said she would come back to set up the morphine pump, it was that important that we had this time together. Mum had no idea what was happening; the penny dropped for me that Dad was in the terminal phase of his illness, the liver cancer diagnosis confirmed the day before; Dad, exhausted but alert to the end, opened his eyes, took the oxygen mask off his face and said quite clearly glaring at the back of the departing nurse “Don’t they piss you off!” And that was that; the next time I saw him he had died.
The structure of Stuff is akin to Jerome K Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; a chapter title heralds a theme where threads introduced throughout the book are woven into their relationship to this theme. As the dust cover said it is a story of adoption, and the threads and themes advertise the continuity of life, life that doesn’t need religion to explain or justify our existence. Considering Rowson’s humanist leanings I am thinking that in some way Stuff is a book for or about Everyman and parallels his acknowledgement: “It was a wonderful example of the therapeutic power of anecdote”. As Coupland and Warhol capture, the book that we have inside us is autobiographical; anecdotes that have shaped us into who we are that come in all the shades of human virtues and vices. One day I will write something longer than a Haiku:
Stuff: Everybody
has their own anecdote; life
recalled before death.
CJHD
30-May-13
Displaying 1 of 1 review