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Patrick Daniel

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Patrick Daniel is currently reading

Porcelain: A Memoir

by Moby

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May 07, 2026 07:34AM

Patrick Daniel is currently reading

Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in May 2024

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Patrick Daniel said: " 'Clarrie Long's jacket and the jackets of the five other drivers are the first racing colours I have seen, but I know already that I am going to study racing colours for the rest of my life. I will still stare at skies and lilac bushes, but only to h 'Clarrie Long's jacket and the jackets of the five other drivers are the first racing colours I have seen, but I know already that I am going to study racing colours for the rest of my life. I will still stare at skies and lilac bushes, but only to help me understand racing colours.'

'From that time onwards also, the man was anxious to find a group of people among whom he could behave as the narrator of On the Road behaved among his friends.'

I would have to reserve a five star rating for the poetic tightness of Murnane's The Plains, which was where I caught the bug, but copious are the wild ideas, tender admissions and slow burns in this one. Perhaps it rewards dipping into, rather than blitzing through like I just have. There are a few novellas in here which need the slow attention more often reserved for novels.

There is a temptation to read quickly because the narrators (or sometimes it thirds out to a main character) and their interests are repetitive, and yet the limited nature of Murnane's focus is also what makes him exciting and different. We're often a writer who used to teach writing, and who at another time worked a boring job, or some slightly differing shade of that, and we're exploring why pieces of imagery have captured the imagination or lingered in the memory throughout life. There's quiet Catholic childhoods, teenage sexual confusion, work and family early in adult life, and then the squeeze of writerly awakening usually a bit later. That emphasis on older people having artistic revelations in some of the stories felt particularly refreshing, even validating to this 30+ reader.

What I most loved was the presentation of writing and reading which sucked the mystique out of both. Here, within the worlds of the stories, we have references to books liked and barely remembered, books judged on the basis of an imagined horse race between the letters, writing done to understand why you can't stop thinking about a particular thing or why you relate two things to each other, and once that connection's made the story's over. Stories never read if the title has even one noun in it that refers to something which is not an object or person.

The plainness of the landscapes the characters look out at captures a certain kind of rural/suburban stimulus-dearth many will relate to, if you're from somewhere like that. These broad strokes of sky and bush also contribute to the Rothko-like effect brought about by these panes of text (the paragraphs are long) which elucidate thoughts that would ordinarily seem simple, or to be a given.

The Peter Jefferies album 'The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World' was a good pairing for reasons that are probably hokey and lame really (GM - Aus, PJ - NZ), but alternating between listens to that and dips into this on a long train journey through East Anglia recently seemed to take each experience a bit further out.

My three favourite stories were 'When the Mice Failed to Arrive', 'Velvet Waters' and 'The White Cattle of Uppington'. ...more "

Jun 01, 2024 01:02AM · see review