Woke up this morning to a sky of mist, all along the river valley, and now it’s rolling in again.

So I finally got around to reading How Proust Can Change Your Life.
I know. I know. A decade later than everyone else. What’s your point?
But I really never seem to be as impressed by Alain de Botton as other people. The Consolation of Philosophy was fine, so far as pop philosophy goes, but his self-referential style sometimes makes me squirm. I actively disliked The Art of Travel.
By the time we get to read the more recent releases (Status Anxiety, or whatever it was, and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work) there has been so much hype and endless exclusive interviews, there’s little left to actually learn or absorb from his writing.
I don’t get it.
If I’m in the mood for a quick dip I’d much rather read A C Grayling. Or the originals. Or even Monty Python (“Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle”, from memory) which, let’s face it, can provide just as much consolation in certain situations as Boethius.
Equally hilarious, albeit unintentionally, is Fromelles, by Patrick Lindsay. I’m alternating between reading it with glee and throwing it in a corner and trying to forget I ever started it.
And don’t go accusing me of being unAustralian or spitting on the graves of our poor dead Digger ancestors. It’s simply a poorly written book.
The only way to read it, I’ve decided, is to actively engage with its most maddening fault: that is, play Count the Cliche.
Pick a page – any page. Here are a few from a single paragraph on page 2, for example:
“two armies faced each other locked in a death struggle” (that might count as two)
“hunkered down”
“young men, brimming with promise and potential”
“show no outward fear, but their eyes betray them”
“the air is foul with cordite”
“you can feel it in your bones”
“moment of truth”
“pent-up kinetic energy”
“straining like dogs on the lead”
“count the minutes”
“taste of battle”
“invincibility of youth”
“prove his manhood”
And as a special bonus, that’s all in randomly alternating first and second person.
Then there’s a History Channel-style outline of World War 1, complete with the usual (and again cliched) outraged editorialising about Haig et al.
Oh it’s fabulous.
I really wish I could get to the bit where they start researching and digging for what will no doubt be “the forgotten Anzacs”. But I’m not sure I can last that long.

Feeling motivated to finish/redraft my new novel for young readers: it’s a kind of philosophers versus Inquisition adventure.
I’ve set myself a deadline. The fingers are tapping.

It would be remiss of me not to link to this meditation on Mother’s Day without a mother.
It’s about my mother-in-law.

The Maid of Buttermere, the first of Melvyn Bragg’s novels I’ve read, begins as a fascinating pastoral – part Hardy, part riff on Sublime tourism (with which I’m a little obsessed) but then turns, quite consciously, into a kind of pseudo contemporary reportage. The concluding sections are not nearly as compelling as a result, and … you know when you get that feeling that you can sense the author at work?

Notes From a Small Island, Bill Bryson’s homage to Britain. It’s not as hilarious as some of his work but I realised why I like him in spite of his many frustrating habits – he never talks to anyone. He travels all over Britain – well, bits, anyway – without any of that extrovert travel writer pallsy chat in the pub bollocks that makes the writer feel they truly understand a place in which they have just arrived and therefore able to convey its deepest secrets to the rest of us. I hate that. The other option of course is the Theroux misanthropic interaction with fellow travellers in order to describe them in scathing terms in a travel book. So Bryon’s rare brushes with unavoidable conversationalists are refreshing, and it’s actually quite a relief to travel around in his head and not pretend otherwise.

Sybil’s Cave, Catherine Padmore’s assured and evocative debut novel, set on the Hawkesbury, Fascist Italy and in post-war London, with all three places expressively and convincingly conveyed with a minimum of fuss and good strong characterisation. I look forward to her next.

Tales From A Broad. I list this only to warn you. It’s by Fran Lebowitz. No, not that one, as it turns out. As I found out too late. Dreadful. Didn’t even finish it. The kind of writer WHO HAS TO USE CAPITALS TO TELL YOU WHEN TO GET READY FOR SOMETHING FUNNY. How these things get printed is beyond me.

Elvin’s Mottoes Revised. What a gem. Hours of endless entertainment. I’ve decided I need a motto. Who wouldn’t, when you could use:
Mone sale (Advise with wit)
Optima revelatio stella (A star is the best revelation)
In utroque paratus (Prepared in either case)
And my favourite – picture the knight trembling behind his visor – Comitae quam viribus (By mildness rather than force)
Or even Bibe si sapis (Drink if you are wise).

Reading:
Susan Sontag’s diary, Reborn.
Strangely disappointing, though perhaps just an anti-climax due to over-zealous reviews and sweaty anticipation on my part.
Of course, it’s interesting to see her ambition intellectual nature form itself over the years, especially those precocious early years; and a few passages dwell on some questions of moral philosophy she developed further in her writing.
There are peeks inside the personal life of a famously private/famously public person. You can’t beat that.
But the private declarations and musing about her sexuality, while familiar, are far from profound: reminiscent of, but not a shade on, Barbara Deming and others.
I suppose one just expects more from someone whose essays make you gasp with recognition or wonder – or more often groan silently with shame that the moral or political arguments she outlines didn’t occur to you when they are so blindingly logical.
But that’s the point, I suppose, of being the voice of a generation.
I also wonder why some entries (eg the addresses of agents or bookshops) are even published except as a vague marker of activity in the world, when so many notes are obviously omitted. The lists of movies Sontag has seen or books she wants to read speak both of her ferocious appetite for ideas and images and input.

But the most compelling passages are the 1957 ‘Notes from a childhood’, a stream of consciousness mini-memoir; and those in which her forensic self-awareness leads her to dig painful at truths, particularly about her relationships.
It all begs the question why someone so sure of herself and so entrenched in queer life – and so honest about so many of her thoughts – was never open about her sexuality.
Perhaps the publication of more notebooks will explain.

Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant
In this book, Grenville crosses the gulf she created for herself in The Secret River, allowing for – in fact exploring – first contact between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the early days of settlement.
It’s interesting, given the debates around Secret River: or rather, the debates around her statements about that book.
I think Grenville acknowledges the wishful thinking of so many white people, now and then (let’s be honest) to be special, to understand Aboriginal life fully, to be free of any shame or guilt from past or present – our own or others’. Of course most of us stuff it up just like everyone else – we remain as complicit as every other whitefella while imagining we would be Rooke/Dawes rather than his trigger-happy First Fleet comrades. It’s a fine old Australian literary tradition, Aboriginalism, and frankly I’m not quite sure where Grenville lands – whether she falls under its spell or is exploring the idea.
In both books there is confusion in the response to brutality. In Dawes/Rooke she has a fundamentally good man through which to work these dilemmas. He devotes his life after Sydney Cove to Abolition and slave welfare. Is he an exemplar? Is he too special – too good – to be a model for the rest of us? Do our own moral shortcomings find an escape in such good people?
We can rest assured when good people exist – when Wilberforce or Oxfam are on the case – knowing that somewhere in history – somewhere in the world – someone better than us (me) is actually doing something, responding as we would wish our best selves to do?
But she makes certain of one thing: “This is a novel,” she writes in her Author’s Note. “It should not be mistaken for history.” She has even changed the names of people such as Arthur Phillip, which is perhaps taking things a little too far.
Nobody mistook The Secret River for history, surely: it was Grenville who muddied the waters with her own hand. But we shall let that debate rest, for now. What we can say though is that Grenville is brave enough to wade into that tide (stretching the metaphor about as far as it will go) of historical reflection and contemporary reaction. And good on her for that.

(Also been reading Peter Ackroyd’s Fall of Troy and am now onto the Edna Walling biography.)

Watching:
Slumdog Mllionaire
Like everyone else.
The Hours
Yes, I know I’m several years too late but it’s one of those films everyone tells you to see, and whenever everybody tells me to do something I won’t. So I’d never seen it and I wish I hadn’t because now I am retrospectively furious Kidman won the Oscar for that dull performance when Meryl and Julianne Moore had both more screentime and twenty times the impact.
Milk
Cried from the moment he made his first speech. Love a good biopic. Couldn’t quite believe I was watching a mainstream one about a gay icon. Harvey would be over the moon. Bless him.

Writing:
My novel about La Maupin.

This weekend I’ll be reading/speaking at a benefit for our furry and feathered friends who have survived the bushfires.
Writers for Wildlife
Abbotsford Convent
Sunday, March 22
1.30pm.

The roads are open. Not all of them, of course, as in Kinglake and other towns they are still sifting through the wreckage.
But I drove up to my place in the country on Saturday: the usual way, through Steels Creek and Yarra Glen, up through the Toolangi Forest, past Castella and through Glenburn to Yea and Yarck and my little half-acre which is still as I left it. But the world around it has changed beyond belief, beyond sadness.
I’ve driven through aftermath before, indeed I’ve driven through flaming bush. Every day for months I drove through the Royal National Park after the fire – blackened, then a glimmer of green.
But this…
There are parts that look like a normal bushfire has been through – bits of remnant foliage, some ground cover – maybe old trunks – for wildlife, a tree here and there untouched, the forest floor clears but substantial shrubs burned but still there. Horrifying but still a chance of survival for burrowing creatures and sturdy plants.
But there are parts of Toolangi that look like nothing I’ve ever seen. Bare charred trunks. And that’s it.
It’s as if there had never been any understorey at all. No skeletal saplings. No cover for anything.
Just trunks and a ghostly rain of grey leaves falling, then carpeting the ground.
Nothing can have survived it.
Whole populations of creatures must have been wiped out, just as whole townships have been reduced to the odd chimney and a tangle of iron.
So it must be a good thing that I’m reading/speaking at a benefit on March 22 at Abbotsford Convent – Writers for Wildlife – to support the recovery.
I’ll post details here soon.

The rain has come. For the moment.
The sky is clear of smoke.
And I am on holidays.

There’s a poisonous pink sunrise this morning – the sun’s coming up behind the smoke that’s spread across the sky from the Yarra Valley, a few miles away.
It’s very still.
No wind is a good wind, right?
Usually when there are bushfires you hope for a change in the wind – this time we know that’s a profoundly selfish hope, because these fires are so entangled around communities that one person’s longed-for wind change is another’s deepest dread.
Healesville is back on high alert. Yarck is just in purgatory. Like so many others.
And so it goes on…