St John Karp Ramblings of an Ornamental Hermit en-US Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Sun, 03 Jul 2022 06:42:04 EDT “Carry On Screaming!” (1966) <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="'Carry On Screaming!' title card." src="" /> </figure> <p>This is the first film I&rsquo;ve written about from the long-running Carry On franchise so I should start by describing what the hell they are. They&rsquo;re almost unknown to Americans, but for twenty years the English made thirty of these movies, all with names like <cite>Carry On Sergeant</cite>, <cite>Carry On Doctor</cite>, or <cite>Carry On Cleo</cite>. They started as fairly snappy comedies that mixed a few no-hopers together to mock respected institutions like the army and hospitals. As they inched towards the 1970s, however, sexual innuendo became more and more the lynchpin of the Carry On style. What was some cheeky colour in the 1950s films turned into some pretty outrageous and tasteless raunch by the mid-70s, so what you get out of a Carry On very much depends on which one you see. On the whole they are sexist, tacky, outright racist in places, and almost universally homophobic.</p> <p>So why are they so much <em>fun</em>? These films each starred largely the same cast of actors playing largely the same roles, so you always know what you&rsquo;re going to get. You get to see familiar faces goofing around for ninety minutes; you get to see them put in more and more outrageous roles from cowboys to Julius Caesar; you get frankly some of the best puns and innuendo ever penned; and you get to see <em>the</em> campest bunch of actors ever assembled, because for the long time that homosexuality was outlawed in England being a performer was the only way these actors could let it all out in public. And it comes out in spades. Watching Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey chewing the scenery is always a complete delight.</p> <p>Take this example from <cite>Carry On Matron</cite> (1972), featuring an exchange between Williams and Hawtrey in a hospital:</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 600px;"> <video style="width: 600px;" controls> <source src="" type="video/mp4" /> </video> </figure> <p>Hawtrey&rsquo;s hideous wig, Williams&rsquo; flaring nostrils, and both of them outrageously camp&hellip; How can you not love it? For my money the second Hawtrey saunters onto the screen and demures, &ldquo;Oh, helloooo,&rdquo; is the highlight of every film. So no, I can&rsquo;t defend the things these movies get wrong, but there is so much to love about what they get right. Even nowadays there is no modern version of the Carry On films. Seeing one of these is like seeing old friends, and what&rsquo;s more you can tell you&rsquo;re watching a movie where the cast is having a ball. Compare Brendan Fraser&rsquo;s <cite>The Mummy</cite> (1999), where everyone is clearly having fun with the material, with Tom Cruise&rsquo;s <cite>The Mummy</cite> (2017), in which the cast is visibly miserable, and you&rsquo;ll see what I mean. There is a real delight in watching people enjoy themselves.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="A young man in Edwardian clothes." src="" /> </figure> <p><cite>Carry On Screaming!</cite> is a middle-of-the-road entry in the franchise. It&rsquo;s not as much of a real film as the earlier ones, but it&rsquo;s not the straight-up smut of the later ones. It comes at the time the franchise started doing direct parodies of other genres &mdash; Westerns, Roman epics, James Bond, and in this case the Hammer horror films, which makes it a great October flick for me. Jim Dale plays a young man on a date in the woods with his paramour when they are disturbed by something wandering around in the undergrowth.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="A hairly wolfman type thing." src="" /> </figure> <p>See, what I love about the English is their unerring dedication to cinematic realism.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="A very camp evil scientist." src="" /> </figure> <p>Kenneth Williams is our main Carry On regular here, starring as a mad scientist Doctor Watt (&ldquo;Doctor Who was my uncle, but I haven&rsquo;t seen him in years.&rdquo;) A school chum of Doctor Frankenstein and Doctor Jekyll, Watt has pioneered a revivification process that can bring back the dead. He&rsquo;s also invented a vitrification process that turns living people into plastic mannequins, which he sells to department stores because we all know how stingy universities are with their grants. You bring a couple of neanderthals back to life and suddenly no-one wants to give you funding because your research is &ldquo;unholy&rdquo; and &ldquo;usurping the role of God.&rdquo; All I know is if Watt had been born a hundred years later he&rsquo;d have made a fortune. There isn&rsquo;t an actress in all of Hollywood who wouldn&rsquo;t pay to be preserved young and brought back to life.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="A Vampira-like woman and an evil scientist." src="" /> </figure> <p>It&rsquo;s typical for Carry Ons to have a dolly-bird type character, often played by Barbara Windsor. The female lead in this one is Fenella Fielding, who seems to love the chance to bust out a Vampira impression. She has one of those whiskey-soaked voices that makes her completely wonderful to watch.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="The elfin-looking Charles Hawtrey." src="" /> </figure> <p>A last-minute addition to this one was Charles Hawtrey. It&rsquo;s a pity he doesn&rsquo;t have a larger role here because he&rsquo;s one of my favourites. He has this perpetually impish twinkle in his eye and his whole presentation is so light-footed and elfin that, even though Hawtrey was obviously gay, he comes off on screen as having no sexuality and no gender. It was one of the great tragedies of the Carry On franchise that, even though the actors were having fun with the material, they were often very unhappy in their own lives. Hawtrey, for example, resented being in these low comedies and wound up drinking himself to death some years later. Williams was another one &mdash; tormented by his unfulfilled sexuality and by a host of medical problems until he couldn&rsquo;t stand the pain. I&rsquo;ll be honest, when I watch one of these movies, I also enjoy the feeling of being in the company of people who I know had problems. Their laughter makes the world a little brighter, but their sadness makes it a little less lonely. <a href="" target="_blank">Carry On Darkly</a>, for anyone interested, is a documentary about how troubled the cast were in real life.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="A man in very unconvincing drag." src="" /> </figure> <p>And of course, because the English find it endlessly hilarious, we have a man in very unconvincing drag. Peter Butterworth is another great comic actor. He was also a war hero and took part in an escape attempt from a German POW camp during the Second World War. When he later auditioned for a part in a film about the escape, he was turned down because he wasn&rsquo;t good looking enough.</p> <h2>The Skinny</h2> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Doctor Watt in a vat of something nasty." src="" /> </figure> <p>&ldquo;Frying tonight!&rdquo;</p> <p>It&rsquo;s camp, it&rsquo;s goofy, and it&rsquo;s very funny. <cite>Carry On Screaming!</cite> has about the normal mix of genuinely wonderful jokes and groan-inducing stinkers, and as ever the enormous talent of its cast not only helps carry the film, it <em>makes</em> the film. There has never been another franchise like the Carry Ons, though I could possibly name the Leprechaun and Scary Movie franchises as close cousins. I&rsquo;d love to see something that takes the charm and wit of the Carry Ons and brings them into the 21st century &mdash; something that sheds the sexism and homophobia and brings us something irreverent, satirical, and clever &mdash; but until then, it&rsquo;s hard to beat the classics. If you want some honest Halloween fun, <cite>Carry On Screaming!</cite> is a great watch. Of course I had to wait until my boyfriend had gone to sleep to avoid his vocal protests, but I suspect he&rsquo;s just getting back at me because I fell asleep in the middle of <cite>Suspiria</cite>.</p> St John Karp Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT “Mame” (1974) <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Mame title card." src="" /> </figure> <p>One of my favourite reads of 2020 was <cite>Auntie Mame</cite> by Patrick Dennis, which follows the misadventures of a fabulous, hard-partying aunt who sends her nephew to naked schools and gets into all kinds of scrapes. I loved the novel instantly, but I dreaded watching the 1958 film adaptation because the book is quite risqué for the 1950s (underage sex, swearing, interracial relationships, you name it) and I thought the film would have to strip all that out. To be fair it did, but it&rsquo;s such a good movie I couldn&rsquo;t hold that against it. But I knew that lurking in the background was the ill-starred 1974 adaptation starring Lucille Ball. This movie is nearly universally reviled, not least by the people who were in it (Bea Arthur called it a &ldquo;terrible embarrassment&rdquo;). So how much of a dent do you reckon we can put in this two-hour-and-twelve-minute epic musical?</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="A hideous overlapping of three images." src="" /> </figure> <p>We&rsquo;re not even past the opening credits and already we&rsquo;re in trouble. Agnes Gooch, the maid, sings a musical prayer to a patron saint while the screen shows <em>three</em> different images overlaid on each other, one of which is a gaudy colourful backdrop. Hoo boy, strap yourselves in, kids.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Bea Arthur as a fabulous 20s flapper." src="" /> </figure> <p>The first scene of the story is the roaring cocktail party where Mame&rsquo;s nephew Patrick meets her for the first time. The book tells us right off the bat that there&rsquo;s men dressed as women and women dressed as men bitching about their friends. I love it! So how&rsquo;s this going to translate? We have Bea Arthur playing Mame&rsquo;s best friend Vera, and she looks fabulous in the part. I won&rsquo;t lie, at first I thought she was the man dressed as a woman because she has such a low voice. So where <em>are</em> our cross-dressers? They&rsquo;re in the 1958 version &mdash; but not in the 1974 version? Sexual revolution my arse!</p> <p>Both the novel and the 1958 film introduce us to Mame as a Chinese woman. Patrick doesn&rsquo;t know his aunt and confuses her for someone else because she&rsquo;s done up in some exotic costume for her party, which would have been a bit naughty and disreputable in the 20s when this scene takes place. I was so curious how they&rsquo;d pull this off without being offensive, but Rosalind Russell in the 1958 film <em>nails</em> this! She&rsquo;s done up in Chinese-style clothes that mercifully don&rsquo;t come anywhere near to offensive. But what about Lucille Ball?</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Lucille Ball as Mame." src="" /> </figure> <p>What the actual fuck? Did my contacts just fall out? I can&rsquo;t fucking <em>see</em> her. And she&rsquo;s certainly not wearing anything particularly edgy. This film was pilloried at the time for shooting Ball&rsquo;s close-ups in extreme soft focus and I have to agree, it&rsquo;s jarring as hell. Constantly trying to refocus my eyes started giving me a headache. It doesn&rsquo;t help that all this happens during an interminable musical number that might be the first song I ever heard that doesn&rsquo;t have a tune. Which brings me to another point &mdash; Lucille Ball can&rsquo;t sing. She <em>used</em> to, I&rsquo;m positive, but I guess her voice had just gone by the time she did this movie because she&rsquo;s so off-note it&rsquo;s like listening to Florence Foster Jenkins.</p> <p>One scene that actually comes off well is Vera&rsquo;s theatrical production, where she dresses up as a lady astronomer and sings, &ldquo;The man in the moon is a lady. The cow that jumped over cried jumpin&rsquo; Jehova!&rdquo; It&rsquo;s the best song yet, frankly, and it&rsquo;s the joke song. Not an auspicious sign. When Mame brings down the whole production Vera gets this line:</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <video style="width: 800px;" controls> <source src="" type="video/mp4"> </video> <figcaption>&#8220;I have an astronomical discovery for you. The man in the moon is a bitch!&#8221;</figcaption> </figure> <p>Aha, now we&rsquo;re getting somewhere! I was struggling to figure out why this film falls so flat, but just now we got a very funny line and a great delivery from Bea Arthur &mdash; so what <em>is</em> wrong with it? Part of the problem is that the music is boring and maudlin. Part of the problem is the flat, static direction. But you can&rsquo;t avoid laying a lot of the blame at Lucille Ball&rsquo;s feet. I can&rsquo;t think why a veteran comedian like her should fall so flat at this. On paper she&rsquo;d be great for the role, but it&rsquo;s like she&rsquo;s not even trying. I don&rsquo;t mind, as some people have pointed out, that she&rsquo;s a little too old for the part. I just don&rsquo;t see Mame&rsquo;s glamour &mdash; or, sadly, her humour. Aaaand then we launch into yet another flavourless song. Kill me now. I have to confess I only fast-forwarded through the rest of the movie because I was only forty minutes in and the prospect of another hour and a half was too much to bear.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Agnes Gooch dressed as a Christmas tree." src="" /> </figure> <p>When you haven&rsquo;t bought a Christmas tree yet and you don&rsquo;t feel like paying for one. Stick a bauble on me and scatter some presents around my feet, no-one&rsquo;ll know the difference.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Mame holding up a fox." src="" /> </figure> <p>Who was it who saw Gloria Swanson in a film with a lion and remarked, &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t tell which one of them is stuffed&rdquo;?</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Men and women in fox hunting outfits." src="" /> </figure> <p>Christ, not more music. I can&rsquo;t with this.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Mame presents some single mothers." src="" /> </figure> <p>In the last scene of the film, Mame gets up the noses of some racist snobs by buying the property next to theirs and building a home for single mothers. While I like the sentiment, I feel like this takes some of the wind out of the scene&rsquo;s sails &mdash; both the novel and the 1958 version have Mame installing Jewish people next door to aggravate the racists. Why they decided to swap out racism with generic class snobbery is beyond me because they missed the chance to make one of the story&rsquo;s great statements. They do look like a fairly diverse bunch and the snobs are characterised as racists, but then why change the end? It feels like a timid choice. Oh well. This film has been anything but courageous, so I shouldn&rsquo;t have expected them to stand for anything at the end.</p> <h2>The Skinny</h2> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Mame and Patrick on top of the Statue of Liberty." src="" /> <figcaption>I hope she falls off.</figcaption> </figure> <p>&ldquo;Life&rsquo;s a banquet, and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.&rdquo;</p> <p>This movie is exhausting. Poor direction, poor casting, poor acting, poor songwriting, and a timid production conspire to make this damn near unwatchable. Bea Arthur is as great as ever, but even she can&rsquo;t do much to float this cinematic Titanic. Do yourself a favour and watch the 1958 version with Rosalind Russell. You won&rsquo;t regret it.</p> St John Karp Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT “The People” (1972) <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="'The People' title card." src="" /> </figure> <p>During my misspent youth I picked up one of my Dad&rsquo;s old science fiction books called <cite>The Anything Box</cite> by Zenna Henderson and fell in love immediately. It was a collection of short stories that were beautiful, gentle, haunting, and infused with warmth. I did a little more digging and read that Henderson was a short story writer in the 1950s but her day job was as a schoolteacher, which explained why she was so good at writing these stories that centered around domestic situations. While the men were writing about spaceships and intergalactic wars, Henderson wrote science fiction stories about children, teachers, mothers, and friends. She wrote about rural communities, in many ways embodying the same American Gothic aesthetic as Shirley Jackson (her story &ldquo;Walking Aunt Daid&rdquo; would not be out of place in an anthology with Jackson&rsquo;s work). It&rsquo;s always pained me, though, that Henderson seems largely unread these days. The only recent reference I&rsquo;ve seen to her was yesterday when I picked up an anthology of science fiction by women called <cite>The Future is Female!</cite> (which, by the way, rocks) and read that they made a TV movie in 1972 based on Henderson&rsquo;s short stories about &ldquo;The People&rdquo;, a group of alien refugees who&rsquo;ve taken up residence on Earth in a small mountain town. I knew where I wanted to be for movie night. I fired up the dodgy ex-VHS transfer I found on YouTube and away we went.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="A woman stranded in the hills." src="" /> </figure> <p>The film starts with Melodye Amerson, a young schoolteacher who has broken up with her boyfriend to come teach in Bendo, a small town in the mountains. They do a good job of characterising her as an outsider even when she was at home &mdash; she&rsquo;s discontent but she doesn&rsquo;t know why. Then the bus drops her miles from anywhere without so much as a GameBoy to keep her company. Wait, that&rsquo;s anachronistic, what did they do for fun in 1972? Without so much as a Vietnam War to keep her company. There we go, nailed it. Topical, like a rash.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="One of the locals with a scarf on her head." src="" /> </figure> <p>Melodye is waiting around for ages when out of the hills lurches <em>this</em> character, all sinister in her head-scarf, looking for all the world like Little Edie Beale from <cite>Grey Gardens</cite>:</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 800px;"> <img alt="Little Edie from 'Grey Gardens'." src="" /> <figcaption>Little Edie: &#8220;Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono, so we had quite a fight.&#8221;</figcaption> </figure> <p>It must have been all the rage among the mountain hobos and washed-up aristocracy of the 1970s.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="A Vogue magazine on a fire." src="" /> </figure> <p>She has a creepy father and creepier grandmother, and a vendetta against Vogue magazine apparently &mdash; as soon as Melodye&rsquo;s back is turned they chuck her fashion mag on the fire. Fuck <em>this</em> issue in particular.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="A young boy in a cowboy hat." src="" /> </figure> <p>As Melodye is preparing for the first day of school she bumps into a young boy who introduces himself as Francher. Now YouTube&rsquo;s auto-generated subtitles had a whale of a time with this one. By turns he was Vanja, Rancher, Friendship, Prancer, and Franchise. It was beginning to sound like the line-up of reindeer pulling Santa&rsquo;s sleigh. &ldquo;On Prancer, on Vanja, on Franchise and Rancher! Look sharp, Rudolf isn&rsquo;t going to bully himself.&rdquo;</p> <p>Melodye has a hard time getting through to the kids of Bendo, who all seem to be humourless and hate music. They shuffle their feet disconsolately and any time there&rsquo;s any suggestion of fun, an adult is there to shut it down.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="A tractor that's gone tits-up." src="" /> </figure> <p>One of the children collapses in a fit so they call for the outsider doctor, but the problem isn&rsquo;t the little girl &mdash; one of the farmers has been injured by his tractor and the girl is feeling some kind of sympathetic pain. <em>How</em> the farmer got injured by the tractor defies the imagination, because it looks like he was driving it along when the entire tractor flipped over and landed on top of him. Must have been that tornado that recently knocked over an Amazon warehouse and held up all my packages.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="Melodye being lifted up into the air." src="" /> </figure> <p>Melodye gets into an argument with Francher, who claims the people in Bendo have psychic abilities. That&rsquo;s why the girl had collapsed &mdash; she was feeling the pain of the injured farmer. He gets so wound up about it that he lifts her off the ground using psychokinesis. The film handles Melodye&rsquo;s reaction to this really well &mdash; she&rsquo;s crying, she&rsquo;s scared, but she cares about the children and wants to stay to help them. It&rsquo;s a moving scene and a fantastic character moment for Melodye. It&rsquo;s the kind of moment I love in Henderson&rsquo;s writing and which suits this no-budget TV movie perfectly. If they made this today it&rsquo;d be full of tits and explosions.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="An illustration of a celestial woman." src="" /> </figure> <p>Slowly Melodye breaks the spell of silence over the children and gets them to draw what they remember of &ldquo;The Home&rdquo;, which turns out to be an alien planet that they had to leave. When the People came to Earth they crash landed and were scattered, since when they&rsquo;ve banded into small communities in fear of persecution from the humans. Here, again, we get something that&rsquo;s much more effective in the children&rsquo;s drawings than it would be if you shot it in some hideous CGI flashback.</p> <p>By the end of the movie Melodye has found a new home for herself with people she cares about, and so have the People, who for the first time are realising they can be themselves on Earth without scaring off the humans and being persecuted as witches.</p> <h2>The Skinny</h2> <figure class="center" style="width: 640px;"> <img alt="A close-up of an old woman." src="" /> </figure> <p>&ldquo;Outsiders are here. Obla forbids it.&rdquo;</p> <p>Parker said this is a new subgenre of science fiction &mdash; &ldquo;quiet sci-fi&rdquo;, something that&rsquo;s slower paced and relaxing that deals more with the characters than with epic space-opera posturing. It slots in beautifully with the kindness-oriented literature that&rsquo;s been popular lately in the work of T. J. Klune and Becky Chambers, or in TV shows like <cite>Steven Universe</cite>, only of course Henderson was sixty years ahead of her time.</p> <p>We all liked <cite>The People</cite>. I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s anyone&rsquo;s favourite movie, but it&rsquo;s a solid watch and did a wonderful job of adapting the Zenna Henderson short stories that I&rsquo;ve loved for so long. The low budget only helps this film as it forces us to interact with the people in it rather than getting distracted by artless effects work. It seems like the kind of science fiction my grandmother would have liked, and I mean that in the best way possible.</p> St John Karp Thu, 16 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT Books Wot I Read in 2021 <p>It&rsquo;s been a bumper year for reading, and not just because I left my day job in June; the 73 books on this list were actually spread fairly evenly throughout the year. I don&rsquo;t know why, but it feels like life turned a corner. I&rsquo;ve been happier and more motivated, and I&rsquo;ve been intellectually curious in a way that I haven&rsquo;t been since my long depression years ago. I&rsquo;ve had some realisations about my life and my career and I have a lot of good ideas about where I want to go next. Maybe I&rsquo;ve become more placid and equanimous as I hurtle towards the grave. It&rsquo;s a nice feeling.</p> <p>The year&rsquo;s books always give me the chance to reflect on who I was and what I was doing when I read them. I read <cite>Don&rsquo;t Tell Alfred</cite> before the January 6 insurrection and I&rsquo;ll take all the credit for my uncanny foresight. <cite>Swamplandia!</cite> was the last book my New Orleans book group read before finally disbanding due to everyone going through major life changes at the same time &mdash; I still haven&rsquo;t found a replacement for those wonderful people. I read <cite>A Confederacy of Dunces</cite> knowing I was leaving New Orleans soon, and <cite>Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet</cite> while sitting on the train headed for my new home with a snake smuggled in my luggage hoping she wouldn&rsquo;t escape in the night and eat a tourist. I read <cite>Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day</cite> while lying on an air mattress, body wracked with pain and bones made of glass because our furniture took five weeks to arrive from New Orleans. I read <cite>Beowulf</cite> while writing 1,600 words a day for National Novel Writing Month, desperate to be productive again and awash in admiration for a whole idiom of epic poetry that was new to me. Where else would someone &ldquo;unlock his word horde&rdquo;?</p> <p>The thing about doing anything well is I feel an obligation to keep it up (cue Kenneth Williams: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s fairly easy to get it up &mdash; it&rsquo;s getting it to stay up, that&rsquo;s what counts!&rdquo;) But I&rsquo;d drive myself crazy that way. It&rsquo;s impossible to keep all the plates spinning, and you just have to let some of them break. I can&rsquo;t promise to be half as productive next year, but I will set myself a mission: to read at least one difficult book I&rsquo;ve been putting off for a while. There&rsquo;s a number that fit the bill &mdash; <cite>Gravity&rsquo;s Rainbow</cite> by Thomas Pynchon, <cite>Summa Technologiae</cite> by Stanisław Lem, and <cite>Gödel, Escher, Bach</cite> by Douglas R. Hofstadter are all candidates. Wish me luck.</p> <ul> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Don't Tell Alfred' by Nancy Mitford" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Don&rsquo;t Tell Alfred</cite> by Nancy Mitford</p> <p>A novel about a diplomat who shows up to a new posting to find out her predecessor is still there and refuses to leave. It seemed relevant at the time! Apparently not Nancy Mitford&rsquo;s best work, but it was enjoyable enough for me. I look forward to reading some of her others.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Max and the Multiverse</cite> by Zachry Wheeler</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Solutions and Other Problems' by Allie Brosh" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Solutions and Other Problems</cite> by Allie Brosh</p> <p>Allie Brosh is a national treasure. <cite>Solutions</cite> is every bit as deep and rib-crackingly funny as her first book, <cite>Hyperbole and a Half</cite>. There aren&rsquo;t many books I would encourage absolutely everyone to read, but this is one of them.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Factory 19</cite> by Dennis Glover</p> <p>A cute premise about a commune where everyone pretends it&rsquo;s 1948. For anyone who knows me, this is my jam. I actually and unironically would love to live there, minus the fanaticism and violence that ultimately bring down the social experiment in the novel.</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue' by V. E. Schwab" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue</cite> by V. E. Schwab</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen</cite> by James Goss</p> <p>This marks the last attempt to dig up Douglas Adams&rsquo; corpse and reanimate it so the BBC can rake in a few extra spondulicks. Every last scrap of paper he ever sneezed on has now become its own novel. Can we leave him alone now please?</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Mr. Tot Aĉetas Mil Okulojn</cite> de Jean Forge</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Book of Frank</cite> by CAConrad</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Egyptologist' by Arthur Phillips" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Egyptologist</cite> by Arthur Phillips</p> <p>This was a bizarre novel that I enjoyed but didn&rsquo;t love until I reached the end. Phillips takes the exact opposite approach from me when it comes to writing historical novels. I&rsquo;ll just make up any old shit to please myself, but Phillips has done an excruciating amount of research that very few of his readers will even appreciate. I studied Egyptology at uni, so I was delighted by the references to old Egyptologists and Egyptian grammar, but those are just questions of detail. At heart this is about the essential unknowability of history and the insuperable cruelty of social class. Our protagonist spends his whole life delving into the sands of Egyptian history, and yet his own life is a cipher that his contemporaries can&rsquo;t untangle. It&rsquo;s an epistolary novel told from many different perspectives, and what makes it so clever is that none of the characters has a full picture of what&rsquo;s going on &mdash; only the reader knows what&rsquo;s happening, and even then not until the end, and even <em>then</em> not everything. I won&rsquo;t spoil anything but it&rsquo;s dark &mdash; <em>really</em> dark. I used to have nightmares about this. But at the same time it&rsquo;s rogueish and funny and certainly a great mystery story. It&rsquo;s one of those novels that&rsquo;s a little bit of everything, and it&rsquo;s one of the few I specifically intend to read again.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: Nightshade</cite> by Mark Gatiss</p> <p>You&rsquo;ll have to excuse the number of Doctor Who novels in the list as I continue my quest to work my way through all the New Adventures.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: Love and War</cite> by Paul Cornell</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>A Children&rsquo;s Bible</cite> by Lydia Millet</p> <p>Lydia Millet (whose name means &ldquo;Lydia Birdseed&rdquo;) has written a high-handed, redundant, and stultifying novel. It has all the charm of piece of ham that&rsquo;s fallen behind the fridge and its smug &ldquo;but think of the children&rdquo; morality leaves a taste in your mouth like a convenience-store cigar. It&rsquo;s about the dangers of climate change (I already knew about that, thanks) and lays the blame on the middle class for not protesting enough &mdash; not politicians, not corporations, not stockholders, not CEOs, not the people who are actually doing the polluting, not even a target as broad and ripe as capitalism in general, but teachers and doctors and artists. This is victim blaming at its obscene worst &mdash; like telling a bullied kid that they were asking for it. It&rsquo;s not only dangerously stupid, but also badly written &mdash; at one point God (actual literal God) shows up in a helicopter and shoots all the bad guys. This is the kind of novel that makes you deeply concerned for the mental health of the author. It&rsquo;s the only book I&rsquo;ve ever read that made me so angry I wanted to demand my money back, not because I felt cheated of the $16 I paid for the ebook (though I did) but because I didn&rsquo;t think the author deserved to benefit from my purchase.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>You&rsquo;re Ruining the Dystopia for Everyone!</cite> by Frank Conniff</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Imaginary Cities' by Darran Anderson" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Imaginary Cities</cite> by Darran Anderson</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Tales of the City</cite> by Armistead Maupin</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Tiny Alice</cite> by Edward Albee</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: Transit</cite> by Ben Aaronovitch</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>6am in the Universe</cite> by Benjamin Frater</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Last Ringbearer</cite> by Kirill Yeskov</p> <p><cite>Last Ringbearer</cite> is often touted as a Lord of the Rings fanfic that portrays Mordor as an up-and-coming industrial power that gets mobbed by the pre-industrial nations surrounding it. That&rsquo;s all on page one. The rest of the novel deals with the author&rsquo;s exploration of his world and its politics. It&rsquo;s really more of an espionage thriller than a sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel or an attempt to turn <cite>The Lord of the Rings</cite> on its head. Yeskov&rsquo;s Middle Earth is intimidatingly detailed and well worked out, so fans of world-building will like this but its appeal for me was a bit limited.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Aeneid</cite> Book I by Virgil</p> <p>I was in two minds about how to treat <cite>The Aeneid</cite>. I&rsquo;ve been brushing up on my high-school Latin and was determined to read one of the world&rsquo;s great works of poetry, but it&rsquo;s twelve books long. I wasn&rsquo;t sure whether to count each one separately, or sum up all the ones I read this year, or just do them all together when I finish it. In the end I think it works better to treat them individually because a) they are thematically different, b) they each take about a month for me to read so they represent a significant effort, and c) so I can see what else I was reading at the same time. Otherwise it looks like all I&rsquo;m reading is Doctor Who trash and Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and we all know that would never happen. <em>Cough cough</em>.</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Teleportation Accident' by Ned Beauman" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Teleportation Accident</cite> by Ned Beauman</p> <p>I can remember exactly where I was the first time I opened this book. I was sitting at a bar in Raleigh, where I&rsquo;d taken a short holiday to go to the 2015 Esperanto summer class. I had the ebook edition and pulled up the first page having no idea what to expect other than maybe something sci-fi. The opening line baffled me unutterably, but by the end of the first paragraph I realised this might be the cleverest and <em>funniest</em> book I&rsquo;d ever read. My opinion has not changed. When I tragically got to the end of Beauman&rsquo;s oeuvre in 2018, I promised myself I&rsquo;d wait a few years before I set out to enjoy them all a second time. I don&rsquo;t know why but this year the time seemed right to buy a nice first-edition hardcover and read this novel the way it deserved to be read.</p> <p>Although it did wind up having some speculative elements, they&rsquo;re not the focus of the novel. The focus is Egon Loeser, a set designer in the 1930s, who is so self-absorbed he doesn&rsquo;t notice Nazi Germany happening around him. He&rsquo;s in a setting that by all rights should be about the rise of fascism, but all Loeser wants to do is get laid &mdash; the one thing that will never happen because, as his name suggests, he is just awful. We track him from Berlin to Paris to Los Angeles, hot on the heels of a woman who has no interest in him whatever.</p> <p>As for what it&rsquo;s about&hellip; Untangling a Beauman novel is never an easy task. I think this one is about the way we treat people via the perfect counterexample of Loeser, who is such a prick to everyone that he makes himself miserable. But it&rsquo;s also about the way we move through the world whether we want to or not &mdash; the way we change and the way things change around us. As Beauman writes, the real trick isn&rsquo;t inventing a teleportation machine, it&rsquo;s inventing a machine that can keep you rooted to the spot.</p> <p>Beauman swings from postmodernism to science fiction to murder mystery to slapstick like Tarzan swinging through trees. It&rsquo;s breathtaking, and an absolute privilege, to behold. File under &ldquo;Books I Wish I&rsquo;d Written&rdquo;. Hell, file under &ldquo;Books I Wish I Were Even Capable of Writing&rdquo;.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: The Highest Science</cite> by Gareth Roberts</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>You&rsquo;ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey</cite> by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Reason Why the Closet-Man is Never Sad' by Russell Edson" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Reason Why the Closet-Man is Never Sad</cite> by Russell Edson</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Swamplandia!</cite> by Karen Russell</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Being There</cite> by Jerzy Kosiński</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Pikniko ĉe Vojrando</cite> de Arkadij kaj Boris Strugackij</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Man Who Spoke Snakish</cite> by Andrus Kivirähk</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: The Pit</cite> by Neil Penswick</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Aeneid</cite> Book II by Virgil</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>More Tales of the City</cite> by Armistead Maupin</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Story of Life</cite> by Chris (Simpsons Artist)</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Changing Planes</cite> by Ursula K. Le Guin</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Peloponnesian War</cite> by Donald Kagan</p> <p>I got a question about the Peloponnesian War wrong in a game of Trivial Pursuit. I was so ashamed that I went and bought the biggest book about it I could find, which turned out to be a grave error. The war went for about thirty years and it took as long to read the book. Kagan is an expert and has elsewhere written a lengthy academic work, but I think I would have preferred something targeted more to a popular audience. Still, you can&rsquo;t fault it for its coverage &mdash; it takes apart a huge and long and complicated confluence of events and explains it in a way that&rsquo;s comprehensible to a modern reader not familiar with the thousands of political alliances that made up ancient Greece. Maybe it&rsquo;s just one of those things that you can&rsquo;t cover without getting into the weeds.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Memoirs of a Space Traveler</cite> by Stanisław Lem</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Concrete Island</cite> by J. G. Ballard</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse</cite> by David Mitchell</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Song of Spider-Man' by Glen Berger" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Song of Spider-Man</cite> by Glen Berger</p> <p>I loved every second of this memoir about the disastrous Spiderman Broadway musical. I hadn&rsquo;t been familiar with it before reading this, but apparently they planned a hugely complex acrobatic stage show that went wrong when the stagecraft jammed and left actors dangling on wires in the air above the audience. The memoir about it defies belief. Berger is so enthusiastic about a concept that seemed dubious to me from the outset. A musical about Spiderman? With music by U2? Called &ldquo;Turn Off the Dark&rdquo;? What the fuck? And then he goes on to express a horror that the result of all his work might turn out to be camp. Ducky, it&rsquo;s a musical about a man in a spandex bodysuit, it was never <em>not</em> going to be camp. Hell, it&rsquo;s a Broadway musical, isn&rsquo;t it? It&rsquo;s almost camp by definition. The obvious approach would have been to lean into the silliness from the start and just give people a good romp instead of treating the thing like Shakespeare.</p> <p>Then there&rsquo;s the show&rsquo;s director, the much-ballyhooed Julie Taymor. Berger talks about her as a genius, buying into the story of her accomplishment every bit as much as she herself does. It&rsquo;s a struggle to figure out just what makes her so brilliant, though. Her past credits include the Broadway adaptation of <cite>The Lion King</cite>, which was a legit success but is still just a Disney story about an annoying kid who grows up to be an annoying adult. Also the Beatles-themed film <cite>Across the Universe</cite>, which is a pretentious slog. So it&rsquo;s baffling to find Taymor as this figure who dominates the memoir like the ghost of Judy Garland, convinced of her own genius and raging at anyone who dares to contradict her. She sounds like a monster, and even though Berger loves her he&rsquo;s also clearly terrified of her.</p> <p>I can&rsquo;t recommend <cite>Song of Spider-Man</cite> enough. It&rsquo;s one of those real-life stories where you just won&rsquo;t believe what you&rsquo;re reading.</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>A Confederacy of Dunces</cite> by John Kennedy Toole</p> <p>I knew I was going to leave New Orleans soon, so I wanted to re-read my favourite novel in the city it&rsquo;s about. Knowing the city doesn&rsquo;t change the way you read <cite>Confederacy</cite>, but the louche atmosphere, the wacky accents, and feeling of decay suddenly make sense when you&rsquo;re there. This novel remains as funny as it was the day I first read it. Everyone who loves this novel remembers the moment it first struck them. I might not laugh as helplessly as I did then, but every time I re-read this I appreciate it in new ways.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Rape of the A.P.E.</cite> by Allan Sherman</p> <p>A personal, eccentric, daffy, and fascinating history of the sexual revolution, brought to you by the man who sang &ldquo;Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah&rdquo;. This one deserved <a href="">its own post</a>.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: Deceit</cite> by Peter Darvill-Evans</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: White Darkness</cite> by David A. McIntee</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Real Queer America</cite> by Samantha Allen</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Erewhon</cite> by Samuel Butler</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: Lucifer Rising</cite> by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Aeneid</cite> Book III by Virgil</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' by Becky Chambers" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet</cite> by Becky Chambers</p> <p><cite>Long Way</cite> is a charming story about friendship in outer space. A friend described it as a space opera, which I think is missing the point. Space operas are about bad guys in pointy hats and melodramatic plots (e.g. <cite>Star Wars</cite>). This is about the pick-n-mix crew of a spaceship and how they all learn to appreciate each other and become friends. There are no real bad guys per se &mdash; no-one rubbing their hands together and saying, &ldquo;Nozink in ze vorld can shtop me now.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s endearing and seems to be part of the wave of positivity that people have been leaning into the past few years. This is effortlessly executed and it won me over with its sheer charm and class. It&rsquo;s the kind of thing I&rsquo;d like to see more often in science-fiction, which is too often dominated by neckbeards and testosterone.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Tomorrow, When the War Began</cite> by John Marsden</p> <p>I grew up with this one in the air. It was a YA best-seller in Australia in the 90s, so I&rsquo;d always intended to read it. I&rsquo;d been told the plot was about what might happen if Australia were invaded by an unnamed foreign power. I was expecting something a bit science-fictiony, but it wound up being a very factual and mercenary novel about teenagers hiding out in the desert and how they survive. Unfortunately there wasn&rsquo;t anything I really cared about in this and I&rsquo;m hard-pressed to imagine why it was so popular. Oh well, they can&rsquo;t all be winners.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Neoreaction a Basilisk</cite> by Elizabeth Sandifer</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Millionaire Next Door</cite> by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Landslide</cite> by Michael Wolff</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day' by Winifred Watson" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day</cite> by Winifred Watson</p> <p><cite>Miss Pettigrew</cite> is a wonderful novel about female friendship. The recent film adaptation tries to inject some drama in the tale by setting some of the women at odds with each other, which misses the whole point of the story for me. The point is that they all help each other, they&rsquo;re friends despite their class differences, so making them catty and internecine is perverse. It&rsquo;s a beautifully guileless and enormously fun novel that isn&rsquo;t like anything else I&rsquo;ve read. A few unfortunate glimpses of 1930s racism do marr the novel, but not enough to derail it. Overall it&rsquo;s a fabulous social comedy and there&rsquo;s not nearly enough of it.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Studies in the Art of Rat-catching</cite> by H. C. Barkley</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Space Odyssey</cite> by Michael Benson</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Ill-Tempered Clavichord</cite> by S. J. Perelman</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Skrine</cite> by Kathleen Sully</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Kingdoms' by Natasha Pulley" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Kingdoms</cite> by Natasha Pulley</p> <p><cite>The Kingdoms</cite> was a delight &mdash; a queer time-travelling historical action/romance that I couldn&rsquo;t put down. Pulley is better known for some of her other novels which I haven&rsquo;t read yet, so I get to anticipate the pleasure of reading those when I need something good in my life.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Tinkering</cite> by John Clarke</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Medusa Frequency</cite> by Russell Hoban</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Death in Brunswick' by Boyd Oxlade" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Death in Brunswick</cite> by Boyd Oxlade</p> <p><cite>Death in Brunswick</cite> is an Aussie classic. The movie has the wonderful cast of John Clarke and Sam Neill, but when I was watching it I was struck by what seems to be a sudden change in direction towards the end. The reason for that was a lot clearer when I read the book &mdash; there&rsquo;s a tacked-on happy ending that tried to make the movie more palatable, but made it weaker. The irony is the most famous scenes in the movie are the most outré ones, so they pulled their punches for nothing. The book doesn&rsquo;t shy away from anything and, despite lacking the comic talents of Clarke and Neill, it winds up being the superior version of the story. It&rsquo;s dark, it&rsquo;s funny, and it&rsquo;s deeply Aussie.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Aeneid</cite> Book IV by Virgil</p> <p>I&rsquo;m probably a philistine but I&rsquo;ll always believe most of the Aeneid is filler &mdash; book I just details Aeneas arriving in Carthage, book III is about them dicking around in boats, and book V is the sport section of the newspaper. The truly moving and beautiful books so far have been book II (the fall of Troy) and book IV (Dido and Aeneas). For me book IV will always be where it&rsquo;s at. You don&rsquo;t need to be the son of Venus or the queen of Carthage to get something out of this. Virgil puts all the power of his poesy to the task of telling a love story &mdash; the conflicted emotions, the heartache, and the passion. When you read something like this, 2,000 years ago feels more like the present day. Aeneas in particular is such a fallible hero. He doesn&rsquo;t want the task he&rsquo;s been given, he behaves with utter bastardry to Dido, and he ultimately winds up ignorant and alone, not even aware of the damage he&rsquo;s caused. His flaws as a protagonist are what make the Aeneid transcendent, in my opinion, because if even a divine prince of Troy can be such a fuckup, then it makes the rest of us feel less bad about it when we fuck up.</p> <p>This book also contains my favourite line from the poem so far: &ldquo;cadat ante diem, mediaque inhumatus harena&rdquo; (may he die before his time and lie unburied in a barren land). The people I&rsquo;ve wanted to say that to&hellip;</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Buckaroo Banzai' by Earl Mac Rauch" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Buckaroo Banzai</cite> by Earl Mac Rauch</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Complete Chess Course</cite> by Fred Reinfeld</p> <p>At the start of this year I didn&rsquo;t know much about chess beyond how the pieces move and something vague about wanting to control the centre squares. I enjoyed chess and wanted to learn how to play without embarrassing myself quite so much. Now I know a lot more about chess but I&rsquo;m not sure how much I still enjoy it. Knowing basic strategy will put you out of the league of all your friends but you&rsquo;ll still be the worst in a room full of regular players. Getting good competitively becomes a matter of memorising as many chess openings and published games as possible, which sounds like my hell.</p> <p>While chess is a timeless brainteaser and a fun pastime, it is ultimately just a very complicated Sudoku. I&rsquo;m not sure it&rsquo;s worth the time to get really good at it when you could be using that time to do something that nourishes your soul instead. Or maybe I&rsquo;m only saying that because I&rsquo;m bitter about my blitz ranking.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: Shadowmind</cite> by Christopher Bulis</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Beowulf</cite> translated by Seamus Heany</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Spoonbenders</cite> by Daryl Gregory</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion</cite> by Sam Harris</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'Long Pig' by William C. Miller" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>Long Pig</cite> by William C. Miller</p> <p>This was a pleasant surprise. It billed itself as &ldquo;a fantasy concerning cannibals, courts and other consumers&rdquo;, which is a big promise to live up to. Part of this takes place on a fictitious island near New Guinea where the locals worship a god called Big Mouth and like to eat the bodies of enemy tribesmen. Part takes place in San Francisco, where a rich woman is accused of murdering a homeless man who tried to steal her purse. It&rsquo;s the old &ldquo;but the white people are the <em>real</em> savages&rdquo; schtick, which would be more yawn-inducing if it weren&rsquo;t so well done. It&rsquo;s genuinely funny and the author has a real insight into political and legal processes that give the novel a wicked bite. I didn&rsquo;t feel like its handling of race was inappropriate or colonialistic, and its depiction of the islanders goes a lot further than the fact that they&rsquo;re cannibals. There is some great characterisation of the American and Australian characters as rapey, drunk, hypocritical, incompetent, and flat-out stupid. You feel every moment of frustration and rage at them, and Miller&rsquo;s satire seems especially prescient even though he wrote this twenty years ago. He seems to have anticipated the wave of anomie, conspiracy thinking, and &ldquo;alternative facts&rdquo; that have characterised the Trump era of American politics. Miller goes as far as to make Big Mouth Himself a character in the novel, and even though that sounds like a completely bonkers thing to do, it&rsquo;s just too much fun not to like it.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Doctor Who: Birthright</cite> by Nigel Robinson</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Future is Female!' edited by Lisa Yaszek" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Future is Female!</cite> edited by Lisa Yaszek</p> <p>The power of an anthology rests with its editor. I&rsquo;ve read some collections that fell utterly flat, while others gripped me in a way that made the editor just as significant to me as the author of a good novel. Yaszek has put together a sensational collection of science fiction short stories written by women and backed them up with an insightful introduction and biographical notes. Some of these stories were already familiar to me while others were new discoveries, which made this feel like all the best anthologies do &mdash; like revisiting old friends and making new ones.</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>Living with a Dead Language</cite> by Ann Patty</p> </li> <li> <p><cite>The Aeneid</cite> Book V by Virgil</p> </li> <li> <figure class="right" style="width: 200px;"><img alt="'The Weary Blues' by Langston Hughes" src="" /></figure> <p><cite>The Weary Blues</cite> by Langston Hughes</p> <p>This was a somewhat late inclusion in the year&rsquo;s reading inspired by the fact that this book will be leaving copyright in 2022. It&rsquo;s been on my shelf for ages and I thought this would be a good way to see out the year. Hughes&rsquo; poems are laced with gentle humour, fangs, irony, awe, hope, pathos, and of course the rhythms of Harlem blues. They&rsquo;re not all gems, but even so they all hang together to create a contiguous landscape with certain words in later poems carrying resonances from the way Hughes used them in earlier poems. It reads like the first concept album. I found too many individual favourites to name and I look forward to enjoying them all again.</p> </li> </ul> St John Karp Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT Anglaise in America <p>Food lies to us all the time. There&rsquo;s Little Debbie, that deceitful brat, who makes everything look delicious on the packet but when you make the mistake of eating one of her sad little cakes you are instantly consumed with thoughts of death. Then there&rsquo;s the great American snack food and murder instigator the Twinkie. When they went out of business a few years ago and then were bought out and started being made again, I wanted to try one to see what all the fuss was about. That was my first and last time. I vowed that day that if I was ever in a plane crash with a cargo hold full of Twinkies, I&rsquo;d eat the other survivors before I ate the Twinkies.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 500px;"> <img alt="Andy from 'Parks and Rec' saying, 'When they say 2% milk I don't know what the other 98% is.'" src="" /> </figure> <p>The deceptions of food go beyond mere lies and veer into the realm of a postmodern nightmare. It&rsquo;s as if all the signifiers and signifieds have been thrown into a bingo barrel and matched at random. Milk, for example. That pasty white traitor. When I moved to the US I was totally bewildered by the milk aisle. Yes, the milk <em>aisle.</em> No-one had explained the code used by the American milk mafia. Half-and-half. What the hell is that? Half what and half what? It doesn&rsquo;t say. It just <em>is</em>, like Yoda, or roadkill. Then there was 2% and 4% milk. A lot of comedy mileage has been made out of these, but it doesn&rsquo;t change the fact that I still don&rsquo;t know what they mean. I&rsquo;ve been told, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s 4% milkfat.&rdquo; What&rsquo;s milkfat? Is it different from baconfat? How much &ldquo;milkfat&rdquo; does normal milk have &mdash; more or less? Is it 4% fat, or does it contain 4% of the fat in whole milk? The deceptive words and coded references baffle like dazzle camouflage. The tenuous threads of reality have snapped and now nothing means anything any more. A saunter down the milk aisle has been known to rattle the sanity. I need a shot of adrenaline just to make it all the way to the other side with my psyche intact.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 500px;"> <img alt="Charlie from 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' getting to the bottom of the Pepe Silvia conspiracy." src="" /> <figcaption>Charlie tries to crack the milk conspiracy.</figcaption> </figure> <p>Now let&rsquo;s talk burgers. Oh, America. You break the heart. The burger is your greatest invention and the one thing you should always get right. It&rsquo;s vexing how many places I&rsquo;ve found &mdash; not just shitty street vendors but proper sit-down restaurants and steak-houses, that can&rsquo;t get a damn burger right. They seem to have nothing but grey meat, and I&rsquo;m too old to waste my time on food that&rsquo;s been sitting on the event horizon of a black hole and had all the colour and flavour sucked out of it by the whirlwinds of the vortex. Part of my burger sadness is my own fault. In my naivety when I first moved here I thought a cheeseburger <em>only</em> had cheese on it &mdash; no meat. I think I was confused by McDonald&rsquo;s, where the cheeseburgers are so dinky I didn&rsquo;t realise there was any meat in there. Then, when I ordered a portobello burger, I thought I&rsquo;d get a nice patty with a bit of mushroom on top. I can&rsquo;t convey to you the sadness of the burger I had to choke down that night. Like its tricksy cousin milk, the hamburger has names that don&rsquo;t actually mean anything. But I should have known &mdash; it&rsquo;s called a hamburger and there&rsquo;s no ham, so I can&rsquo;t get into bed with a con artist and get upset when they rip me off.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 480px;"> <img alt="Homer shaking his fist at an egg in 'The Simpsons'." src="" /> <figcaption>Homer: &#8220;You better run, egg!&#8221;</figcaption> </figure> <p>The hamburger lied from the start, but the humble egg is so elegant in its simplicity. I thought they&rsquo;d never let me down. When I saw something called &ldquo;fertile eggs&rdquo; at the supermarket, I thought it must be referring to eggs that hadn&rsquo;t been chemically neutered by hormones and antibiotics. When I got them home my housemate was aghast. It turns out that in America &ldquo;fertile eggs&rdquo; means &ldquo;fertilised eggs&rdquo; and somehow I had to spend a whole hour explaining the difference: &ldquo;fertile&rdquo; means &ldquo;can reproduce&rdquo; whereas &ldquo;fertilised&rdquo; means &ldquo;will reproduce&rdquo;. All eggs are fertile (before they&rsquo;re omelettes, anyway) but an egg is fertilised when it&rsquo;s been introduced to a partner&rsquo;s sperm and started to form a zygote. So high-school biology taught me anyway, but maybe these eggs aren&rsquo;t biologists, they&rsquo;re grammarians. &ldquo;Fertile&rdquo; is an adjective that refers to an on-going state. &ldquo;Fertilised&rdquo; is a past passive participle with perfect aspect, which doesn&rsquo;t just mean it looks good, it means it refers to an action that&rsquo;s been completed. <em>Mic drop.</em> Get a grammar lesson, egg, and stop wasting my time.</p> <figure class="center" style="width: 400px;"> <img alt="Oprah saying, 'I love bread.'" src="" /> </figure> <p>Lastly a word to sugar. Sugar, I love you. You&rsquo;re great. But you&rsquo;re in a lot of toxic relationships. Sometimes you have an unlikely hookup and against all odds it works. Honey on pizza is surprisingly delicious. So are bacon-wrapped figs. But you&rsquo;re in some long-term relationships that are just awful. When I was growing up legend had it that McDonald&rsquo;s had to add pickles to their burgers because they contained so much sugar they were at risk of being classified as candy. I don&rsquo;t doubt that&rsquo;s false, but the fact that it resonated with people means that we are all aware that things are way too sweet. So sugar, let&rsquo;s get down to business. First, get the hell out of my pasta sauce. If people want sugar on their pasta, let them add it themselves. I don&rsquo;t need to buy a jar of marinara only to find out it&rsquo;s candy. Same goes for bread, which doesn&rsquo;t exist in the US &mdash; it&rsquo;s all cake. And salted caramel? Don&rsquo;t make me retch. Salted caramel makes me hate both salt and caramel <em>and</em> whoever tricked me into eating such a vile frankencandy.</p> <p>Now I know as an Aussie I come in for some stereotypes myself. I do love Vegemite but I don&rsquo;t ride kangaroos. Well, not to work anyway, they&rsquo;re more of a recreational vehicle. But I ask you, America, what did <em>bread</em> ever do to you? Why did you have to hurt it so? I don&rsquo;t want to stop you all eating your horrible breadcakes and preggo eggs and Little Debbie&rsquo;s nasty turdrolls, but you&rsquo;ve got to start saying what you mean or how will I ever manage the grocery shopping without having an identity crisis? Am I even the real me any more? Or am I just the cut-rate, mass-manufactured, sugar-laden version of me that only looks good on the shelf?</p> St John Karp Sun, 24 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT