A Dancing Bear

The last post

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:32:00 +0000

For the moment, and probably forever, I've grown tired of writing a blog that almost nobody reads. But I remain grateful to the small band of readers who've tuned in to my efforts over the past 12 months or so. If you're interested in checking out my future writings, keep an eye on the new online magazine The Ember, to which I'll be a regular contributor. And there's always my novel ...

Depressing quote for the day

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:24:00 +0000

As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, and pain much more painful, than we had expected. A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.

Schopenhauer, "On the Suffering of the World"

Credit where it's do

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 07:48:00 +0000

Here's an odd fact about Sarah Palin. She appears to know something about the finer points of English grammar. For example, she uses the word whom a lot while being interviewed -- and she always uses it correctly.

This is a dying art. I've seen men of letters on TV who are content to say "who" when they should really be saying "whom." And I've certainly run across professors of English who are capable of making the same mistake in print. Even Shakespeare was known to drop the ball on whom.

But Palin, quite correctly, says "those whom I have talked with," or "the people whom we're accountable to." I suppose you could point out that there's no real need to say either who or whom in sentences of this kind -- i.e. that Palin is engaging in her old trick of filling the air with unnecessary words. But the fact remains that her grammar is spot on. (And don't give me any pedantic backchat about not ending sentences with prepositions.) She also -- very commendably -- says "set foot in" rather than "stepped foot in." But let's not reach too far across the aisle. She still likes saying "be all end all" instead of "be all and end all" -- I don't think there's much authority for that.

On the other hand, it pains me to note that Barack Obama recently dropped this grammatical clanger: "President Bush has graciously invited Michelle and I to the White House." Conclusion: good grammar isn't the be all end all of American politics.

Watching Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren, I thought Palin came across as a marginally less nasty and stupid person than she had appeared to be before election day. To put it another way, some polling guru must have told her, at the outset of the campaign, that pretending to be nastier and stupider than you really are is a good way of getting elected to the second-most important office in the world. Let's hope that idea is dead forever.

The Van Susteren interview made me discard another one of my short-held views about Palin. She does not, after all, possess the most disagreeable speaking voice on earth. Greta Van Susteren does. The woman talks like a cockatoo on helium. She makes Palin sound like Eartha Kitt.

People who run hot and cold

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:56:00 +0000

Is it just me, or do you have about five to ten people in your life who, owing to some strange perceptive disorder, are only capable of recognizing you about half the time? I find these people incredibly hard to deal with. Sometimes they make you question your own visibility. Sometimes they get you wondering if, without knowing it, you might have crossed over to the other side Bruce Willis-style.

People who do recognize you but pretend not to are a different matter. They're just total assholes. There's no mystery about that. But what about people who greet you heartily on some occasions, and the rest of the time give you nothing? What goes on in their heads?

I take the same bus every morning, and it's always driven by the same guy. In theory, the guy should thoroughly recognize me by now. He sees me in the same place at the same time every day, and I very rarely board the bus in disguise, and I certainly have no trouble recognizing him.

But here's the enigma. Some days he does recognize me, and on other days he clearly doesn't. One morning I'm "champ," the next he's looking at me like I'm the prime suspect in the desecration of his mother's grave. Once when I asked him how he was he actually kept the bus parked for about three minutes in order to give me a detailed run-down on the full state of his health. It was a little odd, but I really felt we'd made a breakthrough. The next day I asked him the same question and he just looked straight through me. It's a rancid moment when you ask a man how he is and he simply doesn't reply. Asking him again in case he didn't hear you is a high-risk play, because it opens up the horrific prospect of getting no reply twice.

Incidentally, the guy is neither deaf nor -- in any obvious sense -- mentally defective. Nor is it possible that he can't see me properly. He's got glasses the size of Fast Eddie Felsen's. So I don't know what's going on, and I guess I'll never get to the bottom of it. I'm pretty sure I can't be dead though, because he always makes me pay for a ticket.

There was once a girl who treated me in a similar way, to the point where I briefly but quite seriously entertained the theory that she was in fact a pair of identical twins, or possibly even triplets. But good-looking girls are allowed to behave this way. They have to. It's in their DNA. Ageing bus drivers who look like Dick Emery have no excuse.

Charlie don't surf

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:43:00 +0000

Now that I'll never have to listen to Sarah Palin's voice again, I should probably confess that I also have a tiny issue with Barack Obama's vocal stylings. He does tend to talk like a man who's raising his voice on a helicopter. Or, when he takes it down a bit, like a man who's standing quite near the spot where a helicopter is landing. I keep expecting him to announce that he loves the smell of napalm in the morning.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to the next four years.

The higher horseshit

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:34:00 +0000

Last night, in a documentary about the writer Richard Flanagan, no less an authority than Baz Luhrmann proclaimed Flanagan "the Australian Hemingway." These days, of course, it's quite permissible to make such comparisons without necessarily having read anything by either party -- and indeed it emerged, as Baz fleshed the comparison out, that what he mainly had in mind was the fact that both guys were, in addition to being writers, quite keen on the outdoors. But he did, I think, throw in a token reference to the excellence of Flanagan's prose after that.

Never having read anything by Flanagan, I thought I'd better seek out some of the guy's work. Fortunately these days you can get a fair sense of a writer's merits without having to lay down thirty bucks. Here, free from the Web, is the opening to Flanagan's latest novel, The Unknown Terrorist:

The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth.
Jesus is an especially sad example of this unequal struggle. The innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love. He demanded it, as Nietzsche observed, with hardness, with madness, and had to invent hell as punishment for those who withheld their love from him. In the end he created a god who was "wholly love" in order to excuse the hopelessness and failure of human love.
Jesus, who wanted love to such an extent, was clearly a madman, and had no choice when confronted with the failure of love but to seek his own death. In his understanding that love was not enough, in his acceptance of the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him, Jesus is history's first, but not last, example of a suicide bomber.
Nietzsche wrote, "I am not a man, I am dynamite". It was the image of a dreamer. Every day now somebody somewhere is dynamite. They are not an image. They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzsche.
Nietzsche began to fear that what drove the world forward was all that was destructive and evil about it. In his writings he tried to reconcile himself to such a terrible world.
But one day he saw a cart horse being beaten brutally by its driver. He rushed out and put his arms around the horse's neck, and would not let go. Promptly diagnosed as mad, he was locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life.
Nietzsche had even less explanation than Jesus for love and its various manifestations: empathy, kindness, hugging a horse's neck to stop it being beaten. In the end Nietzsche's philosophy could not even explain Nietzsche, a man who sacrificed his life for a horse.
But then, ideas always miss the point.

Hemingway, you might recall, said that a writer's key piece of equipment was a built-in bullshit detector. If Flanagan ever had such a device, it surely maxed out and blew at some point during the composition of that third paragraph. About the best you can say for such stuff is that it seems to be aimed at -- and was quite possibly written by -- the kind of person who believes that the mere mention of figures like Nietzsche and Christ is enough to establish that things are being discussed at a high level. But what is actually being said? It takes a fair bit of readerly sweat to find out. There are a lot of non-sequiturs in there. ("They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzsche.")

Maybe you're not even supposed to make sense of it all. Maybe you're just meant to feel the tone: highbrow, literary, mystical, profound. Maybe you're just meant to feel generally assured that this will be the kind of novel in which current events will meet with deep thought. Maybe all you need to know is that the right thing is being said -- that the figure of the suicide bomber is being understood, contextualized, rescued from the demonization he's suffered at the hands of the George Bushes of the world, who dig on Jesus but probably haven't even heard of Nietzsche. Maybe you're just meant to get a whiff of that heady atmosphere and move on.

In any case, I'm about to do something that might be a bit rash. I'm about to comb these paragraphs for truth-content. Perhaps I am gravely missing the point. Perhaps I'm about to examine these wishy-washy propositions far more carefully than Flanagan did when pulling them out of thin air. But here I go.

Let's start with Nietzsche. Reading the above paragraphs, you could run away with the impression that Nietzsche never really went mad. You could run away with the impression that "one day," for perfectly sane and indeed impeccably eco-friendly reasons, he embraced an oppressed horse. And then: "Promptly diagnosed as mad, he was locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life." I love that sentence. I especially relish that first word: promptly. It superbly captures the kind of writer Flanagan is. He is the kind of writer who will say, for effect, things that are flagrantly not true. Nietzsche, without question, did go seriously and permanently mad, possibly as a result of contracting syphilis. He may or may not have embraced a horse during the early stages of his decline. His alarmed friends and family took him to various clinics, but at no point was he "locked away for the rest of his life." In fact he spent his final ten years in the care of his mother and sister.

But Flanagan wants to believe in the kind of world where sinister and nameless authorities will lock away an entirely healthy man just for hugging a horse. Or anyway he wants us to believe that. He can't possibly believe it himself -- can he? He must know that Nietzsche really did suffer a catastrophic mental breakdown. He can't not know it. Which means he is deliberately -- and a little tastelessly -- telling us things he knows to be untrue. Why? I can only assume he thinks some sort of higher truth can be arrived at by stringing together a succession of quarter-truths and distortions -- some sort of lyrical, poetic truth that soars gloriously free of the factual record. I suppose some people think such irresponsible violation of the facts is the stuff of literature. I'd reply that literature minus truth is no longer literature: it's pulp. It's a cartoon.

On the whole Flanagan drags in Nietzsche not because of what he wrote when he was sane, but because of something he did when he wasn't. This is an odd tribute for one writer to pay another. But there is some reference to Nietzsche's actual writings, from which Flanagan has derived the big idea that Nietzsche was a "dreamer":

Nietzsche wrote, "I am not a man, I am dynamite". It was the image of a dreamer.

Why? Why is that the image of a dreamer? Surely it's the self-image of a man -- the philosopher with a hammer, as he also called himself -- who saw it as his mission to blow away large quantities of untruth. If Flanagan really must engage in the lame high-school pursuit of dividing humanity into realists and dreamers, can't he at least see that Nietzsche belongs firmly with the realists? Nietzsche was all rigor: a far fiercer enemy of bullshit than Hemingway. Plus he was a philologist by training: a grounded student of word origins, a fiery pinner-down of exact meaning. To say that "Nietzsche's philosophy couldn't even explain Nietzsche, a man who sacrificed his life for a horse" is to base an inane non-point on a total untruth, and Flanagan must know it. Nietzsche went tragically insane: it's a medical fact, and his philosophy was and is under no obligation to "explain" it. And the claim that he "sacrificed his life for a horse" is just trivial and false, and any argument that uses it as a buttress is built on nothing but bad faith.

So what about the Christ-as-suicide-bomber motif? I can't say that this offends me as a Christian, because I'm not one. But it does kind of miff me as a respecter of truth. To start with the basics: doesn't suicide bombing have something to do with violence? A suicide bomber doesn't just sacrifice himself. If that was all he did, I doubt he'd be such a controversial figure. But really he sacrifices himself only incidentally, as the best means of killing and maiming as many of the people around him as possible. The more, the merrier. Women, children? Bring them on!

The idea that Christ the man had anything remotely to do with that is just off-the-charts horseshit. A lot of his later adherents practiced terror, without doubt; but not the man himself. Indeed he went around saying a lot of things about turning the other cheek and not casting the first stone. So if you're going to proclaim him history's first suicide bomber -- on the face of it an obscenely false proposition -- you'd better have some pretty good reasons. Flanagan advances two incredibly feeble ones. He, Christ, saw that "love was not enough" (enough for what?); and he accepted "the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him."

These two things might well have motivated Christ. But what on earth makes Flanagan think that they define the suicide bomber? Was Mohamed Atta a man for whom love was not enough? Next time you get a chance, take a look at his contorted mugshot. Does that look like the face of a man for whom love was not enough? It looks more like the face of a man for whom hate was not enough. (Again Flanagan's knack for hitting on the polar opposite of the truth shines through.) And did Atta sacrifice himself to "enable" -- whatever that means -- the future of those around him? No: he sacrificed himself because it was the simplest way of killing an incredible amount of other people. Exactly why he wanted to kill them all is a question I don't really have the stomach for at the moment. No doubt he had his own fevered notions about what an ideal world would be like, but those are dreams that no thinking person -- least of all a writer who enjoys having the freedom to speak subversively -- would want to see "enabled."

All I'm saying is this: if you honestly do see deep connections between people like that and Jesus Christ, you owe it to your readers to state your reasoning plainly. I mean, it's quite an insight. Nobody's ever had it before. So why not clearly explain why it's true? If you half-hide it behind clouds of loose prose and flaccid illogic, you kind of convey the impression that you don't even believe your own nonsense.

Ideas don't "always miss the point," by the way. They only do when they're wrong.

Not a bad point

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:14:00 +0000

Montaigne, "On Fear":

It is fear that I am most afraid of. In harshness it surpasses all other mischances ... People with a pressing fear of losing their property or of being driven into exile or enslaved lose all desire to eat, drink or sleep, whereas those who are actually impoverished, banished or enslaved often enjoy life as much as anyone else.

The real McCain

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:25:00 +0000

I just watched a movie called Shut Up and Sing, which documents the deep shit the Dixie Chicks got into after one of them made the mistake of saying something mildly derogatory about George Bush on stage.

The bit that really interested me was an archival clip from a Chicks-related Congressional hearing that happened to be chaired by one John McCain. I say one John McCain deliberately, because this guy turned out to bear very little resemblance to the platitudinous robot currently running for President.

Anyway, the clip shows the head of a country music radio network telling McCain's committee an obvious and outrageous lie. He's claiming that the network's decision to stop playing the Chicks' material wasn't a sinister directive handed down from corporate headquarters, but a decision spontaneously and simultaneously arrived at by each and every station in the network.

McCain's in a belligerent mood, and he tears the guy a richly-deserved new one:

McCAIN: You made a decision from corporate headquarters that was binding on your deejays, and just prior to that you say that you’re a group of independent radio stations. That’s a total contradiction, Mr. Dickey.

CORPORATE STOOGE: I think that mischaracterizes it. As I mentioned, this was a collaborative decision-making process. Everybody fell in line. This was a unanimous overwhelming decision.

Notice that the stooge, in the heat of the moment, fatally misuses the phrase "everybody fell in line" as if it meant "everybody independently agreed."

So McCain pounces: “Fell in line,” he witheringly says. "I understand."

Watching that short clip, you'd think McCain would be damn good value as leader of the free world. He can think for himself. He knows the smell of bullshit, and doesn't like it. He's after the truth, not toeing some ridiculous party line.

So what's happened to him? The new McCain is so unlike the old one that some pundits have gone so far as to speculate about his mental health. That sort of thing is a bit rash for my taste; but still, it's remarkable that this once-substantial man seems to think it's necessary, in order to get elected, to throw overboard every trait and belief that might conceivably have once made an intelligent person respect him. The McCain in that clip would have been the first man to cantankerously dismiss Sarah Palin as a waffling moron, and the last man to consider her a fit consigliere. The real McCain wouldn't have had a bar of her. Agreeing to her selection must have made him sick to the stomach. It must be hell for the guy to have to stand back meekly on the stage behind her and Joe the Plumber, applauding their cretinous efforts like a battery-powered monkey with a pair of cymbals, and wearing that plastered-on grimace that seems to say: What the fuck have I done?

If and when McCain loses, I wonder if it'll permanently discredit the assumption that seems to have motored his whole disgraceful campaign - i.e. the assumption that in order to win a Presidential election you have to go as downmarket as it's possible to go without actually joining the World Wrestling Federation. Obama, after all, is an intelligent man, and he's never pretended to be anything less, and it looks like that approach is going to carry him to victory. If it does, it'll be a great day for America and the world. But it'll be a sad day for McCain, who will have ended his career on a note of King Lear-like weakness and wrongheadedness.

I'll make a whacky prediction. I believe McCain is still, underneath it all, the same intelligent guy. I bet that if he does lose, he might just still be frank and fearless enough to come out and blow the lid off his whole sorry campaign. Wouldn't it be great if he came out and admitted that he made the mistake -- the huge mistake -- of listening to cynics who advised him to ditch the candour and decency and instead just try to rouse the basest instincts of the basest voters?

I hope I'm not getting ahead of myself in assuming that that approach has failed.

That's got to hurt

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:47:00 +0000

Have you noticed how good Hollywood is getting at showing people getting hit by cars? Not long ago I saw a movie in which a minor character stepped backwards onto a road and was instantly and sensationally mowed down by a hurtling van. He flew about fifteen feet into the sky, pinwheeled like a shot duck, and came down on the bitumen with a sickening crunch, looking as if the incident had killed him in about four different ways.

A couple of scenes later it turned out, rather confusingly, that he was still alive. The only sign that he was the same guy was that he was walking with a slight limp. In other words, the accident looked way too good. This is what happens when a director cares more about individual effects than about narrative sense. Or when unlimited technical possibilities are made available to the kind of "artist" who thinks technique is an end in itself.

Another movie beef. Was it the film Traffic that introduced the idea of stone-washing the celluloid before putting it in the projector? These days all your high-toned thrillers -- from Munich to The Bourne Ultimatum to Casino Royale -- seem to go for the same bleached look. I think it's meant to convey a sort of gritty realism. But script-wise the films contain the same old improbabilities. Thus Matt Damon tricks every single occupant of a CIA office building to jump into their cars and go and look for him somewhere else while he sneaks into the totally empty office, rings up the boss from the boss's own desk, and -- for reasons I still don't get -- just flat-out tells the guy where he is, so that all the CIA officers can turn around and come back and engage him in a car chase. Nothing grittily realistic about that. Washing the film in acid and chopping it up into nanosecond-long shards doesn't make an absurd plot-point less absurd. It just makes it harder to spot.

There's a semi-analogy in the world of books. Go into a book shop. Have the front covers of books ever looked so good? But the contents aren't improving at the same rate. In fact they're not improving at all. I can only conclude that it must be a lot easier to be a competent graphic designer than a competent writer.

The fingernail on the global blackboard

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:01:00 +0000

Not long ago I threw together a list of some of the many things I'd rather listen to than the sound of Sarah Palin's voice: a ninety-year-old man relieving himself, Bobcat Goldthwait being horribly tortured, and so forth.

I now see that I dodged the central question. The question isn't what things one would prefer to listen to than the sound of her voice. That one's for monks with enough time to contemplate the infinite. The real question is: is there anything else on earth, anything at all, that her voice even remotely sounds like? Is there any analogue or precedent, in the annals of noise pollution, for that shrill, presumptuous, vicious, vacuous, hectoring, atonal, in-your-face warble? It's as if the woman's made entirely out of fingernail, and my TV's just a giant blackboard. It's as if I'm Dustin Hoffman and she's Laurence Olivier with a bloody apron and a whining dentist's drill.

Before I go on, let's agree on what her voice doesn't sound like. It doesn't sound anything at all like the sound a normal human being makes when she talks. Which is strange, because the whole point of her's meant to be that she's a normal person. But I've spent a lot of my life around normal people. I've heard them talk. And if they sounded anything like that, I'd have had my eardrums surgically gouged out years ago.

So let's try and nail down some of the things her voice does sound like. There are overtones of the noise Hendrix's guitar made when he set it on fire without unplugging it first. If you can't hear a similar ungodly feedbacky whine in her voice, you're not listening hard enough.

And there are some qualities of an imperfectly programmed android. I could be wrong, but I believe the Robots of Death in Doctor Who had a similar kind of metallic obnoxiousness. Davros wasn't far off the mark either.

I believe I also hear a hint of car alarm in there.

And I once heard a dog taking two days to die under a house after falling off the back of some guy's ute. That's in there too.

And here's something Clive James once astutely said about the acting of Marilyn Monroe:

Every phrase came out as if it had just been memorized. Just been memorized.

Of course I wouldn't want to smear poor Marilyn by pushing this comparison any further. Back in her day, not knowing very much about what you were doing was still something to be ashamed of. It wasn't a viable springboard to the Vice-Presidency of the United States.

And what's with the way Palin unnaturally and unnecessarily throws in the word "also" at the end of every goddamn sentence, and dementedly lingers on it? It doesn't mean anything. Once you've used the word "and" in the middle of a sentence you don't need to say the word "also" at the end, and normal people never do. It serves no purpose except to clog the air. At such moments you almost feel that her yodelling butchery of the language is deliberate, a calculated fuck you to anyone who has ever believed that the spoken word can and should be used to explain clearly and concisely what's on your mind, assuming that that you have a mind and that there's something on it. Yes, she has the tone of the shameless philistine: she tortures language with pride, like Sid Vicious singing "My Way." I know I've had cause to use this analogy before, but the unashamed barbarian is fast becoming one of the defining figures of our era, and one of them might soon be the second-most powerful person in the world.

Got enough pillows there Raymond?

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:41:00 +0000

Do Americans really brush their teeth in the shower?

Last week I saw a guy doing this in a movie and dismissed it as a one-off. But yesterday I saw a guy in another movie doing the same thing.

In Australia, where the water supply is steadily running out, it's a major sin even to run the tap while you're brushing. Where I live the dams are less than half full, and people (not me, but people) take empty buckets into the shower with them to catch the run-off for use in the garden. If you're caught hosing your garden on the wrong day, or on the right day but at the wrong hour, you get fined. If anyone caught you brushing your teeth in the shower the punishment would be crucifixion, with the shards of the toothbrush serving as the nails.

Another thing: do all Americans, while sleeping, rest their heads on a great mound or combo of no less than four to five pillows? Everyone on TV seems to. Personally I find that anything more than one plays havoc with the neck.

Shakespeare, by the way, was a big fan of the angled sleep. I once took a tour of his house in Stratford and saw his bed. It was farcically short. It looked like a cot. According to the guide, there were two reasons for this. Elizabethans were a lot shorter than we are; and they slept half-sitting up, because they feared that if you lay all the way down you'd die in your sleep. The first claim is certainly true. But I've been looking around the web for confirmation of the second one, and I can't find any.

Give Big Tobacco a break

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:43:00 +0000

There's an anti-smoking ad on TV showing this wicked close-up of a pair of gloved hands slowly squeezing out the contents of a smoker's aorta.

The idea is to turn you off smoking. It turns me off having an aorta. In the interests of fair play, shouldn't they also show a close-up of a pair of gloved hands slowly squeezing out the contents of a non-smoker's aorta? I don't imagine that'd look very crash-hot either.

I'm reminded of my futile attempt to exonerate Russell Crowe the other day. Using shady tactics to bring down a person or corporate entity widely perceived to be a bit of a jagoff doesn't make the tactics any less shady.

Silly point

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:34:00 +0000

It used to tick me off that Australian publishers, while refusing to publish anything written by me, were nevertheless ready to slap a cover on absolutely anything written by a cricketer. When they started publishing cookbooks by fucking cricketers, I really lost it.

But I’ve cooled down now, and I’ve decided to face up to publishing reality. As of today, I’m officially shopping around my own cricketing memoir. Entitled The Day I Copped a Full-Toss Fair in the Nuts and Other Largely Pointless Cricketing Yarns, it’s a semi-literate, hastily-cobbled-together collection of perfunctory anecdotes about the world’s least interesting game apart from polo, and is therefore pretty much guaranteed to be a best-seller.

I should admit that I’ve never played cricket at the international level, nor at any level beyond the suburban backyard. But I assume that a book that’s even tenuously about playing cricket will stand a far better chance of getting published than one that isn’t about playing cricket at all. As long as there's a photo of me on the front wearing a white flannel shirt and a green cap, and wielding either a bat, a ball, or a set of wicketkeeping gloves, I figure we'll be in business.

I don’t want to convey the impression that my book will lack substance. From the day I broke the back window, to the day my brother broke the back window, to the day a dog took a giant shit on the pitch while I was forty-nine not-out, the book will be chock-full of not very interesting but nonetheless wholly cricket-based stories. Here’s an excerpt:

With everything on the line, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. It was do or die, I knew it was dead-set crucial to get bat on ball. I decided not to loft the ball over square leg, because there was a house occupying the entire on side. That’s when the dog came on and laid cable on the pitch.

There’s even a page or two of serious social commentary. From p. 174:

I tell you, the backyard game really opens your eyes to the realities of poverty. I once played at this kid’s house where they couldn’t even afford a spare bin to use as the non-striker’s wicket. The kid had to hammer a stick into the ground. Coming face to face with the reality of such poverty, I really felt helpless. It made me want to give something back. I decided to build a school in his backyard.

Mark my words: It won’t be long till Australian publishers stop publishing anything that isn't about cricket. It won't be long till they start cricketing up the classics for today’s busy and cretinised bookbuyer. Here are some suggested first sentences:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that nothing beats a massive six over mid-on.

All happy families are alike, but all unhappy families aim short-pitched deliveries at each other's heads.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from deep mid-wicket, and whipped in a stinging return from short leg.

He was an old man who bowled alone in the nets behind the R.S.L. and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking middle stump.

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for one morning he was arrested for selling pitch reports to Indian bookmakers.

Call me Merv Hughes.

Of course there'd also have to be a life-sized cardboard cutout of Tolstoy or whoever wearing full cricket creams and a pair of pads to stick in the windows of the major chains.

People power

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:40:00 +0000

There's a free copy of my novel on its way to Vic in Canada, who suggested some fine ways of pimping the book online. And Diana has generously offered to review the book on her blog.

So my plan -- to harness the web's awesome people power and use it to gain fame, wealth, personal glory, and the Nobel Prize for Literature -- is already starting to work. But I still have a few more copies to give away. So my original offer is still in force: if you can think of some way to publicize my book (or for that matter this blog) that I haven't already thought of myself, I'll send you a free signed copy. If you're too shy to post your suggestions as a comment, you can always email me (my address is in my complete blogger profile -- there's a link to it somewhere to the right of this post).

Come to think of it, I'm already a pretty sound candidate for the Nobel. Nobody has ever heard of me; nobody has read my stuff; I've made the odd crack about George Bush being a cowboy; and I'm not an American. I've never even been to America. And I'd certainly be willing to retract, if necessary, everything I've ever said about the hideousness of Andre Rieu's Euromullet.

So I'm expecting the Committee's call. I suggest they hurry up and give it to me before I actually publish something and maybe offend somebody.

Another freebie

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:26:00 +0000

While I'm in the giving vein, I've finally got round to making my novel available as a free PDF. So the book is now available -- for free -- in HTML, PDF, rich text, and MP3 audio, and for an only slightly immodest price in print. Short of coming round to everyone's house and reading it to them individually while stroking their feet, I don't think there's much more I can do at this stage to get the thing out there, do you?

Freebies

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:43:00 +0000

Live in Melbourne? Want a free copy of my novel? Go to the Sticky Institute beneath Flinders Street Station. There should be about ten copies of my book, which is called A Dancing Bear, sitting in their Exchange Box. The idea is that you just take a copy, read it, and then maybe bring it back and swap it for something else. If -- as is highly probable -- you like it so much that you end up swiping it for good, at least have the decency to recommend it to all your friends.

And I'm still willing to send a free signed copy of the thing to anyone, anywhere in the world, who can think up any half-decent way of publicizing it online. Try me. My standards are very low.

As always, the free online version is here.

Please don't let her win

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 05:10:00 +0000

Here are ten things I would rather listen to than the sound Sarah Palin's voice makes when she talks:

Ringo Starr singing
An old man defecating
A carny chewing broken glass
Bobcat Goldthwait being waterboarded
Two or more stray cats making love under my window at three in the morning
Fran Drescher reciting the lyrics to "Revolution 9"
A foul-mouthed youth on a bus loudly accusing his de facto partner of fellating his best friend in a public toilet
The Director's Commentary to The Passion of the Christ
Lou Reed playing a guitar solo
The awful screaming of the lambs

Screenplay II: Rogue Baker

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:42:00 +0000

Underwhelmed by your response to my movie idea about the guy who tells a girl some massive lie to get her to like him, I thought I might hit you with something a bit more explosive. Be warned: this one gets pretty nerve-jangling.

A maverick baker, portrayed by Kurt Russell, gets fired for baking outside the rules once too often. Unable to practice maverick bakery, he slides into alcoholism and pastry abuse. He becomes obsessed with the idea that the nation's bread supply is vulnerable to terrorist attack. He presents the government with compelling proof of this, but a high-ranking asshole, portrayed by Donald Sutherland, suppresses the evidence.

Meanwhile, Kurt Russell's wife -- played by either Jeanne Tripplehorn, Anne Archer or Bonnie Bedelia -- tells him it's either her or the bread-based terrorism obsession. Russell, who's hunched over a high-top loaf wearing one of those clip-on one-eye microscopes, fails to even look up at her, thus supplying her with her answer. She storms out of the bread-strewn house for good, taking their baby daughter with her.

Now there's a montage of Russell stripped to his boxers bingeing on strudel.

The montage ends. It's about a year later. A dissolute-looking Russell is walking down a city street. Passing his former bakery, he notices a breadstick in the window and immediately senses that it's contaminated with weapons-grade anthrax. He sprints into the bakery and pleads with the new owner to remove the item from sale. The new baker laughs in his face. It's peak breadstick season, and he isn't about to risk mass customer panic on the say-so of one pudgy hothead.

So Russell bolts down to the local FBI building, bursts into the office of an old African-American friend who owes him a favour, and hips him to the crisis. The old friend knows that Russell's unstable, but has long recognized his baking genius. He reluctantly agrees to put his clacker on the line and storm the bakery.

But while the tactical response unit is suiting up, we cut back to the bakery. Tripplehorn/Archer/Bedelia is in there with Kurt's daughter! It's the daughter's third birthday, and they're buying supplies for a bread-themed birthday party. The girl's allowed to choose one treat from the whole shop. She selects the anthrax-laden breadstick. They buy it and leave. There's a chilling moment when the daughter opens the bag in the back of the SUV, and brings the weaponized bread product perilously close to her mouth. But the mother gives her a clip across the ear and tells her to save it for the party.

Cut back to the bakery. Guys in black overalls rappel out of choppers and take the bakery down. Kurt's first through the door. He kicks down the window display and rummages through the scattered contents. He can't find the compromised breadstick. The baker tells him he sold it to some lady who looked like Jeanne Tripplehorn. Russell, shitting himself, sprints outside and commandeers a chopper.

We cut to the daughter's party. Kids with pointy hats on are running round in the yard. The mother's in the kitchen preparing the breadstick.

I haven't decided yet whether Russell gets there in time or whether the daughter eats the breadstick and dies.

Dan Green, not Brown

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:18:00 +0000

A really sharp short story by Dan Green on the theme of literary submission and rejection. I also recommend Mr Green's blog, and not only because he shares my view that Dostoevsky is a vastly over-rated writer.

Houses of the scrawny

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:04:00 +0000

There has been endless talk about whether Robert Plant will, or will not, participate in the upcoming Led Zeppelin reunion tour. I submit that Plant might be working through some torso issues before he makes his final decision. Plant, you may recall, spent the bulk of the 70s with his shirt open, exposing a trunk that looked like this:

Now that's a fine enough torso by 1970s standards, but these days it just wouldn't cut the mustard, much less grate any cheese. In the 21st century, any male who wants to go round without a shirt on is obliged to have a torso that looks - as Clive James once immortally put it - like a brown condom full of walnuts. These days only a heroin addict, or an English soccer hooligan taking part in a riot, would go shirtless with an upper body that looked like the Stairway-era Plant's.

So I suspect that Plant needs a bit of time before he goes back on the road. Either he's locked away in some gym with a personal trainer and vat of human growth hormone, or he's buying a lot of shirts with buttons on them.

In memory of David Foster Wallace

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:34:00 +0000

I was stunned to read this morning that David Foster Wallace has committed suicide. I got the news about a month late, and I feel sick to the stomach about it. Genius is an old-fashioned word, but Wallace was one of the few writers alive who made you want to use it. He had some of the faults of genius - sometimes he just didn't know when to stop, when to shut off the flow - but this isn't the time to go into that. At his best, he was a phenomenally, an uncannily, good writer. His death is a catastrophe for literature.

I'll tell you a writer's secret. You always hope that your heroes will end up reading your stuff, and liking it. Well, Wallace is never going to read my stuff now. You also hope that one day you'll be able to tell them how much their work has meant to you. Now that's not going to happen either.

And here's another secret. A writer, when reading the work of others, is more or less constantly thinking: I could do better than that. If you're arrogant enough, you can think this while reading just about anyone. But I never thought it when reading Wallace at his best. What I thought instead was: there's no way I could do better than that. He was scarily prodigious. Infinite Jest is as thick as a phone book - and at times, it has to be said, as unreadable as one. But it contains sentence after sentence in which English is made to do things it had never done before Wallace came along. And it contains a metaphor - his heart thudded like a pair of sneakers in a dryer - that made at least one writer decide he needed to go back to metaphor school. I put it right up there with Humbert Humbert's "My knees felt like knees seen through stained glass."

He sounded like no other writer, except for those writers who intentionally or unintentionally echoed his funky, slangy, grungy, abbreviation-riddled, acronym-packed sentences. He made you want to sound like him. You had to resist his influence. Maybe he was like Hemingway in that respect: you could hear his tone creeping into the work of any decent contemporary writer who'd read him.

Most of my books are in storage right now, so I can't pull down my copy of Infinite Jest and type out any of my favourite quotes for you. Nor, having repeatedly failed to read that novel all the way through myself, can I honestly recommend it to you without reservation. But I do have a copy of Wallace's essay collection Consider the Lobster. Here, from a profile of John McCain written in 2000, is a winter landscape seen out the window of a bus:

surely the sun is someplace up there but the February vista still seems lightless. The central-SC countryside looks blasted, lynched, the skies the color of low-grade steel, the land all dead sod and broomsedge, with scrub oak and pine leaning at angles, and you can almost hear the mosquitoes breathing in their baggy eggs awaiting spring ... A certain percentage of the passing trees are dead and hung with kudzu and a particular type of Spanish moss that resembles a kind of drier-lint from hell ... The highway itself is colorless and the sides of it look chewed on, and there's litter, and the median strip is withered grass with a whole lot of different tire tracks and skidmarks striping the sod for dozens of miles, as if from the mother of all multivehicle pileups sometime in I-26's past. Everything looks dead and not happy about it. Birds fly in circles with no place to go.

I could go on. So could he: he could write stuff that good for pages on end. Lynched! The world is running out of people who can even read prose that good, let alone people who can write it. Literature is in no shape to afford the loss of a writer like Wallace.

Here's something else from the same book. This comes from the conclusion to Wallace's wonderful review of Tracy Austin's ghost-written, cliché-crammed tennis memoir Beyond Center Court:

How, at the critical moment, can [great athletes] invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as "One ball at a time" or "Gotta concentrate here," and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it's because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true ...

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, "I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it," the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there's nothing she can do about something bad and so she'd better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

"There's nobody at the other end of the line," Wallace complained about Austin's lifeless prose. With Wallace, there was always someone at the other end of the line. What a great writer he was. I'll miss wondering what he's going to do next.

The Fogerty House: a dream in peril

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:50:00 +0000

Regular readers of this blog might recall that I'm about to move, and that I've got just one requirement concerning my next home. I want a house exactly like the one described by John Fogerty in "Lookin' Out My Back Door." In other words, I want a house that I can lock the front door of when I get back from somewhere, take a rest on the porch of, and basically just look backwards from. That's all I ask. But this quest is now in peril. It turns out that houses with stuff that looks good behind their back doors cost quite a lot of money. And I don't have quite a lot of money.

In part this is Fogerty's own fault. About twenty years ago, after listening to "Born on the Bayou" for the first time, I made a firm decision not to let the Man get me and do what he done to Fogerty's father. This felt like a sound move at the time, but now I don't have nearly enough fucking money to buy a house that I'd genuinely want to look out the back door of. The Man has his faults, but he does tend to pay you some kind of steady salary while doing to you what Fogerty's father told Fogerty he done to him when Fogerty only came up to his knee.

In retrospect, I probably should've taken the less radical "Proud Mary" option. I should have taken a good job in the city and worked for the Man every night and day for some time - say twenty fiscal years - before going to a river and doing bugger-all for a while at the expense of the locals. ("You don't have to worry, if you got no money/People on the river are happy to give." I bet the people on the river were delighted when he let that one out of the bag.)

If I'd done things that way, maybe I'd be lookin' out the back door right now.

Incidentally, in the course of sprucing up my current non-Fogerty house for sale, I've been performing some kamikaze household chores that I've never attempted before. As a result, I can now offer a few domestic do's and don'ts for the absolute beginner. I haven't got any do's yet, but here's a couple of don'ts to start with:

Don't attempt to clean dirty windows. It only makes them look dirtier.
Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to iron a Persian rug. You might reasonably guess that this would fuck up the rug. But did you know that it also fucks up the iron?

My screenplay

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:52:00 +0000

I've got this killer idea for a Hollywood movie. I'd be a fool to reveal any of the details here, but I can't resist teasing you with a few of the more groundbreaking plot elements.

Are you strapped in?

This guy likes this girl, and fools her into loving him by telling her some major lie. I haven't decided what the major lie is yet, but possibly he pretends to be gay, or dresses up as a woman, or falsifies his ethnicity, or pretends to be President of the United States when he really isn't, or pretends not to be President of the United States when he really is, or conceals the fact that he comes from another planet and/or is a superhero.

Anyway, he gains the girl's trust and she starts to like him. Around the middle of the film she lets him either:

see her naked
feel her breasts for some utterly implausible reason
rub a hard-on against her and successfully pass it off as a hairbrush/deodorant can/chisel/thermos
stand there while she takes a shower behind a half-misted screen and talks about the death of a childhood pet

At the very least she lets him see her in her underpants. I'm adamant about that.

But here comes the twist. At about the three-quarter mark, the girl finds out about the lie! So now she hates him. There follows a montage of short scenes - her hanging up the phone on him, him moping around on the street, her chucking out all the presents he gave her - indicating that she continues to hate him for quite a while.

And then, about five minutes before the end of the film, he makes her like him again by demonstrating his true feelings in some inane way. I'm not sure yet precisely how he inanely demonstrates his true feelings. Possibly he holds a piece of stereo equipment up above his head with their song coming out of it. Maybe he holds her up above his head. Or maybe he just tells her he loves her in front of a crowd of strangers, such as might be found at:

a press conference
a sporting event with a giant screen facility
an ice rink
an airport, possibly inside a jumbo jet full of passengers

The crowd must consist of at least fifty people, and it must burst into applause when the guy is done. Any venue larger than the jet will require him to state his feelings through some kind of amplification device, at the very least a bullhorn - although the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of the giant screens. I'm also toying with the idea of making him an astronaut and having him announce his true feelings from a spacecraft via a satellite hookup to a room full of cheering NASA employees.

If I see any of these ideas crop up in any other films, there will be legal action.

By the way, here's a hypothetical question for males. If Jessica Biel or Ashley Judd fooled you into liking her by telling you some massive lie, and you subsequently found out about it, would you really give a shit?

More things I'm never going to get to do

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:47:00 +0000

When I was at school, I was taught that the right thing to do if I should ever happen to catch fire was drop to the ground and roll vigorously around till the flames were quenched. As a nipper I practiced this quite a lot, feeling that I'd probably catch fire at least two or three times over the course of my life.

But as you close in on the age of 40, you start to suspect that if you haven't caught on fire yet, you're probably never going to. In a way this is a pity, because I've always felt that I'd be incredibly good at dropping and rolling. Part of me has always been primed to hit the deck at the slightest whiff of smoke. But unless I get someone to soak me with accelerant and light me up, it's really starting to look like I'll never get a chance to implement the drill. I suppose like most things it'd turn out to be a major disappointment anyway.

When you think about it, it's a strangely specific skill to waste valuable schooling time on. I can't change a tap washer. If I blew a tyre on a remote stretch of road I'd be in pretty deep shit. I don't even know how to get my signature to stay on my credit card. But if I happen to burst into flames while I'm walking down the street, I'll be in business.

Another thing I think I'd be pretty good at is getting executed for something I didn't do. Whenever I'm shit-scared of some forthcoming horror, I have a tendency to go all quiet and impassive. So if I was stepping up to a guillotine, I'd have a gruff look that a casual observer might mistake for Danton-style stoicism in the face of death. This is another opportunity I'll probably never get, but a man can still dream.

Eurotrash

noreply@blogger.com (David Free) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:07:00 +0000

I want to get one thing out there. If I happen to die suddenly during the next month, people are going to find a magazine on my coffee table with a picture of Andre Rieu on the front cover. And I want to make it absolutely clear that this isn't my fault. It's the Foxtel guide, and I have no choice but to keep it for the whole month if I want to know what's on pay TV. The presence of this magazine in my house implies no endorsement on my part of the life, works, and above all the rug, of Andre Rieu.