Janine blew her nose and said, ‘Oh. Yes. Good point. Thank you.’ Then she took her pouch of tobacco and her lighter from her handbag and gave them to me. After I asked a couple of times whether she was OK, I went outside for my break and rolled a cigarette. I blew these big, fat blue-grey smoke-rings and got that under-the-covers feeling when I thought about how I would never, ever have to worry about what Janine was going through.
Seizure's Flashers series continues to be a pretty damn great one for bite-sized fiction. Ben Goodfellow's short, 'Janine', is a pretty perfect representation of the medium too. A simple idea with beautifully orchestrated emotional repercussions.
- Saturday Morning Slow Jams on youtube have been a lot of fun, particularly as they're doing renditions of your favourite childhood cartoons. The newest one, which covers the Sailor Moon theme song, is basically the best thing I've heard all week.
It's really cooling down fast in Brisbane at the moment. My house in particular seems to be a few degrees below the outdoors (a side effect of swollen window frames and raised floors) which tends to be a relief in summer, but isn't quite so pleasant in winter. As a result, I'm unpacking winter clothes and eyeing off pretty stuff. Pretty stuff, this week, being Madewell's awesome FW14 collection. I love the combinations of knits and parkers, scattered with winter grays and spring brights. I feel pretty toasty even looking at them.
I'm pretty partial to short, one-shot comics. I think it often allows a level of fantasy you'd have to over explain in a longer work. The medium and length instead allows you to let go of reality a little while and invited you to just go with it. Sarah and the Seed is particularly lovely. A small, simple story of a woman's desperation for a family, wonderfully told.
Gorman is one of my favourite Australian designers. They're use of colour and print and hard lines below soft just does things to me. Their FW14 collection, Never Smile at a Crocodile, is particularly great. There's not an outfit here I wouldn't wear and I'd basically kill for that cactus print dress.
Jane is fourteen, twenty, thirty and older in this collection of snapshots by Melissa Bank. She's a friend, a lover, a daughter, a sister. An observer, an editor, a reader, a carer. This series of moments are the making and unmaking of Jane, told through her job and her relationships.
There's been a real wave of fiction in recent years that have been part novel, part collection, and when it's done well, it is so great. This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz is a great example of the form, and so's this one. Bank tells a series of compelling stories that centre around Jane, an uncertain, certain girl, then woman, who comes of age over and over again. Bank knows her inside out, which helps in fleshing out a character who could potentially come off as irritating or shallow in a lesser writer's hands. As it is though, Jane make good choices and bad ones, but the reader always ultimately understands them. It's a pretty great effect.
I asked him to tell me the truth about drinking, and he did. He'd been drinking all along. He told me all the times he could remember. I went back over each one. Then I asked about other times when I'd sensed something was wrong, and went back over the years to the first time--when I'd gone over his house to tell him that Jamie and I had broken up. This was how I'd felt finding out about my father; it was like getting the subtitles after the movie. Archie tried to reassure me. He told me that he was not drinking now, and he swore to me that he wouldn't again. He took Antabuse and kept the poker chip in his pocket. But these had failed him before--or he'd failed them. He would drink again, I knew that. It was part of who he was.
I finished Melissa Bank's novel (collection?) 'The Girls' Guide to Hunting & Fishing' this morning, and this was really one of the stand-out story's in it, so I was glad to find it on Zoetrope to be able to link to it. It's a moving portrayal of death and romance, familial love and desperate love and love running out. Bank's writing style is simultaneously distant and intimate, giving you the sort of dull ache that only pretty special writing can. It's lovely, and awful, and a pretty wonderful novelette.
After discovering her husband's affair with her best friend on their honeymoon, The Bride Stripped Bare's unnamed protagonist begins a journey of sexual exploration with a bullfighter, Gabriel. Told in lessons inspired by a book her grandfather owned, this novel is part character study, part kink study and part unravelling.
I was late to the party on this one. It came out back in 2003, and I still remember the media circus that surrounded it. Released as an anonymous work, a journalist managed to worm out the real author, Nikki Gemmell, before the thing even hit the stands, turning an intriguing could-be-true work into a high-profile fiction novel. It's both a good and bad thing, to read it so much later, I think. Gemmell is doubtlessly a good writer, and her exploration of her heavily flawed protagonist's sexuality makes for an interesting, and often complex, novel. The way the relationships play out too is not always what you expect, and that works as often as it doesn't.
I liked Gabriel. I liked that we never entirely knew him, and that he was as honest as he was dishonest. Similarly, Theo, Cole and the protagonist's mother were all compelling. Even if I didn't like them, I was engaged with their stories, which is a nice way to read a novel. That said, I don't entirely understand why the protagonist and Cole stayed together. She was clearly so devastated after the reveal, and her complete erasure of Theo from her life could have sensibly applied back to Cole. I also struggled with the protagonist's wallowing. It wasn't always bad, but she was such a passive character, and her refusal to take accountability for her actions seemed out of tune with the speed in which she cast judgement on others. Those things aren't necessarily separate; however, it left a bit of an unpleasant taste when we spent a lot of time solely with her, and not with the others for her to bounce off. She was an interesting lead, but not a particularly likable one.
I love a good cover song and only recently got exposed to The AV Club's Undercover series. The Decemberists' version of Sugar's If I Can't Change Your Mind has basically been my jam all week.
It's so cold in Brisbane at the moment, like, icy cold (well, for the tropics anyway), and it's totally making me yearn for summer. It doesn't help that most of the world's at that time of year again too, breaking in the season of string bikinis, flowy, cotton dresses and sunny sandals. This collection from Spanish designer, Kolonaki, is all the things I love in warm weather fashion. It's bright and cheerful and this perfect blend of modern fabric with historical silhouettes. It's loooovely.
I'm a pretty big fan of Alison Bechdel, who's perhaps most famous for her invention of the Bechdel Test. And I mean, that's pretty great, but Bechdel's work is brilliant outside of it too. My Old Flame: Gradual Impact is a short comic she wrote recently for The New Yorker and man, it's pretty special. It chronicles a short lived relationship with a woman in her martial arts class and explores those tender, strange fleeting moments that reveal our own self-worth and difficulties with intimacy. It's pretty wonderful.
Barbara is a girl on a mission. Mean, driven and too smart for her own good, she's almost totally friendless, left with a whirl of imaginary ones who help her in her bid to slay the giant she knows is coming. Things are fine until two new people show up in Barbara's life, neighbour Sophia and psychologist, Mrs Molle, and Barbara finds herself having to face up to the real demons, instead of those imagined.
Ugggghhhh, this hits so many of my buttons narrative-wise. Interesting sibling relationships, fantasy as a means of handling reality and strange friendships that hit when you least expect them. All things I love! It helps that Joe Kelly and JM Ken Nimura do such a great job of telling this story too. They're understanding of Barbara, both narratively and illustratively is totally charming, and it makes her less kind moments (and there are a few of them) emphatic and more vulnerable than you'd expect.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the thing (and give it the honour of being the only graphic novel outside of Saga to make me cry), it would've been nice to see the other characters more rounded. Barbara's the star of this show, and she lends weight to every panel she's in, but we don't get to see enough of the others. Her brother, Dave, for instance is virtually pointless within the narrative, seeming to have the sole purpose of exposing Barbara's rage and control issues in an early scene. Similarly, we get hints of brilliance in Barbara's sister, Mrs Molle and Sophia, but none of them feel entirely rounded enough to make me feel for them as much as I do for Barbara.
That said, it's a pretty special book, and one worth checking out.
I am completely in love with this collaboration between Frances May and Church & State. The styling is close to sublime and partnering the model, clothes with the flower backdrop is pretty damn perfect. Plus the clothes look sort of ridiculously comfortable, which is definitely an added bonus! Check out the full collection over on the Church & State site.
June is National Young Writers' Month in Australia , and I've been floundering around with a few of my writing goals lately, so it makes for a great opportunity to get back on track. In prep, I FINALLY bought a new desk (my old one's legs gave months ago), and have set up a workspace that hopefully means less procrastination, less interruptions and more writing. SO, goals for the month are:
1. Finish putting Lost Girls together, the mosaic novel.
I feel like I've been working on Lost Girls forever. It's a novel of interwoven short stories with recurring characters, places and themes. I'd been on track with it at the start of the year, with only three stories left to finish to complete it, but my engine lost steam on it and I ended up dabbling in other things. I'm hoping to finish drafting one of the stories today (!) which'll put me in good stead to draft the other two and then put the sucker together by the end of the month.
2. Finish drafting Homebodies, the screenplay.
I've been messing around with this one for a while. It's a feature-length indie film screenplay about two sisters reunited when the older one's life falls apart. I've got a strong outline for it at this point and character bible's for the main cast, but I'd love to actually get a draft done this month.
3. Finish plotting The Belt, the graphic novel.
I'm a little looser with this one, but it's an idea I've had since highschool. Space military! Inter-planet politics! Aliens! Warfare! It's also always been a graphic novel in my head which, y'know, I have plenty of experience reading, but not a whole lot putting together. I'm not quite ambitious enough to want the whole thing done by the end of the month (hahahaha), but I really want to get it plotted out and the character bibles written and character designs drafted.
So pretty big tasks! I'm aiming to write for at least two hours a day, every day throughout the month (which I more-or-less do now). If I stick to this, hopefully I'll get shit done. To try and keep me on track too, I'm going to be posting updates every Monday, so you can expect to see that too.
