Sunday Short: 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank' by Nathan Englander

It’s a lot for one day, that kind of news. And it feels to me a lot like betrayal. Like my wife’s old secret and my son’s new secret are bound up together, and I’ve somehow been wronged. Also, I’m not one to recover quickly from any kind of slight from Deb—not when there are people around. I really need to talk stuff out. Some time alone, even five minutes, would fix it. But it’s super apparent that Deb doesn’t need any time alone with me. She doesn’t seem troubled at all. What she seems is focussed. She’s busy at the counter, using a paper tampon wrapper to roll a joint.

I feel like this year I've been opened up a lot more to holocaust survivor narratives, or second-generation guilt narratives. Between Lola Bensky, season 5 of Mad Men (which I'm currently watching), living in a house built by a holocaust survivor, and this stirring short story, it's taking up a lot of space in my head. It's beautifully represented in this story in particular, this uncurling of cultural and religious mores, but it's more than that too. It's a story of renewed friendships and faith in more than religion, about national tragedy and who's going to have your back at the end of the line. It's pretty much a perfect short story.

You can read 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank' by Nathan Englander over at The New Yorker website.

Friday Finds

Triple J's Unearthed competition runs annually and serves the purpose of, well, unearthing new Australian talent in music. The big catch is that all entrants to the main competition are highschoolers. So far, it's track record is pretty remarkable - perhaps the biggest winner being Silverchair back in the day, and this year's winner, the dreamy, surreal Japanese Wallpaper is a pretty stirring entrant into the winner's circle. This song, Breathe In, is particularly lovely.

- This video about geek girls acting like geek guys killed me.

- These tampon ads from Carefree are pretty darn delightful (glitter cave! Crimson companion!)

- Nude photos where the photographer is nude and the subjects are fully clothed are basically the best.

- A lot of the new Amazon Prime shows kind of look amazing? I'm particularly excited for Transparent and Red Oaks!

- And to take you out for the weekend, check out these eight short story masterclasses care of Aerogramme Studio.

It's Queensland Poetry Festival this weekend! I talked about it a bit over here, and will be there most of Sunday at this rate. What are your plans for the weekend though? Anything exciting?

Lifetime Collective SS14

Man, I love this collection by Lifetime Collective. It's all sweet, springtime wear which Brisbane is currently edging into at the moment. Plus I'd wear basically every item in it, which is always an added bonus. Check out the full collection over at the Lifetime Collective website.

Friday Finds

Well this is basically the best thing I've seen all week.

- On a related note, I know not everyone's a fan, but I'm pretty stoked on the fact that Pottermore is adding so richly to the content of the Harry Potter books, and not just telling us things we already know, or focusing more on the protagonists. This song by Celestina Warbeck is pretty much a delight.

- The trailer for Studio Ghibli's new film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is pretty divine.

- These sixteen bookish pick up lines are pretty hilarious.

- These rarely seen photos of the Sex Pistols are awesome too.

Matthew Williamson Resort 2015

I've always loved colour aesthetically, but as a young woman with insecurities abound, I was reluctant for a really long time to actually wear it. That's changed over the last couple of years, and I've welcomed brights and bolds into my wardrobe the same way I welcome a glass or three of wine after a long day. Matthew Williamson's Resort 2015 collection embodies everything I love in a line. Recurring but diverse colours, big prints and a wide range of fabrics make for something pretty damn great.

You can check out the full collection over on Style.com.

   

  

   

The Owlish Guide to Queensland Poetry Festival

Queensland Poetry Festival is one of my favourite local events. It always does such a tremendous job of bringing in brilliant artists around strange and compelling themes. This year's is shaping up to be particularly awesome, with a great lineup of local and international artists, panels around resistance, language and race, and a wonderful highlight musician in The Bell Divers. My picks for the festival are below. 

WEDNESDAY 27 AUGUST
Not Much to Tell You
Kaitlyn Plyley is a local poet and storyteller and all sorts of charming. Her solo show is a combination of poetry and comedy, cultural critique and storytelling and should be pretty darn wonderful. 

FRIDAY 29 AUGUST
QPF Official Opening
The official open is always a great event, and features the announcement of the winners of the Val Vallis Award and the Thomas Shapcott Prize. Plus, y'know, drinks! Food! Mingling! 

Needlepoints of Light
The official open is always fun, but it's the following event worth sticking around for. A showcase of some of the most exciting poets of the festival (this year Warsan Shire!) and a stellar musician (this year The Bell Divers!), Needlepoints of Light is shaping up to be one of the must-see events of the festival.  

SATURDAY 30 AUGUST
Tongue Tied: poetry and Asia
This year, QPF has offered up a few panels, and Tongue Tied looks like a really interesting one. MC'd by the (rather brilliant) Eleanor Jackson, QPF will be speaking to four poets with ties to Asia about language and connection. 

Night Uncurls its Palm
All of the evening poetry readings tend to be good ones, but this one is particularly awesome, with a lineup to rival any poetry event in the country. Warsan Shire! Eleanor Jackson! Luka Lesson! David Stavanger!  

Teen Makeouts Hate Poetry
One-sided conversations, contemporary dance and a complete melt down of language is a pretty great way to sell an event, even more so when it involves teen-focused pop culture. 

SUNDAY 31 AUGUST
Celestial MonstersI mean, the theme is celestial monsters. 'Nuff said. 

Riotous Punk Angels
Poetry as resistance has been around almost as long as poetry itself has been, so it makes for a pretty perfect panel. They'll be talking about anger and warfare, discrimination and more. 

Into the Warmth
Poetry and food have an interesting relationship, so it's pretty great to see them interacting through Yum Cha at this year's poetry festival. Particularly with the poetry stylings of Zenobia Frost and Candy Royalle. 

The Space Between: film screening
Poets! Film! Multimedia artists! This is always a good one.  

The Bedroom Philosopher
The Bedroom Philosopher (Justin Heazlewood), is one of Australia's most innovative cross-medium artists, so it's awesome to see him headlining his own slot at this year's festival. It should be pretty great.  

The Unknown Future of Everything
Finish off your festival experience with a slam!  

You can view the whole program over at their website.

Sunday Short: 'The Cheater's Guide to Love' by Junot Diaz

Your girl catches you cheating. (Well, actually she’s your fiancée, but hey, in a bit it so won’t matter.) She could have caught you with one sucia, she could have caught you with two, but because you’re a totally batshit cuero who never empties his e-mail trash can, she caught you with fifty! Sure, over a six-year period, but still. Fifty fucking girls? God damn! Maybe if you’d been engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita you could have survived it—but you’re not engaged to a super-open-minded blanquita. Your girl is a bad-ass salcedense who doesn’t believe in open anything; in fact, the one thing she warned you about, that she swore she would never forgive, was cheating. I’ll put a machete in you, she promised. And, of course, you swore you wouldn’t do it. You swore you wouldn’t. You swore you wouldn’t.

And you did.

 I've talked a lot about Junot Diaz on here before, and he really is one of my favourite authors. He has such a perfect way of capturing the best and worst in people, in relationships, in moments. The Cheater's Guide to Love is an embodiment of all those things, anchored in Diaz's pretty perfect prose.

You can read 'The Cheater's Guide to Love' over at The New Yorker website here.

'Winter's Bone' by Daniel Woodrell (31/52)

Jessup Dolly is AWOL which might not be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that he's due in court and put his house up as bond. At home, sixteen-year-old Ree is raising her little brothers and caring for her mentally ill mother, and when she finds out her father is missing, she sets off to find him, uncovering the small town's seedy underbelly in the process.

I saw the film adaptation of this a couple of years ago and loved it pretty hard, so picking up the novel was a bit of a no brainer. The film does the book justice, but beyond it, the book is a wonderful example of Southern Noir. Gritty and mean, harrowing, but not without it's bright spots, Woodrell does a wonderful job of opening up this small town and spilling it's guts on the page. Ree is a champion of a protagonist too, emphatic and steely and all sorts of wonderful, as is her relationship with her best friend, Gail, a woman of her own strength that shows itself in different ways. It's an awesome book, and one I wish was more popular!

5 out of 5 gutted squirrels.

Friday Finds

- I was totally devastated by the news of Robin Williams' passing this week. I've been trying to capture my feelings on it in my head and on paper, but it's too soon, and touches on some very difficult memories, so I'm going to leave it alone for now. Anyway, Chris Gethard's tribute is pretty perfect.

- Margaret Mead on female versus male creativity is a terrific read. 

- Ursula K. Le Guin talking to Michael Cunningham about genre, gender and broadening fiction is also pretty awesome.

- I love abandoned themeparks, so to see this particularly spooky one burnt down is pretty sad.

- Sophie Turner is set to star in a movie as Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein! There is nothing about this sentence I don't love!

- These 23 cartoonists on drawing their bodies is a wonderful read.

- Why Charmed is better than True Blood. Yes and yes.

Magnolia Antic

It's still pretty darn cold here in Brisbane, and it's really making me lust after spring fashions. Magnolia Antic's new line is gorgeous, full of bright whites and blacks and lovely silhouettes, plus some of the nicest pants I've seen in a long time.

You can view Magnolia Antic's full collection at their website here.

'The Shining Girls' by Lauren Beukes (30/52)

Harper, a drifter in the 1930s, stumbles upon an abandoned house. In it, he finds his past, present and his future, the names of his shining girls, and the ability to time travel which helps him to find them. Harper hunts these women until he makes a wrong turn at Kirby, a tenacious young woman who survives Harper's attack in the 1980s, setting off a game of cat-and-mouse across time.

I really enjoyed this book. Beukes is a strong writer and has a knack for fleshing out compelling characters in limited words. All of Harper's victims are interesting and emphatic and, worse, characters you really don't want to see murdered, which makes Kirby's rise to hunter all the more thrilling. The themes of motherhood and death, life and love are so thoroughly interwoven too that when tensions build to a head, it's almost a relief. It's a great book, but I'd love to have seen a bit more time jumping on Kirby's part.

4 out of 5

Y the Last Man Book 1 by Brian K. Vaughan (29/52)

Out of the blue, every male organism on Earth dies instantly, plant, animal, human. Well, all but Yorick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Yorick sets out to find his girlfriend, Beth, but the world isn't what it used to be without half the population, and society quickly devolves into chaos. With inter-group warfare, starving women and escaped criminals, Yorick, accompanied by a secret service agent and a cloning doctor, must find his girlfriend and try to provide a solution for humanity's dying generation.

I've raved about Brian K. Vaughan's more recent work, Saga, a lot, and so have been slowly working my way through his back catalogue. Y: The Last Man, interestingly, treads a lot of the same themes of Saga. Warfare, star-crossed lovers, created families and real ones torn a part and put back together wrong are all explored in a compelling fashion. As a writer, his handle on dialogue and slow reveals is almost unparalleled, and the illustrations are staged so beautifully and in such detail. It's a great read, but not quite as great as Saga. 

4 out of 5 magician monkeys.

Sunday Short: 'Thanksgiving in Mongolia' by Ariel Levy

I got pregnant quickly, to my surprise and delight, shortly before my thirty-eighth birthday. It felt like making it onto a plane the moment before the gate closes—you can’t help but thrill. After only two months, I could hear the heartbeat of the creature inside me at the doctor’s office. It seemed like magic: a little eye of newt in my cauldron and suddenly I was a witch with the power to brew life into being. Even if you are not Robinson Crusoe in a solitary fort, as a human being you walk this world by yourself. But when you are pregnant you are never alone.

I feel like I've recommended a few miscarriage pieces recently, but this one by Ariel Levy is particularly brutal. She captures the thrill of a pregnancy and the heartbreak of loss, the consuming effect of it, so perfectly it's hard to know what else to say about this piece. It's lovely. It's awful.

You can read 'Thanksgiving in Mongolia' by Ariel Levy over at The New Yorker website.

Friday Finds

I'm loving Charli XCX's surge to the top of pop at the moment, and her terrific cover of I Want Candy is a great example as to why.

- These three TED talks on storytelling are all sorts of wonderful.

- We're getting a female-led superhero film in 2017? Yay? Just wish it wasn't Sony, not being a huge fan of The Amazing Spider Man reboot.

- Keke Palmer is Broadway's first black Cinderella! I am excite! I've loved Keke Palmer since The Longshots (pls don't judge me).

- This Harry Potter/Scott Pilgrim mash-up is basically the best though.

- How awesome are these photos of African wildlife by Will Burrard-Lucas?! And these ones of powerful moments captured in the wild.

- Studio Ghibli's closing <:O and the not closing?

- 18 books perfectly described using emojis.

- These high contrast illustrations by Polish artist, Patrycja Podkoscielny are awesome and basically the perfect thing to start your weekend with.

'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood (28/52)

It's been three years since the religious wars put the women in habits and dissolved society as we know it. Offred has given up her family and taken on the role of a breeder, passed on to a commander with the sole purpose of having a child in a world which is making that increasingly hard. Things don't go as planned though, and the rumblings of rebellion are stirring beneath the city's orderly facade...

Everyone told me I'd love this book and, to be pretty frank about it, I really did. Margaret Atwood's writing is both accessible and compelling, her handle of characters fully realised and her world building immersive. She also has an insane ability with a slow reveal, and a lot of this novel feels like pulling clothes off someone in ski gear to get to the skin and bones beneath.

Offred is wonderfully flawed, and, as our entry point into the story world, a great point of access. She is not the stirring rebel, but rather a woman forced into obedience but not submission. Her strength comes not from grabbing a knife, but from her tenacity in surviving. It's a characteristic that reminds me a lot of Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones and one that really appeals to me within a narrative. Similarly, the supporting characters are awesomely rounded. Biting and desperate and subservient and mean, the whole story has the feel of characters backed into a corner on a social level and damn, if that isn't a good one.

5 out of 5 maydays.

Orla Kiely Resort 2015

Oh, man, Orla Kiely is just the design house of my heart. I blog about them virtually every collection, and their stellar Resort 2015 collection is the cutest thing I've seen all week. There's not an outfit in it I wouldn't wear, and it's like they stole into my brain and discovered my love of stripey sweaters.

You can view the whole collection over at the Orla Kiely website here.