Holly

• Fences made, for some reason, from dry twigs.


• Despite this, a heightened awareness of fire hazards.


• So many front yards thick with oleanders. Hard matte leaves, pink and white flowers, and fretful warnings from parents. There was a boy who touched an oleander and didn't wash his hands before lunch, and he DIED. Oleanders are bright and hardy, which outweighs the fear of death.


• Drive-through alcohol shops.


• The sea, you can go in it and it's comfortable, warm patches and cool ones, take your pick. It's not "fine once you get used to it"; it's just wonderful, straight away.


• There is a shopping centre called Big Crow.


• There are licorice bullets. These are small, hard-chewy, bullet-shaped pieces of licorice coated in (usually dark) chocolate. Rest of the world, please sort out your failure to stock these.


• People do actually say "no worries", all the time.


• Sometimes it's really hot. When this happens, people with cars have to get up every couple of hours to move the car into a new patch of shade.

This week's best thing ever: recordings of suffragettes going back to 1937.

The Holly-and-roz_mcclure Society of Feminists Who Suddenly Feel Bad About Not Fighting The Patriarchy With Airships particularly recommends:

Muriel Matters, who sounds wonderfully as if she's reading out a children's book to a class of eager five-year-olds. It was quite a little airship, eighty feet long, and written in large letters on the gas bag were three words: VOTES FOR WOMEN. Below this was suspended an extremely fragile rigging.

Lilian Lenton, whose specialty was escaping when under house arrest: Well, I set fire to a lot of buildings...

Elizabeth Dean, crossly pointing out that not all suffragettes were middle-class: It didn't take me long to realise that the vote was just one thing, and not very much.

From Oliver Goldsmith's letters:

A Dutch lady burns nothing about her phlegmatic admirer but his tobacco. You must know, Sir, every woman carries in her hand a stove with coals in it, which, when she sits, she snugs under her petticoats; and at this chimney dozing Strephon lights his pipe.

And from Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

SOOTERKIN. A joke upon the Dutch women, supposing that, by their constant use of stoves, which they place under their petticoats, they breed a kind of small animal in their bodies, called a sooterkin, of the size of a mouse, which when mature slips out.

Some foot-stoves. In use in paintings (last two links from a consideration of the footstove in Vermeer's The Milkmaid).

It is coming up to the half of the year where I need to wear tights or stockings or the like, and therefore have itchy legs; perhaps voluminous petticoats and a foot-stove would be a good solution.

Why did nobody tell me about Black Hearts in Battersea?

So okay, it's a children's book set in alternate-history London - written 1965, set around 1825. There is Battersea Castle, built for ludicrous fake-historical reasons. There's a Battersea crest ("two squirrels respecting each other, vert., and az., eating mince pies"). There is a tunnel. There are art lessons. There are people who refuse to go to the opera without company and a board-game to play. There are wolves and snow in Battersea Park, there is a climactic scene featuring a hot air balloon. This book is full of so much stuff that I like that I can't even tell whether it's any good.

It's very confusing to read, because I am pretty sure I never encountered it when small, but also that if I had then I would attribute some of my most abiding obsessions to its influence.

EDIT: APPARENTLY IN THE PREQUEL THE MAIN CHARACTER KEEPS BEES. WHAT.

EDIT 2: Also one of the sequels is apparently about a quest for rare games.

Squirrel tails. Bumblebee bottoms. The eyelashes of llamas.
The individual nodules of a raspberry.
Balloons, soup-bowls, swept piles of autumn leaves. Towels.
Fried breakfasts. Birthday cakes.
Clock faces. The difference between low and high tide. To-read lists. Parcels. Geese.
Cheerleader pom-poms.
Toasters, light switches, computer monitors.
Chalk. London.

Brief reviews of non-fiction that I remember reading in the first half of the year.

( I enjoy pillows, am ambivalent about scandals, and don't like David Foster Wallace. )


Since we solved "why are YA books better?" on Tuesday, today's question is: what books about sport should I read? Non-fiction and fiction are both fine, and it is very safe to assume that whatever you might mention, I will not have read it, unless perhaps the sport takes place in a futuristic dystopia where the only way out of the underclass is to play... FOR YOUR LIFE. I currently have C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary on my to-read list, so maybe steering away from more cricket?

Every six months or so, I realise that hey, reading is great!, and I decide to keep track of books as I finish them. Last time it happened was January this year, which of course means I posted one entry about it and am now seven months behind.

But! I've been suddenly overcome with the desire to catch up. So: today, YA I remember reading in the first six months of this year. Tomorrow, non-fiction. Thursday, adult fiction. And then, presumably, another "oops, forgot about this" post sometime between December 2009 and February 2010 - put it on your calendars now!

( Children's and YA fiction, read Jan-June 2009 )


Anyway, the question is, why are YA books better than books for adults? I don't mean that they're always better, or that the best novels in the world are all YA, or even that most of my own favourite novels are YA. I suppose I mean, approximately, that I would much rather be trapped in a room for a week with 100 random YA novels than with 100 random novels for adults; or that I'm more likely to keep reading them late into the night and through travel-sickness on the bus.

Is it that they're easier to read and I'm lazy? Both these things are undoubtedly true. Is it that, outside the adult section, crime and science fiction and history and literary fiction and all the other genres sit next to each other, and writers (and individual works) are more likely to jump between them? Is it that they're shorter, the extraneous sentences and boring characters excised? Do they just involve more adventures and games and all those things that are fun?

How I spent my weekend (photo by digitaldust):


Proper summary to follow in due course.

So most of you have probably heard me go on about the Sandpit, which I curate. It's a monthly night for games-and-other-random-stuff. There's running around games, and games from theatre companies, and games of treachery and betrayal, and games where people wear bouncy head-boppers and pretend to be bees, and games where people make enormous pictures, and all sorts really.

From 31 July to 2 August we're holding the Hide&Seek Weekender at the Southbank Centre. It's going to be something like an ENORMOUS SANDPIT running all weekend long, made out of the best games of the last year (plus a few we've dragged in from elsewhere). There will be

• 400 badges
• 100 potatoes
• 50 soft toys
• 35 games
• 12 giant wooden spirographs
• 8 lasers
• 6 oddly-shaped parcels
• 5 huge inflatable game pieces
• 3 enormous floor-to-ceiling screens
• 2 walkie-talkies
• 1 bingo-ball contraption
• 1 grand piano
• And more! Obviously; it'd be a pretty weird event if it was constructed entirely from things on this list

So, you should come! It's at the Southbank Centre, it's all free, and it should be lovely, and lots of fun. More details of individual games are available on the programme.

This is what it looked like last year:


The stag is captured.

( Blackboards, sunshine, canvases, a giant grandmother, ALL THIS AND MORE... )

Yes, this is my actual job. I'm not sure how it happened either. It's pretty great!

Summer: not as scary as I thought!

In other news, you know what's pretty great? Summer!

This is surprising to me! Summer is supposed to be a nightmare: three months of misery and rashes and sunburn, of staying up till six in the morning in order to get to the fruit and veg shop before it's too hot to breathe outside, of giving up on baking and possibly eating in favour of lying around looking pathetic and crying out for ice-cubes. But it turns out, the English climate differs significantly from the Australian climate! This shouldn't surprise me, especially as it's part of why I moved, but it's taken a while to really sink in.

This is my third year in London, and for the first two I never quite trusted summer: sure, it seemed pleasant enough, but here I was in a country without air conditioning, and who could tell when the weather might turn on me? But three summers in, and following a "heat wave" that would be known in Adelaide as "oh, thank goodness, the heat wave's over", I think I'm ready to accept that actually, I find summer here pretty enjoyable.

It's a cultivated enjoyment - I have to maintain it through the careful application of fans, summer dresses, ice-cream, water-pistols, excessive raspberries, time for lounging around in the garden, and time for wandering around at night and sitting on famous London landmarks while reading books intended for 12-year-olds. But these are sacrifices I'm willing to make.

Festivals: might they, too, be less terrifying than I think?

I am still, however, very nervous about that hallmark of an English summer, the "festival". Not the sort of festival where you go to a big mixed arts venue made out of concrete, wander along a riverbank or lakeside terrace, drink some slightly overpriced coffee, and wonder whether to go for the production of A Doll's House on motorbikes, Edward II on fire, or Coppélia on stilts. The other sort, where you go and stay in a tent in a field.

I am going to one of these, specifically Latitude, as part of my work with Hide&Seek, in order to run some games there. I'm quite scared by this prospect, because it's in a TENT, in a FIELD, for DAYS, and apparently it's going to be either muddy outside or hot in the tent (it's not clear whether this means England hot or real hot). Also I don't usually like live music, and there is no way to get back early, and it turns out there's a huge list of things I need (mattress of some description! Wellington boots! Long socks! Apparently you're supposed to take special toilet paper? I'm not sure in what way its specialness manifests).

But if summer can be nice, approached in the correct and slightly careful manner, maybe festivals can be too?

So, er, is anyone else going? If you are, you should come and play our games, or at least reassure me that it will all be very pleasant and that you will come and say hello to me! I'm told I will probably enjoy it. At the very least, I enjoy its website's dual conviction that I shouldn't bring ANYTHING MADE OF GLASS AT ALL and that it is VERY IMPORTANT TO BRING A BOTTLE OPENER.

Hey, just in case anyone's desperate for updates on movies starring members of the High School Musical cast which are not themselves part of the HSM world: don't bother with Jump In!.

It's kinda okay! And the premise, at least, is charming. High School Musical, you may remember from my previous repeated posts on the subject, features a boy whose father, a basketball coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves basketball, but he also wants... to SIIIIIING.

Jump In! features a boy whose father, a boxing coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves boxing, but he also wants... to jump rope competitively for a double-dutch team.

(Clearly this bespeaks a desperate attempt to keep remaking the same movie with as few changes as possible ("lead male has awfulesome hair"), which is great because it will, as joranj helped me deduce, inevitably lead to a movie starring Hat Guy from HSM, whose father, a spear-hunting coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves spear-hunting, but he also wants to join his next-door-neighour's synchronised swimming team. There will be a huge swimming spears-versus-sparkles water-dance number.)

Anyway, Jump In!. Jump In!, it turns out, isn't very good, though it does deliver on its implicit promise of lengthy jump-rope dance sequences, which are mostly pretty great, except for this one move that they keep doing despite the fact that it looks very very clearly like wheelbarrow-position jump-rope sex. To be fair there are probably only so many ways for two people to jump up and down repeatedly in close contact with each other that don't involve looking a bit inappropriate for the playground.

Hey! It turns out my telephone is actually capable of making phone calls to numbers that aren't in its directory! It has taken me two and a half years to realise this: apparently it involves pressing the little button with a picture of a telephone on it. Thanks, random person who borrowed my phone and explained this to me!

The fact that I've only just realised this means I have a directory filled with two and a half years' worth of mysterious numbers belonging to people named, among the five Alexes, three Amandas and three Matthews:
6 [no idea who this is; I don't think I know any cylons, but then, I suppose the point about cylons is that I wouldn't]
Aha [no idea; I do not think I know any Norwegian pop bands]
captain [no idea]
copper [no idea]
curry! [actually I'm pretty sure this one is the local curry takeaway]
espiougog [I guess this is a predictive text malfunction?]
fictional [no idea]
ryman
ryman2
rymans [these are, I now recall, all the result of a long, boring, stationery-hunting day]
sky [no idea]
spy [no idea; I don't think I know any spies, but then, I suppose the point about spies is much the same as the point about cylons above]
swarm [no idea; I am pretty sure I do not know any swarms]

REASONS I SHOULD MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. The sea
2. It is quite a lot cheaper than London
3. There are those bungee trampoline things, which I've never tried but they look pretty great
4. The stone beaches are still, after many visits, funny to me
5. Its scones seem generally better than London scones
6. Half-price entry for residents to museum exhibitions!
7. The turquoise metalwork near the sea goes really well with my spring coat
8. It remains willing at all times to wallow unapologetically in Brighton stereotypes, thus:



REASONS I SHOULDN'T MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. Most of my friends are in London
2. As is my lovely job
3. I would replace my "overcome by desire to move to Brighton every time I visit" problem with a new but strangely familiar "overcome by desire to move to London every time I visit" problem

You are going to have to accept as a premise, at this point, that roz_mcclure and I are collectively required to go to any movie which combines (1) a ludicrous premise, and (2) teenagers. Otherwise this post is just going to get derailed immediately into "you went to what? You paid money to see 17 Again? You what?"

So, that premise accepted: roz_mcclure and I went to see 17 Again. We'd planned to ready ourselves by picnicking in a Chelsea park and sundresses, but as habituées of Chelsea will know, there are no parks in Chelsea: only locked private squares with signs reading POOR PEOPLE KEEP OUT. So instead we sat in the gutter outside a locked square, drinking dessert wine from plastic champagne flutes and unwrapping chocolate cake from High School Musical 3 kitchen towel ("clean up your kitchen with High School Musical 3 and Thirst Pockets!"). Inside the fence, polo-shirted families played cricket and laughed merrily.

And then 17 Again. If you've missed the side-of-a-bus advertisements, 17 Again is a movie in which Troy from High School Musical lives in the 1980s, grows up in the present day to become that guy from Friends, and then gets turned by a magical janitor into his 17-year-old self. It is... it is pretty bad. More than pretty bad, it is incredibly messed up. It is possibly the most messed-up movie I have ever watched all the way through. There are so many things wrong with it that there is no way to describe them all; but fortunately, as we sat in the pub afterwards, a magical janitor dropped the Table of Contents of a masters thesis from 2043 through a hole in time, saving us the trouble of trying:

Dissertation for a Masters of Early 21st Century Studies
University of Battersea and Kilburn
"17 Again: No, Seriously, What The Hell?"

1. Troy From HSM, Please Put Your Shirt Back On
2. Lol incest
3. When Nice Girls Put Out: it's all in the family
4. Our Journey So Far: no, wait, what?
5. What's the age of consent in America again?
6. Teen Pregnancy: let God decide
7. Avoiding Racism: it's easy when everyone's white
8. Vapid Teenage Whores
9. It's Fine As Long As You're Rich: male nerds and "no means yes"
10. This film contains every single thing that was wrong with early twenty-first century western culture

APPENDIX A: Strangely, I would have been more okay with the momflirting if he had really been 17.
APPENDIX B: The lectures on female virtue: still a no.

SCANDAL. Gosh. This may require some context, and I'm a little overexcited, so bear with me for a moment. Do any of you remember Truffle the Cat? For those of you who don't and are too lazy to follow the link, a quick summary. Somerfield, a chain of small supermarkets, puts out a monthly magazine. This magazine features a regular interview with the pet of a reader (typically a dog or a cat, but on occasion a hamster, rabbit or other more unusual animal). This monthly interview is conducted by Truffle. This is Truffle:



For several months last year, the interviews stopped, but I wrote in and complained and Truffle returned "by popular demand", which obviously was my personal triumph for 2008 and meant our household could go back to its monthly live readthroughs of Truffle's latest adventure.

Truffle—whose sex has never been revealed—is a lascivious creature who tries to seduce both dogs and cats, though (s)he is typically less taken with other animals. This has been even more distinct since Truffle's return from exile. Recent issues typify these tendencies, well past the point of deniability...

Extract from Truffle's interview with Tara, a tiny and pert-eared dog, showing Truffle's predatory side:

Tara: My mum says I am the perfect companion — friendly to a fault!
Truffle: Well, I myself am on the lookout for a new companion...
Tara: Oh dear. Well, I'm very busy being vigilant at home, so I'd better be going.

Extract from Truffle's interview with Foxie, a ferrett, showing Truffle's bias against animals that are not cats or dogs:

Foxie: But I like to play too — I love chewing on rubber.
Truffle: Can't say I see the attraction in that myself.
Foxie: Oh you really should try it some time.
Truffle: I might give it a miss, if that's all right with you.

(You'll have to trust me when I tell you that Truffle would pretty clearly have jumped on this, or any, offer if it had been extended by a cat or a dog - Truffle's tastes are wide-ranging and his/her advances are if anything only inflamed by the revelation that a young labrador is not very well house-trained, for example.)

So, right, that's got you more or less up-to-speed. The main points are:
1. Truffle is a cat who interviews pets in a national magazine handed out at supermarkets.
2. Truffle's biological sex and gender identity have never been revealed.
3. It has been increasingly impossible to argue that Truffle's lascivious ways are not present in the text.
4. These things please me, and also please various housemates, ex-housemates and tolerant visitors but particularly roz_mcclure and the_alchemist

And then this month:

( TRUFFLE THE CAT IS STARTLED BY FELINE PROSTITUTE'S ADVANCES, ARGUABLY REVEALS SEX )

Gosh, Go does better at naming its famous games than anything else ever. Chess has to make do with stuff like "Polish Immortal", "The Immortal Zugzwang Game", "Pearl of Zandvoort", maybe "Octopus Knight" on a good day. Whereas Go has:

• The Atomic Bomb Game
• The Famous Killing Game
• The Ear-Reddening Game

There's a game of Go where three of the decisive moves were suggested to the winning player by ghosts, and that's not even the most memorable thing about it. It's not called the Suggested By Ghosts Game, or the Supernatural Assistance? That's Surprising! Game: it's the Blood-Vomiting Game.

It's been a while since my last enthusiastic but slightly overambitious "you know what would be a good idea?" project - which means it must be time for Minor Delays: a very short story for every station on the London Underground and DLR, in alphabetical order, with a new story going live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I started last Monday with Acton Town, and if everything goes according to plan will be finishing with Woodside Park in, er, somewhere towards the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011 in fact. Predictions are currently being accepted regarding (1) when I'm first going to fall behind schedule, and (2) when the whole plan will first be messed up irrevocably by massive changes to the tube system.

There's a livejournal feed at minordelays, thanks to amuchmoreexotic.

I should really read more paper books, given that it makes me happier and more productive, with no down-side other than "will have to go the the local library and find out how much I owe them in overdue fines".

This is a New Year's Realisation rather than a Resolution, and it's one that dawns on me - briefly - every six months or so. This time round it's prompted by a December in which I've had a very persistent cold, some holiday time, and to go into a lot of bookshops for "Christmas shopping"; as a result I've read... more than I have any month since, well, since I got home internet access in fact.

It's all the fault of The Internet, yes. In 1994, when I was 13, I turned down the opportunity to see what this Internet was like; I went to the library instead. In 1998, I spent a couple of hours in my dad's office on a cold Glaswegian night, poking around online for the first time and looking for essays about words - the ones I remember best are still online - which I then printed out en masse, filed in a big folder labelled "Interesting Things", carried back to Adelaide, and kept in a cupboard for years. Then university, and computer labs everywhere, and an actual email address, and eventually home internet access in 2002, and if I've read as many books during 2003-2008 inclusive as I did in any single reading year before then, I'd be surprised.

Fight fire with fire, though; turn the internet against itself! Which is to say, I'm going to do what half of you are doing already and post monthly what-I've-been-reading lists with tiny reviews.

( Books finished during December 2008. Dragons, evolution, advertising, THE FUTURE, coffee. )

It's time to talk about High School Musical.

I know, I know - when isn't it time to talk about High School Musical? But it's time for me to talk about High School Musical, because it's been one of the defining themes of my year, and when else am I going to have even the slightest excuse for posting 2200 words arguing that HSM is basically an enormous live-action role-playing game/collaborative theatre piece, and that in experiencing it you are asked not just to watch a movie and give Disney your money, but to become an imaginary member of an imaginary high school and thereby help to create, very temporarily, the world that the movies envisage?

( The most and least important things about High School Musical. )

( Towards a critical framework for High School Musical )

( High School Musical )

( High School Musical 2 )

( High School Musical: Sing It )

( High School Musical on stage )

( High School Musical 3, with adventure! )

( High School Musical: The Ice Tour )

( The two messages of High School Musical - contains a swear word, if you're at work and have filters that might object )

Here are some great things about different systems of classifying books.

1. Their specificity: the particular strange categories that somebody has deemed important. Dewey has "phrenology" and "shorthand" on a par with "anatomy" and "Japanese history"; the Chinese Library Classification system opens its twenty-odd major classification types with "Marxism, Leninism, Maoism & Deng Xiaoping Theory". The Free Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen has a classification for "chafing dish".

2. The unexpected conjunctions: the places where someone's judged "this thing and that thing are alike", and made a whole system out of their brain's unexplained metaphors. The Free Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen combines "bees and silkworms", presumably on the grounds that they're both tiny critters that make useful things for people; and early Dewey does the same thing (at 638, now "insect culture").

3. This:



See also thrillers and fiction.