Tag Archives: reader

Blogging On

By Posted in Carrots and Jaffas, Family, Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

I wrote a post a few days ago expecting it to pass with a yawn. That it did not is a surprise. That it might matter is an astonishment. That I’ll persist is the fault of the addressees below:

Dear palmerglassbox,

I am gratified to bring a ray of sunshine twice a week, but I am concerned about the other five sunless days. Please ask your doc to measure your vitamin D levels.

Dear Lionel Lubitz,
I like the idea of opening you (plural) up. It is ages since I performed a laparotomy. Thank you for your unhyperbole and for the teasing notion that the blog can annoy you (again plural). Someone’s taking notice.

Dear Susanne at Bilingual Options,
Your response delights me because you delight in the stories that delight me most, those about family. As one very familiar with the grandrats (Susanne is the model for the speech therapist in Carrots and Jaffas, and my twin grandsons were her patients), you know well their suicidal energies. And as for wordpress, it conquers even the mightiest intellect. Only my daughter can be its blogmeistress, and that by virtue of her power of persistence (in her childhood, read ‘stubbornness’.)

Welcome kaisywmills, who like Janus, has two faces, one feminine, the second bearded.

Claire McAlpine, bloggist and book critic, says blog on. Same to you, Claire, and more so. Your blog and your reviews bring good books to our attention.

Thank you Sulfen for what I take to be encouragement. It is no chore to write, the contrary in fact; my fear is creating a chore for the reader.

And Kerryn, who wrote so thoughtfully: Kerryn, when you encourage me to tell stories, you give my inner minstrel voice to sing. And your suggestion for a story about the bloke in my wedding photo is irresistible. (Watch this space.) Further, if, dear Kerryn you were born on New Year’s Eve about 35 years ago, you might have been delivered by me; and in that case you have met that man, you knew that face: he is my forever friend, my former partner in the medical practice you attended in childhood.

And dear Louis De Vries – the publisher all writers dream of and none can deserve – we know where the readers are: they are all reading on tablets, which were invented to bankrupt you, to frustrate me and to allow people to read in the dunny.

Dear Miriam Abud,
How delightful to find you finding me in this way. Suddenly the invention of the computer is justified, the existence of the internet worthwhile. The thought of anyone settling down to half a dozen of my writings thrills and amazes me. That it is YOU fills me with smiles of pleasure. I’ll keep going. And I think the radio would bring out all that is boring and pompous and opinionated in me. But if it would sell books…

And you, Helen, in urging more poetry you open a mare’s nest, a can of sperms, and a mix of metaphors. My own verse is largely limited to medical referral letters where, because they are confidential and hence unpublishable, the verse does least harm. On the odd occasion I post the verse of true poets, women – generally young undergraduates – drool and swoon, a pleasant surprise for an old gent. I suspect poetry drives many men away.

Hello, misssophiablog, welcome to this blog. I am impressed that yours has a FAQ section. Golly. When I need fashion advice I’ll turn to you, Courtney.

Hello Spot, your remark, ‘in the outback you give us another window on the world’ is unexpected and brings the sudden thought that a casual smartarse blogger might actually be some sort of postman to another person waiting for a letter, any letter. Suddenly, all this might be serious. Or significant. Thank you and golly!

Hello dear Faye Colls,
No writer could ever earn your unwavering loyalty. You are a warm and kindly spirit. Fair dinkum.

Dear Dear Bruce,
In your steadfast attention to my musings you create a blog of your own, revealing a soldier of the law who defended the weak to his own cost. You show us your wounds of honour, your human vulnerability. In all your humility you lift us up.

Dear Hilary Custance Green,
As well as having the very most remarkable and unforgettable and rhymable name an author or a blogger could desire, you write most thoughtfully and I should say, faithfully. Everyone should read your new novel, which I will buy in the UK in January – despite Amazon’s best efforts to sabotage you – and which I’ll review in this blog. Please ensure Foyles stocks the book.
I have just received your remarkable (and generous) review of Carrots and Jaffas. You have expressed my purposes so adroitly and divined my approach so comprehensively, you’ve actually deepened my understanding of my own book. Thank you, quite humbly, HCG. (in my trade hcg is the acronym for human chorionic gonadotrophin, which is the substance in a woman’s urine that tells her she’s pregnant when she pees onto a stick. You have elevated HCG to a more refined level.)

Dear Nick Miller,
Like you I find myself thwarted by wordpress. I’m all the gratefuller for your close attention to the blog, as to all of my writing. Carrots and Jaffas would have been a much poorer book without your criticisms.

Gerard Oosterman, hello, and thank you for commenting. Your own blog is masterly and you seem to have conquered wordpress. Bravo! (note to readers – chase up gerard’s blog: it’s a ripper!)

Dear I L Wolf, dear Margot Mann (in fact, beloved MCM), dear Glitchy Mind, dear Claire Word by Word, dear the chattyrachel, dear M. Talmage Moorhead (a name to rival Hilary’s), dear mannyrutinel, dear amandalyle, dear fictionistasan (intriguing monniker), dear M. Funk l PHOTOGRAPHY, dear Greg Mercer, MSN, dear jackiewilson, dear bluchickenninja – you all liked a blogpost that ran the risk of becoming a fishing expedition for compliments. You forgave me and you wrote. Thank you all.

And dear DovTheRov, you make me larrf, Thank you for the encouragement. You write a mean weekly newsletter. How many rabbis can make a minyan smile?

In Hebrew we have an expression: “acharon, acharon chaviv” – last mentioned, most beloved. Thank you Rachel, thank you, thank you.

Yours, twice weekly, I’m afraid.

This House of Grief – by Helen Garner, A Review.

By Posted in Books, Family, Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Helen Garner saw it on the TV news. Night. Low Foliage. Water, misty and black. Blurred lights, a chopper. Men in high-vis and helmets. Something very bad here. Something frightful.

It was truly very bad. A man had driven his car into a dam. He escaped from the car but his three small sons drowned. The man was charged with their murder and over the following eight years Garner attended the man’s exhaustive legal trials. She exhausted herself in the process of moral exploration of territory that is indeed, ‘dark, misty, black and blurred.’ Reading Garner’s ‘This House of Grief’ can exhaust a reader in turn.

Three hundred pages of scrupulous enquiry end with the author reflecting: ‘When I let myself think of Jai, Tyler and Bailey lying in their quiet cemetery…I imagine the possessive rage of their families: You never knew them. You never even saw them. How dare you talk about your “grief?”
But no other word will do. Every stranger grieves for them. Every stranger’s heart is broken. The children’s fate is our legitimate concern. They are ours to mourn. They belong to all of us now.’

Garner takes the deaths of the three children personally as if she were herself involved. She seeks to know whether they died by grievous mischance or by human intent. She needs to understand. She begs of fate, of the universe, ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ For us her readers – we who elect to follow her into this frightful something – Helen Garner attends the hearings as our emissary to that house of grief. We too need to know, we too seek to understand; the three lost boys are ‘our’ lost children.

Garner quotes three epigrams, each a succinct cry from a previous emissary, each a pair of hands flung upward in despair over the futility of the quest to comprehend.

He can’t possibly have done it. But there’s no other explanation.

There is no explanation of the death of children that is acceptable.

…life is lived on two levels: one in our awareness and the other only inferable…from inexplicable behavior.

On what account are Garner’s thoughts and reactions, naked here on page after page, a matter for a reader’s interest or a reviewer’s remark? What access has the reader to her deeps, her angst? Garner, the person on the page, our emissary, attends a day of ravaging evidence; afterwards she makes her way, blindly, solitary, to a bar for a vodka. On other occasions she resorts to magical thinking: If only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead…Garner pictures them in their domestic vitality, playing footy, watching cartoons, running with arms open for a cuddle. The only way I could bear it was to picture the boys as water creatures: three silvery naked little sprites,…who slithered through a crack and …sped away together.
Then, haunted by the chill of reality, she races homeward in her mind, to haul my grandsons …from their Lego and their light sabres, to squeeze them …until they squirmed. Young boys! How can such wild vital creatures die? How can this hilarious sweetness …be snuffed out?

And again, this longer account of the observer’s migratory flight of feeling: When I got home I sat on the back verandah mumbling to myself, sick at heart. My third grandchild came wandering around the house. He approached me without speaking, turned his back, and stood waiting to be picked up. I lifted him onto my lap. He was only a few months younger than Bailey Farquharson had been when he drowned. For a while the little boy sat on my knee. He relaxed his spine against my chest. Together we listened to the clatter of the high palm fronds, the wail of a distant siren. He glanced up sharply when a flight of lorikeets swerved chattering across the garden. Then he spread his right hand like fan, inserted a delicate thumb into his mouth, and tucked his head under my chin.

And yet only two hours later when he and his four-year-old brother disobeyed me… and went crashing and yelling down the hall to the kitchen like maniacs, rage blinded me. I ran after them, grabbed the nearest arm, and yanked its owner round in a curve. Before I could land a blow I got a grip on myself. The boys stood frozen in attitudes of flight. Nobody spoke. In a cold sweat I leaned against the cupboard door and took some trembling breaths.

Here Garner gives us her brittleness, her sense of near disintegration, her proximity in extremis to harming loved ones in her care; and subtly too, the boys’ “attitudes of frozen flight” recall the postures of failed flight of the boys in the drowned car.

There is a reticence, a holding back at certain points, a refusal to comment that shouts, no, screams, in unexpressed horror. Thus: The men from Major Collision looked into the car before they opened it to drain the water. Ten-year-old Jai was lying face down across the front seats with his head towards the driver’s door…
Seven-year-old Tyler lay on his right side behind the driver’s seat. His head was near the door and his legs were between the two front seats. Two-year-old Bailey was lying across the top of the baby seat, facing rearwards and still tangled in his safety harness.

It is not until the following page that Garner reveals the killer datum: all three seatbelts were unbuckled. It is this crushing fact that tells us that a child – or two children – struggled. It is this, delayed, that a writer striving for dramatic effect might have juxtaposed earlier and quite unbearably with those postures. As it is, the bodies lie diagonally, piercing my composure. I too need recourse to slithering fishes or to vodka or to clutching hard my own brood of near ten-year-old grandboys.

***

Writing to a friend some weeks following release of the book – a year or more I guess after the trial and the appeal and the retrial and the application to the High Court – after all had ended, Helen Garner said: “This is what I’ve learned from the last seven or eight years: ‘We are small. We are weak. We are mortal’… but I think I knew that already.”

After all had ended it had not ended at all.This House of Grief

‘Joyful’ by Robert Hillman – A Review

By Posted in Books, Literature, Opinion, Reviews, Work by Others Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

There’s a CD I listen to when I want to write about something serious or something true or sad. It is Disc Two of ‘Dirt Music’, the album compiled by Tim Winton and Lucky Oceans to accompany Winton’s great and sad book of that name. Two tracks on the disc speak from the darkest room in the house of sorrow. (I refer to Sculthorpe’s ‘Dijille’ and to ‘Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten’ by Arvo Part). The grief is absolute. It neither cries nor shouts nor tears its hair out. It simply quivers and ultimately exhausts itself and lapses into barely audible human breaths. And thus into harmony with life. The experience leaves me quiet, reconciled – I suppose – by sheer truth. And beauty.

What has that to do with Robert Hillman’s new book, “Joyful”?  I read a passage in the later part of the novel where a character who has lost his only two children weeps silently in the utter darkness of a room in the mansion that gives the book its name. His quivering presence is sensed by his host, Leon Joyce, owner of “Joyful”. Joyce, who has been observing his own prolonged season of bottomless grief, stands, wordless and motionless. The weeping one comes to realise he is not alone. Each sorrows in silence, both men understand. No sign, no word. But something beyond words is known: the two men and the grateful reader make their way from that room in “Joyful” somehow reconciled to loss. And that is what Hillman’s book is about – its chief theme – how we humans risk all and lose all when we (inevitably) invest in passion.

Robert Hillman is not famous for misery, any more than Winton. The misery is there in the book as it is in life. But “Joyful” is also a story of the greatest vitality, the most audacious imagination, the most original characters, (from the carnal priest who absolves himself habitually, to Dally the Wordsworth-loving Iraqi Kurd, to the sexually hyperactive Tess, to the hapless Emily who cannot love any man who loves her, to the world-weary, gusset-guzzling, false-poet Daniel.) And the book is full of gems from the bowels of Hillman’s imagination that made me roar with unexpected belly laughing.

I defy the reader to get through “Joyful” without shedding tears of mirth and tears of joy. In short, I like it. I admire it. I respect it, I envy it, I treasure it. I’ll remember it.

joyful“Joyful’s” characters are destined to live in memory alongside Winton’s Fish and Lamb families that emerged from “Cloudstreet” and took up lodging in a nation’s treasury.

Text published “joyful.” Howard Goldenberg will launch it at Readings in Carlton at 6.30 pm on Wednesday 7 May. Please come along.

The Last Lover of The Age

By Posted in Childhood, Faith, Howard in the Media, Life, Literature, Medical, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Dear Age

I have loved you now for sixty years. I have loved you in all seasons, for good reasons and despite the bad. I have loved you in pleasure and in pain.
It was you who, in 1953, introduced me to Collingwood, the football team that would always run second to the very mighty Melbourne.
My family made the pilgrimage to Melbourne every September for the Jewish High Holy Days, the annual Season of Judgement. It was the judgement of the Age that Collingwood would challenge and would fall short. So it came to pass year after year: the Age proposed and God disposed. Collingwood was David to Melbourne’s Goliath ; and when the Pies went down to the brook they found no smooth stones for their slingshot.

Yes, I loved you. I loved you for the Junior Age in which you published the writings of young readers. I loved you for your literary judgement when you judged my own writings worthy of publication.
I loved ‘A Country Diary’, by Alan Bell. Churchill sent Alan here during the War. His was to be a British voice to keep Australia British. Every Saturday Alan reported on the Australia of his very English garden in Diamond Creek. He kept readers informed about the first duckling sightings in spring. This very British voice did its job: Alan Bell and the Age won the war for Britain.
I loved you when you introduced me to ‘Family Matters’, Martin Flanagan’s weekly report about his pre-school children. He taught anew the old truth that you do not know you have known love until you have sat through the night comforting a child delerious with fever.
I loved you through the seventies when I saw through your selective reporting on Israel and on doctors. In those days the Age pursued three public enemies – Nasty Israel, Greedy Doctors and the Painters and Dockers. If I met someone for the first time at a party and I had to answer the question – what do you do for a living? – I’d say I was a painter and docker. It made no difference.
You no longer pursue the Painters and the Doctors but you pursue Nasty Israel still. Martin Flanagan went to Israel with the Peace Team. To retain his independence he paid his own way. You published his generally favourable reports and I loved you for that.
For a period in the nineties I read Helen Garner’s column in your pages on Wednesday mornings. What joy, what variety, what excellence.
Helen and Martin opened chinks to reveal their human selves and we readers learned more of our own human selves.
I loved you because you were not Rupert. Someone has to be not Rupert or we’d all be in Deep Murd.
I read The Australian wherever I am in the outback, simply because it is available. Impressively, it is available all over Australia. You can read that newspaper from cover to cover and you can weep for bleakness. It is not a good news newspaper. Neither, dear Age, are you – generally speaking. But every so quite often your shrunken front page cheers a reader who yearns and searches for sightings of the goodness of human beings.
Now, and terminally, we have the Internet. Fairfax News can be obtained daily on a screen. (Who is this Fairfax-come-lately? I long for auld lang syme.) So no-one needs newspapers any more.
The Age is preparing for its own Death Notice, slimming down to fit a narrow pauper’s grave.
When you die I will mourn you. You remain necessary. You have been a friend. And as another friend once remarked: no-man is so rich he can afford to throw away a friend.

Postscript: this morning I lit a fire in my fireplace, using yesterday’s Age in place of kindling. The fire took and burns warmly as I write.

Overdue Recognition

By Posted in Life, Running Tagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

The time has come

To say fair’s fair

The time has come

To pay your share…

Taking my cue from the Oils, I have decided to honour my pledge to donors/investors in Pheidipides’ Foolproof Investment Opportunity.

In case this seems obscure to any newer reader, I refer you to the original post, reprinted at the foot of this.

In March I wrote a light-hearted and whimsical (not to mention extremely witty) invitation to contribute to a truly obscure charity in a small town in Massachusetts. My motive was to raise $2000-$3000, which would buy me a place in the field of the Boston Marathon.

Well, you bought me that place. I ran in Boston on 15 April. And I visited the Michael Lisnow Respite Centre before the race. It is hard to know which of the two experiences left the greater impression upon me. (I’ll remind you of how I felt about the race, by republishing Patriots Day 2013 on this blog – a piece I wrote a few hours afterward.)

You, my readers, my investors, my benefactors, raised $5202 for that respite centre. I walked its halls and I read its walls; I met its workers and its clients and its founders. I met people who cannot run, people who will remain forever children; and parents who will age and die before they cease to care for them. And to my surprise and relief none of this was harrowing. I was ambushed by the circumambient joy.

At the finish line a different ambush waited. And in all that horror, all that profound and unreadable human blackness, a kinder light was seen . Somehow I left Boston thinking better of humanity. Your money brought me close to death and into that light.

A few hours after the race I arrived at my niece’s home in Boston. Soon after there was a knock at the front door: a five year old neighbour heard people had been hurt in the race. She wanted to help a runner – any runner. She brought me a plastic cup of water.

No-one makes jokes at airports nowadays. And America’s Homeland Security guys are deadly serious jokers. Anticipating a grimmer grimness at Logan Airport, I allowed extra hours for my departure. But the security guys showed unwonted tenderness, gentled by the bastardry of the previous day.

***
So many of my readers gave so much. If you are one of those who donated fifty dollars or more, I need your snailmail address and a phone number so I can fulfill my promise to send you a copy of My Father’s Compass. Please reply to this post and I’ll contact you to get your address.

One anonymous reader donated $750.00. I promised a signed and inscribed copy of my novel, “Carrots and Jaffas” to the biggest donor. The novel is with Hybrid Publishers as I write, being tamed, tapered, disciplined and beautified into shape. The biggest donor must wait until early 2014 for that signed copy. (A second munificent reader sent three hundred dollars: Jan, you’ll receive a copy of C and J too. Contact details please.)

Earlier Post (5 March 2013):

A unique offer

I write to invite the reader to participate in a remarkable opportunity. It all starts in the village of Hopkinton, 26 miles from Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the Boston Marathon, which I will run on 15 April, 2013. My purpose – apart from winning the race and driving the Mercedes home to Australia – is to raise funds for the Michael Lisnow Respite Centre. The who?.

The Michael Lisnow Centre is, briefly put, a place of joy. As you will see.

All told I have run the Boston Marathon three times and I have never won: a clear case of home town favouritism.

I am coming out of retirement to give it another crack this year because the Michael Lisnow Respite Centre has captured my cold old heart. Haven’t heard of them? Neither had I until someone sent me this short short youtube. Have a look at it: http://www.youtube.com/hopkintonrespitetv

Take a peek at “In 2012”

This program, both modest and magnificent, is located in little Hopkinton, the world’s most famous village on this one day of the year. On the remaining 364 days, in perfect obscurity, the miracles continue.

The deal is this: I do the running, you make the cash investment. I am instructed to raise US$5000.00 by exploiting my friends.

Now I expect many of you are reaching for cheque books and credit cards as you read this, wishing to provide the entire $5000.00 yourselves. I invite everyone who feels a pang of delight at the youtube above to make a modest investment.

Although I lack a Securities Advisor License, I believe I am qualified to comment on this opportunity. This is a BLACK CHIP INVESTMENT, something unique, a guaranteed, dead set, one hundred percent secure opportunity. Unlike other funds, shares, projects and speculations, the fate of your contribution is beyond doubt: you will never see a cent of your money again. Neither will the Tax Office get a share of the funds. Nor will inflation chew away at them.

Every penny goes for the care of these kids. Donors in Australia will not receive a tax deduction in return for their goodness. Finally, I undertake to provide donors with an Investment Report after my return from Boston.

All you need to do to say goodbye to your money is to sponsor me in the Boston Marathon.

Time is short: the marathon will be run – as always – on Patriots Day, falling this year on15 April, 2013. Please send your donations directly through this link– http://www.razoo.com/Pheidipides-Foolproof-Investment-Opportunity

It is just possible that I not win the Mercedes, but together we will certainly improve the life of some lovely children and adults.

Help me to help them, please.

Sincerely

Howard (Pheidipides) Goldenberg