Painting Fakes

Anyhow, onto something really important - Love.  If you've never heard the story of Tristan and Isolde, you've really missed out on something.  You could start by reading it in a children's version, perhaps one of the ones I read as a child.  Following Thomas Malory's 15th century lead, they wove it in between that more famous love triangle involving Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.  You could attempt to listen to Wagner's operatic treatment of it, if you understand German and can stand opera.  Or you could read this most beautiful version, written in the 13th century by the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg and translated into English prose by AT Hatto. The heart of the story is simple and well-known.  Yes, there is a love potion, a dragon, a giant, a fairy dog and a magic lovers' cave, but these are just entertaining diversions from the all too recognisable humanity of the tale.  Tristan is commissioned by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to travel to

Twice in every 100-odd years, Venus passes directly between the earth and the sun.  For a few hours, if there are no clouds, earth-bound mortals can see her shadow as it crosses the face of the sun and then disappears.  It happened today amidst much fanfare and astronomical excitement. This means it's a good day for a post on Shirley Hazzard's wonderful novel, The Transit of Venus .  Expatriate Aussie novelist Hazzard is not prolific by any means but what her work lacks in quantity it makes up in quality and The Transit of Venus is her masterwork. Published in 1980, it follows the lives and loves of Australian sisters Caroline and Grace Bell from their arrival in the UK after World War 2.  It is a lyrical, elliptical novel, moments of sly humour mingled with an all-pervading sense of tragedy.  Her characterisation is beautifully nuanced, you feel passionate love or scorn for each of her creations. Venus remains hidden for long, dreary years, reveals herself in a blinding

My daughter recently introduced me to Elfriede Jelinek .  It was not so much a recommendation as a complaint.  Having run out of subjects that interested her she was forced to study postmodern literature to complete her major.  Jelinek's Women as Lovers was on the reading list.  I said it sounded interesting.  She handed it to me and said "it's all yours". It was interesting, too.  Jelinek is a Viennese novelist and plawright, largely unknown outside the German-speaking world until the 2004 Nobel Literature Prize thrust her reluctantly into the global spotlight.  The Nobel judges cited her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." I suppose that's one way of putting it.  Women as Lovers, written in 1974 but not translated into English until 20 years later, is a parody of the romance novel.  It traces the courtshi

For the past couple of weeks I've been obsessing about Richard and Linda Thompson , and in particular their beautiful song A Heart Needs a Home. Richard and Linda first met around 1969.  Richard was already famous as the guitarist and sometime songwriter with folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention, his guitar playing reportedly the reason for their initial recording contract.  Linda, then performing as Linda Peters, was a struggling singer,  recording advertising jingles and doing folk club gigs in the evenings. In 1971 Richard left Fairport, seeking more scope for his own songwriting.  In between earning his living as a session player he recorded his first album, Henry the Human Fly, with a band that included Linda as a backing vocalist.  By the end of 1972 the couple were married and officially performing as a duet.  Richard had found his muse and Linda her voice and a set of songs to sing.  Of course it was not an entirely equal partnership.  Richard wrote the songs,

Yesterdays Weekend Australian Magazine includes  this moving extract from the soon-to-be-published memoirs of former High Court Judge Michael Kirby.  It tells the story of his lifelong partnership with Johan van Vloten - how they met, the early days of their relationship, his ongoing delight at finding love when he thought he was destined for a life of loneliness. If Johan had been a woman there would be nothing remarkable in this tale, and it certainly wouldn't be the pre-publication extract.  If I remember rightly, none of the extracts from John Howard's book talked about his lifelong love for Janette.  Yet there is an undercurrent of pain in Kirby's telling.  In the 1970s (the pair met in 1969) it was illegal to be gay, and Kirby was a high profile lawyer and later a judge and the public face of law reform.  Their relationship stayed more or less secret until the late 1990s when social attitudes finally allowed them to come into the open.  Of course colleagues knew o

Lois and I went to see the new movie version of Jane Eyre for my birthday.  I don't need to provide a spoiler alert, do I? What a good movie adaptation will do for a classic story - and this is a good one - is to strip away a lot of the incidental details and show the skeleton of the story in sharp relief.  What we see is a story that, while never losing its focus on Jane as its heart, is structured around two interlocking love triangles. If there is a more spiritually charged set of love triangles in English literature then I can't recall it.  What is at stake here is not mere romance, or fortune, but people's souls. Jane lives through hard times before finally arriving at Thornfield House as a governess and falling in love with her master, Edward Rochester.  Although strange, and set against the background of creaky gothic horror, the romance seems set to end happily until the inevitable romance-tale hiatus.  Edward is already married to poor mad Bertha, the s

Even though their courtship makes an absorbing story, I fear the marriage of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy will be a rocky one.  A marriage across class barriers might seem romantic, but there will be a lot of learning to do on both sides.  Fitzwilliam will not find it as easy to shed his arrogance as he thinks, and Elizabeth will not suffer it meekly.  He will sulk after an argument and they will not speak for days.  In those times especially, but at other times too, she will be lonely.  She is used to a small house filled with five other noisy, combative women and a father whose wit cuts the air.  Here she inhabits a cavernous mansion with a taciturn husband, his timid young sister and so many servants that she struggles to remember their names.  Yet if she invites her mother or sisters to visit her husband becomes even more difficult, because he despises them.  Of course they will eventually make up, passionately and with a great show of repentence, after each argument, and perh

In betweeen reading all these Lives of Jesus  I managed to find time to read George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life .   I remember my first year literature tutor telling us Eliot's Middlemarch was the greatest novel ever written in English.  That's a big call but once I read it, particularly after the first 100 pages, I had to agree that she had a point. Eliot (real name Marian Evans) was a minister's daughter but as a young adult she abandoned the established church, "converting" to the ideas of German theological scholar David Freidrich Strauss, whose rationalist Life of Jesus  she translated in 1846.  By the mid 1850s when she started writing fiction she was living openly with a married man and one of the reasons she used a pseudonym was to avoid her writings being rejected because of her rather notorious personal life. Scenes of Clerical Life contains her first published works of fiction - three novellas which appeared seperately in one of John Bl

The explosion of "new folk" music is definitely a Good Thing.  My latest love along this line is Noah and the Whale's The First Days of Spring.  The album is a little on the gloomy side, being (what else?) a series of songs about lost love and the associated despair.  Cue lots of slow songs about loneliness and depression, before the final song climbs out to a kind of acceptance and hope. But now I'm free, Now I'm free, Now I'm free from all your pain. Well you have only let me down you have only, let me down but my door is always open yeah my door is always open. Like the album title says, the first days of spring.  At first listen the whole thing seems gloomy and a tad boring.  Repeated listens get you cued into the clever arrangements, the lush orchestration and memorable hooks, as well as the lyrical movement from despair towards hope. What's really got me buzzing, though, is that in the dead centre of this gloom and despair is an abso

My birthday is long gone and finally the new Richard Thompson CD that I ordered with my birthday money has arrived.  Because it's my birthday I ordered the deluxe version which includes a set of acoustic demos and I'm glad I did because to my mind a band doesn't always add much to Thompson's amazing guitar playing.  I saw him live in Brisbane a few years ago, standing alone on the stage of the Tivoli, and didn't miss the rest of the band for a moment. I must admit though that the new album is a little patchy, and I'm getting more enjoyment out of the one that arrived earlier, Martha Tilston's Lucy and the Wolves.   I caught on to Tilston when I picked up a copy of Milkmaids and Architects in a second hand shop and couldn't understand how anyone could part with it.  If you've never heard her, listen to this beautiful performance of "Music of the Moon".  Lucy is better, if you need to make that kind of comparison. It has a quiet

For some reason I've been listening to Paul McCartney's Silly Love Songs .   It's one of those songs that refuses to leave once it's in your head, even when you try to drive it out with lashings of punk rock or Pink Floyd. I didn't like this song when it first came out in the mid-1970s.  At the time I thought this was because it was silly and superficial.  I was a very serious teenager.  Now I think I was just too immature to appreciate it.  For a start, it's not as simple as it seems.  There's a lot going on beneath the surface.  A jaunty bass rhythm, a horn section counterpointing with lush strings, interwoven harmonies and counter-melodies.  McCartney was (and is) no fool musically. Then the lyrics provide a joyous piece of self-satire, as well as a cheerful poke in the eye for people like his ex-mate John Lennon who seemed to take the art of pop music a lot more seriously than he did.  He asks, "why not have fun?"  Lennon always seemed to

In the 2002 movie adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine (which bears only passing resemblance to the book), its chief character is driven to complete the invention of his time machine by the murder of his fiancé. Traveling back in time, he repeatedly attempts to prevent the murder, only for her to die in some other way. In despair, he travels far into the future and meets someone of highly advanced intellect who explains that since the murder triggered the invention of the time machine, it can only exist in a time stream where the woman dies. Ever since Wells’ novella, time travel has been a staple of science fiction. Usually, as with Wells, the ability to travel through time represents a technological triumph, although ultimately a mixed blessing as various versions of the paradox perplex or endanger the participants. The Time Traveler’s Wife , both the novel by Audrey Niffenegger and the recent film adaptation starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, makes it a disability.