Saturday links

Melbourne’s evening skies at the moment are so gorgeous.

I think that what are lot of us are doing with the internet, with twitter, blogs etc, is curating. We are collecting links to articles of interest, stories, pictures, as well as trying to collect people of like mind, making connections with people. It really is a grand thing.

Often I have a bunch of screens open across my laptop, and they will collect over days. Then my poor machine starts to struggle, with closing windows and applications, and I know it’s time to give it a little sleep. As I did just before. (I am going to have to buy a new machine but am resisting it as long as possible. I know this is risky, especially with Mercury being a bastard right now, but I back up back up back up.)

So here are some links that I’ve enjoyed over the last little while.

I have two knitting projects on the go, inspired by twitter acquaintances author Charlotte Wood and editor Foong Ling Kong. One is a blanket, I’m copying Charlotte brazenly (I asked if she minded, she said no. What else could she say?) My daughter, after watching me on the couch in front of the tv, finding it mesmerising, asked if she could help with the blanket project. So she is madly knitting as well. We are both addicted. My second project is a (ahem, Collingwood) football scarf for my boy.

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This is interesting. Where do writers go to talk freely? Well, I imagine, the same places that private talk has been happening for yonks. I can’t help but think this article is kind of pointing out the obvious, but, well.

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I seize and inhale these types of articles, as a kind of counter-balance to the attention that wunderkinds get in writing. We oldies can be wunder as well, we can be emerging writers at 40+ but I understand that the shiny young things with high televisual capital are always going to get ‘more attention’ than the rest of us. Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but one of my writing teachers told us about a book called Honey Money, why attractiveness is the key to success. It’s by Catherine Hakim, I haven’t read all of it and some of what I read didn’t sit so comfortably with me. But I do believe there is truth in the idea that people are drawn to beautiful people, and want to help, befriend, be around. Hakim talks about making the most of yourself physically, with grooming etc blah de blah, and I know there’s truth in it but I also have this perverse desire to go the other way. For me to not brush my hair for over a week is normal. I can only do occasional grooming and spiffing, because I just don’t value it that much.

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Jonathan Franzen has a new novel PURITY coming out 1 September. I don’t know if anyone told him that’s my publication date and that he should be pretty worried. I am a Franzen-liker. I have enjoyed both THE CORRECTIONS and FREEDOM, so I look forward to this new one. I’m also drawn to him as a personality because everyone seems to give him so much shit. He annoys people, they don’t like him. I feel sorry for him, that he seems to really be quite puzzled about why this is so. I get all that. But J-Franz has a sense of humour. It’s just that his isn’t often on display, or isn’t reported on if it is. (I have seen him in video being really funny.)

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There’s something about caves.

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I am nuts about Mad Max: Fury Road and have already seen it twice; once with my husband on Tuesday for our wedding anniversary, and again Thursday with my daughter.

There’s a lot of reading about, and this is a recent one I came across, that the movie is a feminist playbook for surviving a dystopia. Beware: spoilers.

This article looks at how film is presenting the usual Australian images and tropes in new ways, in the films of George Miller and Miro Bilbrough.

Transcendental Waters

http://www.knitting-naturally.com/footie-scarf-pattern.html