10s Spectrum books THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1998 SUNDAY 11 TUESDAY 13 THURSDAY 15 FRIDAY 16 "cD To) Q) I Q) I ngus Robertson Bookworid presents Diane "mAiirnstrong discussing Mosaic, at Briars Country Lodge, Bowral, 10am. $15. Bookings: 02 4862 1634. The Word on Sunday presents Dany Falconer Flint, discussing Dragon Dancing, hef novel about the life of Caz, a painter and poet, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, West Circular Quay. Herald readers can present the MCA advertisem*nt, appearing elsewhere in Spectrum, for a reduced $6 admission.
Lesley McKay's Bookshop Literary Breakfast with Robin Dalton. author of An Accidental Memoir, on her life as a spy and as a literary agent, at Dee Bee's Restaurant, 27 Knox Street. Double Bay. $16. Bookings: 9327 1354.
Passion, Persistence and Practicalities -Preparing Your Poetry for Publication: Heather Cam reads from her work and offers tips to would-be published poets, at Collins Booksellers Superstore, 2nd Floor, Broadway Shopping Centre. Free. Bookings: 9211 7749. I SATURDAY 17 1 1 1 1 1 1 WEDNESDAY 14 Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): Don Anderson, academic and SMH columnist, discusses the life and work of the author of Waiting for Godot, and the influences of Joyce, the Bible and Dante reflected in his work, in the Jean Garling Room, State Library of NSW, 6pm. 10.
Bookings: 9273 1500. Going Elsewhere Lee Miller's Photographic Exiles: A lecture by Carolyn Burke in Room S421 Main Quadrangle. Sydney University, 4pm. Free. Information: 9351 5344.
Mosman Library and Moscraft Bookshop host Diane Armstrong, talking about her book Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, the story of a Polish-Jewish family, at the Mosman Library, Bookings: 9969 9736. MONDAY 12 SMHDymocks Literary Luncheon with Maggie Tabberer discussing her autobiography, Maggie, at the Wentworth Hotel, 61Phillip Street, Sydney. Bookings: 9449 4366. Lindfield Bookshop Literary Lunch with Diane Armstrong talking about Mosaic, at the Killara Inn, 480 Pacific Highway. Killara, 12pm.
$38. Bookings essential: 9416 4201. The Society of Women Writers hosts Barbara Blackman, author of Glass After Glass, in the Dixson Room, State Library of NSW, 12pm. $1615 members. Bookings essential: 9819 7374.
Diane Armstrong discusses Mosaic, at the Hakoah Club. 61 Hall Street. Bondi Beach, $10. Bookings: 9130 3344. Anne Whitehead, author of Paradise Mislaid, talks about anthropologist Leon Cadogan, in the Mitchell Room, Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, Level 4.
Imperial Arcade, Free. Bookings: 9233 7455. vii sat's on in AMD Anouno i a kui u. i SYDNEY THIS Hazel Whittaker, author of Fortune Telling and Develop Your Psychic Ability, speaks at Collins Booksellers Superstore, 2nd Floor, Broadway Shopping Centre, Free. Bookings: 9211 7749.
The Eastern Suburbs Poetry Group hosts a variety of readings with chamber music, at the Waverley Library, Bondi Junction, 2pm. $3. Information: 9699 2129. The Constant Reader Bookshop and Writers at Stanton present Dorothy McRae-McMahon, retired minister of the Uniting Church, discussing her book Everyday Passions: Conversations on Living, at the Stanton Library. 134 Miller Street, lpm.
Free. No bookings required. 14 If you have a literary event dunng the week beginning Sunday. October 25. email jheckerhutch.com.au or fax (02) 9564 0883.
Details required by 5 pm, Tuesday. Octoter 13. Compiled by Joel Becker Proud to be a drongo JOAN COLLINS: "She really needs to get out more." using it often and insisting DEMI MOORE: "On any given day Hollywood has the potential to release the worst film in history." Woki) Watciiinc; GORDON BILNEY a STEPHEN KING: big thick dumb BILLY JOEL: "No other artist has written so many songs that qualified for the Desert Island Dream List you'd compile for your worst enemy." DAN AYKROYD "The three scariest words in the English language are 'Starring Dan Aykroyd'." sad*stic novels featuring emotionally arrested males and retarded plot lines." N- V. that others do likewise. or my part, I've never felt quite the same about "drongo" since Mungo MacCallum pointed out to me how perfectly my own name anagrammatiscd into "Drongo But one can't let that stand in the way of regress.
What we need, then, are volunteers to become guardians, indeed champions, of words that ought not be allowed to be swamped to death. Adams, as we've seen, has already got drongo named for a 1920s racehorse which never won a race but it's leading a fairly precarious existence, and he could do with helpers. But which others? I'dolunteer for two, to start with: "sook" and "Sook" is a word of great beauty which is not used nearly often enough, save perhaps by horseracing people who use it of a weak or cowardly horse. Writing in Another Newspaper, Jane Eraser did "sook" a marvellous turn by using it to describe Mark Philip-poussis after he lost the US Open tennis final to Patrick Rafter: "Mighty Scud? Oh please. Big she said.
Bravo, say I. "Bodgie" as a noun is as dead as the ducktail haircuts and blue suede shoes the bodgies affected four decades ago. But "bodgie" to mean something flawed or faked is hanging on, not least in the phrase "to bodgie up" still heard among, say, car salesmen to describe a repair job that just passes superficial scrutiny. A few weeks ago, I read a book review by Alan Close which said the ending of the book was glued bodgily on the end of a plot so weak it can't carry its own Bravo again. Nominations, please, of other unjustly endangered Australian words, from Wordwatching volunteers ready to protect them.
And given that Skippy, in the new cartoon version now showing, says "bonzer" an Australianism I would until now have declared virtually extinct you can be as nostalgic as you like. My thanks to Jean Stanger of Darling Point and Joe Andersen of Campsie, who pointed out, with infinite politeness, that the concluding words of the Wordsworth sonnet in last month's column should have been "wreathed not "weathered as printed. Wordsworth indeed wrote as in garlanded with seaweed. So did I but a computer scanner knew better. inally.
I hope others heard Joce-lyn Newman, on Radio National on September 22, saying a caller did not "recognise the enormity of what the GST will do to Well, perhaps some of us did. STARS AND GRIP DM AMONG the hundred-odd Australians who haven't read Over the Top with Jim, Hugh Lunn's bcstselling reminiscence of boyhood in 1950s Brisbane. But having read his account of the writing of it, in Spectrum on September 5, I mean to. As Lunn tells it, a major problem he faced, in bringing the '50s alive for '90s readers, was to revive the colloquial Australian English we used to, speak before American TV took over our lives. "A nerd used to be a drip; a wimp was a sissy; a dork was a galoot words I hadn't heard for decades came flooding back grizzle, drongo, rock, lug, ging and my American word-processing software rejected them all." My software still doesn't like galoot, grizzle, drongo or ging a word 1 confess I'd never heard; in '50s South Australia we called a shanghai a "dinger" but nor is it happy with Restricting oneself to spell-check-approved language, however, is a bit like reading an expurgated novel, or listening to a John Howard speech: you feel that it could be racier.
1 digress. What are we to do to keep good Australian words in our everyday language, faced with relentless pressure from American TV, movies we once said), journalism and the rest? In his foreword to the 1996 edition of Lcnie Johansen's Penguin Book of Australian Slang, Phillip Adams made the inventive suggestion that we should, as it were, do a Fahrenheit 451 on endangered Australian words. In Ray Bradbury's celebrated novel, set in a society in which all books were burned, people became guardians of a particular classic work Great Expectations, say, or Crime and Punishment by learning it off by heart, reciting it for the pleasure of others, and passing it on to a successor guardian all against the day when books might again be permitted. Something similar, said Phillip, we should do for Australian words threatened with extinction, not by fire but by the vocabulary of TV; adopting a word, speaking and writing it as often as possible, doing for our chosen word what Arthur Stacc did in chalk for "Eternity" on the footpaths of Sydney. lliillip, himself, undertook to become the guardian of that fine Aussie word AMERICA Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon By Joe Queenan Picador, 194 pp.
$17.95 ISBN 0 330 35528 7 Reviewed by DAVID DALE ican culture was infinitely more idiotic than I had ever suspected." The first half of the book is drop-dead hilarious. Other commentators might modify their language to avoid appearing snobbish. Queenan revels in what Americans never call class consciousness. The patrons of the Red Lobster restaurant chain, "bedecked in their best windbreakers and their very finest polyester are enjoying NLIKE John Howard, Joe Queenan is keen to apologise on behalf of his country. He feels that America can never be "a truly healthy society 3 has been known to wait outside cinemas showing a film called Gone Fishin' and give those few customers who sat through it their money back, on behalf of "the American Celluloid Retribution Queenan is a connoisseur indeed, an addict of all that is trashy in American society (which he enlarges to include such British icons as Elton John, Phil Collins, Sarah Ferguson and Andrew Lloyd Webber).
His new book, titled America in Australia and Red ljhster. White Trash and the Blue Lagoon in America, is an account of a year-long journey into what he calls "the heartland of He set himself this assignment: "I would throw off the mask of the urban sophisticate and plunge headfirst into the culture of the masses I would furlough that part of my brain that had long revered the rare, precious and beautiful, and instead zero in on the hopelessly plebeian In the days and weeks that followed, I gradually realised that mainstream Amer food that "consisted almost entirely of batter cunningly fused with marginally aquatic foodstuffs and configured into clever geometric The audience for a matinee of Grease, "filled with soccer moms and their vile suburban were in stitches at "an endless parade of fart jokes, cigarette-stuffed-up-the-butt-cheek jokes and full rectal But by the second half the joke wears a bit thin, and you begin to feel the book might have worked better as a long article in, say, Vanity Fair. Queenan never loses his nerv but he keeps telling us of his problem with "scheissenbedauern" (literally which means "the disappointment one feels when exposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one had hoped it would Apparently running out of material, he is forced to resort to discussing the merely semi-awful, because "the realm of the unspeakably repugnant did not approach the He finds himself actually admir ing Wayne Newton and Barry Manilow: "Newton, like Manilow, like Jerry Lewis, like Don Rickles, like Mel Torme, was an old trouper. You had to love an old trouper because old troupers give until there is nothing left to give." When it comes right down to it, Joe Queenan is still an American. The ending may be too neat to be credible, but he's made us laugh so often we're inclined to allow him lots of licence.
He claims to have reached an epiphany in Sydney hen a journalist took him to Planet Hollywood, and they were promptly driven out by a bomb scare. He says he saw it as a warning from God that he should cease his eager descent into the abyss of American culture. We should all be proud that Australia was able to make this contribution to the sanity of America's nastiest and funniest critic. David Dale's latest book is The 100 Things Everyone Needs to Know about Italy (Pan). There is nothing to apologise for in Italy.
until it publicly apologises to the rest of the world for the pain it has caused. Just as the Germans had to apologise for mustard gas, Auschwitz and Horst Buchholz, the American people must one day apologise to the rest of the orld for Jim Croce and Molly Ringwald." And not just Jim and Molly. How about Demi Moore, Billy Joel, Stephen King, Patrick Swayze, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, waiters with ponytails, and Barbra Streisand? Queenan is mortified by all of them. He is so embarrassed about Joe Pesci that he I gradually realised that mainstream American culture was infinitely more idiotic than I had ever suspected." NEW AUTHORS PUBLISH YOUR WORK ALL SL'BJLC 1 CONSIDLRLL) Fiction, Xon-Fitlton, Biography, Religious, Poetry, Children s. AU I HORS WORLDWIDL INVITLD.
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