Here's my proposed itinerary, starting this Friday! Any other suggestions?

Paris

Atomised, Michel Houllebecq
Gigi, Colette
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

Cote d'Azur

Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald

Marseilles

The Water of the Hills, Marcel Pagnol

Padern (village near Spanish border)

Labyrinth, Kate Mosse
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

Barcelona

Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruis Zafon (maybe)

Seville

The Blind Man of Seville, Robert Wilson

Granada

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

San Sebastian

Fiesta, Ernest Hemingway

In today's age, novelist(?) Melanie La'Brooy tries to build the case for the presence of a deep, myriadly-manifested misogyny in today's society. Here's the structure of the argument:

1. Author gets whistled at and called a slut by a carload of young guys
2. self-defence courses teach young women that they have to fear men
3. Indigenous women in the Northern Territory are horrifically abused
4. Inadequacies of the legal system 1 - evidence of emotional abuse towards wife not allowed in trial of man who murdered wife
5. Inadequacies of the legal system 2 - Colleen and Laura Irwin murdered, suspect allowed privacy re previous convictions
6. Women are abused daily, all over Australia
7. International organisations say violence against women is a big problem
8. Back to the boys in the car

That's right - it's a total grab bag of complaints, ranging from the petty to the deeply disturbing. None of the ideas is developed to the point where it can convince anyone - the legal ideas, in particular, need far more explanation and discussion before they can be anything more than a tabloidy "poor us" whinge. I actually agree with some of La'Brooy's arguments, and even perhaps with her overall thesis -- but the way to make this case is to link examples more tightly, and less dramatically.

Victoria's government yesterday announced, amid much fanfare, its vision for Melbourne's transport. The statement, "Meeting Our Transport Challenges", was a total fizzer, as reported in the Age. Vision is exactly what it lacked, providing instead a bunch of non-committal bandaid measures that will still leave 2/3 of Melbourne without usable public transport. That's if the promised measures are ever actually carried out - this government has a history of breaking its transport commitments, like the 1999 election promise to extend the train line to South Morang.

I was listening to the ABC radio quiz last night, and hopping up and down with frustration because I knew the answer to a question that about 7 callers bombed out on. Name the group of three people in the Bible who were saved from a fire.

Any ideas?

Here's a clue - although I am well schooled in my Bible studies, I actually know this answer because it's the name of an early Beastie Boys track.

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego!

So thankyou, Beasties, for letting me feel superior.

Here's another observation: after dumping all over Brooks' March, I went to ceremoniously file it in my bookshelf. I was struck by the false equalities of alphabetical order - Brooks sits cheek by jowl with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and A.S. Byatt's Possession. They're both great books, and I feel Brooks is benefiting from their reflected glory. Perhaps the books should be arranged in order of merit?

This observation, you will probably have noted, returns Hornby's favour.

I knew my thesis had been generating a LOT of interest amongst the global literati, but it was nonetheless very good of Nick Hornby to come up with a considered critique of my main problematic.In the article No Half Measures, Hornby reflects on the difficulty of straddling the pop culture/high culture divide. Mentioning his debt to Anne Tyler, Hornby reveals:

Before reading such books as Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Hornby didn't know that a simple and intelligent novel that draws heavily on pop culture could win big audiences and good reviews at the same time.

Hornby goes on to blame England for this great perceptual divide:

In fact, when he first started writing books in 1992, he thought those qualities had been lost in a contemporary British fiction that was dominated by self-styled intellectuals who wrote dark and difficult novels aimed at literary awards and posterity, not popularity.

America, on the other hand, is the land of Mark Twain, and accessible, funny, critically acclaimed writing. Hornby goes on to say that the literary pages of the British media host an ongoing debate about the role of pop culture in high literature, and that the more popular a book is (a la Da Vinci Code), the more it is excoriated in the press.

Hornby's got the basic contours of the literary field right - but I think there are a nuances he's missing. Hornby is by no means the only author to pull off the supposedly rare bestseller/critically acclaimed combo. Here's a comment about Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, from The Chicago Sun Times in 2001:

[The Corrections] is a big (568 pages), serious, literary novel that instantly hopped onto bestseller lists.

And just yesterday, I read Robert Drewe's The Bodysurfers, a 1983 text promoted with the tagline "The Critically Acclaimed Australian Bestseller". So I think the paradox is a marketing tool rather than a literary reality. There are wanky books of course - hello, John Banville, but they don't seem to be suffering too much in the sales department either. It's a fragmented marketplace, that's all. There's no great divide between worthy and bestselling novels.

It sounded unconvincing, and it was. Brooks' reworking of the children's classic Little Women was not the sort of robust, radical and creative reimagining that Jean Rhys provided for Jane Eyre with Wide Sargasso Sea. Instead, March provided a little embrodiery around the edges of the original. Written from the point of view of the absent father, away as a chaplain at the Civil War, the novel tried to introduce a little psychological complexity and darkness to the set-up -- but it was only a little.

My main beef with the book is its workmanlike feel. Brooks is skilful, yes, and has done a clever job of incorporating both historical and Alcott-esque details. She also captures the moral and emotional tone of Alcott's work. But it all feels like mimicry. It's just not a novel.

This bitter realisation is compounded by just how good last year's Pulitzer winner was. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead - also about a preacher man - reached imaginative heights utterly beyond anything within the ken of March, this year's winner. A real disappointment.

Because the news is full of rescued miners, which is lovely, and tax cuts, which are boring. Enjoy FEEDBACK FROM JAMES JOYCE'S SUBMISSION OF ULYSSES TO HIS CREATIVE-
WRITING WORKSHOP. It includes:

Truly felt I got to know Leopold (Poldy?). Nitpicky, logistical question: Is this really how people think?

- - - -

"Snotgreen" = hyphenated.

- - - -

Show us how these characters process memory, language, abstractions, and the urban landscape through stream of consciousness, don't just tell us.

- - - -

I normally appreciate your extravagant wordsmithing, but got the sense here that you wore out the Shift+F7 keys (i.e., thesaurus). "Honorificabilitudinitatibus"? What, are you trying to impress that girl Nora?

I should have watched the Logies - I'm as sentimental about John Wood as anyone else and I love a glitzy frock.

But I forgot it was on, because I was so excited by a review of The Alan Clark Diaries, shown on the ABC in the same timeslot. That review said if you liked Yes Minister, you'll LOVE this! It was wrong though. The review should have been refined: if you liked Yes Minister because you're in late middle-age and a lifelong bureaucrat, you'll LOVE this. Whereas I liked Yes Minister because of its deft wordplay and hilarious one-liners, so I didn't really LOVE The Alan Clark diaries at all. Sad.

After that, however, I tuned into Part 2 of the Vincent Van Gogh documentary series, also on the ABC, and I did like that a lot. Fascinating. Not many frocks, though.

Books bought:

March, Geraldine Brooks
We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham

Books read:

The March, E.L.Doctorow
I For Isobel, Amy Witting
Dispossessed, Philip Hodgins
We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver

April was a real mixed bag of reading: a roadhouse lucky dip that veered from trashy hair clips to chocolate caramels. Doctorow's NBA-nominated civil war novel was engaging, intelligent, broad ranging and evocative - but ultimately lacked the kind of emotional punch I was expecting. Characters struggled, suffered, bonded...and then just sort of moved on to different things. Odd.

I *hate* I For Isobel - I've taught it before to tutoring students, and I didn't read it then because I had a feeling it would be very bad. I was right. All "ooh, my mother was soooo mean and I lost my identity but then I found it! I'm a WRITER!" You should all know by now that any novel where the narrator is a writer is doomed in my eyes. Doomed. I couldn't quite finish the novel - and I think maybe some of its structure was subtle and poetic - but I'm happy to pronounce it crap.

Hodgins' verse novel was quite lovely, in a brutal, disturbing, death-and-losing-the-farm kind of way. Now that's a subtle and difficult work, but one that's infinitely rewarding.

We Need To Talk About Kevin - our next book club pick - delivered an emotional punch alright. A savage uppercut that bruised my jaw, winded me and left me curled up in a small ball on the floor for hours. I actually had nightmares for the next three nights. But it's brilliant, too - a deftly moral, provocative and empathetic exploration of what it would be like to be the mother of a teenage mass killer.