Readings.com.au: St Kilda

The Ungiven

2008-11-24T00:00:00Z

It's some years since I first watched Chris Marker's extraordinary and unsettling meditation San Soleil. That night I decided that I wanted to live in a house (perhaps near some live volcano), where this film was always playing somewhere in the background, where ordinary conversations might be constantly interrupted by such dream-like sentences.

"The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick..."

At the heart of this film is the recognition that the given world is forever being broken into by the ungiven. Which is to say that the world we see and accept is like a skin over the numinous, the world of dreams and memory and death.

The existence of underground train systems beneath the surface of cities has long fascinated me in this regard, embodying as they do, the idea of a hidden, mirror city beneath the surface, an underworld, where the laws are different and which we can step into as Orpheus steps through the mirror in Cocteau's film.

This is also one of the reasons why I loved Heather B. Swann's Gates of Hell, which stood for a while near the entrance to the Flinders St. Station underpass in Melbourne.

"Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does."

Its not hard to draw comparisons between San Soleil and and the work of W.G Sebald, who charts in his similarly ambiguous documentary style a kind of mournful, psychological journey across time and space. Both Marker and Sebald employ the tangent as a fundamental tool, and both use a series of voices which entwine with one another in such a way that it often becomes difficult to tell who is speaking.

"And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring."

These stray sentences half heard even, unlock something. Like snatches of conversation heard in a crowd, like a telephone ringing in the night, like unsent letters, like images returning from a dream or half glimpsed scenes from a late night film: it's as if the otherword is always speaking to us.

Don Delillo recognised this in White Noise and made the television itself a character who was always interjecting into the layered conversations of the family, constantly making some surreal point. And of course the Internet works in a similar way, running off on tangents and forever comforting itself with the compilation of lists. Perhaps that is the real function of the Internet: the business of ordering somehow, according to whatever particular obsessiveness, the endless stuff of memory. I'm sure there's a Kafka story somewhere that might describe this task: the ordering of files which in itself produces more files, burying itself by digging to get out.

Somehow, there is a belief that all these moments might fit together, that nothing need be lost, that the half remembered thing might return, renewed by its association to another. We believe that such moments might mean something at last and find a kind of repose amongst the restlessness of images. This (probably futile) hope, is signalled, in the opening scene of San Soleil:

"The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked."

somewhere in the heaven

of lost futures

the lives we might have lived

have found their own fulfillment

wrote Eavan Boland.

I had believed until this moment that the name of the author of these words (words which I cut from a newspaper review in London almost three years ago) was no doubt lost forever. But of course here is the exact review, unlost forever.

"Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart'."

The Clowns in the Castle

2008-11-11T00:00:00Z

So perhaps the miracle consists not only of the fact that Americans voted in a black man call Barack Hussein Obama but also, and perhaps more importantly of the fact that they put up for so long with someone so obviously incapable as George Bush. How on earth did this man keep getting up day after day, and through two election campaigns and saying things that people even half believed in or thought decent enough to probably kill a large amount of other people for?

Anyway, after eight years, America has a President who can speak English again. And not only that, the man can write. It’s a rare thing indeed, a politician who is able to overcome the usual political thought patterns, which short-circuit anytime they anywhere near approach a modicum of normal human self-awareness. And it's rare too because these two worlds, politics and literature, are so thoroughly opposed. So much so, in fact, that I used to get excited when John Howard said the words “post-modern sludge”. “At last”, I used to think, “let’s talk about it!” More often than not, though, when you mix politicians and language, you get a pretty strong cocktail of boredom or vitriol or bullshit. Remember for example Donald Rumsfeld’s utterings of Orwellian proportions, which were the literary equivalent of a blind driver trying to extricate themselves from one of those 7 story freeway junctions in L.A.

Hillary Clinton’s 1996 attempt at a book was, as Martin Amis explained “out there on the cutting edge of the uncontroversial” and so deeply inoffensive apparently, that it seemed as if every sentence had been work-shopped by a team of PR consultants. Mark Latham’s diaries, which didn’t have to concern themselves with getting their author re-elected, certainly didn’t concern themselves. It was a great big spew of completely gratuitous gossiping-hatred which was incredibly enjoyable to read but certainly not because Latham was any sort of prose-stylist.

From the other direction, writers, generally have had just as hard a time of it. Peter Garrett penned a few decent lines in his time, but has managed so far to be the most singularly disappointing and ineffective parliamentary performer since Harold Holt, who at least knew how to drown himself. In 1990 the author Mario Vargas Llosa ran for President of Peru, as a conservative mind you, and lost. His novel The Feast of the Goat, which imagines the details around the true assassination of the Dominican Republic’s horrible, unsweating dictator Raphael Trujillo (father of Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo, no doubt) remains nevertheless one of the defining novels in all Latin American Literature. ( By strange coincidence, a certain Senator John MCcain has also managed to rid himself of the ignominy of perspiration, at least according to David Foster Wallace’s account of his 2000 Primary Campaign.) Perhaps the highlight, until now, of the this whole genre of reinvention happened in1989, though, when the dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel become President and commissioned, as his first act of executive weigh-throwing, a troupe of Circus Performers to purge the evil grey-suited communist spirits from the Prague Castle. He also appointed Lou Reed his special ambassador to America. Politics could do with more of that sort of thing, and if you’d voted for Latham, you probably would have got it.

It’s doubtful, sadly, that Obama is going to get very carnivalesque on us. On the other hand, though, unlike pretty much every other politician with a book, he manages to come across, especially in Dreams from My Father, not only like a real person, (which in the world of politics means like a kind of super hero) but like a real writer; an intelligent, committed, compassionate, interesting, complex human being who writes to make sense of the world, to extend its possibilities, because that’s what language is capable of sometimes.

Please God Let Him Win

2008-11-04T00:00:00Z

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here - what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur?

Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don't look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?

People of the world - the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again. "

from The Berlin Speech - July 2008

Dream of Light

2008-10-27T00:00:00Z

I’d never had a crush on a 61-year-old woman until I saw Patti Smith in concert. Some people cast an unprecedented type of light, and Smith is surely such a person. Old women came pouring out of the Arts Centre punching the air, spitting, showing off their tattoos and ripping their credit cards with their teeth. Flowers bloomed where the spit hit the asphalt and the air fizzed with a rabid optimism of the sort the world had forgotten. Young liberals hid in their holes, Wall Street collapsed, Sarah Palin’s semi-automatic rifle misfired and the moose got away.

It just so happens that, while she was at Readings in Carlton, Patti Smith also bought Bruno Schultz fantastic, little-known novel The Street of Crocodiles. Shultz was shot dead by a Nazi in 1942, near the ghetto of Drogobych, in South Eastern Poland with barely a handful of published works to his name. The Street of Crocodiles is his masterpiece, a short, hallucinogenic, highly poetic, fragmented dream of a book, written in prose likened to that of both Proust and Kafka. To that list I would add Italo Calvino:

"It is, as usual in that district, a grey day, and the whole scene seems at times like a photograph in an illustrated magazine, so grey, so one dimensional are the houses, the people and the vehicles. Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. At times one has the impression that it is only the small section immediately before us that falls into the expected pointillistic picture of a city thoroughfare , while on either side, the improvised masquerade is already disintegrating and, unable to endure, crumbles behind us into plaster and sawdust, into the storeroom of an enormous empty theatre."

Passages such as this could almost have been lifted straight from Calvino’s sublime exercise in paradox, Invisible Cities, had they not predated it by 40 years that is.

The Street of Crocodiles is partly an autobiography, but an autobiography as seen by a child whose imagination has reached almost to breaking point. Schultz’s world is one in which the real, (or what might pass for it), is held by a thread like a decadent, noxiously filled balloon, hovering in the sky above the city (I’m thinking of the dream which begins Fellini’s 8 ½, possibly the best dream sequence in all cinema). It is a treatise on the power of art to liberate, to stand against the tide of consensus, and to undermine the empire of the quotidian, (the world of Telstra). As Schultz himself noted:

“Goodwill knows no obstacle; nothing can stand before a deep desire. I have only to imagine a door, a door old and good, like in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron latch and bolt. There is no room so walled up that it will not open with such a trusty door, if you have but the strength to insinuate it.”

It is a sentiment, the echoes of which we might hear in Marco Polo’s closing speech, in Invisible Cities:

"The Inferno of the Living is not something that will be; If there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. "

And you can detect more than just the glint of these struggles in the light that Patti Smith casts like a stone through a window.

Simmone Howell book launch

2008-10-15T00:00:00Z

Saturday 15 November 2008 at 4:00pm

Readings St Kilda: 112 Acland St, St Kilda, Victoria, 3182

Riley Rose doesn't want to be at Spirit Ranch Holiday Camp. Riley wants to be partying with her best friend Chloe at the beautiful Ben Sebatini's house. But is everything at the Spirit Ranch as it appears? What secrets are waiting for discovery in the abandoned Fraser house? And why doesn't anyone want to talk about the accident that landed the mysterious Dylan in a wheelchair last year?

Everything Beautiful is a love story about the broken and the broken-hearted from the award-winning author of Notes from the Teenage Underground.

Free, no need to book.

The Sky was Falling

2008-10-14T00:00:00Z

When the whole Bill Henson thing hit town five months ago, I went into a state of shock. I seemed unable to change the topic and I started dreaming about Brendan Nelson. I was convinced that the sky was falling in, that it was only a matter of time before the storm-troopers started smashing into galleries all over town and outlawing everything that wasn’t Impressionism or Sunday markets. The coverage by the traditional media, (or the traditional excuses for a media) was unsurprisingly useless, preferring to reinforce, as it usually does, those stereotypes about artists as some sort of elite and united, black-clad gang of wankers intent on destroying society with their smoke and mirrors and lattes and giant government cheques. (To be honest, if I had a giant government cheque the first thing I’d do with it is destroy society, but that’s beside the point.) The only clear headed reporting to be found, was found on the blogs, which were much more supple a forum, capable of dealing with the saga’s quickly changing elements and of accommodating a whole range of voices in, for the most part, an intelligent conversation. The open letter from the 2020 delegates came out of blog discussions across numerous sites including Alison Croggon’s TheatreNotes and Nicholas Pickard’s Sydney Arts Journalist.

My own feelings are that Henson's work speaks for itself, if you bother to look at it, and that his retrospective a couple of years ago should have been proof enough of his worth and legitimacy as an artist. His vision has consistently explored the gothic underworld beneath the surface of the everyday, a theatrical, at times disturbing shadowland at the edge of suburbia, steeped in art historical references, where subconscious desires, the illicit, the brooding, the mythical and the dreamed of, meet at the boundaries of consciousness, of society. And none of this is to mention how breath-takingly beautiful these images are. If anything, I feel, the question is not about whether his works are pornography, but how the consent of his models was managed. From all accounts it seemed an issue with which the artist, the models and in particular the parents of the models resolved with exceeding intelligence and sensitivity.

In his recently released book The Henson Case, David Marr gives, with incredible attention to detail, a narrative account of the entire controversy, putting the whole circus into some sort of perspective for the first time. It’s a story of hyperbole and hysteria, of witch-hunts and scapegoats. We are able to hear Henson himself speak his mind, talking at length about his personal response to the furor and his techniques as an artist. Marr weaves into the narrative some strong analysis and manages to examine, with a cool head, one of the fieriest public debates Australia has ever witnessed. His writing is sharp and engaging, and his opinions generally balanced, though clearly coming down in support of the artist.

For many however, the fight over the portrayal of nakedness isn’t over, and once again, the blogs are at the forefront of the debate. You know, perhaps it really *is* time to stop Anne Geddes.

http://www.stopannegeddes.blogspot.com/

To Have and To Hold

2008-09-30T00:00:00Z

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t read books based on their covers. In fact, sometimes a book is so ugly that I get too embarrassed to read it in public. And sometimes I get a little worked up when lazy publishers make ugly things. If you live in Melbourne, there’s a good chance that you spend a lot of time waiting around for public transport to arrive. I once waited an agonizing 40 minutes for a bus only to wake up when the bus finally arrived to find that I had been dreaming the whole thing. And the other day, so I heard, a man was run over by a National Bus because he just couldn’t believe that the thing bearing down on him was actually real. In any event, a book is more than a packet of 2 dollar noodles which you empty into a bowl and pour Swedish MSG over. And especially if you’re waiting at bus stops for a lot of your life, a book is a kind of talisman you take with you. It matters how it’s made and what it looks like and how it feels to hold.

The glossy Australiana image which wraps Kate Grenville's new novel, The Lieutenant, might not be the least inspired book cover in the history of the world, but it puts in a good show. We were relenting that particular missed opportunity the other day, and we got to thinking about some of the best and some of the worst looking books we could think of.

Up there with the worst of the worst, is the The Perennial Collection which released a whole lot of really good books early this year, each one uglier than the next. Of particular note is the botched job they did of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, an otherwise bloody fantastic novel. The cover of John Updike’s new novel, The Widows of Eastwick also pushes the boundaries towards gut wrenching horror and makes the man himself look pretty smashing.

On the other hand, If not, Winter Anne Carson’s renderings of the fragments which remain of Sappho’s 3000 year old poems is so exquisite a book, that I have seen it bring tears to peoples eyes within minutes. Because almost none of Sappho’s poems have survived in their entirety, this is a book that owes much of its effect to the sensitivity of its design, which treats each word like it’s a miracle.

Alison Croggon’s new collection of poems, Theatre, is also a stunning book, to have and to hold. And the excellent little novel, Hunger by Elise Blackwell, I bought, knowing nothing about it, solely because it was such a beautiful little object. Such books are perhaps the only material objects which signed-up communists dream ravenously of possessing.

Compare Updike's old toad in a teacup (above) with the American editions of Haruki Murakami's books, and you’ll understand why I think who ever designed these deserves a big hug.

Fighting the Void

2008-09-19T00:00:00Z

from Ross Mueller's Construction of the human Heart

If you're a playwright in Australia, even a successful one, you could be confident of never, ever seeing your work published in this country. Until Now. Full Dress Productions, a small production company well used to punching above its weight, has just extended its sphere of influence to include a tiny publishing arm. An arm with a devastating overhand right capable of shocking the flabby, over-fed world of Australian publishing, that is. The first books to roll steaming from the press feature the work of two of Melbourne's best young theatre writers, Lally Katz and Ross Mueller. It would be a venture well worth supporting, even if the plays were crap. And this, they most certainly are not.

Lally Katz's Apocolypse Bear

[my] nightmare

2008-09-15T00:00:00Z

It seems ironic that companies whose business it is to make and sell telephones are almost always incapable of answering them. Such companies are not in fact concerned with making or selling, but with the business of capture, the business of burying people in a network of labyrinths, which tighten as you struggle. I spent the best part of three hours the other day struggling, first with Vodaphone, then, more terrifyingly, in the new castle in the city, which is the antechamber to the meaningless labyrinth known as Telstra. The little part of my soul which survives, owes its existence firstly to the book of Howard Hodgkin paintings I was lucky enough to have with me, and secondly to the knowledge that this had all happened before somewhere, to a gentleman known firstly as Joseph K, and then simply as K.

Night and Day by Howard Hodgkins

The snow might fall differently in Melbourne and the decor these days might be made from reconstituted chipboard rather than oak, but the story remains the same, and it's a testament to Franz Kafka that the longer it all goes on, the righter he gets. But let me explain.

Someone must have made a false accusation against me, because the other day my phone number was suddenly cancelled, without my having done anything wrong. "This is not your phone they told me, this is Natasha's phone." It seems that Telstra had "ported" my number from Vodaphone, and were refusing to "release" it. Then there was Natasha's mysterious answering machine message which people occasionally heard when they called me. Natasha, it turns out, owned my number years ago, but the "quarantine" was botched somewhere along the line, by some unknown official, in an office far, far away. I spoke to the accounts department, the customer service department, the activation department, the claims department, the complaints department, the activation department again, the delivery department. I was transferred and misunderstood and hung up on and transferred.

(Kafka's Castle in Prague, far left, and a Telstra Employee).

In his excellent study of Kafka, K, Roberto Calasso writes:

"The trial and The Castle share a premise: that election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable… The court that must judge Joseph K and the castle administration by whom K wants to be appointed are contiguous organisations that resonate, each in the other. Both are populated by scrupulous, peevish officials. They share an easily wounded sensibility, quick to detect the slightest changes – and to suffer from them. They form a delicate spiderweb, the extent of which they themselves are not in a position to judge. But in each of them , even the lowliest, one senses the breathing of a great organism.”

Such telephonic empires are in the business of identity control. They decide who is allowed within the system, and the terms and conditions by which they are allowed. These strange words, “porting” and “quarantine” seem to speak of an uncertain harbour territory, the border zone of the kingdom, which must be guarded, where everyone is suspicious, where men routinely disappear. My erasure lingers on.

Daring to Disagree

2008-09-11T00:00:00Z

Our DVD buyer Dean, dares to disagree. The best book in the shop is in fact, Haruki Murakami's epic, surreal detective journey, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a book which "takes a baseball bat to the inside of your head", allegedly. Few books are capable of inducing this sort of disorientation, of taking over your life so that you can't tell for sure what is happening and what is only maybe happening from what is definitely not happening on this side of the underworld.

The oracle according to Page 53 reads:

Still, we - or at least I - enjoyed listening to Mr Honda's stories. Most of them were bloody, but coming from the mouth of a dying old man in a dirty old robe, the details of battle lost the ring of the reality. They sounded more like fairy tales.

Wrestling with Oracles

2008-09-09T00:00:00Z

"What's the best book in the shop?" is a question which no one seems to agree upon, strangely enough. Gladiators have been maimed fighting over lesser questions. In fact, the current Mexican Wrestling Champion "The Duke", who moonlights as our music expert Declan, began his fighting career in Acland Street some years ago, when someone suggested they take precisely this question "outside". His opponent now agrees that Iain Banks' gothic masterpiece The Wasp Factory is indeed the best book in the shop.

Declan kindly consented to read the opening two sentences from the second paragraph of page 53, suitably dangerous, we both agreed.

"A couple of jets screamed over the island at one point, two Jaguars wing to wing about one hundred metres up and going fast, crossing the whole island in an eyeblink and racing out to sea. I glared at them, then went on my way".

For Whom the Belle Tolls

2008-09-04T00:00:00Z

Resident WonderWoman, Fashionista and steady back flanker Belle, is here in St Kilda on an exchange from Wonderland, the town where the beer is colder, the tans are tannier and the desert stretches from the doorsteps of every house for days on end. In Wonderland, there's only one book, because who wants to read poetry when you could be tanning it up with celebrity footballers. Fashion Wonderland is that book, an assortment of cool looking things drawn in cool ways by people who are way cooler than you. In a moment of sudden introspection, Belle turns to page 53, finds that there is no second paragraph, but reads instead the image of a very beautiful bird who may or may not be a pyromaniac about to burn the cold heart of this melencholy city.

Random Oracles and the Black Market

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The psychic astrology guy Jonathon Cainer makes about 3 million bucks a week selling random sentences to strangers. We need that stuff, that little dose of the future, like coffee, to get us through the day. So in the name of free enterprise and good will I offer here; The Black Market Guide to the Future, Happiness and Wisdom. And you need never buy the Hearld Sun again.

Step 1. Choose a book at random

Step 2. Turn to page 53

Step 3. Find the second paragraph

Step 4. Read the first 2 sentences

As an example, I turn to the copy of The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka I have here:

"You would oblige me if you would be a little more manly, more self assured. What am I to do with a mere shadow of a guest?

hhhmmm...

The Best Book in the Shop! (1)

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The impetus for all this strangess was an afternoon I spent a while ago in a vast library, engaged in a competition to find the strangest and most interesting book. If I had of stumbled unknowingly upon W.G.Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, I would have won in a landslide, so deliberately does it seem to have been conceived for just such an occaison. It's also my answer to the much asked question, "what's the best book in the shop?"

The Rings of Saturn is the most remarkable of books for the way it is able to move so brazenly between events, times and topics. If you drift away for a second you’re more than likely to find yourself on your return far from where your concentration left off, in an obscure annul of history, on another continent, contemplating some now long defunct scientific theory.

Sebald’s gift is to transform the job of life, by offering an example of the way memory, history, accumulated knowledge and imagination combine continuously with the present to create a poetic, unreliable and infinitely complex field of experience. For Sebald, the present is radioactive with association. The past is forever invading the present, and the present is always threatening to give way entirely, to become as it inevitably must, the past. The present in Sebald’s work is like the merest of threads which holds his erudite, factually dubious and obsessive digressions together. Yet what actually happens in the present of his books is almost nothing: he takes a walk, catches a train, buys some food, enters an undisclosed delirium in a hospital, wakes, falls back to sleep and goes out for another walk.

Yet what he is able to summon in between these most ordinary (and thus intensely relieving moments) combines to amount to one of the most profoundly moving meditations on the human species and its entropy:

There is no antidote against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set ones name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

For an excellent discussion of Sebald's work, have a look at Vertigo, or the many interesting plot twist at Self Divider.

Just Strange

2008-08-28T00:00:00Z

It really is amazing how many people are prepared to buy books about cats being exploited by vindictive photographers. Perhaps these people haven't discovered the internet yet, which was invented by vindictive photographers solely to share their exploitative cat photos. King among such books is Kittenwar, where various kittens do battle against each other in dubious betting rings across the sordid Islands of Great Britain. Not only is it strange, it's a little bit wrong too. But did that ever stop you, Cat People?

Strange But Not as Strange as it Looks

2008-08-26T00:00:00Z

Thai Beat A Go-Go Volume 3: think pirated copies of the Dirk Diggler karate movies. Think Elvis on a street corner in Bangkok. Think air travel in the 60's, 33 000 feet above somewhere in South East Asia, the waitresses bringing trays of sweet lime. Think smoking seats. Think freaky seventies vampire monster guys with freshly preshed Chinos. Perhaps what's strangest of all, is the fact that this is actually a really good CD. Our choice as Strangest (but actually not that strange) CD We Can Find.

Strange but True Too

2008-08-25T00:00:00Z

In Hungarian, the word for heaven is also the word for tomato. Fair enough. But Hungarian is also the only language, so they say, which the devil respects. Many years ago, Readings St Kilda was a small Hungarian bookshop. Old men would huddle in the corners learning Hungarian just to keep out of the snow, so they say. A fitting stage perhaps for something by the Hungarian Director Gyorgy Palfi, whose Taxidermia tells three increasingly macarbe stories involving a leading sports eater, a master taxidermist and a lonely orderly with a fascination for fire. Sad, wild fairtales for the 21 first century. If you thought heynas were strange, try these guys. Our choice for Strangest DVD We Can Find.

Strange but True

2008-08-20T00:00:00Z

If strangeness is a virtue then beautiful photos of hyenas shackled with chains beside malignant looking men, might be considered downright holy. I was thinking of this book the other morning riding the bus up Punt Rd. Recently the National Bus Company have taken to playing Hyena Radio rather loudly, to fill the silence which contemporary life has evidently deemed unsatisfactory. The breakfast program sounds like a particularly hysterical massacre of the innocents. Luckily enough, Hyena and Other Men doesn't make any noise. It doesnt have one of those secret speakers on which you can listen to 100 different hyena screams. But it is very strange. In fact, it's our choice for Strangest Book We Can Find.

Melanie La'Brooy book launch

2008-08-14T00:00:00Z

Friday 05 September 2008 at 7:00pm

Readings St Kilda: 112 Acland St, St Kilda, Victoria, 3182

Melanie La'Brooy is the author of the bestselling novels Love Struck, The Wish List and Serendipity. Although she wrote The Babymoon shortly after the birth of her first child, she would like to make it clear that this book is fiction, as the thought of making love while dressed in a Carlton football jumper makes her feel ill. Join us to hear more!

Free, no need to book

Volunteer at Sacred Heart

2008-08-06T00:00:00Z

The Sacred Heart Mission is a St Kilda-based program that helps people who are homeless or living in poverty. The mission relies on volunteers to deliver its programs and new volunteers are always needed and welcome.

Volunteers help prepare and serve 600 meals every day and have played a large part in bringing in record-breaking takings for the Mission's Op Shop. In the Health Clinic, volunteer practitioners provide disadvantaged people with access to a wide range of care.

If you're interested in helping out at Sacred Heart Mission contact Cassie Hense, the Volunteer Coordinator on 9536 8471 or chense@sacredheartmission.org.