the age-old question

Books I didn't read in 2019

The red clothbound at right is Clancy of the Overflow.

The Jindyworobaks anthology has a poem about weeds and other invasives: "Prime Minister To Go Home" by Paul Grano.

King of the Air by Herbert Strang had a postcard of the Matterhorn glued inside its cover I tore out.

The Dutton Penguin on Eyre: Hero as Murderer came with a sheet of mint stamps.

M read the Dickey and said it was horrible. I got a fair way through the Chabon and a chapter or two of Sent For You Yesterday. You Can Learn English was in Polish.

The Art of Bowling smelt of shoe polish.

I abandoned The Night Land.

The 'Burbs

width of The 'Burbs = ~ two smartphones

This, a jar of date balls and a tin of hand-shaped homemade marzipan figures - an unko, a rat, an ice cream, a knotted-roll - were given me for Xmas.

Thames & Hudson's marketing line on the cover 'A visual journey through the Australian suburbs' would read more accurately: 'through Melbourne's south eastern suburbs'.  There's no captions in the book, I doubt there's any pictures of Launceston suburbs here, but there's plenty of Bentleigh.

There is at least one pic from Fitzroy. It's of the Kosovo TV repair shop, which I thought, not knowing Fitzroy too well, might be in somewhere in Sydney, given the phone number on the shop's window begins with 4. But a google search proved me wrong, and I learnt David Wadelton also takes photos of fading milkbars, compositions of white cast-iron balustrade and sentinel shrubs.

I like the fading milkbars, compositions of white cast-iron balustrade and sentinel shrubs, but am not so keen on all the vintage cars in The 'Burbs, but that's my taste. Still there are photos here that shouldn't have made the cut, most blaringly a pair of rainbow lorikeets on a twig, and this gives the book the feeling that maybe there wasn't much of a cut, and that what the book needed was a photo editor.

Perhaps the lorikeets are still up on Walvisch's @sublurb instagram, maybe there's a clue in the comments as to why the photo was included, but I would need an account to log in and see if there's a discussion about the late 90s drought, and how before then lorikeets were an unusual sight in Melbourne, but that may not be how instagram comments work.

As an insta book, The 'Burbs belongs to the genre of books publishers now publish because of the internet. One Red Paperclip being an exemplar from the early 2000s, Grumpy Cat a more recent standout. I won't be donating my copy any time soon, but I expect to see The 'Burbs on op shop shelves in coming years.

Walvisch judged the 2019 Glen Eira Council My Brother Jack photo competition on the theme Life in Glen Eira. My entry, a photo of a tuft kikuyu grass sprouting halfway up a power pole, didn't seem to make the show reel at the small exhibition for the awards held at council's gallery, even though it seemed every other entry did, including multiple pictures of tweens posing in a laneway. I stood for twenty minutes watching that reel and anticipating the slightly embarrassed feeling when my photo would appear, but nothing. Somehow it didn't make the cut.

Are the bushfires Scott Morrison?