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'There is sufficient space 
for about 120 characters
(including spaces) on 3 lines.'

Sard Harker

There's a good chance with an out-of-print book that you could be the only person on the planet reading it. I might be the first person to have read Sard Harker out loud for seventy... I don't know how many years, maybe ever.

I had to learn off something by John Masefield
about the sea that he wanted to sail a ship on,
heavily stressed. I thought all poets old and bald.
Laurie Duggan, Adventures in Paradise.

There are lots of adventures in Sard Harker - though they take place on land, not sea. There's abandoned pueblo adventures, desert adventures, high sierra adventures, fixed wrestling match adventures, chicken fight, cantina, poblacion, mining town, cougar, stingray, silver train at midnight, cañon hunt, rotten rock, waking up with a snake on your chest, and pages upon pages of wading through swamp adventures.

Another good thing about reading old books is coming across odd spellings. In Sard canyon is spelt with a ñ.

Title of book = name of hero. Might Masefield have been trying to do a Conrad? Sard never quite manages a Nostromo; he's always just scraping through, getting weaker, getting into worse and worse shit, never winning, staying alive but only just.

I was very proud of myself in 1999 or so when I finished reading Nostromo (to myself), proud I'd read such a long book, a full-price purchase (probably from Hawthorn Readings) prompted by the silver-ish cover and the sticker on the front that would've read, 'One of the top 100 books of the Twentieth Century' or somesuch. And I read the whole book, me, and I can still picture Nostromo slipping into the waters at midnight to apprehend a sailboat just like in Swallows and Amazons.

I've not yet got to the end of Sard Harker; the sentences are awful to read out loud, syntax stiff and repetitive; and it's such a shaggy story, I don't trust I'm going to get anywhere when I do.

La Fontana

La Fontana (the fountain (at right))

La Fontana is Italian or Spanish for fountain. It's also a block of flats in Glenhuntly Rd, Elsternwick with a fountain out the front. La Fontana's water feature is middle right, though it's difficult to make out in this photo. The fountain was working the day I took this snap - several thin streams of water curve approximately a metre and a half into the air from a sprinkler centred in a concrete pond around 4m in diameter. I ride past La Fontana's fontana three mornings a week and always check if she's on. Lately no.

Joie de Vivre

Joie de Vivre as it once was

Joie de vivre is French for corps d'esprit, the joy of living, the very essence of existence, and is probably the name of a perfume. It's also a block of flats in the Avenue, Windsor. In the photo, taken from a real estate website archive, you can see the sign affixed to the steel picket fence. The sign reads Joie de Vivre. I used to walk past this block of flats most days and look at the sign and wonder about joie de vivre. I remember there was also big cursive lettering on the flats' front in brassy plastic that read the same. But the other day when I went to take a photo there were no signs. The flats had been given a paint job and the signs removed. Joie de vivre is no more for joie de vivre has gone.

Santa Monica

Santa Monica is a town in California, a saint named Monica, and a block of flats in Carnegie on a street that runs alongside the train line, not far from Carnegie station. If you lived on the second floor of Santa Monica you could see your 9.49 to Cranbourne arrive 8 minutes late while eating your toast. These flats have no front fence, clipped pines and grass mown tight, although the shrub on the right is quite choked. I don't know what Monica is patron saint of, but she was a character in Friends which I have watched episodes of.

Mogador

MOGADOR - obscured by pine

Mogador is a town in Hungary (I think) and a two-tone brown block of flats on Dandenong Rd in North Caulfield. Mogador sounds like Mogadon which was a sedative from the seventies. Mogador the block of flats was built in the seventies too. The town in Hungary is probably very old. In recent years someone has planted a vigourous pine tree close to the building's front, and you can no longer see the name from the street.

A thousand and one blahs you must blah before you blah

Taking some time in the library to choose a book or two from its ever diminishing stacks, I flicked through 1001 Zs to Y before you die, where Z = book, Y = read. I think, thankfully, that this series has died its natural, miserable death. But not before there was a proliferation, of possibly 1001 ...before you die directories*. Why that figure, 1001? It's the 1001 Arabian Nights of stories to tell your psychopathic betrothed before he beheads you. Only here the threats come from the publisher. Buy this so you don't miss out.

1001's a good sounding number - the rhythm's pleasant when said out loud - plus it's a palindrome. And the goal it sets is pleasantly impossible. You can't possibly read all these books, see all these movies, skin all those goats, dig all those holes to the other side of the world. Not starting from deep middle age. A hundred and one is much more achievable, hence 101 places to get fucked up b.y.d. - that's more like it. Sensible too - you would probably die before reaching a 1001 mark. 

So as I flicked through at the library, looking to see if I've got any prior credits (none really), I flipped to the end, to the contemporary books and chose something to read - The Road Home by Rose Tremain, I found it on the shelves, borrowed it, read it. One down. However, if this series was revived in ten years' time, the content revised and a new edition published, I not sure The Road Home would appear. So it probably doesn't count - unless I die before then.

*The list format + fear of death was infectious in the 2000s: listed on Amazon are 2,208 reference titles suggesting activities you can do b.y.d.