Monday

Normally Mondays are a bit on the gloomy side, but today, with my house not burned to ashes and all my relatives intact, I have to feel quite lucky. I didn’t watch or read any news while I was up the mountains over the weekend, and the Victorian bushfires completely passed me by until this morning. The scale of the damage, the number of deaths, is a bit hard to compute. Some of these places are the little towns I used to drive through on Sunday outings with my mum and dad, back in the 70s. The stories coming up from there, even without the dramatic flourishes added by the journalists, are just shocking.

Meanwhile, the heat in eastern NSW was only enough to mean that the train had to travel extremely slowly last night, bringing me back from Bathurst. Door to door, the trip took almost exactly six hours. I watched the creeping-past landscape while there was still light to do so, then I filled 5 pages of my notebook, and I read the chunk of Greer Gilman I’d brought with me, as well as half of Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which I bought cheap at Blackheath Gleebooks. I’m not sure that it makes me want to rush off and actually read Stein - I think she’d be one of those writers you should take a holiday for the specific purpose of reading her, as you would Proust (or so I’ve heard). There’s one book of hers, The Making of Americans, which even very few Steinophiles have read all the way through - Malcolm calls it ’something so monstrously peculiar that although it is possible to finish, it is impossible to sum up’. The extracts in the book make me think it might be rewarding in the way that Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes is rewarding - in fact, there’s a great description of the attitude one might take towards challenging writers: ‘[Dydo] is a leading figure in the recent movement to accord Stein the  status of a major modernist master and to read her work with sympathetic, rather than hostile, incomprehension.’

Who is a rewarding but challenging writer (or just book) that you’ve read, that you’d recommend to other readers? The next one on my list is Alan Garner’s Strandloper.