Sunday 29 October 2006

Got my book

Hooray for Readings. They have pissed me off in the past (by saying on the phone that a book was put aside for me, when in fact it wasn't even in the building) but today they not only had copies of The Children of Men, they also had a big stack of The Road right inside the front door which made me feel like it wasn't unreasonable to expect a place calling itself a bookshop to at least be aware of the existence of a very widely reviewed new novel by a very good and celebrated novelist. (This is related to a little whinge I had at Sarse a few days ago, if you're puzzled.) And furthermore when I took my things up to the counter to pay the assistant looked at them and said "I read the Border Trilogy last year, I sort of expected it to be full of macho cowboy crap, but it wasn't like that at all, it was really good." Yes, indeed, Readings actually is a bookshop.

Other activities carried out today included scraping a flattened and maggoty and indescribably foul-smelling dead possum off the driveway where someone (some dog, possibly) had left it, going to the Gillian Wearing retrospective at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, buying new eyeshadows to replace used-up ones in Myers (MAC "Patina" and "Steamy"), supermarket shopping, going to the gym, watching the last half-hour of Idol and the first half-hour of the Arias, and now I'm going to lie on the couch and read. I have a craving to listen to Nina Simone singing "Four Women" so I'll play some records too.

If you're blogcruising this evening/morning I have been very much enjoying having these (relatively) new blogs about the place:

Bernice Balconey's Baloney

Ms Batville

Superannuated Feminist.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm also looking forward to reading "The Road", hopefully I'll pick it up on Friday. I must admit I only found out about the McCarthy release about a week ago, and was a little surprised at the speed at which McCarthy is producing his works - if I recall correctly "No Country For Old Men" was only published last year.

Personally still think it is McCarthy's earlier works "Blood Meridian" and "Suttree" that so far represent his high-water mark, "Blood Meridian" in particular is such a head-banging intense work about the violent world of the human imagination that it couldn't be excluded from the thesis. It just says so much about the psychopathology of attempting to enforce existence into the rigid shape of taxonomy that the Freudian/Lacanian interpretations are almost endless.

lucy tartan said...

a little surprised at the speed at which McCarthy is producing his works

I think he's the classic late bloomer, Stephen.

What's your thesis about?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the plug.

"Patina" and "Steamy" sound great. I have often thought my ideal job would be naming comestic colours. I hardly every wear nail polish but I had to have OPIs "I'm not really a waitress" nail polish mostly because of the name and I once paid waaaaaay too much for a NARS "Jungle Red" nail polish just because that was the name of a nail polish in a film I love. Today I wore a little of two eyeshaows "Serene" and "Prose and Fancy" with a "Carnal" lipstick. It sort of sums up my various moods today too.

lucy tartan said...

Oh, I made a mistake saying Steamy. It is actually Surreal, which makes me think of Rik in the Young Ones.

Do you think people get to name cosmetics colours after a long arduous apprenticeship naming house paint colours?

Ms Batville said...

Maybe. You would need some inspiration after coming up with 72 different names for off-white.

I once met a man who worked for a paint company and named colours. I thought this was so exciting so babbled on about what a great job it would be. He grunted back that it wasn't that much fun. The business folded soon afterwards. I wasn't surprised.

Zoe said...

BAZLOTTO!