The Travellers

 

 

I suppose it is a bit ironic for someone in ancient Greece to update you on Australian cinema. But then again, we've had a few thousand years of headstart while your folks were still hanging out in the trees, followed by a sudden influx of convicts. Consider this a little cultural exchange from the cradle of civilization!"

Thus wrote my old friend and fellow-worker in Greece, Bozenna, after she had watched the Australian film "The Travellers", which hasn't even been released in Australia yet. It tells the story of Stephen Seary (Luke Bracey), a successful set designer who returns from Europe to Western Australia to visit his dying mother one last time. What begins as a short journey turns into a stark confrontation with his stoic, resentful father Fred (Bryan Brown) in a small, traditional town.

As I told Bozenna, any movie with Bryan Brown in it is worth watching. I mean, who could forget him from his appearances in "The Odd Angry Shot", "Breaker Morant", "Stir", "The Shiralee" - especially "The Shiralee" - and dozens more. I must try and watch them all - and certainly Bozenna's latest recommendation, "The Travellers" - even though some of them are now almost fifty years old and quite hard to get hold of.

 

 

"Stir" is one of those old ones, dating back to 1980, of which I could only find this incomplete copy on YouTube. It's still worth watching though.

 

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My social 'colander'

 

 

My social 'colander' is full of holes these days, but somehow a whole lot got pushed through today: an early-morning float in the 34° warm-water pool followed by an eye test for my driver's licence followed by a quick dash to the RTA to renew it.

At my age I hate to over-capitalise and would've been happy to renew it for six months, but they offered me five years for $234, which I took on the condition that, if I don't use it up, my heirs will inherit the refund.

 

 

With the whole day still ahead of us, we drove the fifty kilometres to Ulladulla for lunch at the local bowling club followed by some grocery shopping, which I sat out on the 'Waiting Husbands' Bench' outside a second-hand shop. I'd gone back there because during a previous visit it had displayed an old OLYMPIA typewriter which was almost the same model I had bought in New Guinea and then schlepped around the world for twenty years. It was still for sale at $200 but without a ribbon, and where would I be able to buy a new typewriter ribbon these days?

 

 

And so I went to my other favourite op-shop where I picked up several interesting books, such as "It's All Greek to Me!" and "The Summer of my Greek Taverna", to remind me of one of my more memorable and laid-back work assignments (I refuse to call them a career; they were more like a succession of occupations that seemed interesting at the time).

I also picked up two books by Hugh Mackay, "What Makes Us Tick?" and "Turning Point - Australians Choosing Their Future", but since none of my readers would be interested, I won't mention them - or did I just now?

 

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P.S. A frequent reader of this blog in my old hometown replied to this post with this clever little message typed on his very own OLYMPIA typewriter which still had an inked ribbon and includes the German character 'ß' and even the umlaut 'ü'. It's enough to make me homesick for a 'Vaterland' that had ceased to exist for me a very long time ago.

 

"Hello Peter, sunny greetings from your old hometown Braunschweig!"

 

 

And this is the German reader's very own OLYMPIA typewriter full of 'Ü' and 'Ö' and Ä's which, if you look at them, they look right back at you, but the no longer much used 'ß' is tucked away below the question mark. I still remember the rule: a double-s is used after a short vowel ('Wasser') but an 'ß' - which is just another form of a double-s - is used after a long vowel ('Straße'). Strange, how some rules stick with you all your life! Such as "'Gar nicht' wird gar nicht zusammengeschrieben!"

By the way, did you know that if a standard western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph, it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide? That would make it slightly less portable than my trusty old OLYMPIA typewriter.

 

 

The Language Instinct

 

 

At the end of his book "For Who the Bell Tolls", David Marsh recommends some further reading. The books he recommends include Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue", which I have read more than once, but his top recommendation goes to "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.

As he writes, "If you only read one book about language, apart from For Who The Bell Tolls, make it this one. Starting from Darwin's assertion that language is 'an instinctive tendency to acquire an art', Pinker, a cognitive scientist, develops the theme that 'people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs'."

And he quotes from the book: "To a scientist, the fundamental fact of language is its sheer improbability. Most objects in the universe - lakes, rocks, trees, worms, cows, cars - cannot talk --- I can arrange a combination of words that explain how octupuses make love or how to remove cherry stains; rearrange the words in even the most minor way, and the result is a sentence with a different meaning or, most likely of all, word salad. How are we to account for this miracle?"

 

 

My friends at www.archive.org offered several copies of the book for online reading but had to remove them for copyright reasons. Luckily, YouTube offers the above audiobook. It may not cover the whole 500-page-long book but should whet your appetite to order it on ebay. While you make your decision, you may want to listen to the man himself:

 

 

He's written so many fascinating books - click here - that I may well be tempted to press the   BUY   button more than once. However, right now we're off to the 34°C warm-water pool to chill out those ageing bones.

 

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I've just bought my first Kindle book!

 

 

Actually, it's a twenty-page-short essay by Mark Forsyth about bookshops and the delights of not getting what you wanted, which is why I didn't immediately click the   BUY   button when I saw the hardcopy advertised on ebay for $7.

 

 

Instead, I bought it for $1.49 as an online Kindle file which I read online on the read.amazon.com.au/kindle-library, and then tucked it away on my harddisk for later re-reading. There's so much in those twenty pages. Take, for example, the short chapter "The Ghost in the Bookshop":

 

 

What a beautiful description of a perfect bookshop. Perhaps I should've paid the full seven dollars for the hardcopy. After all, I can afford it, as BHP has just now hit an all-time high of $68.77. Mind you, during the twenty minutes it took me to read this essay they eased back to $68, but that's still a 50% increase from the $45.27 at the start of this year.

 

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At my age, Happy Hour is an afternoon nap. While I was asleep, BHP had given up all of today's gains and closed 27 cents down at $67.40. Still, there's always tomorrow. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

 

The Elements Of Eloquence

 

 

What do you know about alliteration, polyptoton, antithesis, merism, the Blazon, aposiopesis, hyperbaton, anadiplosis, hypotaxis and parataxis, polysyndeton, asyndeton, aiacope, hendiadys, epistrophe, amd the tricolon? Yep, me neither - and that's only on the first one hundred pages of the 230-page thick book "The Elements Of Eloquence".

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

As in his previous books, "The Etymologicon" (which dealt with the connections between words) and "The Horologicon" (which covered obsolete words), Mark Forsyth employs his ingenious trademark of ending one section with a word that starts the next, which I think is a form of anadiplosis - see chapter 9 on page 60. It means you are likely to start off reading a couple of chapters, and end up reading the whole book in one go.

Some of the rhetorical devices he discusses are well known, such as alliteration (Pride and Prejudice, Power to the People), but most will be unfamiliar terms. Forsyth's examples bring them immediately to life: for example polyptoton, where you repeat a word in a different sense (Please Please Me, "but me no buts").

It's packed with obscure but fascinating facts. On page 24 we learn that "to be bonny and buxom, in bed and at board, till death us do part" was part of the medieval marriage service; on page 25, that the first world war song "Bless 'em all, bless 'em all, the long and the short and the tall" originally went "Fuck 'em all".

Like Doug Piranha in the old Monty Python sketch – "he knew all the tricks: dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire" (see 10:54 in the above video clip) – Mark Forsyth wears his considerable knowledge lightly. And writes it down so beautifully.

 

 

I read about this book while reading "For Who The Bell Tolls". That's the thing with books: you read a book and then, like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls, another book pops up inside it. Of course, I could've read the online copy - as you can by clicking here - but I'm a booklover and need to open its cover and turn its pages, and so I lashed out $33.33 on a beautiful hardcover copy. Hours of reading pleasure await me!

 

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P.S. Haven't had enough yet of Mark Forsyth? Here we go: