Flipper - 5:49 p.m.

Bitter Disappointment Now A Life Style Option

Until the recent rash of rejections, denials and barrings, Mr. Oaf was taking a keen interest in the world of literature. By reading lots of book reviews, profiles and lists of recent releases it was becoming easier to have a general idea of what was going on in the world of books.

For example, at lunch recently Mr. Oaf was able to hold forth on D.B.C. Pierre and his recent winning of the Booker Prize, even though he’d never read the book or even heard of the author until a few weeks ago. Ditto the controversy over Tibor Fischer’s comments on the new Martin Amis novel Yellow Dog and then the backlash against Fischer’s own book in the UK press. Or would you prefer to discuss the whole McSweeny’s crowd and that new collection of American authors introduced by Zadie Smith? Or the connection between Michael ”Wonder Boys” Chabon and Ben Katchor?

Actually, it was all stuff just cribbed from The New York Times Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and the Review section of the weekend Australian newspaper. It was a sham, but it was working….

Then something happened. The more Mr. Oaf read the more he started to feel a little left out. Sure, he’s an optimist, but this was all starting to take its toll.

On Saturday, Mr. Oaf started to read about Alasdair Duncan and his new book Sushi Central. Apparently Duncan is “the new voice of Australian gay youth”

‘Good for you’, thought Mr. Oaf, ‘How nice it is to be the voice of something, and to have a fabulous first novel coming out’. Mr. Oaf read on through the profile as he lay in the bath with a glass of read wine:

“His ‘very, very cool’ parents encouraged their only son to love reading from an early age and by 9 he was devouring Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’. He wrote his first novel – a fantasy story with dragons – at 12 and he’s been writing ever since…”

Mr. Oaf wished he had kept the short stories he had written when he was nine years old. They weren’t very good, being obvious pastiches of The Persuaders starring Tony Curtis and Roger Moore but they had all the essential ingredients of a good spy story – they featured two friends, were set in the south of France and, with the aid of Mr. Oaf Snr, were fully illustrated.

Reading on about Alasdair, Mr. Oaf discovered the following sentence:

Born in 1982, Duncan lived in the wealthy Brisbane suburb of Albany Creek….

With a sudden an inexplicable expolsion, Mr. Oaf spat wine all over the bathroom tiles… Mr. Oaf read and reread the sentence. NINETEEN EIGHTY TWO. What was Mr. Oaf doing in 1982? Nothing really. Just eating pizza in Bondi and pretending to be an artist. What a waste.

The next day, while perusing the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr. Oaf came across a story about a young author in America named Christopher Paolini Aside from the fact that this kid is 19 years old and has just knocked J. K. Rowling off the top of the Children’s Best Seller list with his debut novel, a fantasy called Eragon, he also has a pretty extraordinary background. His parents were survivalist nut cases who moved to somewhere called Paradise Valley in Montana and joined a cult led by Ma Prophet who preached the usual end times nonsense and sold berths in a privately built and owned nuclear fall out shelter in a mountain.

Paolini’s parents left the cult when he was 2 years old and built a cabin where they raised their child far from the reaches of Federal Government Agents and the influence of the Z.O.G.-controlled United Nations. The story made no mention of his parents after that (except to mention that his father owned a formidable science fiction collection), so Mr. oaf could only speculate what Paolini Snr. did with his time – perhaps building fertilizer bombs and scanning the skies for black helicopters?

Anyway, Mr. Oaf was sitting at the office table eating pitted dates when he read the following:

Paolini, who has never been to school, has read 3000 books, watched 4000 videos and claims to be unbeatable at video games […]. By the age of 15 he had learnt a passable version of Old Norse and picked up enough about iron forging to make his own armour and sword. He had also written the first draft of an epic novel,‘Eragon’.”

Those dates were supposed to be pitted, but as Mr. Oaf bit down he found that they did indeed have pits. That was his excuse for crying out in pain and throwing the paper across the room.

Later, while dealing with the aftermath of eating too many pitted dates, Mr. Oaf was back in the bathroom reading the appropriately named Rear View column by Luke Slattery, who is some bald guy with a column in the back of The Australian:

Genuine novels […] stem from the need to write. They are as mysterious as the demi-dream states in which they are written. This is an important point. There are too many ordinary novels written by people who want be novelists. The best novels issue from inner compulsion, not ambition…”.

Well, thanks a f*#@ing bunch Luke. What we need more of are people who just do it because they have to with no more reason than the need to scratch. Masturbation is an inner compulsion, but it’s not necessarily something we want to see in public.You make a conscious decision to be a writer and, if you’ve got enough gumption, you stick it out until like our good buddy 50 Cent, we get rich or die trying…

Perhaps we’ll get our just desserts eventually. Apparently someone in England is making a film about the love life of Robert Graves, the author of Goodbye To All That, King Jesus and I, Claudius ( which in high school we used to call “I Clavdivs” on account of the faux-Latin in the title of the TV version).

’Poetic Justice’ will be centered on the ménage a trois between Graves, his wife Nancy and his mistress, American writer Laura Riding – an affair that scandalised English society in the 1920s. […] Graves eventually left England and moved to Majorca with Riding. She left him for another man and in his later years Graves turned to hallucinatory drugs and teenage girls…”

bears in history - future bears

“This diary cracked me up, completely, perhaps the oddest diary I have ever read. I'm not sure if it's a takeoff on something or someone that I have somehow missed. Regardless, TEZNEZCO! chronicles the adventures of two bears and describe them as if they are a minority of some sort. The writing is disturbingly matter-of-fact as if it is perfectly normal to be writing about these bears as people. I like it; it's pleasantly novel" - Diaryreview

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