This video is astounding, the next best thing to my dream. Watch it. Watch it full screen.

Marvel also at the agonising ballet as the surfers try to stay on top of the water before eventually pirouetting into the all consuming wall of energy…

The wrapper of a sweet given to us in a course recently.

Rich in Glucose!

Photo taken in Honiara

1. No one else seems to notice it.
2. Something particularly Australian about a lake that’s been dry for years and only recently returned.
3. It’s the closest place to home that feels swallowing and spacious like Australia should.
4. What the clouds and light did.
5. Windmills!

Like Danyl I think he was at his most wrong, most pugnacious and most repugnant over Iraq. And yet I think I can forgive all that having heard his thoughts on death.

“It will happen to all of that at some point you’ll be tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on but you have to leave.”

Your parents they fuck you up they do

Your kids – they get to finish you off

This morning I was halfway through Jonathan Franzen’s novel ‘Freedom’, when the penny dropped. The book is the story of a musician, the couple who are his closest friends, and the couple’s children. According to one of the enthusiastic review quotes on the inside cover it is a ‘great American novel’. According to another, it is an ‘indelible portrait of our times’. Maybe. But first and foremost, I realised as I read it earlier under a threatening sky, the book is a horror story. A tale told to frighten the middle-aged.

Dim the lights and contemplate – if you dare – the rapid erosion of the freedom that you doodled day dreams all over in your youth. Ponder uncomfortably the path dependency of relationships and how this allows time to take the small flaws we all have and use them to pry people apart. Squirm as the author shows how spookily easy it is to ruin your kids, and how it will be easier still for them repay the favour. Good politics won’t save your personal life, nor will being well read. The gym and veganism won’t help either. And love and kindness will just as readily lead your deeper into the woods as show you the way out.

However fiendish the characters are in Stephen King novels, at least they live for the most part in cemeteries, or other dimensions, or cottages out along gravel roads in distant woods. Franzen’s demons, on the other hand, are much closer to home – your partner’s lingering silence at breakfast this morning, the preciousness of your five year old. The haunted houses here are our own.

I stopped regularly reading fiction about five years ago. It wasn’t a principled stand to do with the decline of the modern novel or anything like that; rather I was, I think, simply tired (probably right after reading the God of Small Things) of how cruelly most authors treated their characters. I’m misanthropic enough in my way: I despair of humanity as a whole, am mildly frightened and repelled by strangers and somewhat vexed by the many of the people I know,  and yet tell me someone’s story and I can’t help but care about them. Paint it vividly and evocatively and, to be honest, I’m just simply not going to enjoy it when by the final chapter you leave them so broken as to only be able to engage in incest.

I suppose what I should have done when I realised this was research my books a bit before I read them: read only Annie Proulx novels and not her collected short stories, or something like that. But there was a whole heap of non-fiction to read, not to mention the internet, and so I quit.

What about Franzen then, will he lead me back to the world of stories? I’m certainly enjoying devouring a book, having to force myself to put it down, feeling emotionally involved, and possibly learning something at the same time. It’s not a perfect novel, I think, good but not perfect. The characters aren’t always convincing, and I’m not totally sold on the structure. And yet it’s certainly dragged me in.

Ultimately, my fiction reading fate may depend on how many of the main characters get splattered before the sun comes up. If they all end up lifeless husks with their souls sucked out of them then I doubt I’ll be racing to read ‘the Corrections’. On the other hand, if at least a couple manage to emerge into the light of a new day, bent and bloodied, but not broken, then maybe I will.

[Update: Never mind profound questions about the modern novelist, what about the modern reader? Absolutely un-pleasable. No sooner had I got to the end of the book and discovered - to my relief - that the demons are vanquished and that most of the characters live to see the light of day, then by brain kicked in and I'm like hhhmmmm...was pretty, two dimensional, doomed Lalitha anything other than deus ex machina?]

“Hey mate, how’s it going?”

“I am good. How are you?” He spoke deep, purposeful words with a German accent.

“Good. Good. What brings you to Malaita?”

“Giants. I am studying Giants.”

“Oh. You’re an anthropologist. I’m studying political science. Have you collected many legends of giants? I didn’t know giant stories were part of the culture here.”

“No. I am not collecting legends. I am here to study giants.”

“ ”

“ ”

“G-giants. Um, ah, have you seen any yet?”

“No. I am going into the mountains to find them this week.”

“Oh. Um, what are you going to do when you find them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe take some photos.”

“Oh…okay…um…Good luck.”

The next day we headed off to the Langa Langa lagoon in search of answers to electoral questions.

Three weeks later, laden down with data, we clattered back, riding a wheezing old bus. The giant hunting German was there again too. Still walking around with great big strides. Still looking tidy, but also unravelling just a bit, on the way to becoming dishevelled. When he walked by, the guys at the general store joked in a way that suggested they’d situated him as weird. Feeling awkward, I avoided him.

The last we saw of him was on the ship back to Guadalcanal. As we came into berth he descended the stairs from the first class compartment, ignored us, heaved his great big pack, covered with an XXL rain shield, onto his great big shoulders and strode off into the sweaty streets of Honiara.
As he walked away I felt sorry. Great big forlorn strides. I imagined the sorts of sad stories that might send a mildly delusional German man to Western Melanesia in search of creatures that don’t exist. I wondered what would become of him.

And then, for the briefest of moments, I entertained the thought…maybe this wasn’t a tale of delusions at all. Or of a lonely, slightly-odd guy striding in search of apparitions around a lost little tropical island.

Maybe the joke will end up on me and the guys in the store after all. Maybe that pack was filled with film.

Let me know if the National Geographic starts publishing pictures of the ‘Giant Men of Malaita’ any time soon.

Giving pretend painkillers, for instance, can reduce the amount of pain a patient experiences. A study carried out in 2002 suggested that fake surgery for arthritis in the knee provides similar benefits to the real thing.

and

Despite the power of placebos, many conventional doctors are leery of prescribing them. They worry that to do so is to deceive their patients. Yet perhaps the most fascinating results in placebo research—most recently examined by Ted Kaptchuk and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School, in the context of irritable-bowel syndrome—is that the effect may persist even if patients are told that they are getting placebo treatments.

! – although I wonder if the weren’t just capturing some form of regression to the mean here?