Book fair is my friend

Yesterday I went to our uni's massive biannual book fair (also including audiobooks, records, cds, random crap..but mostly books). Apparently they have over a million items!

It's quite an amazing sight. The Great Hall is more full than I bet you've ever seen it - packed out with long rows of trestle tables piled with books, boxes and boxes of books under the tables, people milling about carrying piles or boxes of books and bumping into each other. There's people pawing through the books, some systematic, some turning a page here, another there.. digging through boxes, flicking through rows.. there's a whole row of dear old volunteers adding up the purchases, a guy with a microphone up the front interjecting now and then regarding some exciting book or other on offer.

There are children's books, art books, languages, literature, fiction, crime, collectibles, religion, poetry, cooking, gardening, history, philosophy, psychology, health, and more. Even an "Interesting" section - for all the books they couldn't think where else to put. I found an assessment of London's loos there. Up to date as of the 1920s I think.

And what did I find, on my brief sojourn there?

I was hoping you'd ask!

GK Chesterton: The Everlasting Man

Manalive

The Club of Queer Trades

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Hillaire Belloc: The Green Overcoat

George MacDonald: Fairytales and Stories for the Childlike (donated by J)

The Marquis' Secret

Prayers of St Francis

Diana Wynne Jones: The Magicians of Caprona

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Paulo Coelho: Veronika Decides to Die

Longfellow:Poetical Works

A book on Impressionism

Rudyard Kipling: Kim

T.S. Eliot: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (x2)

Four Quartets (love this!)

Arundhati Roy: The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

Myth, Magic and Meaning in Tolkien's World (Randel Helms)

Jean Vanier: The Broken Body

Ralph Morton: The Iona Community Story

E.L. Allen: a Guide to the Thought of Karl Barth

a Guide to the Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (I dunno, sounded interesting!)

the 10 laws of leadership

a couple of cute Joan Walsh Anglund books

a couple of the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency books

Anne Rice: Christ the Lord - the Road to Cana

Barclay's commentary on John

..and I didn't even get to all the tables!

All those for a total of $21.90. Bargain!!

It's on all week, so if you like books you should defo check it out :)

Ok so it may be 1:25am but I haven't gone to bed yet so it's still the same day. right? yeah.

Today I did a really really really dumb and forgetful and embarrassing thing. But I can't tell you about that yet, cos I need a bit more distance. Sorry for the suspense :P.

Instead I'll tell you that today I slept in a bit, woke up all blocked and wheezy - ugh, tidied and washed up, started trying to make a onesie out of a pair of pants I never wear for a friend's party tomorrow, went & had yummy coffee at the Godfrizzle's place, read a book in a tree and was stumbled upon by a couple of random guys (so it's the first time in ages I've been up a tree with a book - and a thermos of tea, no kidding - and I get sprung!!) I'm sure they thought I was a fruit loop but they were very friendly and polite all the same. Maybe they didn't see the thermos. That would have confirmed it.

OH and then tonight (after the phonecall with my mother which made me realise the stupidly stupidly idiotic thing I had done - forgetting that thing, you know..well you don't.. but..) so yeah, tonight, I went to a loungeroom gig at my friend Aidan's place, and the lovely Redhanwen trio played and they were _gorgeous_ and then his friend James Fahy played and he was super! Cool voice and very entertaining. Such a great, cosy, intimate vibe there.

I had to leave early to pop in at another party which was a bit of a pity - but that was a good time of chatting & catching up with people so definitely worth it too.

And now here I am, onesie now half-made (I'll let you know how it turns out!) and I'm off to bed.

Jottings on Postcolonialism

Here is one of the compulsory weekly journal entries I wrote for my Postcolonial lit class. I don't know if you'll be able to make head or tail of it, but hopefully it might give a hint of what the course has involved (and why I've loved it!).

Wk 3 – Danticat – We are Ugly But We are Here, Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries, Bhaba.

I danced in the rain on Monday night.

On Tuesday I ate pancakes at 8am in the morning. I took my sister breakfast in bed and she was very happy.*

On Wednesday we bought a new packet of Earl Grey tea (Nature's Cuppa, the one and only). It smelt good and the whole household was content.

On Thursday I drank some beer. I didn't get a free lunch.

But on Friday I got free sushi and sand between my toes.

On Saturday I played an epic game of 500. 22 rounds, 3 hours.

On Sunday I played soccer in the park and sang in a silly voice to Mika.

That was my week (or one impression of it at least). I also reflected on stuff I read [finally!]:

I enjoyed the Motorcycle Diaries but it wasn't as substantial as I'd imagined it might be. It seemed to be little more than just two guys rambling around South America surviving on nothing but the hospitality of locals and enjoying it where they could. I would have liked to hear more about their experience of the leper colonies and a little more of the development of their thinking regarding communism, power to the oppressed and stuff. I did like the bit where they'd managed to get first class fares on a ship, but then concluded that they connected better with – and enjoyed more – the sailors anyway.

I really liked Danticat's piece. Wished it was longer! Her pithy observation regarding Haiti “economics and politics are intrinsically related; who is in power determines to a great extent whether or not people will eat” spoke volumes about her experience, and that of the people of Haiti. I liked the strong feminist overtones, introduced and then threaded through with the story of Anacona amongst the reflections on the other women in her life. It is confronting, even devastating, but there is still a beauty in the strength and hope expressed in their catch cry “we are ugly, but we are here.” There is a real solidarity and honesty about it. Life is hard, but it is still worth celebrating the fact that they have survived another day together. The ending expresses more of the concept of the circularity of life; as her grandmother believed: “if a life is lost, then another one springs up replanted somewhere else, the next life even stronger than the last.” They exist through memory in an endless circle of power and endurance.

Bhaba [Postcolonial theorist] was pretty dense. It took me forever to get through the shorter article (Of Mimicry and Man) and I barely touched the other. I did really like that idea of the colonisers keeping the colonised in a bondage of mimicry: they would give them a dose of the Christian faith, or of 'civilisation', what it meant to be a gentleman, etc, but just a limited amount that would prevent them from being able to be fully 'civilised' (in their terms) or a free Christian. I could see some of this in King's stuff from the week before – how there was this writing and rewriting of what it meant to be Indian which ended up being a lose-lose situation for them.

When we went over it in class, I grasped more of what Bhaba was meaning by hybridity and ambivalence. The coloniser is in an alien world with an imagined picture of their old world, writing the image of the colonised. The colonised meets them in the middle of these images – it is not all on the one side but an exchange that grows into something new. Some ideas of postcolonialism rely on traditional manichaean dichotomies, but these don't honestly represent the situation. There is a blending. Also, if it is defined with regards to possessions and lacks; with this understanding it becomes evident that everyone possesses and lacks different things, and so there are no longer dichotomies.

*I made that one up. Or Skye did. Don't remember. She wishes it happened...

I might try and tell you about my favourite books from the course soon.. & bug you to read them!

holiday reading

Books books books (the ones I've read already these hols are bolded)

Harry Potter 5, 6 & 7 (yes, I've been suffering withdrawals since last year's HP 9-day-7-book Challenge)
River Town (fascinating book about a guy's couple of years in a backwater chinese town, I should write a whole post just on it)
Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
In Patagonia - Bruce Chatwin
Fire & Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
The Book of Lights - Chaim Potok
El Leon, la Bruja y el Ropero - CS Lewis
The Silmarilion - JRR Tolkien
.....and finish War & Peace!

Any recommendations?