I am a little late to the Peter Temple Fan Club. I feel like the doors opened years ago and now I'm the guy who got there late and is trying to catch a furtive glimpse through a dusty and grimy window. Last year I read his book called The Broken Shore and loved the mood and the environment and the ttunnel he put me in where I was watching a movie made only for me. One of those books that I kept close and read snippets in seconds if that was all I had.
The Broken Shore's semi-sequel Truth is one I picked up last week and remembered everything good about its semi-prequel. The character picture is holistic and visual. The settings and plot create that quiet dread within me that he got there first.
The style is sparse. Commas for conjunctions. Names for sentences. A word for a paragraph. And yet so much is squeezed into each page that it is little wonder that he won a Miles Franklin for it.
Inspector Villani is such a flawed and lovable character but he is only one in a role call of likeable people within whom I could recognise failings and impulses and bad judgments.
A back-catalogue of Peter Temple will shortly be making its way out of stores and onto my to-read pile already stacked with too many books now relegated to second-billing.
Tom
Sunday 28 July 2013
Monday 22 July 2013
Trust in smartphones
At the encouragement of a smarter man than I another post has been written. Looking back on my previous anger-riddled attempt at connection to humanity I think it is a good thing that I dont leave that as my last published contribution to the world. It was certainly convcieved in contempt and misguided contempt at that. So I box on to try and create some sort of equanimity in my world.
Yesterday on my way to visit the smarter man than I and his delightful family it was an overcast day threatening rain that eventually came while I was still driving. It was the Melbourne midwinter. I was stopped by the intense amber then intense red of a traffic light. A pedestrian waited by the side of the road waiting to cross. She was immersed in a white headphone coccooned smartphone visual world. I have no idea what she was listening to or watching and would love to speculate but wont.
She obviously heard something in her external world because without looking away from her screen she stepped onto the road. Now, sidestreet, minimal problems. But I was on one of Melbourne's eastern arterial roads. By the time she was halfway across there was a serious line of cars backed up both ways. Saturday early afternoon with people possibly rushing to get home before the rain came is not the time or place or environmental circumstancews to push fate's envelope. And I dont even believe in that shit. So, let's try another analogy. It was not the time to test drivers' reactions or levels of fatigue. Or to put it another way, all it would have taken was another person driving a car to be doing exactly what this girl was doing (looking at a phone I mean, not standing by a pedestrian crossing, that would just be foolish) for this girl to be in serious levels of distress and exsanguination.
This girl looking at her phone made it all the way across the road and otnot the footpath before she looked up and appraised her actual rather than virtual surrounds.
And they say we dont live in a trsuting society anymore. Or maybe there is some new Safe Road Crossing Application.
Tom
Yesterday on my way to visit the smarter man than I and his delightful family it was an overcast day threatening rain that eventually came while I was still driving. It was the Melbourne midwinter. I was stopped by the intense amber then intense red of a traffic light. A pedestrian waited by the side of the road waiting to cross. She was immersed in a white headphone coccooned smartphone visual world. I have no idea what she was listening to or watching and would love to speculate but wont.
She obviously heard something in her external world because without looking away from her screen she stepped onto the road. Now, sidestreet, minimal problems. But I was on one of Melbourne's eastern arterial roads. By the time she was halfway across there was a serious line of cars backed up both ways. Saturday early afternoon with people possibly rushing to get home before the rain came is not the time or place or environmental circumstancews to push fate's envelope. And I dont even believe in that shit. So, let's try another analogy. It was not the time to test drivers' reactions or levels of fatigue. Or to put it another way, all it would have taken was another person driving a car to be doing exactly what this girl was doing (looking at a phone I mean, not standing by a pedestrian crossing, that would just be foolish) for this girl to be in serious levels of distress and exsanguination.
This girl looking at her phone made it all the way across the road and otnot the footpath before she looked up and appraised her actual rather than virtual surrounds.
And they say we dont live in a trsuting society anymore. Or maybe there is some new Safe Road Crossing Application.
Tom
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