punned it

Matthew tagged me with a 5/5 meme the other day. I'll give it a go.

1. Name your area of expertise/interest:
I thought about offering "procrastination" as my area of expertise, because on my way to the computer to write this post today, I had to first make a lime cheesecake and then repaint my bathroom and then do some cartoons and then have a lie down and feel sorry for myself for having a cold (you know how you get those fits and bursts of energy when you are sick?). And then sure enough it was time to collect my child. And somehow now it's five to midnight. No more time for mucking around!
So I'll say "puns". I love making them and I love reading other people's puns. It's one of the things I love about blogging--especially since there's not much call for punning when writing straight fiction, for example. (Having decided on puns as an area of interest, though not necessarily expertise, a few days ago I immediately found I couldn't make any good ones for my new posts. Stage fright, I think.)
2. How did you become interested in it?
Growing up with a dad who was a sub-editor and spending a childhood listening to he and his colleagues make drunken puns around dinner tables.
3. How did you learn how to do it?
I think it's just always been part of the family tradition, to engage in word play all the time. Then later when I worked in magazines and newspapers for years, I got to write headlines to my heart's content.
4. Who has been your biggest influence?
Tie between Asterix and Groucho Marx.
5. What would you teach people about it?
A triple entendre is even better than a double entendre.

border lines

I'm so jealous of those of you who could go see Anna Broinowski's doco on Norma Khouri, Forbidden Lie$, which premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival the other night. Anyone see it? Still, maybe the film will just happen to be showing in Sydney in May, as I'm heading there for a girlfriend's wedding, and to go along to the Sydney Writers Festival to hear my sister's good mate Suzanne Leal talk about her book "Border Street".
(I won't hold my breath for Broinowski's film to make its way up to Porpoise Spit...)
Might try to hook up with some Sydney bloggers then, too; if anyone's interested, let me know.

Mountain comes to Mohammed update: Ah, but I see in my local paper that the Beatels are gonna be playing Porpoise Spit on March 30. See you there, Ringo baby! Talk about the long and winding road...

making it big

I can't resist the opportunity to drop a name. So to add to my tally of 'I knew them when's, I now have to add Peter Templeman, who has just been nominated for an Oscar for his short film. Onya, Tempsie!
Temps was a good mate of my boyfriend Jimbo's a decade ago when I lived in Perth for a year. We'd go see his band Rude Emily almost every weekend (he's a fantastic singer) and I remember the odd post-surf session sitting around Tempsie's house, chatting to him about writing. Great to see he's been doing so well with it.
I'll have to see if I can dig up any incriminating photos for New Weekly but I have a feeling Jimbo ended up with custody of all our photo negatives. Lucky for you Tempsie!

that's gotta hurt

I like Helen Garner but God, she can be catty. In the new magazine The Monthly--like every other blogger who read Surfdom and/or Troppo's posts about it, I signed up for a free first issue via the magazine's website--Garner reviews the Nicole Kidman flick Birth:

"But two things are wrong. One is Kidman herself. When such a blatantly manufactured force as the Nicole Phenomenon keeps coming at you every time you open your front door, it is a point of honour to put up resistance. I long for her to wriggle out through the bars of her stardom, to persuade me she's not made of cardboard. But I can't get past that thin, nasal little voice with its high-school intonations; those melodramatic brows; the awful girly thing that happens when she laughs."

Miaow.

urge overkill

This NYT story, "We all have a life. Must we all write about it?", about the proliferation of memoirs being published (first czeched out at Jozef's) made me laugh, at myself as well. After all, blogging's a form of memoir, isn't it? Though it's odd that the writer didn't mention blogs in the context. This bit was interesting:

"[The memoir writer's] efforts may be as fundamental as breathing. John Eakin, an emeritus professor of English at Indiana University, has argued that human beings continuously engage in a process of self-creation and self-discovery by constructing autobiographical narratives. In a sense, we are the stories - multiple, shifting and constantly evolving - that we weave about ourselves, and this storytelling urge may even be hard-wired."

Ah, so that's it. Can't be helped then, I guess.

french polish

Back in the days when I'd pore over the book reviews and then go fork out $100 on four or five books in one go, I bought a copy of Antoni Libera's Madame, but I never read it. For some reason I couldn't get past the first page. Anyway, I picked it up again recently and was blown away. It's actually a beautiful love story, and very witty.

"Madame tells the story of a Polish teenager pursuing intellectual maturity--and the older woman of his dreams, his French teacher--in the communist-dominated Warsaw of the late Sixties."

Reminded me of some of the terrible crushes I got on various teachers in high school. Mind you, the hero of this novel certainly got luckier than I ever did!
I also found it an eye-opener because I've never really paid much attention to Poland before, although my mother's mother was Polish so I do have some vague curiosity about it.
There's some great quotes in the novel, too. I like one from Schopenhauer:

"A novelist should aim not to descibe great events but to make small ones interesting."

Anyway, highly recommended.