vogwurk + werdwurk
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

in the machine. i've been using osx for 6 months now, and after having got used to most of it (though i'm far from the sort of user i used to be, these days i find i just don't have time to read all the books and learn all the tricks as i onceuponatime did) and deciding it was rather too slow along came 10.1 and it is just fantastic. still, i wouldn't run it on anything but a g4, and my 256mb of ram is starting to feel like some things are getting slow partly because in osx i tend to keep things open for longer than in classic (even now when i'm not doing much i have 8 apps running).

i've just finished the 18th, and last, of patrick o'brian's aubrey maturin series. i never thought i'd read such novels. the covers are enough to deter me, the sorts of things old (much older!) men read at that point in their lives when they know that adventures are the dreams of years that have passed.

but no. stuff and nonsense. first of all o'brian turns out to be quite an interesting character, much like his major characters. some sort of anglo-irish childhood and then i'm not sure how but french, spanish and catalan also come to be his. he's the major translator of de beauviour into english. has written a major biography of sir joseph banks (a major scientific and political figure of the 18th and 19th centuries who figures large in australian history) and of picasso, who it turns out was a neighbour. which i guess means he must have been rather well to do.

and then there are the novels. where to begin?

there's a fascination with detail and accuracy. an extraordinary and insistent naming of parts of the ships, food, events, manners, naval customs. so much so that for pages you have little sense of what on earth things might mean and the novels appear to make at best a token effort at letting you in. There is little effort to explain the nautical terms, nor just what on earth spotted dog (a dessert much loved by captain aubrey) actually is, though apparently it can be very large. the best the novels ever do is describe something for the benefit of maturin, the physician come natural philosopher, but even then it is not what you would ordinarily get in a novel or a film. instead of an explanation for the reader it often consists of a statement along the lines of "what a fellow you are stephen, to be sure. why the [insert obscure nautical term here] is that [insert shape] piece used for [insert second obscure nautical term here] by the [insert third obscure nautical term] aft of plaice" (a character). to which stephen will observe the said piece and nod. but not the reader. or in an introduction to the reader o'brian will apologise for some historical inaccuracy, for instance readers will note that the timing of the battle described (which is based on fact) is wrong since the grapes in spain couldn't possibly have been harvested by then! i mean, if that's the extent of the historical error. i find this detail fascinating, exotic, exhilirating and somewhere or somehow expressing a fidelity to a vision (of manners as a mode of appropriate and reasonable conduct) that is mirrored by the novels themselves.

for so often in these books the intimate is found between what is not said. the reserve and discreteness of the major characters is straight from austen, but it would be an error to think that o'brian only writes about boys in boats. there are political intrigues, and a series of increasingly complex (and despairing) personal relationships revolving around love, infidelity, wealth, and apparently intractable misunderstandings. in particular between maturin and diana, his eventual partner, a relationship that is played out, explored, teased, broken, established, only to be broken i think 4 times, over some 9 or 10 novels. this builds a history and a texture which is simply extraordinary, and means that their final reconciliation can be reduced to a single concluding paragraph at the end of a series of events that has occupied two entire novels encompassing several years, at no point they ever being able to see each or talk with each other (he was pretty much involved in a circumnavigation of the world). yet because of this texture that paragraph reverberates with a known history of addiction, desire, loss and, well, a feeling of 'oh for fuck's sake, just bloody well talk about it!'

exactly the same thing regularly happens with the naval battles, such as they are. the mauritius campaign for instance has our heroes in a position of some power as commander of a fleet, after several hundred pages we are coming down to the final action, outnumbered yet moral superiority clear. but history gets in the way of an ending for the british fleet appears over the horizon, completely outnumbering the french who must as a matter of course strike. that's it. no battle, no heroism, no deserving victory. it just ends. and in the same novel one captain, clearly incompetent and the nearest thing you get to a 'baddie', makes an incompetent mess of one major action which results in the loss of much life. nothing happens. no comeuppance, no narrative resolution, he just made a cock up of it and he's no good. any other novel (well, nearly any other) would have some narrative resolution around this, some outcome leading to his disgrace - death, loss of command, suicide. but alas history again intervenes. exactly the same thing seems to happen in the penultimate novel when it is clear that one british captain flogs his crew unnecessarily and is a tyrant. this is repeatedly observed and aubrey (one of the major characters) comments that the ship will be close to mutiny, but nothing ever happens. they are victorious in their final battle and they all sail home.

and again there is a pacing in the novels that is almost religious in its careful exaggeration of slow detail until a brief and intense instant. a chase might happen over days, and pages, but the final maneouvres that win the ship may all be achieved in two paragraphs. in some cases it even feels as if an entire novel builds to one such moment, and as quickly as it arrives the novel merely ends. and it is this (which i only realised around book 14 or so) which makes the writing surprisingly subtle and o'brian's debt to austen becomes very clear. though it isn't just austen. no one in austen says "fuck" as the lower deck does here, or has characters launch into frank discussions of the commonplace presence of buggery in the service and of whether sailors ought to hang for it (aubrey's of the view that buggery, like women on board, is bad for discipline but certainly no one ought to hang for it). or detailed descriptions of flora and fauna in various countries, all consistent with the knowledge of the day, or of medical techniques and practices. etc.

and there are 18 of these. 18. this is the fidelity to something that i mentioned earlier. some insistent idea that finds voice in these novels and leads to a work that does become a world. novels often make my cry, laugh, and move me in dense complicated and extraordinary ways, shadowing parts of me in ways that words ought not be allowed to do. but these, these are something else again. to read them all does feel somewhere or somehow like joining a monastic order of a particular sort. probably a bit of a boys club, or maybe that's just the cover design?

the long distance lover. gawd, its kleenex time. duck and cover everyone. (and yes, there is some patsy k on my cd shelf.) :-)

my partner lives in norway, i live, most of the time, in melbourne. being divorced and all that christmas turns out to be a hard time of the year. time for families, friends, your kids. between having my kids, then not having them for a day, and then christmas and boxing day with them, but without my partner to share with, it becomes a strange, lopsided time. i think the hardest, or weirdest, part is that really the only people who share the quotidian pleasures and struggles of children are their parents, and when you're divorced that world affirming confidence of collaboration and struggle gets balkanized and bullied.

bah. humbug.

it's christmas eve and tomorrow my children have that thrill of gifts and families.

when coming home from bergen i often get a bottle of aquavit (something jan rune holmevik introduced me to on my first visit). the best aquavit is line (or linie) aquavit, which means it is put in sherry casks and put on a ship and has to cross the equator (the line). since it has to get back to norway this of course means it crosses the line twice. real line aquavit - i'm told - has this information printed on the back of the label so you can read it through the light tea coloured drink (usually flavoured with things like cardamon).