London History Festival.

If anyone is in Kensington over the next few weeks and would like some literary events to go to one evening, we are running a London History Festival from the 14-24th November. Featuring authors such as Max Hastings, Simon Sebag Montefoire and Claire Tomalin. Tickets are only £3.
You can find out more information at: http://www.londonhistoryfestival.com/index.html

Back!

Back up at Uni and I am finally starting to get on top of everything. The last few months have been a bit crazy with work but it's getting there now.
I've started an internship with Richard Foreman and Chalke Authors. At first it was pretty challenging and I struggled with almost every task I was set. Although it's not become easier, I have more of an idea of what's expected now which is good and I'm starting to build some solid contacts within the publishing world. The events that I have been to are amazing, spending nights in the Tower of London for Nigel Jones' book launch, drinks at Goldboro's Books with various authors, or evening openings of the Imperial War Museum. I think over the last few weeks I've seen far more of London than I ever had before.
I had a brilliant careers talk the other day from Suzanne Collier and it has really helped me to define my CV and sort out what I'm doing after Uni. It was brilliant to hear someone say that you are on the right track and that getting a job should be within my power once I'm out of university. What was far more interesting was her advice on work experience, to which she said as little as possible is best. Here I am trying to line up as much as physically possible after Uni and now I've been told that's not strictly the case. It's also good to hear a range of people's thoughts on MA's in anything, or specifically publishing, and that although they will be interesting to do in terms of helping my career there's very little they can add at the moment. I'm still keeping my options open but at the minute my main objective is to get my dissertation out of the way and finish Uni with the grade that I want.

The road trip from Perth to Darwin

Flying into Perth at 1am, it's always strange trying to orientate yourself in a town at night. Our hostel left very little to be desired; all the bathrooms were wrecked through varying amounts of bodily fluids and who knows what and I awoke at night to find my bed rocking thanks to the inhabitants on the bottom bunk. Leaving early in the morning to go and buy supplies, being the most unprepared person out of the group I had to buy hiking boots, a sleeping bag and some basic first aid bits. Once the man in the hiking shop had truly freaked me out that I was going to die in the bush, convinced me to buy a wooly hat and I had visions of Wolf Creek going through my head we went to collect the car and meet the other girls.

The Pinnacle Desert.

We decided we were going to head towards Cervantes and the Pinnacle Desert. Getting to our first camp site we realised that the tents supplied by Travellers Auto Barn, who we hired the car from, had no outer sheets. We managed to bodge together one tent from the two inners and emptied the car so we could sleep there. Five girls in one Ford Falcon estate is cramped enough, let alone when it's a bedroom as well. Thankfully our tent neighbours took pity on us and gave us their lovely 4 man tent the next day.
The Pinnacle Desert is all these rock structures that look like weird fingers pointing out of the sand, in fact the Aboriginal stories are that they are fingers of the dead trying to drag people down. No-one knows how they are formed; trees that have been fossilised by sand is the most popular answer at the moment.
Heading up to Kalbari National Park afterwards, camped and readied ourselves for the first day of proper hiking. Our first site was the Mushroom Rock loop walk which want right down to the sea, you could climb up the rocks and watch the sea crash about, brilliant. Also got to see the first wild red kangaroo. Then we moved onto the Nature's Window walk, 8km up and down 300m high gorge. It was beautiful, scrambling up the sides of gorges, swimming in the rivers, saw wallabies and kangaroos, trapdoor spiders and amazing sights. 

Nature's Window.

The lost path...

Deciding to head to Billabong for the night, we ran out of petrol half way and again found ourselves being saved by Australian's who take pity on us. Thankfully this guy had enough petrol to siphon us off some so we could get to Billabong for the night. Waking up early to discover we had been eaten by midges in the night, we headed to Shark Bay for some scuba diving and snorkelling. Shark Bay is lovely, the sea comes right up the the main road in the town and there's a lot of natural features, it's one of the few places that has wild dugongs so it was surprising to get there and find a lot had closed down and there was no scuba company there any more. It's a real shame and as a result we decided to go straight over to Canarvon and then on to Coral Bay. 

Coral Bay was packed full of hippies, divers and general travellers. We decided on a manta ray dive and snorkel over the Ningaloo Reef. It was amazing, we saw huge 5-7m manta rays feeding off the bottom doing enormous loop-de-loop's, also saw sea turtles, coral and we had a stalker fish who we named Bob. All manta rays have different markings on their underside, like a fingerprint, so each of the one's we saw we could then search for back on the ship's log. 

Leaving Coral Bay we moved onto Karijini National Park/Tom Price, en route blowing out a tyre that took a lot of muscle to change it. Karijini was the closest I'd come so far to the wild life, camping in the National Park I saw red back spiders, other spiders I couldn't name but ran away from, huge biting ants, all sorts of animals moving around in the night and termite mounds taller than me. Our first walk through the park was the Kalamina Gorge, we had to cling to the rock faces at parts but the contrast of the red rock and the turquoise water was stunning. We went swimming in the Fortescue Falls and Circular Falls to cool down, it's amazing to be able to swim under waterfalls and dry off in the sun. 

Towed...

Staying overnight in Port Hedland, we went onto Broome. In Broome our cars breaks failed thanks to a mixture of problems we later found out. Here is my one major traveller advice: do NOT hire a car from Travellers Auto Barn, they are awful and extremely unhelpful, particularly when your car is broken and you are stuck. Thanks to a lovely customer rights lawyer in Broome, Annetta, she managed to get our car back on the road for us and save our road trip. Broome itself is pretty, but very small. Spending more than the three days we were there and you've run out of things to do really. 

This was our final stretch to Darwin, our car was fixed and things were looking up after a stressful few days. 

Wangi Falls.

Moving on up to Katherine, we watched the last match of the State of Origin, QLD won 34-22 much to Amanda's annoyance and saw lots of snakes, wold hogs and cows on the roads as well as a toppled over road train which was pretty scary, luckily no-one was hurt. In Katherine we went to the hot springs for a morning swim which was lovely, even if the crocodile signs were a bit of-putting! Leaving Alix in Katherine with relatives we headed onto Litchfield National Park for our final hike and camp. Litchfield was possible the best one yet, we walked the Walker Creek path, saw the Wangi Falls and the rainforest walk, Tolmer Falls and Buley Rockholes and Florence Falls. Swimming at Florence Falls was breathtaking, a huge waterfall you could swim straight under and look up. 

Florence Falls.

Getting up early the next day we saw the sun rise over the Magnetic Termite Mounds, looking like huge tombstones all lined up North to South. It was a lovely start to the last real day of our road trip. 

Reaching Darwin in about an hour, camped and headed to Mindil Beach to watch a tinnie boat race and do some shopping round the markets. Meeting up with Alix again we had dinner, watched the sun set on the beach and headed back to camp for Lucie to pack for her flight in the evening. With Lucie leaving in the evening, Victoria the following day and Alix the day after it was back to Amanda and I within two days, it was sad but nice to get some time together before we all left off. I was headed back to Melbourne via some friends in Wollongong and Amanda was going down to Alice Springs and over to Cairns. 

It was an amazing trip, more than I can fill in on here and would recommend it to anyone as a way to see a country outside of the tourist spots. If you're going to do it anywhere you might as well chose Australia, it's so different and varied you can see a completely different place every day. 

I'm off...

I was planning to be off on a jet plane, or at least a Tiger Airways plane to Sydney in order to meet my friend and start working our way up the coast. Thanks to a mixture of fog and volcano ash it was cancelled and I spent a rather strange 12 hours on a coach in a "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" type scramble for a ticket. Now, I know people like and even love Sydney, but personally it's always been Melbourne for me. I just prefer the atmosphere there, particularly after finding myself in Sydney at 7am on a bank holiday morning in dire need for a coffee and warmth. Avoiding the man being arrested by police I found my way into the train station, sat down and prepared to wait for my friend and the world to wake up.
We decided to make our first leg up the coast to Newcastle. The Country Link XPT train is not only cheaper than a Greyhound coach, but far comfier and quieter, all good things in my book! Our hostel in Newcastle was a standard YHA that was apparently an old Gentlemen's Club and as a result was full of leather chairs, fireplaces and rugs. Pretty swanky for a hostel and a nice way to start our journey. We walked along the coast and pier, where I got swept over by a rogue wave that soaked me and ruined my boots. For a first day it was filled with both success and damp laughter.

Newcastle Beach- choppy!

Deciding to move onto Coffs Harbour after a day in Newcastle, we had high hopes for horse riding, white water rafting and kayaking. However, thanks to a huge amount of rain everything was flooded and once we got to Coffs we could not get out. The town itself is small and divided into two, one small part down by the coast and the other inland with the majority of shops and restaurants. We did manage to go canoeing one day which resulted in a lot of splashing, near capsizing and getting rained on as well as watching the second State of Origin match which NSW won, annoyingly. After three days we did get to move on, by which time we had both run out of things to do in Coffs when everything was closed.

Coffs Harbour on a rare unrainy day.

Byron Bay was next on our hit list. Getting the train up we reached the bay early evening and prepared to hit the town. Within minutes of entering the first club there was a man proudly naked and that spelled the tone for the rest of the night. Byron Bay was a strange mix of beauty, hippies, drunks and older residents. Oddly it seems to work well with the majority of the town revolving around the beach which is truly amazing. The rainforest goes right down to the sand and the water is beautiful. We had the chance to go kayaking where we were lucky to see dolphins and manta rays coming to the surface to feed. Byron Bay is also the most easterly point of Australia and one morning we made the painfully early start to watch the sunrise which was worth it in the end, particularly after a mid morning snooze on the beach.

Moving on from Byron to Surfers Paradise was a shock neither of us was expecting. Knowing Surfers was going to be built up we didn't expect what we found. Huge high rises and shopping malls, coming from lots of smaller towns with quirky buildings Surfers was not particularly nice and it only took us an hour to go back to the office and book our coach out of there the next day. However, we had reached Queensland which needed a little celebration so we treated ourselves to an early night! Greyhound coaches leave a lot to be desired, luckily we were only on it for a few hours. One thing this trip has proved to me is that I can fall asleep on pretty much any kind of transport now.
Having heard about the floods in Brisbane I didn't know what to expect, but there were hardly any signs in the city that it had happened. We went about an hour north to Noosa and Eumundi for the day and there were some signs up there of flooding. The markets at Eumundi are beautiful and huge; the food is varied and smells amazing. It's very hard not to want to buy everything, although there are lots of free samples! Another day, just for Amanda, we headed to Steve Irwin's zoo. It was a strange experience. The entire zoo is almost a shrine to Irwin while they are desperately trying to move the empire over to the daughter. It's a very bizarre experience when you can have pictures with his cardboard cut out or transfer his face onto the background of your photograph. The zoo itself was not as big as I was expecting, we saw the croc show and other bits. One thing they do well is having the animals out amongst the crowds, wombats on leads, koalas clinging to trainers and even tigers, all ready for petting and snapshots. Brisbane itself is a good city and there's a lot around it to keep you going. Sadly we'd run out of time and had to get our flight over to Perth to start the road trip.

Noosa- beautiful. 

"The Bingo Palace" by Louise Erdrich. A quick analysis...

The Bingo Palace takes place over the course of roughly a year, from one winter to the next. In relation to events within her previous novels and with regards to the Indian Gaming Act we can place the novel around the late 1980s. There is a strong difference shown between the present actions of the characters, and the past which continues to haunt and affect them now. For example Fleur’s age does not add up, having cheated death three times prior to this novel it would make her at least 100 years of age. It seems that Erdrich creates a present story that is filled with undertones of previous characters, plots and places from earlier novels. The Bingo Palace is also one of the first novels by Erdrich that does not have a date at the start of a chapter, making this novel feel even more ambiguous in terms of time. By having a text that has no definite time frame means that Erdrich’s storytelling will be continuous because there are no grounding factors that force the tale into a certain period or place. We know that everything happens on the reservation, but even the reservation is not clearly defined geographically, instead as a reader we are given hints at towns in the surrounding areas, but nothing more than that. As a result The Bingo Palace places you within a fluctuating time frame on a fictional reservation which causes the reader to have a sense of dislocation with the world Erdrich is attempting to describe.

From the very opening of The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich we get the sense that Lipsha is not a character welcomed back to the reservation. He is recalled as a troublemaker, smart but hopeless, he does not bring anything good back to the tribe. It seems that Lipsha is representing the role of the Native American in a modern American society as a whole, he does not fit with his tribe and their constant surveillance of each other yet he does not fit in with the world outside of the reservation either. From his birth Lipsha has lived in a liminal space, stuck under the mud he does not die, instead Misshepeshu maintains him in a form of limbo between life and death, waiting for Zelda to find him. One of the main reasons that he pursues Shawnee Ray is because she recognizes him; she talks to him and even holds his hands. She brings him out of his liminal position within the tribe, making him a proper member through his connection to her. Although Lipsha’s return can be seen as a homing plot, the reservation itself is stuck in a liminal position within America, with the way its bordered away from the rest of America and the restrictions put upon it, effectively the liminal character is returning to the limbo in which he has grown up.  

"House Made of Dawn" by N. Scott Momaday. A quick analysis...

Both Francisco and Abel are strongly connected to the past in this novel, each paragraph of the present is contrasted against one of the past despite the fact that there is a generational gap between the grandfather and grandson. The past is strongly linked with better times, Francisco recalls “that year he killed seven bucks and seven does” (p.8) reminiscing over better times of his youth, before the problems of the present arise again, haunting him more than any past could. There seems to be a strong disjunction between Francisco and the present world he inhabits; he is supposed to be a respected elder figure, indeed Abel remembers better times with his grandfather on page 10, however with Abel turning up drunk he is forced to “laugh and turn away from the faces” staring. The pervasive flashbacks between both grandfather and grandson unite them and accent the repetition and handing down of events through generations. Contrasting both these men on the reservation is the arrival of Mrs. Martin St. John, new and different, and almost instantly upon hiring Abel she feels she lacks a place “she was aware of some useless agony” (p. 32). It’s interesting that this woman who seems to have no past also watches the skies for “the birds that hied and skittered” (p. 32) and feels the same sense of foreboding as Abel; a sense of being “empty again and eternal beyond all hope” (p. 32). It seems that despite the backgrounds and pasts of these characters, there is an overriding relationship with nature, the past and the present.

The albino at first appears to be a white man to Angela observing the riding contest held for Saint Santiago, riding on a black horse the contrast between the man and his horse is clear. However she soon realises that there is something “unnatural” (p. 43) about the man. Abel’s inability to properly compete in the riding contest is shown through the crowd’s jeers and his wariness. His inability to perform the ritual well and courageously “leaning sharply down on the shoulders of [his] mount” (p. 42) means that the sacrifice to the Saint Santiago is not met, therefore it is not only himself he is letting down, but the village as a whole who relies on the sacrifice to maintain the good will of the Saint. It takes a complete outsider, and one that is uncannily a white man, to successfully snatch the rooster out of the ground, in turn saving the villages crops for that season. In terms of his place within the tribe Abel is an outsider, however in being beaten by an albino, who is far more of an outsider than Abel, means that socially the hierarchy has been upset and symbolically a white man has strived over the Native American again.

"Fools Crow" by James Welch. A quick analysis...

By placing Fools Crow in the late nineteenth century, prior to the invasion of the white colonizers, it is in effect a pre-colonial text. Through the use of language and images Welch shows the reader something which they won’t have encountered before and as a result there is a feeling of dislocation. However, there is a paradox wherein Welch goes back to a pre-colonial time, yet he uses a language that was derived from colonizers. As a result Welch is forced to use a language that is not natural to the pre-colonial time in order to communicate to the modern world. This results in the reader becoming both a translator and reader, because there are still aspects to the text that a western reader cannot easily understand. It confronts the ideas of names, territories and culture so that Welch creates a world that is dually alien and similar, affecting a sense of déjà vu. The reader is forced to re-assess their position in respect to the text as it is presenting to them a foreign world and history that the western reader has not been taught to understand. In this respect Fools Crow then forces the reader to re-assess not just their position towards the text, but towards the world in which the text exists in comparison to the modern day world. Fools Crow therefore presents a pre-colonial world that affects everything the reader knows and accepts as the norm within their western world.

Within James Welch’s novel Fools Crow the names of people, animals and objects is very reflective of their position within the world. Everything is names figuratively: animals are “ears-far-apart”, guns “many-shots” and even people “Rides-at-the-door”. The argument then is whether Welch is creating this language as a way of forcing the reader deeper into Native American culture, or whether it is simply the case that the names for these things just do not translate into English and as a result they are short, descriptive and connected words. Personally, knowing that Welch does not speak the native language it is difficult to believe that all these names are true to the language. At points in the novel there is a sense of disjunction with the naming, it does not seem to totally fit. This shows the most with the “Napikwans” or “white men” who are referred to as both these names. It seems odd that for everything else only the native name applies, however the white man is referred to in both senses. It gives the idea that it is potentially a purposeful authorial slip-up that allows the reader to constantly readdress the issue of names within the text. It represents the people they know in dually a foreign sense and a similar sense. This gives the reader an idea as to where their loyalties lie within the text, it is genetically most likely with the western invaders, yet the native name allows them to distance themselves from their settler ancestors.

George Bird Grinnell wrote in 1892 that Blackfeet’s “are firm believers in dreams” and a powerful dream within Fools Crow by James Welch must be shared with the fellow tribe. From the outset the importance if dreams is shown through Fast Horse’s one on the horse raid, the failing of his dream mission leads to the failure of the horse raid and the loss of Yellow Kidney. Dreams are prophetic, seeing the fate of his people on the dress of Feather Woman; Fools Crow awakes knowing that his tribe is doomed to eventual forced assimilation. However, dreams are not just figurative images, they invade reality. This is shown through the joint dream of Fools Crow and Kill-close-to-the-lake; both are left with a perfect white stone with which to remember their dreams and the consequences had this have happened in the real world. All the events which Fools Crow sees on Feather Woman’s coat come to pass, however this can also be a result of the authors hindsight. It is this hindsight that leads many critics to argue that Fools Crow is magic realism, a text that can be both fiction and fantasy, because Welch presents the dreams as accurate through his storytelling and historical knowledge. However this has been denied on the basis of what Welch is presenting to us is not so much the story, but the insight into Native American, and specifically Blackfeet, culture. Although the story is integral to this insight, it is not what is most prominent within the book. As a result the dreams are as vital to both the story and the culture and this makes the argument of magic realism irrelevant when thinking about what Welch is trying to present to a western readership.