After Grog Blog

GET THE 'NAC

Penguin is about to release a book.

The Footy Almanac 2008: The AFL Season One Game at a Time

Relive the joys and sorrows of another year in the life of the people's games with The Footy Almanac 2008.  Our motley collection of straight-talking footy fans has banded together to write about what really matters - the on-field action, not the off-field dramas!

Every match, including finals, is reviewed with passion from the grandstands, the barstools and the couches of Australia.  It's football as you know and love it.

Like most every other footy fan of my generation, the first Aussie Rules books I read were And the Big Men Fly by Alan Hopgood, The Great Macarthy by Barry Oakley, The Club by David Williamson and The Coach by John Powers. The latter is a chronicle of Ron Barassi's 1977 season coaching North Melbourne, in which North and Collingwood conspired to do Powers a ridiculous favour by having the Roos win the premiership via a grand final replay. Is it possible for Powers to write a book about Dean Bailey and Melbourne?

Since the 1970s, though, I can't remember reading a book about football, apart from those esteemed daily tomes published by the Fairfax family and Rupert Murdoch. That changed recently when I acquired The Footy Almanac, a collection of articles written by a collection of writers known collectively as the Almanackery.

Behind Footy Almanac are John Harms, who you will have read in The Age and seen on ABC's Offsiders; and Paul Daffey, also from the Age, who you will have heard on ABC radio and seen in Ardmona, where he is extremely popular, Wangaratta, Warnambool, Wedouree and even Wullewa... sorry, Mullewa in WA. Both contribute their share of games, too. Harms, the angry man of football, unleashes the full savagery of his short sentence structure on Geelong matches, while Daffey tries, and almost succeeds, in hiding his allegiance to the COR (Cult of Richo).

Naturally, the first thing I did was read about the Melbourne wins. Slowly. Savouring. Every. Moment.

Five minutes later, I got stuck into the rest of the articles. There, among other cultural touchstones, you will discover more Richo, prosciutto, parma-cide, BTO, the Buffalo Springfield, the Odyssey, National Lampoon's Vacation, Kryal Catle, but no fairy-tale ending, not for mad-Kat Harms, anyway.

The Footy Almanac, while not yer great literature, is nevertheless a terrific resource to add to yer footy library. But you know what is wrong with it? I mean really wrong? There are only two of them: Footy Almanac 2007 and Footy Almanac 2008. There should have been a Footy Almanac for every year since 1897.

THE ARTY DODGER

Charlie Mortdecai:

When you burn an old carved and guilt picture frame it makes a muted hissing noise in the grate - a sort of genteel fooh - and the gold leaf tints the flames a wonderful peacock blue-green. I was watching this effect smugly on Wednesday evening when Martland came to see me. He rang the bell three times very fast, an imperious man in a hurry. I was more or less expecting him, so when my thug Jock put his head around the door, eyebrows elaborately raised, I was able to put a certain aplomb into my "Wheel him in."

Don't Point That Thing At Me, Kyril Bonfiglioli ("Loved and respected by all who knew him slightly.")

LET'S RICK!

Courtesy of a Leapster review, I've been reading Rick Johnson's Tin Cans, Squeems & Thudpies. You should be, too.

Why?

This is why.

ELO: Discovery
Jeff Lynne, chief cook and viola tamer with the Ethiopian Lapdog Orchestra, is one of those people who complicates things. He scrambles his eggs with an undersea drilling platform.

Peter Frampton: I'm In You
Peter Frampton is such a nice guy. He never strikes infants with baseball bats. He always sends his mum a card on Mother's Day even though she's dead. He'd probably stoop over to rescue a worm drying out in the sun. That's not so bad. Ted Nugent would eat it. It's hard to find something bad to say about such a nice person, but I'll try.

Bernie Taupin: He Who Rides The Tiger
A lot of thinking goes into picking the best album of the year, but how about the worst? It's easy to go down the line, throw your favourite LPs into a pile and the forcibly align them with reference to some imaginary standard. But how do you measure STINKERS?

Talking Heads: Remain In The Light
The main thing that people and Talking Heads fans alike want to know about the new, improved line-up is: What does it sound like? Well, either that or, can it get those stubborn plutonium stains out of Junior's bib?

The Who: Who Are You
This new pan of Who Helper isn't nearly as useless as their last couple of records, but it's still nothing to fall down the stairs over.

The Rolling Stones: A Bigger Bang
A Bigger Bang is a truly disgusting dish, something that even a dog would rather roll in than eat.

Wings: Back To The Egg
Paul McCartney is well on his way to becoming Rod Stewart. Not his image - it's a little hard to imagine Paulie running around in see-thru Danskins, wagging his weenie at the front row and whispering "D'ya think I'm sexless?" But it's not too difficult at least to imagine an infinite string of formulized Wings albums stretching into that dreaded future time where people have forgotten to say, "Who cares?"

About now you are probably wondering whether it's the done thing to pinch Rick's gear. You might even think what Bill Sherman at Blog Critics thinks: "It's tempting to pad this review with even more of his great lines -- this is a guy who packed a Budgie review with nuthin' but parakeet jokes -- but why spoil the yuks?" But let's not beat around the thick foliage, I'm no book reviewer. I just decided, in my definite wisdom, to give you a Reek sneak peek at what Thudpies has up its sleeve, figuring you would rush down to the nearest internet to buy it. What's more, there's LOTS more. If you're a music fan of a certain age, you will find hundreds of reviews of bands ranging from Jo Jo Gunne and The Raspberries to the artists that used to be known as N.Y.Dolls and B.O.Cult to Split Enz - "Nobody knows what Split Enz is: some weird group from some two-bit country, frequently confused with Skyhooks" - to TV, food, sport, video games and stuff. As Molly Melodrama used to say: "Do yourself an immeasurable service."

HAVE YOU READ ANY GOOD BOOK REVIEWS LATELY?

I haven't. I was forced to give up reading book reviews when I was diagnosed with a rare condition caused by the phrase intensely readable. (Unless I write it myself.) There is no cure.

As yogurt is to dairy, reading reviews of book reviews is allergy neutral.

Reviews of fillums are an altogether different matter:

One personal idiosyncrasy is that while I adore books that are astonishing, I do not feel the same way about other genres. Films as varied as “The Queen,” “The Last King of Scotland,” “The New World,” “Catch a Fire” and “World Trade Center” have all been labeled “astonishing,” but for me the word does not resonate in a celluloid context. And while it may be true that “Half-Nelson,” “Gabrielle” and “X-Men: The Last Stand” are all astonishing motion pictures, I have not seen any of them, as I personally do not enjoy “astonishing” motion pictures.

A poll. "The Queen" will be:

I. Boring.
II. Astonishing.
III. Worthy.

LES TRUE BLEU

Bought a book; see if you can guess which one ... that's right, Raymond Chandler's The High Window. Oh yeah, and Les Carlyon's The Great War.

In The Civil War we are read a letter from Sullivan Balloo to his wife Sarah: "Love you, miss you, hope to do my best, etc." It's a poignant moment, rendered all the more so when we hear those fateful words "Sullivan Balloo was killed at Bull Run."

The Great War is like that - relentlessly so. Carlyon's fat tome contains around 800 pages filled with accounts of Australian soldiers followed by - and each time you just know it's coming - their death. Margetts was killed at Pozieres; Philip Schuler died from his wounds after Messines; Harry Fletcher and Austin Mahony were friends at university, they both died at Montbrehain. 

It's tough going. You find yourself wishing for 1918 and the successes at Amiens. Perhaps there the grizzly parade of casualties will ease up. No such luck. Even when the going is "good" a good many of the stories are the stories of the soon-to-be-dead.

Still, Carlyon is an economical writer, so it's not hard to plough through the book. There is no leaden prose, no paragraphs you need a compass to get out of, and although there's plenty of detail, it doesn't bog you down. Not being the most fluent reader in the world, I was thankful for that. Gallipoli was in much the same vein although The Great War spends less time on the Aussie spirit. Once the introductions are done with: "They seemed alive to the hopes of the New World and careless when it came to the protocols of the old. They didn't expect too much from life; that was the way of people then. They wore shoulder patches that said 'Australia', and even these really weren't necessary. Their look, those languid poses, gave them away. They didn't call themselves diggers: that came later." it's all business, and the business is not pleasant.

It's a relief, indeed, when chapters 16 and 17 are about politics, Billy Hughes, Keith Murdoch and conscripition. Even if it's merely a short break from the trenches.

Years ago at school, daydreaming in another tedious assembly, I'd occasionally read the honour boards on the wall. Philip Schuler's name is on one of those boards and the older I've become, the more I've read books like The Great War, the more I've thought about the likes of Schuler. They are sad and not particularly pleasant thoughts. Why? Well, for one: wrong place, wrong time - it could have been me. And two: if it was me, would I have been up to it? They are unsettling thoughts.