Man-boy scouting anthropomorphism as a form of understanding the shared self within the newt, the toad, the snake. In uncanny pond magnetics the slimy scale of nonhuman othering. Our self hurts like the clipping of a toe in the name of science.
The brutality of meat as family, covered in the beauty of flowers, of stubborn trees. This in a patriarchal hot house that scorches life to death. Perhaps ‘this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was’ (201). The book closes.
No explicit mention of a hurting colonised land. That story is told by kookaburras. Their busy singularity. They kill a snake as a team. Use their beaks to pulverize a rat in its skin until it’s ready to eat. I mourn Tiny.
The cream white pain of a girl-woman’s skin, fleshed up and ready for scarring. The smirched recurring dreams of parents caught in their own traps. Claustrophobic love, ‘grubby and slippery and desperate’ (258). The First Floor Ladies Restroom only a temporary escape.
This gruesome witchy tale made me want to hide my cauldron. Or seek the needled poppet that makes my joints stiff and sore. Sparse writing and deep historical acuity makes current gender relations seem louse-ridden and dangerously power-laden. No Samantha in sight.
Proof of the power of the short story. Each vignette carefully traces over the bruises left by teenage vulnerability, showing the destructive power of choice bound by the contingencies in family, finances and friends. Easy to read, a long way from light.
Of its time and place with wisps of early delights (my own with P. G. Wodehouse) but privilege only lasts so long. Rich or poor, we all die. Memorable injunction to ‘practice’ the ‘remembrance of death’ in order to live with intensity.
Deep dive into the Merri and Yarra. Boys I would have worked to befriend and river I would have swum in. Emotive writing, water under change. Swirling flow of an ancestral serpent spitting out the chest-puffing of capital and welcoming the good-hearted.
Traipsing through this museum a hard slog. The narrator’s obsessive love makes the theory of mimetic desire real. A dizzying doubling reflexivity. Read compulsively and reluctantly in patches, taking a breather with other less needy works. Journey done. Cup of tea required.
The Fever of Animals (Miles Allinson 2015) is a clever book but despite that, it drew me in through my cautious love for the surrealists and the way Allinson criss-crosses the fine lines between fiction and fact, study and practice, readers and writers.
