Sydney debrief

Syd­ney is a fun city for a week­end. Beyond that I can make no informed com­ment about the place. Here are the funnest of the funs from the week­end in the ‘arbour city with my trav­el­ing part­ner Sean #3 (I knew two Seans before him).

I.

Gatz

What an amaz­ing piece of theatre/experience-that-wasn’t-really-like-theatre-at-all. You’ve never been so emo­tion­ally invested in a show like you are if you sit through those final ten minutes/few pages of Gatz/The Great Gatsby hav­ing been there for the pre­ced­ing 7 hours. There’s a nice recent review of Gatz from the SMH here. That’s Sean #3 above check­ing out the bald head of Gatz himself.

II.

Me find­ing a copy of Ursula Dubosarsky’s out-of-print Bruno and the Crumhorn in that mega-stock book shop Kinoku­niya.

III.

Me buy­ing Tintin fig­urines for only $13 each from said Kinoku­niya store. How could I not for that price? I was just going to get Had­dock but I thought I’d be a lot fun­nier if he could be star­ing down an obliv­i­ous Castafiore.

IV.

The Syd­ney Writ­ers’ Fes­ti­val was pretty nice too — in par­tic­u­lar the panel that dis­cussed the ques­tion ‘Are some teenage nov­els too ‘hard’/literary for teenagers’. Obvi­ously, they’re not, der, was the con­clu­sion Margo Lana­gan, Mal Peet and M.T. Ander­son all came to. I’m about half-way through M.T. Anderson’s first Octa­vian Noth­ing novel The Pox Party and it really is as good as every­one keeps say­ing. Hard and lit­er­ary and appro­pri­ate read­ing for teens too.

V.

T’was wet’n’windy. As Sean #3 demonstrated.