The Man in the Box has a Few Things to Say

He had a rough time as a kid, a tough time as a teenager, and did hard time as an adult in maximum-security, an ideal upbringing for a Coffin Confessor, a calling Bill Edgar, the author, pioneered.  

You need balls to be a coffin confessor, a job, if you’ll excuse the pun,  he fell into. A coffin confessor gatecrashes funerals, and reads out what his client, the deceased, discloses to him on their deathbed. He is entrusted to let the mourners know the bitter truth that has been largely hidden from them all this time. There is always at least one of the mourners who receives a right royal drubbing, a public flogging by the lash of truth.

He3re is his spiel: “Excuse me, but I’m going to need you to sit down, shut up or fuck off. The man in the box has a few things to say,”

You gotta read this book. Every chapter is rivetting.

Life Isn’t a Beanbag

I am reading a book of jokes

that looks like a book of poems

double-spaced typing, plenty of white space,

400 pages long.

almost unheard of unless it’s a ‘Collected’

& it’s by a comedian,

the comedian of comedians — Seinfeld

and it’s been 25 years in the making

so you’d think something with heft

like a comic ‘Crime & Punishment’, for instance.

Look, I wasn’t expecting Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor

but this stuff was tame, kindergarten, Christmas cracker

material, vanilla, timid as marshmallow.

What I wanted to ask was:

where are the pangs, the pricks, the pranks

life has played on you? the prangs of relationships?

Your life couldn’t have been that cushiony, surely?

Life isn’t a beanbag, Jerry. Where is the dark matter?

All I’m saying is, you coulda done better.

After 25 years of  nothing in print,

you coulda done better, Jerry. Will you give me that?

Almost Normal

Reading about Roz Chast’s parents in her cartoon memoir

‘Can’t We Talk about Something Pleasant?’ makes me feel

Almost normal. I do know how to use the toaster,

I can change a light bulb, open cereal packets neatly

so it doesn’t look ‘as if a raccoon had tried to get into them’

AND I was comfortable using the new stove after only

six months. Compared to them I’m a genius.

 

Meeting the Parents

But I do ‘walk around with my feelers out’ like her old man

and ‘get distracted by interesting words thereby missing

the larger point of what was being said’. And I am a fast eater

like her mum. ‘Stop gobbling your food’, I was told as a kid,

[and am still told from time to time].

 

I’m only on page 30 of this 230 page memoir but I’m enjoying

meeting the parents. It’s like meeting me in a book.

 

• what book are you enjoying at the moment?
• Have you ever ‘met yourself’ in a book? how did it feel?
  

Inside the Panels

Reading when one person dies the whole world is over, a bleak and beautiful scratchy black-and-white graphic novel. It rains a lot inside the panels. Even for Melbourne. Even when it isn’t raining, the sky is dark and broooding. After a while the pages become soggy; the panels leak into each other; water begins dripping on the floor. I go to get a bucket but it rains and rains. The bucket overflows. In the end I have to close the book and take it back to the library before the house gets flooded.

On Reading Carolyn

All week I have been reading Carolyn,

Her chapbook of twenty poems focused

on one anatomical feature — the ankle.

 

How could anyone do that? I wondered.

Breasts, yes, the penis, body parts

with a sexual agenda. But the ankle?

 

I read on. Carolyn fractured hers

recently in a fall so that provided the bones

of the material.

 

Wonderful, warm, poems,

inventive and insightful that trace her

journey towards wellness.

 

My favourite?

‘Zero Weight Bear’ with its zen-like title and

witty word-play. ‘Gravity Sucks’ runs a gamut

of emotions but ends like the collection itself

on an optimistic note.

 

• books can be purchased through the publisher: Ginninderra Press

On Reading Jilly Cooper

I do not much like her novels.

They are crammed with characters like clowns jammed in jalopies.

But I like her epilogues.

They are lean and succinct, sinewy.

A bit like you, Bev says with a chuckle.

I may not have a novel in me but I have a draw full of epilogues.

And when push comes to shove I can pump out prologues at the drop of a hat.

It’s the in-between bits I’m not good at.

I could leave them to someone else.

Jilly Cooper, for instance.

‘The True Colour of the Sea’: Book Review

The challenge was to write a book review in haiku form. Here is my first attempt. Do you want to try one? It will be interesting to see what people come up with.

 

‘The True Color of the Sea’

 

didn’t flow for me

its prose flat and monochrome

as a pancake sea