Seven Books on a Billboard Outside Paris

The seven books I take with me for a year living overseas may not be the same as the bundle chosen for a year in solitary confinement. If I was stranded on a deserted island for a few months and needed hunting weapons I would not, for instance, want with me a copy of Scott Morrison's christo-politico-manifesto because no amount of sharpening would ever bring it to a god-damned point.

In fact, I can't even picture a circumstance in which I would end up on an island with that book, short of being stuck on an atoll beneath the mid-air explosion of a former Hillsong jet packed to the gills with remaindered copies destined for some Pacific nation doing perfectly fine without the missionary 'outreach' of rapacious hucksters.

But I digress.

For the past week several of Mum's friends have all asked, with more or less the same level of dismay on being given the answer, if I had bothered to pack yet for Paris. The answer, of course, was no. And the answer was no because I was not – am not – the father of 10 children and I am not moving even a single armoire across a single border. Few are the belongings I truly need; fewer still the ones that require much thought. I have packed two suitcases, the night before my flight, and I am on [ed: was, when I wrote this] the flight now confident that my system has worked.

The system, to wit, is: undies for the number of days you are away plus two (u=n+2) but capped at 10 as the balance between longevity and space so demands. More shirts than pants, usually by a factor of three. Running shoes and every day shoes with the luxury, on an extended international trip, of an additional three pairs: the boots, the birks and the back-ups. I travel a lot and don't think about any of this anymore, but after the fourth parental acquaintance expressed concern that I had not bothered to prepare I started the long, Damascene conversion to believing them.

As it turns out they were only partially correct.

On Sunday night, shortly before my visiting nephew Hugh was due for bed in the office where most of my treasured books are kept, I decided to select the five (which became six, which became seven) that I would physically bring with me to France for the year. This choice had seemed easy in the temporal periphery of my mind but here, racing the 17-month-old's bedtime, it now appeared hopeless.

Much as I most desired a re-read, Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov was clearly too big to bring with me in paperback. And though I needed Robert Sapolsky's fascinating Behave for research purposes, the highlights I actually require are already contained in an app I use for keeping book notes (Readwise, for those at home). Ditto all of my Steinbeck and Ocean Vuong (who I also need for work-related purposes while I am gone).

If I were going somewhere else to do something else my selection would be different. If I had more time, I might have chosen all of my books. I'm not a collector for the sake of it, although a room full of books has a medicinal aesthetic quality all its own. My desire is almost entirely practical, however. When I read, I underline passages in pen. I do this as often or as little as I feel in the moment.

Later, when I am writing and memories of these lines – even just vague feelings about what they might have been – bubble up, I can swivel my chair to the bookcase(s) and engage in the tactile art of organised discovery. I say organised discovery because there is always a degree of stochasticity involved flicking through the pages of one book to find a specific passage only to be taken by yet another in that very moment. Or to be only a little sure of what book you thought the line was in in the first place, requiring the soothing scan of several more.

All of which is to say: one cannot swivel a chair to a Kindle. Or to my app. And to the extent that one could, in theory, swivel a chair to the seven books that made the travel cut it calls to mind the exasperated line from Julia Louis-Dreyfus' titular Veep in the Iannucci comedy Veep when her networking event has only two people in attendance and she is told to mingle anyway: 'Did Simon mingle with Garfunkel?'

Of course, I will buy more books wherever I am. I will buy 100. More! But one must pack books as if one is the stowaway on a poorly serviced former Hillsong jet packed to the gills with the remaindered copies of a singularly obtuse fart of a book.

So. I have made my choices on the swivel principle. What books, when I turn my back from writing, must I be able to hold and scan when I am on this trip, far from home, and gone for some time?

Here's what I brought with me:

(1) Spring Cannot be Cancelled

Sure, it's Hockney in France, and Hockney talking explicitly and fondly about his studio days in Paris and wandering around Montmartre where I am staying, but that's not entirely why I chose this absolute treat of a book. Hockney sees things that nobody else does, or appreciates them in new ways in any case. The light is never the same twice, is the upshot of it, and I think it's a tremendous way of looking at the world as a human being (even one, like myself, who cannot paint for shit). Hockney also studies the lives and art of people he loves and the art critic Martin Gayford, who spent voluminous amounts of time corresponding with the acclaimed painter, draws these out over the length of this gorgeously illustrated work that really feels as if you were at one of Monet's 11.30am lunches. Monet, we are told, never entertained anybody for dinner because he was always in bed by nine o'clock. With the exception of actually going to bed, that's a process I can get behind.

(2). Magritte

The slimmest of my six or so volumes on Magritte and his life, this one had to come with me if only so I could occasionally hold the key images and works of this man whom I adore and who, I know, was not a native Parisien – he was a Belgian surrealist – but who worked a productive spell in the city nonetheless. I've mentioned it here before but a series of Magritte's paintings, not to mention his lens on the world more broadly, serve as the essential foundation for the novel I hope to write while I'm here.

(3) The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the supreme beings who gave us intelligent science-fiction, a craft based as it is in telling deeply human stories against the backdrop of circumstances and contexts designed to poke and prod the concepts we take for granted in our current worlds. This book is not necessarily (well, it's not) my favourite Le Guin, although I've not read more than a handful, but it is more accessible than The Left Hand of Darkness and she was writing it against the Vietnam War, as a way to understand her own fierce opposition to the war. For these reasons, I have taken my (new) copy to Paris for the re-read.

(4) Giovanni's Room

OK, I'll admit it, I was almost embarrassed about this one. James Baldwin is my all-time, and I adore his writing and the way he presented to the world as both invitation and oh do fuck off then. And I adored this when I first read it many, many years ago. It seems that recently – and this is the part about which I am needlessly embarrassed – every not-black gay man on the planet has suddenly discovered Baldwin and this work especially. This is a good thing. But it also meant I was acutely aware of being thought to be among the new arrivals. How pathetic, that it should even cross my mind. This copy was bought and given to me as a birthday present by a charming friend of mine who offered, by way of inscription, that it might be reading for the flight to, and consequent living in, Paris. And I think that's just the kindest gesture, to be seen in that way.

(5) Fifty-Two Stories

I have always liked Chekhov because he has always reminded me a little of myself. And that is a very funny thing to say if you do not immediately clarify that I mean only in the sense that he had to battle a little bit to make something of himself. Mind you, his version of doing this – dashing off his simple little stories for the 'provincial' audiences in Russia – still paid quite handsomely at the time he was doing it. Chekhov today would have been lucky make rent after filing four different pieces in a single week. Every week. He suffered from an often disabling self-doubt but, truly, the guy was one of the best to ever do it. He taught us, for instance, that if the story mentions a gun by way of description in the first act it had damned well better fire in the third. That is, all detail in a story had work to do. I can't remember who said this now, but one of the best ways to understand Chekhov's stories is to know that every character is talking to the wrong person. And that's the other thing we need to remember about the gun that fires, in a play as in life; the trigger is often pulled due to a series of compounding miscommunications.

(6) An American Dream

From the New York Times obituary of Norman Mailer: 'At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing'. Gore Vidal both fought with and adored Mailer. Say what you will about him, Mailer could write. This is my current read and it's... a lot. But I have rarely read a writer whose sentences are works of such vertiginous urban planning; they just build and build and build. Some have stopped me in my tracks. One that made me chortle but was no less profound: 'He coughed with the long phlegmy hacking sound of a gambler who has lost every part of his bidy but the wire in his brain which tells him when to bet'.

(7) Out of Sheer Rage

On 5 September 1914 the author D.H Lawrence wrote in his diary: 'Out of sheer rage I've begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid – queer stuff – but not bad.' And so we have the title for this deeply strange and hilarious almost stream-of-consciousness nervous breakdown of the writer Geoff Dyer as he struggles to 'start his study of Lawrence' or finally begin his novel, but not both and probably not any of them. I've written about Dyer here before but nobody write the internal despair of the writer better than he, and I am glad for the company as and when I experience it. Which is every minute of every day.

Which is right now.

Addenda

Goodbye Hugh and the Whole Damned Zoo

I am so late to everything, least of all this newsletter, because my final week in Australia was a rush. I sold my car, finished two stories for work (one of which was held over for another week thanks to the Tasmanian government being the Tasmanian government) and drove to Brisbane Airport to pick my sister and nephew up from their flight. Hugh is at that age now where he is really putting things together and it was a delight to see him at the baggage carousel as I walked up to him – riding atop the suitcase as he was – and a surprised little grin crept across his face. He wasn't sure that the uncle he liked who lived in the phone could really be there so he looked up at his mumma for confirmation, still smiling. My heart!

The following day we took him to a zoo where he saw a monkey and almost lost possession of his beautiful little mind. Hugh is obsessed with birds, especially chickens, but really anything at all. There were plenty in the exhibits but he was non-discriminatory in his adulation. The little double-barred finches were not in the official zoo collection but snuck in through the various cages for free seed and they were a hit. He spent more than a little time communing with a particular meerkat that was taken with his presence. There were animals I had never even heard of, such as the Javan binturong (sometimes called a bearcat which is a name I have heard) and others I've never seen in person before. As my sister said to me later: 'I never knew how much I loved capybaras until today'.

We've been trying to get Hugh to say my name, Uncle Ricky, for some time now but the closest we have got before my departure was 'Uncle Dicky' which is less than ideal but also better than 'who is that'. He can say the dog's name, Jack, and Duke and Charlie (cat) but not yet Ricky. I'm working on it, still.
On Sunday I did one last washing run and my little helper was determined to come out and help me get everything off the line in the late afternoon.
Thanks, pal!

Very Little to Say About Morrison's 'Award'

Scott Morrison has received a King's Birthday Honour and been made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) which is both maddening and not. On the one hand, he doesn't deserve one. But on the other, it makes perfect sense that a largely automated system of nods and gongs for people would proceed without impediment and without taking into account the individual circumstances of that person's legacy, in this case, allowing Cabinet to be misled in the creation of an automated and illegal debt-raising scheme that proceeded without impediment in the wholesale harm of hundreds of thousands of people. If only there was a way to stop and fully examine these things. Alas.

Let's Get Ready to Ombo

It would seem the Commonwealth Ombudsman has grown at least a few extra teeth (molars, perhaps, if not canines) since its deserved shellacking at the Robodebt Royal Commission and just before I left Australia it announced an update to its investigation into an issue I have been reporting for a year now: the abusive use of the Coalition-era Targeted Compliance Framework which apparently was operating outside the law and glitching to buggery, wrongfully cancelling the welfare payments of people stuck in the meat grinder and punishing many others even more than the system was intended to.

Now, the Ombo says:

'I commenced an investigation on 4 February 2025 into the Targeted Compliance Framework to examine if income support payment cancellation decisions were being made and implemented in a manner that is lawful, fair and reasonable. Following my Office’s review of information from relevant agencies, I have decided to expand the scope of the investigation. As this is a live investigation, I will not be providing further details, as my Office investigates in private'.

This is huge. The edifice of good governance is crumbling and we cannot take it for granted that the systems promised to us by government – even the ones designed to be punitive in nature – are actually doing what they were sold as doing. In fact, I would say in my experience across these areas, DSS, Services Australia and Dept. of Employment, the National Disability Insurance Agency and others I have witnessed in my reporting we should be actively sceptical of their work being delivered as advertised.

I aim to continue that scepticism, even from this perfect city, Paris.

A Very Quick Note on Paris

Yes, I am here. And j'adore. I think I know in my heart I was meant to live here. But I want to write about that properly, and will over the coming days for another newsletter update. I didn't want to shoehorn it into this one which I started writing before I left Australia, then continued on the 25-hours of flying time and finally, here, now, from a cafe that serves what seems to be a flat white.

Thank you for your patience!