Review of Laid

I do not normally review television. In fact I have never reviewed television. I stick to my meandering about books for awritergoesonajourney and occasionally elsewhere. However on this occasion I have decided to review the latest new offering from ABC Television, Laid.

This program was the brainchild of co-creator, writer and co-producer, Marieke Hardy. Marieke has an enviable television and entertainment pedigree. Her parents were television writers and producers. Her grandfather was Frank Hardy, noted Australian writer and radical (the polite family euphemism for becoming a communist) and grand-niece of the very funny and always unpredictable comedian, Mary Hardy. Any Victorian from my generation and back would remember Mary Hardy and her caustic, riotous wit on The Penthouse Club. The fact that Marieke became an actress and then writer is therefore not surprising although she has emerged to become a writer and personality in her own right. Her love and opinions of literature come through loud and strong with her appearances on ABC Television’s First Tuesday Book Club. Quirky, funny, intelligent and a vegan (which has nothing whatsoever to do with things but it’s a useless fact I know from following Marieke on Twitter) I was really interested to see what her new work was like.

Unfortunately I missed the debut of the program on Wednesday, February 9th. I was otherwise engaged on matters of earth-shattering importance. Oh OK. I was too busy scratching my fat, hairy ass and forgot. Happy now? Anyway I was able to legitimately download a copy from the ABC’s website today and watched it earlier this evening (after fighting with the DVD burner to get a disc burned that actually worked in the television’s DVD player rather than trying to watch it on the small laptop monitor).

Roo McVie is a market researcher. An old boyfriend that she privately refers to as ‘that dickhead’ has just died and Roo attends the funeral. She finds herself attending the wake with the family afterward and things go downhill from there.

Laid is a somewhat dark, adult comedy. It is not slapstick or farce. There is no laugh track, synthetic or otherwise. I hesitate to say that it is a clever piece. It was Chris Rock who said “If only smart people like your shit, it ain’t that smart.” But I thought this was a cleverly done and thoroughly enjoyable although to get the most out of it, you need to be listening carefully to the dialogue. The closing left things on a note that just compels coming back next week. I have already noted the diary.

10 "Rules of Life" from Tolstoy

From www.happiness-project.com, these are supposedly Tolstoy's 10 Rules of Life, written when he was 18. Let's see how I stack up against them.

Get up early (five o’clock)
There's a five o'clock in the morning now?

Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)
And miss out on all the thrills of the late-night 'infomercials'?

Eat little and avoid sweets
Oh strewth - this man was a masochist!

Try to do everything by yourself
Nobody else going to do it for me, so that means I have to do it for myself. But surely it is a good thing to utilise the resources of others when relevant?

Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater
This I agree with. I do not always do it as often or as well as I could or should, but I think he's right on the money.

Keep away from women
Definitely not an issue for me except that it's the women staying away from me! I think that my deodorant must emit the wrong sort of pheromones.

Kill desire by work
Man, this fella had the constitution of a Benedictine monk!

Be good, but try to let no one know it
I hide my goodness by being a bastard - and I'm good at it!

Always live less expensively than you might
Aren't we writers all supposed to be starving in French garrets anyway?

Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer
Oh please - continue starving in a garret even after you start getting the seven-figure advances?

So how do I rack up against Tolstoy? Not terribly well. With those rules, he must have lived the life of a particularly unhappy monk. Or were these the sacrifices he was prepared to make for his calling? The question then becomes just how much am I prepared to sacrifice for my chosen vocation?

Don’t just write it down...

There is an episode of Seinfeld, the show about nothing, where Jerry has a funny idea occur to him during the night, writes it down, then spends the rest of the episode trying to work out what he actually wrote.

I am sure every writer has experienced the frustration of having that great idea pop into their head, failing to write it down and afterward not being able to remember what it actually was. Hence the thought that it is always a good idea to have a pen and paper handy. I first got into the practice while at uni, of keeping the pen and paper handy on the bedside table. All too often the solution to the latest problem for a taxation tutorial or computer programming would occur to me during the night and I saved them by scribbling something down.

One of my vanities (curiosities, eccentricities) is writing comedy routines for my alter ego, Teddy Rant. I came up with one the other evening and scribbled out a rough outline. Earlier today I sat down to do something with the idea. It generally makes sense and is humorous but there, right in the middle of a seemingly key passage, is a string of incomprehensible scribble.

What on earth does that scribble mean? Where’s my George Kostanza or Elaine Bennis to help me out. I wonder if sending a copy of it to Julia Louis-Dreyfuss (Elaine) would be of any help? Doubtful, but it at least it gave me an excuse to briefly think about the lovely JLD as a pleasant distraction.

So the moral of the story is don’t just write it down, write it down so it makes sense afterwards!

And my perfect match is...

So there I was, happily tweeting away on twitter (Rossisawriter), when I noticed twitter's suggestions for who I could be following. I assume these suggestions are the product of some sort of algorithm which matches you against other tweeples with similar interests etc. But please, pray tell, what in the blue blazes of hell I am supposed to have in common with a bloody vacuum cleaner?? Yep, that's what twitter in it's wisdom thinks I am best matched with. No wonder I'm on my own.

NaNoWriMo 2010 and what I learned from it

Well I have made it to the end of NaNoWriMo but could not have gotten there without my writing buddy, Lisa, cyber-whipping me there (sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me!). So what lessons have I learned this year?

1. I reconfirmed that I am a plotter/planner and not able to just sit and the keyboard with a vague idea and the story comes flooding in as some people seem to be able to do
2. Do not get too wedded to the original outline as the story may well want to be going in another direction entirely and that little person in the head pushing it in that direction may well be right
   
3. For NaNoWriMo - plan and plot further ahead!
4. I did not know my characters well enough and found myself regularly wondering "hold on, is this what they would really do in that situation?" so more character work in advance for future projects
   
5. That having a writing partner egging you on is a great way to work
   

I also now find myself wondering whether I am telling the right story. Further back-story ideas came to me that I now wonder whether they would be a more compelling fantasy in the first place?

Why exclude males?

I have been a fan of Portia De Rossi for a long time. And not just because she is gorgeous. I thought her character portrayal in Arrested Development was simply brilliant. I also admire her for continuing to push for equal rights for gays and lesbians. For the record, I am straight, but I believe in simply live and let live, provided nobody is hurting anyone else.

I am, however, entirely puzzled by Ms De Rossi's stance on her recent return to Australia when she apparently refused to speak to male journalists. Isn't excluding someone based on their gender in direct opposition to her beliefs? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to spread the word as far and wide as possible? Ms De Rossi is publicising her recently released book that targets helping other women address issues of body image and self-esteem that she herself has had to fight. Again, what is achieved by excluding males from this publicity?

This one really does puzzle me.

What does the BBC know?

My Internet-friend, author Kim Falconer, brought this one to my attention. Apparently the good folk at the BBC in their wisdom have determined that few people will have read more than six on the following list of 100 'classic' books. Those that I have read are in bold font and those I have started and either given up on (Tolstoy and Joyce!) or put to one side to go back to sometime, are in italics. I suspect plenty of other people will pass the test and have read more than six of these as well.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (and I HATED it - sequel was even worse!)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis -

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce (boooooring!)

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo