Emily Paull

Hmmm did I tell a fib yesterday when I said it was my last thoughts on... I think I did. Oopsy. Bear with me for one last post on my uni books? Pretty please? I'll be your friend. And I'll keep it short and sweet. First of all, I really liked Neuromancer. It was edgy and it was young and fresh, and minus all the high teck jacking in and stuff, it was sort of what I want my Nano novel to be this year, although I have already given up on making it work the way I want, seeing as the scene in which Dean discovers The Shakespeare has already turned into something of a Magical Realist scene. If you have no idea what I am talking about, but would like to, click here. Henry Dorsett Case is a really good example of an antihero. He likes drugs. He likes them a lot. He's not all abstinence-guy, "oh no, I couldn't possibly, my body is a temple." And that makes him likeable. I think if anyone is doing research on Anti-heroes, look at Case, because it's reall...

Hey again. There are just a few little things I have to say about this book, and it is my last thoughts on for a while because the semester is over, so it's writing time... and then Barcelona time, which will be amazing! The Left Hand of Darkness is one of those books that even if you DO NOT like Science Fiction and Fantasy, you have at least heard of it. I think I'd probably seen it for the first time in the library at my primary school because for a while people were constantly telling me to read LeGuin but I was never into it. And aside from a few favourites like Tamora Pierce, I never really jumped on the Speculative Fiction bandwagon. I've always been a realist novel kinda girl. So needless to say, The Left Hand of Darkness kind of knocked me for six. First of all, it completely wrecked my reading schedule for the semester. I didn't finish it in time for the lecture OR in time for the tutorial the day after, which is just not me. I'm queen of the nerds u...

As I write this, I am trying to think back to Wednesday night when I stayed up past midnight finishing this book. I remember that it was unusually warm considering that the day had been so rainy, and I remember that my bed and its usual mountain of pillows was very comfortable. I remember turning page after page of this book and being fascinated by the things I recognised from my own life in the story. Because, you see, Simone Lazaroo, author of Sustenance, teaches at my university, and her daughter is my age. I went to school with her daughter. And the Perth in this book was my Perth, so that was pretty amazing. I have to keep this Thoughts On (the third last) short and sweet because I only have two weeks left of uni until the nuclear apocalypse also known as the day all my assignments are due happens. I have been writing a plan for a History essay all day and its longer than the actual essay is supposed to be, so that's a bit annoying. Plus it's all quotes. You know h...

What if your life is an illusion? What if your life is a myth? What if your entire life has been predestined for you, written in letters that look like clothing on a washing line by an aging gypsy magician who dies not once but twice? What would you do then? Aureliano Buendia never has to contemplate the answer to this. He doesn't have time. The manuscript, which after 100 years can finally be read, tells of his imminent destruction; seconds later, the village of Macondo is wiped from the memory of the Earth by apocalyptic winds. This may be one of the most important books I have ever read. It raises several issues which I will briefly outline. 1) History. I'm not only a student of English Literature, I'm also a History student. It makes for an interesting point of contrast, when I realise under the influence of discourses like New Historicism and Post Modernism, that OFFICIAL HISTORIES do not exist. And just like a novel, history can be interpreted in a multitude ...

I don't think that it's for no reason that there is an essay question option for my class that claims the characters are less important than the technology they use. Had the manuscript been rejected by the publishers, the rejection letter might have read something like this. Dear Mr. Clancy, It is my regretful duty to inform you that we will not be optioning the publication of your manuscript "The Hunt for Red October." As you know, we only take on a small number of new options per year, and your work narrowly missed the cut.* Your writing shows great determination and commitment, but is not what we are looking for at the current time. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours. Sincerely, Joachim Bennett** Big False Publishing Company, Elimy's Desk, Australia P.S. You might consider sending your submission to the United States Navy, as many of your passages read EXACTLY like a technical manual. If fiction is definitely the course that you would l...

Don't ask me why, but when I bought this book ($10 at the guild second hand bookshop), suffice to say I was less than enamoured with it. For some reason, I looked at it and it seemed thick ; the other thing that struck me was that it seemed like a depressing French book. Is that just me being culturally ignorant about the name Andre? Perhaps. More than perhaps. I kept thinking about it along the same vein as the book Perfume. How stupid I was. The Rights of Desire is a charming, deep novel set in South Africa, around the time of Mandela's long walk to freedom. I think the historical setting tells you a lot about the tone of the book; the weight of history hangs low throughout the lives of the protagonists, and the sadness and futility of the way they live their lives immediately puts me on their side even though the things that they have done, and continue to do I sometimes find reprehensible. Although by the final section I found that I could predict what was going t...

I would like to introduce you to some friends of mine. Not close personal ones or anything, but people that I've spent some time getting to know over the last week or so. You're probably going to say "That's Sean Connery and Ursula Andress." Well, actually you'd be wrong. Because I'm not talking about the actors. I'm talking about James Bond and Honey Rider. Or if you read the books rather than just watch movie versions, Honeychile to be perfectly accurate. I'm not exactly a Bond fan. But I've watched a lot of the films. Dad and I went through a phase of watching them when they were on foxtel. I may have been in year 12 at the time but it could have even been last year. My memory isn't the most reliable, and therefore it won't surprise you if I say I don't remember much of the movies. I can tell you that the first one I saw was one with Connery in it, and there was a shark, and it may have been... no I was going to say N...

That's right... I finally finished it. And this edition of Thoughts on contains SPOILERS. Those of you who know me, know that I was struggling to get into this one. I carried it around a lot, but often I would read only 3 or 4 pages every few days because it was driving me crazy. McCarthy kind of has an aversion to using the same punctuation as normal people, but I guess that's his style. I can respect that. Everyone has their own style when they write and I'm sure I manipulate the rules of English in ways that annoy everyone. For example, I use way too many commas. My motto when it comes to grammar is "Commas are a Priviledge, not a Right." This book really didn't make sense much in the first section. I couldn't work out who was being talked about sometimes; was it John Grady Cole or his father (the places where I wasn't sure, it was usually his Dad), and Lacey Rawlins was a character which I expected to be female. Oops. The fact that there...

You might recall that some many moons ago, I said that Ian McEwan was one of the writers I aspire to be like. Well. The man has been nominated for the Booker prize umpteen times, plus his stuff is very entertaining, so can you really blame me? I've read Atonement (finished it within minutes of having to go and meet friends at the cinema to see the film), Amsterdam and as of a few hours ago, I've also read On Chesil Beach. Let me tell you the best thing, in my opinion, about Mr McEwan's books; He makes the little nothings of life seem like everything. I find myself always able to relate to his characters, even when they are so far removed from my own situation that without his help, I would not be putting myself in their shoes. I am Briony Tallis; I am Florence Ponting. I am even a little bit of Edward. It makes me wonder if I am little bit like McEwan myself. Does he wonder about the same trivial things that I do? Does he search for significance in every thing h...

I read this script in about two hours last night. As far as screenplays go, this was a super readable one, but I would not recommend tackling it without seeing the movie first. I found myself remembering the scenes and imagining the actors in their roles and things. Isn't it funny how you associate a particular movie with the first time you watched it? Isn't it even funnier when you think back to that day and feel nothing; no nostalgia, no sense of lost. Looking back on watching that film with a boy I used to date, I realise that I am a different person now. That girl in the memory reel I am watching is not me, but she sort of looks like me. I digress. I like Tarantino films because they deliberately fly in the face of taboo. Adultery, drugs, sex, gangsters etc. all feature in Pulp Fiction in a round about sort of way and yet it manages to remain remarkably kitsch, rather than deep and meaningful. I remember when I was small, seeing the movie poster framed in someone...

Just a quick post... I must say that I am growing somewhat tired of blogging about Uni stuff all the time. On Friday, I did try to work on the Compound, but I was so incredibly tired and brain-sore that I only managed to write about one hundred words about Winston's first shower on the ship that rescues him. Well, no actually, I managed to write a bit more than that but I suddenly realised the impracticality of writing about a warm shower... it would have been a fairly cold one probably. I will try to finish off that chapter this week though because my lack of writing is fairly ridiculous. Anyways, on to our main event. Poirot. What comes to mind when I say that name? He's one of Agatha Christie's most famous creations, the 1930's detective from Belgium with the adorable curliqued moustache. And I must say that reading his last adventure was much like playing a game of Cluedo. Or Clue, if you happen to be American, I suppose. We are given a series of old murders...

I had been dreading reading this one. Drama? Gag me. (And yet ironically I have somehow ended up friendly with a lot of people who LOVE drama. Weird.) And then weird, freaky, shock you to your senses until you fall out of your socks kind of drama? Double gag me. But Sarah Kane is fortunate that I was being made to read her book for uni, because I actually really enjoyed it. I don't know if you remember, but I read the Monkey's Mask for Australian Literature and Film last semester, and I really liked that. It was great because it was so precise, all these pretty images/ not so pleasant ideas were put forth in a lovely, concise, understandable way, and I was able to just read and read and read... 4.48 Psychosis was like that. I'm definitely going to need another read of it to get my head around some of the core ideas but as a work of art, it just really spoke to me. My interpretation is probably wrong, mind you. But what I got from it was a sad, lost, lonely person...

It's really, really hard not to think of the movie instead of the book version of this, but the book came first. Bridget probably was never supposed to look like Renee Zellweger, and it was a bit of laugh to have Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy no doubt, but as is the case with novel adaptations which enjoy considerable success, the sad fact is that most people now can't separate the two. There's a rule I tend to respect, which was (I think) probably taught to me by my Grandpa: If you see the move first, you hate the book and vice versa. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Bridget Jones' Diary is basically Pride and Prejudice and I cannot believe that I never noticed that before. I think it's probably because Bridget is infinitely LESS likeable than Elizabeth Bennett. (Seriously, chain smoker, obsessed with dieting and appearance, believes perfect boyfriend will mean ultimate life happines... what kind of a role model is she trying to be?) Yet despite this I h...

I do not speak French. Well. I do not speak much French. Like most of my generation, I know the lyrics to Art vs. Science's 'Parlez vous Francais' and also that bit from 'Lady Marmalade' but those sorts of phrases are hardly the sorts of things that you can walk up to a normal French person and say without either being slapped or lead into an inappropriate situation. Nor do I speach Czech. (I actually don't even know what language they speak in the Czech republic...) One person who would definitely speak both of those languages is Milan Kundera, prolific writer of modern literary fiction. And for my World Writing Today course, I have been asked to read a little novella of his called "Slowness." First, an overview. Milan Kundera and his wife soujourn to a chateau (see I can use French words)in the French countryside which has seen two instances of... shall we say corporeal expressions of spontaneous love. Each of these events is one hundred years ...

I think I probably owe Georgette Heyer a bit of an apology. The other day I was at work, sitting in my boss's comfy chair and eating some lunch while reading Devil's Cub and our Jeweller asked me what I was reading. I said "The kind of novel you buy for five dollars at an airport and then throw out when you reach your destination." You see, in my head, the works of Georgette Heyer were much akin to Mills and Boon novels. I think this largely comes from an earlier reading of a book called The Fiction Class , in which the main character has been named after a Heyer book by her vapid mother. Well. At the time of making those comments, I was fairly sure I was right. I'd only read the book a chapter at a time and it seemed to be all heaving chests and duels. And then of course, I started to like it. I found that I really connected with Mary Challoner, being the older, less... popular sister, and even though I could predict the ending, I wanted to watch it all...

What do you get if you lock five people all interested in Literature(or six depending on the day of the week) in a house by a beach and tell them to write? (In case you were wondering the answer is bad amateur photography.) In all seriousness, I think that the little break from the norm was exactly what I needed.  I would (and frequently do) describe myself as a somewhat uptight person.  I live by the mantra of “What Would Mum and Dad think?” and when I usually go away to my Grandparent’s beach house the week can have the effect of turning me into Scary Prison Guard Dragon Lady.  But so far, every time I have taken people with me down there without parents, I have managed to become a little more laid back and enjoy myself a little more.  Every night this week, The Writers did some cooking.  (This was a nice break from consuming a lot of raw cookie dough/ chips/ chocolate and in some cases wine.)  Every day, there was much lying o...

Is this not just the most beautiful sight you have ever seen? Okay, well maybe that’s just me then.  New notebooks have always felt like new chapters in my life.  When I start a new notebook, I feel like maybe I am not tied down by what I wrote in the old one.  All the whinging and pining and the rants (my gosh, the rants!) are closed up. They are over.  They are stuffed into a pile of old notebooks.  I actually have a lot of notebooks.  Waiting.  Waiting to be used.  People give them to me for birthdays and stuff like that, and I’m rather behind on using them.  I really miss being able to just buy a fifty cent composition book and cover it with pictures as I go on, but I understand that buying me notebooks is how the people around me try to say that they “get me.” Front view.  Do you like my funky calculator?  Back view.  When you put them together they actually say Know Your Rights.  And the words are the De...

June 16. Its a date that won't ring true to many of you, unless its your birthday or the birthday of someone close to you. But I want to introduce the concept of Bloomsday to you all. James Joyce's Ulysses , a modernist novel spanning a whopping 600+ pages of train-of-thought, takes place over the course of a single day, June 16. And Joyce fans everywhere like to celebrate this special day by reading it over the course of Bloomsday. Or at least starting it. I'm pretty sure I came across the idea of Bloomsday in a column by Danny Katz once. Of course, back then, Ulysses was just a really thick, scary book. So how, you may ask, did I come to read it? Well, first of all, read it is being used relatively here, because I actually didn't finish it. I got through 150 pages, which is pretty impressive because a lot of sources say that if you're going to give up on a book you need to at least give it 50 pages. And I gave it three times that. I gave it a week and a bit of my...

This year, for the first time, I made sure that I went to the writers festival. I have been before, maybe a year or two ago, with a friend of mine and her mother (who is also a writer). On that occassion, we saw a panel on creating new worlds in science fiction and fantasy stories. But on this occassion, I was determined to go. Luckily for me, so was a good friend of mine, and we met up at the event. For some reason, these things are always more fun with someone you know sitting beside you. Perhaps it is because you can talk about it long afterwards and prolong the experience. Anyway. I went to three sessions. The first one was called Reimagining the Literary Tradition which, roughly speaking, was about intertextual references and the use of other forms to shape new work. The speakers on that panel were Helen Oyeyemi, Goldie Goldbloom and Craig Silvey. I have to admit, I was only there to see Craig Silvey talk about Jasper Jones. I read that book at the end of last year and I really l...