Our Selection 4 (Steele Rudd)

Steele Rudd

Chapter 4.

When the Wolf was at the Door.

There had been a long stretch of dry weather, and we were cleaning out the waterhole. Dad was down the hole shovelling up the dirt; Joe squatted on the brink catching flies and letting them go again without their wings — a favourite amusement of his; while Dan and Dave cut a drain to turn the water that ran off the ridge into the hole — when it rained. Dad was feeling dry, and told Joe to fetch him a drink.

Joe said: “See first if this cove can fly with only one wing.” Then he went, but returned and said: “There’s no water in the bucket — Mother used the last drop to boil th’ punkins,” and renewed the fly-catching. Dad tried to spit, and was going to say something when Mother, half-way between the house and the waterhole, cried out that the grass paddock was all on fire. “So it is, Dad!” said Joe, slowly but surely dragging the head off a fly with finger and thumb.

Dad scrambled out of the hole and looked. “Good God!” was all he said. How he ran! All of us rushed after him except Joe — he couldn’t run very well, because the day before he had ridden fifteen miles on a poor horse, bare-back. When near the fire Dad stopped running to break a green bush. He hit upon a tough one. Dad was in a hurry. The bush wasn’t. Dad swore and tugged with all his might. Then the bush broke and Dad fell heavily upon his back and swore again.

To save the cockatoo fence that was round the cultivation was what was troubling Dad. Right and left we fought the fire with boughs. Hot! It was hellish hot! Whenever there was a lull in the wind we worked. Like a wind-mill Dad’s bough moved — and how he rushed for another when one was used up! Once we had the fire almost under control; but the wind rose again, and away went the flames higher and faster than ever.

“It’s no use,” said Dad at last, placing his hand on his head, and throwing down his bough. We did the same, then stood and watched the fence go. After supper we went out again and saw it still burning. Joe asked Dad if he didn’t think it was a splendid sight? Dad didn’t answer him — he didn’t seem conversational that night.

Our Selection 3 (Steele Rudd)

Steele Rudd

Chapter 3. Before We Got The Deeds

 

Our selection adjoined a sheep-run on the Darling Downs, and boasted of few and scant improvements, though things had gradually got a little better than when we started. A verandahless four-roomed slab-hut now standing out from a forest of box-trees, a stock-yard, and six acres under barley were the only evidence of settlement. A few horses — not ours — sometimes grazed about; and occasionally a mob of cattle — also not ours — cows with young calves, steers, and an old bull or two, would stroll around, chew the best legs of any trousers that might be hanging on the log reserved as a clothes-line, then leave in the night and be seen no more for months — some of them never. And yet we were always out of meat! Dad was up the country earning a few pounds — the corn drove him up when it didn’t bring what he expected. All we got out of it was a bag of flour — I don’t know what the storekeeper got. Before he left we put in the barley. Somehow, Dad didn’t believe in sowing any more crops, he seemed to lose heart; but Mother talked it over with him, and when reminded that he would soon be entitled to the deeds he brightened up again and worked. How he worked! We had no plough, so old Anderson turned over the six acres for us, and Dad gave him a pound an acre — at least he was to send him the first six pounds got up country. Dad sowed the seed; then he, Dan and Dave yoked themselves to a large dry bramble each and harrowed it in. From the way they sweated it must have been hard work. Sometimes they would sit down in the middle of the paddock and “spell” but Dad would say something about getting the deeds and they’d start again. A cockatoo-fence was round the barley; and wire-posts, a long distance apart, round the grass-paddock.

Our Selection 2 (Steele Rudd)

Steele Rudd

Chapter 2. Our First Harvest

 

If there is anything worse than burr-cutting or breaking stones, it’s putting corn in with a hoe. We had just finished. The girls were sowing the last of the grain when Fred Dwyer appeared on the scene. Dad stopped and talked with him while we (Dan, Dave and myself) sat on our hoe-handles, like kangaroos on their tails, and killed flies. Terrible were the flies, particularly when you had sore legs or the blight. Dwyer was a big man with long, brown arms and red, bushy whiskers. “You must find it slow work with a hoe?” he said. “Well-yes-pretty,” replied Dad (just as if he wasn’t quite sure). After a while Dwyer walked over the “cultivation”, and looked at it hard, then scraped a hole with the heel of his boot, spat, and said he didn’t think the corn would ever come up. Dan slid off his perch at this, and Dave let the flies eat his leg nearly off without seeming to feel it; but Dad argued it out. “Orright, orright,” said Dwyer; “I hope it do.” Then Dad went on to speak of places he knew of where they preferred hoes to a plough for putting corn in with; but Dwyer only laughed and shook his head. “D— n him!” Dad muttered, when he had gone; “what rot! WON’T COME UP!” Dan, who was still thinking hard, at last straightened himself up and said HE didn’t think it was any use either. Then Dad lost his temper. “No USE?” he yelled, “you whelp, what do you know about it?” Dan answered quietly: “On’y this, that it’s nothing but tomfoolery, this hoe business.” “How would you do it then?” Dad roared, and Dan hung his head and tried to button his buttonless shirt wrist-band while he thought. “With a plough,” he answered. Something in Dad’s throat prevented him saying what he wished, so he rushed at Dan with the hoe, but — was too slow. Dan slept outside that night. No sooner was the grain sown than it rained. How it rained! for weeks! And in the midst of it all the corn came up — every grain-and proved Dwyer a bad prophet. Dad was in high spirits and promised each of us something — new boots all round.

Our Selection (Steele Rudd)

Steele Rudd

Starting the Selection.

 

It’s twenty years ago now since we settled on the Creek. Twenty years! I remember well the day we came from Stanthorpe, on Jerome’s dray — eight of us, and all the things — beds, tubs, a bucket, the two cedar chairs with the pine bottoms and backs that Dad put in them, some pint-pots and old Crib. It was a scorching hot day, too — talk about thirst! At every creek we came to we drank till it stopped running. Dad didn’t travel up with us: he had gone some months before, to put up the house and dig the waterhole. It was a slabbed house, with shingled roof, and space enough for two rooms; but the partition wasn’t up. The floor was earth; but Dad had a mixture of sand and fresh cow-dung with which he used to keep it level. About once every month he would put it on; and everyone had to keep outside that day till it was dry. There were no locks on the doors: pegs were put in to keep them fast at night; and the slabs were not very close together, for we could easily see through them anybody coming on horseback. Joe and I used to play at counting the stars through the cracks in the roof. The day after we arrived Dad took Mother and us out to see the paddock and the flat on the other side of the gully that he was going to clear for cultivation. There was no fence round the paddock, but he pointed out on a tree the surveyor’s marks, showing the boundary of our ground. It must have been fine land, the way Dad talked about it! There was very valuable timber on it, too, so he said; and he showed us a place, among some rocks on a ridge, where he was sure gold would be found, but we weren’t to say anything about it. Joe and I went back that evening and turned over every stone on the ridge, but we didn’t find any gold. No mistake, it was a real wilderness — nothing but trees, “goannas,” dead timber, and bears; and the nearest house — Dwyer’s — was three miles away. I often wonder how the women stood it the first few years; and I can remember how Mother, when she was alone, used to sit on a log, where the lane is now, and cry for hours. Lonely! It WAS lonely. Dad soon talked about clearing a couple of acres and putting in corn — all of us did, in fact — till the work commenced. It was a delightful topic before we started,; but in two weeks the clusters of fires that illumined the whooping bush in the night, and the crash upon crash of the big trees as they fell, had lost all their poetry.

The Night-born (Jack London)

Jack London

It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club–a warm night for San Francisco–and through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name of O’Brien was mentioned–O’Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air had seemed to freshen. O’Brien had been a clean-living young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the body of a beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayer-book to the ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the dressing-room… afterward. Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied–the thing of glory and wonder for men to conjure with… after it has been lost to them and they have turned middle-aged. And so well did we conjure, that Romance came and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered how many Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon all that was forgotten. “It was in 1898–I was thirty-five then,” he said. “Yes, I know you are adding it up. You’re right. I’m forty-seven now; look ten years more; and the doctors say–damn the doctors anyway!” He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe away his irritation. “But I was young… once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner’s, and the longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in ’98. You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn’t I a pretty good bit of all right?” Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.

Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar (Francis Scott Fitzgerald)

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities. But here and there lie patches of garden country dotted with old-fashioned frame mansions, which have wide shady porches and a red swing on the lawn. And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a mid-Victorian wind. When tourists come to such last-century landmarks they stop their cars and gaze for a while and then mutter: “Well, thank God this age is joined on to something” or else they say: “Well, of course, that house is mostly halls and has a thousand rats and one bathroom, but there’s an atmosphere about it — ” The tourist doesn’t stay long. He drives on to his Elizabethan villa of pressed cardboard or his early Norman meat-market or his medieval Italian pigeon-coop — because this is the twentieth century and Victorian houses are as unfashionable as the works of Mrs. Humphry Ward. He can’t see the hammock from the road — but sometimes there’s a girl in the hammock. There was this afternoon. She was asleep in it and apparently unaware of the esthetic horrors which surrounded her, the stone statue of Diana, for instance, which grinned idiotically under the sunlight on the lawn. There was something enormously yellow about the whole scene — there was this sunlight, for instance, that was yellow, and the hammock was of the particularly hideous yellow peculiar to hammocks, and the girl’s yellow hair was spread out upon the hammock in a sort of invidious comparison. She slept with her lips closed and her hands clasped behind her head, as it is proper for young girls to sleep. Her breast rose and fell slightly with no more emphasis than the sway of the hammock’s fringe. Her name, Amanthis, was as old-fashioned as the house she lived in. I regret to say that her mid-Victorian connections ceased abruptly at this point.

Beyond the door (Philip K. Dick)

Philip K Dick

_Did you ever wonder at the lonely life the bird in a cuckoo clock
has to lead–that it might possibly love and hate just as easily as
a real animal of flesh and blood? Philip Dick used that idea for
this brief fantasy tale. We’re sure that after reading it you’ll
give cuckoo clocks more respect. _ beyond
the
door _by… Philip K. Dick_ Larry Thomas bought a cuckoo clock
for his wife–without knowing the
price he would have to pay. That night at the dinner table he brought it out and set it down beside her plate. Doris stared at it, her hand to her mouth. “My God, what is it?” She looked up at him, bright-eyed. “Well, open it.” Doris tore the ribbon and paper from the square package with her sharp nails, her bosom rising and falling. Larry stood watching her as she lifted the lid. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall. “A cuckoo clock!” Doris cried. “A real old cuckoo clock like my mother had.” She turned the clock over and over. “Just like my mother had, when Pete was still alive.” Her eyes sparkled with tears. “It’s made in Germany,” Larry said. After a moment he added, “Carl got it for me wholesale. He knows some guy in the clock business. Otherwise I wouldn’t have–” He stopped. Doris made a funny little sound. “I mean, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford it.” He scowled. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve got your clock, haven’t you? Isn’t that what you want?” Doris sat holding onto the clock, her fingers pressed against the brown wood. “Well,” Larry said, “what’s the matter?” He watched in amazement as she leaped up and ran from the room, still clutching the clock. He shook his head. “Never satisfied. They’re all that way. Never get enough.” He sat down at the table and finished his meal. The cuckoo clock was not very large. It was hand-made, however, and there were countless frets on it, little indentations and ornaments scored in the soft wood. Doris sat on the bed drying her eyes and winding the clock. She set the hands by her wristwatch. Presently she carefully moved the hands to two minutes of ten. She carried the clock over to the dresser and propped it up.

The inverted forest (J. D. Salinger)

J. D. Salinger 

“Cosmopolitan”, December, 1947

To say that this short novel is unusual magazine fare is, we think, a wild understatement. We’re not going to tell you what it’s about. We merely predict you will find it the most original story you’ve read in a long time-and the most fascinating.

The following diary extract is dated December 31, 1917. It was written in Shoreview, Long Island by a little girl named Corinne von Nordhoffen. She was the daughter of Sarah Keyes Montross von Nordhoffen, the Montross Orthopedic Appliances heiress, who had committed suicide in 1915, and Baron Otho von Nordhoffen, who was still alive, or at least, under his gray mask of expatriation, was still breathing. Corinne entered this chapter in her diary on the night before her eleventh birthday.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am going to have a party. I have invited Raymond Ford and Miss Aigletinger and Lorraine Pederson and Dorothy Wood and Marjorie Pheleps and Lawrence Pheleps and Mr. Miller. Miss Aigletinger said I had to invite Lawrence Pheleps on account of Marjorie is coming. I have to invite Mr. Miller on account of he works for father now. Father said Mr. Miller will drive to New York in the morning and bring back 2 cow boy movies and show them in the libery after dinner. I got Raymond a real cow boy hat to wear just like that cow boy he likes wears. I got everybody else hats also only paper ones. Miss Aigletinger is going to give me Parade Prejudice by Jane Orsten she said. She is also going to give me the elsie I don’t have. She is the most adorable teacher I have had since Miss Calahan. Father is also going to give me more room in the kennles for Sandys puppys and I already saw the doll house from Wanamakers. Dorothy Wood is going to give me an autograph album and gave it to me already 3 weeks ago. She wrote in the front of it in your golden chain of friendship consider me a link. I nearly cried Dorothy is so adorable. I don’t know what Lorraine and Marjorie are going to give me. I wish that mean Lawrence Pheleps did not have to come to my party. I don’t want Raymond Ford to give me anything for my birthday just so he comes is all. He is so poor and not rich at all and you can tell by his cloths. I wish Dorothy had not written on the first page of the album because I wanted Raymond. Mr. Miller is going to give me an alligator. He has this brother in Florida that has alligators and T. B. like Miss Calahan had. I love Raymond Ford. I love him better then my father. Anybody that opens this dairy and reads this page will drop dead in 24 hours. Tomorrow night!!! Please dear lord don’t let Lawrence Pheleps be mean at my party and don’t let father and Mr. Miller talk German at the table or anything because I just know they would all go home and tell there parents about it except Raymond and Dorothy. I love you Raymond because you are the nicest boy in the world and I am going to marry you. Any body that reads this without my permission will drop dead in 24 hours or get sick.

Close to nine o’clock on the night of Corinne’s birthday party, Mr. Miller, the Baron’s new secretary, leaned forward and volunteered down-table straight at Corinne, “Well, let’s go get this boy. No use sittin’ around mopin’ about it all night. Where’s he live, birthday girl?”

Corinne, at the end of the table, shook her head and blinked violently. Under the table her hands were caught hard between her knees.

Nabokov and the moment of truth

 

If you heard our interview on The John Batchelor Show tonight (catch it at the 29:50 mark), and if you want to check out the marvelous clip of Vladimir Nabokov reading Lolita, here it is.  Originally aired on 1950s French television, this clip gives you some vintage Vladimir Nabokov. Early on, the Russian novelist reads the wonderfully poetic first lines of Lolita: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Then we get down to real business. Putting on his literary critic cap, Nabokov tells us what 20th novels make real or pretend claims to greatness. First the fakers: I’ve been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called “great books.” That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice, or Pasternak’s melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago, or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term “great books,” is to me the same sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.

And then the true greats in order of personal preference:

1) James Joyce’s Ulysses

2) Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

3) Andrei Bely’s St. Petersburg

4) The first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time

Check the Open Culture Cultural Icons collection, which features great writers, artists and thinkers speaking in their own words. And if we have piqued your interest, don’t miss these other Nabokov gems:

Nabokov Tweaks Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different “Lolita” Book Covers

Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita: Just Another Great Love Story?

El amor brujo (Roberto Arlt)

Roberto Arlt

De allí que Balder oscilara entre los excesos más opuestos con brevísimos intervalos de tiempo. Una ansiedad permanente solicitaba en él compañía femenina, que rechazaba casi inmeditamente de obtenerla. Las mujeres le desilusionaban por la esterilidad mental de su existencia. Donde se imaginaba un palacio descubría una choza. De cada una que se acercaba, pensaba impaciente: —Es ésta. —Luego reconocía que se había equivocado. La presentida era como las otras, y se apartaba de ellas con agrios modales de defraudado. Lo acosaba una incomodidad permanente, cierto furor lento que inopinadamente estallaba en una avalancha de groserías inconcebibles. Pero después de la explosión de su hastío, repleto de malevolencia, se apartaba de esas desdichadas, lívido de rencor, como si ellas fueran responsables de la existencia de ese infierno en el que se consumía sin posibilidad de salvarse. Al aparecer Irene, su corazón dio un salto tremendo. Creyó identificarla. Era, más cuando la jovencita escapó a su voluntad, él se sumergió casi con naturalidad en la monotonía de su vida gris. Pasaban meses sin que la imagen de la colegiada tocara la sensibilidad de Balder, luego un incidente la despertaba flamante, tal cual la conociera en el primer minuto que ella lo contempló absorta. Reconstruía con alegría el espectáculo de un encuentro inesperado. Conversarían interminablemente, le narraría la odisea de su inercia. Irene le perdonaría sus ficciones, admitiría realmente que él era un hombre que no mentía nunca. Estanislao, a su vez, le confiaría que no se reprochaba las falsedades injertadas en su primera y segunda carta, ya que eran para mayor gloria de ese amor que envasaba. Cierto es que nadie miente sin un objeto, mas es auténtico que Balder jamás mentía, ni para defender intereses estimables.