Ex-library and Wassup Rockers

I've been doing HEAPS. I've been all literary in Melbourne, and I just spoke at the Bendigo Booktalkers event with Mal Peet and Libby Gleeson, and I spent all yesterday at Weeroona Secondary College doing writing workshops with some great and occasionally manic and very funny Years 9 and 10 AND (joy of joys!) some of them were male! (My workshops tend to be all girls all the time, not that there's anything wrong with that but it's nice to mix it up.)

I didn't go to all of Reading Matters, in fact just snuck in to catch Amra Pajalic, Randa Abdel-Fattah and Libby Gleeson talking about representation of Muslim children in fiction - very intersting and informative. Libby Gleeson's presentation was sharp and political and compassionate - at Bendigo she read her children's book The Great Bear - this fantasticall sad allegory about tyranny and oppression and to think how much she says in 12 lines, is just mind-boggling. I loved Randa's story about Does my Head Look Big in This? being prompted by airport bookshop titles like: Beyond the Veil, Behind the veil, all about the veil, the veil, the veil!! Amra talked about the Western Suburbs experience, writing from the fringes. Her desire to write seemed to come from out of nowhere - and whenever I hear stories like this I know that story-making is a human function no how much current Government tries to suppress it.

The librarians at Weeroona Secondary College were saying that when the new school gets built there will be no library - there will still be some books, and some space for kids to read, but no actual library. I'm hearing this more and more; school libraries as we know them are on the way out. This makes me incredibly sad. The school library for me was like a refuge. What's the bloody point in giving every baby a free book, trying to instill a reading culture if there is no place for kids to practice it. Urgh. I am fairly crap at rants, but most of the time it seems to me that the world is operating in the exactly opposite way than it should.

On to excellent things. Films in particular.

Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark) - like the Magnificent Hispanic Seven - about a bunch of South Central LA Salvadorian and Guatemalen teenage boys who wear tight pants and listen to punk rock and skate. Felt really authentic, and sweeter and funnier than most LC. Made me think of all the 60s Hispanic garage rockers, and weirdly, made me think of Frank Zappa being this Pachuco weirdo who doesn't give fuck. (I"m not really a Frank Zappa fan, but I always liked the way he celebrated weird.)

Boom! (Joseph Losey) - another from Cinemascope. Based on a Tennessee Williams play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - you know, that's all I need! - set in Sardinia in a house that looks like some kind of inverse Guggenheim. Liza plays a dying millionaireness, and Richard Burton is a poet, nicknamed the angel of death. Look here - John Waters has a whole seminar about its wonderfulness.





ps- Mal Peet was also great, a very funny speaker and it was lovely to hear about his whole write-what-you-don't-know philosophy ... I am reading Keeper at the moment and enjoying it.