The Three Dog Reader

I read and re-read all the time for work and pleasure and am always finding passages that are so good, or intriguing, or contain an idea or memorable anecdote, they must be passed on. Here are my latest (newest from the top), including treasures from the past.

Published November 4 – This piece reminds me of James Thurber and I always laugh helplessly when I re-read it. 

 “I said you should have driven first.”

Someone asked me the other day if I ever wrote in books and I don’t. (I sometimes fluoro sentences which is probably worse.) But this morning I did write something in my copy of Geoff Dyer’s White Sands. I wrote: “This is an avocado smear from my breakfast” next to a brown-green mark that might have been questionable otherwise. It’s on page 111, in the essay “Northern Dark” which is one of the funniest pieces I’ve ever read and I know I will urge this book - or the essay - on someone one day. Hence the written note.

In “Northern Dark”, novelist and travel writer Geoff Dyer has given in to his wife’s obsessive imploring to go to Norway to see the Northern Lights. This entails catching a plane from Heathrow in winter to go to Oslo, then further north to Tromsø and into the Arctic Circle to the Svalbard archipelago. Norway they discover is paralyzingly expensive and when they eventually arrive at their destination, Longyearbyen, it was “colder and darker than anyone in their right mind would ever have visited. We had only just got off the plane, were walking to the terminal, when Jessica said exactly what I was thinking: ‘Why have we come to this hellhole?’”

It gets worse. After arriving at their hotel, they go for a walk, “one of the most horrible walks we had ever embarked on. The Norwegian word for ‘stroll’ is best translated as ‘grim battle for survival’”. That night, the fickle Northern Lights don’t appear but the next morning they are due to go dog mushing. Ninety chained Alaskan huskies, with all the females on heat, await them, yelping and clamouring to be chosen by the guides to go out that day on the sleds. 

 Eventually we were saddled up and ready to go. Whenever we hire a car, Jessica always steers us out of the parking lot for the first few tentative miles, when we are unsure of the controls and the chances of an accident are at their peak. On this occasion, though, I was driving. I said that she should take the reins, but she insisted that this was my manly prerogative and plonked herself down in the sled on a comfy-looking piece of blue rug. 

A few moments later we were off. First team out, second team out – and then us, bringing up the rear in suddenly hot pursuit. The huskies meant business, there was no doubt about that. I still had the sled’s anchor in my hand, was struggling to hook it to the side of the sled so that it would not impale Jessica’s head like a fishing hook in the cheek of a big human fish. 

An extraordinary amount of speed had been abruptly unleashed, unharnessed by even a modicum of control. We were charging downhill, at an angle, so we had to lean into the slope to avoid capsizing. Through my hood I could still hear the dogs yelping, though by now my head was so full of yelping this might have been the residue of the old yelping of dogs in the compound, not the ecstatic yelping of huskies galloping through the Arctic dark. 

It was hard work steering the sled, hard enough to make me sweat. It felt good being hot, but sweating was not good at all, because – I remembered this from Alistair MacLean’s appropriately named Night Without End – as soon as this exertion was over the sweat would freeze.

We were zooming along, plunging down a slope. I lost control of the sled, over which I had never had the slightest control, and tumbled off the back into deep snow. 

The sled spilled over, but the anchor – which was supposed to serve as a brake – had not been deployed and the huskies did not stop. They had not been released from captivity in order to have their outing curtailed at this early stage. Even through my hood, I could hear Jessica yelling “Stop”. She was dragged for fifty metres, tangled up beneath the sled and, for all I know, had the anchor embedded in her skull. As I ran after her, with no thought in my head except her welfare, I was silently forming the words, “I said you should have driven first”. 

Extract taken from “Northern Dark”, from the collection White Sands by Geoff Dyer. First published by Canongate, 2016.  Published in Australia by Text.

Published November 2 - The public has huge power when it comes to ending the abuses of factory farming. Here’s one encouraging story.

“… one bird caught my eye.”

 I once wrote, in a review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, that I had had to read parts of it through my fingers, so brutal and heartbreaking were the scenes from the heartland of industrial farming. Leah Garcés’ Grilled – Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry is like that in parts too. 

But it is also an account of how things can change, and in just a few years, given energy, will and the right tactics and strategies. 

It gave me hope that, with enough people on side and enough alignment of interests on both sides, we will be able to see the end of industrial farming as it is today: horrific, inflicting unnecessary pain and terror on helpless animals, and with an end product that is not as good as it could be given the processes. 

The reason Garcés and her fellow animal welfare fighters were able to make such progress was simple. She channelled Gandhi and turned her adversaries into allies. And she was able to do that by exposing to the American public not just what was being inflicted on farmed chickens, but all the horrible diseases to which they were prone because of the way the big producers forced their contract farmers to work.

Americans started rejecting chicken meat. That woke up the industry, given at the time 9 billion chickens were being raised and slaughtered every year. Read the book to find out what happened next and how animal lovers everywhere might apply these lessons. 

Garcés grew up in an animal-loving household in Florida and went into animal welfare campaigning early. In this seminal scene, from the prologue to Grilled, she writes about driving her children along a Georgia highway out of Atlanta on a stinking hot day. Up ahead, they see an industrial truck, stacked with cages of chickens headed to slaughter. 

 We pulled alongside the truck, and I tried to take in the individual chickens and what they were going through. It was 100F (37C) outside. They had never seen sunlight before this day; they had never felt the wind or heard the noise of the road. Now they were stuffed with 10 other birds in crates stacked 8 high and 15 wide. Some were panting; some were contorted with their legs, wings, necks, squeezed or trapped in corners of the crates. The feathers my son had innocently taken for snow were whipping off the truck, littering the road, leaving a trail softly floating in the air, as if in slow motion. The birds were exhausted. Even from the car, you could see they were done with this life. They could not live another day even if they were allowed to. Their bodies were like balloons with toothpicks for legs sticking out beneath. Most had large patches of feathers missing from their chests or bottoms. They were babies, just six weeks old despite their oversized bodies, but they couldn’t have survived much longer. This is likely the only time Americans will see these birds alive; the rest of the time they live behind closed doors, deliberately kept out of sight and out of mind. 

 As I scanned the truck, one bird caught my eye. She had somehow found a steady position in the crate. She looked straight ahead. This was her last day, but I thought she might be thinking, ‘At least it’s over now’.

Extract taken from Grilled – Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry by Leah Garcés, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Published November 2 - Who doesn’t want to try and understand why we keep failing in our personal lives, day after day?

“…so who’s the arsehole now?”

 To paraphrase American author Janet Malcolm, every person who is not too stupid or too full of themselves to notice what is going on, knows that what we often do in life is morally indefensible. 

As I note in my other running blog on my website, about the insidiousness of evil, “All About E”, there are so many ways in which we can find ourselves behaving badly, so many influences on us to do so, ranging from vanity to prejudice to pride to self-interest. That’s how badness can come to lodge, moving in, and then nesting, on our insecurities and fallibility. 

 This passage from Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity  is one of the most concise and pungent expressions of the above. 

 Rob the narrator’s live-in girlfriend Laura has moved out. At first there was “this great feeling, part liberation and part nervous excitement” on his part. Now he is missing her, and enduring all the roiling, excoriating self-scrutiny that comes with that. But Laura has just confided in her best friend, Liz, who had until then been on Rob’s side, why she had finally left and Liz has confronted Rob in a pub – “she’s nice, Liz, but she’s huge, and when she’s angry like she is now, she’s pretty scary…. ‘You’re a fucking arsehole, Rob,’ she says and then she turns around and walks out.” 

 Which later leads to this, a riff about our moral failures that is as priceless as Miranda Priestly’s riff about cerulean blue in The Devil Wore Prada. 

 I do not know what, precisely, Laura said, but she would have revealed at least two, maybe even all four, of the following pieces of information:

 1.   That I slept with somebody else while she was pregnant.

2.   That my affair contributed directly to her terminating the pregnancy. 

3.   That, after her abortion, I borrowed a large sum of money from her, and have not yet repaid her. 

4.   That, shortly before she left, I told her I was unhappy in the relationship, and I was kind of sort of maybe looking out for someone else.

 Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances (in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the worst four things that you have done to your partner, even if – especially if – your partner doesn’t know about them. Don’t dress these things up, or try to explain them; just write them down in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? OK, so who’s the arsehole now? 

Extract taken from High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, first published by Victor Gollancz, 1995

Published September 23 - I read Ann Patchett’s latest novel in proof form months ago and have been waiting impatiently until publication date to share it with you. It’s SO good.

 “Your father has a friend …”

 Ann Patchett’s new book The Dutch House opens memorably: The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister’s room and told us to come downstairs. “Your father has a friend he wants you to meet.”

And a few sentences on, “Our father didn’t have friends, at least not the kind who came to the house late on a Saturday afternoon.”

 Of course, most of us know what’s coming next, though clearly not the narrator’s father who can’t have read any fairytales about wicked stepmothers and wicked witches in his childhood. Instead, he welcomes  the pert, determined and much younger Andrea into his spectacular home. 

 The Dutch House is the story of the involved relationship between a brother, Danny, and his older sister, Maeve, over the course of their lives. It is set against this extraordinary home, a floating, glassy palace, and is haunting and beautiful in its capture of the forces that enter out of nowhere and shape and shake our lives. It begins with loss. And a keen awareness of the frailties of the male mind. 

 He never talked about Andrea, not when she was gone, not when she was back. He didn’t tell us if he had her in mind for some role in our future. When she was there, he acted like she’d always been there, and when she was gone we never wanted to remind him for fear he’d ask her back. In truth, I don’t think he was particularly interested in Andrea. I just don’t think he had the means to deal with her tenacity. His strategy, as far as I could tell, was to ignore her until she went away. “That’s never going to work,” Maeve said to me.

 Extracts taken from The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. $26.99

Published September 21. Who doesn’t love a good thriller?

 “You think I’m playing you?”

 This novel, about literary ambition, A Ladder to the Sky, by John Boyne, author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, was published in 2018. It’s divided into five sections and what’s creepy is that about halfway through each of them, you can guess what’s ahead for the characters. But this isn’t bad or predictable writing; it’s because Boyne wants us to feel like spectators of one of those savage wildlife documentaries where you can see the zebra peacefully grazing on the veldt with a predator in the distance. What can you do? Nothing, except read on. In this passage, the lead character, the beautiful and coldly determined Maurice, who is capable of beguiling both sexes, is accompanying a much older man, a successful author, who is besotted with him on an overnight visit to a cliffside Italian villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Boyne has fictionalised two real characters, literary lion Gore Vidal and his partner Howard, the inhabitants of the villa, in this section. The night before, Maurice has slipped into Gore’s bedroom to seduce him. He is unsuccessful and the next morning, the two of them discuss what happened as if it were an incident Maurice has had nothing to do with. 

 “Very quietly, the door to my bedroom opened and a figure stepped inside, dressed only in a red bathrobe … he was naked underneath, his body a work of art. Michelangelo might have sculpted it and failed to capture its beauty …

“And what did you do?” asked Maurice.

“I turned over,” said Gore. “Not to invite the figure into my bed, you understand. But to make it clear that I had no interest in him.”

“Perhaps you’ll live to regret saying no,” said Maurice, standing up and gathering the remainder of his belongings, not bothering to fold them now, simply tossing them carelessly into his case. “One day it might feel like a lost opportunity.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” admitted Gore. “I’m not made of stone, so I considered it. But I resisted because I’m not a fool. I feel rather pleased with myself this morning that I said no. Something tells me that, had I lifted the covers and invited the figure in, my life would have taken an unhappy turn afterwards.”

“Maybe you ate some rotten cheese before you went to bed,” said Maurice.

“We didn’t have any cheese.”

“Then perhaps you’re just losing your mind.”

“Oh, I’ve been doing that for years. But not long enough not to recognise when I’m being played.”

“You think I’m playing you?”

“I think you came here hoping to. And have been disappointed to find that I’m not such an easy mark. Erich Ackermann was one thing, a pussycat I imagine. And Dash, what is he? A tomcat. Slinking around the neighbourhood, hoping for a little night-luck. But I’m a different beast entirely, aren’t I? I’m a lion. I belong in the jungle. And so I suspect, do you.”

 This is also a very funny novel and I found myself yelping often in surprised laughter at the darkness of the various asides, the jabs in conversation, and the perfect observations about the ethics, or otherwise, of the publishing world. Go and hunt it out. 

 Extract taken from A Ladder To The Sky by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2018

Published September 2, 2019 - My fascination with Europe in the lead-up to, and during, World War Two reveals itself again.

“The revolution was lost …”

 A snippet from Jane Thynne’s Faith and Beauty. Thynne has written a series of intensively researched novels featuring actor Clara Vine who is working in a Berlin film studio in the 1930s as Germany prepares and then goes to war. Vine – who is Anglo-German – also works for British intelligence. In the extract below, Vine is chatting to British foreign correspondent Hugh Lindsey as they walk back to the Adlon Hotel, through Alexanderplatz square and past its circular lawn, and Lindsey explains the German character to her.

 “You know, in 1918 there was shooting going on in this square. Fighting between the Reds [influenced by the Russian Revolution] and the Freikorps [former WW1 soldiers],” remarked Hugh. “But even though this lawn was the shortest distance across the square, and the obvious way to escape the bullets, Berliners still refused to walk on the grass. Isn’t that extraordinary? Lenin said he realised at that moment that the revolution was lost. He said you can’t hold a revolution in a city where people obey the ‘keep off the grass’ signs.”

 Extract taken from Faith and Beauty by Jane Thynne, Simon & Schuster UK, 2015

Published August 31, 2019 - I love everything about journalism, except what has happened to it in the last few years under economic pressures.

“They never slag off the director”

British journalist Lynn Barber (also the author of the memoir An Education which was also made into a movie with Carey Mulligan and Peter Saarsgard) pioneered a new approach to profile-writing in the early 1980s. It was first person, full of the kind of observed detail that, until then, writers had politely left out of their completed pieces, and astoundingly insightful because of all the hard work Barber put into understanding her subjects. It was also very funny. In 2014, she passed on what she’d learned about profile-writing – and celebrities - in A Curious Career. I love this bit. 

 And of course it’s an article of faith that they never slag off the director, or other actors – everyone they work with is always “wonderful”, at least while they are plugging the film. I’ve found a fairly fruitful question is: which other actor on the film did you most admire, or most enjoy working with? Invariably, they nominate someone who had such a tiny part you never even noticed them. (Though when I interviewed Robert Redford about The Horse Whisperer, he couldn’t bring himself to praise any of his fellow actors, not even the horse.)

I wanted to see if I could draw my three dogs now I’m taking lessons.. Illustration by Shelley Gare

 I’ve also written about Barber and her book, at length, in my blog, issue 27, for the Sydney Institute (see fifth item). It’s terrible for readers, and society, that, as advertisers and public relations managers have increased in power, Barber’s style has become unwanted by more and more editors. Might upset the stars. 

Extract taken from A Curious Career by Lynn Barber, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014

Published August 31 - I have a large collection of books about WW2 and historian and journalist Lynne Olson is a standout author. See also Last Hope Island and Citizens of London.

“It was also fear”

I so admire the way good authors start their books. The opening sentences, or even the very first sentence, are baited like fish hooks. I guess they have to, given our attention spans and all the other books we could be picking up in a bookshops. 

 Anyhow, American historian Lynn Olson’s latest, Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, again about people who were fighting back against Hitler, hits you in the face. 

 It was the middle of the night. The air in the barracks detention cell was hot and sultry – typical July weather for the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. Not surprisingly, the woman lying on the cot was bathed in sweat. But the reason wasn’t just the stifling heat. It was also fear. A few hours earlier, she had been captured by the Gestapo while combing through intelligence reports from her resistance network. 

 The Germans who had taken her captive knew she was an Allied spy, but they had no idea of her true identity …

 It’s July 1944 and the dowdy-looking woman in captivity has altered her appearance with a dental prosthetic, hair-dye, spectacles and dowdy clothes. The tricks hide her glamour and that she is Marie-Madeleine Fourcade – spy, saboteur and head of “the largest and most important Allied intelligence network in occupied France”. She knows exactly what will happen once her captors work it out. 

 So what I also love about this passage is that it so clearly captures how terrified she was, and that’s not something that a lot of the WW2 books mention much, that primeval fear that has its own scent. Olson reminds us these people weren’t super-human; they were just like us except for circumstances. What motivated them was patriotism, moral courage, outrage or just a feeling they could do nothing else. 

Extract taken from Madame Fourcade’s Secret War by Lynne Olson, published by Scribe, 2019, $45 (hardback)

Published August 7, 2019 - I read this paragraph a couple of years ago in one of my secondhand treasures from Berkelouw bookshops and it has never left my mind.

“One good idea”

In Richard Whelan’s 1985 biography, Robert Capa, the story of the inventive Hungarian war photographer, adventurer, gambler and taker of risks, Whelan unerringly captured Capa’s down to earth approach to life. In 1947, Capa realised his dream of founding, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David Seymour, an elite photo agency, Magnum, which would be a co-operative and which continues to this day.

Capa was also the agency’s ideas man, very much as [Simon] Guttmann had been at Depot [Deutscher Photodienst, founded in 1928], coming up with ideas not only for group projects but also for stories to be done by individual members. When someone told Capa that he could make millions with all his ideas, he replied “I’ll never make millions. It’s the man with one good idea who makes millions. If you have twenty ideas a day, you have to give them away.” The corollary of this was his dictum that “coming up with ideas is not difficult - the hard part is making those who can carry them out believe that they came up with them in the first place”.

Extract taken from Robert Capa - A Biography by Richard Whelan, Faber and Faber, 1985

Published August 6, 2019 - This is what entranced three dogs and this reader today.

“Like we never knew each other”

As an ambitious East Coast socialite, who had once been married to a Wall Street rapscallion, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, was on the lookout for well-heeled and suitable beaux for her two marriageable daughters, Jackie and Lee. Now married to a far more suitable man, Hugh Auchincloss, Janet had no intention of letting her daughters make the mistake of falling in love with the wrong men. In 1951, she met stockbroker John G.W. Husted Jr, whose family she discovered, to her delight, was listed in the Social Register. Here was a man for Jackie! But, as J.Randy Taraborrelli details in Jackie, Janet & Lee, Husted - unfortunately for him and his heart - turned out to have a serious flaw. Neither he, nor his family, were anywhere near as rich as Janet had supposed. Having pushed her daughter into the relationship with the unwitting Husted, Janet now needed to end it - even though a lavish engagement party had just been held at Merrywood, Hugh Auchincloss’s estate in Virginia, in February 1952. “This was not the time for sentiment,” Janet told her daughter who now worried about hurting Husted’s feelings.

Shortly after that conversation, John Husted, spent the weekend at Merrywood as planned. With Jackie not present, Janet asked him directly how much money earned. He told her the truth - $17,000 annually - which, of course, she already knew. “My prospects for making more money were reasonable but not assured,” he would later recall, “and I had no great family fortune, at least, not the kind she wanted for Jackie. Consequently, Janet did not approve.”

After talking to John, Janet told Jackie what she had learned. Mother and daughter knew what had to be done. Later, when Jackie took him to the airport for his return flight, she simply slipped the engagement ring off her finger and dropped it into his jacket pocket. “She was ice cold,” John would remember. “Like we never knew each other. I understood that the end had come. I never heard from again. Not ever.”

In the weeks to come, Jackie would experience pangs of guilt about the way it had ended with John. She’d even gone to church to pray for guidance. Had she done the right thing? Yes, Janet reassured her, she had, and, in fact, she would one day thank her for her counsel….

… It’s worth noting that Janet’s prediction [“Why care about him when, in a week, he won’t be in our lives?”] that the family wouldn’t remember John Husted’s name seemed to come to pass when the first in-depth biography of Jackie was published in 1961. It was an authorised book written by a good friend of Janet’s, Mary Van Rensselaer. In it, John Husted isn’t even mentioned, totally written out of history.

Extract taken from Jackie, Janet & Lee by J. Randy Taraborelli, St Martin’s Press, 2018

Published August 6, 2019 - The very first, and explanatory, post for The Three Dog Reader.

“A novelist … has to conform”

I spend a lot of my time, these days, seemingly skiving off and reading. My big research project is so expansive I can pretty much justify reading almost anything, from Richard Parker’s biography of J.K.Galbraith to Movie Love in the Fiftiesto Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything and Cecil Beaton’s diaries. 

I’m also, for another project – All About E - starting to explore our attitudes to evil: so, more carte blanche to reading everything from thrillers to chronicles of resistance to Hitler. 

And finally, given how I have made my living, any book about writing, journalism, creativity, is allowed too. 

Along the way I come across so many memorable, remarkable, moving or just funny passages asides and cameos that I want to pass them on, which I will do here regularly – at The Three Dog Reader. Maybe the offerings will entice you into going out and finding the same book yourself. 

Here’s one of my recent favourites from Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, winner of the US National Book Award in 2018. 

The main character in The Friend teaches creative writing and, as the years go by, she is finding her students less and less appealing:

 That was another thing I noticed about the students: how self-righteous they’ve become, how intolerant they are of any weakness or flaw in a writer’s character. And I’m not talking about blatant racism or misogyny. I’m talking about any tiny sign of insensitivity or bias, any proof of psychological trouble, neurosis, narcissism, obsessiveness, bad habits – any eccentricity. If a writer didn’t come across as the kind of person they’d want to have as a friend, which invariably meant someone progressive and clean-living, fuck ‘em. 

I once had an entire class agree that it didn’t matter how great a writer Nabokov was, a man like that – a snob and a pervert, as they saw him – shouldn’t be on anyone’s reading list. A novelist, like any good citizen, has to conform, and the idea that a person could write exactly what they wanted regardless of anyone-else’s opinion was unthinkable to them.

 It’s no wonder that the same character, earlier in the book, writes this cameo:

 “In the faculty club. Another teacher and I drink gin and amuse ourselves speculating: in the event of a school shooting, which of our students would we or would we not take a bullet for.”

 And, in closing, a reminder that life always finds a way to imitate art, in late July, 2019, the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art announced, in an exclusive report from Ashleigh Wilson at The Australian, that from now on “artists accused of ‘serious misconduct’ will be scrutinised under a new policy to determine whether their work should be embraced or rejected”.  

Extracts taken from The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, Hachette Australia, 2019 - $22.99, also available as an e-book