Quiet Communion

On Wednesdays I have a little ritual that I follow, and that I secretly delight in.
My wonderful partner drives me into the city early, and I have a wicked bacon and egg roll at a cafe on Macquarie Street.
Then I toddle over to the Mitchell Library and sit on the steps in the sun and wait for it to open, normally listening to a Unity FM podcast.
I spend all morning in the exquisite Mitchell wing, reading early twentieth century Australian self-help books, and delighting in the sunny, open reading room when I remember to look up.
At about ten to one I get up, stow my things in the locker and cross Macquarie Street to the wonderful art deco St. Stephen's Uniting Church. At 1 the delightful Reverend Doctor Matthew Jack conducts a Quiet Communion, and it is an exquisite service. A simple, meditative set of prayers, meditations and readings followed by the Holy Supper, it is normally sparsely attended, but I find it a great point of mid-week spiritual renewal. The wonderful art deco setting of St. Stephen's helps, of course, with its wonderful woodwork and sweeping staircases and cement halls.
Actually, I sometimes wonder if the church IS actually art deco. Everyone says so, but to me its fluid forms are more reminiscent of art nouveau, but I am no expert.
St. Stephen's has a fine history of progressive preaching, having once been the parish of Gordon Powell, one of the grandfathers of Australian self-help literature (and the subject of one of the chapters of my PhD thesis).

Sun, Sea and Bargain Spotting

Anyone who knows me knows that I am something of a collector.
My grandmother and my beloved Aunty Audrey were great collectors, so I inherited their hoarding instinct. Also, I grew up with a mother who was a great thrower-away of precious objects, so in reaction I developed a great desire to keep things, for pleasure, nostalgia, or "just in case."
Naturally, I am utterly in love with antiques programs on television. This was a passion I developed early, watching the wonderful Clive Hale (may he R.I.P) in that iconic 1980s ABC television show For Love or Money. Under Clive's tutelage I learned all about chinoiserie and murano crystal and Lladro figurines. These days I am loyal to the Antiques Roadshow, The Collectors on ABC, and what is quite possibly my favourite TV show ever - Sun, Sea and Bargain Spotting on ABC2.
A kind of low-rent reality show for the middle-aged, each week two contestants are given a set amount of money and let loose on a flea market in continental Europe. Then they bring their purchases back and have to try to sell them for a profit in a market in Britain. Isn't this brilliant? It's enthralling television, and leaves me on the edge of my seat each week wondering if Natalie, a customer-service supervisor from Sussex, will turn a profit on the shabby chic wardrobe mirror she bought at a car boot sale in Slovenia.
Angela Rippon is the host, and she camps it right up visiting out-of-the-way museums and reflecting in her glory days. She also gets in lots of comments about how fabulous the British are.
It runs for a full hour, leaving the viewer almost completely satiated, but still hanging out for next week's installment.
So forget glamorous evenings out. Stay in and watch some ABC2 - somebody's got to.

The Lover

My reading group at Uni next week is discussing Marguerite Duras' novel The Lover.
It is one of those books that has actually shaped my life, so I will be very interested to hear it discussed in an academic context. I read it when the English translation first came out (I was just an impressionable teenager), and I was instantly absorbed in its lushly romantic world. I never imagined that one day I might be living a similar story. Who knows, maybe what we read really does affect our destiny?
It is a unique text, very short, very dense, quite poetic in its effects. It seems to be the story that Duras had to tell all her life (Hiroshima Mon Amour covers the same territory, as does The North China Lover). Duras is also quite unique in the annals of literature, being the only author I'm aware of to repeatedly and even obsessively detail the story of interracial love between a Caucasian woman and an Asian man.
Whenever I am in Saigon, and particularly in Cholon, I am constantly reminded of sections of The Lover - since I read the book before I ever visited the city, I suppose the experience of the text shaped my experience of the place.
I think it is the perfect book. Quite cold and realistic about sex, and deliciously spiked with both autobiographical detail and orientalist exoticism, in many ways it is a deepy unfashionable work. I assume it is Duras' gender that shields her from the kind of reflexive post-colonial criticism that would have destroyed a male author writing a similar story.
For anyone who loves Vietnam I think it is essential reading. The book is extremely short and can easily be read in an afternoon. It is so intriguing, however, that once read it will certainly be read again. I will probably be reading it for the rest of my life, each time getting something new from it, being intrigued by a different detail.
Naturally, I suspect that my own deep engagement with the text arises from my own autobiograpical projection. From the very first I identified with the love-starved, plain-but-sexually-precocious teenaged heroine wasting away in dire poverty in a hot, dull and provincial place.
As well as being about sex and loneliness and desperation, it is a meditation on anger, both repressed and destructively vented. There is cruelty at the heart of this book, and not one of the characters escapes unscathed. As well as being lushly sensuous, the novel is dark and even mystical.
And the lover himself - the cold, sickly Chinese boy - is so cruelly and artfully sketched. So many of the details about their brooding liaisons are perfect, and perfectly honest.
Duras wrote this book when she was old and quite remarkably ugly (a fact she discusses in detail at the beginning of the book). It still stands as one of the bitterest memoirs of youth, and of the messy complexities of youthful desire.

Acedia & Me

I am a huge fan of Kathleen Norris. Along with Thich Nhat Hanh, she has helped me to re-shape my spiritual landscape over the years, and opened my eyes up to contemplative riches. Her books also helped me to get over my blockages surrounding Christianity.
Norris's humility, her unpretentious good humour and wonderfully clear and simply expressed writing make her something absolutely extraordinary in the field of spiritual writing. Very few can match her for wisdom, insight and craftsmanship.
I shamefacedly confess that in the years since her last book, The Virgin of Bennington, I have grumbled a little, saying "Why doesn't Kathleen Norris bring out a new book? Plenty of other crap people pump out a book or two a year - what's holding her up?" In this wonderful new book, she explains just exactly what she was doing in that long interval - nursing her dying husband and then coming to terms with the grief that comes after his passing.
She takes as her theme the delightfully archaic sin of acedia and explores its influence on her own life. Norris's thesis is that the contemporary world is quick to diagnose ill-feeling as depression, when in fact many suffer from acedia, which is both less serious and more insidiously destructive than clinical depression.
Acedia has always been the special weakness of intellectuals, artists, the religious and the otherwise sensitive. Indeed, over the years I have been conscious of its effect on my own life - great swathes of which have been lost to this all-consuming and tremendously wasteful sin.
Kathleen Norris could write a brilliant book about almost any subject, and she is a truly original thinker and writer. Her book Dakota is one of the most strikingly original pieces of writing I've ever encountered. But in Acedia & Me she has created a masterpiece, and a must-read for anyone who has had to deal with grief and loss and the frittering away of their own God-given talents and opportunities. This is a book I will turn to again and again, and already many of its themes have preoccupied me and caused me to pause and reflect.

Harold Acton

You may know that I am overwhelmingly interested in the figures at the margins of life. The successful I find dull - their stories are so standardised and oft repeated, and their work is frequently over-praised. If someone is too regularly acclaimed, all of my warning bells start ringing. If the world is at one in agreeing a person a genius, I am invariably at odds.
I admire the careers and stories of those who struggled for success, but never quite made it, for whatever reason. So often the books of the moderately famous are SO much more interesting.
One of those people who have fascinated me since I first heard of them is Harold Acton.
Acton was an extraordinary person. Born to an immensely wealthy American woman and an impoverished, but upper class, English father, Acton grew up in Florence and went to study at Eton and Oxford. He knew absolutely everybody, and was a socially gifted raconteur whose legendary charm (and ample allowance) made him a popular figure in "between-the-wars" England. Clever and entirely over-cultured, Acton developed a reputation as a lounge lizard and dilettante, and being wealthy proved to be his curse. Never forced to earn a living, Acton never really applied himself to anything much, and so a really quite brilliant talent was frittered away in a lifetime of moderately amusing interests and diversions.
For many years he was supposed to be the model for Evelyn Waugh's foppish character Anthony Blanch in Brideshead Revisited, but Waugh always denied this, and it is much more likely that the real-life model was Acton's Oxford pal, Brian Howard - the most phenomenally wonderful failure ever to have existed (with the possible exception of Stephen Tennant).
Acton became something of a sinophile, and spent some years living in Beijing, where he set a wonderful comic novel called Peonies and Ponies, which no-one ever reads any more, but which is really quite lovely.
He was a lifelong friend of Nancy Mitford, and wrote the first biography of her.
Acton's most famous book was probably his autobiography, Memoirs of an Aesthete, which I am currently re-reading for the umpteenth time. He had the good fortune to outlive most of his contemporaries, and so when he released the autobiography he was enough of an historical oddity to excite the interests of a nostalgic reading public.
All his life Acton was more or less openly gay, and there are some stinging passages in Memoirs when he reflects on the respectable middle-aged scions of British society who were once his lovers during the salad days at Oxford. His reputation as an art connoisseur grew and grew, and when he died he left his sizeable fortune and collections to New York University. This estate is still the subject of court challenges, as it was one of the finest and wealthiest in Italy.
Acton's miniscule literary output belies his skill as a writer. The books are really very charming, well-crafted in an old-fashioned way, and well worth reading.

The Medicine Buddha

One of the more intriguing figures in the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon is the Medicine Buddha.
This particular Buddha (Duoc Su in Vietnamese) is credited with special properties of healing, but images of him are reasonably rare in most Mahayana temples.
Within the Tibetan tradition there is a much greater representation of him, in his exquisite Blue form, his skin exuding the very soothing properties of health and wellbeing. These blue Buddhas are among my favourite images. In the Vajrayana there are any number of Medicine Buddha practices, and there is a special mantra attributed to him. At the Khuong Viet Vajrayana Temple in Ho Chi Minh City the focus of practise is entirely on reciting the Medicine Buddha Sutra and chanting his mantra.
There is really very little written on the Medicine Buddha in English, though he is such a popular figure in Buddhist folklore and practise. There is an excellent book by Raoul Birnbaum, and at the moment I am reading quite a fascinating book called In Search of the Medicine Buddha by David Crow, which sets out the system of traditional Tibetan medicine, which of course traces its roots back to the Medicine Buddha.
This is the Medicine Buddha Mantra. I hope that it helps you if you're feeling a little under the weather:

Om namo bhagawate Bhaishjaye guru

vaidurya prabha rajaya tathagataya

arhate samyaksam buddhaya teyatha

om bekhajye bekhajye maha bekhajye

bekhajye rajaya samungate svaha

Spirits

Vietnamese cinema fascinates me, for many reasons.
The films produced in Vietnam are still, for the most part, extraordinarily low-budget affairs, patched together with censored scripts and on-location shoots and frequently embarrassing outcomes. That said, sometimes this enforced economy produces films of some delicacy and artistry, and several times I have seen at festivals and on SBS some really beautiful stuff filmed in Vietnam. Let's face it, as a country it is jam-packed with amazing stories, so occasionally one simply has to rise to the surface. For the most part such films are ignored in Vietnam, where people are much more interested in watching B Grade action flicks from America or Europe, or Korean and Taiwanese Soap Operas. Cinemas are little more than glorified love hotels, so what's showing on-screen is just not important. It is not uncommon to see movie houses screening 1970s Bruce Lee flicks dubbed into Viet, or a marathon screening of the Look Who's Talking films, all dubbed over by a single actor, the English soundtrack barely, but annoyingly, audible.
Then there are Vietnamese film makers working overseas. The most famous is probably Tran Anh Hung, the justly celebrated French-Vietnamese auteur who created a masterpiece with his The Scent of Green Papaya, a film which managed to evoke completely the nostalgic memory of Saigon past while being filmed exclusively on a set in Paris.
Interestingly, almost the entire Vietnamese music industry is based in California, where studios pump out CDs, DVDs and variety concerts consumed slavishly by Vietnamese all over the world - including in Vietnam itself.
The film Spirits seems to be an outcome of this Californian Vietnamese AV industry, featuring American Vietnamese actors and filmed in California, yet telling a subtly spooky series of ghost stories set in Vietnam. It is well done, and for the most part the actors do a good job - I particularly loved Catherine Ai as the shonky middle-aged medium and feng shui expert sent to pacify the ghosts. The movie captures perfectly the Vietnamese conviction about the existence of ghosts, and explores issues of the subjugation of women, the exploitation of grief and, intriguingly, the nature of literature and being a writer. Altogether it is a sophisticated little production that deserves to be better known. See if you can find it.