And what Netty thinks about being an Invisible Man …
Ah, race relations. What a hoary old chestnut. And while next month Andy and I will be discussing this subject again in the context of indigenous Australians, the past month found us delving into the topic in its American circumstances, courtesy of African-American writer Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I couldn’t help but wonder after finishing a book considered “the great American Negro novel”, and first published back in 1952, what its author would think about it all if he were still alive today (he died in 1994 at the age of 80). After all, his country of birth now has its first black president. But anyone who thinks the black-white divide in

Invisible Man – Yo, motherfouler, wanna get hep with what Andy thinks? Oh dear lord…
Motherfouler. Yep. I’ll explain later. Meanwhile if you’ve never clicked on the “Follow this blog” button to the right do it. Now. No questions. Just do it. Now. Now. You’ve been told. I’ve had trouble blogging about this book. Not because it isn’t good – well, it’s not good, it’s great. And not because I didn’t love it – well, I didn’t love it, I liked it. Having read it, finally – it’s one of those novels that I’ve known about for years, presumably since I picked it up in a secondhand bookshop as a teenager thinking it was HG Wells’ scifi yarn – I can understand

Netty likes Liquor. Well, no surprises there …
Cuisine is the new black. You can’t step out your front door these days without tripping over a hot new restaurant, a happening new chef, a smash-hit culinary TV show. And whilst yours truly is more likely to drool over a bowl of two-minute cheesy noodles (yeah, I’ve always been a white-trash foodie) than braised cumquat in ricotta couscous, even I spend more time than I would like to admit watching the Food Channel (Iron Chef America, natch). So, American writer Poppy Z. Brite, better known for her forays into the goth-horror genre, may well have tapped into the zeitgeist slightly before the game with the 2004 release of Liquor, the second of her four novel

Liquor – What Andy thought after he sobered up… Oh, sorry, that never actually happens
I’m on holidays this week and there have been a couple of mornings when I toyed with blogging about last month’s book. But then I thought, well, a book called Liquor, you can’t really blog about a book called Liquor when you’re sober, can you? No. No, you can’t. So I’m not. If you’ve read the book it gets better than that. Because I’m blogging half pissed after a contre temps in the kitchen over my dinner. Tandoori-marinated chicken breasts over (dodgy microwaved) rice with a chickpea curry on the side. My boyfriend was upstairs doing battle with a sudden plague of ants I hadn’t noticed cos my eyes are fucked

In which Netty attempts to again come to grips with economic concepts, but instead gains an even gre
I did a year of economics during my HSC, back in the mid-1980s. I don’t know how much of it I’ve retained – none, I suspect. Pretty much all I remember of that class was that my teacher had a collection of rather natty bowties. And that was where I met a certain boyfriend who managed during the course of a year to dump me not once, but twice – and the second time during swot vac, which is, trust me, not a good time to be dumped. I also seem to recall that he got a credit in that class, whilst yours truly barely scraped through with a pass. Of course, he got his karmic relationship comeuppance later down the track, but let’s face it, that’s g