In August, I read the headline I’d been waiting for all my life:

Motorcyclist fined for wearing BBQ

In a nearby suburb on a late August day, Michael Wiles, a 29-year-old man drove merrily down the freeway on his motorcycle wearing a BBQ.  A report on Yahoo!7 news said that Wiles had

found a discarded BBQ on the side of the road, and decided to take it home with him.  Albeit, haphazardly.

After being tracked down by police with the help of an emailed photo which went “viral”, Wiles was fined $800.  Shortly after, he was approached by the retailer, Barbeques Galore, to appear in an advertisement.  Wiles is reported to have

refused the offer, copped his fine, and … been forced to admit the discarded BBQ was a dud.

*****

Also in August, a month of follies as it turned out, Mark Latham, cauliflower-brained contender in the Campbelltown corner, delivered a KO to his journalistic nemesis in the gallery, Laurie Oakes:

It’s like an elephant hiding behind a bar-stool.

I shouldn’t laugh, but I howled.

*****

August was the month of Fernando Pessoa.  Now, if I’ve heard this Portuguese writer’s name before, it must have been once a decade.  Then Harold Bloom, keeper of the Western Canon, anointed him one of the chosen.  And suddenly, Pessoa’s name leapt wherever I looked.  Including on the shelves of Dymocks where his Book of Disquiet palpated and disgorged a recommendation so compelling that September too will be the month of Pessoa:

This book has moved me more than anything I have read in years.  I have rarely encountered such exhilarating lugubriousness.

~ Daily Telegraph

*****

Finally, in August, I finished reading the wonderful Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.  Tatyana Tolstaya in the Afterword discusses some of the problems of the novel, including Turgenev’s obvious quandary about what to do with Bazarov once he’d brought the abrasive young nihilist to life.  In fact, Turgenev confronted the exact issue that must confront nihilists everywhere and in every time: what to do when nothing’s worth doing? So Turgenev had to kill him off.  But Tolstaya assures us Bazarov’s fame lives on, even today, as a hero of loutishness for Russian school boys and in the common noun bazarovshchina, meaning crude materialism, rejection of art, and so on.

Turgenev is a master portraitist.  With just a dab of paint here, a shadow there, his characters would up and take a turn in my heart.  Here are just a few delicacies:

Only the young men ate.  The master and mistress had had their dinner long before.  Fedka served, clearly bothered by his unfamiliar boots, and he was helped by a woman with one eye and a masculine face …

Dunyasha was happy to giggle with him and surreptitiously gave him significant glances as she ran past him like a little quail.  Pyotr, an extraordinarily conceited and stupid fellow, always anxiously wrinkling up his forehead, whose entire virtue lay in an obsequious manner, in being able to spell out his words and in frequently brushing his coat …

… she didn’t take her eyes off her son and kept on sighing; she was dying to know how long he had but she was frightened to ask him.  ‘What if he says for two days,’ she thought, and her heart froze.

In reading Fathers and Sons, I once again marvel at what the novel is capable of, what it once was capable of, and I wonder if we’ll see its glories again.

Tell me, why is it that even when we enjoy, for example, music, or a good party, or conversation with sympathetic people, why is it that all that seems to be a hint of some infinite happiness existing somewhere else rather than a real happiness, that is one we own ourselves?

*****

Images: BBQ man, courtesy of Yahoo!7 news; Fernando Pessoa, courtesy Wikipedia