five for friday

I’M WRITING THIS AT THE end of my second week of full-time teaching, which has been – to be perfectly honest – an assault on both body and mind. It’s been seven years since I last worked these sorts of hours in a university, and being a teaching-focused academic means a notoriously intensive workload. I can’t help but feel apprehensive about the next three months. However, I’m grateful for the opportunity to focus on just one thing.

Before the semester started, I was worried I’d disgrace myself by conking out in the lecture theatre – or some permutation of a public speaking nightmare – but the first class last Monday passed without disaster. In the time since, I’ve met more than a hundred students in the classroom, memorised only a handful of their names, and even dreamt about a particularly sullen third-year who claimed (in real life) they had nothing to learn in my course. No goals. No worries. Nothing whatsoever to share. Splendid.

Anyway. Every year, I pester my students to share their recommendations for books, TV shows, films, and music. My polling/pestering so far suggests that fantasy and romance novels really are having the best time, that nobody liked season 4 of Bridgerton, and that the 80s and 90s have become nostalgic touchstones for kids born well after the Y2K bug left our systems. (I regret to say that I visibly broke a sweet undergrad wearing a Def Leppard t-shirt when I pointed out the band had played in Brisbane a year or so back – and he’d missed seeing them live. My husband asked later me how I even knew, and I pointed out I’d ridden the train that day, and the carriages were squashed full of people in wigs, ripped jeans, and dramatic eye makeup. I feel so old.)

ANYWAY. Here’s a round-up of good things I’ve encountered recently.

One. Adele Dumont’s The Pulling has been on my bedside table for months and months. I started it last year, got sidetracked with other reading, then returned to it again only a fortnight ago. Luckily, it’s the sort of book you can savour over a long period of time, given its subtle pacing, meditative character, and incredible depth of detail.

The Pulling offers a painstaking account of a disorder called trichotillomania in which sufferers compulsively pull out hair from their scalp, face, or body. Like Dumont, I was an adult by the time I discovered there was a medical term for this behaviour. Unlike Dumont, I pull only sometimes and never to the extent that I’ve caused any visible hair loss. (In fact, I have unmanageably thick hair – WOW, a lot of hair, as hairdressers often say – which has helped conceal this urge I’ve experienced since my teenage years, despite my car often ending up full of discarded strands.)

Even if you have no personal experience of trichotillomania, The Pulling makes for fascinating and affecting reading. An unusually literary example of autopathography, the book centres almost entirely on Dumont’s own experiences, from childhood and adolescence through to the present. In later chapters, she introduces fragments of research into the telling, but her voice remains steady, lyrical, and entirely her own, never lapsing into solipsism or self-pity. This restraint, it becomes obvious, is in some ways related to her upbringing, born of a perfectionism and hypervigilance perhaps familiar to any child who’s tiptoed around a volatile parent.

Dumont’s candour does make for uncomfortable reading at times. She shares, in forensic detail, what an episode of pulling involves – both physically and psychologically. She also describes the unremitting shame she endures and the considerable effort she makes to ensure few people (if any, including her psychologist and boyfriend) see her hair in its natural state. For anybody who’s suffered a similar sense of stigma and subterfuge, no matter the source or reason, The Pulling makes space to explore some of the more inexplicable ways we all struggle for dominion over our bodies and inner worlds.

Five stars from me.

Two. Those who know me reasonably well will understand I have a mysterious penchant for war dramas. Such is the ferocity of my interest that I’ve completely run out of films and TV series to watch in this genre. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled across The Pacific on HBO Max, a 2010 miniseries following Band of Brothers (from 2001) but preceding Masters of the Air (2024).

I’d never even heard of it.

The Pacific (spoiler alert) is set in the Pacific Theatre of WWII – including Guadalcanal and Pavuvu (Solomon Islands), Cape Gloucester (New Britain), Peleliu (Palau), Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

The series follows a cluster of US Marines fighting the Japanese Imperial Army in treacherously hot, wet, and poorly resourced conditions. (Side note: Rami Malek appears as ‘Snafu’, delivering a flawless Creole accent in one of his first major roles at the time.)

While sometimes still perpetuating an obvious ‘America good, Japan bad’ ethos, the series does a harrowing job of highlighting the profoundly injurious effects of war on combatants.

Even more so than either Band of Brothers or Masters of the Air, The Pacific underscores the senselessness of WWII, particularly in the Pacific region, where thousands (if not millions) of soldiers lost their lives fighting low-stakes but high-casualty battles that ultimately had little effect on the overall trajectory of the war.

It goes without saying that war dramas depict graphic violence. But there’s violence and then there’s violence. The Pacific is renowned (and also criticised) for its relentless blood and gore. For me, some of the most troubling scenes in the series reveal the indifference of the Marines to enemy corpses; indeed, dead (typically decomposing) bodies are strewn literally everywhere. American soldiers often took ‘tokens’ from enemy soldiers, including flags, firearms, and even teeth.

The series is not for the faint-hearted or weak-stomached. But as far as war drama goes, it’s almost up there in my estimation alongside Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

Another five stars from me.

Three. Lately, I’ve been enjoying some tunes that take me back to my house-sharing days, and The Civil Wars’ ‘I Want You Back’ has been top of the list. It’s an acoustic cover of The Jackon 5’s original recording, and although all the dipthongised vowels now give me the giggles (for example, ‘bunch’ becomes something like ‘baaaaaiiiinnnch’ – why do indie musicians do this?!), it’s soothingly sombre and saccharine – and it reminds me of gossiping with my housemates in that shitty rental in Yeronga with the yellow formica kitchen and a scourge of cockroaches. Good times.

Four. Does anyone else find that if they love a product, it’s almost guaranteed to be discontinued? I love Yorkshire Tea, and they have (well, had) some flavoured varieties that I became almost religious about, especially the malty biscuit one. I’m not sure if these products have been discontinued entirely, or if they’re simply hard to find in Australia (Coles stopped stocking them, followed by David Jones then IGA). Whatever the case, I’ve been mourning their disappearance. I drink multiple cups of weak, milky tea every day, and nothing comes close to Yorkshire Tea Malty Biscuit Brew. Sorry, T2. When I was in Toowoomba last weekend, however, I found a box of M&S Luxury Gold Shortbread Tea while rushing through a local supermarket. It’s not the same as malty biscuits, but it’s… just as good! The only ingredients are black tea and some mysterious ‘flavouring’ – so it’s vegan but potentially carcinogenic, I surmise. Worth every drop. (Edited to add: A kind person alerted me to the joyous fact that David Jones has restocked!)

Five. Something is happening to me. Maybe it’s hormonal. Maybe it’s Brisbane’s interminable summer.

But my skin is so dry.

It’s the texture I longed for as a teenager circa 1998, when nothing signalled unkemptness so much as a shiny T-zone.

These days, as I stumble towards the desiccated age of 42, I want to look more like the love child of a disco ball and the Tin Man.

Dewy. Hydrated. Shiny af.

Daiso saves the day because – at least where I live – it stocks Curel products, one of my favourite brands from Japan. The intensive moisture cream is rich and emollient without being too turgid and heavy. It reminds me a little of the Glow Recipe avocado night cream that was also ruthlessly discontinued. (You can buy Curel products from W Cosmetics, too.)

Bonus. This comic, ‘My Sensible Work Pants Have Chosen Violence’ or ‘Free the Fupa’, captures a familiar feeling…