I'm half way through Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's book, Tourism, which (as promised) I am reading in the bath, and sometimes cheating a bit and reading on public transport. Not the sort of book you want to be reading on public transport and have someone read over your shoulder, though, if you get my rather pornographic drift.

It's not what I thought it would be at all. I thought it was going to be something challenging and innovative and exciting, even if I didn't agree with what it said about race, or women, or sex. But actually I think it's just another pseudo-existentialist monologue about an enraged, solitary, non-communicative boy who can't express himself, but loves describing how broken and manly he is, and desperately wants to have sex with the only clever woman in his life who isn't his mother. Which is a story I've read before, and was boring even the first time.

But of course, I'm keeping an open mind.

Could be rip-snorter from here on in. Who knows.

Want to get a different perspective on a really stupid news story?

I never thought I'd end up having an opinion about Brad and Angelina's baby, but there you are. Check it out here.

In other news, almost finished my Aleksandar Hemon book, which is addictively beautiful, especially now that I have his accent in my head. The character in his book is always talking about being painfully aware of his accent, so now I retrospectively want to reassure Hemon, the author, at the Writers' Festival, while he's signing books, that in fact his accent is lovely, and so is his book, and so is he.

You would think that by now I would understand that the author and the character are not the same thing, but somehow (J K Rowling excluded) I can never quite draw the line...

I'm frankly still coming down from the screening of the film the other night, which was right up there with the most exciting moments Standing There Productions has had this year (squeezing in just above the time I cleaned my room so comprehensively that I could see my desk for a whole day and a half). But in other news:

Nearly finished Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, which is getting really juicy now that his love of science has driven him to work on a little old thing called the nuclear bomb. But I must confess that I broke the rule of never dallying from one book, and I read two articles about Alan Bennett (in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books) which means that I now feel more or less entitled to discuss him as if we've been acquaintances for years. When David Lodge, in the NYRB article, started criticising Bennett's diary entry of September 11, I found myself thinking, "Oh dear, David, your problem is, you just don't understand Alan". It's just like when I was watching the winter Olympics and I actually called out furiously in my own loungeroom, "Oh I can't believe she thought she could do that during a 360 turn". Massive expert, me.

Today I've been working in the Victoria Law Foundation, trying to help organise Law Week. I was trying to find some funny quotes or jokes about law. Problem was, they had to NOT be offensive to lawyers, which of course left me with things that sound like bumper stickers. "Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal" etc.

So anyway, thankfully along the way I found the following statements from the snorty-laugh-inducing Dave Barry (go here) who is also the man who established the rule that you should never comment on a woman's pregnancy until you actually see a baby coming out of her (in case she has put on weight, rather than become pregnant). Anyway, here's Dave:

"Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world".

Also:

"Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear"

Finally, I greatly enjoy the following as a sage commentary on American party politics:

"The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club".

... If you want to genuinely laugh as well as quite inexplicably wanting all of a sudden to watch the entire of series one of 24, go to his blog entries on TV. Most amusing.

Did I mention we had fun at the screening? Pictures up soon.

So tomorrow night is our cast and crew screening in Fitzroy. I'm reminded again of how bizarre my life is when I find myself asking questions using words I don't understand to people I barely know, the answers to which could well determine what it is people actually see when they come to see our film.

Did you know, for instance, that there are heaps of different ways to watch a film on a TV? There are heaps of different DVD players and heaps of different sorts of TVs and projectors and there are things called "modes" and "formats" and WHY WASN'T ALL THIS SORTED OUT IN A MEETING SOMETIME IN THE LATE EIGHTIES?

I was watching our film today in my loungeroom when it ocurred to me that I must have lost quite a lot of weight since I was in that film. I was thinking, "Hang on, is this a movie about a fat girl? Is this a comment on the representation of women in the media?" I mean, I was reeeeally wide. Then (with considerable relief) I realised I was in "wide" mode.

Mental note: remember not to put film in wide mode tomorrow night. Actors may take offence.

Reading update: Sydney Writers' Festival fast approaching and I'm a fraction (geddit?) of the way through Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, which is a book full of deliciously outdated expressions and vast overuse of the exclamation mark. It's also fascinating because it's about a guy who treats every moment in life as an opportunity for an experiment (social or scientific). Including dreams. He decides he wants to work out what dreams are like, so in his own dreams he sits there going, "ah, this bit of my dream is clever. See what my subconscious is doing there? That's most intriguing".

This is my favourite bit so far, which is an aside during a description of the kinds of things he would argue with fellow students about at university:

"I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas something that they didn't believe - like the time we got into an argument as to whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and I had to demonstrate that that wasn't the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head".

Of course you did. You had to.

Here's to nerds.

Where would we be without them?

Us. Where would you be without us?

Today is the first Sunday for four weeks that I haven't had to cram everything in before a seven thirty show. It's the first day of no comedy festival shows whatsoever.

So I got up at two this afternoon, after a rather colourful night at the festival club, and I thought very seriously about getting some of the work done that Rita and I had scheduled in for Sunday. Then I got dressed in what clothes I could find that weren't held together by cigarette smoke and rain (it's been a very healthy couple of weeks) and I went for a walk. Which was quite adventurous, considering the other option was staying in bed.

In other news, Sammy J, the guy who plays the Young Liberal in I Could Be Anybody, was awarded Best Newcomer last night at the comedy festival, which is enormously exciting and he should be sent to the congratulatorium (along with Tim Stitz, who is already there. They can have cups of tea together by the fire and talk about what to do next).

Also, I went to the Victorian College of the Arts graduation ceremony the other night. I was outraged that I had to pay thirty dollars to go and watch someone walk up on stage and collect a piece of paper. I would now like to retract that outrage. It was quite brilliant, with bits of film, music, dance, and performing that really made me wonder (once again) what life would have been like for me if I'd gone to art school.

Ben Hjorth, who played Oliver in our play, People Watching, led the most astonishing chant from the back of Hamer Hall in Melbourne. The people who did Men of Steel at the comedy festival performed some of their hilarious food-fight puppet comedy (a genre consisting, I should think, only of them) and the kids from the school of dance made me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my body (walking? sitting around? Pathetic!). Then, hours into the ceremony, a shambles of musicians appeared onto the stage and played some awe-inspiring stuff (and I'm leaving out the actors and the film makers because I'm far more interested in watching things I don't know anything about). So there. Pretty excellent stuff. Stew graduated (and surprised everyone a little when he took a polariod of the actual moment he shook hands with the Vice Chancellor) and then my friend Simon graduated, as did our 1st AD from I Could Be Anybody, Eva Tandy (who was whooped with considerable gusto by the rather reserved audience). I'm very lucky to know these people.

Anyway, I have to go and fall asleep over my new book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman. Yay for learning things from other people.

So my book reading project is going well.

Last night I finished the enormous tome that is Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, which (nerdishly) I read from cover to cover as though I was reading a novel. It's really fragments from his diary and stories about his life, cobbled together when he thought (and his doctors thought) he was probably dying.

One of the best things I discovered about him was the stance he took in relation to Oxford University, the university he attended and apparently loved. He was, however, horrified when they set up "The Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications". When asked to attend a charity event, and later to accept an honorary degree at the university, Bennett wrote back to them and suggested "that if the university thinks it's appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch's money, perhaps they ought to approach Sadam Hussein to found a chair in peace studies".

I wish I could be offered lots of important-sounding honours so that I could wittily and pointedly turn them down.

So that's two books (one play and one autobiography) as well as two essays by Cooke and now almost half of an extract from a James Kelman book (yes I know, extracts shouldn't count, but this is the information age so I'm doing well to even maintained my concentration throughout this paragraph. I bet you skimmed).

You did so.

In training for the Sydney Writer's Festival, I've decided I need to finish the books I've started (those on the top of the pile next to my bed). Until then, I'm not allowed to buy or borrow new ones because I don't deserve them.

Over the years, I've become a hopeless reader. When I was a kid, I used to read every book from cover to cover, and then read every other book by that author, in order of books written. Now, I'm hopeless.

You know on your computer, if you press ALT and TAB at the same time, it flicks between one program and another? That's how my life works. There I am, working on a film and then ALT + TAB I'm also working at the Comedy Festival but ALT + TAB I'm working at the Law Foundation and ALT + TAB I'm working at Radio National. All the other windows are open and the programs are running and stuff, but I'm flicking between them all the time, so I never quite optimise my experience.

That's how I read, too. I've had Alan Bennett's new book (which is so funny and brilliant) next to my bed since I ordered it online so I'd get it before anyone in Australia could claim to have read it before me. Several ALT + TABs later and I still haven't finished it but I've read several Joanna Murray-Smith plays, two brilliant scripts by Tom Stoppard and the beginning of a book called Boyhood by Coetzee. I also started a book by Will Self but I lost it down the back of the bed somewhere and I wasn't sure I didn't resent and despise it anyway, so at least this way I don't have to find out.

I do feel so guilty about these books I don't finish. It's a form of infidelity, not unlike when you have to turn off a CD in the middle of a really intense bit where the singer is belting out a particularly complicated couple of bars of climax and you have to rush out of the house but you know you're not paying enough respect to Aretha, or Buckley, or more likely if I'm being honest, Ben Folds.

Anyway, point being, book-wise, I am turning over a new leaf. Last night, after visiting Penny's and Yianni's shows (yay for them by the way, they're selling out)... I went home.

Yes! Home. Not to the Festival Club. Not to a Kitson gig or to support one of the local heroes or to a bar to hang out with people I don't see enough of anymore. I went home, I had a bath and I finished Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Yay for Tom Stoppard being clever about British snobbery and writing good characters for women and being a little bit obscure and making you wish you'd studied history right the way through university.

So, I'm on my way. For a lovely take on the reading of books, check out this. Nick Hornby, writer of things like About a Boy, writes a column about what he reads versus what he plans to read every month. Depressingly, he reads more than I do and complains about not reading much and being a philistine. But all that will change now I'm sure and I will become the sort of person Nick Hornby wishes he could be. Or not. We'll see how that one pans out.

Last, ALT + TAB, a dig at The Age, which I realise is a dead horse, but COME ON. Yesterday, they (the Melbourne newspaper that sponsors the comedy festival) ran reviews of Ross Noble (who so desperately needs a good review), two people with national TV shows, and two Americans.

Good. Excellent. So people know what the things they won't be able to get into because they're SOLD OUT are going to be like. What a service to the community.