The ABC has posted the transcript of the first half of “In Realms of Gold”, a documentary about Shirley de la Hunty.

I was reading the paper yesterday and was interested to see one of the columnists address something that’s bothered me for some time. The United States of America is an enormous country, 300 million people, lots of resources, the most powerful nation on Earth and rich as heck, yet you can not buy a decent cup of coffee there for love or money.

I’ve spent more than two years in the US (mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area) – either living there or visiting – and I’ve never come close to anything half way palatable. I’ve tried the chains – Peets, Starbucks etc – and they’re appalling. I’ve tried five star restaurants, even five star restaurants specialising in Western European cuisine, and they consistently show a near total ignorance of how to make a cappuccino or a latte. Heck, when I was in Boston last month the first cappuccino I tried came in a large glass and the second with a straw!

The thing that’s particularly weird about the coffee thing is that the US is a crap country for coffee that thinks it’s a great country for coffee. There’s a constant chatter in the US media about how wonderful their coffee is, and how great their chainstores are. Everywhere you go – from groceries to bookstores – you can get coffee, but it’s always in foot high styrofoam cups with toffee and vanilla or some other crap. It mystifies me. Oh, and as if to confirm all of this, the newspaper columnist noted that Starbucks is being forced to close stores in Australia’s booming coffee market because of lack of sales. The only place they’re doing ok is at airports, where choice is limited and tourists abound.

So, my tip if you’re headed for the US is go, enjoy the wonderful people, the amazing sights and all of the nation’s many attractions, but don’t drink the coffee.

The year is slipping away and it’s looking less and less likely that Subterranean Press will get Howard Waldrop’s new collection Heart of Whitenesse into print for 2004, which is a little disappointing. I should probably add here that I’ve never heard of Subterranean dropping a book, so I’m sure it definitely will come out, but just probably next year some time. Oh well.

I am happy, though, to hear that Cemetery Dance is going to publish a new collection of stories by Terry Dowling, and that Small Beer are publishing Kelly Link’s second collection, Magic for Beginners, and a new Maureen McHugh collection. This year, 2004, has been a pretty outstanding year for collections in what seems to be a golden age (almost) for great collections (you need only look at Lucius Shepard’s Trujillo and Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice to see that), and 2005 looks set to be every bit as good.