secret scribbled

What are you reading?

2012-02-10T07:59:00.002+11:00

I'm interested in this. Many people pass through this blog, maybe on the way to somewhere else, and I wonder who you are, and what you're reading right now.

(Let me say that I'm interested in all sorts of minutiae about people. I find the contents of the supermarket trolleys of the people in front of me quite interesting - it passes the time and stops queue rage. If you want to tell me what was on your most recent grocery list I'll listen to that too.)

So me: I've been rather distracted lately with Life and writing, so my reading has been very slow. But what I can't stop reading (and I've almost finished it) is this very odd book called Troubles, by J G Farrell.

It's set in Ireland in about 1918-20, and concerns major Brendan Archer, an Englishman just back from the War, who thinks he may be engaged to a woman named Angela (she dies early on), who lives with her family in an enormous crumbling hotel in rural Ireland called The Majestic.

The Majestic is in a way really the main character of this book. It's so enormous and rambling that people are always getting lost, so dilapidated that they routinely change rooms when the one they're in ceases functioning. A place so vast that even the owner gets lost in it; people wander fruitlessly down corridors searching for each other and missing each other; a huge and increasing tribe of cats has taken up residence - one room is described as 'boiling with cats' - who are later slaughtered and carried in sacks dripping with blood downstairs (luckily the carpets are red).

This is a book that teeters on the edge of humour and farce, yet it is violent and tragic. Throughout are newspaper reports of 'troubles': in Ireland, and India, and other parts of the British Empire. There are troubles nearby in the village as well, as the aftermath of the Easter uprising of 1916 is played out.

Major Archer is a strange man; he seems almost trapped in the hotel, too apathetic to leave. After Angela dies, he falls in love with a dreadful woman named Sarah, the Catholic daughter of the bank manager in the town; he finds the linen room, one of the only warm places in the hotel, and regularly lies there on a nest of sheets in its fug from the heat in the kitchen and fantasises about her. Repressed sexuality is one of the themes running through the book.

Then there are the twins, Faith and Charity, Angela's younger sisters, who hint at a less repressed time coming in the 1920s; and there's Padraig, the grandson of the local doctor, whom they enjoy dressing up as a girl (as does Padraig.)

All very metaphorical ...

This book won the delightfully named Lost Booker Prize a couple of years ago, a once-off prize for books published in 1970 that slipped through the Booker net when the dates for eligibility were changed. I became interested in it when I read a piece about Farrell by Penelope Fitzgerald in a book of her collected writings.

And you? What are you reading? How did you get to hear of it?

Favourite books of 2011

2011-12-31T10:29:00.000+11:00

Wet day ... sniffles ... last day of the year ... and I can't resist a list:

The Golden Day, Ursula Dubosarsky

One of the few books I read that was actually published this year. I've read it three times, so far.
I love the way it's written, the humour, and the threads and patterns of the fabric of it. It's coloured with the light of memory and childhood. Reading should be an experience akin to actually being somewhere, and this is. If it was a dream (and it is dream-like) I'd try to go back to it. As it's a book, I can simply re-read it.

Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro

This pretty well describes my experience of getting hold of this book. It had slipped beneath my radar: I think it came out in 2009. It's currently down on my writing desk - I read a few of her sentences to push-start my writing on days when words don't come gracefully. Munro and I go back a long way - at least 30 years, and she just gets better and better.

Thanks to the Queanbeyan library: when I was minding rabbits there for 3 weeks I tried to do a temporary membership: theoretically possible, but the person on the desk was so reluctant that I said 'Forget it!' and left a copy of this book that I'd discovered on the shelves behind. There are no bookshops in Queanbeyan. When I got home to Wongavale I ordered a copy online.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Found on a table at Aldi - a Collins Classic.

Had I read this before? I thought I had, but remembered none of it (the goldfish method of reading, you simply forget what you've read and go round and round rediscovering things), although of course I knew what it was about - how can you live in the world of books and not?

Wilde's only novel, this reminded me of why I love him so much. He's compassionate and so intelligent - his sheer intelligence is what I noticed most in reading this.

Many of his best-known aphorisms come from this novel. I will (naturally) read it again.

Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger.

I hate Catcher in the Rye. I read this because another blogger wrote about it.

Can this guy write!

Come back, J.D. All is forgiven.

Underground, by Haruki Murakami

Another old book I hadn't read. This isn't a novel, but an account, through interviews, of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

It's a fascinating study of the way various individuals were affected, the way the authorities responded (and failed to respond) - a story of muddles and incompetencies, bravery and survival, and, as the subtitle suggests, the 'Japanese psyche'.

The character of Murakami, as interviewer and commentator, comes across too. I like him. I received 1Q84 (its themes not unrelated to this book) for Christmas, and I'm looking forward to reading it, when I've finished reading:

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Can you count a book as read in 2011 if you haven't finished reading it yet? I have less than 14 hours left of this year, so I can't see it happening.

I kept reading other books in between, not because I didn't like this, but because I read multiple books at a time (you know how it is).

But this is possibly my top book of the year. I struggle with the Russian names, the way the characters seem to have many titles that refer to them, and the fact that I'm not a 19th Century Russian, or indeed a 20th or 21st Century Russian and doubtless don't get all the nuances.

But I think I may feel Russian by the time I've finished it, because the world of this book is so addictive and all- consuming and detailed, the characterisation so subtle and precise.

I love some of the women in this book! Dostoyevsky is an hon woman, in my estimation, along with James Joyce. The eccentric Epanchin women, for example:

The three daughters of General Epanchin were blooming, healthy, well-grown young women, with magnificent shoulders, well-developed chests and strong, almost masculine arms; and naturally with their health and strength they were fond of a good dinner and had no desire to conceal the fact.

Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford

What a delightful comedy. I read this about 30 years ago after the TV series with Judy Dench in it, and had lost it (I think I may have lent it to my sister, from whence no books return).

A month or so ago I saw she had a new Penguin Classics copy, and borrowed it.

I don't think I'll give it back.

Flynn

2011-12-30T09:33:00.001+11:00

Over Christmas, my children were showing me Facebook (how old-fashioned am I?), and I discovered that About A Girl (called Flynn in the Netherlands) has its own Facebook page (so do I, but it's not really mine, just the page of the author Joanne Horniman, who at times seems quite removed from me).

Anyway, I'm sure the publisher La Vita won't mind me stealing a picture from Flynn's page, of two lovely Dutch women with the book ...

... and what looks like a pink flamingo.

Which just goes to show that books are like children. They grow up and have lives of their own, and you need to keep track of 'em on Facebook if you want to know what they're really up to.

Vampyres are taking over my world

2011-12-17T10:57:00.001+11:00

I was in a book chain yesterday; not, I have to say a high class shop, but one in a shopping mall in a large country town. And almost every book in the YA section had a vampyric type cover. They weren't all vampire books, but they all had a sensational look to them (yeah, I know, don't judge a book etc). *

Australian books: I saw a few. A pile of John Marsden's Tomorrow books. Andrew McGahan's new Ship Kings series. A copy of Steven Herrick's The Simple Gift.

It was pretty slim pickings. ALL THE REST OF THE BOOKS WERE THE SAME.

That's what disturbs me. This is the current paradigm of books and book covers. All jumping on the Twilight bandwagon (sorry for the cliches: my mind is addled today: too much time in a shopping mall, obviously. New Year's res: stay away from the shops).

I'm not the first to mention it; nor it is the first time I've noticed it, of course.

I mean, I go to airports a lot.

In Big W a few weeks ago I saw a similar treatment given to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. There was a candle there, I think, and a lot of red and black.

Now, these gals (the Brontes) didn't exactly invent Gothic, but they did a lot for its literary credentials. And their time was full of sensational books by female authors, writers they have all outlived, and then some.

It's the homogenisation I hate.

On the way home I breathed deeply and said, to myself, 'This, too, will pass.' I've seen a lot of fads in kids books come and go in my time.

In the meantime, I'm working on a novel whose contents will not be amenable to this kind of treatment (but hey, you can stretch anything...)

*An addendum: I'm not against vampire books, by the way. When one of my sons was a teenager he chose to read Dracula for a school project and I was delighted that he enjoyed what is essentially a nineteenth century novel, with all its difficulties.

Recipe for North Coast Girl

2011-12-09T15:56:00.002+11:00

Rich boiled fruit cake:

500 gms mixed fruit
1 tabsp golden syrup
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup sherry (or orange juice)
4 oz butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
1 1/4 cups plain flour
1/4 cup s/r flour
1 teasp mixed spice
1/4 teasp cinnamon
1/4 teas nutmeg
1/4 cup split blanched almonds

put fruit, golden syrup and water in saucepan. Bring to boil, simmer 2 minutes. Pour into bowl, add sherry or oj, cover and stand overnight
cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time
Sift half flour and spices over fruit mixture, and mix so fruit is coated. Add to cream mixture and mix well; add rest of flour and mix well
put in tin and bake at 160 degrees C for 3 hours

This is my mother's recipe exactly. I do things a little differently, and you can adapt it to suit your tastes. This is a very plain, very basic fruit cake.

As our eggs are big, I often only use two, esp when the chooks aren't laying. I also use less butter and substitute a bit of olive oil.

On top I put whole, unblanched almonds, more than 1/4 cup.

Sometimes I add a bit of preserved ginger and chopped dates to the fruit as well. You can put whatever fruit and nuts in you like - I know you will.

Also, it takes a bit less than 3 hours to cook - watch it and keep testing with a skewer.

Line the tin with a layer of brown paper, and then baking paper if you have it.

When it's cool, wrap it and keep for 2 weeks - it's better than fresh.

(It's called a boiled fruit cake because you boil the fruit, not the cake.)

(see, easy as making a regular cake - maybe easier - certainly a cinch for you, cake inventor!)

Why I love the USA

2011-11-19T15:32:00.005+11:00

"don't you get low as hell
when the peace dove is felled
by a man with the blackest of minds
and above the din
let the sighing begin
as we're bound for the longest of days"

He's singing about Bush, but the warmongering doesn't seem to stop, whether we have Labor or Liberal, Democrat or Republican.

America, your true patriots have always been your dissidents and poets and songwriters - Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan ... all of them putting their queer shoulders to the wheel.

And then there's A. A. Bondy.
Sydneysiders, you can catch the excellence of him at the Sydney Festival in January.

Tall tales

2011-11-15T08:55:00.000+11:00

I've been interviewed by Tracy on the UK blog, Tall Tales and Short Stories.

You can read it here.

gratuitous picture of Little Tiger, as the post looks very short, and we are feeling relaxed

Three little words

2011-11-11T12:12:00.001+11:00

After exhorting the world to 'Type Slowly' (not that much of the world is listening) I've become caught up in this mad November writing month.

Not that I've signed up, but today I came close to the nanowrimo quota of 1667 words: 1664 words (though this included half a sentence in brackets at the end reminding me of what I want to write tomorrow). I always like to leave writing at a stage where I could keep going, rather than expend everything in my head.

So: three little words. You'd think I could bust a gut and write three more. But no, something in me likes falling just short of the quota. Actually, I'd been wondering if any day in the entire month I'd come close.
I must say, knowing I was close, I pushed on further than I normally would.

So - this fast writing really seems to work. I know I won't finish a novel, but I plan to get a large part of it under my belt, and I'm loving it.

Onward!

And because some of you are interested in that gayya thing...

2011-11-03T07:05:00.000+11:00

I'll link to this.

Type slowly

2011-10-26T06:34:00.000+11:00

One of my writing fantasies used to be to write a novel really quickly, in one of those lathers of white hot inspiration.

You hear of writers doing this ...

How Kerouac wrote his On the Road scroll in 3 weeks of continuous typing between April 2 and April 22, 1951, with his (brief) wife Joan handing him cups of coffee, and him wringing the sweat out of his t- shirts and hanging them round the apartment.

It's true (apparently) - he did this - but Road was also the product of years of thinking and false starts, which is the way of novels.

On October 17, 1949, Kerouac wrote that it was still "impossible to say 'Road' has really begun." " I really began On the Road in October of 1948," he wrote, "an entire year ago. Not much to show for a year, but the first year is always slow."

There's a myth that the work was fuelled on Benzedrine. But he told Neal Cassady: "I wrote that book on COFFEE, remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks."

He did use Benzedrine when he wrote The Subterraneans in 3 days of day and night typing after the break-up of a love affair ... all very well for Kerouac, but in the absence of a broken heart and Benzedrine, what's a girl to do?

I'm musing on these things because Nanowrimo is almost upon us, and many thousands of people will be signing up to write a 50,000 word novel in a month.

I like the idea of Nanowrimo. It's kind of collegiate - writing's a long lonely business, and the thought of all those other people powering away must be a source of strength.

But let's see - 50,000 words a month is over 1,000 words a day, but less than 2,000. Sounds doable.

Every day, for a month.

Maybe I'm a piker, but that sounds like hard work. Even given that you're doing it full-time, I'm thinking it leaves little time for the sort of relaxed daydreaming that leads to happy discoveries, the kind of hard thinking that allows you to keep diving down again and again to come up with something deeper and better than you thought you were capable of, let alone time for getting paralysed at that dreaded two-thirds of the way through mark where it all comes unstuck.

What's the hurry? You've heard of the slow food movement ... I want to start a slow writing movement.

I may just be an old hippy, but ... enjoy the moment. Dwell with your novel a while. Enjoy it. Don't torture yourself. Make discoveries. Go down unexpected paths. Write ten pages and throw em away! Throw away a whole novel! It's just words.

But if you have joined up for Nanowrimo, I really do sincerely wish you the best.

Feels like coming home

2011-10-12T10:55:00.002+11:00

Whichever way you look at it, the blue room is the perfect place to write.

Jack Kerouac- American Haiku

2011-10-06T10:09:00.004+11:00

And because people keep looking at this site, it would be churlish not to post occasionally.

Just dig!

The big to-do

2011-07-15T10:54:00.002+10:00

Often, I have a rock album going through my mind (pity me if you like, but I enjoy it), and last Friday (a mere week ago) when I was in Canberra for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, it was The Drive-By Truckers who filled my head: their most recent album Go-Go Boots, especially the first song, 'I do believe' which is about the only one not about murder and mayhem (well, murder at least). It's about Patterson Hood's memories of his grandmother, and it's very lovely: "I do believe, I do believe, I do believe I saw you standing there/sunlight in your hair..'

And, (my mind being what it is), I was put in mind of their previous album, the much rockier The Big To-do, which was what I was going to, in a way.

Rock music was remarkably absent, which disconcerted me (but did not surprise). It was all writers and publishers and politicians and associated other people.

From a bit before 9 am (yes, it was an early morning do) we milled about in the foyer of the National Library (talking talking talking, meeting and talking) where there were chairs set out for The Do, and a stage ... My publisher, Allen and Unwin, sent one of their lovely publishers (a Publisher is a company, but also a designated position) Erika W to take us all under her wing (which she did very ably: we were like a bunch of chickadees). She also took it upon herself to get very excited (all we writers, or at least, Laura Buzo and I, under her wing, were being quite calm) and kept spotting celebs (like Barry Jones, and Bryce C : you don't expect me to link all these do you? readers from abroad might be mystified).

But we persisted in Remaining Calm.

The most amazing thing was that when someone announced that the Prime Minister was in the building, silence was immediate. And people scurried to their seats (We had already made a move to being seated in order to start a general movement in that direction).

It was all over very quickly. Julia Gillard (our PM, to those not in the know) gave an excellent speech, and then she announced the winners. As most of you will know by now, Cath Crowley's Graffiti Moon won the YA award (and congratulations again, Cath!) and Boori Monty Pryor, with illustrator Jan Ormerod, won the children's section for Shake a Leg.

Then all the shortlisted authors went up to get framed certificates and a cheque ( the total prize money is now partly distributed to all on the shortlist, which is nice), and it was all photographs and congratulations and a bit of a blur, really.

The PM left and celebrations continued, with morning tea, and then lunch, and then a public event with interviews of winning authors. The National Library also had a special exhibition, called Trove, of some of their treasures for authors and guests, and it was really worth looking at.

My special memories:

Before the Library opened, in about minus 6 degrees (or it had been), I walked along the shores of Lake Burley Griffin; it was so cold and misty and beautiful, all muted colours. And the Carillon was playing, very slowly and melodiously though the mist. My fingers were frozen in the pockets of my coat but it was a very lovely experience.
Laura Buzo's little four-year old daughter Penny told me very softly and shyly that she thought my dress was pretty.
In the Trove exhibition I almost dropped tears onto the ms of 'Five Bells' by Kenneth Slessor when I leaned over it to read it. I love his poetry, and here it was in his own handwriting (pencil, in a lined notebook), and the phrasing is so beautiful, and the whole thing so perfect. They don't let you touch these things (and have white-gloved attendants to touch them for you, if required). I had to go and get a hanky from my bag (left at entrance). What if I ruined a valuable ms with big fat teardrops?
Boori Monty Pryor wandered around stunned that he'd won. Also he said he'd rung his relatives and caused them to use bad words. (On the other hand, I found that not winning hadn't made a dent in my ambient level of happiness. Once the announcement was over the whole day was fun).
At lunch I sat opposite the daughters of the non-fiction winner Rod Moss, and had interesting conversations.
Julia Gillard has lovely skin.

And I think our PM would look great in go-go boots.

Don't you think?

Lentils

2011-07-14T10:08:00.001+10:00

Here's a recipe for lentil potato pie. It's based on an old-fashioned shepherd's pie recipe, using meat. You can take my word that this wegetarian version is even nicer.

The best lentils for this dish are the very small brown ones, called 'Whole red lentils'. If you break them open the lentils inside are red, but they cook with the skins intact, and don't become mushy. Cooking time may vary with the age of the lentil, and more water or stock may need to be added - the filling you're aiming for is a soft lentil, with a bit of sauce, not too sloppy.

I suppose you could also use the ordinary large greenish brown lentils, but the results may not be as nice. These ones are really worth sourcing. Or use the small black french lentils, if you like them.

Filling:

oil
one large onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic
two thirds cup of lentils (or more)
1 carrot, finely chopped or grated
celery, finely sliced
a cup fresh or frozen peas
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon fruit chutney (Rosella's sweet fruit chutney is good)
1tablespoon worcestershire sauce (or use soy, but less, if using soy sauce as it's very salty)
at least 2 cups water or stock, to begin with ( use a veggie stock cube, if using water)

fry onion and garlic in oil, then added chopped celery and carrot, fry a bit longer
add lentils
add water or stock, and flavourings (tom paste, chutney, sauce, stock cube)
add frozen peas
simmer gently with lid on till liquid is absorbed and lentils are soft (add more liquid if necessary) (or remove lid if you need to reduce liquid at the end)
put into a baking dish with mashed potato on top (I am not going to tell you how to make mashed spuds, Hortensia. Just use your favourite method).
sprinkle with breadcrumbs and grated cheese if you like these things
bake in oven till top is browned.

Serve with veggies or salad. This recipe serves 4 generously (or lots of leftovers). Perfect winter comfort food (especially for cows, who don't need to be eaten). It is ridiculously inexpensive and utterly delicious.

Pig

2011-07-13T10:03:00.000+10:00

Life continues rich and strange. One day you're shaking hands with Julia Gillard at the National Library in Canberra (the PM's Literary awards); a few days later, early, (before even so much as a first cup of tea of the day - horrendous!), you're watching your best beloved coax a pig up a bush track with an apple, trying to lure it away from your house.

Once lured, that pig was back down the road faster than you could say 'apple'. It had found lots of nice things to eat here - fallen guavas, oranges, the tail end of a cabbage. Yes, I admit, I did feed it. It was ravenous.

It was a nice pig, and once I got used to the fact that it wasn't going to bite me, I warmed to it. A stray pig - what to do with it? And where was it from? There was a story that the renter in the house across the road had a pet pig, ages ago. Someone had seen her in bed with it. Had she turned it loose when she left? Dumb hippies, to let an animal loose to fend for itself. Cruel. All my worst thought about people came to the fore.

We were waiting for the council to open so we could phone the pound, but before that could happen the pig owner arrived, and took it away. He'd been phoned by someone we'd enquired of earlier. It was his daughter's pet he said, but she'd lost interest once it had stopped being cute.

Sad.

Today, there was no pig. We drank tea in peace.

Meanwhile, the live export trade of cattle has recommenced. How we exploit and abuse animals.

Next time: my recipe for lentil and potato pie.

Non-writing states

2011-06-27T13:07:00.004+10:00

In the early 1990s I finished my second book (it became Sand Monkeys, pub by Omnibus in 1992). It had preoccupied me for some time; I was also working as an adult literacy teacher and had two youngish children. After finishing it, I began to notice the world again and observed two things.

One: the cuffs of my shirt were frayed. And two, wherever I went there were people quite happily not writing. At the bakery! Happily not writing! At the clothes shop! Not writing! Happy, happy, happy!
Then sadly, I realised I was not one of these people.

Over many years of writing since then I've recognised several states of mind where writing cannot happen.

Writer's Block:

I found myself googling these words while working on Candlelight Novel (Allen and Unwin, 2008). Don't know why. I loved the book, but was beginning to wonder, Why bother? I found that writer's block is really a state where meaning goes out of the work. I think it's really like depression. Solution: ride it out, or get treatment. I got treatment and finished that book with a focus I'd never experienced before.

'Can't take the jump':

This is where you know where your ms is going, but when you come to a particular section or scene you're like a horse shying away from a jump. You keep saying, 'not now, not today.'

When this happens to me I know it's because I don't know enough about what I'm about to write: a character, an incident needs more mulling over and looking into. I have to think more and look more deeply into it. Sit under a tree in the sun with a notebook and a cup of tea, read a book, allow my mind to roam freely over my material until the whole thing is filled out and known more thoroughly.

Then there is Brain Freeze.

This happened most memorably for me when I was writing Mahalia (Allen and Unwin, 2001). The whole ms took only about 5 months to write and was mostly a joy, but I got close to the end and my brain just wouldn't work. I pressed the start button. Nothing.

This is just the mental exhaustion that happens working on something day after day; thinking about emotions can be especially tiring. I remember going to the university library in Lismore and getting out a whole pile of books; one of them was Andrew Motion's biography of John Keats. Quite a weighty tome, so my brain was still working in some ways. I lay on the red sofa and read it and relaxed (for days? weeks? I can't remember), till I could start work on my novel again. I expect this to happen at some point in writing; it doesn't always. Solution: rest and recreation.

Anaemic Brain:

You have to have illness or misadventure for this one. In 2002 I lost one and a half litres of blood in 3 days and almost collapsed. Solution: endrometrial ablation ( there's a support group - it's scary). I wanted to write the novel that became Little Wing (2006) but all I could do was lie in bed and take notes for it. After several months I felt well enough to write, but what I did write was Secret Scribbled Notebooks (2004), which came to me in a brilliant blinding thought explosion one morning. Thank you, endometrial ablation!

And when I did come to write Little Wing I never looked at those endless notes I'd made in bed. It had been just 'busy work'.

And now, having just finished a ms (and unsure of its outcome) I am very happily not writing. Just like a 'normal person'. (Except for this - just can't break the habit). But novels are different: harder work, more thinking required, take a long time etc). I have no idea what I will write next, or even whether, in fact, I ever will write a novel again. I'm happy either way.

I'm calling this the Creative Pause.
Lots of people do it. You feel you've done enough for now. Time to do other things. Garden. Invite friends over for lunch. Give that body a bit of exercise for a change. Have a major recharge.

Associated rock trivia

2011-06-23T11:04:00.000+10:00

John Kennedy Toole also wrote a novel called The Neon Bible at the age of 16, which was later published after the success of A Confederacy of Dunces.

I always thought that Arcade Fire's rather overblown 2006 second album, Neon Bible was named after the novel because the liner notes say the title was used with permission of the book's publisher. But Win Butler has apparently said that this is not so - they just liked the image of the flashing bible.

Confusing. Copyright gone mad?

Whatever ... the boy sure could write.

The New Orleans book

2011-06-22T10:29:00.002+10:00

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew out of the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once."

So begins A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Is Ignatius J. Reilly one of the most memorable characters in fiction? I think so. Is he the most endearing? Yes, if you like your characters fat, intellectual, idealistic, brilliantly and hilariously wordy, and flatulent.

There is also something very sad about Ignatius, with his war on the modern world, his constant invective and outrage; something innocent and hopeful about his world view, his harking back to the philosophers of the past, and his attempts to ferment uprising amongst black factory workers and the gay community of New Orleans.

Perhaps the sadness also comes, as Walker Percy notes in his brief introduction, from the knowledge that the author killed himself in 1969 at the age of thirty two. The book was written in the early 60s and failed to find a publisher. Publication came posthumously in 1980, followed by the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. That's a lot of baggage for a book to carry, especially considering its sheer brilliance.

I had heard the title but had not read this book till four or five years ago, perhaps less. Now, on the third reading, I appreciate how very good it is - not just a good book, but a great book. One of the great books. Walker Percy likens Ignatius to Quixote, says the farce is of Falstaffian dimensions, and he is right. It is works like these that the book is akin to.

Reading it again has made me appreciate how tightly woven are the themes and plot - and it is intricate, the cast of characters vast, and hilarious. Who can ever forgot, not just Ignatius himself, but Myrna Minkoff (the minx), Miss Trixie from the Levy Pants company, Dorian Greene, and the witty and resourceful Jones?

It's a book that could manage to offend everyone, if they wanted to be offended: homosexuals, heterosexuals, blacks, Jews, overeducated fat white boys from New Orleans, little old ladies, mothers ... except that it is somehow one of those books that is so big and warm-hearted and inclusive that (if you read it right, just as you can't be offended by Mark Twain if you read him right) it is actually the most liberal, progressive and forward-looking of novels.

Read Boethius, if you will, and discover how his philosophy has influenced the themes and plot (I haven't, but you can bet it's there, as his Consolation of Philosophy plays a key part in the narrative, and it's there for a reason). Everything in this book is there for a reason - it's one of the most intentional and literary books I've read.

Or just read the book and laugh. Feel your belly loosening and your chest expanding. Confederacy is better than a laughter club; it is a laughter club; just mention the title to someone who loves it and a look comes over their face ...

Ignatius is troubled by his pyloric valve, which closes up and causes him great agony when the 'lack of theology and geometry' in the modern world offends him. For me, this book is full of the right theology and geometry.

Thank you, John Kennedy Toole. You have opened my valve.

* And if you can't get enough of Ignatius J. Reilly, Kate O'D has also written about this book over at Bean There Read That. Why this blitz on Confederacy? We just thought we would.

Bloomsday

2011-06-16T09:20:00.002+10:00

The day when JJ lovers the world over dust off their copies of Ulysses and congregate to read aloud this most wonderful, mystifying of novels. The name was apparently coined by the publisher and bookseller Sylvia Beach.

16 June: the date on which Leopold Bloom makes his odyssey around Dublin; the date of Joyce's first date with the delightfully named Nora Barnacle, who soon after shocked her family by running off with him for a life of literature and living abroad.

Sequestered here as I am in my cabin in the woods, I am marking the day by carrying around my decrepit, annotated-in-university-tutorials, 40+year old copy, to appreciate this most singular of books. Though we are but two people and a cat ( and to my knowledge Ulysses has not yet been translated into Cat: perhaps Ranulfo could assist?) we in the cabin can still take part in Bloomsday!

To begin with, the lady of the house (um... that would be me) should be brought tea in bed.

And the cat should be given part of a burnt mutton kidney. (We omitted this. He had Whiskas as usual).

Bob: "HUGE JJ fan! HUGE fan!"

And lacking the woman-power to do an all-day reading, selected excerpts may be savoured instead:

From the first sentence:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

To the last: (difficult to post, as the 45 pages of Molly Bloom's soliloquy has only one full stop, at the end) ... but it famously finishes this way:

... and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Going in to bat

2011-06-10T09:43:00.000+10:00

I always say that we YA writers have the best readers - passionate, intelligent, unpretentious and honest. It seems folks are still on about dark themes in young adult fiction. And this reply is eloquent in its defence.

All Passion Spent

2011-06-08T10:55:00.002+10:00

I'd never felt the urge to read a book by Vita Sackville-West until I saw a blurb for All Passion Spent (1931) at the back of Lyndall Gordon's Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life.

The blurb begins:

"In 1860, as a young girl of seventeen, Lady Slane nurtures a secret, burning ambition: to become an artist. She becomes, instead, the wife of a great statesman, and a mother to six children.

Seventy years later, released by widowhood, she abandons the trappings of wealth and retires to a tiny house in Hampstead ..."

I bought it immediately.

It's an odd, very likeable book, not perfectly written, but few people or books are not flawed in some way.

I was surprised that on page 48, I found a sentence almost identical to one in my current work-in-progress:

'The house had indeed been waiting several years for someone to come and inhabit it.'

My sentence: 'The house had waited years for someone to inhabit it again.'

Well, it was partly the idea of the house that got me in. She writes:

"... how strange a thing a house was, especially an empty house; not merely a systematic piling-up of brick on brick, regulated in the building by plumb-line and spirit-level, pierced at intervals by doors and casements, but an entity with a life of its own, as though some unifying breath were blown into the air confined within this square brick box ..."

One of my favourite books is Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, in which he shows how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories and dreams.

All Passion Spent addresses ideas about ageing and memory ('How dreadful it is to be twenty'), and vocation. In many ways it is a link from the Brontes through Virginia Woolf to our own time - the way women in Victorian times (and after) had no occupation (that is, if they were well-off - poorer women worked as domestic help, or governesses if they were genteelly poor).

Lady Slane, at seventeen, had wanted to be a painter, yet she had never picked up a paintbrush. It was more the idea of freedom and strong sense of vocation that she craved.

This novel is dreamy, funny, and satirical. At times I felt mildly annoyed by it. But it is what it is. It's a gentle, slow read, fitting the way this old woman has at last retired with her memories, 'all passion spent.' Sometimes I found the characters unconvincing and irritating (her landlord Bucktrout, for instance ), but her old French maid Genoux is delightful.

This is a book you can sit and be quiet with, the way you can be quiet with certain people in your life. A companionable book. It's one I know I'll return to.

One of the stories of my life

2011-06-06T13:07:00.002+10:00

About a Girl has just come out (no pun intended) in the Netherlands, titled Flynn there. I did an interview for an online lesbian books site, and one of the questions they asked was, had I ever been to The Netherlands.

I have, in 1980, and that set me thinking about my trip there. So hello to any new readers from Holland - here, with help from my travel diary are my recollections.

We'd (my partner and our 2 year-old son) spent a month in a bedsit in London, and bought a ticket to Amsterdam on the Magic Bus. 'There's nothing magic about it,' warned an English friend, sardonically. She was right.

At the age of 29, this was what I wrote: (and there is a foul language warning)

"...we went to wait for 2 hours at Victoria Station, where our so-called 'Magic Bus' was leaving for Amsterdam at 7.15. A huge crowd of countercultural-looking people finally assembled, & we were allowed to board the bus about 7.15 - there was a huge rush forward, which we joined - just as well. The 3 last people to get on had to stay behind as the bus was over-booked. One girl was really upset - & the guy collecting the tickets couldn't give a fuck if 'Magic Bus' had inconvenienced her. The driver was a little deadshit too."

We arrived in Amsterdam at about 10.30 next morning. There were touts at the station.

"Was approached by a weedy looking young English guy in a suit, who handed me a card for the 'Hotel Brian'" ... and "an aggressive Dutch lady who offered us a room in her home. She was practically abusing us for not taking up her offer at once."

We went to the 'Hotel Brian'.

"... in a small house on a canal. It was very narrow with a steep staircase (nearly perpendicular). It was run by Americans, & inhabited largely by countercultural-type Americans (but not cosmic types). Our room was on the top floor, very small and knocked-up looking. The light didn't work, so we were given candles. It was primitive but very clean & comfortable, & the breakfasts were good."

Ah, the breakfasts. Bacon and eggs and beautiful coffee and as much lovely bread and jam as you could eat.

"The downstairs parlour looked like a bit of a scene, with people sitting around most of the time and a record player & rock music & rock posters on the walls. We met a couple of American girls, sisters, who'd been travelling a few months and seemed very sick of it. While we were in Amsterdam John Lennon was shot & one of the sisters was very doleful about that."

I love the way I dismiss Lennon's death like that.

What happened was that all through breakfast they were playing Lennon songs, and one of the sisters did look doleful. I said to Tony, 'I think something may have happened to John Lennon.' (Why didn't I simply ask?) When we went out we found the headlines, and an English language newspaper.

Amsterdam ... prostitutes in windows with poodles, beautiful coffee, and expensive food.

I bought a coffee cup and saucer, and backpacked it through the rest of our trip - Paris, Venice, and down through Yugoslavia to Greece, where we finally felt we'd had enough of travelling with a 2 year old and flew back to London, and then home.

The saucer has since broken, but I have my Amsterdam coffee cup, a lovely memento, more than 30 years later.

Cabin in the woods

2011-05-31T13:54:00.001+10:00

Bon Iver did it. So did Simone Felice. Retreated to a cabin in the woods to create their albums.

And now every musician on the planet is doing it. Every time I pick up a music paper, some musician or other has sequestered himself (and it is usually a man) in some cabin somewhere.

But novelists can do it. We can sequester. I've decided it's the only way to get something written.

Hints for sequestering:

lay in a stock of good new music. The Felice Brothers' Celebration Florida is brilliant. Or dig out your old AA Bondy albums. Joanna Newsom is great. Or Alela Diane. Play M Ward, and put on your red shoes. Listen to Bon Iver if you really have to
bottles of wine are good for long winter nights in the cabin
Stock food that keeps: lentils, tofu and home grown veggies. Make your own bread
Reading matter: The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky, All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville West. Re read Elizabeth Taylor. Browse through old issues of Uncut.
cut your own fringe - it saves a trip to town and no one will see you for a while anyway
Work every day. It will accumulate.

Perfect day

2011-05-27T17:52:00.001+10:00

A perfect day to fire a kiln - 23 degrees of north coast sunshine and no wind. Cats always enjoy a firing.

Bob - kilncat

It's a long hard slog all day (not that I'm doing the slogging)
And it's best at night, when the flames shoot up the chimney

Or you can look into the firebox (with goggles)

And of course, it's also a perfect excuse not to write a thing.

(Gulp) Prime Minister's Literary Awards shortlist announced

2011-05-26T16:01:00.002+10:00

Which About a Girl is on!

Congratulations to everyone on the list. You can see the complete list here.

The judges' comments on the young adult shortlist is here.

What do you read?

2011-05-21T14:40:00.000+10:00

About 15 years ago I went to hear David Malouf speak at a small function. At question time I asked him, 'What do you read before you write?'

'Shakespeare,' he said.

I thought that figured. I'd asked him because I was impressed by his prose style. And because I was in the habit of reading something before I pushed off into a day's writing, I assumed that he would too - I don't know why. But he seemed unsurprised by my question.

I used to read a lot of poetry before I wrote - something about the way words are put together in poetry make things happen in my head. I read a lot of Katherine Mansfield. Then I stopped reading her for a while because an editor told me my work reminded her of Katherine Mansfield (She said it in an admiring way, so it wasn't bad. Actually, I was flattered).

Mansfield .... Lyrical, full of sensibility and detail, almost no plot ... perhaps not good if you're writing YA. But her sentences have beautiful rhythms.

These days I'm back to Katherine Mansfield. And Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway is good for me to begin a morning's work on.

It's all about the rhythm, which might be why Malouf read Shakespeare. More than words, you need to get a rhythm in your head that carries you along. Rhythm and images - don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better, as Kerouac said (good old technique 22).

A good rhythm can carry me along 400 or 500 words almost without pause. No rhythm and I'm like someone getting onto a bike and falling off right away. You need to get on and start pedalling ... and hopefully you'll get somewhere.

Samarkand revisited

2011-05-16T10:23:00.000+10:00

On Saturday I spent some time walking around literary Lismore with Nat*, a lovely student who'd come up from Sydney to talk with me and walk around literary Lismore (it was the call of the exotic I'm sure. I warned her that it was very ordinary, but she wouldn't be dissuaded. Luckily the weather was beautiful).

Of course, I took her to the old house on the river that was the model for Samarkand** in Secret Scribbled Notebooks and My Candlelight Novel.

It's looking a bit less shabby. This house has the most extraordinary curved galvanised iron railings, once only partially there, and now being restored with new ones built exactly to the originals - though the new stuff, I'm sure, is made of zincalume, much hardier than old gal iron. And the newly restored railings cover up somewhat the amazing zig-zag staircase I made a point of mentioning in the books.

It's strange for me to look at a building that I imagined over two novels - several years I've dwelt here in my mind. I've never been inside, and don't want to (well, now I've finished writing maybe I wouldn't mind a peek inside), but the house both is and isn't the Samarkand of my imagination. When you write, you enter an an interior space that is like no other. My Lismore is different to other people's Lismore. My Samarkand is subtly different to the Samarkand experienced by readers.

At the side of the house some of the old railings haven't yet been replaced. Here they are in all their peeling glory. I do hope the restoring of the house doesn't ruin its magic for me (I like places old and decaying) - but I'm pleased the owners are being faithful to the original.

And now, do admit, dear readers, that Lismore is indeed a little bit exotic. This building always looked to me like it should be part of old Singapore, or some exotic outpost of the British Empire that once was (like um ... Lismore?)

* Not her real name
** Not its real name

Booktrailer: Flynn

2011-05-15T09:51:00.002+10:00

... which is what About a Girl is titled in The Netherlands.

Yes, I know, Hortensia, I ought to be able to upload it here, but am pleading tech incompetence (even though I managed to do it once, for a Timbre Timbre clip.)

But you can see it here.

I like it! Except they should have chosen an Okkervil River Song (Say, 'Happy hearts': 'Why must happy hearts break so hard?') rather than Jack Johnson, for the music.

Segue into Virginia

2011-05-11T09:34:00.000+10:00

And so from the Brontes to Virginia Woolf - not such a stretch when you consider Woolf (or Stephen, as she was for much of her life) was born in late Victorian times and fought against the constrictive roles of Victorian women that stayed on onto the 20th Century: the 'angel in the house', the idea that women should remain silent - which Charlotte certainly never was. And nor Virginia, once she'd put herself through a long writer's apprenticeship of reading and thinking.

But the link for me was really the wonderful Lyndall Gordon, whose book on Charlotte Bronte was so good it made me want to read her Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, which I'm still reading, slowing myself down to absorb and enjoy it more, stopping to put quotations into my red silk notebook with gold dragonflies.

Gordon has me in the palm of her hand - I'll head off to read her other literary biographies, unless some other enthusiasm bumps me off course.

From Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, by Lyndall Gordon:

(in the red silk notebook)

(Woolf) ' acknowledged the inevitable debt to Charlotte Bronte and George Elliot "for they disclosed the secret that the precious stuff of which books are made lies all about one, in drawing rooms and kitchens where women live, and accumulates with every tick of the clock."'

No life, then (Gordon comments) is too narrow for the material of fiction.

The precious stuff. Take note.

Women are clearly mad

2011-05-03T07:03:00.000+10:00

The Bronte Blog has a link the the Awl, which lists the 111 most banagble boys in British Fiction.

No 111 is Frankenstein's monster.

But of Bronte interest:

1. Rochester (Jane Eyre)

(This was the man who kept his first wife in solitary confinement, with a drunk woman as her keeper: see John Sutherland's Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?: More puzzles in classic fiction to see if he would really make a good match)

12. Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)

(If you like men rough and brutal)

38. St John Rivers (Jane Eyre)

(Based on a man who made a dispassionate proposal of marriage to CB: she turned him down, as does Jane Eyre, for the reason that she expects more from a marriage. Modern women are clearly less fussy.)

46. M. Heger (Villette) (??)

(This is really confusing fact with fiction, as Heger was the real-life teacher in Brussels that CB used as a model for M. Paul Emanuel, who is the fictional character. I could fancy him at a pinch.)

But if you don't go for Bronte men, there is always Orlando at No 9 (for people who prefer their men/women to be a little ambiguous.)

Or how about Aslan? (no 32).

Okay. I rest my case.

Emily Jane

2011-05-02T09:34:00.000+10:00

And because some of us just can't get enough of those crazy girls from Haworth parsonage, here is Emily, on a holiday she and Anne took in 1845. She was almost 27, and still deep into their Gondal 'play':

"Anne and I went on our first long journey by ourselves \ together /- leaving home on the 30th June - monday - sleeping at York - returning to Keighley Tuesday evening sleeping there and walking home wednesday morning - though the weather was broken, we enjoyed ourselves very much except during a few hours at Bradford and during our excursion we were Ronald Macelgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Augusteena, Rosobelle Estraldan, Ella and Julian Egramont Catherine Navarre and Cordelia Fitzaphnold escaping from the Palaces of Instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans - "

From Juliet Barker, The Brontes (all punctuation and capitalisation is sic)

Note: not 'we pretended to be', but 'we were'.

This was the mind that brought us the deeply imagined Wuthering Heights.

(When Charlotte's first biographer Elizabeth Gaskell saw their juvenile writing she said: " They give one the idea of creative power carried to the verge of insanity.")

Emily Jane, I think you're my girl.

Sense or Sensibility?

2011-04-30T07:11:00.002+10:00

In my recent (and continuing) orgy of reading about the Brontes, I realised that over the years I've been voting with my eyes.

I've read Jane Austen, of course (P & P, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Love and Freindship),
and admire her, but the books I keep returning to are the Brontes, especially those of Currer Bell.

Charlotte, on reading Emma, said this:

"She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the passions are perfectly unknown to her ... Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death - this Miss Austin ignores ... Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman, if this is heresy - I cannot help it."

(From Juliet Barker, The Brontes)

And yet is it simply a matter of sense or sensibility? After all, Charlotte's books, passionate as they are, are not without sense, and Jane's are not without sensibility. Yet many people express a preference for one or the other.

(I putatively studied Sense and Sensibility at university in the 70s, but don't think I actually read it. I confess I have a university degree in many books I've never read, but I've made up for it since. My copy of S and S still has an old BETTER DEAD THEN WED sticker on it, perhaps the last surviving example of this feminist sticker.)

Virginia Woolf is an Austen woman. She likes the perfection of her sentences and thinks they can't be bettered. In A Room of One's Own she takes Charlotte to task for interrupting the flow of the narrative in Jane Eyre to put a rant about the condition of women in her character's mouth.

" ... the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?"

Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Oh, please, Virginia.

So Charlotte was a bit of a ranter. maybe that's why I like her.

Book charms again!

2011-04-26T10:08:00.000+10:00

Well, some people had a good easter weekend ...

Death by Bronte

2011-04-24T10:32:00.000+10:00

It all started so low-key - a used (but apparently never-read) paperback from the 70s found in Canberra recently: Charlotte Bronte: Unquiet Soul by Margot Peters (and yes I know I'm missing the dots above the e - any idea of how to do?) - well written and informative, quite a nice book with of course a 70s feminist viewpoint (she would not allow Charlotte to be happy with her husband or that she would have continued writing had she lived: she'd have had the poor woman alone and single and creating works of genius for us! )

Then on to The Bronte Myth, by Lucasta Miller (bought from the Evil Empire the Book Depository), which isn't a biography, but about the way the Brontes have been viewed at various times - this is an entertaining and intelligently written must-read if you're at all interested in the Brontes, and there are a couple of nice chapters on Emily. Miller's main beef is that the Bs were above all, conscious artists, who read widely and were part of a literary tradition, rather than strange, lonely, untamed spinsters who almost subconsciously created - this myth is especially held about Emily, the 'mystic of the moors'. There are references to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Kate Bush (if you need to know why, go back to rock school), and theories that Branwell actually wrote Wuthering Heights. Oh, and of course a large part of the book is about the bio that started the ball rolling, by Charlotte's friend Elizabeth Gaskell, who published it two years after Charlotte's death in order to soften or excuse her friend's reputation for unseemly 'coarse' writing (meaning passionate and forthright).

Miller references many books, so on to the Richmond-Tweed Library catalogue, which had the two I wanted.

Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life, by Lyndall Gordon is the book I'd recommend to read, as it's a portrait of the novelist at work and her inner life. This is Bronte as writer - the chapter on Villette is so probing and analytical and brilliant it almost send me mad. Gordon calls Villette 'the longest love letter in English Literature'. It's also a text-book example of How to Piss off your Publisher (my interpretation).

Still to read: Juliet Barker's The Brontes, which is about the family as a whole. It's long (about 700 pages of actual text) and scholarly - full of detail, and meant to be one of the best bios available. But how much do you need to know about the Brontes? I'll end up reading it just because it's There.

I feel that in the end I will like Lyndall Gordon's book the best (inner life and all that), and on the strength of it have ordered in a library copy of her book Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life. Do I need to read another book on Woolf? If it's by Gordon, I think I probably do.

If you don't hear from me again it's probably because Virginia has done me in.

2480 revisited

2011-04-18T12:17:00.001+10:00

The camera never lies, even though novelists might present reality as they see it (or even make it up). Kate, here is an unexotic look at Lismore, from the places that inspired About A Girl.

"...I went to a cafe for lunch, one I hadn't been to before. The place was all hard surfaces -polished concrete floor, brightly painted brick walls, timber and chrome chairs and tables."

"Only days later, we ran into each other in the street as I was leaving work."

Keen Street, Lismore

"The stairwell was dark, and smelled of eucalyptus. The stairs and walls were painted purple; I kept my eyes on the treads the whole way up, and on the back of her heels."

(Okay, so I sort of made the stairwell up. The one I was remembering was when I went years ago to a natural hormone consultant, and that one's in another street. I went back to look at it today and it wasn't the way I remembered it. I must have made up the eucalyptus smell as well. But this is one in Keen Street, just about where Flynn's stairwell would have been.)

"We were on the roof at the back of the building, overlooking the very laneway from which I entered the bookshop each morning [ ] I noticed the geometry of the backs of the buildings, all squares and triangles of various shapes and sizes. Graffiti on a wall across the lane said SHADOW; it was written with grey paint in slanting capitals with shadowing behind the letters. Like everything that day, it seemed beautiful to me."

This one's for the other Jo: :)

"I had found work in a bookshop ..."

And, though it doesn't appear expressly in the book, here is Lismore Underground ( the sign now says 'MORE UNDERGROUND': can you be more underground?) which our friend Jesse used to run.

(Because Anna reads Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, and I had Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans in mind as I wrote (which is another way of saying 'underground') - a book about a failed love affair, which was modelled on the Dostoyevsky book.)

And I can't resist a final shot of that famous Lismore lane. Unromantic enough for you Kate?

(But of course, when you're in love, as Anna was, everything seems beautiful)

Poetry Season

2011-04-17T09:30:00.000+10:00

For the next few months I'll be judging the Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Competition, in the Secondary section. I did it last year as well, so it's the second and final time I'll have the pleasure of judging the competition. There were over 2,000 entries in the Secondary section, and more than 8,000 overall.

Entry is open to all school students, Australia wide. The poems that came in last year were astonishing in their variety, originality, and skill. I laughed, I cried, and I had the unenviable task of choosing between them, but also the great delight of reading them all.

The competition is now open, and entries are coming in slowly at present - towards the end there's a deluge.

I'm looking forward to it.

Atelier

2011-04-09T09:31:00.005+10:00

From The Macquarie Dictionary:

atelier n. The workshop or studio of an artist [F: workplace, originally pile of chips, from astele chip, from LL astella, from L astula]

I love the word 'atelier' - such a light and airy word - and from such common letters - all worth a mere 1 point on a Scrabble board, one I have used at least twice to get the 50 point bonus.

It's a romantic word, that conjures the elevated life of the artist, even though really it just means 'workshop' and refers to the 'pile of chips' on the floor.

There are two quite romantic, atelier-like places at home where I have variously worked.

One is a little room off the pottery workshop, with views of the creek from a line of windows all along the front. You step down into it. (I could post a picture, but a few words is worth a picture). It's a very snakey room - I've had two memorable encounters with snakes there - a northern brown tree snake and a carpet python - maybe the reason snakes made their way into A Charm of Powerful Trouble, which I wrote in that room. Many snake skins were shed in a space above the door there, and I can tell you that snake shit has a pungent and unmistakable odour.

The second atelier is my lofty loft where I write this. It's above the house and looks down into the living room/kitchen. It looks out to the McKellar Range, and the trees in the garden. Unfortunately it was also the best spot for the internet connection when we got satellite broadband (cable and wireless aren't available here). It has a bed and bookshelves, and is not a bad place to write. The bed and bookshelves and internet can be a distraction, though.

So months ago I decamped to a room below this, a small room at the back of the house, the only one without access to the verandahs. It's been repainted a pretty pale green, and looks out one side to the garden, and there is a long line of windows looking out to a cluttered, deep back verandah, with garbage bins, and the door to the composting loo. All our junk, and shoes, and brooms, and wood boxes collect here. Through the carport you can see the little citrus orchard behind the house. Pleasant enough, but far from the nicest room in the house.

I work on an old kitchen table covered by a length of old Thai silk. There is a pile of notebooks and mss papers. I have my little brass buddha on the table there, the only constant besides the notebooks in all the places I've worked. It reminds me to concentrate humbly on the work at hand, that writing is just ordinary work, like growing plants or sweeping the floor or doing the dishes, all of which are worth being mindful of.

In the definition of atelier, I like the word's origin: pile of chips.

I assume, in other words, the debris made by the work of a carpenter or sculptor.

Is there a french word for piles of mss, for scribbled notebooks, for discarded attempts? Then that is the name of the place where I work.

In the meantime, atelier will have to do.

Is this work?

2011-04-04T06:41:00.001+10:00

The weekend before last I pioneered the idea of 'the weekend', and declared that from now on I would not write on the weekends.

The first weekend was very successful = no writing done, though on Sunday I sneaked a look at The Plan and thought about how I would begin the next day. I did find myself weeding the garden Sunday morning and thinking that I would probably prefer to be writing. (Like gardens, hate gardening. Hate writing; love having written. It's a cross we bear.)

Last weekend (just finished) I did work (ie write, actually on the computer) for an hour on Sat morning, plus half an hour's planning in the morning, but no harm was apparently done. And I did look (despairingly) at The Plan in the afternoon/evening.

Since I'm one of those people who work 'for themselves' I can please myself when I do it. The trouble is that this means I feel I am never actually having time off, unless I'm away from the house. Maybe it's because when I had children I always wrote whenever I could - and now, out of habit, any free moment is potentially time to work.

Hence niggling feelings of guilt. Hence the institution of The Weekend.

The trouble is that when you work at home all sorts of things happen and you don't work, so end up 'making up' for it at other times, like the weekend. Those 'all sorts of things' include the writer being unable to actually make herself sit at the desk and put down words.

The example of some of members of the household is not exactly inspiring, either.

I'm not really complaining (after all, many people work on weekends, and a lot harder than I do). It's simply the lack of demarcation between 'free' time and 'work' time makes me feel I'm working all the time.

This isn't really very coherent. Maybe by the time I actually start work (is this work?) my brain will have kicked into gear.

Hand made

2011-03-28T10:38:00.003+11:00

Almost all the pots in our kitchen are hand thrown - comes from having a resident potter - and I love them. They seem to retain the warmth and plasticity of the original clay - machine-made pots are all hard edged - though some can be very pretty.

The hand that made the pots can also cast itself in clay:

It looks creepy, as it's so grey, and clay shrinks when it's fired.

I've never thought of myself as working with my hands, until I was given these earrings, many years ago:

They're made by Amanda, who also did the wacky illustrations on the cover of About A Girl (See the sidebar), and were among the first she made, while still a student. The first time she saw me wearing them she said that it was fitting they were hands, as I'm a writer. (There followed some banter about them being bandaged hands, and make of that metaphor what you will).

Up to then, I'd never thought of myself as working 'with my hands', but of course the very image of writing is of the hand with a pen moving across the paper. And the ideas do seem to come through the brain via the hand - the very act of writing down (or even typing) stimulates ideas and images to flow. It all happens on the page, which is why it's best to WRITE rather than simply thinking about it.

The Victorian writer Anthony Trollope was entirely practical about writing, and said that it was a trade, its conduct much resembling the work of an artisan, such as a shoemaker.

And writing is, after all, a craft like any other.

My favourite image of the writer's hand is in this fragment, by John Keats, which reminds me that all the books by dead writers I love to read were once written by a living hand, and their work reaches out to us, even after death.

Lines supposed to have been addressed to Fanny Brawne

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thy own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed - see here it is -

I hold it towards you.

1820 (?)

Writing: "a peculiar internal state"

2011-03-22T09:55:00.001+11:00

Annie, again:

" ... writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours along with a hundred other Zulu warriors, you might be able to prepare yourself to write. If you were an Aztec maiden who knew months in advance that on a certain morning the priests were going to throw you into a hot volcano, and if you spent those months undergoing a series of purification rituals and drinking dubious liquids, you might, when the time came, be ready to write. But how, if you are neither Zulu warrior nor Aztec maiden, do you prepare yourself, all lone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?

How to set yourself spinning? Where is an edge - a dangerous - and where is the trail to the edge and the strength to climb it?"

In my second-hand copy of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, this was the only passage that a previous owner had pencilled a line beside. (pre-owned books: I love em - this one was first bought from The Feminist Bookshop in Lilyfield many years ago, I'd say.)

Procrastination: not all writers suffer from it; I do, and writing does seem to be one of those activities particularly prone to it. I always do write, eventually, but have to work my way into it ... I've sat for hours under trees waiting to write.

Or is it 'inspiration' you need? On inspiration, Jane Smiley has this to say, in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel""

'My definition of 'inspiration' is "a condition of being stimulated by contemplation of the material to a degree sufficient to overcome your natural disinclination to create."'

'Your natural disinclination to create.'

I like it. have you noticed how many people there are in the world living quite happy lives not writing novels?

My ambition is one day to be one of them.

But in the meantime, as I think the Victorian writer George McDonald said in this book The Golden Key, the only way forward is to jump in.

A Day in the Life of Antonella Illuminati

2011-03-19T10:10:00.000+11:00

OR: Eluding my slippery double

What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of 'the writer? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward - the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth - and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.

(Margaret Atwood, Negotiating With The Dead, page 30)

I have often wished I'd used a nom de plume when I began to write, because I have trouble reconciling the me I know with the person who has stolen my name to write books under.

There was a point when I suggested that I use one to my publisher (it was when A Charm of Powerful Trouble was to be published), but she dismissed the idea (she thought I was being modest, I think, and was scared of being held responsible for the obvious brilliance that was ACOPT).

And she hadn't even heard what the name was.

It's Antonella Illuminati.

'Antonella' because of my Italian heritage. The Antonellis came to Australia in 1882, part of the famous and ill-fated Marquis de Ray expedition. The whole thing was a nineteenth century scam, and they ended up starving and dying in a mosquito-riddled New Ireland before setting sail for Australia where Sir Henry Parkes allowed them in and gave them land on the north coast of NSW. This became New Italy, and it was where my mother (obviously not part of the original expedition, but a descendent) grew up. There is now only a memorial park there.

And 'Illuminati' because of a cheap Italian red wine I used to drink: Riparosso by the Illuminati brothers.
The 'Illuminati' are also people who claim to be enlightened. That's me.

And because of the double nature of the writer, I will now claim my mooted nom de plume for myself, and let 'Joanne Horniman' (whoever she is) write whatever she wants under my name, and go out into the world pretending to be a writer.

She never travels by car up the Pacific Highway of NSW in daggy old track pants and brown rubber thongs (some of you might call them 'flip-flops'), stopping off at McDonalds for a caffeine fix. She would never watch The Bold and the Beautiful ('Who's Ridge Forrester?') Antonella can do all that. No, she just sneaks into a room when no one is watching, and writes.

Margaret Atwood says this:

All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person. Or so goes the alibi. One the one hand, this is a convenient way for a writer to wriggle out of responsibility, and you should pay no attention to it. Yet on the other hand, it is quite true.

( Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double, in Negotiating With the Dead)

So, Antonella: what is she like? She has tea, toast and muesli for breakfast. The first thing she does is feed the cat, the chooks, and after breakfast, laces on some heavy-duty bushwalking boots and goes down to the creek to feed the ducks.

She plays a lot of scrabble, reads, listens to music, bakes all her own bread (with rye, millet, quinoa and wholemeal wheat), and puddles around in an overgrown vegetable garden. She can spend a week or more at home on a little rural plot without going anywhere.

Really, most people would say her life is quite dull. But she likes it like that.

Because, ideally, every day she sneaks into a room and writes.

Girl, translated

2011-03-17T12:56:00.001+11:00

Late last year the German rights to About a Girl were sold to Carlsen Verlag, and now the Dutch rights have gone to La Vita Publishing, which, interestingly, publish only lesbian themed books. I am guessing I'm the only Australian YA author who has this curious distinction, if not the only Australian author, full stop.

It will be some years before the German edition will be ready, but the Dutch are quick off the mark.

The book is to be retitled Flynn, and you can vote for the cover you prefer here. I have linked to the untranslated page as it is easier, and you will understand enough to be able to vote, but perhaps not enough to learn that Flynn and Anna 'love to their ears'.

After voting, you may learn of the results. I was pleased that the one I liked best (though I don't exactly love it to my ears) is by far the most popular.

The Writing Life

2011-03-17T07:28:00.000+11:00

I've been travelling.

Some observations:

McCafe coffee is crap (but you knew that).
Canty's secondhand bookshop in industrial Fyshwick, ACT, is still my favourite bookshop.

Found at Canty's: The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard.

Some books about writing make it seem dull and formulaic, like a recipe for muffins. This is writing as altered state. It's a book for re-reading and putting under your pillow, for brief, restorative draughts when the very thought of writing is getting you down.

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know ... Do you like sentences?"

The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of the paint."

(From The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard)

Charlotte Mew and her Friends, by Penelope Fitzgerald

2011-03-07T14:53:00.002+11:00

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was a notable poet who, according to Thomas Hardy was 'far and away the best living woman poet' (note the 'woman') of the day. She once met Virginia Woolf at Florence Hardy's sick bed, but both were too shy to speak to each other ( I guess that was the kind of gels they were). You can read about her on Wiki, or, (far better and more interesting, and something I strongly advise) read about her in Penelope Fitzgerald's book, Charlotte Mew and her Friends.

She was a lesbian who apparently lived a celibate life (perhaps because the women she became enamoured with weren't similarly inclined). Mental illness ran in the family, and, with their father dead and several siblings in institutions, she and her sister lived with their difficult mother in impoverished circumstances, made harder when you have a middle class veneer to keep up (they had lodgers but no one mentioned it).

But she had many friends, and it is the story of this milieu at the beginning of the 20th Century that is so fascinating. Charlotte made a little money by writing for various publications, including 'The Yellow Book'. She knew people such as 'Mrs Sappho' (to Charlotte, who had trouble with first names). Other people called her Sappho after a poem she'd written, but she wasn't lesbian or particularly interested in sex at all. Her real name was Mrs Dawson Scott, 'a dumpy energetic little woman'.

Charlotte was also friends with, (and fell for) the popular writer May Sinclair, Sydney Cockerell, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Florence and Thomas Hardy, and many others.

Then, and most importantly, there was The Poetry Bookshop, run by Harold Monro, later with his friend (and then wife, though he wasn't heterosexual) Alida Klementaski.

Who can resist this description?

The Poetry Bookshop (in its first premises) existed from 1913 to 1926. It was in a squalid bit of Bloomsbury, full of small workshops, dustbins and cats - 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street). It opened from 11 am to 6.30 pm, never had many paying customers at any time, and, right from the start, was usually in financial difficulties. But it was there, and even the fact that it was there was of real importance.

The shop itself was on the ground floor of a dilapidated eighteenth-century house, with only one cold-water tap for the whole building. However, as you came through the swing door you felt the warmth of a coal fire burning at the other end of the room. There was a dog stretched out there and a cat, which sometimes sprang around the shelves, apparently deliberately, knocking down piles of books.

(Ah, they don't make bookshops like this any more. Forget the demise of Borders, it's the lack of places like the Poetry Bookshop we should be mourning).

The bookshop published poetry books (including Charlotte's), and illustrated rhyme sheets for children, to put on nursery walls. Charlotte used to help Alida hand-colour the sheets. Penelope Fitzgerald, born in 1916, had these as a child, part of her impetus to write this book, I think. She dedicated it in Memory of The Poetry Bookshop.

And it's because this wonderful book is written by Fitzgerald that it's so very good. Few people write this well. She has the ability, demonstrated also in her novels, to conjure up an era, and characters, so economically and well that you feel you are there.

And then there's Fitzgerald's sly humour:

"These famous bookshop readings, famous, that is, out of all proportion to the size of the audience ..."

Several of Mew's poems are included in an appendix, and rightly so, for it only spells out what a very good poet she was.

You can read one of them, 'The Farmer's Bride', here.

But do read the Fitzgerald biography. I promise you will be entertained and moved, and will love Charlotte Mew forever, as I do.

I'm collectable

2011-03-06T09:56:00.001+11:00

... or at least the posters I produced are. This one, printed in c 1978 ( the second edition, done after Frazer lost office)

is for sale at the Josef Lebovic Gallery (but not, alas, our copy) for an extraordinary price, considering it once went for about $5 at Jura Books in Sydney, and that the National Gallery of Australia bought our second-last copy from us, also for considerably less, about a decade ago.

I feel like telling them we can easily print another 100 (but it doesn't work like that, does it?)

The designer is said to be one Tony Chinnery (who he?), but the words, and the handwriting, are mine.

"...put on your red shoes and dance ..."

2011-02-27T09:28:00.002+11:00

On Friday night we went to see M. Ward at the Byron Bay Community Centre, an hour from here.

Byron (which Rudi Maxwell, the lovely editor of the Northern Rivers Echo, refers to as 'the Lismore lowlands' - instead of us being 'the Byron hinterland') is one of those places that brings out the Grumpy in me (as in grumpy old people, because everything was better Back Then).

But I can barely recognise the Byron of old, which had old houses in the main street with surfboards propped up outside and one of those old beachside shops selling buckets and spades and sun hats. 30-odd years ago (and they have been odd years), when we lived 2 hours away behind Kyogle in the hills near the Queensland border, my parents-in-law gave us money for our birthdays, and we brought our infant there and stayed overnight in an old motel in the main street, listening to trains being shunted in the (now defunct) railway behind us. We ate at Earth'n'Sea Pizza, a small place that sold strange hippy inspired pizzas with thin wholemeal crusts (not my favourite kind I must say - I like 'em big, white and Italian-style) to surfers and alternates like ourselves. Earth'nSea has long since become a huge standardised Pizza place and where that motel stood is now a very tasteless 'gallery' selling extremely bad art - I mean painted stuff on canvas.

Byron is full of tasteless architecture, deluded backpackers, rich folks, pricy frock shops, lots of restaurants, the odd bookshop (but the really odd and good bookshops, like Persephone's Window, are now gone) ... and is extremely dull. Everyone is an artist or a musician or a writer. I rest my case.

I usually like places where lots of people hang out, but this is a place that is entirely predictable. It's Interesting with a capital I (or maybe inverted commas) if you like that sort of thing.

Okay, rant over, they do have a Community Centre with a nice little theatre in it, and it was there we saw M. Ward.

One man, an electric acoustic guitar and a piano ... how brilliant could it be?

Extremely.

M. Ward looks ethereal and no-nonsense at the same time. He really knows how to play that guitar, and use his voice to effect. He's quite thin and small-boned, and I kept watching his hand plucking the guitar - it was the hand of an Eighteenth Century lady, small and white and fine. He might be an angel (sorry ... must be Byron Bay getting to me).

And the songs! - some of his own, from the album Hold Time, which is the only one we have (yet! more will be coming, after that performance), and a beautiful rendition of 'Lonesome Me' (also on the album) ...

And then came 'Lets Dance' by Bowie ... a beautiful, slow interpretation.

"Let's dance put on your red shoes and dance the blues"

and I knew I was in heaven.

(I had worn my red shoes too, or red sandals put on at the last moment because I thought my sensible black walking shoes would be too hot)

"Because my love for you
Would break my heart in two
If you should fall
Into my arms
Like a flower"

I think everyone wanted him to go on all night - I know I did.

But he left, and we left, and our friend Nigel, who hadn't had time to eat, went to the all night bakery for a pie.

On the way out of Byron we had to stop because there was a frog on the windscreen (from our place? From Byron?) We stopped and put it out at the golf course. I hope it found water.

We drove through Lismore, 40 minutes away, and there were still kids wandering the streets there too.

At home, I kicked off my red shoes onto the living room floor. Bob The Cat sniffed and sniffed them very cautiously.

I'm sure they told him all kinds of different stories about Byron.

Vegetables vs the novel (a slow, thoughtful, spontaneous post)

2011-02-25T10:28:00.001+11:00

Well, they're not in opposition really, but it occurred to me this morning that the vegetables are doing really well.

there's a button squash in there somewhere...

All despite too much rain, too much heat, grasshoppers, slack gardeners ... they've come through it all and survived, making the most of the good weather (which we've also had lots of).

And next to the eggplants, two pawpaw trees have come up out of the compost. We're going to leave them there, as happy accidents. The garden can grow around them

And somehow, this hasn't got a lot to do with writing a novel, although that's what I've been doing all the time these little beauties have been doing their thing.

Everything's a work in progress, really.

"The everyday life of strangers"

2011-02-20T09:31:00.001+11:00

Was it Borges who wrote a story about a man who couldn't forget a thing? It's a torturous condition to be in, and one I'm thankful I don't suffer from.

All those books you read. What do you remember of them? I'm a constant re-reader, and a week or so ago I went to our town library (they call it the City Library - but Lismore a city?) and took out two books I've already read, A.S. Byatt's Possession, and Strawberry Hills Forever, by Vanessa Berry (Local Consumption Publications, 2007).

Of the Byatt, all I remembered (sort of) was the rather poignant end. And the Berry: I found I remembered quite a lot - whole pieces of writing and phrases and details that I recalled with pleasure.

Strawberry Hills isn't a novel. It's a collection of writing from her zines. I love the piece (you couldn't call it a story, more a personal essay) called 'The Velodrome and the Olympia', in which she recalls a couple of places that are significant to her. "Once I cross their boundaries I feel a shift as the relationship between myself and my surroundings is amplified. I'm in it and it's in me."

There's a piece called 'Second World', in which she she discusses her fascination with op shops. I get more enjoyment from reading about her forays into these places than going there myself ... but that's reading for you!

She spent many years recording in detail what she did on the 23rd of each month, calling the pieces "Laughter and the Sound of Teacups", with the rationale: " I didn't pause to examine motives or consequences, or to question whether anyone would want to read about my life. I just assumed people would, because the everyday life of strangers was the kind of thing that I found interesting."

I do too, and I found that I remembered many of the details of these days far more than I remember the contents of many stories or novels. I have always had a problem with plot, finding, like E.M. Forster (in Aspects of the Novel) that the characters end up, like the ugly sisters, trying to force their way into something that doesn't fit them - the plot being the shoe (they aren't the words he uses, but I cannot find said book in my muddled shelves). The effect does appear unnatural and the novel, as he says, goes dead as a result.

There is nothing dead about Strawberry Hills. It's as alive as writing can be, and I'm more than happy to journey with Vanessa through her day. There are moments of self-revelation, as in when she encounters a man on a bus:

There is something about me that attracts drunk old men. Or not even old men, just ugly ones with something not right up top. It is because I look sad most of the time, and they think something is wrong with me, that something terrible had happened to me or I am upset, when I am merely going about my daily business. I just have a sad face, and am disposed to melancholy in times of solitude.

She goes shopping with her mother in Turramurra and chooses the tin of tomatoes with the nicest label.
I like that.

I like her adventurous way of approaching the world, and her interest in all kinds of things most people would regard as trivial. Reading this book reminded me that you should go about with your eyes open and her mind and heart ready to examine whatever comes along. It's foreign travel in your own suburb.

Adult books a young woman might like (if they like that sort of thing)

2011-02-11T10:45:00.001+11:00

I do like a List, and this is the first I've compiled, in view of the feminist/young adult lists popping up at the moment.

These are books from my own shelves, some of which I read when I was a teen, or not much beyond. I believe they show young women in a strong, unconventional light, that open up possibilities rather than close them down.

The Pea Pickers, by Eve Langley: published in 1942, an often neglected Australian classic. Two sisters dress as men, call themselves Steve and Blue, and set off to earn a living working on the land. Laugh-out-loud funny, often heartbreaking, this book is lyrical, frequently overwrought in the manner of youth, and utterly true to life. "A wildness came into my heart and I spent myself with a free hand on imaginary adventures there."(see also Wilde Eve, Eve Langley's story, edited by Lucy Frost, Vintage, 1999)

The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood (1969): Marian is engaged to be married, and that would be utterly Wrong. Her body tells her so, and rebells. This books is so deliciously funny I reread it regularly. My copy is stuck together with tape.

Orlando, By Virginia Woolf: Written when she was in love with Vita Sackville-West, this is Virginia Woolf at play and at her best. Full of energy and inventive, witty writing, this story of an androgynous hero/ine is joyous to read. Virginia should have been in love more often.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, by Simone de Beauvoir: A respectable, conservative childhood and the revolt against it. Perceptive, reflective, this shows the development of an adolescent's intellectual life (and not just any adolescent).

Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid: A 19 year-old au pair from the West Indies goes to North America to work. Sexuality, memories, and the feelings for her mother are explored as she sees the cracks in the facade of her employers. The voice is clearsighted and intense, utterly convincing and beguiling.

The Millstone, by Margaret Drabble (1965): Her first sexual experience leaves Rosamund pregnant; after a failed abortion she raises her baby alone. This book is about how having a child changes you utterly - one of her best books.

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, an anthology of stories edited by Angela Carter: That says it all, doesn't it? A lovely sampler from some of the best, wildest women writers: Katherine Mansfield, Colette, Jane Bowles, Djuana Barnes, Jamaica Kincaid ... and Leonora Carrington's 'The Debutante' is here (my Sophie wrote about this story in Candlelight Novel).

Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto: her first novel. "mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love" ... all in Yoshimoto's trademark spare, addictive prose.

Daughters of Jerusalem, by Charlotte Mendelson: probably the most contemporary book on my list (2003): mothers and daughters and lesbian love in Oxford academia; families, children, hatred, love. Funny, satirical, lyrical ...

Girl With Green Eyes, by Edna O'Brien: "Haven't you already read that?" friends said 40 years ago when they saw me reading it yet again. I started reading this in my teens, own several copies (against disintegration - I think I may disintegrate first), and have read it countless times since. Young women in Dublin in the early 60s; blokes and dances and the quest for enough food to feed greedy young women. Is it feminist? Well, it's a portrayal of women I recognise, done with affection and humour, and that's good enough for me.

(And I know I've left a lot out: "Oranges are not the only fruit" for eg - but I don't possess a copy (I have others of Winterson's). But this is unashamedly a highly personal list. Feel free to recommend - I always have an eye out for a good book.)

36 young adult books for the feminist adult

2011-02-11T09:12:00.000+11:00

Because I'm a friend of Dorothy, and I like this list, have a look here.

She explains why. Some of these books sound brilliant (and I'm not talking about mine).

My day in teacups

2011-02-10T06:38:00.000+11:00

If my cup isn't exactly runneth-ing over,

as you can see it is at least very full.

And when it's almost empty

you can see a dear little black hen standing tentatively on the edge of a small pond of tea, wondering if she wants to go in.

I've had this big teacup (by Renee) for many years. It's the breakfast cup, and I need it filled, twice, before I consider the day begun. I wash it and dry it at once, with extreme care.

Later in the day, I'll use a smaller cup

(left) seen here talking to its short friend, coffee cup.

And even when a handle breaks off,

a much-loved teacup (seen here consorting with the Buddha) can be used as desk furniture, as a useful hold-all for pretty-well useless objects.

(Not pictured: contents of cup: extremely ancient pot of tiger balm, two ballpoint pen caps, a small shell from the beach, paper-clips, a screw, a pin, dead insect (unidentified), and moth dust).

Nothing your grandmother wouldn't recognise

2011-02-04T09:11:00.003+11:00

Hot days. I got up early and picked lunch ...

(I'm planning salad, fetta and home made bread) ... and remembered Michael Pollan's advice (In Defence of Food: The Myths of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating, Allen Lane, 2008), where he says "Eat plants, especially leaves".

He also says"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food".

Well, I'm old enough for that to be my grandmother, so that rules out tofu and yoghurt I suppose (sometimes I pretend that my grandmother is Chinese or Greek).

Pearl was born the century before last. She had nine children, eight of whom lived. She saw several sons go off to WW 2, and come back, after being held captive on the Burma Railroad. She lived mostly in 'the bush' - my grandfather, George, was a timber cutter. There's a famous picture of a bullock team hauling timber, and if you look really closely, you can see a pair of legs on the other side of the cart - just the legs. That was my grandfather. He was a very short man.

She married into an Italian family, and was very scornful of 'graven images' and salami.

I have many memories of Pearl's cooking.

Here are some of the foods she'd recognise:

corned beef
pig's trotters
brawn (?) ( made from various bits of pig, m'dears)
cakes of various kinds
and sweet home-made biscuits: ('More weight for my girl's hips.")
toast (white, naturally) made in the door of a wood-burning stove with a toasting fork
home-made ice cream made of powdered milk, set in a kerosene fridge (lots of ice crystals, but delicious!

Pearl lived to be 83. She didn't think I'd get married or have children - I was to be a 'career woman' - a new-fangled breed she'd read about in women's magazines.

But of all her grandchildren, my life is probably the one she'd most recognise (apart from the blogging). I have a wood-stove I cook on in winter, grow my own vegies, make bread (something she never did), and make lots of cakes and biscuits.

Michael Pollan also says to "get out of the supermarket."

And I do. My favourite shop is Pacific Bulk foods in Lismore - a great place for yummy organic ingredients for bread-making and other eating - millet, quinoa, linseed, rolled rye...(Pearl wouldn't recognise these either).

GROW YOUR OWN GRASS ROOTS DEFIANCE AGAINST THE CAPITALIST DIET
is what I say : the sentiments of this fine poster by Matilda Graphics in the 1970s, and which hung in our kitchen till recently (and is currently put away - like art galleries, we 'rotate').

So, sisters, while you're smashing the state, remember to keep a song on your lips and a patch of greens in your garden.

(Gratuitous picture of my rocket patch)

Still listening to

2011-02-01T13:18:00.000+11:00

Lets tone it down a bit

2011-01-31T06:47:00.001+11:00

In summer, when days are too long and too hot, flowers too bright, colours too intense, weather too extreme

It's nice to wake up to a house at dawn, where colours are soft, dreams turn to writing, and consider muted things

grey hair
memories of a grey cat
a grey cardigan against the morning chill

and the modest beauty of a moth on an unpainted wall.

She had always dreamed

2011-01-24T08:42:00.000+11:00

Dear Jen,

Do you mean something like this?

She had always dreamed that after retirement she would live close to nature.

Death of a laptop

2011-01-23T11:24:00.001+11:00

Well, here I am blogging again, and I wasn't going to because work on the current project was continuing apace, until last Friday afternoon, when my laptop died.

I was there at the last. The time I used it before it had become very slow, so I didn't do much work that day, and even backing up took ages - for the memory stick icon to appear on the desktop even.

So on Friday I was doing some editing work. It started out okay, and then became s-l-o-w - I decided not to back up the changes this time (only 20 mins work and I had it all on paper anyway).

I started asking it questions about what was wrong with it, and the poor little thing did its best, starting up some kind of diagnostic program. And then stalled. I came upstairs to this computer (a newish Mac with a Snow leopard or Black Panther or anyhow something strong operating system) and asked a question on the web about my little G4 iBook being slow, and all the answers were: your hard disk is giving out.

So I went back to try and shut it down. It can run on a battery, so no use pulling the power plug. I could have let it die in its sleep but that seemed too protracted - it was fully charged. I eventually got it to force quit.

It took ages even to do that. And the scary thing was, there was nothing on the desktop at the end: no hard disk icon, no document folder - nothing! apart from the screen picture of a flying ladybird. The lights were on but no one was at home.

The screen eventually went black, and I closed it up and put it away.

It was an excellent little workhorse. I figured out I had it from early 2005. It helped me write Little Wing, Candlelight Novel, and About a Girl. It did one and a half versions of my current project.

It even featured in the first version of my current project, as a little white apple laptop belonging to the main character, but in the next version I was writing it out of the story.

Perhaps it found this discouraging. I think people (and perhaps even computers) don't mind being used as models for characters, as long as its fairly flattering.

I rarely feel fond of anything mechanical, but that little computer had stood by me for a long time. I know I should have replaced her a year ago when I had a brief flirtation with a new model in a computer store, but I thought ... no.

Happy afterlife, little computer. I know you did your best.

Other people's letters

2011-01-21T09:32:00.004+11:00

I've read almost all Penelope Fitzgerald's novels, and a book of her short stories, yet I find her work still quite elusive. Her novels are short, and so elliptical that readers sometimes wonder if she's left something out (whenever I've tried this editors merely tell me that they think I've left something out.)

Still, she was shortlisted for the Booker 4 times, and won once (for Offshore, in 1979), so she must have been doing something right. I think she's one of those people with such an unusual and informed intelligence that she's hard to pin down.

This is the picture that's been looking at me from her book jackets for years (or rather, I've been looking at her) - to my way of thinking she looks wryly amused, and perhaps a little fed up with having to pose for an author photo. But there's something about those eyes that are a clue to the books.

Her first book was published when she was 60; not a novel, but about the artist Edward Burne-Jones; she also wrote about her father and his three brothers in The Knox Brothers. (Her father was the editor of Punch, one uncle was a famous code-breaker during WW2, and there was a strong strain of influential clericalism in the family as well). She married a man named Desmond Fitzgerald who apparently Drank; they lived for a while on a boat on the Thames, which sank (I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but perhaps I'm channelling Vikram Seth), and was quite poor for most of her married life, living for a long time in a Council Flat in London. She died in 2000.

And now here are her letters: So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (which actually came out in 2008 but I have trouble keeping up), and it's such a delight and a privilege to read them. There is no biography of her yet, but the letters give a strong impression of her life and personality.

I love her letters to her daughters: Here's a description of a grandchild when her son received his doctorate:

- I felt very proud and was allowd to hold baby Greg on my knee, extinguished by a large woollen cap, he looked such a sight, chewing my umbrella handle.

The throwaway grace of the word 'extinguished' gives an idea of how her novels, while quite compressed, are so perfectly descriptive.

Her letters are ones I want to quote and quote.
Here is a description of the Annual General Meeting of the Clapham Antiquarians:

... I went down to the Church hall kitchen to help Mrs Smith (the treasurer's wife, in a green hat and cardigan) to get the tea (for 47 famished members) she was having a crise de nerfs, she told me she'd been worrying the whole of the week, about the tea for the meeting and, do what I could, I couldn't get her to put on more than one kettle, so the tea could only be made in small relays and the Antiquarians, who'd already sat down and eaten all the cakes, were getting quite riotous.

There is also correspondence with her publishers and editors, whom she chats with, enquires after their gardens and cats, and drops in, very mildly, but pointedly, things like this, in 1977:

It worried me terribly when you told me I was only an amateur writer and I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status?

She frightens herself in mirrors by how decrepit she's becoming, attempts to dye her hair with teabags ("like Death In Venice") to save money ...

She said (though I can't find the letter now) that one ought to write biography about people one admires and respects, and novels about people who are sadly mistaken.

There's a gorgeous piece by Julian Barnes about her here. In his last paragraph he gives an analysis of how her writing works, something I've been abysmally unable to do...

(And of interest to Children's Lit people: her stepmother was Mary Shepard, the illustrator of the Mary Poppins Books, and daughter of E.H. Shepard, who needs no explanation).

Current musical obsession

2011-01-19T09:15:00.000+11:00

October's Uncut gave it 4 stars and said " Ontario guitarist/vocalist Taylor Kirk does the kind of dark things to the traditional rock 'n' roll ballad we usually find on the soundtracks to David Lynch movies."

Of the 5 CDs that entered this house on Xmas day it's the one we most often listen to, and have now had to buy a previous self-released album, Medicinals, from iTunes, such is our addiction.

What (who?) is it? Timbre Timbre.

Two 16 year-old young women who visited us recently liked it as well...

The loneliness of the long-distance novelist

2011-01-14T10:17:00.006+11:00

Frequently asked question: How long does it take you to write a book?

Well, that depends on the book - it can take five months from idea to finished ms without many changes needed (Mahalia) to about ten years of thinking/planning/writing (current project), and I'm wondering if these long term propositions are the go really.

It takes stamina to write a novel; I'd say that most people who are published are the stayers. In his book What I talk about when I talk about Running, Haruki Murakami says the 3 things novelists need are
talent, focus, and endurance.

For talent, I'd substitute the word aptitude. There are a lot of people with possible writing talent who just don't want to do it, or do the things that writing entails. I know I have aptitude, because I love having a day ahead with nothing much more to do than write something. I really love choosing the best words, the way decorators choose paint colours. I admire dressmakers, and love the results, but sewing a seam neatly does not thrill me, nor do I have the fortitude to teach myself the fine motor skills to become good at it.

But writing is always a struggle for me. It's so much hard work. I must want to do it, because over the years I've taught myself, through trial and error and constant reading, how to produce something that looks like a novel. Plotting is not my forte, nor is it something I look for in a novel (if that's all it has). I don't read Dickens for the plots, I read him for the atmosphere and characterisation; his almost filmic way of looking at the world.

Focus: this can vary. It comes and goes for me. I read once in an article about manic depression (sorry ... bipolar disorder) a description of a character type that is considered 'normal' and this fits me. This type goes through periods of lethargy and low energy, and periods of energy and focus, when they can be very productive. Sort of like bipolar without the debilitating extreme highs and lows. When I'm in an 'up' period it's like catching a wave, and I work hard and ride it until it inevitably comes into shore. Then paddle out and hope for another surge.

If you want an example of endurance, look no further than Jack Kerouac when he was writing The Town and the City (the ms came to 1,074 pages - and it was his first book). Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 (ed Douglas Brinkley) shows him at work. Kerouac kept a writing log while finishing T and C in the winter of '47-48, and much of it records words written, days of good work, days when little was done. One does become obsessed by wordage, and Kerouac's journal says it all:

SUNDAY FEB 29 - wrote 1000 'bloodletting' words and that makes 23,000 for the month. Tired and absorbed. Read papers.

FRIDAY JULY 16 - These must be some of the worst days of my life, I don't know. I feel old and finished ... just working with the most alone sense I've ever had. 'Nobody left', it seems, and it feels as though I'll die soon. [ ... ] Must finish this soon. I'm tired. I'd like to live for a change. It's been so long.

Did - that is, revised - 8 more pages groaningly ...

And as for me - I have a plan!

"This strange...
plan is random at best

This strange...
how much more can I take?

This strange ...
change in atmosphere "

(Built to Spill: 'Strange', from Ancient Melodies of the Future.)

And a plan can take you a long way.
Or at least to the end of the manuscript (an initial, modest ambition).

Juvenilia

2011-01-11T09:52:00.000+11:00

Written when she was in her teens, this small book (one of the classic Penguins issued in 1995 in a series of teeny tiny books) demonstrates Austen's irreverence and wit even as a very young person.

It's an overview of the British monarchy:

"HENRY the 8th

It would be an affront to my Readers were I to suppose that they were not as well acquainted with the particulars of this King's reign as I am myself. It will therefore be saving them the task of reading again what they have read before, and myself the trouble of writing what I do not perfectly recollect, by giving only a slight sketch of the principal Events which marked his reign."

Quite.

The cover has delightful drawings by the author's sister, Cassandra.

Also recommended: another novel by the teenage Austen, Love and Freindship (sic), a satire on the woman's novel of sensibility of her day, from where comes her famous line: "Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint."

(Thanks to Cath for this book)

Writer's minor holiday*

2011-01-08T09:39:00.001+11:00

I'm a stick in the mud (quite literally, now!) when it comes to going away. I love it so much at home, that one night is just about perfect.

Brisbane is two and a half hour's north, by car, so it's perfect for a short escape to the city. We like to go up to listen to live music - and January 2 found us there again for Built to Spill.

Last time, when we went to hear Gareth Liddiard about 5 weeks ago, we found the perfect motel, on Gregory Terrace, at Spring Hill.

We asked for the same room as last time, as we loved the balcony with a view over the old houses in Spring Hill, and looking towards Fortitude Valley, where lies The Zoo - about 20 minutes walk to the gig.

The rest of Queensland was flooding, and the TV news was full of it, so we felt rather fortunate to be in a sunny city to the south of the floodwaters. We walked to the Roma Street Parkland, and back along the length of Gregory Terrace, where we found one of the few ungentrified houses in the area.

(Sigh) Which is exactly the kind of house I like. All peeling and old and gorgeous.

Thirty years ago (how strange, in your own life, to dispense with three decades in a few words) we lived in Brisbane for about 9 months (though in West End, another inner suburb south of the river) and everywhere in inner Brisbane looked like this. One night we went for a walk to the city's CBD, pushing our 2 year old in a pram, looking for a place where we might have a coffee. The whole city was deserted (literally), everything shut, and dark. We were stopped by two policemen, who asked what we were doing (I am not lying). We didn't look weird, or not to my way of thinking. Just two late 20s people out for a stroll with their baby, looking for a coffee.

Those were the Bjelke-Peterson years, when Brisbane was conservative and backward. Our friends who lived there used to know, by sight, the policemen who hung around the demonstrations, they had seen them so often.

But I love Brisbane - then and now. The climate is familiar, and similar, to where I live now, and there are all sorts of quotations from our life here at Wongavale - timber houses, verandahs, fruit bats venturing across the evening sky.

*the title of a song by Calexico

hello, 2011

2011-01-04T07:59:00.000+11:00

This is the year I turn 60. As one of my (only slightly) younger friends said on the phone the other day, you can't deny that old age has pretty well arrived when that birthday comes around.

And so I am at the stage where that poem that is such a favourite of my sister kicks in; you must know it: "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple" etc

Trouble is, I already do what I like. The other night I trashed my ears again at The Zoo in Brisbane, listening to Built to Spill, who were brilliant. I saw a few wiser, much younger people wearing ear plugs (sensible: there are registers that are dropping out of my hearing). And I can say I was the only 59 year old woman there. People nod and say, 'Oh, yes, research,' when I say I go to rock gigs. But that's not it at all- I'm a fan!

Maybe I'll stop going out to live music ... just kidding. I can remember coming away from Okkervil River (at the Zoo in 2009) thinking, 'It would be really sad and depressing if all of their fans were my age - but it's okay if one or two are ....)

So this year, what do I aim to do? Finish the current ms, whenever...

Not start writing anything else until I'm fully dilated (but do I ever?)

And just generally, lounge about

doing very little, like other members of our household.

Happy New Year, everyone!

hello, blue sky!

2010-12-29T08:04:00.000+11:00

Ducks: the first sighting

2010-12-28T10:58:00.000+11:00

Which is rather like the dove and the olive branch up here. Kleine Ente (or Little Duck, as she is known to her non-German speaking friends), and her paramour, Pierre, have once again survived the deluge.

And were a little bit peckish.

(not visible: grain left by kind, duck-loving person)

And the water keeps on rising...

2010-12-27T17:45:00.000+11:00

This is our little creek. Lismore, I think you may soon be in flood.

Weather

2010-12-27T13:19:00.001+11:00

We've had a lot of it. Only two dry days last week, and now this ...

all heading down Hanging Rock Creek to Lismore, Flood City.

But there's something nice about spurts of water

coming off the roofs of kin sheds.

The rain gauge is working overtime

since about 9 am this morning - it's now 1.09

Still, we're all keeping dry as best as we can.

the lovely Mavis

And the view from the veranda is, well, wet.

Low tech things to do in the wet:

scrabble
reading
patting the cat
listening to the sound of cane toads at night

Or, using electronics:

listening to cds
blogging
television

But not writing. I need sunny days for that.

Meanwhile, it seems that the rest of the first world (those not trapped in airports) is going shopping!

Sometimes I think the earth is trying to tell us something.

Rock Valley Nativity

2010-12-21T08:56:00.000+11:00

just down the road

'Oh, the Rock Valley road is a mighty fine road,
The Rock valley road is the road to ride ...'
(exit, singing, to the tune of Rock Island Line)

I'm doing that end of year thing

2010-12-19T14:12:00.003+11:00

where you list your favourite whatever of the year.

Music: Top album would have to be Roky Erickson with Okkervil River: True Love Cast Out all Evil

Wonderful songwriter backed by my favourite band, this album is all heart.

Also enjoyed: The Dexateens (Singlewide), The Sadies (Darker circles), The National (High Violet), Delta Moon (Hell Bound Train), The Heavy (The House that dirt built), and White denim (Fits). And Johnny Dowd's Cemetery Shoes nearly drove me crazy. It's good in very small doses.

Gigs: a toss up between Pavement and Wilco. And a gig at the Hippo Bar in Canberra where my son did a jazz/funk/rock kind of thing with a group of friends.

Books: This was my year of Elizabeth Taylor and James Boswell. I'm currently reading Christina Stead's The Man who Loved Children which is possibly the best book I've ever read. Sorry, but all my favourite writers are dead. But my favourite musicians are nearly all alive.

Um .. and that's about it.
Just having a rainy afternoon ... back to Christina Stead

What is this thing called blog?

2010-12-11T10:49:00.000+11:00

I am sometimes troubled by the amorphous nature of the blog (sad, I know. I frequently have strange thoughts, some of which I turn into novels).

I especially wonder about the Author Blog, which is frequently about One.

Some people come to the site via One's publisher's page, so a (very) few people are interested in One. I always hope they don't find me too weird for their tastes ('Well, I'm never reading THAT author again!')

(It should be said though, that one of my most popular posts is called 'Thanks to the beaver', which from stats I know people find by googling the word 'beaver'. I have done this to find out where I rank on this subject, and have not found my blog - the top sites on this subject are about that amusing tampon ad where a woman goes to lunch with her beaver and generally has fun with it).

I sometimes think that people who flit here might be disappointed to find the beaver post to be about Boswell and Johnson, with a passing reference to Simone de Beauvour.

I think that as a genre, I prefer the novel, which is shaped and artful. The blog tends to be bitty (at least mine does), and things appear seemingly at random (my last post was about my new teapot which is apparently unrelated to this post and while not impossible to segue into, is probably not worth the effort).

You come to the end of writing a novel, where a blog goes on and on until you or other people lose interest in it, and then you either wipe it or leave it circling endlessly in cyberspace, like a dead star.

But as I was making my Festive Cake this morning (currently in the oven) I realised that the blog does have a shape, of sorts. Since it is organised primarily by date, and we are getting to the end of the year, it is a good time to have a little hiatus.

And to thank all of you, dear readers, who have taken the trouble to visit, read, leave comments or send messages. Please have a slice of my virtual cake, when it it cooked (and allowed to mature for the two whole weeks before Christmas - I'm tardy, I know).

I'd also like to thank the people who have blundered here, like a butterfly alighting on a flower that turns out not to be the right colour for its taste. I welcome random visitors - you add a touch of the exotic.

I hope you all have a delightful end of year, doing whatever pleases you the most.

Goodbye, little teapot

2010-12-09T10:19:00.012+11:00

While I was emptying it, the handle of one of my favourite teapots came off ...

and now it's waiting down in the kiln shed to be smashed and added to the pottery rubble in the new concrete floor of the chook pen (not sentimental, the potter. Pots come and they go ...)

The scungy looking stuff on it is wood ash, from where it was fired in the wood kiln, and the pink blushes are where the flames licked over it. I'm no photographer and this picture doesn't do justice to its beauty - it's very faintly bluish in colour, and I love the fluid fish decoration on the side.

But then a few days after the breakage, having completed the day's work on chapter 5, I went out to the kitchen and found this on the bench:

Its sudden and unexpected appearance made me very happy (and chapter 5 had also gone well, so there was much happiness that day).

It's a celadon glaze, but fired in the gas kiln, so no ash or grunge.

And while I quite like it, I don't love it yet.

Walk on the wild side

2010-12-03T10:11:00.000+11:00

Just cross the bridge near the Lismore CBD, near the corner at Planet Music...

and you'll come to The Winsome.

A charming old pub, which has been variously rough old pub, then a slightly smarter alternate/gay/music pub, and after 'going bust' is now accommodation for homeless people.

And now you're in North Lismore. Drop in to the Serpentine Gallery, an artists' collective exhibition space, or buy a shirt from the animal charity op shop a bit further on. You can have a coffee or juice at the Blue Tongue Cafe, sit all morning there at a big old wooden table out the back, or swing in a hammock. Then head down Wotherspoon Street to admire the shabby overgrown houses, and find the park full of enormous fig trees, swathes of grassy lawn and outgrowth of rainforest plants. You could sleep all night in this park after a party; if you're lucky a kind person might cover you with a coat against the chill coming off the nearby river.

There's the 20,000 cows Vegetarian Ashram, and another pub on the corner where you can get cheap counter meals. 30 years ago there was a cafe called The Bluebird, where the cook wore a sarong with nothing else on underneath. When it got hot, she (or he - I have only been told this story) used to stand out the front of the shop flapping the sarong (revealingly) to cool herself. Afterwards, that building was lived in by an imaginary character called Matt and his baby Mahalia. It burned down a few years ago but thankfully, I think they'd moved on by then.

Going from there down Terania Street, which leads out of town to Nimbin, you could pick up some food at Rainbow Wholefoods (if you dared). Across the road and down a narrow lane is Northern Rivers' Pottery Supplies. It used to be called The Fabled Workshops, until my friends Faye and Bil retired. If they were still there, we could drop in there for a chat, and throw grain to the wild little hen that lived in the yard with her brood of chicks.

Just walk around, take in the sights. You might see a couple with evilly stylish hats walking past with their whippet, Trevor. Or people shuffling in trackie pants. Or a girl in a red, spotted dress. Or a writer with a camera and notebook, looking suitably nondescript.

If you get up early enough in the morning, about sunrise, you might see a young woman with wild dark hair walking her baby in a pram.

That's Sophie. But she's capable of speaking for herself:

I continued down Bridge Street, past the Winsome Hotel and various shops and houses and the cafe where Kate used to work. As I passed the hotel, I always looked up at the side of the building where a white mixing bowl sat on a shelf inside the window of some scullery of kitchen. I loved the ordinary domesticity of it, the white bowl against the dark brick wall. My life at this time revolved around seeing each morning the stillness of the white bowl, and the singing man (or perhaps the still, pale face of the man as he paused to watch the sun rise in the sky, and the singing bowl in the window.)

Let me be your writing desk calendar

2010-12-01T11:57:00.001+11:00

Thought for today:

"I try to write a little each day, without hope and without despair."

Isak Dinesen

negative capability ...

2010-11-29T09:43:00.001+11:00

... a concept so famous it has its own page on wiki.

Thought up by the poster boy of the Romantic movement, John Keats, it goes

"that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

For some reason I've always associated it with writing a novel ... the months, or sometimes years of uncertainty while you write it, never knowing if it will ever come full circle, or make sense. Keeping the big picture in mind all the time while each day looking at the little postage stamp (remember them?) sized piece of the puzzle you're working on at the moment.

And (in the weird connectivity of my thought patterns) this made me think of the line 'tightrope walking over Niagara Falls' which is in the book Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Edited by Earl G Ingersoll, Virago 1992) where she says, when asked about her weaknesses:

'Weaknesses? We can't afford to think about those kinds of things. Most writers are tightrope walking over Niagara Falls all the time. Look down and you've had it.'

Anyway, now that I've got that off my chest, I'm off to do a bit a tightrope walking, exercise my negative capability, concentrate on a postage-stamp sized piece of writing. Just one little bit at a time ...

Ooo. Read this review.

2010-11-27T10:33:00.002+11:00

The kind of review a writer dreams of.

Strange Tourist

2010-11-24T08:30:00.009+11:00

Friday, November 19, Gregory Terrace, Brisbane:

We're heading for the Old Museum (a Nineteenth Century birthday cake of a building, featuring alternating red and white bricks in arched patterns), now a performance space, tonight the venue for Gareth Liddiard's tour of his first solo album, Strange Tourist. It's a perfect Brisbane spring evening, mild, slightly humid, and at 7.30 pm darker than it is a mere 2 and a half hours drive south, where we live (no daylight saving time in Qld ), so the lights in the city and along the roads are beautiful.

I'm tagging along with the resident potter, who has produced many a fine pot to the strains of Liddiard's band The Drones, so their albums Gala Mill, Havilah, and (my favourite title of all time) Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By are all familiar to me, even if I haven't listened them to death (if you've seen the size of our CD collection : 'ing HUGE! you'll see why I can't fixate on everything). But I'm interested to hear what Liddiard has come up with.

The support is Loene Carmen. She comes on when there is still only a trickle of people there. It's tough being the warm-up when the place is only part full and everyone is waiting for the main event, but everyone is attentive and seem to clap extra-loud to make up for lack of numbers. It's not hard anyway as she's great with her simple, strong plucking, breathy voice, and intense songs about, among other things, the lives of women.

Then a break, in which the place fills up, with anticipation and people. And then Liddiard wanders onto the stage as though he's somehow lost his way and the place goes still.

There's nothing tentative about his performance, though. 'I'm just going to play the album,' he announces, and proceeds to do so, in between quips about it not being 'folk music', explanations about the songs, cryptic utterances that I don't catch, and slugs from a water bottle that doesn't look as if it has water in it, eyeing the audience with amused speculation all the while.

Why is it that performers who give songs their best voice tend to mutter in between times? It's almost as though they're expecting everyone to hang onto their every word, and in this case they do - the place is obviously full of fans. Easily 75% of the audience would be men.

Men at rock gigs: I love 'em. They are so sweetly serious about the music they clearly love. I always see blokes who could be straight out of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, one of my favourite books. I saw a quintessential Hornby character when I went to see Pavement earlier in the year. He was wandering lonesome in the crowd, ever so slightly paunched and balding with a beer in hand and wearing a Wilco T-shirt. Then there are the young men with mates - I love their easy affectionate ways with each other. Crowd watching at rock gigs: almost as good as the music.

I was interested in the way this predominantly male audience received Liddiard's songs; from their reactions many of them seemed already familiar with the album . They're songs that aren't making any concessions to anybody - quite long (one, The radicalisation of D, based loosely on someone like David Hicks, is about 15 minutes), empathetic, oblique - not easy listening, though riveting. Liddiard is the main songwriter and singer of The Drones, and bands have a palette of sound, mood and phrasing, so it was rather like The Drones solo - the delivery holds nothing back. He's a confident and engaging performer, and held the audience's attention absolutely. I admired that - I've seen performers with equally good track records act as though they can't trust their audience enough to take them somewhere unexpected, and quiet and reflective and emotive - but he did. And some of it is just plain weird stuff. I love that too.

And I couldn't help thinking how reviewers of young adult books are in the habit of stereotyping what boys (or, I should more accurately say, young men) will like in a book - that they are always after action, not interested in emotion or relationships.

My experience of men is otherwise - and this performance bore that home to me.

The writer in fiction

2010-11-17T10:17:00.005+11:00

It's interesting the way writers are presented in fiction - after all, who should know better what they're like?

The writers I've portrayed (though they're not published ones), the O'Farrell sisters Sophie and Kate, lie around on beds for hours reading Great Books, keep notebooks (or at least Kate does), and generally suffer from lassitude. It's the heat on the far north coast of NSW that causes this estivation. Portrait of the artist as a young woman ...

I'm gradually working my way through the oeuvre of Elizabeth Taylor (obsessiveness comes with the territory), and have found writers variously presented:

as a chronic liar, murderer (possible psychopath), who jumps under a train at the end (spoiler ... sorry) (A Wreath of Roses, 1949). But to be fair, he's lying about being a writer too.
as having enormous doubts as to the point of writing: "And even if I were one of the great ones, who, in the long run, cares? People walk about the streets and it is all the same to them if the novels of Henry James were never written. They could not easily care less. No one asks us to write. If we stop, who will implore us to go on?" (A View of the Harbour, 1947)
The writer in In a Summer Season (1961) also has doubts. She is a housekeeper, putting together a collection called 'Five thousand and one witty and humorous sayings'. Her problem is not having a dearth of material, but too much: 'Prolixity is my problem. having too much, you see." But "what is the use of it? Where is the point? were the words she fought against in secret."

But in my favourite so far of Taylor's novels, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) the writer is young, is working on his first novel, and has no such doubts.

Ludo is writing a novel about old age, and when he rescues Mrs Palfrey after she falls down in the street, he discovers in her a wealth of material. She lives in a hotel, along with a lot of other old people, last step before the nursing home. She unknowingly gives him his title: 'We're not allowed to die here,' she tells him.

Ludo is no cold-hearted , unfeeling monster. He's kind, charming, considerate. But all the time, he is observing and taking notes. As writers do. She falls in love with him; he is the way she wishes her real grandson was (and in fact pretends to the others at the hotel, with Ludo's help, that he is her grandson in order to save face as the real grandson never visits.)

But her feeling that they are 'soul-mates' (though Taylor does not use that term) is, in many subtle ways, shown to be not true. When she says that no one needs her, he tells her, to her enormous gratification: 'I need you.'

And soon after that, in Taylor's cleverly spare way of putting things, the chapter ends:

In bliss, she went to bed.
Ludo hurried back home to write up his notes.

Ludo is an attractive character, as is Mrs Palfrey, but being an Elizabeth Taylor novel, this is no heart-warming, sentimental tale of a cross-generational friendship. ('The modern man's Jane Austen', indeed.)

And which of us has not hurried back home to write up our notes?

Hat like a teapot

2010-11-14T10:22:00.005+11:00

Blogger stats: you've got to love 'em.

This week, someone found my blog with the words: "Virginia Woolf -- hat like a teapot on her head."

I may have written about Virginia Woolf. I've certainly written about teapots, but not hats.

But thank you, random Googler - I now have an image in my mind of Virginia with a hat like a teapot on her head and it won't go away.

Coincidentally, Virginia (and photos thereof) figures in my Current Project.

(Note for notebook: a photo of Woolf with a hat like a teapot on her head.)

But does this picture actually exist? It will - at least in fiction.

Serendipity - one of the best parts of writing a novel.

Added later: And in a bit of post-modern self-referential cross-referencing, if you want to see a teapot hat you can go here. At least now people googling the words 'hat like a teapot' will have something to look at!

Necessary Conditions

2010-11-10T08:26:00.006+11:00

The writer Elizabeth Taylor, with whom I am having one of those writerly flings, apparently hated writing (don't we all), wrote very slowly in longhand, and thought it all up while she was doing the ironing (now there's a strategy...). 'The arduous isolation of writing a novel always weighed upon her." (Elizabeth Jane Howard, 1984, in the introduction to the Virago edition of The Wedding Group.

Her books contain many writers. In The Wedding Group she writes of two of her minor characters:

The Father and Joe were both writing books, but neither of these works was likely to emerge for a long time, as their authors detested being alone in a room, without talk, for more than ten minutes, so that the necessary conditions for getting on with the job were seldom achieved.

Spotted: Girl in a red spotted dress

2010-11-09T11:49:00.004+11:00

Kissing

2010-11-06T10:14:00.004+11:00

'Chagall,' he said affectionately, as if he'd just met an old friend. 'The man who painted the picture,' he added, when he saw Emily's puzzled expression. He nodded at another print, of a man and a woman floating in an embrace above the ordinary domesticity of their living room, the woman with a bunch of flowers in her hand. 'Love can be like that.'

Emily looked again at the picture. The woman had a most tender and expectant expression as she raised her face to be kissed; both she and her lover hovered gracefully, gravity pulling at their feet, their bodies fluid like lengths of ribbon falling to the ground.

'How to you learn to do that?' she asked. 'Float above everything so effortlessly?'

'In a radiant and ecstatic way? 'If I ever get hold of the instructions I'll give them to you.'

Little Wing, pp 46-47

I was reminded that I'd written about this picture ("The Birthday' by Marc Chagall) when I saw it over at Walking Zig. I like her take on it.

And if that's not enough kissing, over at Bean there Read That, Kate is busy kissing books!

Pretty Things

2010-11-05T14:41:00.004+11:00

I like a nice teacup. Especially ones with spots.

Something that you feel will find its own form: TAKE #2

2010-11-03T08:27:00.007+11:00

This is number 5 in Jack Kerouac's "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose" - it astonishes me how many people Google this line and come to my blog this way.

What they find is a post on how I came to write Secret Scribbled Notebooks: how after many drafts it is possible to find your meaning and arrive at a completed work.

I don't think this is what Kerouac meant - and since so many people obviously wonder what it means, here, for what it's worth, is my take on it:

I had an inkling that the answer might be to do with his writing and editing of The Subterraneans, and went to letters he wrote at that time (in Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1957-1969. Edited by Ann Charters, Viking Penguin 1999).

Here, in a letter to his editor Donald Allen at Grove Press (who had 'edited' this most poetic of Kerouac's works by putting in commas, full stops etc - Kerouac went to the great trouble of restoring the original, even saying he would pay for the changes if it cost at the printer) - he explains his techniques of writing. In part, he says this:

...the best statement is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind TAP FROM ONESELF - blow! - now! - your way is your only way, it cannot be 'good' or 'bad' but only always honest ('ludicrous'). spontaneous, confessional, interesting because not crafted. Craft is craft. [ ....]

... I see it leading to a tremendously interesting literature everywhere with all kinds of confessions never made by man before, leading to a cool future ... the strange future where it will be realised that everyone is an artist, naturally. And each good or bad according to his openness!

page 16, Selected Letters

(The first part of this statement later became incorporated into Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.")

In his critical biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe (Grove Press Inc, 1983), Gerald Nicosia has this to say:

When he wrote "Craft is craft," he meant that the attempt to impose form on an art work is the worst form of deception, self-deception, in which the artist has lost touch with his inner being, from which the deepest impulses of his art spring.

page 454, Memory Babe (Penguin Edition)

Of course, Grove Press were trying to impose form on Kerouac (their form - standard English, when what he was writing was poetry), insulting him by assuming he didn't know what he was doing. But no one was more certain of his poetics than Kerouac. At the conclusion of his letter to Donald Allen, he says:

... I feel (and know, in fact) that Subterraneans is a careful large poem and shouldn't be fiddled with (overmuch) any more than the shorter poems of Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder, Whalen et al, who wd. certainly have not been impressed with my heralded Subterraneans cut 60% like that and all sentence structure rhythm broken, like Satevepost nowhere tale ... Don't be bugged, I know what I'm talking about tho I may get drunk and act childish socially and tho my Zen name is LAZY LUNATIC ... I'm an artist, oldfashioned, devoted.

Please write. As ever
Jack

If you've never heard Kerouac read his own work, you should, as it will bring home to you that his so-called prose is poetry. After listening to a recording of Kerouac, I now read his work more slowly, savouring the rhythms. I can hear his voice, hear the way he would have read it himself.

And I think he's right: as a writer you need to listen to your own inner being, and write what you want to write, do it your way - "your way is your only way".

And isn't this good advice for life as well?

A book by the more famous Horniman

2010-10-31T15:39:00.007+11:00

Roy Horniman (1872-1930) was (I think) my grandfather's cousin. Related somehow, anyway. I think his father and my great-grandfather (a man who was called affectionately by the family "Bushy", came to Australia in the 19th century and was the manager of the first bank in Lismore) were brothers.

My uncle Sid, who died before I was born, or very close to it, went to stay with Roy Horniman in London when he was a boy. I wish I could have talked to him about that. Stupidly, no one else in the family seems to have bothered to ask him about it, or if they did, left no record.

Published in 1907, Israel Rank is the book the classic film Kind Hearts and Coronets was made from.

I bought this copy in about 1980 from a second-hand bookshop in Brisbane for about a dollar. This 1948 Eyre & Spottiswoode reprint is now worth (if you can find one) a hundred pounds or so. I have used this one ill - it once had a near-perfect jacket, but after 30 years of lying about on my shelves ... well, you can see the condition. I have plans for getting some acid-free paper to wrap it in.

Need I say it's brilliantly written - a satire about an ambitious man, basically a psychopath, who murders about six people who stand between him and a title - and gets away with it. This review here says more about it than I could.

It's now available from Faber in print on demand.

"The modern man's Jane Austen."

2010-10-27T09:01:00.011+11:00

Virago.

Was there ever a better name for a publisher?

From the Macquarie Dictionary:

1. A turbulent, violent or ill-tempered scolding woman; a shrew.

2. A woman of masculine strength or spirit. [ME and OE, from L: manlike woman]

And now, here they are, a whole box of Viragos, spilling over on coffee tables, sitting around on beds, and lurking on bedside chests.

I bought them on eBay, where they were called (9) Elizabeth Taylor novels. I was the only bidder, and they came all the way from Wichita, Kansas (I know: book miles, but as I eat largely from a garden a few steps from the kitchen my food miles are very few).

Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) is an English novelist I knew about, but have only just started reading ( due to good old word of mouth). To my chagrin, I had not read the tattered Penguin copy of The Wedding Group which lived with us for years, then disappeared, but after discovering her I had to read this book - and the rest came with it.

Is there anything better than finding a writer you love, and then that she has written many books, which you now have in your possession?

How to describe her writing? It's economical, and it's tough - not in the stringy, too much gristle sense, but in that over time it will not fade, rot away, or otherwise disintegrate ... in other words, it will wear well.

And has. Her novels were published between 1945 and 1976, so like Austen, the people are not of our time. Her characters are mostly women (though she 'does' men well too, and often takes us into the lives of minor characters, who may or may not appear in the novel again.), middle class, who go to the hairdresser, read Henry James, and send their children away to school. She portrays women's friendships very well (Virginia Woolf, who is a guest at a literary tea party game two young women play in A Wreath Of Roses (1949) would have approved.)

Elizabeth Taylor is wise, witty, ironic - her writing contains frequent jokes, many of them literary. Yet there is an underlying seriousness, and as I said, wisdom. She's the sort of writer you want to annoy people with, stopping them every few minutes to say, "Listen to this!'

So listen to this:

From A View of the Harbour (1947):

(Beth and Tory are friends - Beth, a writer, is going up to London to see her publisher, and Tory assumes it is a man):

"But my publisher is a woman," Beth said, looking mystified.
"A woman!"
Tory sobered up at the shock. "How could a publisher be a woman?"
'She could be and she is."

And after Tory tells Beth off for being so absent from the people in her life (as writers often are: you may disagree), she apologises.

"I think it is the change of life," she said, looking haughty.
"My dear Tory!"
"Have you a cigarette?"
"Of course."
Beth got up and began to search, looking in all sorts of unlikely places.
"We must have a nice talk about our wombs some time," Tory laughed, dabbing her eyes.
"Yes, that would be fun. Here is a rather bent Turkish one. Cigarette, I mean, not womb. Do you really think all that about me? Beth asked shyly, holding out the lighted match, her hand shaking.
"Yes, I do," Tory said. "But I think it in a quiet way, not crossly like that. I feel you don't live in this world any longer. But your husband and children do. I do, too. You will balls everything up with your indifference one of these days."

And finally, here is Beth's husband:

'Women are so coarse-fibred, so tough, so lacking in sensibility,' he thought. This was constantly borne in upon him. 'If they talk like this to men, God knows what they say to one another when they really throw back their veils.'

It was someone called Arthur Mizener, quoted on the back of several of the Viragos, who called Taylor "the modern man's Jane Austen". (And I reel, that even in about 1982 he couldn't find a way of saying that that doesn't use the word 'man'. )

"The Jane Austen of our time?" perhaps.

Except that Austen is timeless: she is for all times.

I think Elizabeth Taylor will prove to be so too.

Tea

2010-10-23T09:33:00.008+11:00

Tea.

It's what keeps this show on the road.

Jack Kerouac liked coffee (preferably with rolled-up bits of paper from benzedrine inhalers dropped into it. It gave him phlebitis). (But gave him the energy to write, I guess).

I like coffee too. I grind it myself. I have grown it myself, but it's a long way from a raw bean to a cup of coffee.

I like a nice teapot. Preferably hand-made.

The little spotty pot which is moi is the one I use for solitary cups of tea, early morning or when I'm at home during the day by myself. It was given to us by Renee, whose whimsical pottery can be found at the Bangalow and Channon markets.

The large brown wood-fired pot is made by the resident potter, and is useful when we have more than three people. There are two other teapots in use, in-between sized pots perfect for two people, or at a squeeze, three.

Teabags are ugly (but convenient). I live in fear of the time when it is no longer possible to buy loose-leaf tea at the supermarket (my brand is Dilmah). The loose-leaf section is becoming smaller and smaller.

40 years ago, when I was 19 and visiting an Australian friend who was a student at a Canadian university, it was near-impossible to get leaf tea. There was a rumour that you could buy it at a place called Billings Bridge, a suburb of Ottawa. I trudged through the snow to buy it.

Beginner's Mind

2010-10-20T09:41:00.009+11:00

A few weeks ago I was in Queanbeyan, and managed to catch up with my friend Kathy Kituai, who lives in nearby Canberra. A year or so ago she gave me her most recent books of tanka, Straggling into Winter, and In Two Minds, one written in collaboration with Amelia Fielden.

We walked to the river along untidy overgrown paths, and explored the Oaks Estate. Kathy has just returned from three months in Scotland, where she worked on a poetry and pots project with a potter, Fergus Stewart, and we talked about that and about writing and life (the two naturally going together) as we always do. Afterwards, we drank tea in my son's kitchen. A lovely afternoon.

Since I know many readers of this blog are interested in writing, I'm linking this with an interview with Kathy at Tanka Online. Although she's talking about poetry, there is much of interest to any writer, especially those who value the process and philosophy of writing. I especially liked her reference to 'beginner's mind', a term I'm not familiar with, but which I understand instinctively, and will now take into my vocabulary and writing.

From the faded red notebook

2010-10-19T12:11:00.002+11:00

Federico Fellini:

"Tell the story as if you're telling it to a friend ... or a joke!"

Wotherspoon Street

2010-10-18T09:34:00.010+11:00

The only thing the houses had in common was an immense shabbiness; it was the sort of place where a rainbow flag is used in place of a curtain, where there are several empty plots of land with kikuyu grass as tall as your shoulder and nasturtiums running wild. [....]
It was an ugly place, a beautiful place, and one day a poet might well write a suite of lyrical poems to it. The title could be Wotherspoon Street, for that is its name.

From My Candlelight Novel

Tirra Lirra by the River, by Jessica Anderson

2010-10-13T08:25:00.004+11:00

...it seemed that whenever one member of our family sat down to write to another, the very act invoked a spell compelling us to present our lives and our surroundings as utterly, impossibly banal. There were occasional exceptions, however, when under the attack of some emotion unexpectedly felt while writing, this strange rigidity would relax for a moment, and life would leap in.

There is no banality at all in Tirra Lirra; life has most definitely leapt into this book.

Reading it is like having a conversation with one of those rare people who always say the unexpected. It is never dull. But the unexpected also has the ring of utter truth. Life is like that.

I am possibly the last person in the literary universe to read it. It was first published in 1978, and won the Miles franklin Award; it has been on school reading lists (though not, it must be said, while I was at school)

What must I have been doing to have missed it? In 1978, having a baby and etc. And afterwards ... well, it just slipped through the net.

Don't let it slip through yours. A young friend of mine who works in a bookshop tells me that people don't browse the shelves any more - they only want a book they have heard of before.

Well, I had heard of it, but it wasn't until a writer I know mentioned it briefly during a day when we walked and raved on for hours that I thought I should read it.

She didn't urge me to read it, simply got a look on her face that said it was impossibly good, sublime, beyond words really. That's the kind of book review I like.

Matt liked his new place

2010-10-12T09:28:00.006+11:00

Matt liked his new place. [...] He liked looking out in the mornings to see the grey-bearded man from the 20,000 Cows Vegetarian Restaurant across the road eating breakfast, visible through the glass window of his shop. He liked the buzz of commercial activity: the service station across the road, the saddlery next door(WE TRAVEL TO FIT YOUR SADDLE said the sign), the paper shop on the next corner, and the pub down the street. He even liked the rambling voices of drunks making their way home on foot after closing time, their bursts of song and equally brief bursts of argument. Most of all he liked the way you could see the country in the distance if you looked down the end of the street.

From Mahalia

Kate doesn't seem to work here any more

2010-10-08T10:20:00.009+11:00

On Saturdays I worked in a cafe, to save up for university [ ....] The cafe was called the Dancing Goanna, and it was across the river on the wild side of town, where students and hippies hung out. The tables and chairs were old laminex and vinyl ones, and none of them matched. There was a courtyard with a long, messy garden behind it, full of long grass, nasturtiums trailing orange and yellow flowers, and bok choy gone to seed. The place looked like the country.

Secret Scribbled Notebooks, page 38

Maybe not everyone realises that the place where I live is also the setting for most of my books: Lismore in northern NSW. And many of the places I mention in the book are real places. Only the people are imaginary (and some of the minor characters, such as the 3 legged dog in Mahalia are real too.)

In Secret Scribbled Notebooks Kate's place of work is called The Blue Tongue in real life. I went there yesterday, meeting up with a girl in a red-spotted dress, where we sat in the back yard and talked.

The cafe's changed a bit since I described it in 2003. The yard is a little less wild - no nasturtiums or bok choy gone to seed, and it's been neatened up with pavers and umbrellas, and the addition of a hammock.

And then, of course, there's the vexed question of whether the place is really the place in the book at all. I know that it's the model for it, but when you create fiction, some sort of transformation takes place in your mind, so that you can take the liberty to invent, make it over in your imagination, and make it yours. This is necessary, and it's the magical aspect of writing.

So the place both is and isn't the place in the book.

Readers make their own pictures in their heads when they read, and no two pictures will be exactly the same - that's the another magical aspect of reading. So I don't really want to replace the images any of the readers of Secret Scribbled Notebooks might already have of places in that book. That's for you to create.

But this is the place that inspired that part of the book, like it or not. I know it, so you may as well know it too.

And what, another real Kate, might ask, is their coffee like?

On the day I went, it was beautifully hot, and strong enough. No fancy patterns on the white fluff, but a satisfying taste.

The girl in the red spotted dress had some sort of fresh juice (apple and beetroot, I think). I didn't ask what it was like. We were too busy talking.

North coast hippies

2010-10-07T08:01:00.004+11:00

Hippeastrum that is. A bit the worse for wear after well over a week of rain .

As are we all.

I was up what felt like (and was) half the night trying to get my uploaded photos to go where I want them to. My friend over at Walking Ziggy can do it.

But I'm giving up. Found what looked like a useful thread on it, but to no avail.

You know what? I'm not going to bother with it. My pictures will be dorkily positioned at the top forever.

But today the sun is shining, as you can see, the first proper sun I've seen for a while. And in my struggles with the computer I found the spot where I can set this thing to the time I'm actually at. Which is what this post is aimed at proving to myself.

Huzzah!

I'm labelling it 'alcohol' because I feel like I've been drinking all night.

My Life in Music #1

2010-10-06T07:02:00.000+11:00

The music I painted my garret to: The Felice Brothers by The Felice Brothers (Loose Music, 2008)

Three coats: undercoat and two top coats, I listened to this album over and over again (it's not a big room, but still...)

Nick Hornby, in his book 31 Songs has an hypothesis that we listen to rock songs over and over till we 'solve' them somehow. Or from memory that's what I think he said - I don't own the book. So did I solve the Felice Brothers?

Sort of. I don't have to listen to them all the time any more but I still enjoy them. Their next album, Yonder is the Clock (2009), was great but almost too melancholy to listen to... though I did, a lot. I think I like Tonight at the Arizona the best, or their Mix Tape, available at gigs, or through their website.

Gigs: they're from upstate New York, have toured Europe and Britain several times, but never Australia. It's not beyond credibility that someone reading this knows them (6 degrees and all that): tell them to come to Brisbane (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, get it?). The Zoo or the Tivoli would be a great location. And while they're at it, bring A A Bondy with them. (Please?)

Or do I have to fly to New York?

Style: they're mostly tagged Americana, have been compared to 'The Band', but as Levon Helm of that erstwhile band says of Americana: 'I just call it rock and roll.'

This charming book

2010-10-03T05:17:00.003+11:00

Royalty time.

Look, people always want to know how many copies one sells, so I'll tell you. In the last 6 months this book sold 4, bringing its life net sales to 1, 445 copies.

And it's a great book, if you like that sort of thing. Literary award judges did - it was shortlisted for 3 Premier's Awards (NSW, Qld, and Victoria). It's what my publisher once described as a 'meaty' book. I call it 'Mullumbimby gothic'. Predictably, some reviewers felt the need to warn that some people might find the subject matter 'challenging'.

But what I love about books, and not just my own, is the way they hang around. Paper's pretty long-lasting (I'm thinking about all the ancient paperbacks I own that just keep keeping on), and eventually a book will find its way into the hands of someone who loves it. And it's won an award! The reviewer's personal Happy Sapphist Award. Thank you, Rie.

I wrote this novel at a time when I was finding writing pretty discouraging. A common enough experience. I'd published a book called Loving Athena in 1997, which a lot of people didn't seem to get. (You can now buy this book somewhere in the US for about $52. Must be a rare book). I wondered if I wanted to keep publishing (note I said publishing, not writing. I knew I wanted to keep writing).

So Charm was my Secret Project. I took years to write it. Writing and rewriting till the language was the way I wanted it. It was an odd form - a novel told in a series of connected stories, many of them years apart, about a whole family, mother, daughters and friends. I really didn't think I would ever finish it, or even if I wanted to. It was writing for the sake of writing. When I finished a section I would sit down and write it again, differently. I remember the house I wrote it in - a place we'd built in a beachside suburb, a pole house with bare polished timber floors, louvres that rattled in the wind, and a view to Mt Chincogan, in the hills outside Mullumbimby, where the book is set.

In that same house the idea for Mahalia came to me. I wrote it very quickly, putting my Secret Project aside.

The rest is herstory.

Not blogging: reading, sleeping, thinking about writing

2010-10-01T09:45:00.000+10:00

On Keeping a Notebook

2010-09-22T08:45:00.001+10:00

Every so often I pick up Joan Didion's delightful collection of essays written in and about the 60s in California, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She has a personal essay, 'On Keeping a Notebook', where she says this:

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

I, also, began keeping notebooks at a young age - before I started school, as far as I can remember. We lived above my parent's general store (what would now be called a convenience store), and I took several exercise books from the shelf and began to write in them. I have always loved stationery.

But I didn't keep notebooks again till I started to write in earnest, in my thirties. They seemed to be an entirely practical way of keeping hold of all the details one needs for creating works of fiction: things observed, overheard, read, thoughts thunk, ideas for stories. There are two classes of notebooks - larger ones that live in and around my desk (on the floor, the bed, in accumulating piles), and smaller ones kept in my bag for thoughts and observations on the run.

These mobile notebooks are interesting because they are predicated on the idea that a writer is always at work, that there is no place one does not need a notebook, no time that one is not thinking about writing. In the absence of a notebook, I have written on scraps of paper, bus tickets, boarding passes - any paper will do.

I have only two of these books. In one, an address book at the front,, there are notes for my books Mahalia and A Charm of Powerful Trouble. I have noted that "Sometimes to keep a secret you have to keep it from yourself" (from Orwell's 1984). I have noted that "Children know when there are secrets". I remember sitting outside the Conservatorium in Lismore waiting for my son to finish a music lesson where I watched people:

Someone in an hawaiian shirt wheeled an old bicycle down the steps rapidly, got on it and rode away (no helmet) adjusting his sunglasses.

At the Con - a 3 legged dog with a bandana round its neck - the V of the bandana hides the bit where its leg is cut off
hops into a Kingswood with some people

an ensemble playing - as they finish (a little raggedly) they clap and whoop with joy

A woman in the street shouting 'Get fucked!'

The sturdy girl with plaits coming out from under her beret - a striking striped jumper - she uses a mobile phone - jeans, sturdy shoes

Some of these observations made their way into Mahalia - but was this just 'a compulsion trying to justify itself' as Didion says - would I have written these things down anyway?

Someone said that the urge to preserve is the basis of all art. Who said this? I think it's Helen Garner quoting someone - I can't find it, though I have not bothered to check the web.**

I know Helen Garner did say this about using bits from real people's lives(it's in my other 'mobile' notebook, and I remember sitting in the Tafe library in Lismore copying it from a newspaper, though I don't record which one):

A writer who's any good might save a bit of your life from oblivion. What a writer 'takes' from you might otherwise have been lost. In the long run, maybe that's what writers are for. Writers aren't necessarily nice people. Writers can be mean and lonely. But you need us. We exist. Live with it.

That notebook also has a recipe for vegetable lasagne, millet rissoles, and Dutch ginger cake. I have made the Dutch ginger cake.

There's also this ad I found on the noticeboard of the Lismore library:

FEMALE DESEXED CAT NEEDS HOME
LIKES TO BE ONLY ANIMAL
GOOD RATTER
HER NAME IS ARTEMIS

I gave Artemis to the family in A Charm of Powerful Trouble; Lizzie brings her home, and she turns out to be a wild little animal. That was in the 15 years when I decided not to keep cats, otherwise I might have given the real Artemis a home myself, and not had to put her in a book. Sometimes putting something in a book is another way of having it. I wonder now what happened to her - the real cat Artemis.

It seems to me that the keeping of notebooks, as well as being a compulsive activity, is an act of faith in writing. But perhaps it is only the fallacy believed by some writers (including at times, myself) that life is only worth living if you can write it down. From my reading about Anais Nin, she only ever felt that she'd lived something after she'd written about it (usually falsely, and in a light flattering to herself). Happy the children like Joan Didion's daughter, who is 'a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her'.

The urge to preserve.

Some of my characters have been writers. Kate in Secret Scribbled Notebooks is a notebook person, and she writes her life as well.

So does her sister Sophie, in My Candlelight Novel. Sophie, wiser than I am, says

'But you can't capture anything. Everything changes. And as a way of preserving, even writing seems futile.

and concludes that

... I know that all any of us ever has is now.

** (Added later) It was Phillip Larkin, quoted by Garner in Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe's Making Stories.

What I did next

2010-09-17T10:15:00.000+10:00

Why hide my light under a bushel? After leaving the 'School Magazine' under a cloud in 1977 (see previous post) what did I do? Retire to the country to look after a baby and plant vegetables?

Not for this stroppy woman. I printed posters, and one of the first was on a children's literature theme, which you can see here.

Apologies, May Gibbs, it was signed (apologies I ripped off Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and politicised the Gumnut parade, apologies I put a little penis on the baby gumnut standing with his blossom mother watching the parade but I don't like the kewpie doll asexuality of your characters).

We did quite a few posters (and the joke was that the Without Authority poster collective was actually a nuclear family with baby in bouncinette on the screen printing bench in the ex chookshed). But this one is one of my favourites, again on a literary/political theme (in this case an allusion to Orwell's 1984.)

And aint it still true? Our (would-be) political masters still try to control us by our fears. That's why Abbott pledged to Stop The Boats,

and so on

Stroppy women

2010-09-16T14:07:00.000+10:00

I've just listened to the repeat of the Hindsight program on the history of the 'School Magazine' (see link in previous post) where Jonathan Shaw talked about the wonderful stroppy women editors who influenced the magazine.

This gave me fond memories of Patricia Wrightson. She once overheard me talking to a man at the government printing office on the phone. I started calling him 'darling' and 'sweetie', because that's the way he was talking to me (little old early 70s feminist me could not tolerate such a thing).

But that's not quite the way she looked at it. After hearing me out afterwards she said briskly, "You're quite right, it's unprofessional." Which wasn't quite the way I saw it - I thought it was sexist, but she was right, it was unprofessional.

She also had a lovely idea for the way the magazine should be given to children. Rather than it being handed out in class, she thought copies (by that stage there were 6 different magazines for 4 primary grades each month) should be strewn on the steps of the school, so that children could discover it and decide which magazine(s) they wanted.

Bad behaviour

2010-09-14T08:41:00.001+10:00

In the mid 90s I did a three day Presentation and Promotion course for writers with the National Book Council. On the session about 'dealing with the press' the presenter got us to write down any hidden thing in our pasts that a reporter could seize on. Only a couple of us scribbled anything.

When my turn came the presenter threw this question at me: "I notice you've written a book called Bad Behaviour," he said. "You'd know a thing or two about bad behaviour would you?"

I was speechless.

No one ever has asked me about my bad behaviour, even this week when ABC radio's 'Hindsight' did a program on the history of the NSW Dept of Education's 'School Magazine', where it was mentioned.

So, for the record, here is my story.

It was March, 1977. I was 25 (yes, all that long ago... and it still trails after me). After graduating from uni I had a job on the 'School Magazine', and was by then Assistant Editor. ("You're very young to be Assistant Editor", a snarky librarian had said to me on a school visit the previous Childrens Bookweek. "I mean, that's a good job, isn't it?"

"Yes," I replied, with heavy irony, "but after all, I am 24."

I lived in the inner west in a little terrace I co-owned with my ex-boyfriend and three cats (Syntax: the cats didn't own it, but they sort of did too). It was the beginning of the gentrification of those areas which I now abhor, but I and people like me started it: leave uni, get a job, buy the sort of house you once rented. He was a university lecturer at 26. But we still lived pretty much like students. We planted the yard out with native trees, were part of a food co-op that went to the markets every week for fruit and veg, part of a large, loose group of young people who went out to eat Chinese or Lebanese a couple of times a week, played in garage bands, cut each others' hair in back yards, talked to and about our cats, cooked banana cakes and bread, drank tea, went on marches for this or that, started anarchist bookshops, fell in and out of love with each other. And sometimes smoked a bit of marijuana. As many people did then (and now). But that part of it was very incidental and occasional; as a non-smoker, I seldom took part, though people tried to teach me to inhale.

At the school mag, we were a pretty young bunch; four of the 5 editorial staff were under the age of 30, and the Editor, Lilith Norman, was 49. We started a series of articles about current topics of interest, and for some reason I took on one about drugs.

I called it 'How do you Feel?' because I took the approach that if people stayed in touch with how they felt about things, and were used to making up their own minds without being told what to do all the time they'd make good decisions. Not having a TV, I didn't know it was also a line from a Toohey's ad. (Answer: 'I feel like a Toohey's.")

When the proofs came from the printer and we gathered to read them, I remember the other members of staff praising the article, saying it was the best I'd ever written. I remember in particular Mark O saying this. He was only about 21, was a committed Christian, and very anti drugs of any kind.

Labor was in power; there was proposed legislation to distinguish between hard and soft drugs on the one hand, and between drug users and drug pushers, but I don't remember that being the driving force towards my decision to write. But my article became a matter of politics. We knew at the time I was a scapegoat; a reason for the Festival of Light to get up in arms, and for the liberals to bash labor.

I remember the afternoon when we were told that THE ARTICLE had been mentioned in Parliament. Annette K, a junior editorial assistant, told me later it was the only time she'd seen me look anything but cool. But nothing more was said that day, no contact from The Department of Education, and we went home.

At home, the phone kept ringing (not hard for journalists to find out where you live, I discovered). I was invited onto This Day Tonight to put my case; my house mate urged me to do so. Yeah, I was young and stupid (and am now very impressed when I meet young people nowadays with more savvy), and I agreed to go.

Reporters from 'The Australian' were at the door as I went out to the taxi. One leaned inside the window of the car and asked if I smoked marijuana. When I refused to answer he said, 'You will be asked.'

And so I went on TV and was afterwards delivered into the hands of 'The Sydney Morning Herald'. I went back to my current boyfriend's place (we weren't living together), and he drove me round to various friends. Late that night in a lane in Redfern, we came across an Aboriginal man who was bleeding and under the influence of alcohol (drugs again); we took him to Casualty in Missenden Road. A memorable night. I didn't spend it at home.

The next morning I picked up the Sydney Morning Herald from the doorstep. I was on the front page with ABBA. I was not pleased (do I need to say that? The whole thing was a nightmare). To deal with it all I crept into the bedroom of a medical student who lived in the house; half asleep, he delved in a drawer and gave me a Valium(the only one I have ever taken in my life).

I went to work. Of course, as public servants we weren't meant to talk to the press, and I had. And during the next few days a lot of things were said that I shouldn't disclose because it makes other public servants in the Department of Ed (and not on the School Mag, mind you,) look bad. Machinations. Indiscretions.

The Editor, Lilith Norman, and I were sent to Other Duties while investigations were made.

They sent her to the School Library Service at North Sydney (a lovely place then with views of the harbour - I visited her); I was also at North Sydney in a department whose name I forget. They put me in a small room without a window and gave me nominal work to do; after a while all I did was sit there and answer the many personal letters of support I was getting. I don't remember how long I was there - only days - but each lunch hour someone from School Mag took the train across the bridge to spend time with me.

Eventually, they 'gave us our jobs back'. But school principals had been told to rip the article from the magazine. (I received a letter from a year 6 girl who told me that she was not allowing the principal to rip the article from her magazine!) We received calls that said, 'Have they sacked that pair yet?"

Apart from anything else, what the article had done, I was told, was to 'divide the community', and the School Magazine was not there to divide the community. An insider whom we dubbed 'Mata Hari' told us that the Department had received mail 'this high'. And (in a confidential whisper): 'They weren't all on their side.'

One of the good things to happen, Lilith Norman said afterwards, was that we found out how many friends we had.

Opportunities were sent my way. A publisher rang and offered to publish a book by me, 'about anything'. I was asked onto panels to speak about drugs. I accepted none of it.

Regrets? I had a few. We should never have published the article.

I found out what it was like to be monstered by the press, and my sympathy now goes out to anyone thrust suddenly into the public eye, most of them with less culpability than me. I was recognised in public a couple of times, fortunately by people of friendly intent (and there were many: the community was and is still divided on the issue). I couldn't live at home for a week or so, nor did my housemate. I'd sneak back to feed the cats to find telegrams shoved under the door.

It changed my life.

I decided, in the midst of it all, that I wanted to be reinstated in my job, but that I would resign at the end of the year and leave Sydney. I needed a new prescription for the contraceptive pill at the time and decided I'd rather have a baby.

I left in December 1977, six month's pregnant, and moved to the North Coast of NSW with my partner. We still live there, in a house we built ourselves. I write young adult novels. It might seem an enviable life to many people, one that those stuck in city gridlock might dream about.

But I've never had another full-time job. It is safe to say that we have eked out a living. I left a place I felt familiar and happy in and moved to where I knew no one but my family. It takes a lot of years to make new connections, and find work you like to do.

I cringe whenever The Article is mentioned (and it has been, and will be, though a lot of people I know don't even know the story of how I came to be where I am).

In hindsight(and not just my hindsight, but everyone's), marijuana has proven not to be as harmless as people once thought it was, especially on young brains. And in those days we didn't foresee the super extra-strong dope that's being bred now.

From a newspaper at the time, the then NSW Attorney-General Frank Walker was quoted as saying:

"My reasoning is that marijuana is not a very harmful drug, certainly not as bad as alcohol."

And maybe it still isn't.

Me? I stick to a glass or two of dry white. More than I drank when I was 25.

They called me the wanderer, yeah the wanderer...

2010-09-08T08:34:00.001+10:00

... I wandered roundandaroundandaroundandaround...

Question: You are in a town you've never been to before. In between various commitments you are going to:

A. Sit in a motel room like one anywhere in rural Australia.

B. Walk around and have a good look at the place.

In my 42 hours in Gunnedah, I became known as 'the wanderer'. I was seen wandering 'up near the hospital', 'on the bridge', and in various other places.

Pics: I should have taken more. But look at that lovely old house. And the main auditorium of the old Town Hall, where I did writing workshops (very echo-y). How's that for Art Deco excellence? (though the exterior isn't Deco, more traditional clock-towered town hall).

I loved the place.

Observations:

They have a coffee shop named Corso's (impressive in a town devoted to the poetry of Dorothea Mackellar). I looked for coffee shops named after other beat poets (Ferlinghetti's? Ginsberg's?) but failed to find them.
There is a very good deal on for Redback elastic sided work boots. I was tempted but have a newish pair of another brand ...
the people are very friendly. Within half an hour of arriving at 6 pm last Weds night, after asking the way to a supermarket (so I could buy some fruit and my favourite organic yoghurt) I met a woman who had been to Lismore and had eaten at the 20,000 cows vegetarian cafe in North Lismore.
Maybe everyone in Gunnedah has eaten at the 20,ooo cows, but steak was very prominently on the menu there.