18 Tuesday Oct 2016
Posted in autobiographical, Series: Short Stories (2016)
Post #7 in my Australian Short Story Festival series
In my writing career, I have had the triumph of a short story which became a novel – a familiar enough transformation – but also the tragedy of a full length novel which only ever saw publication as a short story. There’s nothing tragic about short stories, of course, but generally a writer doesn’t like to spend twelve years on one. Continue reading
01 Saturday Oct 2016
Posted in autobiographical, Series: Short Stories (2016), writing
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Post #1 in my Australian Short Story Festival series
I have a confession to make: the beginning of my literary career was powered by coal company. The arts festival presented by Griffin Coal is a big event in the life of Collie, the coal-mining town in the south-west of WA where I grew up. Winning second-prize in the open category of the 1996 Griffin Festival Literary Awards at the age of fifteen – beaten by my drama teacher – made me think I could be a writer. Continue reading
05 Thursday Mar 2015
Posted in autobiographical
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I walked around the lake next to my dead grandparents’ house. I saw Wild, the morning session, with the waifs and strays who watch movies in the morning. Then I asked the internet the meaning of turning thirty-four. Continue reading
22 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted in autobiographical
The captain of the Collie football team was in court last week, escaping jail after being convicted of kneeing an opposing player in the face during a game. I grew up in Collie, a coal-mining town fifty kilometres inland from Bunbury, two hundred kilometres south of Perth. I played football for a year, too, and going through a packing box which has sat in our spare room for two years, I recently found my trophy for Most Improved, Collie Saints under sixteens in 1996.
That year of football was a culmination of my three years at the high-school. It was a rough school, where fists ruled, and kids were brutal to each other. I took up playing football after years of hockey because we’d done football in phys-ed class in year nine, and everyone was amazed that I was one of the better players, at least against boys who mostly didn’t play. The ones who did play were inviting me to join their team; it was half a joke, because I was a nerd, and so very skinny. A second reason: I wanted to be consistent. I watched football on television with my dad and brother every weekend, and I collected football cards. It seemed inconsistent to not play.
There were two teams, the Collie Saints and the Mines Rovers, and you had to choose. The rivalry was not just friendly; it was more defining than religion or ethnicity. I chose the Saints, because I liked St Kilda. In the clubroom, there was a picture of an aerial mark from the sixties, with a caption, “The closest a Collie Saint will ever get to heaven,” disturbing for an earnest Baptist.
I wasn’t prepared for the violence of the game, the constant, bruising physicality of it. It was a test, and I endured, but not easily. The first game on a Friday night was a derby against the hated Mines Rovers Eagles. We had a full team that week, bulked up by five or six good athletes who came just for the derby. I was in the front pocket, and panicked the one time the ball came to me, kicking it out of bounds. The rest of the season, I was moved to the back pocket, usually finding myself pitted against solid behemoths on the other team. I was reasonably effective, with only one or two goals scored by my opponents in the whole year. Once when we were losing badly, one of the dads at half-time pointed at me and said, “Look at this kid – fuck-all skills but there he is trying his guts out. Can’t you at least do that?” I nearly cried; it was a harsh compliment.
Our team didn’t do well; that first derby match was one of the few we won, as our undermanned team played in the mud of country town ovals each week against stronger, better teams. There was a strong sense of camaraderie, though; we were warriors together.
At the end of the year, our family moved to Bunbury. I trained a few times with the South Bunbury team the next year, and coming home with bruises, exhausted by all the running, I asked myself why I was doing it, and I realised I didn’t know. I quit football, not just the playing, but the watching. In the years since, I’ve developed an allergy to the dominance of football in Western Australian culture.
*
Some time after I left, the two struggling Collie football clubs merged, and became one very strong club, the Collie Eagles, winning premiership after premiership in the league. Perhaps in having to swallow old rivalries, a new peace exists in the town and in the school.
I haven’t been back to Collie much. My childhood has this extra layer of distance from me, having grown up in a place I no longer have ties to, even though it lies just up the hill from where my parents still live. It seems a strange place for me to have grown up.
24 Thursday Jul 2014
Posted in autobiographical, music
In 1991 the greatest song of all time, bar none, was Amy Grant’s “Prodigal”. It’s a beautiful piano ballad, a song about waiting for a loved one to return. It was at the end of my cassette tape of the album Unguarded (1985), which I’d saved up my pocket money for two months to buy, and Dad warned me if I played the same part over and over, it’d wear out. So I had to listen to the whole tape to wear it evenly, all those bouncy aerobic songs of mid-80s pop till I got to that Greatest Song of All Time. I’ll be waiting, counting the days, until I finally see your face. I knew Amy Grant was waiting for me, somewhere, waiting, probably for me to hit puberty and not be ten years old.
These days, my music collection is managed by itunes, and I studiously rate all additions to my library. Being an impartial judge of music, my ratings are objective of course, and a five star song is a five star song forever. But, why then, do I keep skipping tracks by Au Revoir Simone, that band of synthesiser-playing hippy housewives who I had a brief crush on in September 2011? And how come Depeche Mode and the Smashing Pumpkins keep dropping a star these days? Was there something wrong in my objective taste of five star songs? Of the 253 five star songs in my collection, 32 are by the Cure and only 25 are by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Does this finally arbitrate the long running rivalry in my head over who my favourite artist is?
Being a librarian and having some fondness for records (in the non-LP sense), I wish itunes was more sophisticated. I wish it had multiple ratings: a rating for when this song was in season, when it was in tune with me and my life, and my rating now. Then I could re-rate songs with impunity, without losing a record of just what my taste was in years gone by.
I haven’t listened to Amy Grant’s “Prodigal” for quite some time. I don’t have it on itunes, or even on CD. I don’t have a working tape player any more. I have the tape itself, and I don’t think it ever wore out. My dad never warned me that a song could ever wear out in my head, that my favourite song, that a perfect song, might one day stop being so.
*
As I write this, with my five-star song list on random, The Cure come up with a song I have not tired of despite living with for fifteen years, “Bloodflowers”, which carries in it all the ambivalence of loving a song and knowing it’s the best song in the world, and then not knowing that any longer:
Never fade
Never die
You give me flowers of love
Always fade
Always die
I let fall flowers of blood
06 Sunday Jul 2014
Posted in autobiographical, writing
Ten years ago today, The Fur was launched. It is a night special in my memory. A reunion of people who knew me, people who I could never imagine all being in the same room as each other. Friends from high-school days, great-uncles, old friends – people I haven’t seen since; my grandparents, still alive. And the literati – so many writers. All there to have me scribble in a copy of my book.
I was living intensely in those days. It was only a month later that I re-met my future wife, on another enchanted evening. We started talking that evening, and just as Paul Auster writes of Siri Hustvedt somewhere, we haven’t stopped since. She has lived with me through the aftermath of The Fur and into the long season of the Difficult Second Novel. ‘Slow down,’ I think she was trying to tell me in the early years of our marriage, or perhaps, ‘Write carefully,’ and it was advice that would take a long time to sink in. Sometimes, being in a rush is what takes the longest time.
I don’t think I’ve read The Fur properly in book form. It would be an eerie, existential act of time-travel, and probably make me sad. (There’d be moments of embarrassment, too, and hopefully a few moments of pride.) I’m always thinking of time passing, and the way things used to be, and the people and places I’ve lost, and the whole novel is the account of a season – youth – now lost to me. It’s probably nearly time to try.
06 Friday Jun 2014
Posted in autobiographical, film review
I’ve been caught up in the US version of House of Cards. You can choose to watch each episode with or without ‘recaps’. I choose with. The recaps shift entirely each episode, highlighting a different thread of the long and involved narrative. You suddenly remember one of the minor characters and the brewing subplot which hasn’t been touched for an episode or two. The recap is determined by the episode you’re in. And the thing is that memory is like that too. Whenever I make a change in life and find myself in a different context, I make a new narrative, dredging up memories which were dormant in the previous episode but now make sense. An example: I moved to an Anglican church last year for the first time in my life. Suddenly I’m seeing new foreshadowings, a book I read at eighteen which nearly convinced me, the times I visited the cathedral with my grandfather the rector. Connections to other Anglicans. I’m finding in the mass of memory a subplot which made this inevitable. The difference is that in House of Cards, in almost any fictional narrative, there are no dead-ends, there are no superfluous events or characters.
08 Tuesday Apr 2014
Posted in autobiographical
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In year ten, my English teacher told me about deconstruction. Or at least he tried to; I didn’t get it. He said I should study at Murdoch – they taught lit theory. It was the mid-nineties. I followed his advice a few years later, and found myself plunged into the epistemological crisis of postmodernism. ‘Was there a meaning in this text?’ My lecturers said there were many; it depended on the reader. (There’s some truth in that, as far as it goes.) I spent a year or two quixotically fighting for the idea of a literary canon, and siding with the one brave resistor, Professor Frodsham. After that, I learned to love postmodernism; I liked confounding the other Christians on campus by insisting it was the way forward.
It feels, looking back, that there truly was an impoverishment in my English major. The impoverishment was the divorce of literature from history, from the social and cultural and biographical backdrop from which works emerge.
It would seem today that the tide has turned on lit theory as the primary approach to literature. The new interest in reception history has reconnected the text to history, but now with a new interest in the readers of texts which postmodernism helped us find.
The new biography of the literary theorist, Paul De Man, is attracting much attention. A hero of my undergrad lecturers is now denounced as a fraud:
Barish, like others before her, proposes a link between his negation of history and his career of deception, between his denial of the continuity of the self and his suppression of his own past… between his insistence that the written or spoken word never tells anything about the intention of its originator and his assumption of a new identity. This is certainly plausible, but I would also like to suggest a different kind of continuity between de Man’s mode of operation as a literary theorist and his mode of operation as a con man. It has to do with his style. In his writing, abstruseness, bristling abstraction, and a disorienting use of terms make his essays often difficult to penetrate. This was part of the key to his success: to his American admirers, with their cultural inferiority complex, it seemed that if things were difficult to grasp, something profound was being said.
This final comment rings true for a number of the theorists I read. Being older now, I’m no longer bound to an absolute position on anything, even postmodernism. It has its important insights; but, of course, it wasn’t the final word. And sometimes it was the emperor’s new clothes. It excites me, now, to reconnect literature to history, to believe in the possibility of recovering the past, however imperfectly. And this is why my next book is to be a biography of a writer.
07 Monday Apr 2014
Posted in autobiographical, death
Today we buried Uncle Philip at the Harvey Lawn Cemetery. It would be hard to say where his home was; he moved around a lot. I think he did live in Harvey a short time, at some stage. He died in Bunbury, but that’s mainly because the hospital was there. It often happened that he would get upset at his neighbours and move to a different town. He was probably autistic, and he liked his routines and his own company. Philip loved not horses (as his name means) but dogs, and he didn’t like being around people.
At other funerals, it seems wrong that the person himself is not there. But for Phil, his absence seemed appropriate; he didn’t turn up to social events. I should have appreciated how significant it was the times I saw him at his brothers’ weddings, at his dad’s 70th birthday, at a couple of Christmases. These wouldn’t have been easy appearances for him.
His middle name comes from his grandfather, an architect of some note in Perth who raised his family in a beautiful house on the foreshore at South Perth. I wonder what the architect would have made of his grandson living much of his life as part of the welfare underclass in WA? If the wealthy are not often a single generation from destitution, they can easily be two generations away from it.
All the time I knew him, Phil struggled with his weight. It pains me that my first memory of him was asking him, when I was about five, ‘Why are you fat?’ Dad took me aside and said that was not something you asked someone. I didn’t understand. Philip was a shy, sensitive man, and I hope he forgot or forgave me.
He didn’t want to hear about God. I’m not sure whether that was out of incredulity or a sense that this is not a world with much good news in it. I cannot fathom a God who would, in an afterlife, deepen and perpetuate the miseries of those who have suffered in this life, confirming their despair that life was hopeless. Weren’t Jesus’ great warnings about reversals of fortune? The mighty laid low, not the lowly laid lower?
I think Philip Alexander Winning (1953-2014) should appear somewhere on the internet, if only here, on this blog. He loved his dogs, each of them his companion for a decade or so of his life; their names were Sam, Barney, Pippa, and Toby. A photo of Toby went down into the grave with him. He liked camping with his brother, he liked walking the dog on the beach, and he liked doing his own thing in his own way.
05 Wednesday Mar 2014
Posted in autobiographical, music
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In the late nineties I was obsessed with The Smashing Pumpkins. (So was everyone, but not many like me – I lived by their songs, lodged as they were in my adolescent soul.) I have liked their hopeful-but-melancholic song “Thirty Three” since that time.
Tomorrow’s just an excuse away
So I pull my collar up and face the cold, on my own
The earth laughs beneath my heavy feet
At the blasphemy in my old jangly walk
Lately I have had this theory he must have been writing about turning thirty-three. It all seemed so true in my head. I was to finally understand the mood of the song, having reached his age. But I had it wrong. I just checked; Billy Corgan was born in 1967, making him just 28 when the album was released. These days, obscure song titles don’t seem as clever to me as they did back then.
Anyway, I don’t have to face the cold on my own, that’s not what thirty-three is about. That’s what being sixteen was for.
Jarvis Cocker of Pulp certainly wrote about being thirty-three, there’s no misinterpreting him in “Dishes”, his song about having the same initials as Jesus:
A man told me to beware of 33.
He said, “It was not an easy time for me” but I’ll get through even though
I’ve got no miracles to show you.
It wasn’t an easy time for Jesus, obviously, it being his last year on Earth. For several years I’ve thought that I’m not that old, given I was younger than Jesus. This defence is no longer open to me.
I have a lot of things I want to do this year. I feel like shouting Miss Brodie style, “I’m in my prime!”. Trying to enjoy it while I can.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 