Category Archives: autobiographical

[Turning 30 #1] Travel Is So Broadening

01 Tuesday Mar 2011

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I turn thirty in a few days and I have been to very few places in the world. I rationalise this as a counter-cultural decision, a radical resolution to stay put. Of course, it has more to do with a certain strange inertia. I also make myself feel better by getting irked at my peers who are always on the move, always restlessly preparing for the next big trip to Europe or Asia to find themselves.

I once lived with a Singaporean girl in student village who was contemptuous of how little I had seen of the world – and I was only twenty then. ‘You don’t understand the world yet,’ she said. But once I asked her about atheists in Singapore and she asked what an atheist was. When I explained, she said she didn’t know there were people in the world who didn’t believe in God.

I will see the world, don’t hassle me. But I’m also uneasy about the idea of tourism. I don’t think it’s possible to experience other places. Of course it’s possible, but what I mean is, it’s nothing like the experience of actually living there, it is only like the experience of visiting there. How much does it tell you of what it is to live in Perth to visit King’s Park or the Bell Tower or the Perth Mint? And then again, who wants to spend several decades living in a house with a view of a cul-de-sac in Belmont or Bibra Lake and getting stuck in traffic jams every morning, which is more like what actually living in Perth is like?

I have this nostalgia for Thomas Hardy’s village life. They didn’t travel very far in those days. (It’s always ambitions beyond one’s station which destroys Hardy’s idyll, ambitions like seeing the world.) And then I have a soft spot for Isaac Asimov’s detective who had never been further than thirty kilometres from his house in his whole life. I think he was stuck in a wheelchair. I read a number of his stories sitting in the sunlight in the brown hues of the Collie Public Library some time in 1996. I cannot remember the detective’s name, although these days I could so easily find out.

Don’t worry, I will get to Europe. I will go through the motions. I will take in the sights. But I’ll probably still be questioning the value of seeing. I’ll be outside looking in on me as a tourist and not liking it. What I will try not to do is come home and try to convey my experience to others, those long winded travel narratives people tell each other. So often masked boasts and so often self indulgent.

T-shirts: a memoir

19 Wednesday Jan 2011

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The other day, I saw a teenager in the supermarket with a t-shirt that said, ‘When I’m God, Everyone Dies.’ I wondered what made him pick it out at the shop and decide that he wanted to buy it, that he wanted this slogan to represent him in public.  Does he hate the world and wish we would die? Was he just being ironic? (There’s nothing indicating irony in the design.) Or did he not particularly think about it? Later, a google search revealed it’s a line from the Marilyn Manson song, “The Reflecting God”. Which doesn’t really answer the questions.

What does it mean to wear a t-shirt with a message?

For a time in my early twenties, I would nearly only wear t-shirts with messages. I was a billboard of anti-war and anti-capitalism messages as well as bands I liked. It showed the world what kind of person I was, I suppose. Maybe I thought it would also convert some people.

I don’t have too many t-shirts-with-messages. I have a Clash t-shirt, but that’s an accident, because I didn’t pack enough clothes for my honeymoon and when we got to Christchurch on a Sunday, it was the best option from the markets. I feel dishonest, as these days I don’t listen to the Clash, as the very low play count of their songs on my itunes will prove.

I didn’t consciously turn away from t-shirts-with-messages. But these days I’d rather be more anonymous. Maybe it’s a part of being old.

I should be understanding of people who do wear t-shirts-with-messages. But many of them are disturbing. Not usually in the way of the ‘When I’m God…’ example. More often in their banality. What does it mean to wear a t-shirt saying, ‘I can only please one person per day. Today isn’t your day…and tomorrow don’t look good either’?  There’s quite a few of these kind of t-shirts with a standing joke, often postured slightly against the world or against women, or against men. I can understand a t-shirt promoting a cause, or a band, but what do these do? Is this as close to an ideology as a certain kind of person goes? Perhaps people are actually wearing their philosophy of life and they just wanted to share it with us. I don’t know.

He liked to listen to the babble of voices

09 Thursday Dec 2010

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The radio is one of my comforts in this life.

My first radio was red and ran on batteries. I won it as a prize in a fundraising activity in Year 1. I don’t remember what we had to do, but I do remember the fear of asking people if they would give money to sponsor me balanced against the hope of winning the Brownes Dairy Pack or, if I cracked $50, the red radio. I do remember that Tammy raised several hundred dollars and got to meet Daryl Somers from Hey Hey It’s Saturday. We were all so jealous.

I used to love to listen to my red radio just for its novelty. Perhaps that’s how I got into football and cricket as a child. Listening to the broadcasts on my red radio, being just like Dad.

When I was about eight, Dad came home with a new tape player, and I inherited the old stereo, the one with the broken tape player but a working radio. It had short wave, which I thought was the most wonderful thing in the world.

I spent a long time roaming the short wave band, amazed to pick up signals from America and England. I found an American religious program once, which made me proud, because people I knew would always complain about how the radio and the tv were so anti-Christian. I told Mum excitedly, but she didn’t want to listen to the American religious program. She said there were a lot of strange Christians in America, which confused me, because the things they said sounded a lot like church.

The short wave signals were always fleeting. If I moved the radio in the wrong way, they would disappear. Even if I didn’t move the radio, the Earth would move, I suppose, and the signal would go.

I liked to go to sleep with the radio on, a friend in the dark, murmuring.
Growing up near Collie in the 80s and 90s, we had two stations on AM – ABC Local Radio and Radiowest – and one on FM, Classical FM. Perth was a wonderful place full of more radio stations than you could even think of. It wasn’t till after we moved to Bunbury that Triple J came.

For me and my brother, our teen years were a desperate struggle with Mum and Dad about music. We wanted our alternative rock music – The Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, Radiohead, Metallica for a while – on the radio and the tape player, in the car and in the kitchen. Mum liked quiet; Dad hated swearing. The war was long and unresolved. Triple J came close to a complete ban a number of times. I didn’t listen to the voices so much then, and the old radio had broken completely. But I did listen obsessively to Triple J. I remember listening to the entire Hottest 100 from start to finish when I was 17, and knowing every song. Oh, I was lonely, and horrified with myself by the end.

When did my addiction to Radio National begin? It’s come upon me slowly, but now I know every program on Radio National and I listen to it at all hours of the day and night. When I stopped going to uni – well, I never really stopped going to uni, but when my undergrad days ended – Radio National took up my education.

Milan Kundera knows what it is to love and need the radio, not the music but the talking:

Out of despair, out of nervousness, she turned on a little radio beside her pillow. To get back to sleep she wants to hear a human voice, some talk that will seize her thoughts, carry her off to another place, calm her down and put her to sleep; she switches from station to station but only music pours out from everywhere, sewage water music, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, and it’s world were she can’t talk to anybody because everybody’s singing and yelling, a world where nobody talks to her because everybody’s prancing around and dancing.
-Identity, p.124

A surveyor rang the other day, wanting to know about radio listening. My instinct was to hang up, but instead I did his survey, because I am addicted to radio. I could not do his survey very well, though. He almost grew exasperated with me, because every answer was ‘Radio National’ or ‘Newsradio’ or, reluctantly, because it is so middlebrow, ‘720 ABC Local Radio’. ‘But don’t you listen to any music on the radio?’ he asked. No, I should have told him, there is no station which plays Morphine, the Cure and Regina Specktor with no ads and no competitions. But he wanted to know who had the best competitions. I told him I hated those competitions SO MUCH. This is one thing I could still be passionate about. How DESPICABLE commercial radio is. How much I HATE commercial radio competitions. Never mind the music. It sounds so terrible too. Always holding a single emotional note of manufactured states of love or disappointment.

No, I live in Radio National, where everyone is serious, and everyone is thinking, all of the time. They talk to me about the state of the world. About politics, religion, identity, books and history. They do it all night and day. I weary of it sometimes, but I’m addicted, so I keep listening.

Weeding and the meaning of life

04 Monday Oct 2010

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I was thinking on the weekend, it’s definitely easier to believe in a benevolent world on a sunny spring day. But just a few clouds, an overcast day – well, the world looks different. I get prone to a certain kind of ennui.

I pulled out some weeds on the weekend. This is becoming a more common occurence. I was once very resistant to pulling out weeds. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a 3 acre property, with probably nearly an acre devoted to well-tended gardens that seemed to consume my parents’ entire weekends. I didn’t want to become like that. But now I see houses with no garden and I think they’re ugly, depressing. I have begun to see why people spend time in gardens.

One of the problems was that there seemed to be nothing to do in gardens except gardening. As much as we put out chairs and tables in gardens, very few people just enjoy their garden. I certainly have trouble doing so.  If only I could sit still outside and read a book! But I’m very bad at this; never comfortable.

Another problem was my tendency – starting in childhood – to divide the world and its tasks into ‘meaningful’ and ‘unmeaningful’. Anything which was repetitive, like pulling out weeds which would grow back, tended to be put into the ‘unmeaningful’ basket. Never mind that everything in life really fits that basket. No wonder I had such unrealistic expectations of life I have spent my twenties disabusing myself of.

Kathleen Norris writes incisively of making one’s bed as an act of hospitality to yourself in Acedia and Me.  I now believe this in theory, though I still have trouble doing it. I’ve always had troubles with routines. I think one thing I’m learning to accept in life is routines. I’m learning to see them as usually necessary and sometimes good. Yet they lull me into my my boring self, that’s what I fear.

Because too often in recent years, people see the wrong side of me, or they see something that’s really only a part of me. Me in safe mode, a librarian not wanting to stand out for the wrong reasons. The struggle between standing out and not standing out. (This has something to do with the stalemate between 1 and 4 in my personality on the Enneagram, not that I’ve really looked into it.) I have come to detest in myself and others acts designed to stand out for their own sake, without substance, attempts to get attention. It’s easy to offend, especially if you dull your empathy with the roar of righteous indignation or ambition.  These days, I’ve resolved to only offend or stand out when I really have to.

Fear of offending has made me so careful what I write on my blogs. Oh, the things I used to write on those blogs which a failed server in the USA obliterated! Perhaps they have grown in my memory. But I was fearless, reckless, ready to tell everything to everyone. Perhaps this post marks the return of getting personal, as inoffensively as a gentle truthfulness allows.

Being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old

15 Monday Feb 2010

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Kiki recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old; remembered feeling exactly this: that if her family could only speak the truth, together they would emerge, weeping but clear-eyed into the light.
-Zadie Smith, On Beauty, p.60

In this sentence from Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel, Kiki, the mother of the family, is responding to the latest truth-telling assualt of her son, Jerome. I think it is a brilliant and wise insight into families and generations.

Does it ring true for you? At twenty, did you have the answers to your family’s problems? Did it all seem so clear? If only they could be more honest, fearless, authentic like you, then all their problems would disappear?

I think it was true of me. I think when I was twenty I believed more strongly in people’s ability to change and the absolute value of unflinching honesty. If only we could all tell exactly how we feel, instead of holding back.

Nine years later, I recognise the value of social niceties, of politeness, of treading carefully. My twenty-year old self looks through the decade in disgust. I don’t really care. He wasn’t all wrong, just too absolute.

Lionel Shriver on holidays

05 Friday Feb 2010

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i just returned from a great holiday, but even it wasn’t completely free of my ambivalence about holidays. I hate packing, I hate unpacking, I find it stressful choosing somewhere to stay, and I often wonder what I should be doing. (I don’t like having to answer what I did on a holiday, because I generally like to do not much at all. Not this frantic activity some require, see at least three sights a day.)

I liked discovering a kindred soul (besides my wife) in Lionel Shriver, who has outright hatred of the idea of a holiday. She writes excellently as always in her anti-holiday rant.

She has a new novel due out next month, which has already attracted some unfriendly reviews on goodreads.com. I wonder if it was people who had seen an advance copy, liars or confused readers. They didn’t sound like proper reviewers who I would bother sending an advance copy to.

[Thursday 3pm #36] By the orange trees

10 Thursday Dec 2009

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So I missed a week and no-one commented. That’s a relief, in one sense. Last Thursday I was camping in the bush, a long way from a computer.

It was a semi-cleared area near Jarrahdale, and I pitched my tent near a row of four old orange trees. Animals – kangaroos, is my guess – had stripped all the oranges on the lower branches, but there were plenty higher up, slightly sour with hard to peel skin. Further over was a tall oak tree. Near my tent were pieces of an old china plate and broken bottles.

I tried to picture the house which must have stood there. There should be monuments in places like this. To think people might have lived whole lives in that space, and no-one even knows today.  Our ancestors are strangers who leave some traces, a mystery to us.

While sitting under the shade of a gum tree on Thursday afternoon, I finished Anne Fadiman’s excellent collection of personal bibliographic essays, Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.  These are the kind of essays I aspire to in this blog. She writes about the experience of ‘marrying’ her book collection with her husband’s and the challenges of agreeing on ways to arrange books. She explores the ins and outs of annotating – or not annotating – books. (I am a lead pencil annotater. I have sympathy with people who consider it desecration.)

[Thursday 3pm #24] The cartoons of my childhood: nostalgia and disappointment

10 Thursday Sep 2009

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voltron

Have you ever tried going back to the cartoons of your childhood? I have, and it’s been a mix of nostalgia and disappointment. I can watch the same episodes again, but I can’t watch them with the same eyes.

I watched some episodes of He-Man and Voltron for the first time in twenty years this year. I was shocked how bad they were. They both offered incoherent, ludicrous story lines, combining visual elements likely to appeal to six year olds with no thought for consistency. He-Man features bare chested warriors with swords next to cyborgs all living in a castle and each episode fighting off a simplistic baddie called Skeletor who is a skeleton in a cloak. The castle is an important element: Voltron has it too, as five astronauts find hidden robot lions to save a princess from an evil alien king.

The backstory of Voltron is that the mighty Voltron robot was so powerful that a space-goddess (!) cast a spell on it, splitting it into five different coloured parts, which became robot lions as they fell to the ground, each one falling to an environment relevant to its colour – the green lion to the forest, the blue lion into the water, etc. It takes some keys buried in the king’s sarcophagus (and one stolen by ‘space-mice’) to reactivate the lions. But of course, the team learns that it has to join together into one big robot if it wants to win. It sounds remarkably well designed to sell toys. And it worked – we all wanted all the lions; my brother got the yellow one, and I the green one.

It’s no wonder children wrote terrible stories at school. The cartoons they watched were setting a terrible example. Although not all of them – I also rewatched a number of episodes from The Mysterious Cities of Gold, and it stood up much better. It used to be on at 5pm on ABC in the late 80s. It’s an epic story of lost orphans who are taken to South America to find the Mysterious Cities of Gold. It has a lot of moral ambiguity and complexity to some of its characters and it still managed to fill me with some sense of wonder.

I hate to think what will happen when I try to re-read the Famous Five. The only childhood book that has stayed with me into adulthood is John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy.

[Thursday 3pm #22] Sports culture is oppressive

27 Thursday Aug 2009

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Yesterday I felt oppressed by the dominance of sports culture in Australia. It was a meeting and we were making introductions and we had to say something interesting about ourselves. And most people’s ‘interesting thing’ was their sporting loyalty, some comment staking their loyalty and denigrating a different sports code or a rival team. What I hated the most was the raucous laughter which accompanied it. To me, it felt so unfunny and childish.

Usually I wouldn’t care much, but the mood I was in yesterday, it felt oppressive. It was made worse when someone explained to the visiting Englishman, ‘This is just Aussie humour’. And that made me think how sporting obsession is normalised and if you don’t fit it, you’re abnormal. Common ground is established by exploring one’s football loyalties. If you don’t care about the football… what sort of person are you?

Football team loyalty seems misguided to me. The players themselves swap teams. (Do they care who they’re playing for?)

Do I want everyone to start appreciating the arts more? What if you established initial common ground by giving your opinion on James Joyce or how moved you are or not by Beethoven?

Yes and no. As much as I feel oppressed by a raucous, crass, crude, unthinking, primitive culture of sport which elevates men (and only a few women) as national heroes for their ability to kick balls or swim fast, I wouldn’t actually like to be a part of the mainstream. I guess I relish my role as outsider and my shameful feelings of cultural superiority.

How about you?

[Thursday 3pm #18] American Habits

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, lists, reading, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

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On Tuesday night, when I should have been doing something productive or relaxing, I created a graph showing how many novels (and other narratives) I had read by country since 1996. The results were predictably homogenous, but even more weighted toward the USA than I imagined.

Novelsbycountry

There you have it – 220 from the USA, 101 from Britain, 68 from Australia, 14 from Canada for the top four places. I don’t have records from 98-00; maybe I was much more cosmpolitan in those years. The figures are also skewed toward the USA because in 96 and 97 when I was a science fiction addict, just about everything I read came from there.

I was thinking of resolving to read more Australian, European, Asian and African texts to broaden my horizons. And maybe I will. But I’m not going to worry too much. There’s too many things in this world to feel guilty about.

But I am curious about why I’m so drawn to American fiction. I have an aversion to consumerism, patriotism, fundamentalism and unchecked capitalism, all those things America is famous for. But I am also fascinated by America, and even to prod and gawk at those things I hate. Many of my favourite authors are American – Auster, DeLillo, Franzen, Moody, McCullers, Updike. I’d like to visit the USA some day; I’ll just have a hard time convincing my wife. (I think I would like to travel by train across its heartland; keep meaning to read Don Watson’s account of this.)

I think its easier to read in tune with our own culture, rather than cross cultural boundaries; and interestingly I don’t feel like I have to cross much of a boundary to read American fiction – or British fiction, I suppose, but I’ve found less authors there whom I love.

Interestingly just about every European novel I have read has been brilliant. This is merely a reflection of how selective I’ve been, but there’s an untapped continent there. In fact, there’s at least four of them.

What are your reading habits like? Regale and shame me with the stories of how you spend your leisure time reading Afghani novels in the original or 13th century Chinese epics. Go on, show me up. 🙂