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Sunday, January 31, 2016

Houston ... we have a Triffid

Embedded image permalinkWhen we bought the house three years ago there was an old wheelbarrow strategically positioned in an empty spot of the front garden. It contained a bed of small, uninteresting succulents barely reaching the top of the barrow sides. The plants have grown quite a bit in the intervening years and are now in danger of becoming quite interesting indeed. 

About three weeks ago they all began to look bigger, broader, more ... more ... succulent. And in the last fortnight or so, through days when the temperature regularly reached 30 degrees plus and almost touched 40 degrees a few times, despite several ferocious thunder storms and in the face of two wild hail storms, one of the succulents has shot up - straight into the air, heading towards half a metre.  It reminds me of the fictional Triffids.  Who knows what it will do next?Embedded image permalink

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Letter to Clive

Photograph of Jeremy Corbyn
This week's soft target of the usually more witty Clive James
Clive James writes a weekly column in The Guardian.  In today's edition he's having a patronising dig at Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party, and a less than subtle go at Mr. Corbyn's support for a policy of not replacing the UK's so-called independent nuclear deterrent - Trident.

Clive writes, 
I admire the way [Jeremy Corbyn's] principles are uninhibited by reason. I also like his beard, which reminds me of one of the beards I grew at various times in my life when I wished to prove I was still a student, even though the years had passed. Corbyn is a student at heart.
I couldn't resist a response. It's here. 
Dear Clive, 
I know you strive to be witty and for that you have our respect. But (as you know) the Trident thing is not about beards or eyes glittering with goodness. 
Field Marshall the Lord Bramall KG GCB OBE MC, former chief of the defence staff, is, as far as one can tell, clean-shaven AND opposed to the Trident nuclear missile system, writing "our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant, except in the context of domestic politics." 
And General the Lord Ramsbotham GCB CBE, former Adjutant General, former ADC to Her Majesty the Queen is, like Lord Bramall, clean-shaven and, like both Lord Bramall and Jeremy Corbyn, opposed to the Trident nuclear missile system. Lord Ramsbotham wrote, 
"We don't own the missiles and it is absolutely unthinkable that we should ever consider using it or threatening to use it without having the clearance of the United States". 
"The fact is that Trident is an inappropriate weapons system. You can't see Trident being used against something like nuclear blackmail by international terrorism. It is a cold war weapon. It is not a weapon for the situation where we are now." 
Two more points, if I may. 
Having a dig at the Daily Mail version of Mr. Corbyn is beneath a man of your intelligence and wit. Sinking to the Mail's level belittles you. 
And it's my confident guess you are being disingenuous when you suggest you were nicer when a student than you are now. I'll bet my house on it that your peers would beg to differ, even those who liked and admired you. 
You can join CND here http://www.cnduk.org Beards are not compulsory.
I'm very glad to see my remarks have produced some quite agitated responses from Tories. Who knew they trawled The Guardian looking for Lefties to abuse? I would have thought that's about as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel.

Friday, January 29, 2016

Writing exercises from Week 2 of my MOOC

Image result for open universityEmma said that ...
Time was running out. The ship would sail from Southampton on Tuesday morning. She was sure Cranston would be on board. He was losing his nerve and since the incident with the Chinese magician it was clear he trusted no one. We do it now or we're all in for a very long sea voyage.
I remember ...
I remember the look on her face. But that’s it. Nothing else.
I know we spoke. Of course I do. I'm the one that told her Brian had been in an accident. In the car. On the way to work.
Did I mention the fire? I don't remember the exact words ... my words. But I must have mentioned the fire because her face ... well, it just changed ... became something I've never seen before. It started with her eyes, you know? As if a veil had been lifted and it was all right there in front of her ... not me ... but the car, Brian, the flames. Directly in front of her eyes. 
I shouldn't have mentioned the fire. 
"Carol ... Brian's been in an accident. It's serious and he's in the hospital. I've come to take you." That's what I should have said. 
But I don't remember. I must have said 'fire' ...
'Emma said that' & 'I remember' are both really good ways to have started these two exercises. I don't think I'd have come up with either of my scenarios without such prompts and the ... 'just do it' ... approach to completing a sentence then seeing where that leads.

I didn't know there was someone by the name of Cranston inside me who would become nervous after whatever happened to the Chinese magician! Eh? Where did that come from? Well, it seems 'Emma said it' so it must be true. And the same sort of vital spark of story-telling started the piece below. Same thing as 'Emma'. 'I remember' ... who knew?

Thursday, January 28, 2016

The beginning of the end

Image result for Megyn Kelly
I doubt we'd agree on anything but the world owes
Megyn Kelly a great debt for not giving in
to Donald Trump's intimidation
The Guardian is giving one of its 'live update' reports on the run up to today's Republican Party candidates debate in Iowa. The latest update I saw (21:14 local time) begins with this paragraph
Billionaire Republican front-runner and aspiring solo (debate) artist Donald Trump gave a scorched-earth performance on the airwaves of the very network whose upcoming presidential debate he plans to boycott.
I think we're beginning to witness the beginning of the end of Donald Trump, Presidential-candidate aspirant.
I wrote these words in the Guardian's comment section.
I could be wrong here - but I think I'm not. This begins to look like the moment the ridiculous Mr. Trump suddenly grasped that the world is real after all, that the Earth is not flat, that in the cold light of day almost no one actually cares what he thinks. Running scared Donald, shouting 'look over here'. And out of time. Very soon not even his most enthusiastic supporters will be listening to a word he says. 
Snake oil salesmen get found out eventually. And he has no one to blame but himself, although for a while he will try to blame everyone and anyone who is not Donald Trump. It will begin with sackings or departures from his campaign team.
Self-serving fool.

Should I wait until I'm inspired?

Image result for beginThat's the question kicking off exercise 2.14 of the second week of my Open University MOOC - Start Writing Fiction.  It's about getting starting by plunging in. Part of the introduction to the exercise read this way:
Don’t wait until you have the perfect first line. In practice, it often transpires that perfect first lines no longer fit with the story once it’s written out. Instead, try to think of your opening line as being simply like a doorway that you must pass through to get into the ‘room’ of your story. The doorway is much less important than what’s inside the room – focus on that. If you find yourself ‘seeing the whole story at once’, and you’re unsure where to begin, concentrate on one particular detail and start there. 
Example: You want to write about a young man and his girlfriend. He’s just realised he’s in love with her, and is going to say so, but you think that having him just saying ‘I love you’ will sound a bit flat. So, think about how else you could approach it.
And this was my response.
Alice flung her bag onto the kitchen table, knocking the fruit bowl. An apple fell out, wobbled on the weathered pine then rolled to the edge from which it plummeted, ending-up nestled between the refrigerator and the cat's saucer of half-eaten 'Chicken Dee-lite'. With a phone cradled between her neck and ear, Alice payed no attention to the wayward fruit. She was intent on the voice at the other end, making sure she caught every word. 
Weary from the day's routines, Alice slumped into the chair beside the table. And while adjusting the phone with one hand, she reached into her bag with the other to extract a crumpled pack of cigarettes. She had sworn she would give up but this was serious. So she pulled one from the pack, put it to her lips then rummaged in her bag again until the lighter came to hand. Alice lit the cigarette, drew heavily, then - as she arched her spine against the back of the chair, eyes to the ceiling - exhaled deeply. 
Something Alice heard made her sit upright. "Frank," she said, "it just won't work. You know? You can't keep messing up like this then hope things'll be OK by saying I love you." Alice paused. Listened. Spoke again. "Frank," she said, "grow up!"
Maybe 10 minutes to write the first draft.  An hour to get it down to less than 1200 characters to fit inside the submission window.  Still writing every day. Still hope for this old man.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Burns Night on Australia Day

Image result for robert Burns
Robert Burns - 1759 to 1796
There are eleven hours today - between Midnight and eleven o'clock this morning - when my past and present meet, where the miles between the land of my birth and the land I now call home vanish.  Time and space collapsed through the cultural connections I make.  They help shape my identity in ways I don't fully understand.

January 25th is the celebration of the birth and life of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns.  He was born on the 25th January in 1759 in the village of Alloway, south of the town of Ayr.  Here in Australia today it's our national holiday commemorating - increasingly controversially - the arrival of the 'First Fleet' in the great southern land in 1788.  The vast continent would be claimed as territory for King George III by Captain Arthur Phillip when he and a dozen or so oarsmen and military personnel landed at Sydney Cove from HMS Supply. The other ships in the fleet were marooned in Botany Bay by a fierce storm.  Burns was 29 years old on that very day.

My blog draws its name from Burns who wrote a poem To A Louse: On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnet, At Church (1786). I'm the louse that answered back.

My friend Stuart Hepburn (we met at university where we were political rivals in fiercely opposed left-wing camps) delivered an astonishing, awe-inspiring rendition of Burns's comic masterpiece Tam O'Shanter, written in 1790. I believe you'll not come across a finer interpretation of the poem anywhere than Stuart's rendition. Burns would be the first to raise a glass and cheer.

Monday, January 25, 2016

Summer in Australia ...... a winter wonderland?????

Not quite a polar vortex ...

... but enough to trouble a plaster-cast wombat
and his friends - the teapots.
We had temperatures in the high-thirties last week - 38 and 39 degrees, a total fire-ban and plants in dire need of rain.  This evening, as we arrived home from shopping, this lot and much, much more fell in two minutes.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Imagining writing spaces

Music to lose oneself inside
Week 2 of my writing course has started and I'm enjoying myself. So that's not at all bad. It's free. I think I'm learning something (about myself if nothing else). And I'm writing, inspired by Andy Warhol in a way and with track after track of Brian Eno's mesmerising* 'ambient' music playing in the background. It has a meditative, trance-inducing quality that seems to help me write, distraction-free, like I have never known before.

Here's an exercise completed during this afternoon's three-hour session. The time flew past unnoticed.

Trying to picture the worst place for you to try to write can help you realise what your best venue might be. Imagine two different venues for writing – one that seems most suited to you, and one that you would find bizarre or too difficult. Write a paragraph describing two writers at work, one in each of the venues.
(Edit of previous attempt, still describes my imaginary writing-space from Hell. All those responsibilities!) 
The Kitchen Table 
It's crowded with belongings that are not mine. Some, I suspect, have no known owner. Space is at a premium and we tussle over any new area that opens up temporarily. It's like the universe described by Dr Steven Hawking - constantly in motion and expanding. Chaos rules. Meals take place there sometimes and a fruit bowl, like a giant black hole, devours any object falling into its clutches. Were there not bananas once, a handful of pears, perhaps a pineapple? All vanish no matter how often we replace them. There are stacks of books - his, hers, theirs - like ancient standing stones in far locations set by the great librarian in the sky. Layers may shift and change over time but the columns remain. Inviolable. Like the pillars on Mount Olympus. There is mail too - who could imagine so much could still be sent and received in this online age? And homework - there is always homework; three sets at varying stages - not quite finished, waiting to be checked and ... "oh, is that where my homework went?" 
So. Not a place to write. But what a place to live our lives.
And the positive alternative:
"Andy Worhol - superstar"

My Place 
I have a room of my own, as Virginia Woolf advised us almost a Century ago. I know I'm lucky. 
It's a small room at the end of the hall and the cat is my most frequent visitor. She, by and large, is entirely disinterested in a mere mortal like me. Unless she wants fed. 
My desk faces an almost blank wall, except for the paper carrier bag I've hung there: large, square, white with giant black letters down one side. 'MoMA' - from the gallery store. It contains a print of Andy Worhol's image behind these words, "art is what you can get away with". I think that's a bit like my mind. Words are in there. Hidden. They might be art. I just have to work at taking them out of the bag. 
There's a PC on my desk and clutter - my clutter - which only I may move: a teapot, books I've read or am about to read, and my new writer's notebook, never out of reach now. I have bookshelves behind me, a radiator for winter and a window with a seductively uninteresting view of the world beyond: our back garden which is world enough when I'm working. 
We've agreed it's my place. To think. To be not distracted. To take small risks as I write. To make mistakes. To learn. Make more mistakes. And write again.
* By the way, "mesmerising" seems to be this week's fave word. I'm using it all over the place.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Friday, January 22, 2016

The Big Short

I watched the film The Big Short last week and had been meaning to post some thoughts about it here before now. That good intention slipped (as many do). I was brought back to the film by Peter Bradshaw's review today in The Guardian Online. Mr, Bradshaw, whose film criticism is always worth reading, was considerably less impressed by the film than I was. Here's just one part of his two-star review:
I came to The Big Short in a state of anticipation, only to be baffled at how smug, laborious and self-important it is, trying to combine Gordon Gekko sexiness with anti-banker correctness, like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street rewritten by Malcolm Gladwell and Justin Welby. It’s a film that doesn’t let you have your cake, or eat it. And how agonisingly it keeps stopping to explain technical stuff by bringing on celeb guest stars such as superchef Anthony Bourdain or singer Selena Gomez to recite the patronising and gimmicky mini-explanations written for them.
I was kinder.  I added my twopence-worth in the comments section below the article.  This is what I wrote.
It is quite a difficult film to rate. Parts of it worked well, I thought (breaking the 4th wall worked well for me and I thought the performances were very good). Parts of it not so well, although I did wonder if what seemed like a weak script at times (e.g. the Florida mortgage brokers' bragging) had more to do with the fact that the truth about those people at that time is more difficult to accept than fiction - as in, 'you couldn't make up this stuff'. 
I think as well it's interesting to contrast The Big Short with Spotlight: two drama-documentaries about small, tightly bound groups of (predominantly) men seeking to uncover hidden truths about corrupt social institutions - one group for personal gain, the second group for a higher moral purpose. I quite enjoyed both films but I couldn't stop thinking about how old-fashioned & trad Spotlight felt in its style, technique and structure. Maybe that was intentional (although I doubt it). For all its flaws (some of which I agree with PB about - a degree of smugness, the almost total absence of dramatic concern with the folk who were ripped off by those sharks) The Big Short does seem to be trying to tell its kind of story in a more contemporary manner. 
Two out of five is a bit harsh. It's a film worth watching even if it doesn't deliver all the time.
I guess that means I'd give it three, maybe three and a half.  Still worth the ticket price.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Wet ...

A lightning strike over Gungahlin on Thursday.
Photo: Rohan Thomson

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Art - eat - art - coffee

Fred Williams - Lysterfield triptych.  NGA
A day off from the office to spend time with friends visiting from Scotland, Barbara McKissack and Brian Smith.  After Spike gave us the guided tour of the Canberra Glassworks - where one of her works sits in a kiln slowly lowering its temperature before being extracted tomorrow - we enjoyed a more than decent, very late brunch on the Kingston foreshore - at the Local Press Cafe.  Then we headed for the National Gallery of Australia to see its recently re-located and re-hung national collection.  (I'm afraid we all agreed we could give the Tom Roberts 'blockbuster' show a miss.  Personally, I feel I've seen the sheep-shearing scenes enough.  There may be more to discover in them.  My opinion may change. Or not.)

On the other hand I never tire of seeing the Fred Williams triptych. It does something but I don't quite know what or understand why.  But that doesn't matter.  You simply need to look.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

So good it does your head in

A gift to myself arrived from England a few days ago.  Today I got round to reading Andrew McMillan's first collection of poems, physical, which won the Guardian First Book Award 2015.  It's not difficult to see why it was a contender.  

I read the short collection in one sitting; read it aloud because poetry like this benefits from being read out loud.  The absence of punctuation wasn't a hindrance.  The rhythm of the poems takes you through the text.  Almost without conscious thought you learn quite quickly, perhaps intuitively, that two spaces between words signifies a comma, three tells you where a full stop might be.  And the lines seem to fit with the simple but profound idea that where you need to take a pause for breath the text requires a break as well.

There are echoes (for me at least) of Marianne Moore in the tightly structured verse (I thought of The Steeplejack and Poetry when I read protest of the physical, a magnificent longer poem).  I heard the whisper of T S Eliot in WHEN LOUD THE STORM AND FURIOUS IS THE GALE. There is even a bit of Billy Collins in THE FACT WE ALMOST KILLED A BADGER IS INCIDENTAL. Best of all though, this a collection from a unique and confident voice. A true poet.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad

Delusional man looks at tomatoes today
So I submitted my resignation this morning. I have no new job to go to. I'm returning to full time study at the Australian National University, hope to pick up bits and pieces of work where I can and use the comparatively meagre resources I have to support us. I think I can eke out two years. I'll either succeed with this bonkers plan or fail spectacularly. There is no Plan B but I intend to succeed.

In advance of the university year beginning next month I enrolled in a free, online course provided by the Open University. It's called Start Writing Fiction and encourages you to do what it says on the label. The course started today. 

One of the early exercises goes like this:

Write a paragraph (50 to 100 words) containing one fact and three fictitious elements. 
You can write about yourself, about your interests, about history – about anything you like. Then try the reverse – write a paragraph containing three facts and one fictitious element.

And this is how I responded (based on some previous attempts);
One fact, three fictitious elements 
There are lies, damned lies and - of course - there are statistics.  Everyone knows, statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be crushed to death by a vending machine tipping over than to be taken by a shark.  Except that out here, an hour east of the Whitsunday Islands, there are no vending machines of any shape, size or form.  Not one.  But I’ll bet my last soggy dollar there are more than enough sharks to go round.  Not far from here.  And this yacht is sinking.  I reckon we have an hour. 
Three facts, one fictitious element 
Four miles south-west of the Clachan Bridge, which some folk call the Bridge over the Atlantic, a five-minute ferry crossing takes you from the pier at Ellenabeich village to the island of Easdale.  It was there, on that slate outcrop, my mother gave birth at the height of the great storm in the winter of 1881.  As I entered the world, shrieking like a hungry herring gull, a monstrous wall of wild water breached the island’s sea defences, flooding the quarries.  Nothing thereafter could ever be the same.
I'm started.  As I hope to continue.  Writing.