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.

At the end of a hot, frustrating day in a kiln room ...

... the need to prune a rioting bush is irresistable

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.

Wet ...

Photo: Rohan Thomson

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.

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.

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.