August 27th, 2009
This blog is slowing down for now. I’ve had the odd month of blog frenzy, tried a more sedate weekly post, and now, as my writing project reaches its tentacles deeper into my brain, the blog needs to stand back in the shadows for awhile.
If you write you’ll understand the fever that infects the blood once you get going. I can’t think of anything but my characters and what they must do next and why. It’s an effort to cram in mundane daily-existence chores, and quite often they are done with less than full attention.
Getting going on this project has been an epic process. The project is the sequel to The Book of Love - published by Hachette Australia in April 2010. When I finished that manuscript I was so possessed by my characters that I couldn’t stop writing about them, or I didn’t want to stop. So I launched into a sequel simply for my own pleasure.
Once the first book was picked up it was suggested to me that a sequel might be a good idea. I mentally rubbed my hands together with glee at this suggestion. It’s like spending time with dear old friends. And I had thirty thousand words already. What could be better?
But it’s not that easy.
I’d written three novel length manuscripts in two years and needed a break. I knew I couldn’t force it, because it would be obvious in the writing, and for most of this year I simply have not had the mental space for a big project. It’s been an important time in terms of understanding my own work processes and not panicking because I’m not writing. I knew it would return if allowed to do so naturally. I’ve spent months thinking about the themes of the book and discovering what feels right to me about the characters and their lives. To outsiders it looks like I’m aimless, but that brooding vat of ideas needs to ferment in silence – apart from everyone and everything. And now, to push this metaphor, I’m ready to bottle.
I’ve had some huge boulders to shift regarding plot technicalities and I’ve had to speak in depth to various experts in other fields to get my facts correct. Hours of research on the Internet have proved fruitful as usual, leading me to marvel at the usefulness of the net once again.
I’ve ended up discarding most of what I wrote last year. It doesn’t fit now. Letting it go is disappointing, but letting go of what doesn’t work is as essential as treating rejections in a business like manner. Both part of the job specs. And I’ve never been one to pay much attention to my word count. It will be finished when it feels whole and complete. To produce the eighty five thousand or so words of the first book required generating over two hundred thousand words and then editing, whittling, exchanging, adding and carving away for months full time.
But now I’m in the most addictive, most heady and exquisite part of writing – the creation. I don’t have room for anything else and I don’t want anything else until I’m done.
me at my desk
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August 26th, 2009
Sheep via Urban Flea Design Blog
Tilda Swinton via The Feeling of Absurdity Blog
Wool Face and Twins - Chrystl Rijkeboer
Mask and Skull - Max Dupain
Wool Organs - Sarah Hillenberger
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August 22nd, 2009
Pity the poor sod who has a job which requires them to wear a name tag. I have worked front-of-house in theatre and had to wear a name badge. But mine kept getting lost, or I left it at home, or it fell accidentally into the bin. Then I could be anonymous rather than having to suffer the impudence, insolence and complete lack of grace so many people show to the ‘named.’
I’d much rather be identified by my surname than my given name. That puts a distance between ‘them,’ and me - which, when dealing with the public is sometimes ones only refuge from the demands and presumptions of the odd rogue customer. Of which, among theatregoers there are very few, I must confess. But the number of males who made flippant or personal comments eventually convinced management to ditch the badges.
That’s my personal experience of wearing them. Now, sometimes I find myself reading a shop assistant’s name badge and musing on the origins of their name. Trivia flits through my mind as I wait – but I would never presume an intimacy with them simply because I know their given name.
Names used to be more than a fashion accessory. They signified family ties more than anything and the immersion of the individual into the greater whole of the clan. Now we strive for individuality in the names we give our children. These children will grow up in a culture so casual we have to be told what to wear when entering a bar. Like, put a shirt on. And, in the case of one memorable sighting in a supermarket in tropical Darwin, a shirt and shorts. Food shopping in just your jocks is taking casual attire a bit far. This guy probably also felt compelled to read aloud the cashier’s name and make some incredibly witty and suggestive comment.
To give the ‘named’ an equal chance to discover who they are serving, follow this link, download and print your nametag for November 14…….
http://www.lucidity.ltd.uk/farty/concepts/variety.htm
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August 20th, 2009
People have asked me if I was going to do the cover for my forthcoming book, a question they ask because of my background in visual arts. Naturally my answer is no, and then the response is usually ‘isn’t that unfair given it’s your book?’
But actually it’s not my book. And it wouldn’t be a book if the publishers didn’t put their money and people behind it. It’s my manuscript, but it’s our book, a collaborative effort. The amount of person-hours going into shaping the manuscript and bringing it to publication is phenomenal. Then they advertise it and put bundles of them in trucks and drive them all over the continent and then sit back and hope they’ve picked a winner. So, yeah, they can have the cover
I have seen the cover and I’m happy with it, and I’ve seen most of the numerous ideas the designer came up with. The publishers asked what I didn’t want, and if I had burst into tears and flung their choice across the room I’m sure they would have changed it – but no way would they let me near the responsibility for designing it. (And I probably wouldn’t get another contract)
What would I come up with if I were allowed to do the cover, I wonder? My interpretation of the themes of the book, and the images that I use could be so off-putting and downright upsetting to many people. Or they might not work in the hundred different ways that a book cover has to work. And then there is a big gap between contemporary visual art practice and book cover design. The former sometimes takes a perverse pride in not selling and producing discomfort in the viewer. And we don’t want that in the bookshop - plenty of other places to go for a dose of outrage.
Book covers perplex me. Shopping for them is a very different experience to my usual shopping trips. I wander down supermarket aisles and buy by colour and format. I buy the same things usually and my brain goes for a picnic while I just reach, grab, toss, reach, grab, toss and thence to cash register. If you asked me what brands I bought I’d be hard pressed to tell you. Sometimes they change the packaging and I have to snap out of my reverie and make a decision or root around and find my normal brand of tuna. I resent that; I don’t want to think when I shop. And too many times have I not paid enough attention and arrive home with something different to what I intended.
I felt that creeping perplexity the other day in an airport bookshop. Hundreds and hundreds of covers were competing for my attention. How could I choose? I wanted to buy something so I walked up and down the aisles and sometimes I’d stop and pick up a book – not for the title but because something in the image resonated with me. Some covers shrieked at me ‘you would hate me,’ and others, particularly in the crime section said ‘if you want a ballsy read, pal, choose me, otherwise f**k off.’
Around and around I went. I felt, as my hand reached out for a book, that a character like Christof from The Truman Show was in Marketing HQ saying, ‘she’s made a decision, quiet everybody…she’s picking up the … yes, she’s picking up the purple embossed one, quick look inside her neo cortex and find which lights are flashing.’
Those marketing people would love to know how an impulse buy is made. But I can’t help them. So visually battered was I that I felt like I was in a scrum of colourful beggars all with their hands held out, whining beseechingly, ‘have pity on me, lady, I’m near the end of my six week shelf life, I’ll go into the backlists and then remainders, for god’s sake, BUY ME!’
I fell with relief on the Penguin re releases and found an old friend decked out in the modest and sober orange, black and white. I’d read this book many years ago, when it too wore a flamboyant look-at-me cover, and that day in the airport it appeared to be just the thing – there was security of satisfaction. It’s well written, a good story, a classic haven’t read for a decade. All the others – titivated up in their embossed card and luxury flaps exhausted me. I couldn’t commit, I wasn’t going to risk surrender to such a delicious seduction, because I could have opened it on the plane and realised it was just a physical thing. Too late then, isn’t it?
I prefer second hand bookshops most of the time anyway, so I suspect the marketing supremos would give me up as a dead loss. Stick to writing, honey, they’d say, and leave the rest to us. And I shall do that with pleasure.
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August 19th, 2009
Jean Dagnan-Bouveret
Orpheus Eurydice Hermes
That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.
There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.
Down this path they were coming.
In front, the slender man in the blue cloak —
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy, out of the failing folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, —
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:
The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.
A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars —:
So greatly was she loved.
But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.
She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.
And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around —,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?
Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Rainer Maria Rilke Tr. Stephen Mitchell
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August 18th, 2009
Picasso
Franz Stuck
Bronzino
Rembrandt
Minotaur, Bronze (artist unknown)
Title from Ted Hughes poem The Minotaur
Correct attribution for the bronze minotaur sculpture welcomed
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August 17th, 2009
I’d rather pull my toenails out with my own teeth than chat up someone because they could be useful my career.
I like whom I like, for who they are, not for what they can do for me, and I find it impossible to schmooze someone I dislike because my feelings are as transparent as a wet, white swimming costume.
But social networking … what about that? It used to be called making friends with people who shared your interests, and having friends you enjoy is one of the great pleasures of life. Building personal relationships in almost all most spheres of human life is important. But in the arts and writing world it’s essential. And we are the ones most likely to have poor people skills, extreme shyness, or a strong aversion to networking and schmoozing on principle. This can wreck arts careers before they even start. Many talented and disciplined artists have fallen during the race because they just can’t schmooze. And they look up from their bitter, tear stained pillow to see a sizeable number of those who can do these things getting the shows and getting the grants.
Eva Hesse alone in her studio
Consider this scenario…
Augustine Personage walks in and a tiny ripple, almost imperceptible, runs through the room. You don’t know Ms Personage personally, maybe you don’t even like their work, but you know that she can help you make the connections you need to get to where you want to go. Every body in the room knows it. And there Ms Personage stands, over by the table laden with wine glasses and bottles, deep in conversation with another. And you? You are by nature solitary, intense and impatient and sometimes ill at ease with social intercourse.
Do you pick up the nearest bottle of red, gulp half of it, and saunter over to Ms Personage and blather on until incoherence or nausea compel you to retreat?
Do you slither out the door and into the cold night air bitching to yourself about the way the world works and how those who probably shagged their way to the top and possess the coarsest of sensibilities always shun your beautiful, soulful, unique and superior vision?
Or do you say to yourself, ‘this is a business and to move ahead I have to talk to that person.’
You pick number three, of course. But as you gird your psychic loins the thought occurs to you … what if Augustine (you’ve mentally debated with her for so long you feel entitled to first name familiarity) snubs you? Ridicules you? Patronises you? Is it worth the risk?
Or what if some other lean and hungry writer/artist, who just happened to be less given to rumination, nipped in before you and is now smarming and schmoozing in an undignified display that you would never, ever consider – even in your most animated rehearsals under the shower.
I’m familiar with all the scenarios above to varying degrees and I still don’t know the answer. But I do know it gets a hell of a lot easier to attend these functions if you don’t want anything from anyone. That is anything beyond a drink and a laugh and to swap experiences. If you want to press your beloved manuscript on them, or lure them to your studio or latest show, that’s when it becomes tricky.
And yet…how are they going to know about your fabulous books or paintings if you don’t do this? Do you do the usual – write query letters that are never answered? Lob your precious manuscript into a slushpile that is not touched for months? Mount exhibitions that are never reviewed? What other choices are there? Social networking is an accepted part of creative industries where there is no obvious vocational ladder. It’s just another hurdle you have to clamber over.
It’s a pity, really. It should just be about the work. Or should it?
Maybe the bottom line is that, yes, the work is primary, but in order to get your book published you have to be able to work and mix with others. You have to respect their deadlines, appreciate their input and be able to resolve conflict in a peaceful and consultative manner. The same with artists – you have to work with gallery owners and dealers, reviewers, museums, printers, caterers and more.
In neither area can you afford to be demanding, self absorbed and difficult. Maybe schmoozing and social networking is the industry way of filtering out those who simply can’t work with others – because your work has to bloody exceptional to get away with bad behaviour or a refusal to mix.
Of course there are exceptions, we could probably all name at least one. But nowhere is it written that creative endeavour alone should be rewarded with success. You need a vast range of skills to succeed, as well as a good dose of luck; it’s not an egalitarian world where participation alone gets a gold star. Mediocrity is tolerated in many professions, but the arts world is not one of them.
The combination of talent, imagination, sensitivity, persistence, discipline and drive also requires the topping of people skills – particularly in the modern world where self promotion is considered essential for writers/artists.
It’s exhausting to think about, perhaps a bit of a bore, or perhaps an interesting challenge - depending on what mood you wake up in – but there is no doubting that developing people skills as part of a professional approach is essential. I draw the line at schmoozing, but I like to meet those who share my interests in writing and visual art, in thinking and storytelling or in sharing a bottle, a laugh and a few tears over how we got here and where to next.
Lana Turner and Lex Barker
The uppermost image is Gloria Vanderbilt and Richard Avedon
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August 11th, 2009
Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in Wuthering Heights
Irasema Dilian and Jorge Mistral in Abismos De Pasion
Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights
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August 10th, 2009
‘But at my age, a snootful of English Lit. made me savagely demanding in my insistence that the written word exemplify only the highest seriousness and truth, I treated these forlorn offspring of a thousand strangers’ lonely and fragile desire with the magisterial , abstract loathing of an ape plucking vermin from his pelt. I was adamant, cutting, remorseless, insufferable…..I levelled the scorn on that could only be mustered by one who had just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity upon these sad outpourings piled high on my desk, all of them so freighted with hope and clubfooted syntax. I was required to write a reasonably full description of each submission, no matter how bad the book. At first it was a lark and I honestly enjoyed the bitchery and vengeance I was able to wreak upon these manuscripts….Oh clever, supercilious young man! How I gloated and chuckled as I eviscerated these helpless, underprivileged, sub-literary lambkins.’
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice
Offering one’s manuscript to peers for review is an act of trust - usually rewarded with helpful feedback and insight. It’s impossible to develop as a writer without these. But submitting your manuscript to agents and publishers is a different process altogether. One wreathed in hopes and fears and a small measure of crazy bravery. One always hopes never to strike a reader like Styron’s young man.
There is no need to draw blood when offering a critique of people’s manuscripts. Head kicking for the hell of it may be ‘a lark’ at the time, but it personalises the whole process and simply works to close off all creative possibilities – for both reviewer and writer. Tears and humiliation calcify into a negative, reactionary fear. And where there is fear there is no risk and thus no art. Quite often all that needs to be said is nothing. No matter what you are thinking. Unless there is implicit trust and respect between you and the reviewer - then it is disrespectful to give anything but honesty.
I found myself mulling over these issues and processes when I attended an art exhibition today. Hopes high and a spring in my step, I walked in, scanned the walls and my shoulders slumped. I shuffled around dutifully looking at everything, trying to be generous but found myself saying to the artist, (in my head, of course) ‘Why did you persist with this slender idea? Why did you put all this work in for something so obviously mediocre?’ Of course the artists would have learned a hell of a lot by finishing and exhibiting. But it wasn’t a student show and I didn’t want to see half cooked artwork.
With my old hat of visual art lecturer jammed back on my head I immediately felt an overwhelming weariness. Giving critical assessment of student work is a very delicate procedure, emotionally draining for both. Invariably you walk in to the student gallery, look around the walls and pick three or four with something interesting happening and the rest, well, you do what your position requires of you. This recognition of the indefinable is done with an eye developed over a period of time - time spent looking and looking and thinking and more looking.
Criticism hurts, let’s be clear about that, and hurts even more if you have over identified with your work. To not take criticism personally is very tough, particularly when you are a young student. But that is part of the purpose of critique sessions – to toughen those tender souls for the real world. The students question your judgement, they bitch and whine, they say what would you know, and it’s just personal taste and your paintings are crap anyway so who are you to speak. I remember being in a straggle of art students in a large gallery viewing the paintings of our senior lecturer. We were as supercilious and dismissive as Styron’s character. All who were there felt justified in ignoring this lecturer’s criticism of our own work now we’d seen his.
This last point is an important one, one that we arrogant and tiresome students misunderstood completely - you don’t have to practice an art form to develop a critical response to it.
Agents and publishers work on the same gut feel, or instinct, born of long experience and wide exposure to manuscripts. They get it wrong sometimes. But within the criteria they have to satisfy they get it right too. With floods of manuscripts pouring in every day it is impossible to read all to the end. So they start with the synopsis, first paragraph, the first page and toss it aside if they can tell it doesn’t have legs. And how can they tell? They can tell because they have developed, through years of experience, an eye for the markers that signify something good, something worth investigating.
It’s not a personal vendetta; it’s not a random short straw procedure. Yes, it is partly subjective; all responses to creative work must be to an extent. The submitting author must accept that and research very carefully the person to whom they are submitting, who they publish or represent and what their interests are. An agent can’t sell something they find clever but dull, and a publisher can’t convince marketing to go with a manuscript they have no belief in.
Hard as they are to fathom sometimes, these agent/publisher responses are not random – they don’t make paper crowns of dead query letters, place the manuscripts on office chairs and dance around playing musical manuscripts, bottles of cognac in hand, laughing uproariously at the aspirations of writers. Or perhaps only occasionally.
As writers, whether we like it or not, or agree or not, most of the time we have to accept the expertise of the commercial publishing world - and keep reminding ourselves of the word ‘commercial’. If this is not the parameter within which we want to work then we must look elsewhere.
The book and publishing industry adapts to meet whatever challenges the contemporary socio-economic climate throws at it, as do all industries. Some survive some don’t. I can’t comment on the publishing industry and be taken seriously, but a very good place to start looking at alternatives, if ‘commercial’ is not the place for you is - http://agnieszkasshoes.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
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August 5th, 2009
I’ve had hens I could have a conversation with. Not complex conversations, I grant you that, perhaps even mutually unintelligible, but no more so than other everyday conversations I have with my own species.
Some of my gals have been real characters who stood out from the lumpen poultry. But even though I am a solitary writer, my life is not so bereft of humans that I need hens to fulfil my companionship needs. No, they are there for practical reasons. Their droppings go in the compost, which goes on the vegetable garden. The vegetables fail to thrive - because of water restrictions, not enough compost and dwindling enthusiasm - and so they are pulled and fed to the chickens. And so the cycle continues.
And the eggs. They keep on coming … a deluge some season. More than can be eaten by reasonable omnivores. I have been known to cook up the excess eggs and feed them back to the bloated courtesans of cuisine who live in Castello dei Polli. This won’t lead to Mad Chook Disease, because the perverse creatures will happily eat their own eggs if they discover how tasty they are – and once that happens it’s a case of dead chooks walking, because nothing can cure them of this foul and benighted vice. Their little piranha brains are drawn to fresh blood too, so a hen with an injury better know how to fight back or she will go down. The sisters will make sure of it.
Henworld is a fascinating place, but it also means keeping every egg recipe that comes your way, lest you slide into that avian solipsistic cycle of keeping hens so you can feed them their eggs so you can keep hens and so on. And I am going to share my top three recipes with my reader(s?) just because I feel like it.
Let me say here before you get in a muddle…..….all measurements are Australian
Vanilla vine
Vanilla Gelati
You need five egg yolks, two cups of full fat milk, half a cup of caster sugar and one vanilla bean split in two.
Scrape the tiny seeds out of the bean and into the milk. All of them. No stinginess, if you are going to have vanilla, have vanilla.
Bring milk and vanilla to simmering point. Whisk egg yolks and sugar until light and fluffy, and then whisk in the warm milk. Return to the saucepan and stir with a wooden spoon – continuously – until the mixture thickens. Cool and churn in an ice cream maker.
This is best eaten the next day. It doesn’t keep long as it has no preservatives – therein lies its beauty. It is, to me, delicious with Frangelico, or a walnut liqueur like Nocello, poured over it and with a small black espresso on the side. Not on top like an affogato, which is nice but you miss that evil slap from the coffee.
So what about the egg whites? Meringue perhaps, or these biscuits…
Almond Flake Biscuits
Three cups of almond meal, three egg whites, one cup of caster sugar, one cup of flaked almonds, three drops almond essence and, if you like, a splash of Strega.
Mix everything but the almond flakes together and form into small logs. Roll in the flaked almonds and bake at 180 C for fifteen minutes.
Or the meringue option. This is a good solid choice for an Australian. We can slop all our delicious fresh fruit on top and before you know it you have a dish people are clamouring for. But there is an Italian option that I like more and more these days…
Torta di Nocciole Meringa…
Three large eggwhites, one hundred and seventy five grams caster sugar, three hundred ml fresh cream- whipped, three hundred and fifty grams of fresh raspberries, and here the recipe says fifty five grams of hazelnuts but being of an extravagant nature I use one hundred, and some icing sugar.
Preheat oven to 140 C. Line two baking trays with baking paper and draw a twenty cm circle on each.
Whisk eggwhites until stiff; add sugar gradually whisking all the time until the mixture is stiff and shiny. Carefully fold in the chopped hazelnuts. Divide the mixture between the two baking trays and bake for one and a half hours. Then let them cool in the oven.
Take one round and smother it with the cream, lavish the raspberries all over the cream and place the other meringue round on top. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve as soon as possible. The moisture in the cream and raspberries will make your meringue a sad, flabby shadow of what it once was.
This is my current, best ever, never-want-to-eat-anything-else dessert dish. And nothing this delicious can be served without an espresso hovering in the wings.
And a thank you for my flock of hard working princesses?
Of course. A bundle of dandelion greens, a corncob and a natter at dusk once the guests have gone home.
The Torta di Nocciole Meringa is from Ursula Ferrigno’s book, Trattoria, Mitchell Beazley, 2004
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A Feverish Turn
for a good feed ...
