Thoughts on ‘Thoughts on Thoughts’

I always try to catch a few science sessions at MWF. I didn’t study science beyond Year 10 (somewhat regrettably) besides a bit of psych at Uni, so it’s a special, pleasurable challenge to wrap my head around the concepts and questions raised in sessions such as this afternoon’s Thoughts on Thoughts.

Chris Krishna-Pillay was our engaging and funny host, chatting to cognitive neuroscientist and raconteur Michael Corballis. It was a free session in the Yarra Room and the audience was crowded in, standing and sitting on the floor all the way up to the back. Corballis explained that he came to write ‘popular science’ because in his many years of lecturing he often encountered students who, simply, didn’t understand many of the concepts in the (academic) language they encountered. With the pop science, you have to ‘let loose a little bit’, he said. His latest book Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain features short, sharp chapters that began as magazine articles.

Corballis spoke a lot about language, about what we don’t know (and about what he’s trying to find out) as much as what we do. He believes that language capacities in human beings have evolved incrementally (not with a ‘big bang’, as Noam Chomsky has suggested). He supports the theory that language is related to, and has evolved from, gestures as opposed to sounds and calls, eg. an intentional gesture of an ape grooming another, as opposed to their more emotive and involuntary calls. The gesture theory is supported by the fact that sign language, in MRI scans, lights up the same area of the brain, in the hippocampus, as does speech language. Corballis’ research takes him many places—from the now sequenced Neanderthal genome, to fossil evidence, to studying chimps and bonobos.

Other animals do communicate, but language is separate from the communication of simple concepts. For example, we can’t know, and it’s improbable, that a dolphin or a dog or other intelligent mammal can express ideas of what happened yesterday, or what is going to happen tomorrow. This is part of what makes a language, the discussion of what’s happening, what has happened and what will.

Memory is therefore intertwined with language: ‘the ability to communicate about the non-present’, as Corballis put it, the ‘means of describing things that are not in front of you’. Humans have what he called ‘episodic memory’. Whether animals actually remember an ‘episode’, or whether they are simply ‘conditioned’ to act a certain way is not something that can currently be proved. For example, if a dog buries a bone, and he goes to retrieve it, is he specifically recalling the ‘episode’ of burying it, or is it more instinct, sense, and smell that come in? It is an absolutely fascinating question. And I like that sessions like this place those kinds of (possibly unanswerable) questions in your mind.

To go a step further, Corballis discussed the fact that human beings are capable of having ‘thoughts about thoughts’, and about other people’s thoughts, but we cannot know if other intelligent species have this level of awareness. It is probable that we are unique in this aspect, and that it is tied in with our capacities for language and episodic memory.

We are limited with what we can know about memory, too, because animals and young children (before language) cannot tell us what they remember. Language is inadequate, in many respects, Corballis explained, because there’s more to memory than we’re able to get from language, such as the specificities of sense memory (though of course some of the greatest writers do try, and manage to spark our recognition).

At one point, a question was raised about dreaming. We still do not know the exact purpose of (human) dreaming, though there are many theories. Corballis said that animal dreaming is pretty much to do with the consolidation of memory (ie. a rat coding the maze). He says that human dreams are undeniably strange! Our own dreaming and mental time travels ‘help us frame futures and even our sense of self’, he said, but there will always be a ‘random component’. Dreams can be like Rorschach tests, Corballis said, we can read into them what we will.

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Michael Corballis will also be appearing on The Story of Science panel, tomorrow (Saturday 1 September) with  Margaret Wertheim, Peter Doherty, Elizabeth Finkel and Leah Kaminsky. His most recent books are Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain and The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilisation.

See some of my previous vaguely sciencey MWF posts:
Lab coats, lit journals & marrying frogs (2011)
Birds of a feather (2011)
Complex life (and our plastic brains), a beautiful fluke (2010)

Five facts: John Boyne

John Boyne is one of the main stars in this year’s program, he has appeared in no less than seven festival sessions. He is the author of seven novels including the international bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas which has sold more than five million copies worldwide. His latest novel is The Terrible Thing That Happened To Barnaby Brocket.

Five facts:

My favourite writers’ festival experience was taking part in an event with the great Morris Gleitzman at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2009. We had both written books on a similar theme and having known his work for some years it was an honour to share a stage with him.

I’m currently reading The Forrests by Emily Perkins. I’ll be visiting New Zealand in September and am interested in reading some contemporary NZ fiction.

When I was a child I wanted to be a writer or a pop star. Sadly the latter never came true but the fomer worked out ok.

When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I take my dog for a run in the mountains, let the fresh air clear my head.

The first thing I ever wrote was a new adventure for the Secret Seven.

 

Mini-reviews: Nine Days by Toni Jordan; Gold by Chris Cleave

Over the past month or two I’ve been reading many of the books by authors featured in my Morning Read sessions, and today I thought I’d share with you mini-reviews of a couple of the books you’ll be hearing about/from in MWF’s second big weekend:

Nine Days
Toni Jordan, Text Publishing, 9781921922831

Toni Jordan’s novels Addition and Fall Girl are what you’d call ‘damn good reads’ and her new novel Nine Days, doesn’t disappoint. Nine Days is structurally different from Jordan’s other novels, told from the point of view of several characters. It’s also partly set in the past: WWII-era Richmond, with its cramped spaces, factories, horses, trams, ‘funeral cakes’ and snobby neighbours. The Westaway family takes centre stage, beginning with the hardworking, misunderstood rascal Kip. In the next chapter, Kip’s daughter Stanzi underestimates the value of her father’s lucky shilling. Through each chapter—mother, lover, brother, grandson and more—the heart of the story is slowly, cleverly revealed. In the meantime the reader builds a picture of the family, being privy to traits and foibles the characters have inherited. Nine Days a heart-warming and witty tale of family, loss, obligation, remembrance, love, and finding out what really matters.

Gold
Chris Cleave, Sceptre, 9780340963449

Zoe, Kate and Jack are Olympic-level cyclists, lovers and rivals. Zoe and Kate are best friends who share a trainer (Tom) but whose lives have gone in very different directions. While Zoe pushes herself to extremes in the velodrome and in life, Kate is balancing the sport with caring for her sick child, Sophie. She has missed out on two Olympic games because of the child, but is still partly the envy of Zoe because she has people who care deeply for her. Zoe is scarred by events in her past and this is partly what has cemented her attitude, but also the drive that enables her to win. The tension between the characters and what might happen in the lead-up to the London Olympics provides plenty of drama. My favourite character was Sophie, the Star Wars­-obsessed superkid who would do anything to avoid worrying her parents. The chapters told from her POV are compelling, sweet and fun, and mean that we really feel for her when she takes a turn for the worse. Cleave obviously has had experience and has done much research into cycling, as the tense moments in the velodrome (and on the road) make you aware of your muscles, your breathing. The characters have enough dimension that your loyalty to Zoe, or to Kate, may shift and shift back again throughout the course of the novel. You really don’t know what they might do next. Gold is a page-turner, is psychologically interesting and makes you think about choice, commitment and sacrifice, not to mention the completely admirable physical hard-yards that athletes at the top of their game put in.

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Catch Toni Jordan at The Stella Prize Trivia Night on Friday 31 August at 7:30pm, the Morning Read on Saturday 1 September at 10am, and on the Father’s Day panel with Tony Birch, Deborah Robertson, and Patrick Gale on Sunday 2 September at 1pm.

Chris Cleave will be on that same Morning Read session on Saturday 1 September, he’ll be in conversation with Blanche Clark that afternoon at 2:30pm, he’ll be on a panel called Still Great Britain? on Sunday 2 September at 10am with John Lanchester, Susan Johnson and Jenny Niven. And with Susan Johnson he’ll be conducting a seminar called The Art of the Novel on Sunday 2 September at 2pm.

A work in progress on Work in Progress

Geoffrey Blainey in crumpled suit and Gideon Haigh in torn jeans, 59 books between them—

On the elevators and steel skeleton constructions
coinciding with the growth of a city.
White collars.

Fogged windows and chocolate biscuits: a comfortable routine.

Both Chicago and Melbourne had height limits, for a time, on office buildings. ‘Some of the earlier skyscrapers [in Chicago] sat like a petrified forest’, said Haigh, until the ’20s and ’30s when more skyscrapers were built.

In Melbourne, the six story limit related to the length of fire ladders. ‘People wouldn’t go into the lifts’, said Blainey. They were afraid.

The Manchester Unity building on Swanston Street is the ‘little brother’ (as Haigh put it) of the Chicago Tribune building, which was built from Raymond Hood’s competition-winning design for the most beautiful office building in the world. (Aside: glorious art deco.)

You used to be able to tell, said Blainey, what line of work people were in, by the way they dressed. Office workers were clean. Positions in some professions were determined by uniform, now we have titles. And many titles don’t tell us anything.

How do we judge the output of office workers?

‘We come up with means to judge an office worker’s productivity.
9-5 or 8-6
there’s an expectation of
minimal diligence by presence,’
said Haigh.
It’s hard to judge productivity, in an office, any other way.

In the early mixed-gender office men were worried they’d be distracted by ‘female frivolity’, or perhaps the women would become coarse. They were still segregated: telephone operators, secretaries; in the basement. Typing was ‘feminine’ but relied upon. Lorena Weeks fought for the shiftman’s job and, eventually, she won.

Blainey remembered a boy writing his school essays on a typewriter. At the time, they didn’t know what to think of him.

Haigh was ahead of the technology in the early ’90s, taking a giant computer home from the office each night to do his writing.
Now we can easily work from our homes/on the move. ‘Perpetual contactibility,’ Haigh called it.
The office is inescapable (she types, working from home).

At least as long as the physical office exists, we can leave it behind—Haigh (paraphrased).

One can be seduced by corporate culture. One can belong.

Or there are those subtle acts of subversion: stealing stationery, satirical emails.

But, as an audience member pointed out, we’re not so assured of ‘careers’ now. Contract work, downsizing, takeovers, discrepancies between the salaries at the lowest and highest levels. Decisions are made a long way from where they’re implemented (but maybe, the panel says, that’s not new).

But work itself. Blainey and Haigh embody it, because they enjoy what they do:
‘It gives me enormous pleasure,’ said Blainey, who remembers the joy of working with the fruiterer as a boy.
For Haigh there is the satisfaction of self-sufficiency, there’s a desire to improve and to be productive. Blainey is an inspiration to him.

Gideon Haigh’s latest book is The Office: A Hardworking History and Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is A Short History of Christianity.

A brief intro to a vast subject: The Other Africa

It was impossible for the four writers on The Other Africa panel today to give us anything more than a glimpse of such a complex and diverse continent. And that was partly what Kwame Antony Appiah, Majok Tulba, Uzodinma Iweala and Sefi Atta talked about, in their conversation with Arnold Zable. I’ve been reading Iweala’s wonderful book Our Kind of People about people and communities in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The book takes an intimate view through Iweala’s conversations with HIV-positive individuals, community leaders, and government representatives; and through personal questions and reflections. As Iweala said on the panel, he was trying to find a ‘different way to talk about HIV/AIDS in Africa, which doesn’t descend into hyperbole’. He wants to get away from the idea of Africa as a monolith, and the way to do that is through individual stories, individual voices. Iweala spend four or five years on the book, letting himself be guided by the stories people told him.

Esteemed philosopher Kwame Antony Appiah spoke about the fact that, yes, Africa is an enormously diverse and complicated continent (and not just countries but the diverse cultures, languages and religions within them) but when travelling about the world he said that someone from Nigeria, South Sudan, Ghana (to name a few) is often simply perceived is as ‘African’. He said while that is never going to be enough (would ‘Australian’ be enough to describe you?) that perception still informs a part of one’s identity. It is not so much that people intentionally stereotype, though certainly reading nuanced stories about people from cultures other than our own goes some way to helping us break down stereotypes.

Fiction, of course, takes us into the world and experiences of another person, a character, and can be incredibly effective at building empathy and complexifying one’s relationship to other people and places. Nigerian-born Sefi Atta began writing when she was 30, living in the US. She realised she’d never read a novel about a Nigerian woman like herself. She builds up her stories with detail from the characters’ lives so as not to fall on/enforce any particular ideology, though she says ‘there’s something about integrity which matters’ to her as a theme in her writing. She says this is possibly a response to misconceptions about Africa. Her latest novel, being launched at the festival, is A Bit of Difference.

Majok Tulba’s debut novel Beneath the Darkening Sky I have written about in detail previously on the blog. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about his work. Tulba said that writing the book wasn’t easy, because of the topic. As a child he thought that starvation and war were ‘all the world was supposed to be’. In Australia he saw a different world. He returned to his village (which he talks about so movingly) in 2007 and was heartbroken to see the aftermath of war. He remembered some of his friends he used to play with, eat with. He believes in the power of writing, as a way to make people realise the horror of what some children go through (and he did choose not to specify the country in the novel, because he said it could have been a few countries besides South Sudan) but also to show them the beauty of the Africa ‘where we can tell the time by a rooster crowing’. ‘This is the Africa I love’, he said. He wrote the book also to ask the question: ‘why is this happening?’ And he hopes the reader will ask this too.

Appiah spoke about how problematic it can be when there is a perception that an ‘African writer’ is approached only to write about ‘African topics’. His latest book, The Honour Code, is about the role of honour in shaping some specific moral movements. He says that, of course, we also cannot deny the influence of our backgrounds, our cultures, and he recounted a story of his father lying in bed smoking and reading the Ghanaian newspapers, before (I believe) Appiah went off to England, and he said: ‘don’t forget you’re taking the family name with you’. Despite the fact Ghana, and Africa, are not present in the book, the idea of exploring honour may have come from his own personal (and cultural) background.

I don’t want to make this too long. As I said, the session barely scratched the surface (and my notes probably don’t even do it justice) so I would encourage you to check out the work of these writers, the fiction and the nonfiction, and try to catch them at their other sessions during the festival. Click their names in the first paragraph for more info on those.

I hope to see you at the first Morning Read session at 10am tomorrow (featuring Majok Tulba) or at the one on Sunday (featuring Sefi Atta and Uzodinma Iweala).

The Age Book of the Year Awards

The Age Book of the Year awards were announced last night at the Melbourne Writers Festival 2012 opening event, prior to Simon Callow’s enthusiastic, informative Keynote speech on Charles Dickens.

The awards, now in their 38^th year and highly regarded, were presented by Age literary editor Jason Steger. They went to…

Fiction

Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears (Allen & Unwin)

Poetry

The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems by Mal McKimmie (Five Islands Press)

Nonfiction

1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia by James Boyce (Black Inc.)

Overall winner / Age Book of the Year

1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia by James Boyce (Black Inc.)

Boyce was very humble about his win, he commended the Age for continuing to support literature and authors, and he very gratefully acknowledged author and historian Inga Clendinnen, who has been a supporter of his work.

This afternoon the winning authors will be reading from their work in The Age Book of the Year Reading. It’s a free event at 2:30pm at BMW Edge. Do come along.

—

Just in case I/we don’t get a chance to write about Simon Callow’s Keynote, his Lateline interview with Tony Jones is online, and of course, you can check out his writing. I can personally recommend (though not on the subject of Dickens) his essay in the latest Sight and Sound (UK) magazine on Orson Welles (another figure he’s passionate about, he’s currently working on the third volume of his biography). See also my Q&A with Callow on writing and playing Dickens.

Five (or more) facts: Toni Jordan

Toni Jordan is the author of the popular, award-winning and internationally published books Addition and Fall Girl. Her latest witty, sweet novel, Nine Days, is the story of the most important day in the lives of four generations of one family. Jordan teaches creative writing at RMIT University in Melbourne and has lectured and presented workshops on writing around Australia. Her short stories and articles have been published widely.

Five (or more) facts:

When I finished my most recent book I went straight from the publisher’s office to the airport, where I flew to Beijing to start my AsiaLink residency. Never a dull moment.

My favourite cocktail is anything with gin in it, and I like it sour and lemony.

I’m currently reading Gerald Murnane’s The Plains. I loved the first half; it’s brilliant writing and very clever. The second half is also brilliant, but it’s clearly meant for people cleverer than me.

When I was a child I wanted to be Wonder Woman. The whole bit. Belt, boots, strapless top, magic lasso—she was kick-arse magnificent.

Last night I dreamt I had a bandaid stuck on my eyeball, and when I pulled it off, half my eyeball came off. I was left with this jagged hole like a broken boiled egg instead of an eye. I don’t know what it means but it can’t be good.

When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I take Myron the WonderWhippet for a walk. He’s vital to my process and should be tax-deductible.

—

Catch Toni Jordan at The Stella Prize Trivia Night on Friday 31 August at 7:30pm alongside Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly, Emily Maguire, Susan Johnson, Jacinta Halloran and Ruby J Murray. She’ll be reading from her work at The Morning Read session on Saturday 1 September at 10am, and she’ll be discussing dads on Father’s Day, Sunday 2 September, with Tony Birch, Patrick Gale and Deborah Robertson.

Football & figuring out: Paul D Carter on Eleven Seasons

Paul D Carter’s debut novel Eleven Seasons was the Australian/Vogel Literary Award winner for 2012. It’s a coming-of-age story set in the ’80s/’90s about Jason Dalton—Hawks supporter and burgeoning player—struggling to find room to breathe and grow and be himself. I asked Carter some questions about the novel:

Jason Dalton is a great character. His searching, his anger, his passion—all very believable. How did the character form in relation to the novel’s focus on both AFL and personal history/identity?

Jason appeared in earlier drafts of the book, at which stage the narrative focused on his entire family unit, including his mother and father (he was also following Footscray, and the novel began in 1980, not 1985). After writing some 40,000 words of this draft, I felt that the characters were being welded to the themes I wanted to explore, as opposed to the narrative emerging organically from the fears and desires of the characters themselves.

In my second draft, I focused on Jason, and moved the narrative forward so that it encompassed the era dominated by the Hawthorn Football Club. I wrote the opening chapter in a week, and felt I was onto something much better—I cared more for Jason, and I could see more clearly the correlation between his football ‘dreaming’ and his life outside the game as a socially invisible boy.

I like how the novel interrogates different cultures around the game—good and bad—through Jason’s encounters. Was it important to you to shine a light on both the positive and negative aspects?

My greatest aim with this novel was to write a book that dealt with football but which non-followers of the game could appreciate. I wanted to get the reader to think of football as a sphere in his life that was interdependent with the other spheres in his life: his relationship with his mother, his relationships with his friends, his relationships with girls. Football is something he uses for a sense of selfhood and direction, in the same way that other people might embrace music or dance to provide themselves with these things.

This said, I felt it was important to look at the way the way football culture might inhibit him as much as it provides him with solace. I think it can be easy to escape the hard work of growing up and figuring yourself out if you are part of a club or institution that does this figuring out for you. I think this issue extends to cultural pursuits outside of football as well, but in football it is quite explicit.

You were writing a PhD at the same time as writing the novel, well done! Did any of your research feed into the novel, or was it unrelated?

Much of my PhD research informed the novel as I ended up writing a review of creative writing about football and the ways this writing has reflected Australia’s recent social history. This said, I wrote the novel mostly from the gut.

The best things about completing the novel as a PhD were that it created a window of time in my life that I could devote exclusively to writing, and it also gave me a timeline. Without this structure, I’m not sure I would have found the self-discipline to see the project through.

Eleven Seasons won the Vogel this year, and was subsequently published by Allen & Unwin. What was that road to publication like? Has your writing life changed much since then?

I had a very intense summer of 2011-12 rewriting the novel in line with the suggestions of the editors. They read the novel very closely, and very critically. I’m still unsure that I was able to deliver a revised manuscript that answered all of their criticisms. This said, the pressure to push myself above and beyond what I’d already done proved a terrific learning experience. It seems to me that one of the best ways to learn is to have someone believe in you and take you to task at the same time. As an English teacher, it’s a lesson I’m trying to take on board when working with my students.

On the subject of teaching—I’m in my second year as an English teacher, and most of my mental space is still occupied by it. It’s one of the most complex and taxing jobs there is, and my writing has taken a back seat for the time being. But I’m taking notes on a book that will deal with teaching and teenagers. This time around, I’d like to write more about women. I feel like I’m done writing about guys for now.

—

Carter will discuss what it’s like to be a first-time novelist with Chris Flynn, Eowyn Ivey, and Ruby J Murray on Saturday 1 September at 1pm, and he’ll be reading from his work at The Morning Read session on Sunday 2 September at 10am. Both sessions are free.

Five facts: Uzodinma Iweala

Uzodinma Iweala is the author of the novel Beasts of No Nation, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His latest book is Our Kind of People, a nonfiction account of the AIDS crisis in Africa. Iweala is an American-born Nigerian.

Five facts:

My favourite writers’ festival experience was the FLIP Festival in Paraty, Brazil because a.) it’s Brazil b.) my little brother came with me and ended up getting profiled as the author’s ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ brother who ‘walks down the street followed by ladies’ in a national newspaper and c.) it’s Brazil.

The best thing about being a writer is not working in a hospital/ listening to all my friends talk about how horrible their real jobs are and realising that I would do what I do for free (don’t get any ideas now…)

When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I go for a walk, run or bike ride. I often find that vigorous physical activity can help eliminate some of the anxiety that blocks those creative inclinations.

My parents had a great influence on me, because they have been very encouraging of my work but also extremely honest with me about how difficult this world can be. It has really helped form a sense of commitment to my work and a strategic way of thinking about how best to create the right environments to do good work.

My greatest ambition is to sleep, oh please sweet sleep!

—

Uzodinma Iweala will be appearing on the panel The Other Africa on Friday 24 August at 2:30pm, with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sefi Atta, Majok Tulba and Arnold Zable. He’ll be interviewed by Peter Mares on Saturday 25 August at 11:30am in a session called Humanising the Virus. And he’ll be reading from his work in The Morning Read session (free) on Sunday 26 August at 10am.

Five facts: Zoë Foster

Zoë Foster is a best-selling author, journalist, blogger, relationship commentator, beauty expert and pancake aficionado. She has published three novels, the most recent being The Younger Man. She is the contributing editor of Mamamia and relationship columnist for Cosmopolitan. She is also the beauty correspondent for Channel 9’s Mornings and a regular on The Today Show, The Circle and A Current Affair.

Five facts:

When I finished my most recent book I took a screengrab of the words ‘The End’ and emailed it to my fiancé to prove I was finished and was ready for gushing admiration and congratulation to commence. Then I’m pretty sure I messaged my best girlfriends to arrange an urgent meal bookended with champagne and all of the wrongest and most ludicrous desserts available. So, you know, I’m pretty casual about it all, really.

My favourite cocktail is an Old Fashioned (with bourbon) and I like it because it reminds me of watching Mad Men season one, and falling deeply and violently in love with Don Draper, and needing to drink whatever he did. Mercifully I really enjoy the taste of an Old Fashioned, and have become a terrific snob with regards to how they’re made, which bartenders find really cute and quirky and infuriating.

My favourite place in the world is probably Queenstown in New Zealand, which I know as an Australian you’re not supposed to admit, but I find it such an astonishingly beautiful and rejuvenating place. Plus, they have excellent Pinot Noir and arrogant infused olive oils and artisanal, overpriced burgers—all things I love dearly.

The best thing about being a writer is the phenomenal freedom and flexibility. I’m in the enormously fortunate position of being able to work anywhere in the world, regardless of the day, time, weather, or state of my hair. Also you get sent heaps of free sports drinks and tracksuits. No, my mistake, that’s professional basketball.

When I need to take a break from writing, I 1. Change focus, and read or watch something that is completely removed from what I am trying to do, or is just very excellent/funny/inspiring. 2. Get outside and remember about things like ‘fresh air’ and ‘the sky’. 3. Treat myself with some form of pastry or cake or small sartorial purchase. The delight/guilt from this treat inspires me to go on and complete a huge chunk of work in order to earn it. Oh, it’s sick, but it works.

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Zoë Foster will be in conversation with Bethanie Blanchard on Friday 24 August at 10am, and will be reading from her work at The Morning Read session (free) on Saturday 25 August at 10am.