Blog Archives
MWF 2010 authors on… air travel
As lots of authors are flying in to Melbourne, and the festival is about to begin, here is the last in the ‘MWF 2010 authors on…’ series. As always, click on their names for info on their festival appearances. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series!
It is my first flight.
I am 11 months old. We are at Essendon airport. In those days you got to walk out onto the tarmac, right up to the aircraft. All your relatives could come up to the plane and wish you goodbye. We are on our way to Canada. We are going away for a long time. We will stop in Sydney, Honolulu and Vancouver. When we get off the plane in Toronto my father is waiting on the tarmac in the blistering cold. I haven’t seen him for six months. I don’t remember him at all.
Someone ought to write a book on air travel etiquette for international flights (unless it’s already been done and I missed it). It could include such helpful hints as: smile at the person/people sitting next to you, but not too warmly; bring along a blow-up pillow to avoid leaning on some poor stranger’s shoulder; if you have a window-seat, visit the loo before the lights are dimmed for the ‘night’. Other suggestions welcome.
I developed a bad fear of flying as a result of one very bad flight from Melbourne about 15 years ago in which the plane circled Sydney for a long time, unable to land because of bad weather, and in my memory it was actually hit by lightning but maybe that just can’t be true. Since then the fear has receded – I guess I’ve been up and down enough times in a plane by now to have beaten it into my mind that I probably will survive. It’s still a good excuse to enjoy a few hours on Valium, although that has become a real luxury now, something I only do when I travel without my son (international flights with a small child are a whole other story). I am a compulsive eavesdropper so I love the opportunities a plane provides. There’s nothing like the view I saw once, the moon in a night sky on one side of the plane and dawn breaking on the other.
‘On another tip, another trip, another plane/
I think of life and I wonder will it be the same.’ – ‘Hemingway’, Omar Musa, 2009
Omar Musa “Hemingway” (Dir: Tom Spiers) from MRTVIDZ on Vimeo.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… apathy
I would like to see more attention paid to the distinction between ‘apathetic’ and ‘disaffected’. The common characterisation of the ‘voting public’ as apathetic neatly sheets home to them any ills in the political system. By contrast the term ‘disaffected’ implies a healthy and justified scepticism that implies the need for significant political change.
Is it possible to have strong feelings about apathy? Rather than succumb to the limbo of apathy, my preference (or so it would appear) is to hold strong opinions that I will inevitably disagree with, and, in this way, I can easily vacillate between extremes, thereby avoiding apathy (although you could argue that the net result is the same since these opposing opinions balance each other out like the two sides of an algebraic equation). I have, however, been bored, tired, emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed (and perhaps even drunk) to the point where it’s tantamount to apathy. I have also experienced ambivalence, although I have mixed feelings about it. I do suspect that the great novel of apathy has yet to be written, but, ultimately, whatever.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… listening
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
The film Morvern Callar by Lynne Ramsay is based on a book by Alan Warner (although the film has a completely different tone and aesthetic). The title character is a young woman whose boyfriend has committed suicide as the film opens, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel, which Morvern then submits to publishers under her own name, successfully, as it eventually turns out.
This is the final scene. It may not be apparent that Morvern is actually wearing earphones connected to a Walkman (this is pre-iPod), which provides an implied diegetic source for the soundtrack, even if the version we hear is obviously overdubbed. This theory is subsequently confirmed by the final few seconds of the clip, in which the sound is ‘overheard’ through earphones turned up too loud, although by that point there is no accompanying image, so that the sound only becomes literally diegetic after it has ceased to make sense in diegetic terms.
Clearly there is something else at stake besides narrative logic by the time we get to the black screen.
I remember going to a concert with friends when I was a teenager, when one of our group also insisted on wearing a Walkman, through which he listened to heavy metal, to register his disgust at the sappy Christian folk being performed on stage. This has always struck me as a peculiarly eloquent and perverse gesture, which expresses both the need to belong to a group and the inability to reconcile oneself to that need. I think that this same gesture, whose perversity goes unremarked in the clip, except insofar as its eloquence is amplified by the sound design, means something more in Morvern Callar.
The sequence also works visually of course. It is not merely moving bodies filmed under a strobe. Rather, it is a tour-de-force of choreography and editing, in which a series of jump cuts disguise abrupt focal shifts as well as changes in the lighting.
DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE.
David Bowie. Preferably Hunky Dory, Pin Ups or The Man Who Sold the World.
We talk a great deal in Australia about the ‘right’ to free speech. Much less is said about the right to be heard, to be listened to. Susan Bickford has interesting things to say about this in The dissonance of democracy: listening, conflict and citizenship (Cornell University Press 1996). In my own work (with Joan Eveline) I’ve been exploring the concept of ‘deep listening’, developed among transcultural mental health practitioners (Gabb and McDermott 2007: 5), who describe deep listening as entailing ‘an obligation to contemplate in real time, everything that you hear – to self-reflect as you listen, and then, tellingly, to act on what you’ve registered’. These ideas and references can be pursued in Mainstreaming Politics (Bacchi and Eveline, University of Adelaide Press, 2010), available as a free download at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press.
Angela says…
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… dinosaurs
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
STORY: A wisteria vine grows on the terrace outside my study window. Tiny blue wrens come there to swing on a particular
branch that balances on the cross-bar of another branch. I never succeed in getting there fast enough with the
camera. So one day recently I substituted a swinging plastic dinosaur for the wrens. As you do. He seemed to enjoy
the experience.
When did ‘dinosaur’ become a pejorative term?
As the author of ‘Grannysaurus Rex’, I am officially part of the dinosaur industry. This sometimes causes problems at schools as child dinosaur enthusiasts tend to know a fair bit more about them than I do. I know the Raptors, because they are a Canadian basketball side, and I know stegosaurus, because who doesn’t, but I can get in real trouble when I mix up my brontos and brachios. And not all the ones with wings are Pterodactyls – make that mistake and a room full of Grade 5s will rip you limb from limb.
Having a four year old has refreshed my perspective on these creatures. I am still unsure about what exactly is the reason for their magical appeal to little boys. Henry at age three could distinguish between a whole catalogue of dinosaurs and is especially interested in the distinction between herbivores and carnivores. He obsessively watches and re-watches a movie shown on a loop at the Australian Museum in Sydney that reconstructs what supposedly happened one day at some lake in ancient Queensland, and ends with one big dinosaur eating a small dinosaur for lunch and roaring in a terrifying way. ‘They eat each other,’ he announced, with sombre and resigned amazement, the first time we saw it. Ankylosaurus is my favourite. I love that this one dinosaur is known as both Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus. We spend hours every month in the dinosaur rooms at the Museum and it’s the one part of it that never gets boring. They have crazy looking ones there with feathers and scales and claws all at once, like something out of Maurice Sendak. I love trying to get my head around the meaning of the time scale they make you confront: millions of years.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… dreams
I am fascinated by the writing process. ‘What has this to do with dreams?’ you may well ask. In a recent interview in The Age, Bret Easton Ellis says: ‘So much of writing is like a dream, you’re not conscious …’. This reminded me of what Siri Husvedt describes in her new book The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves as the phenomenon of ‘automatic writing’, ‘the feeling that words are being dictated to the author rather than actually composed’, that a kind of collective unconscious helps us along. This, of course, is not to deny the agony of composition.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… which dead author they’d have for dinner and why
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Kurt Vonnegut, not sure how he would taste, but if he’s anything like his writing, he would be lean, gluten free, and leave a lasting impression.
I thought it would be easy to think of someone, but actually, I have met a fair few renowned authors that have not lived up to expectation. The gap between authorial persona and the real person can be enormous. I suspect that as a rule it’s better to read the books and keep a wide berth of brilliant authors dead or alive. However, I have also been honoured to meet writing legends Isabel Allende and Marie Darrieussecq. If I could bring back to life the Botswanan writer Bessie Head and dine with her, I’d tell her that her novella Maru is a sublime poetic achievement. I doubt she’d snap at me for the compliment. I think she’d smile graciously. And then I’d thank her for leaving such a jewel for others to read behind.
Henry James. I just want to know what his voice sounded like.
It would have to be Michel Foucault. There are many questions I would like to ask him: did you really change your position to the extent that there is no point in reading your earlier writings? How does the concept of ‘apparatus’ relate to ‘discursive practices’ and to ‘assemblage’? and many others. However, there would not be much point as he would probably continue to answer them in his provocatively enigmatic way. So perhaps we could just have a quiet tête-a- tête.
Angela says…
Albert Camus, to talk about then and now in a ‘burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness’.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… the last movie they saw
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
My love for British film director Alan Parker was reawakened when I rewatched Shoot the Moon, a devastating story about the breakdown of a marriage that makes Kramer vs Kramer look like You’ve Got Mail. The main protagonist of the film is a writer (Albert Finney) who in his wild success experiences a midlife crisis that leads him to leave his wife (Diane Keaton) and four unruly yet charming daughters. It is a decidedly uncomfortable and confronting viewing experience, and one of the most unfliching portraits of a narcissistic writer ever presented on screen, yet strangely remains one of Parker’s most overlooked films.
Alan Parker was once accused in a review of Mississippi Burning of being a ‘manipulative’ filmmaker, with a directorial style equivalent to a ‘cinematic bludgeoning’. Parker’s response to this was that it was a ridiculous accusation because the very role of director is that of manipulator. Parker comes from an advertising background and knows exactly how to get his audience right where he wants them: how to elicit need, emotion and desire. Most of what I have learnt about writing has come from filmmakers rather than other authors. Those who write with light have just as much to teach us as those who use a pen.
The ending of Shoot the Moon is so sharp and tragic it reminds me of how I like my fiction: short, punchy and leaving me in a state of despair and wonderment, a changed person from the experience. I like my stories to shoot from the hip, and Parker doesn’t pull his punches. He hasn’t made a film since the very bizarre The Life of David Gale in 2003, and I hope he returns to deliver a cinematic one-two punch to confirm his status as one of Britain’s greatest auteurs, or at least erase the memory of The Road to Wellville.
I borrowed Women in Love from the library thinking I would be swooning over Oliver Reed, when in fact my eye was on Alan Bates.
I usually go to the cinema relentlessly, but it’s been a while now as cinemas in Helsinki really slow down in the summer. Choices are also restricted by my not speaking Finnish or Swedish. The former is a deliriously difficult language and I have no excuse for not speaking the latter. Most things slow down in Helsinki during the summertime, with the exodus towards The Summer Cottage (On the Island / By the Lake)… The capital, which is usually lovely and mellow, becomes something of a ghost town, pleasantly drowsy.
Mother and Child: A rather disturbing endorsement of the current paradigm that blood/genes prevail over human relationships.
I don’t know what the last movie I saw was for the reason that, simply put, I don’t really like movies. This isn’t some highbrow pretentious thing (I love television and don’t trust anyone who doesn’t own a TV set), but I hate movie theatres, for the reason that there’s nothing more alienating then going to see a movie which you find unfunny/didactic/obvious/ham-handed/emotionally manipulative etc., only to find that everyone around you seems to be laughing and having a good time (this may sound inherently misanthropic, which, of course, it is). It’s to the point where my wife won’t even go to the movies with me, because I inevitably end up sitting there huffing and fidgeting and basically making the movie-watching experience uncomfortable for everyone around me despite my best attempts to remain still and quiet. If I were to try to justify this intellectually – and I am always happy to attempt to justify everything intellectually – I might argue that television has clearly surpassed the film as a storytelling medium and that it’s difficult to think of any movies from the last decade that match the power of the best television from the same period (like The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, or Arrested Development), and at times when I’m feeling particularly emphatic, I might even suggest that all government funding for film should be reallocated to novelists – but that would be absurd, wouldn’t it? Clearly, I’m just not that fond of movies…
Angela says…
My man and I have been on a bit of a vampire bender. The classic Dracula, then Nosferatu (superior – wonderful) and the other day The Hunger, a very sexy film that I can’t believe I haven’t seen before. It has everything: Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve getting it on; David Bowie in an old-man suit; ’80s decadence; monkeys; an original kind of undead; and so much more. Delicious fun.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments. What was the last movie you saw?
MWF 2010 authors on… passion
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
My passions include:
Gary Oldman & Val Kilmer; collecting ‘Old Hollywood’ themed coffee table books; second-hand bookshops; trying not to let the responsibilities of adulthood obliterate the delights and memories of my inner-child; ideas; Hamlet; Gothic Literature; a nice, long walk; coffee; sleep; Whitby Abbey, from the Dracula association (this picture hangs in my bedroom); wondering about the identity of Jack the Ripper.
There’s a scene from Robert Bresson’s film Pickpocket, which the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader quotes repeatedly in his work – but Schrader alters it.
The version in American Gigolo takes place in an official area. A woman visits a man. They’re separated by a pane of glass. The woman brings her right hand up across the line of her body, reaching forwards, and rests the outer edge of her fingers along the inside of the glass. The man leans in to press his forehead against the same point on the other side of the glass, hard. Their movements are reciprocal rather than identical. It’s the closest they’ll ever get to touching.
In Pickpocket, Bresson’s protagonists are also separated, but by bars rather than glass. They can touch, if only obliquely. She kisses his fist, which grips a bar. He presses his cheek to her temple; or rather they press together the small cross-sections of skin that can be contained within a single square of the prison grid.
In the version of the scene from Schrader’s Light Sleeper, there are no bars and no glass, and the final shot initially appears to be a still, which freezes the image of Willem Dafoe’s character kissing the hand of Susan Sarandon’s character. But even as the credits roll, even as they keep rolling, it’s only the flickering of Dafoe’s closed eyes – moving like those of a dreamer in the R.E.M. phase – that betrays the patience of both actors.
Spanish fingers pointing to their first star on World Cup winning jerseys.
This photo shows me sitting next to my first boyfriend Peter Zombory-Moldovan (on the right). I was two years old and Peter was our neighbour in Manchester, England. Apparently the two of us would kiss and hug so enthusiastically we’d tumble over onto the floor. I don’t remember loving this little boy of course, it’s all hearsay, but I have no doubt toddlers can feel as strongly for their special friends as adults do.
I was struck by Glyn Davis’s review of Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, in The Age (26 June 2010), which he describes as ‘a work of passion’. The comment led me to wonder what it would take for more academic writing to be passionate, committed and ‘urgent’.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 
