Blog Archives
MWF 2010 authors on… Franz Kafka
I actually had Franz Kafka round to dinner just a few weeks ago and, let me tell you, it was a bloody disaster. First, he showed up late, citing some sort of problem with his carriage. He had a wild look about him and smelled a bit funny, too. I thought he was supposed to be a mild sort of fellow but, in fact, the opposite was true. He leered at my wife, told filthy stories and generally carried on like a pork chop. Late in the evening, when we were all heartily sick of him, he went to the bathroom and, when he hadn’t returned for quite a while, I went to investigate and found him slumped in the hallway snoring like an old dog. By this time we had had enough and bundled him away in a taxi. The next day we discovered that he had, in fact, stolen some of my cufflinks and a handkerchief … My wife wanted him charged but I thought a trial would be a fruitless exercise.
Angela says…
Read my post on my favourite Kafka story ‘In the Penal Colony’ over at The Gum Wall. Also, I have this photo, framed, near my bed:
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… mornings
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.
I’m more a day-break person than I am a morning person. My wife is neither a day-break nor a morning person, and so I thought to invent a vibrating wristwatch that woke me and only me during my six years of breakfast radio. I thought to invent it, but unfortunately my complete lack of technical ability and the fact that it had already been invented stopped me making my millions.
I love dawns. For six years, it meant Triple R Breakfasters and time spent waking up with the rest of the city. Now it means sitting on a couch, sipping coffee and watching my ten month old strain through his morning nappy. We both watch The Gruffalo as he does this, and both love the owl.
Mornings start earlier and earlier now that I have children.
‘At this hour of the morning,’ he said, addressing nobody in particular, ‘people who are awake fall into two categories: the still and the already.’
So says a character in Italo Calvino’s story ‘The adventure of a wife’ to the protagonist, who has wandered into a cafe at six a.m. She, like the speaker, falls into the first category, since she is on her way home after being out all night.
In 1994, I was up at six a.m. almost every morning, but for the first part of the year I was a ‘still’ and in the second part I was an ‘already’. Initially I worked on the night shift as a security guard at a cardboard factory. (I think that’s what they made. I didn’t really care, so I never bothered to find out). After that, I worked as a postman, and I started work at 5.45. In both jobs I set a record of sorts: I had the longest hair of any security guard in Glasgow that year; and later I was the slowest postman in the entire city.
I became a connoisseur of tiredness during this period. The first critical distinction to be made on that subject is related to Calvino’s observation, since the tiredness of staying up too late is qualitatively different from the tiredness of getting up too early.
Mornings? Don’t do ’em.
I’m a morning person if you accept that morning is a state of mind, beginning when you decide it should. I think Descartes said something like you shouldn’t let anyone get you out of bed until you’re good and ready if you want to do decent mathematics. In a perfect world, it would be the same with writing, of course. But even on little sleep the morning can be golden for creative work, the brain surprisingly deft, somehow reborn.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… alcohol
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.
Charles Baudelaire
I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler while writing my novel, among other things, and one of the things that kind of seeped into my own writing was a ridiculous amount of drinking. Reading his stories and novels sometimes it seems as though characters pour themselves another drink after every two or three lines of dialogue. If you look at the picture of Ray in this gallery of drunks and addicts you will understand. I decided to take out some of the drinking in my book after feedback from two of my first readers. I didn’t want it to be that noticeable. There’s still too much tea drinking in there, but that’s ok I guess.
I’m not allowed to drink anymore because it contributes to my migraines. If you encounter me at the festival please excuse my social awkwardness.
Alcohol? Never touch it.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all writers must be drunks (although it could also be said that many drinkers happen to be writers), but, like most universally acknowledged truths, this assertion is in want of a correction: not only do writers drink, but they also sometimes write about drinking. Shakespeare does this through the character of the Porter in Macbeth, who argues that drinking ‘is a great provoker of three things’, including ‘nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery… it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance’, which (if you’re of those people inclined to believe that all writing is autobiography) may provide a little bit more information about Shakespeare than you wanted to know. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ John Keats also yearns for a drop, calling ‘for a draught of vintage! that hath been/Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth’, but apparently he couldn’t hold his liquor very well, as his description of inebriation illustrates: ‘a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,’ which basically proves that even drunk Keats was a bit of a downer. Thomas Love Peacock (whose name almost reads like a transitive sentence describing an amoral act) loved to wax philosophical about liquor, arguing that ‘There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it,’ which just goes to prove that if you’re looking for a reason you will invariably find it.
Angela says…
See my post on the creative ‘spirit‘.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 