Whedon out the weak

I was standing in a crowd of people making mist from the chilled air with each breath taken. To stave off the cold I invaded the personal space of a giant woman in a long leather coat, nuzzling against her back as nonchalantly as I could. Her head whipped around, revealing a long neckbeard and a man’s face that shunned sunlight in favour of the glow of a computer screen.

The neckbeard told me his name was Obsidian Blackdarknightblack and introduced me to his afterlife partner Amanda. Amanda, wearing slightly less make up than her beau, asked if I was here to see Joss, placing both hands over her heart as she spoke the name Joss. I told her that I was supposed to be here to write about Joss. This time she placed her hands over her heart when I said Joss’ name. Amanda told me that she too was writing about Joss, and in fact, wrote about him in her dream journal on a daily basis. Obsidian explained they were there to sacrifice Amanda’ to Joss, so that she could bear his precious seed. I didn’t think goths could get pregnant and told them it was my theory that goths are asexual. You only ever see fat or skinny goths, so obviously when a skinny goth gets fat enough, the chunky goth splits itself into two skinny goths, and so the circle of goth continues. Obsidian said that if he wasn’t sure his make up would get smudged, he would kick the living shit out of me, and the pair spun around to face the front of the queue once more.

At most MWF events you’ll find people nodding intently at the speaker, politely bearing the appropriate amount of teeth to smile at a T.S. Elliot quote, and the occasional champagne fizz of laughter rippling through the audience. What you won’t normally see is a few hundred high-pitched Beatle-mania squeals as a writer walks on stage, and that was just from the fanboys in the crowd, the fangirls were too busy updating their twitter feeds and clawing at their multicoloured hair when Joss was introduced by Steve Grimwade and his ulcer Stephanie.

Joss Whedon walked out on stage in the robes of a standard nerd, faded jeans, a jumper, and sneakers. Someone screamed Joss and I witnessed hundreds of people place both hands over their hearts simultaneously. Joss silenced his church with a gesture. He paused for a moment before saying “I have faith…” He was cut off by a number of guys who stood up screaming “Where is she? Is she wearing the red leather pants? Please say she’s wearing the red leather pants”

The main conversation of the evening seemed to revolve around a number of Joss’ television shows being cancelled suddenly. This caused howls of rage to erupt from the audience, and people started passing around effigies of Fox executives and lighting torches. I instantly regretted wearing a suit and tie and began mentally noting where my nearest exit was in case they demanded some form of human sacrifice.

A group of the MWF volunteers began setting up microphones within the crowd, and the audience was invited to ask questions of their lord and saviour. Of those questions, five were asking if Joss would impregnate them, there were actually six asked, but I didn’t count the 40-year-old man. There was one girl who asked what every fan had been dying to know “So is there anything about your shows that, like, you like, like?” I erupted in laughter and a security guard told me I would have to leave. I told him that I didn’t think my laughter was that disruptive. He pointed out it was for my own safety and pointed to a thousand people staring at me like I was a skid mark on a hotel towel.

Many ways to be Uuman (a festival diary post)

The festival adrenaline kicked in for me yesterday afternoon. First up, I had my Q&A session with global chameleon Mohezin Tejani. Mo and I had a session together at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali last year (you can enter to win a trip to this at the festival bookshop, Readings). Mo’s life is amazing – from his exile from Uganda during Idi Amin’s reign of terror; to his humanitarian work around the globe; his exhilarating and his terrifying experiences, such as climbing Kilimanjaro and being caught in a tsunami; and his curious and continuing evolution as an adventurer who calls the globe his home. His book A Chameleon’s Tale places the reader and all their five senses alongside Mo in different cultures, in different places and times around the world.

I was running late for one of the sessions I was most looking forward to, a celebration of Albert Camus, and GOD DAMNIT I was locked out, as the venue was at capacity. I cried into my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus then decided to stop waiting outside the door as with a ‘leap’ of hope, and stay lucid. I pushed a boulder back up the escalator.

Which brought me to the launch of DBC Pierre‘s Lights Out in Wonderland at the gorgeous little red-lit Chaise Lounge on Queen Street. I haven’t read Booker-prize-winner Pierre as of yet, but his new book sounds both strange and necessary. We stood around for a while sipping free booze and munching cashews, and just as I thought I’d have to leave to go line up for the Keynote, the book was launched by Pierre’s long-time friend Roger Pike, a winemaker (Marius Wines, McLaren Vale) who is also a character in the book. The speech was so moving – talking about their shady pasts, their long friendship with its inevitable gaps and anagram games which have resurfaced in the book and the name of the Pike’s next wine. Pike had tears in his eyes at the end, and of course, this got me going.

Pierre took the microphone and thanked the small crowd and said, with such genuine gratitude: ‘All that is exaggerated in fiction about comradeship you have today made me feel’.

I had to run off, but I’ve made a note to get the book ASAP and add it to the teetering ‘tower of hope’.

The Age Book of the Year Awards were announced at the first Keynote. The winners were:

Nonfiction: Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth
Poetry: Pirate Rain by Jennifer Maiden
Fiction: Lovesong by Alex Miller

Overall: Lovesong by Alex Miller

For those of you who read me over at LiteraryMinded you’ll know I am so very pleased for Alex!

Alex was one of the authors then reading in the Eight Ways to Be Human Keynote Address. The others included Brenda Walker, who read a beautiful section (one of my favourite parts) from Reading By Moonlight about her father’s actions when their house flooded, when she was a child. Barry Dickins (whom I have nicknamed the Philip Seymour Hoffman of Australian poetry) read from his memoir of depression and treatment Unparalleled Sorrows – a day out on the streets from the ‘unalive’ clinic, a visit from his father (so vividly described). I’d still like to get my hands on this one.

Cate Kennedy was her usual delightful and warm self, speaking of her daughter’s joy in improvising language, in creating meaning, and Cate’s resistance to boxing her in (to ‘proper’ language categories) just yet. I think my favourite speaker, though, was Jostein Gaarder – not specifically for what he said, but the way he said it. I don’t mean his accent – I’m part Norwegian and have traveled there and am very familiar with the accent (it’s really a comfort), but throwing his hands up in the air, orating so loud that certain audience members around me flinched. He spoke of reciprocity, doing good unto others – but carrying that generationally. Doing good for the next generation. ‘Our time has no more central importance than all the epochs that will come after,’ he said, forcefully and animatedly.

The second Keynote was of course, God, as he was called by the chair Sue Turnbull. Anyway, being the first person in the hall, sitting up the back, I got a got look at the cult of Joss Whedon. Fans strutted in, geeks in coats and lace, with boots and fan shirts, pockets of blue and orange hair. The energy was quite infectious. God strolled in on stage and there were squeals and whoops. Whedon was smart, passionate and funny, and very encouraging to the crowd, telling them everyone can ‘make it’ nowadays. What he meant was, everyone can gain an audience through independent means. Whedon was refreshingly immodest – saying he believed from the beginning he’d make shows with cult followings, because that kept him going. But ‘it wasn’t until I started writing television that I discovered I was a writer’, Whedon said. Buffy was one of the shows in the ’90s that became part of a kind of revolution in TV as a storytelling medium. Whedon loves writing for TV, it’s ‘living with a story for years and years, in a collaborative fashion’. And Whedon admitted, as Buffy took off at the same time as the web, its success was ‘definitely related to the internet’. Whedon interacted, early on, with online fan communities. Whedon and the crowd lamented the end of Firefly and there were such sad whimpers when Whedon says he still thinks of the Firefly episodes he could have made.

Whedon doesn’t set out to write to a particular theme, issue, or to create a franchise, but he walks around with the story a bit, then gets the good bits down, filling in some of the exegetical stuff later. The theme of corporate monopolisation runs through his work, and this just occurs, he says, as it is an issue he’s concerned with. ‘The culture of the giant company is here and it’s destroying the fabric of our society’. Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog was a totally independent venture. And it’s heaps of fun.

Now it’s Saturday and I’m about to rush off to the festival again… See you there!