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Space, brands and brains (some things I’m looking forward to)
So today I’ve put together my little schedule for the festival, and I thought I’d share with you just a few of the sessions I’m looking forward to this first weekend coming up. Sometimes I pick sessions just on who sounds the most interesting – someone I’m curious about and might be able to learn from in session, or later on, reading their book.
One such person is Marcelo Gleiser, an American professor of physics, astronomy and natural philosophy. Apparently his lectures are as popular with literature students as they are with science students. (Well, he’s pretty good lookin’ too, hey?) This Saturday, the 28th of August, I’ll be seeing him In Conversation with Editor-in-Chief of Cosmos, Wilson da Silva.
Neuropsychiatrist-authors Norman Doidge and Perminder Sachdev are going to tell me all about these heavy, complex things in our heads (and their changeability) on the same day, in their session The Amazing Brain.
That brain of mine had a part to play in this personal ‘brand’ I partly by accident constructed – Ms LiteraryMinded. I’m very curious to hear Kathy Charles, James P Othmer and Karen Andrews talk about The Author as Brand – the professional self as commodity, the online persona and so on. This panel really could take many different directions.
And on Sunday afternoon Sandy Jeffs offer us A Privileged Insight into writing with, and through, mental illness.
What are you guys looking forward to this weekend?
Oh, and, of course, do come along to the sessions I’m chairing! A Q&A on Friday with global nomad and self-confessed chameleon Mohezin Tejani. Mo’s life story is fascinating, and the event is totally free. And on Sunday I’m chairing ‘A Wordsmith’s Dream’ with word-nerds Ursula Dubosarsky, Davis Astle and Kate Burridge.
MWF 2010 authors on… the 1970s (pt 1)
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.
Is summed up in a black, long-sleeved, boat-necklined wool dress my mother bought in 1974. She still has it. It is the glory of vintage apparel defined.
When I should have been in my twenties, black and in New York instead of being four, in Warrandyte and dubbed Grandmaster Flashdrive.
The 1970s started for me with the Springbok tour of Australia. I didn’t know anything about politics – or South African politics – at the time, but I remember the chant ‘Paint them black and send them back’, and remember thinking it was racist and wondering what it was for. I also remember seeing television images of police riding their horses into demonstrators, and 19-year-olds (they seemed all grown up to me then) with bloodied faces.
We talked about it a bit in my house: my mother protested against the Springbok tour, against the Vietnam War. She took a cushion along to sit down on Bourke Street, and I remember watching that mass of humanity sitting on Bourke Street on television and hearing the wildly differing estimates of people numbers. Why did the police always say there were fewer than what the demonstrators said?
We lived in Seymour and in the 1970s I went with my brother to the swimming pool and we ate sunny boys and razzes and I first discovered girls, notably by pushing them into the pool to show you liked them. One of their big brothers beat me up on the way home once and put a stop to that.
There were elm trees lining Station Street in those days and the cicadas used to sing in them when it was hot. There were other streets in town called Railway Street, and Loco Street, which was Seymour’s Struggletown.
The Vietnam War sizzled its way into my memory because we saw it every night with our chops and mashed potatoes and steamed carrots. Our tv was on top of the fridge and it chirruped on while we ate. I remember announcements of ‘three diggers were killed and two were wounded’, or something like that, and Peter Couchman standing in villages in Vietnam with a chopper in the background messing up his hair, talking about places called Nui Dat and Vung Tau and Bien Hoa.
I also seem to remember an expression you heard on the news at that time: ‘he was dead before he hit the ground’. I don’t know if that’s my memory playing tricks on me, but I swear newsreaders used to say that. Then how did they know?
And the politicians coming on tv saying if we didn’t stop the downward thrust of Communism they’d be here those Reds, under our beds, probably ravishing our wives and mothers by the tankstands, just as the Huns were going to in WWI or the Japs were in WWII.
Of course there is the searing image of a little girl running down the street naked with her back on fire, and the Americans afterwards saying it was a mistake.
This was a televised war, so we saw it all: the Saigon police chief shooting a man through the head and him collapsing in the street, the NVA approaching Saigon in their tanks and the young, rich and wealthy Vietnamese kids sitting in cafes playing dice games.
Uh oh.
Something dawned on me with that televised image. My brother had been called up to the war, but the change of government in 1972 let him off the hook. By the mid-seventies I was understanding this was more than just a war in a far off country among people about whom we knew very little. This was about justice at home as well. Our government was conscripting young men and sending them away to kill and be killed. This was what the demonstrations were about. As well as about the mayhem we were producing overseas.
Yet here were some young Vietnamese kids sitting around playing dice while the Commies advanced on Saigon! (Maybe we’d been sold a crock?)
My mother said she would protect any draft dodger who went underground, and I didn’t get what going underground was, and why you would do it, although it did sound vaguely like fun. I imagined riding my skateboard through tunnels. I also heard about young male politicians who were encouraging young men to go to the war, and the question was continually raised in my house: why didn’t they go themselves?
In between learning about the world I was learning about girls and asking them to the local Show or the movies, vaguely trying to put my arm around them and realising they were really, well, different.
We wore high heeled shoes and flares and messed around with strange ways of doing our hair, growing it lank and slicking it back. We did kung fu and went to Bruce Lee movies. The guys I went to school with listened to Nutbush City Limits and the Electric Light Orchestra and Queen, bands I detested.
Now my little boys play We are the Champions on their iPods, and I suppose it goes around.
Just like the wars. As I write this, last week Julia Gillard was given the top job in Canberra. Also last week 10 civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan’s Khost Province.
‘We have received five bodies of civilians in our provincial public hospital,’ Khost provincial health director Amirbadshah Rahmatzai Mangal told AFP.
‘The dead include two female children of seven and eight years of age.’
Those irritating Kiwis across the ditch said they wouldn’t send a soldier to Afghanistan because it wasn’t in their national interest. How dare they not play this game?
That war in Vietnam was in the 1970s, but in the 2000s they’re still trying to win hearts and minds and occasionally apologising for mistakes, like when they blast a primary school and kill a lot of kids, (although these days they’re more likely to just blame the terrsts).
Within the first 24 hours of Julia Gillard being given the hot seat in Canberra she was on the phone to Obama assuring him of our troop commitment in Afghanistan. Right after a fortnight when five young Australian men were killed there. Plus ça change.
Just like the wars, and the 1970s rockbands, I have a sneaking suspicion that the crocks are still going around as well.
On Saturday 4 September there will be a session called Living in the ’70s, featuring Francis Wheen and Frank Moorhouse. Get tickets here.
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 
