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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… 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.
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?
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 
