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… 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… 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… 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.
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