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A greek tragedy: David Vann
It was not my best moment of judgement when last year I gifted to my mum a copy of David Vann’s Caribou Island for mother’s day. For anyone that has read the book, you’ll know why this gift may have been taken the wrong way. For those that haven’t yet had the pleasure, a grab from the NY Times review sums the case up well:
This Alaska with its salmon boats and trash dumps becomes a stage for ancient stories of survival and will and connection and love, and also, in the end, the failures of love. Strong poison.
I repeat, ‘strong poison’. For a few weeks post May 8 2011, Vann and I had at least one thing in common: a temporarily strained relationship with a close family member.
Yesterdays ‘In Conversation’ session with David Vann (hosted by Estelle Tang) was a chance to delve further into the reasons the author is so unpopular with members of his immediate family. As he put it “a writer is the worst thing that could happen to a family”.
Vann began by admitting that his new novel Dirt was not the novel he intended to write. He described the experience of having it published as a sad and awful experience. While Vann’s other novels drew from the troubling aspects of his father’s side of the family, Dirt is the first time he has put the lens on his mother’s side. And with the book now on shelves, Vann seemed to genuinely fear that his mother would never speak to him again once she got around to reading it.
Dirt (which I’m just now starting to read) has received mixed reviews in different parts of the world. His portrayal of feminine characters in the novel was criticised by Stella Clarke’s review in The Australian, but Vann was praised by The Guardian as “the real thing”: “a mature, risk-taking and fantastically adept fiction writer who dares go to the darkest places, explore their most appalling corners.”
In conversation at MWF Vann revealed he felt Dirt was as close as he had come to writing a greek tragedy. He described his process of placing characters under such duress and pressure that they would eventually break, and in that moment of fracture, reveal the truth of themselves. He suggested that in that same moment, readers were forced to question themselves, the impact of which is cause for the enduring use of tragedy in global literature.
At times I can be an incredibly shallow reader, and I had never really thought about how tragedy worked as a narrative. It was quite a treat to have such an insightful explanation of the process from Vann, a professor and current Guggenheim fellow. It shed new light on why bad things must sometimes happen to our characters even though we might inwardly wish them well, and how the intentions of writers such as Vann could be misconstrued or simplified as evil or misogynistic.
Vann explained his characters were not necessarily bad people, or wished bad things upon each other. Rather, it was their individual natures that worked against the group. In revealing tragic characters, Vann investigates what is good and bad about us, and why we treat each other the way we do.
Vann was also incredibly open about his intentions as a writer. He felt his writing was more important than himself, and also more important than approval of his family, and he had come to accept the resulting collateral damage of taking such a position.
The author revealed that most of his novels were completed within intense sittings and he had a fear that editing might result in him removing parts he didn’t understand yet. His new novel (still unreleased) Goat Mountain was written beginning to end in this fashion, with as little as 1000 words edited from the final manuscript.
I’m often left disappointed by author events. Complex and inwardly focused personalities don’t always shine on stage, nor open up in such a short sessions. But I felt yesterday’s session was a rare exception to the norm, and with it’s small and intimate setting, was easily my favourite event of the festival thus far.
Vann was both intense and talkative. Near the end point of the session he commented that it was the best interview he had ever done, having given him the chance to properly explain the motives behind Dirt.
The right balance of open ended and revealing questions seem to allow Vann to reflect on his book anew, so that by the hour’s end, both the audience and author had gained some new perspective. And that felt pretty special. It got me wanting to write again, and to read. And like a lemming I joined the line at the Dymocks counter shortly afterwards. And now I have Dirt in my hands.
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… apathy
I would like to see more attention paid to the distinction between ‘apathetic’ and ‘disaffected’. The common characterisation of the ‘voting public’ as apathetic neatly sheets home to them any ills in the political system. By contrast the term ‘disaffected’ implies a healthy and justified scepticism that implies the need for significant political change.
Is it possible to have strong feelings about apathy? Rather than succumb to the limbo of apathy, my preference (or so it would appear) is to hold strong opinions that I will inevitably disagree with, and, in this way, I can easily vacillate between extremes, thereby avoiding apathy (although you could argue that the net result is the same since these opposing opinions balance each other out like the two sides of an algebraic equation). I have, however, been bored, tired, emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed (and perhaps even drunk) to the point where it’s tantamount to apathy. I have also experienced ambivalence, although I have mixed feelings about it. I do suspect that the great novel of apathy has yet to be written, but, ultimately, whatever.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… listening
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.
The film Morvern Callar by Lynne Ramsay is based on a book by Alan Warner (although the film has a completely different tone and aesthetic). The title character is a young woman whose boyfriend has committed suicide as the film opens, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel, which Morvern then submits to publishers under her own name, successfully, as it eventually turns out.
This is the final scene. It may not be apparent that Morvern is actually wearing earphones connected to a Walkman (this is pre-iPod), which provides an implied diegetic source for the soundtrack, even if the version we hear is obviously overdubbed. This theory is subsequently confirmed by the final few seconds of the clip, in which the sound is ‘overheard’ through earphones turned up too loud, although by that point there is no accompanying image, so that the sound only becomes literally diegetic after it has ceased to make sense in diegetic terms.
Clearly there is something else at stake besides narrative logic by the time we get to the black screen.
I remember going to a concert with friends when I was a teenager, when one of our group also insisted on wearing a Walkman, through which he listened to heavy metal, to register his disgust at the sappy Christian folk being performed on stage. This has always struck me as a peculiarly eloquent and perverse gesture, which expresses both the need to belong to a group and the inability to reconcile oneself to that need. I think that this same gesture, whose perversity goes unremarked in the clip, except insofar as its eloquence is amplified by the sound design, means something more in Morvern Callar.
The sequence also works visually of course. It is not merely moving bodies filmed under a strobe. Rather, it is a tour-de-force of choreography and editing, in which a series of jump cuts disguise abrupt focal shifts as well as changes in the lighting.
DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE.
David Bowie. Preferably Hunky Dory, Pin Ups or The Man Who Sold the World.
We talk a great deal in Australia about the ‘right’ to free speech. Much less is said about the right to be heard, to be listened to. Susan Bickford has interesting things to say about this in The dissonance of democracy: listening, conflict and citizenship (Cornell University Press 1996). In my own work (with Joan Eveline) I’ve been exploring the concept of ‘deep listening’, developed among transcultural mental health practitioners (Gabb and McDermott 2007: 5), who describe deep listening as entailing ‘an obligation to contemplate in real time, everything that you hear – to self-reflect as you listen, and then, tellingly, to act on what you’ve registered’. These ideas and references can be pursued in Mainstreaming Politics (Bacchi and Eveline, University of Adelaide Press, 2010), available as a free download at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press.
Angela says…
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… their first computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Classic
She was a first gen Mac, I was but a starry-eyed Year Eight student.
We got to touch for thirty minutes a week. Mostly awkward fumbles with a square mouse playing Minesweeper while humming Go West’s ‘We close our eyes’.
I don’t so much remember my first computer as my first word processor. It was called ‘Multimate’ and they put ‘mate’ in the title just to try to defuse the inevitable falling out that would occur within fifteen minutes of the user getting acquainted. The Ctrl key was a big part of Multimate, as was the Shift key and the Alt key. If you wanted to, say, indent the paragraph, the user would have to press Ctrl, Shift and Alt all at the same time, punch in some IBM function keys with his forehead while trying to elbow the spacebar.
As I grow older, I plan to bore children by telling them about the Commodore 64. ‘You know that wasn’t 64 megabytes, it was 64 kilobytes. What we would have given for even 64 megabytes. And yet we still had fun. ‘Choplifter’, kids. Look it up online. You can still have fun with 64 kilobytes.’
Angela says…
Silkworm FTW.
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… Melbourne
If Sydney is the loud good looking kid in class who everyone gravitates towards but who you eventually discover has ADD and an eating disorder, Melbourne is the quieter, more measured kid who you don’t really like at the beginning of term but who is interested in the same things that you’re interested in, and whose parents own a really kickarse record collection.
A city that still strikes me, a lifelong Sydneysider, as unaccountably foreign and exotic. Every time I hear a tram bell I close my eyes and brace for impact.
I see myself living in Melbourne. Vividly. I do, no doubt, in a parallel universe. It took me too long to get there for the first time, but when I did the city was like certain people you have just met but seem to know already in some special, intuitive way. As if you’d dreamed them. I’d already discovered the landscapes of Clarice Beckett by then, so I had dreamed Melbourne.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
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… dreams
I am fascinated by the writing process. ‘What has this to do with dreams?’ you may well ask. In a recent interview in The Age, Bret Easton Ellis says: ‘So much of writing is like a dream, you’re not conscious …’. This reminded me of what Siri Husvedt describes in her new book The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves as the phenomenon of ‘automatic writing’, ‘the feeling that words are being dictated to the author rather than actually composed’, that a kind of collective unconscious helps us along. This, of course, is not to deny the agony of composition.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 