Against All Odds (Don’t Bet On It)
I know I’m flying too close to the sun when I start believing I can beat the bookies.
I started betting two years ago, on tennis matches mostly. I was obsessed with odds, swept away in torrents of sums. My system had just one flaw: it didn’t work.
The odds, I discovered, are empty. Probability predicts only the past.
Which, by the way, makes me feel more hopeful about writing. For although the cards are stacked against us, they collapse like houses of cards when met head-on.
Lately I’ve tried spreading the risk by betting both ways, with much the same success as before (i.e. none). And no wonder. As the ‘gambling fool’, Randle P. McMurphy, from Ken Kesey’s novel reminds us, ‘you hit or you sit’.
So I’ve decided to sit. I don’t want to be next to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.
Falling Into Place (The Genesis of an Idea)
First China, then Korea, Vietnam and Laos, all the way along the chain to India.
No, that’s not my travel itinerary but rather the projected march of Communism through Asia according to the Domino Theory, itself an idea based upon the domino effect.
Of course, the theory never worked in practice – it was only a theory, after all.
To see the domino effect at work you need only look at my life, and at the genesis of this very series of posts – dubbed, you’ll recall, the daily 12-dozen.
An interview on a podcast gave me an idea for a book which made me think I had to start a writer’s group but to do so I thought better I’d kickstart my blog and a competition hinted at how I might do it.
Down they go!
Ever wonder which domino will be next to fall?
The Worrying Wind (And Music’s Sweet Air)
It’s four in the morning and I should be asleep. But it’s windy outside so I’m not.
Lying here in my fretful bed, I’m reminded of the music of Walter Piston, whose sixth symphony has a questing restlessness reminiscent of the wind.
Despite his name, Piston’s music is anything but mechanical, which belies the fact he also wrote handbooks.
Orchestral music is the least ‘literary’ of the arts; even now I find it hard to put words to its sounds. And yet it was a work based on a play that first sucked me in: ‘The Tempest’ by Sibelius.
Shakespeare’s play has since become one of my favourites and it reminds me now – in my hour of need! – of music’s full power, of its ability to allay the fury of the elements with its ‘sweet air’ (I.II).
I think I’ll put on some Piston.
On Making a Creative Comeback (With Carmel)
Carmel Bird is holding a writing workshop here in Hobart next week. That’s good. Ms Bird is an Australian literary legend, something most tutors can’t claim to be.
What’s not so good, though, is my reluctance to attend.
So why won’t I be making a creative comeback with Carmel, having spent years hiding my literary lights – dim though they be – under a bushel?
Money, first of all. I’m on a ‘smash the mortgage’ kick at the moment so there ain’t much left over for luxuries, literary or otherwise.
Pride, too. I hate admitting to myself – less so to others – that I’m not king of this writing caper. Did I tell you that I’ve published three stories?
And anxiety, last of all. About writing to please others and not just myself. Therein lies the secret to my startling (lack of) success.
Carmel, here I come!
Ghosts of Books Half-Read (Here Laid to Rest)
It’s time I tidied the books on my bedside table: two are giving me nightmares.
They’re fine novels, I’m sure, it’s just that I can’t read them right through. Here’s why: Less has too little sex and Atomised too much.
Like all earnest readers, I’m haunted by the ghosts of books half-read.
I can’t finish Catch-22 because the story changes; Inside Mr Enderby because it stays the same, funny but futile.
The Hobbit hobbled me a few pages in.
Of Tug of Love I’ve read only the title, while just one chapter of Eleanor Oliphant was completely fine.
I conquered War and Peace but that other Russian behemoth, Life and Fate, has got me beat.
Clearly it’s time I exorcised my literary demons. If reading is a kind of rewriting then my versions of some books are simply shorter than the rest.
Job done.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Inside Mr Enderby by Anthony Burgess
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tug of Love by Penny Jordan
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
I Write Therefore I Am (Not Necessarily Read)
Frustrated. It’s one of those rare things: a song by The Knack that isn’t ‘My Sharona’. It’s also what I’ve been feeling for months. For decades, even, if I count the rest.
I’m no different, I know, to all the other unfulfilled lucky white guys who ever lived – in Maslow we trust – and yet knowing this doesn’t make my frustration any less, er, frustrating.
Or bearable. For a day doesn’t go by without me dreaming up some half-baked solution.
What is it, then, that I so badly need to let out? Energy? Emotion? Spermatozoa? I think not. Words, most likely: those little whizzbangs that build up in people like me, people who know they’re not being noticed.
The antidote? Writing, of course. A daily twelve-dozen (d12d) words on any trope, topic or theme.
I write therefore I am. Half-baked if ever I heard it.
Sweetly Sour: Lennie Lower, Antipodean ‘Plum’
Oranges and apples can’t be compared – we all know that. But what about plums?
Well, you be the judge. See if you can spot the similarities between these two fleshy fruit.
First, a piece of P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle:
He was profoundly stirred. It is not too much to say that he was shaken to the core. No father enjoys being flouted and defied by his own son; nor is it reasonable to expect a man to take a cheery view of life who is faced with the prospect of supporting for the remainder of his years a younger son…
And now a slice from Here’s Luck by Lennie Lower:
Problems innumerable beset the conscientious father, but the greatest problem of all is to know in what trade or profession the boy will be best fitted to support his old father at a later date.
Yes, both are about self-pitying parents – that’s a superficial similarity. More telling, though, is their matching moods, the light satirical tone that makes both excerpts amusing. Because this is what our two ‘plums’, Wodehouse and Lower, have most in common: both are masters of comedy.
We’ve all heard about the European ‘Plum’, as P.G. Wodehouse was known to his friends. He published scores of best-selling books, and is, some say, one of the funniest men who ever wrote in English.
And yet his southern equivalent, Lennie Lower – the Antipodean ‘Plum’, as I’ve dubbed him – is much less famous, despite being no less funny or prolific.
Born in Dubbo, Australia, in 1903, Lower served briefly in the navy before falling out of work. He started publishing humorous pieces in the late 1920s, and for the next two decades he wrote up to eight newspaper columns a week.
Published in 1930, Lower’s one and only novel, Here’s Luck, was an instant success. The work has gone on to become a modern-day classic, a contender for the title of ‘Australia’s funniest book’.
And funny it is.
Set in Sydney during the early depression years, Here’s Luck is a tale of middle-aged male discontent. Jack Gudgeon has it all: a wife and a job, a terrace house and a teenage son. But aged forty-eight, worn down by responsibility and his routine existence, Gudgeon finally rebels, seeking solace and excitement in women and wine. Mayhem ensues.
His wife, Agatha, leaves him.
Here was I, a lone man, left to look after the house and Stanley, my wife selfishly gone off to her mother’s, leaving me to manage as best I could, with only memories for companionship. Deserted. Bereft. Alone . . . Hooray!
Gudgeon and his son, Stanley, are left to fend for themselves.
‘The trouble with some people,’ said Stanley, stamping on a piece of blazing charcoal that had once been bread, ‘is that they’re too well fed. There’s an onion behind the gas-stove if you’re feeling fastidious.’
Hounded by hoodlums and by the private detectives hired by his wife and her sister, ‘that parrot-brained Gorgon’, Gertrude, Gudgeon is unable to work.
Woggo Slatter was on my trail . . . Agatha and Gertrude would arrive with a gang of witnesses at eleven o’clock that night. I had lost my job; this did not worry me much but I put it in with the rest.
The destruction of the family home proves to be the last straw. As an ‘enormous green elephant’ walks out of the ‘flickering ruins of the gutted house’, Gudgeon collapses. He comes to in a sanatorium.
I’ve been out of hospital a week now. My life was despaired of and I suffered frightfully. The doctors told me that I had alcoholic poisoning but I know that it was something entirely different and far more serious. Something to do with a nervous breakdown.
Is it the fire that pushes Gudgeon over the edge? Or rather his realisation that he can’t escape his fate as a fettered man, his wife having forgiven him and a job having been found for him in a ‘little ham and beef shop in the suburbs’.
Either way, all is not lost. Gudgeon still has grog to fall back on. In fact, alcohol is seen as much more than a drink, as the words of the proselytising politician, Mr Sloove, suggest:
‘Gaze on your glass of beer . . . See how the lambent, lazy bubbles drift to the top, as men drift through life; linger a while in the froth, and burst of old age, or are cut off in their prime in Fate’s thirsty gulp.’
It’s shadowy sentiments like this one that distinguish Lower’s novel from the works of Wodehouse, which are invariably sunny throughout. For there’s an underlying sense of futility to the action in Here’s Luck, as if Gudgeon knows that his struggles are hopeless, that life itself is a flop.
It’s in this way, then, that we’re able to tell the two writers apart, despite their similarities. Both are funny, but each has a flavour of his own.
P.G. Wodehouse is the original European ‘Plum’, a Damson perhaps, and is large and lovely and sweet. Lennie Lower, on the other hand, has a tartness to him that doesn’t travel well, for he is an Elephant Heart, the perfect Antipodean ‘Plum’.
Talk and Self-Talk: People, Their Diaries and Me
Conversations – I had over two thousand kilometres of them during a recent foray into the Australian bush.
For ten days my brother, my best friend and me shared a car, a tent and a track. We talked the whole time as long-separated soul-mates will do, mulling over food and fatherhood, music, the moon and more. It was our way of reaching out, of clasping hands, of arm-wrestling and twiddling our thumbs.
In the weeks leading up to the trip I’d been holding conversations of a different kind, as I gave myself a good talking-to. That’s right – I wrote in my diary.
I’ve kept a journal on and off since I was seventeen, when I started recording my doings on a daily basis, larding my jottings with pithy reports on public events and, er, the weather. Thus, on 3 January 1992, I penned this informative entry:
Overcast and rain tried hard. I had a shave first thing ‘smorning – just felt like it. Achievement: Ironed a wet shirt until it was dry (cuffs don’t count). India has clawed into the Test Match due to an Umpirical decision and luck reversal.
Thankfully I went on to lose that kind of complacency. Over time the tune of my self-talk changed, my manner becoming more managerial as I tried to get a grip on myself on the page. Hence the following entry, made at 8.55 am on Tuesday, 11 October 2005.
Yesterday I did everything I planned to do – yippee! I expect today to be much more relaxed. Apart from sending an email to Bridget and buying prunes (as you do), all my other tasks are work- and study-related.
No sour grapes there – just prunes!
That was then and this is now. In more recent times I’ve written in my diary for a deeper reason: to better understand myself. Here’s the opening of an entry I called ‘Lost Causes (cont.)’, dated 22 November 2017:
What can I write about myself that I haven’t written before? That I’m flaky? Definitely not. Anyways, after ending my last (if only it was my last!) notebook on such a positive and hopeful note, I’m here to dispel the mood and return myself to that thing I call reality. For a day or two.
I really believed I could become a nurse…
Therein lies its beauty, for a diary can be many things to many people.
We get a glimpse of this astonishing versatility in Thomas Mallon’s A Book of One’s Own – People and Their Diaries, which I’ve recently read. As Mallon reminds us, journals have been kept by all kinds of characters, infamous, famous and forgotten, from Degas, Goebbels and de Beauvoir to Byron, Trotsky and Voltaire, their motivations varying wildly.
Some are chroniclers of the everyday. Others have kept their books only in special times – over the course of a trip, or during a crisis. Some have used them to record journeys of the soul, plan the art of the future, confess the sins of the flesh, lecture the world from beyond the grave. And some of them, prisoners and invalids, have used them not so much to record lives as create them…
Diaries are clearly the cosiest kind of literary accommodation.
Of all the diarists covered in Mallon’s lively review, it’s the would-be writer, William Allingham, for whom I feel most. Allingham lived in the shadow of two great poets of his day – Tennyson and Browning – and it seems he never quite came to terms with his own lack of success, as this poem suggests:
A man who keeps a diary pays
Due toll to many tedious days;
But life becomes eventful – then
His busy hand forgets the pen.
Most books, indeed, are records less
Of fulness than of emptiness.
Sad but sometimes true, I suppose.
I finished A Book of One’s Own on my way back from the bush, in an aeroplane. Closing the book, I sat back and wondered about my own diary-writing, and how it seems to separate me from the world as much as it makes me feel connected.
And then, to my amazement, as I watched idly on, two fellow passengers took out journals and pens. Dating pages with due deliberation, they settled down to write, one a teenage girl trying to find her voice (her words kept deteriorating into doodles), the other a middle-aged man reflecting on the book he was reading.
It was an incredible coincidence and one I couldn’t wait to get down – in my diary, of course.
Goode’s, Better, Best: ‘Ladies in Black’ and the Growth of a Nation
Aussie, Aussie, quite contrary – how does your country grow?
In three ways, according to Bruce Beresford’s latest film, Ladies in Black, a pointed, semi-poignant parody of life in 1950s Australia, a land where men are ‘gormless’, women are entrusted with the sacred task of putting tea on the table, and where a department store – Goode’s, the proud purveyor of robes and respectability – becomes the scene of social change of a far-reaching kind.
Based on a novel by Madeleine St John, the movie dramatises the workings of a trio of transformative forces – immigration, regeneration and education – by tracing three distinct stories: the tales of Fay, Patty and Lisa, the eponymous ‘ladies in black’.
Fay is restless and romantic, a good-looking girl put off by the boorish behaviour of the ‘Australian’ men she usually meets. Enter Magda, the stylish Slovenian mistress of Goode’s high-fashion department. She introduces Fay to an urbane ‘refo’ called Rudi, and the two fall swiftly in love. Vowing to learn the ways of her husband-to-be, Fay sets out on a new path, her life – and the life of the nation – irrevocably altered by immigration.
Her pal behind the counter, Patty, has a different problem: her husband hardly touches her. A shy boy from the bush, Frank is deeply ashamed of his desires. He worships women, and the thought that he might have harmed his wife drives him briefly into exile. By putting Frank’s fears to rest, Patty succeeds in remaking her man, who, in a matching act of regeneration, plants the seed that will see them grow up and out of themselves, out of the old world and into the new.
For sixteen-year-old Lisa (née Leslie), it is learning that promises to free her from the present. A ‘clever girl’ who goes to Goode’s as a temp, Lisa loves literature – she reads Anna Karenina on a park bench before reciting poetry later in bed – and has her heart set on going to university, despite the objections of her philistine father. An actress, a poet, a novelist – there’s no limit to what Lisa thinks she can be. And, thanks to the reformative power of education, her future does indeed look bright.
By movie’s end, the lives of these three ‘ladies in black’ have been altered forever: powerful forces have dispelled the darkness and led them into the light of a remodelled land. Like the film itself, which, it must be said, makes only mildly amusing viewing, this vision of national growth is simplistic and sentimental. Therein, though, lies its charm.
From Goode’s to better, Australia awaits its best.