a parisian original

A couple of years ago I read Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. I enjoyed how he talked about adventure.

I've been scribbling away at a story for the past (long) while that I plan to expand into a novel at some point (not yet) and because it's about nostalgia, connections, memory, relationships and la France I like to read French novels and all stories about these things.

I was searching recently for some Very Important Notes I remembered writing in a little black notebook ... and I can't remember if I found them, but I did come across some hilarious pensées I recorded during my time with JPS and Nausea.

* * *

8/10/10

Been reading JPS's Nausea. Just one dude sitting about in cafes + museums and on trams wondering not just who he is or what he is. I'm getting through it now, not sure if I totally get it though... He seems to be talking about how he exists because he thinks about existing (but I know this from Descartes) But that his hand is the same as a table, that a root is nothing at all, that is is ... a crab? Must read on. He has some lovely phrases but is a bit of a wanker...

...

I've read more and Anny is trying to explain to Antoine about perfect moments + privileged situations (p210-214) and it is like someone - damn you JPS - has reached into my brain and yanked out my stupid desire for all situations to go a certain way, gone back in time and written it down. How depressing to realise you're not original! Every emotion has already been felt by someone else.

I'm picturing a scene with Eliza and Marc. She explains in great detail this thing she has, trying to make every small moment a MOMENT. After the explanation, Marc asks innocently: "Like in Nausea?" and Eliza rages and stomps about because she's sick of being unoriginal
...

Err, so two pages later there's Anny (p215) getting annoyed that she's not original. How do I manage to plagiarise something I've never read before?

* * *

So I'm trying to get comfortable with the fact that every story has been told before, and that nothing is original - even though I got very cross at Woody Allen when his lovely* film Midnight in Paris came out.

So I'm pretty chuffed that the frisky francophile folk over at The Rag and Bone Man Press have published the short version of my story, which is called When You Were In Paris and it has love and books in it, as well as some ghosts ... or are they?

*But clearly derivative of my work in some ways...

Discussing post-war US literature...

On my to-read bedside table pile

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

~ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers (1953)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) was the very best book we studied in my undergrad literature subject American Liberals and Moderns - and it was in exalted company of Faulkners and Fitzgeralds and Hemingways and Steinbecks - because Carson McCullers writes simply, beautifully and about such curious people: the outsiders, the misfits, the weirdos. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe tells of what happens to Miss Amelia Evans when her hunchbacked cousin comes to town. This short story is enthralling and unnerving, with such an excellent turn of phrase to place the reader right into this Southern, small-town setting. Pitch-perfect dialogue, the way she writes the characters' mannerisms and the almost confessional feel she's given the narrative. She is a wonderful writer.

I found this one at Barwon Booksellers in Queenscliff, along with McCullers' Member of the Wedding and Monica Dickens' The House at World's End. The Messinger Bird by Rosanna Hawkes I got at The Hill of Content (Melbourne), Town Life in Australia (about colonial life in Australia and published in 1883) by Richard Twopeny snatched up at Red Wheelbarrow Books in Brunswick and Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl at the Mill Markets, Geelong.

on writing, for something different

This is John Steinbeck's second tip of his six tips on writing, and one of the things I am coming to terms with this weekend:

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

So here I go, writing with the view to produce a Very Bad First Draft, just so that the First Draft bloody well gets written. Watch me bash out tired old metaphors and smoosh together cliches and BEHOLD ALL MY ADJECTIVES! Moreover, see how my characters are so boring and their dialogue so stilted? That is just for now.

And of course, when writing, it is important to just keep writing and not spend most of the afternoon reading writing advice.

Or drinking tea and eating chocolate buttons...

The Tillermans

Maybe life was like the sea, and all the people were like boats ... Or maybe each boat was a kind of family. Then, what kind of boat would the Tillermans be? A little one, bobbling about, with the mast fallen off? A grubby, worn-down workboat, with Dicey hanging on to the rudder for dear life.
  Everybody who was born was coast on to the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats - they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbour.

Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt, first published in 1981, is one of those quintessential classic American children's books. Or at least one of those thick-paged, yellowing novels from the 1970s and 80s that have the same feel, the same smell, the same dorky, now-dated cover illustrations. The characters and the worlds they inhabit are small, but the stories are so rich. I don't feel like the authors are trying to impress me with how cool the characters are, but the focus is on creating relationships that ring true, that tell stories of sadness without being shocking or depressing, that capture a little bit of a life so fully.

Dicey and her brothers and sister (James, Sammy and Maybeth) are abandoned by their mother and find themselves alone in a car park in a strange city. When she doesn't come back Dicey decides they will walk to Bridgeport, where they had been headed before their mother left them, to go and stay with a relative there. Within a few pages you know these children so well and your heart fairly breaks for them as they hope to find their Momma waiting for them in Bridgeport.

There's a lot of walking involved, a lot of trudging, lots of stale donuts eaten and every penny they can get their hands on can go five ways. As the children walk, they talk about their Momma - who clearly became a very sad woman unable to care for her family - they sing together and they form an unbreakable unit. When Bridgeport doesn't turn out the way they expected, the Tillermans head off again, in search of an estranged, eccentric grandmother.

This review made me so sad. Of course we're not all going to like the same stories etc etc, and the books have more supporters than critics on Goodreads so I shouldn't complain, but at least try to tell me what made you stop reading.

Homecoming definitely has a wholesome whiff about it, for sure, but in a way that acknowledges and appreciates the dark side of the world and doesn't dismiss it or run away from it. All the children (and most of the grown-ups) learn about right and wrong, about what's important in life - and learn that all these things are difficult and changeable and confusing. The people that the Tillermans encounter on their travels, and the kindness (and cruelty) of strangers, the sea motif and the ideas of home and family all make for the best kind of book, in my opinion.

Homecoming's sequel, Dicey's Song, won the Newbery Medal in 1983.

The Tillerman Cycle: Dicey's Song, A Solitary Blue, The Runner, Sons from Afar, Come a Stranger, Seventeen Against the Dealer.

"a thin bat's squeak of sexuality"

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945).

This book is hilarious, romantic and also, disappointingly, a little bit rubbish. I loved the social satire (fits on my shelf with Nancy Mitford), I loved the critique and the sadness of the crumbling classes, and the homoerotic relationships ... and the language! It is divine! I dog-eared all the pages and underlined all the lines.

The story opens to Charles Ryder as a middle-aged army captain, who happens to be stationed at a big country house during WWII - called Brideshead. But! It is not Charles' first time here, and we are then swept back into his memories of being a young man and in the company of the enigmatic and ever-so-slightly troubled Sebastian Flyte.

Just the place to bury a crock of gold,' said Sebastian. 'I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.'

...I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.

Sebastian is much devoted to Aloysius, his teddy bear. How this made me laugh! A teddy bear driving a car?! What ho! Sebastian writes in a letter to Charles:

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

All the interactions between Sebastian and Charles are charged with sexual energy, lots of references to lips and faces. But Charles is drawn to Sebastian's sister Lady Julia, too. When he first meets her (rushing to the sickbed of Sebastian, who has actually only sprained an ankle) she asks him to light her a cigarette:

It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.

But he feels peace when not with Julia. Is it because their love overwhelms him? Charles is a bit of a softy. Also, it is obvious he is in love with Sebastian.

But years later, a now alcoholic and mostly useless Sebastian having floated off to North Africa, Charles is returning to England via a fancy cruise ship from a painting trip he took in South America. Here, he and Julia succumb to their mutual love over the course of a couple of days, while the ship is buffeted by very rough seas and poor Charles' wife is seasick and in bed. These scenes on the ship are wonderful. Surreal, almost, and romantic.

Ten hours of talking: what had we to say? Plain fact mostly, the record of our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one.

And they are a little hilarious. When Charles' (cheating) wife is seasick he unsympathetically describes her suite as a maternity ward and she is so wan and pathetic when she receives a bouquet of flowers:

as though the game were a private misfortune of her own for which the world in its love was condoling with her ... my wife seemed to make a sacred, female rite even of seasickness.

Then, especially towards the end of the novel, religion becomes (well, it was a theme throughout but really dug itself in here for the long haul) a big part of it - and ruins the story for me. According to the notes at the front of the book, Evelyn Waugh became a devoted Catholic and this book is kind of a hodgepodge that he wrote in a very short amount of time, which represents his conversion. But it made the story so unsatisfying for me: so C and J can't be together because she is too much of a sinner? And poor, poor Sebastian who thinks he is mad, or has indeed gone mad, and has gone to live with monks/priests? No one seemed to be happy, they had happiness but they threw it away because of Catholicism. So strike me down and call me sacrilegious but I could have done without this part, Evelyn.

I enjoyed A Handful of Dust more. But that is for another day. Tell me, what did you think of this one? What am I missing? Am I just a sucker for a happy ending?

"i prefer stories about squalor"

THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun - or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left - the wet - hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and - it was the fifth or sixth ring - picked up the phone.

~A Perfect Day for Bananafish, JD Salinger

At the risk of being a total cliché hipster doofus*, I hereby proclaim my love and awe and adoration for the short stories of Mr Salinger. He can create atmosphere and character like nobody's business, like in the piece above. He can write dialogue that leaps sprightly from the page, at once being mere banter while also ringing with subtext.


Salinger often wrote about young people, about teenagers and innocence and experience. His story For Esmé - With Love and Squalor breaks my heart every time. Like Sybil in Bananafish Esmé and her small brother Charles** are beautiful foils to the damaged adult to whom they speak and with whom they interact. Perhaps they can't save them, but sometimes they can.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac - with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

I think I prefer his short stories to The Catcher in the Rye (eek! the Catcher cult will be after me!), possibly because there are more of them, and I adore the Glass family. Also because, taken as a whole, they give the reader such a fascinating peek at America in the 50s and the middle and upper classes as they existed post-war. He can make you laugh and break your heart all in the space of twelve or so pages. How's that for inspiration? And emotional squalor.


*See the film (500) Days of Summer - "just because someone likes the same bizarro crap you do doesn't mean you're soulmates." (This line even delivered by the film's own version of Holden Caulfield's kid sister Phoebe)
**The evil sister and I often recite to one another, with great amusement: HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHALES.

review : a confederacy of dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

You probably read Joanne Horniman's post yesterday over at her blog Secret Scribbled about this wonderful book. This was one of the books I read during those delightful undergraduate years when my classmates took everything rawther seriously, and I reveled in it.



Ignatius, a college graduate, is entirely convinced of his superiority to pretty much everyone and everything in modern life (and much of history too). He's writing a great tome on big chief tablets in pencil. He knows an awful lot and spends his days philosophising and avoiding much of humanity. But when he and his mother (with whom he lives) need money, a new fate awaits Ignatius: "and what a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK."

As Jo said in her post:

It's a book that could manage to offend everyone, if they wanted to be offended: homosexuals, heterosexuals, blacks, Jews, overeducated fat white boys from New Orleans, little old ladies, mothers ... except that it is somehow one of those books that is so big and warm-hearted and inclusive that (if you read it right, just as you can't be offended by Mark Twain if you read him right) it is actually the most liberal, progressive and forward-looking of novels.

Yet I delight in Ignatius' self-righteous and almost repugnant observations and comments. You feel for the cretin: "I am forced to function in a century which I loathe." I love it because it's honest, but hyperbolic at the same time - yes, that's just how amazingly well written and clever this book is.


The dialogue is pitch-perfect and the descriptions superb. Toole captured all those little parts of human life and culture that just make the words leap from the page, whacking your funny bone on the way to your heart. The dialogues between Ignatius and his mother Mrs Reilly, in particular, are spectacular examples of characterisation and dialogue. Also, it amuses me how Ignatius holds a particular disdain for Mark Twain. Calls him a "dreary fraud".

Jo posted today about John Kennedy Toole's only other novel, The Neon Bible. We'll just have to wonder what other gems Toole would have given us.

something old

when one doesn't have anything nice to say, it's best not to say anything at all. apparently.

these days it isn't that i can't think of anything nice to say (quite the contrary) but blogging feels like a chore. so i shan't worry myself, but instead offer a little peep at some nice things, which may or may not interest, but what the heck.

wonderful classics*:


and my (and everyone else's) absolute favourite rereads:


and gorgeous wee stories like this one:


if only for tales that start like this:

"once upon a time milly-molly-mandy was going for a picnic.
it was a real, proper picnic. father and mother and uncle and aunty were all going too, and little-friend-susan and billy blunt (because it wouldn't seem quite like a real, proper picnic without little-friend-susan and billy blunt).
they were going to take the red bus from the cross-roads to a specially nice picnic place, where milly-molly-mandy hadn't ever been before because it was quite a long way off. (the nicest places often do seem to be a long way off, somehow.)"

and that include the little gang of picnickers tidying up the picnic ground, which had been ruined by terrible litterbugs, because "mother said: 'i think a place ought to look nicer because we've been there, not nastier!'"

also, i joined twitter and it makes me feel kinda dirty (but can't stop), so i'm taking refuge in worlds where tweets only happen between birds.

*a confederacy of dunces, john kennedy toole. tess of the d'urbervilles, thomas hardy (damn you angel!). little women and good wives, louisa may alcott. selected poems, ee cummings. the heart is a lonely hunter, carson mccullers. for esme with love and squalor, jd salinger. jane eyre and wuthering heights, charlotte bronte and emily bronte. the secret garden, frances hodgson burnett.

lovely new things to read...

two newbies that arrived at the shop today, and one i borrowed from a friend:


cannot wait to start beauty queens because it has such a kickarse cover and because i loved going bovine so much. black painted fingernails i have already had a sneaky sneaky peek at, but can't wait to sit down and luxuriate in herrick's wordy words.

but first, reading matters. yes, my reading does matter, but no. it's the reading matters conference this week. be there, and be a square. a cool, hip, melbourne bookish square.

then i shall retreat to the hons cupboard and catch up on what darling fanny and her husband alfred are up to. this book is set in paris (!) but i hope there shall be at least one visit to alconleigh. "Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them."

and so what were the grownups reading in twentyten?

well i don't know about most grown-ups, but for me it was a little bit scary when i realised these three books were probably the only 2010-release grown-up books i read this year. they were all fabulous, at least.

our tragic universe, scarlett thomas

scarlett thomas' third book was sort of about nothing, but was also a wonderful story all about stories. about writing and ideas, coincidence and relationships, knitting, the beast of dartmoor, taking the dog for a walk, kissing married friends on ferries - this is an absolute must-read for all writers (and readers).

read my review here.

the hopeless life of charlie summers, paul torday

i've relished each paul torday book since his brilliant 2007 salmon fishing in the yemen. you never know what his next book will be about. this one is actually narrated by hector 'eck' chetwode-talbot who is in finance in the city, but it's also about eck's doppleganger charlie summers, whom he meets by chance. eck works with money in the million, the billions, the squillions. charlie sells weird dog food and has lots of hairbrained schemes. eck's about to find out just what makes him so different from charlie. now i don't pretend to know a snit about $ or finance, but this book played on my unease regarding stocksbondsinternetbanking:
'then, somewhere, someone asked a new question. it was: "can i have my money back?" we didn't know it then, but the money that had come out of nowhere was about to return to exactly the same place.' (p8, uncorrected proof)

eleven, mark watson

at once hilarious and tragic, i loved eleven. xavier ireland is a late-night talk back radio dj in london, his sidekick murray a more laconic version of murray from flight of the conchords, but xavier was once chris cotswold and lived in melbourne. this book is about why he left. at first i was concerned this book was mere dick-lit and was hesitant to get on board with the omniscient narrator that told me all about a series of other people whose lives were getting increasingly difficult. but he pulls it off! however, it's marketed as a funny book by "one of britain's best-loved comedians" but THIS BOOK HAS A HARROWING, HARROWING MOMENT. my blood ran cold and i cried. read it, this one is worth it.

here's a photo from the launch at the sun bookshop (actually held in 'the grand' at the sun theatre due to massive attendance):


i did also read some grown-up classics, including (but not limited to):

• keep the aspidistra flying, george orwell
• nausea, jean-paul sartre
• pursuit of love, nancy mitford
• the great gatsby, f scott fitzgerald

but here's to a new years resolution to read more contemporary fiction. anyone read anything amazing this year i should go back and explore??

adventure!

i think that this, too, is how a good story is written (or told).


(this is from page 85 of nausea by jean-paul sartre, popular penguin edition)