Let me make one thing plain from this here outset. I did not open a book for pleasure until I was, oh, about 15. All I did before that was watch TV. So I know the lovely luxury of switching off as you switch it on. I know the intoxicating escapism of the medium. Believe me.
But these days, Jesus. All I ever seem to want to watch are snippets from iView and ABC News24. Even when I have a television at my disposal—when I'm languishing on someone else's couch, say—I turn to freaking News24.
Why I can't sit down to watch The Block or Masterchef or The Voice or Grand fucking Designs like the rest of the world, I have no idea. I am re-watching Deadwood on DVD, but that's like one episode at a time, a couple of times a week, max.
So maybe I watch four hours of moving pictures a week at the outside. I do like movies; I just don't seem to get time to watch them.
I know what you're thinking: what the hell do I do with my evenings? By way of retort, let me say I would rather die than surf the channels nightly, looking for "something good on". I would rather die than get the paper for the sake of the Green Guide (I know people who still do this. People with the Web connected to their very homes. I'm not kidding). I would rather die, these days, than give up my nights at home, any of then really, to The Television.
What I do when I have an evening at home—and there are, say, four a week—is:
write; light the fire, then stare into it; wash dishes; play records; mail-order seeds, books, cheese cultures, music, or wine yeast; clean the chainsaw; make cocktails; mend things; cook; turn the incubating eggs; thin seedlings; write personal email to my closest charmers; Skype if the stars align; go to bed with a rum and read.
Far from the days of Gilligan and Solid Gold, I've become so abstracted from TV/series culture that I literally cannot understand how people go home and turn it on and sit down in front of it every night, let alone put it on in the mornings. You'd think that living alone I'd be glad to have it babbling—for the company, as people say—but I'd much rather listen to the wind and the frogs and the odd cow lowing in the valley.
I don't know what's happened to me. But I'm really, seriously, not kidding about The Television.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
[inescapable]
[The sky tore across the bowl of the valley. There was a light rain, yet we could see stars.
Nothing made sense.
Not the still trees, whose leaves wept drizzle; not the dark turned dirty by an ill-conceived moon; not even the earth, which gave beneath our feet: every step a misstep, every step taken in blind faith, in hope and peril, and in most, the peril proved out.
Nothing was as we wanted it.
The nearest we came was a delusional ignorance—if we took a thing and turned it in the light just so, we could convince ourselves it was real, and what we needed. But shift the light, move the thing, and back sprang reality, sure as darkness, inescapable]
Nothing made sense.
Not the still trees, whose leaves wept drizzle; not the dark turned dirty by an ill-conceived moon; not even the earth, which gave beneath our feet: every step a misstep, every step taken in blind faith, in hope and peril, and in most, the peril proved out.
Nothing was as we wanted it.
The nearest we came was a delusional ignorance—if we took a thing and turned it in the light just so, we could convince ourselves it was real, and what we needed. But shift the light, move the thing, and back sprang reality, sure as darkness, inescapable]
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Niche selection
Derek Bickerton's Adam's Tongue* hits a heart-stopping high point on its second-last page.
The book, subtitled, "How humans made language, how language made humans" argues that niche selection is the reason why we have language and no other species does.
It's a long story, and one I can't explain here. But here's the para that put the whole book—and the concept of niche selection's impact on human evolution—into perspective:
"Why is it, do you suppose, that when a hunter-gatherer group is sucked into the vortex of 'civilisation,' so many of its members seem to undergo a kind of spiritual death, quickly falling victim to drugs, alcohol, irrational violence, or suicidal despair? ... for ten thousand years, ever since cities and government began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs—all those opposed to the current norms of society—have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered or executed ... But the passive the compliant, the loyal, the obedient ... prospered like the green bay tree. Has this really had no effect on human nature?"
While this seems to imply a degree of idealism in what is hardly a perfect or idyllic lifestyle, Bickerton's point—that we've spent less time being civilised than we have evolving from uncivilised origins, and that we're still continuously adjusting to that world as a species, potentially with dire future consequences—is pretty arresting.
Especially for anyone who's ever felt they don't belong here. Which is all of us, right?
*Woo! Buy it for $12.95!
The book, subtitled, "How humans made language, how language made humans" argues that niche selection is the reason why we have language and no other species does.
It's a long story, and one I can't explain here. But here's the para that put the whole book—and the concept of niche selection's impact on human evolution—into perspective:
"Why is it, do you suppose, that when a hunter-gatherer group is sucked into the vortex of 'civilisation,' so many of its members seem to undergo a kind of spiritual death, quickly falling victim to drugs, alcohol, irrational violence, or suicidal despair? ... for ten thousand years, ever since cities and government began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs—all those opposed to the current norms of society—have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered or executed ... But the passive the compliant, the loyal, the obedient ... prospered like the green bay tree. Has this really had no effect on human nature?"
While this seems to imply a degree of idealism in what is hardly a perfect or idyllic lifestyle, Bickerton's point—that we've spent less time being civilised than we have evolving from uncivilised origins, and that we're still continuously adjusting to that world as a species, potentially with dire future consequences—is pretty arresting.
Especially for anyone who's ever felt they don't belong here. Which is all of us, right?
*Woo! Buy it for $12.95!
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Unfreakingbelievable
Isn't it a bit late to start telling me what the thing is after I've signed up?
(The only reason I signed up to Medium was for work—for this, you might say—and because it used my Twitter login to make that happen.)
But wait. There's more. Here's what happens when you click the "Read this" link:
That's the start of 841 words of ... something. (One of the headings is "Why Medium? Why Now?" I'm not kidding.)
Let me paraphrase from the intense, eye-hurting speed-scanning I attempted: you publish something on Medium and it's collected into a larger collection of stuff, like funny life stories. Maybe. Think Storify crossed maybe with Tumblr and WordPress.com, then multiply by the number of the first house you lived in...
Why didn't they just say so on their homepage? Who knows. Maybe because their "preview" in itself doesn't look that exciting. Maybe because they feel your precious personal details are in fact due payment for the exciting if vague news of their thrilling, if currently-still-in-development-and-not-really-available-for-human-consumption-or-indeed-even-beta-testing service. But do you?
Startups, no shit: get a copywriter and maybe someone to help you with brand communication. Even the early adopting first wave deserves that much.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Diggin' du Maurier
There's no shortage of books that have been turned into movies. And some of them are good movies—think Capote, American Psycho (only digestible in cinematographic form), Murder on the Orient Express (ha!).
Not so, oh similarly innocent friend. Not so at all.
According to the Big W, the author herself "was not enamoured" of the movie, and while I love the book, and dug the movie, I can see why. Hitch switched whole, entire characters who play major roles in a plot that, while largely accurate, ends differently than the novel (from what I remember).
These are some pretty major changes. If some director took your story, and switched the responsibilities of characters who ended the thing differently than you'd intended, you'd be a bit miffed too. Like, I imagine, du Maurier, I do wonder why Hitchcock couldn't have stuck more closely to the novel. Although, speaking to the Canadian recently, I pointed out that the talkies were young when Hitch hit the screen, and Jamaica Inn, the movie, was made in 1939. Hitchcock was an experimenter—who knew what he was thinking?
In any case, both book and film are good. I recommend them to you heartily, as good fodder for stormy nights in any season but summer.
I'm currently at the pointy end of Jamaica Inn, a beyond-excellent novel by Daphne du Maurier of The Birds fame (another great story-turned-film). I saw the movie, also by Hitchcock, who, needless to say, directed The Birds—honestly, what's happened to this sentence?—before I read the book, and loved it. And I assumed, like most films made from books, that it basically told the story of du Maurier's novel.
Not so, oh similarly innocent friend. Not so at all.
According to the Big W, the author herself "was not enamoured" of the movie, and while I love the book, and dug the movie, I can see why. Hitch switched whole, entire characters who play major roles in a plot that, while largely accurate, ends differently than the novel (from what I remember).
These are some pretty major changes. If some director took your story, and switched the responsibilities of characters who ended the thing differently than you'd intended, you'd be a bit miffed too. Like, I imagine, du Maurier, I do wonder why Hitchcock couldn't have stuck more closely to the novel. Although, speaking to the Canadian recently, I pointed out that the talkies were young when Hitch hit the screen, and Jamaica Inn, the movie, was made in 1939. Hitchcock was an experimenter—who knew what he was thinking?
In any case, both book and film are good. I recommend them to you heartily, as good fodder for stormy nights in any season but summer.
Friday, August 10, 2012
[fury]
[The fury
of the raging trees
as plain as me,
enraged for me
we are of the same place—
we, together,
know the darkness better.
The screaming
of the flailing grass—
through which I passed
when I went, at last—
gapes, aghast, to cold stars
cast forever
as lonely tears unfettered.
The icy
cut-cold, bitter pond
lost before long
to summer's song
stares, unrippled, back at me,
who's lost
and beyond scared forever.]
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Let's not talk about it
I've been having a lot of trouble stopping talking about All the Pretty Horses, which I read not so long ago.
As Aces points out, Cormac McCarthy has a knack for making you laugh and cry for mummy on the same page. It's amazing. I want to read the whole trilogy, although I don't know if I can bear to start from the beginning again. It's such torture—a beautiful torture, true, but torture nonetheless.
So, the book was good, and I am enraptured. But now that my own life seems to be taking on an alarmingly All the Pretty Horses-ish vibe of its own, I find I've stopped talking about it.
I've stopped talking about it altogether.
Still, it's best to be optimistic, right? As long as I stay out of Mexican prisons, things should turn out okay.
As Aces points out, Cormac McCarthy has a knack for making you laugh and cry for mummy on the same page. It's amazing. I want to read the whole trilogy, although I don't know if I can bear to start from the beginning again. It's such torture—a beautiful torture, true, but torture nonetheless.
So, the book was good, and I am enraptured. But now that my own life seems to be taking on an alarmingly All the Pretty Horses-ish vibe of its own, I find I've stopped talking about it.
I've stopped talking about it altogether.
Still, it's best to be optimistic, right? As long as I stay out of Mexican prisons, things should turn out okay.
Monday, August 6, 2012
The last thing
So, Monday. So, watching the low ebb of what you think of as your life slip away, molecule by molecule, in a slow and necessarily tedious drain. So, absent friends you would literally kill actual humans to be with right now. So, there never being enough time to do the things we yearn to, to say the things we long to, to be properly in touch.
So fuck you, Monday.
The answer to all these problems, momentarily speaking of course, is to get your blue self to The Paperback and pick up The Ragged Edge of the World.
To buy it new, because you never buy anything new.
To buy it from an independent bookshop, because you like the bookshop and you like the lady behind the counter.
To buy it regardless, because for Christ's sakes people, the world as we know it is crumbling to nothingness around our very ears, and if all I have left in life is the ability to spend $20 on a new book by someone who put some thought into writing it, and to buy it from someone who likes talking about books without the merest hint of pretension and who held Other Voices Other Rooms for me when I was still a long way away but really really needed a copy, then by God, I shall.
If it's the last thing I do. If it's the only thing I can actually do.
So fuck you, Monday.
The answer to all these problems, momentarily speaking of course, is to get your blue self to The Paperback and pick up The Ragged Edge of the World.
To buy it new, because you never buy anything new.
To buy it from an independent bookshop, because you like the bookshop and you like the lady behind the counter.
To buy it regardless, because for Christ's sakes people, the world as we know it is crumbling to nothingness around our very ears, and if all I have left in life is the ability to spend $20 on a new book by someone who put some thought into writing it, and to buy it from someone who likes talking about books without the merest hint of pretension and who held Other Voices Other Rooms for me when I was still a long way away but really really needed a copy, then by God, I shall.
If it's the last thing I do. If it's the only thing I can actually do.
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Ways of thinking
"...set out with the avowed object of guiding [people] ... into more constructive ways of thinking about the topic."
This quote is taken from Adam's Tongue, a book on the evolution of language by Derek Bickerton. He's talking about a paper published in a scientific journal, but when I read this this morning, the blue sky blueblueblue above my bed, the sunlight playing in the forest, it struck me that this is what the best writing does, and the best films and the best art:
They show us more constructive ways of thinking.
Perhaps it's by example—think In Cold Blood or prettymuch anything by Clive James. Or perhaps it's by evidence, sometimes self-contradictory evidence, like Catcher in the Rye or The Bell Jar or, since you're probably thinking, Jesus, can you pick anything else from the year 11 English reading list?, A Burnt Out Case or The Weekend.
Good writing shows us what we can't see in ourselves, and the world. It brings pieces of life to light, into focus, and then makes sense of them for us.
More constructive ways of thinking are to be pursued. This is not to suggest that there are Officially Constructive and Officially Unhelpful ways of thinking, but that if you're stuck on something, and you can't move forward with it, there is bound to be a more constructive way of thinking about it, if only you take the time to look elsewhere, and to look with an open mind.
Adam's Tongue also has a lot to say about thought and language, about online thinking (concentrating on a task at hand) and offline thinking (daydreaming or thinking about something that isn't in the here and now).
This discussion made me see differently the pop-culture notion of "mindfulness", and wonder if perhaps the reason I feel so at ease, so much freedom, when doing something physical that requires concentration in the here and now is because this is where we began—this is the most basic, and oldest way we think.
Maybe imagining and abstraction are hard—taxing, engrossing, entrapping, painful—because these kinds of thoughts were acquired later, when language came about, and we need to expend more energy on them to make them happen. Maybe we're not as adept—or comfortable, or skilled—with offline thinking as we like to tell ourselves, and as our creative capabilities would have us believe.
Maybe. Who knows? In any case, it's an interesting way of thinking about imagination and abstract thought. And one gleaned through reading good writing.
This quote is taken from Adam's Tongue, a book on the evolution of language by Derek Bickerton. He's talking about a paper published in a scientific journal, but when I read this this morning, the blue sky blueblueblue above my bed, the sunlight playing in the forest, it struck me that this is what the best writing does, and the best films and the best art:
They show us more constructive ways of thinking.
Perhaps it's by example—think In Cold Blood or prettymuch anything by Clive James. Or perhaps it's by evidence, sometimes self-contradictory evidence, like Catcher in the Rye or The Bell Jar or, since you're probably thinking, Jesus, can you pick anything else from the year 11 English reading list?, A Burnt Out Case or The Weekend.
Good writing shows us what we can't see in ourselves, and the world. It brings pieces of life to light, into focus, and then makes sense of them for us.
More constructive ways of thinking are to be pursued. This is not to suggest that there are Officially Constructive and Officially Unhelpful ways of thinking, but that if you're stuck on something, and you can't move forward with it, there is bound to be a more constructive way of thinking about it, if only you take the time to look elsewhere, and to look with an open mind.
Adam's Tongue also has a lot to say about thought and language, about online thinking (concentrating on a task at hand) and offline thinking (daydreaming or thinking about something that isn't in the here and now).
This discussion made me see differently the pop-culture notion of "mindfulness", and wonder if perhaps the reason I feel so at ease, so much freedom, when doing something physical that requires concentration in the here and now is because this is where we began—this is the most basic, and oldest way we think.
Maybe imagining and abstraction are hard—taxing, engrossing, entrapping, painful—because these kinds of thoughts were acquired later, when language came about, and we need to expend more energy on them to make them happen. Maybe we're not as adept—or comfortable, or skilled—with offline thinking as we like to tell ourselves, and as our creative capabilities would have us believe.
Maybe. Who knows? In any case, it's an interesting way of thinking about imagination and abstract thought. And one gleaned through reading good writing.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
The ugly side of being a writer
Invoicing. That's the ugly side.
Or, more specifically, telling a client with annual revenues of, oh, $8 billion that you can't continue to work on their projects until the payment for that 7-day invoice you gave them a month ago lands in your account.
That yes, they will be missing the precious Tuesday deadline they had in their mind but hadn't communicated to you until now, since, ahem, they owe you more than a few lazy gs and have done for weeks despite your repeated requests for immediate payment.
That yes, this most certainly is a change of tack from your previously lap-doggish eagerness to please, and your unrelenting commitment to meeting their tight deadlines with outstanding copy time and time and time again.
This is the ugly side of freelancing: being a hard arse. It doesn't come naturally to almost anyone as far as I can tell. It is much easier to just happily continue on, writing pretty things and talking sweetly to stakeholders you want to impress with your professionalism and understanding. Believe me, it really is.
If only that were the way to get paid. If I were feeling philosophical about it, I'd say that sometimes we must be who we are not in order to do justice to ourselves. But I'm not feeling philosophical—just disgruntled—so instead I'll make a cocktail* and write something devastating for a client who does pay.
*Yeah so it's only 3pm. But it is Friday.
Or, more specifically, telling a client with annual revenues of, oh, $8 billion that you can't continue to work on their projects until the payment for that 7-day invoice you gave them a month ago lands in your account.
That yes, they will be missing the precious Tuesday deadline they had in their mind but hadn't communicated to you until now, since, ahem, they owe you more than a few lazy gs and have done for weeks despite your repeated requests for immediate payment.
That yes, this most certainly is a change of tack from your previously lap-doggish eagerness to please, and your unrelenting commitment to meeting their tight deadlines with outstanding copy time and time and time again.
This is the ugly side of freelancing: being a hard arse. It doesn't come naturally to almost anyone as far as I can tell. It is much easier to just happily continue on, writing pretty things and talking sweetly to stakeholders you want to impress with your professionalism and understanding. Believe me, it really is.
If only that were the way to get paid. If I were feeling philosophical about it, I'd say that sometimes we must be who we are not in order to do justice to ourselves. But I'm not feeling philosophical—just disgruntled—so instead I'll make a cocktail* and write something devastating for a client who does pay.
*Yeah so it's only 3pm. But it is Friday.
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