Pen Hanley

  • My favourite newspaper is The Guardian Weekly. I tried googling Annie March, a woman after my own heart who writes the most wonderful letters sometimes, published in their Reply section. Google suggested Linked In but the illogical, Catch-22 nature of Linked In made it impossible to get her email address. (If I want to contact Annie March, ‘type in her email address here’: duh!) I love everything she writes. But she’s a Cassandra – no one will listen. So I wanted to spread a sample of her succinct and humane words of warning a little wider. They relate to Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity section in my 27 April 2012 blog.

    Annie March in The Guardian Weekly 5 may 2013, p. 23, wrote a letter entitled ‘The real cost of cars’, which points out what so few people see:
    ‘…The cult of privatised, instant mobility has a hideous underside: cars generate 20% of greenhouse gases; poison soil, water and air at all stages of their life cycle; drive oil wars; usurp 35% of urban land, turning our streets into noisy, dangerous rat-runs while forcing everyone to inhale their excretions; annually kill 1.2 million; and are complicit in the epidemics of asthma and obesity. There are a billion cars in the world; the number is growing exponentially.
    Now it’s proposed, as an act of terminal and bloated self-indulgence, to turn these Molochs into giant smartphones. The mining and processing of the rare earths underpinning this technology have already turned Baotou in Mongolia into a noxious wasteland (Hunger for rare earths leaves toxic legacy, 10 August 2012). Coltan, another essential ingredient, fuels civil war in the Congo; in a brutal twist, Congolese women end up working as slaves in the coltan mines.
    Cars not only displace their real cost on to less privileged humans and our 8bn co-species, but defraud and despoil the future; how can driving be freedom when it’s based on an ecocidal, fundamentalist lie? Fundamentalists can go to perdition any way they like, as long as they don’t take my children’s children with them.
    How do we strip the glamour from cars? What’s the difference between driving in a public place and smoking in one? Cigarettes are at least silent.
    We’re driving our way to extinction. Cars are incompatible with a healthy biosphere. They’re as small-brained and doomed as the dinosaurs; so are we, if we don’t break their addictive spell.’

    On a lighter note, the phrase ‘a woman after my own heart’ recalls a funny comment made to me on a hot day recently. I’d got off the No 2 bus and was walking the long walk on concrete paths to tango class. Then I would be squeezing my hot feet into high heels. (One toe has a minor deformity which makes the foot half a size bigger than the other, so unless I’m wearing sandals or boots, it feels like the first stage of Chinese foot-binding on that side.)
    I walked along in the heat, my feet swelling inside my sandal straps. Suddenly I saw a long stretch of beautifully green, cool, dewy-looking, shaded grass beside the footpath in front of a posh building, probably some legal firm that charges an arm and a leg, if you’ll pardon the cliché.
    No one was around and I risked slipping off my sandals and sinking my feet into the coolness of that soft grass and walking through it in refreshingly cold bliss. Just then an immaculately coiffed woman in a charcoal grey suit and black high heels stepped out of that building looking as if she owned it. There were no signs saying ‘Don’t walk on the grass,’ but I felt as if I were trespassing. I thought she was going to reprimand me. But she said when she spotted me, ‘Ah, a woman after my own feet!’

  • After a few days of Conference early mornings and late nights, organising interviews for rural health experts and liaising with them and journalists, I realised yet again how much I love the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission to you lovely people from Canada, the UK and the US who discourse with me about my blogs). Their journalists and producers invariably take the time to learn the facts and get to know the important things before interviewing the person.

    I was in Adelaide doing this for my work Conference, as mentioned in last blog. But a couple of years ago I did many radio interviews about my book Creative Lives. With the very short ones (through no fault of the journalist some were just too short) I found it hard to compress 18 months of research and writing of 22 people’s lives and careers into convenient sound bytes; whereas the longer interviews were much easier and I was able to convey something of the complexity and nuance of the task and the subjects, as well as establish some sort of relationship with the interviewer, which is essential in any conversation.

    Theodore Zeldin writes that conversation is an adventure ‘in which we agree to cook the world together and make it taste less bitter’ (Conversation, 1998, p.6). This of course is what blogs can do too.

    After the Conference I had a few days off, and moved to a hotel I could afford and which I had booked online. Having no real knowledge of Adelaide apart from seeing the Festival, the Hills and the beaches a couple of times over 15 years ago, I discovered that I’d booked a hotel in the Kings Cross (Sydney) of Adelaide: the Plaza in Hindley Street. The people were nice and I had a big bathroom and sitting room, but it was all very shabby, noisy and grubby. The corridors smelt of chain-smoking and the streets rang into the early hours with the noise of endlessly repeating bass notes, fist fights and traffic.

    I saw friends, had lunches in vineyards, caught the Turner exhibition (can never resist) and didn’t want to wait till it comes to Canberra. I saw most of that collection often before at the Tate but find new things every time. I’d forgotten how abstract many of his works were – and so early! I love Adelaide’s Markets and went there twice. And I bought a copy of the new Barbara Vine: The Child’s Child. It’s a psychological thriller ‘book-ending’ a historical novel also having thriller elements, and both plots dealing with the changing moral and legal landscapes in England surrounding illegitimacy and homosexuality.  I can hardly put it down.

    At the wonderful ‘Flights of the Mind’ conference at the National Library of Australia 24-25 October 2009, author Geraldine Brooks said that historical novels contain more than facts: ‘they contain emotional truths’. Her books certainly do, and Barbara Vine’s do too. (Ruth Rendell, as you probably know, writes her psychological thrillers under the name Barbara Vine.) I haven’t finished The Child’s Child but two-thirds of the way through I’m finding it fascinating. Her language has the clarity of Simenon but more depth, and her psychological insights are profound, but her real genius is in plotting. It was so hard to unpack and do domestic things when I was desperate to finish that novel. In fact, I still am. That’s what I will do right now.

    If you haven’t read any of Barbara Vine’s there are about 14. So if you read one and like it you’re in for a treat: 13 more to go! More actually, if she continues to write them for a few more years. I love them because I’m interested in psychology and human nature; I rarely read detective novels and the ones with all the focus on the forensic details. I’m just not that interested in that aspect of life.

  • This is an instance of my literary and professional worlds meeting, which is wonderful! Penguin books published a chapter of mine in their recent book, Bush Nurses. So I’m pasting a word from the Editor: attached is a link to Bush Nurses on the Penguin site http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781921901393/bush-nurses

  • Thank you for your interest in my blog, and yours are really interesting – work has been too busy to respond properly but after the Conference is over, I will. Huge Conference is on now – more than 1,000 delegates. So, I am in beautiful Adelaide in the Media Room of the biggest venue (Adelaide Convention Centre) I and probably you have ever seen. So no proper bog this week, just an apology of sorts because semi-frantic with interviews and writing about rural health so no time to do my own writing, not even a blog! Head crammed with things you wouldn’t want to hear about – except for my favourite strand of all this: Arts and Health. Always interesting, inspiring and incredible. But that strand starts tomorrow.

    And by next week I’ll have also been to some vineyards – for all those antioxidants in red wine, of course. Only have time for one literary note, but what a note: Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Instructions for a Heatwave. Set in the big heatwave of 1975 in London plus some of it in Ireland – the novel plus the heat! Wonderful novel about the extraordinary in ordinary life. A family so plausible and recognisable that you feel you really know them through and through by the end, with the sibling differences and familiarity, the misunderstandings and the warmth, the craziness of one’s parents and the differences being the eldest or youngest makes – all that family stuff expressed so poignantly. I was so glad to be immersed in that world before being sucked into a week of professional milieu – not that that is not interesting, and it’s certainly worthwhile, but: it’s not fiction, it’s not literature, even though I can use my literary background and way with language in its service. I love health, sure, but I love the literary world more. I consider myself lucky to be able to write about health for a living. But I so enjoyed the immersion in that beautifully written and gripping novel before this Conference took over my life completely.

  • We sit too much, those of us who write for a living. Or use the computer for a living. Hmmm, that’s a lot of us. Some health writers are even suggesting that we stand at our desks. But long ago I read that the best thing we can do for our legs is walk with them and the worst thing we can do is to stand on them.

    I write for an NGO four days a week – to leave one day a week for my own writing, which would normally be fiction. But now with a non-fiction commission I spend the time on that – and towards the end or even before that I know I’ll be spending three days on that. It will be like a mini-PhD. I must be mad.

    But it’s what I wanted – to make the leap from editing for a living to writing for a living. I’ve made that leap and I’m happy with it. (I used to love editing, when it was playing with language and ideas, and getting inside the heads of some very smart writers. But it changed, the technology changed and I changed. All that’s another story.)

    I’m happy writing all the time, but yes, it does involve an awful lot of sitting. One of my English Literature lecturers at ANU told us that Charles Dickens used to write for one hour then walk around London for an hour, write for an hour, walk for an hour … imagine him coming back and scribbling down some of the conversations he’d overheard in the London streets – no wonder they have that authenticity and immediacy and wit. A later English writer, the very witty and very prolific Tim Parks, wrote a book called Teach Us To Sit Still – a memoir about writing, illness and meditation. He had developed a strange, embarrassing, seemingly-undiagnosable, painful ailment, and tried everything to cure it – and that journey he recounts is fascinating. It’s in the ACT Library system and it’s worth reading so I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s worth reading anything Tim Parks writes – novels, essays, memoirs.

    Now, in the light of this new concern about sitting shortening our lives, it’s tempting to think that Tim Parks was simply sitting too much. But a lot of people do that, some of them nearly as prolific as Tim Parks, and not everyone gets sick from it in the prime of life.

    In any case, I’m trying to get up from my writing more often, and on Saturday morning I walked around the lake with a friend. It’s about five kilometres. It was 8.00am and exceptionally calm, the sky brilliant blue and the white oblongs of the carillon reflected in the water perfectly still like an abstract painting. We walked, talked and watched the cormorants drying their wings and the black swans gliding along leaving pale ripples behind them like ruffled satin.

    Then we saw two wildlife officers fetching a sturdy cotton bag, something struggling and obviously heavy inside, out of the lake.

    ‘That’s a big fish,’ said my companion. ‘What sort of fish is it?’

    And the man said, ‘It’s a kangaroo fish!’

    A kangaroo had jumped into the lake. A fisherman had seen it – and rung them. They must have been close by. The kangaroo was shivering. Imagine what a shock it had – hopping along, Boing-Boing-Boing – then suddenly Splash! I don’t even know if kangaroos can swim.

    So that was a diversion from writing. I’d like to do it every day. But isn’t it a contradiction to have to drive somewhere to walk? If I lived near the lake sure I’d walk around it every day. Easy to say, I know. I went back refreshed and invigorated and wrote for hours. But I get into that world and forget to have a break.

    My breaks are to read some of the dozens of fabulous books I’m desperate to read but don’t have enough time for. I’m sure lying on the sofa is a good break from sitting. I’m reading Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, Instructions for a Heatwave. If you haven’t read her novel before this one, The Hand that First Held Mine, just go out and get a copy – or get it on Kindle or from the library – it’s riveting and humane and wonderful. This latest is very good but I’ve only just started.

    Of course there are other breaks: domestic ones plus Argentine tango lessons plus doing yoga plus drinking wine plus going to films and plays – and haven’t there been some good plays and films on lately?… But if I do any more stuff I’ll never get that book written.

    To conclude, and keeping somewhat within the theme of this piece, although obviously going way beyond it too, one of my favourite quotations is by Antonio Machado (I discovered it in Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, also available in the ACT Library):

    ‘We make the road by walking.’

  • Siri Hustvedt, in the last paragraph of her Author Note in Living, Thinking, Looking begins the paragraph with “Every book is for someone”. True. And of course every blog is for someone. There are many contemporary words I dislike. But blog is one I like. A combination of Biography and Log. And it, like a ship’s log, should be regularly updated. Someone somewhere will read this log and know what conditions were like for the person writing it at that particular time.
    As alluded to a fortnight ago, busy-ness is the salient condition for me (and for so many) here and now. In fact, that is why I am writing this now instead of a week ago. I’ve been working overtime. We’re an NGO and they can’t afford to pay us overtime but we can take the time in lieu, which is how I prefer it. Time is far more important to me than money. So I took Friday off and drove with some friends to the coast. We had a long weekend with no laptops, no iPads, no phone range. We didn’t turn on the telly. We’d rented a two-storey wooden house on top of a cliff. Quirky charm and stunning views. Talk, laughs, swimming, eating, drinking, reading New Yorkers, walking, sleeping … relaxation hardly begins to cover the sensation of those few days.
    And then the working week starts, with its treadmill (mainly because of the commuting). But I won’t talk further about that. Because this is a blog mainly about literature and language, I’ll tell you some words I think we should have a moratorium on. Challenging – because it has become the euphemism everyone uses for hard, difficult or problematic. People are trying to sound positive. But there are so many hard, difficult problems now that ‘challenging’ is practically every second word. I’d rather hear someone say that they were struggling against almost insurmountable odds than say their circumstances were challenging.
    Another word I dislike is ‘significant’. That is the biggest cliche now. So I’d rather hear big, enormous, huge, horrendous, overwhelming, large or much more – anything than significant, or the adverbial form of it. There are so many that a page of writing will contain ten or a dozen! Clearly this makes a mockery of the meaning of the word.
    I hate impact as a verb not a noun, and people often use it as both in the same sentence. We used to say ‘affect’. I suspect that so many people did not know when to use ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ they thought they would avoid the problem by purloining impact in the place of affect, and this caught on. This is unfortunate. It sounds graceless and awkward.
    And I’d like to have a moratorium on ‘outcome’. We used to say ‘result’. Nothing really wrong with outcome but it’s every second word in every policy document, paper and chapter now. Can’t we swap ‘result’ for it sometimes? And we used to say ‘probably’. Gosh, it is years since I heard that. Now everyone says ‘likely’. Why is that? We used to say ‘the probable result’ but now it has to be ‘the likely outcome’. I am not saying it’s bad grammar. I’m saying that my ears are bored with the ubiquity of these phrases. I’d like a rest from them.
    Of course I can get a rest by reading, say, Simenon. The New Yorker (Oct 10, 2011) had a wonderful article on him by Joan Acocella. As you probably know, Simenon was famous for writing first drafts and then getting that published. Instead of like the rest of us who have to write about 27 drafts before something looks publishable. His other famous feature is that he is meant to have slept with 10,000 women.
    The article states that he would type about 80 pages every a.m. “Then he would vomit, from the tension, and spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing.” (p. 21)
    He had a lucky shirt to write in, which he washed every night, and he had four dozen pencils, sharpened. He wrote a novel in a week and revised in three days. (So the rumours about first drafts were wrong – but not by much.) The author said that he would get into a trance and then, chapter by chapter, the plot would come to him. He would average five novels a year. Acocella writes: ‘Despite the vomiting, Simenon appears to have enjoyed himself for many years.’ (p. 126) The article was called ‘Crime Pays: The dilemma of Georges Simenon.’ Funny and fascinating. Simenon never used challenging or significant or impact as a verb or outcome. He was readable. He would have been more readable if he’d been less prolific but a few of his books are very good.

  • I haven’t updated this for a long time because of much busy-ness: Chaucer wrote, “Great peace is to be found in little busy-ness”. He was correct. But who is not too busy these days? So sometimes I take a Sunday off and do nothing. (Sundays will be my time for blogging from now on.) Of course my doing nothing is busy compared with some people’s idea of doing nothing. When I say I do nothing, I mean I take the time to sit in the garden, do yoga, read a non-work book, meet friends and perhaps tidy my wardrobe.
    What I have done since my last blog: finished my novel. Researched on who to submit it to. I have written a lot of publications, which I have not been able to put on my Publications List on my website because Crazy Domains refuse to answer any emails. There is no other way of contacting them. The contract runs out soon and so I can then be released to be able to get a competent domain registrar. I have about eight new articles published, including one in press that is a chapter in Penguin’s Bush Nurses (to be published 20 March). So this has been frustrating.
    I am still reading The Guardian Weekly, New Yorkers and many wonderful books. More on these next Sunday. I have my four day a week writing job and more news next time on another book commission. Not official yet. Let me end with this quotation from Julian Barnes from The Guardian Weekly 20 July 2012. ‘Life and reading are not separate activities. When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life; you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic and for this serious task of imaginative discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.’

  • Non-fiction

    By Hook or By Crook

    David Crystal.  Harper-Collins, 2007

    Anything by David Crystal is wonderful – he writes erudite and funny books about the English language. This one has entertaining snippets such as the following. A best words competition in The Sunday Times in 1980 came up with: melody and velvet (tied in first place). Then gossamer and crystal (tied), then autumn, peace, tranquil, twilight, murmur, caress, mellifluous, whisper.

    I always liked the name Snitterfield. David Crystal tells us that Shakespeare’s grandfather had a farm here, in the mid 16th century.

    Crystal describes alternative versions of Shakespeare performed by the other RSC – the Reduced Shakespeare Company. The actors perform 37 plays in 97 minutes. It was advertised as a show for everyone.

    If you like Shakespeare, you’ll like this show. If you hate Shakespeare, you’ll love this show.

    It was London’s longest-running comedy – ten years at the Criterion.

    The Italian Job is a witty action film involving a heist and some minis. The 1969 version was directed by Peter Collinson and starred Michael Caine and Noel Coward. There’s been a more recent version, not as well received, but I didn’t see it. I wish I’d seen the following version: at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003 a theatre company performed Bill Shakespeare’s Italian Job – red, white and blue minis with number plates BARD 1, 2 and 3. The whole thing was in pseudo-Elizabethan English, for example, ‘Thou wert only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’

    Crystal has a collective nouns list (page 188,9):

    Wisps of snipe

    A gaggle of geese

    A muster of peacocks

     A paddling of ducks

    A murder of crows

    Tidings of magpies

    An unkindness of ravens

    An absence of waiters

    A rash of dermatologists

    A shoulder of agony aunts

    A clutch of car mechanics

    A vat of chancellors

    An annoyance of mobile phones

    A bumble of beekeepers

    A complex of psychiatrists

    A fidget of choirboys

    A sulk of teenagers

    I also liked this piece of graffiti David Crystal quotes:  Roget’s Thesaurus Rules – Ok, all right, very well, you bet, certainly.

    Family Romance

    John Lanchester. Faber & Faber, 2007

    Family Romance is a memoir by John Lanchester about his parents.  After his mother’s death he was going through her papers when he came upon discrepancies, investigated further and discovered an amazing secret that she had kept hidden from him and his father all their lives.    The book he has written about this deception and about identity, love and family ties is beautiful and fascinating, with illuminating insights on virtually every page. 

    To take just one, he writes about the idea that ‘Every fear is a desire. Every desire is a fear.’ (p. 288) It is intriguing and recalls the insight from a psychologist that when we are failing at something, we are always succeeding at something else. – So if you can figure out what you are getting from an apparently undesirable, destructive behaviour or habit or compulsion, that will be the start of the awareness that can set you free of the destructive behaviour.

    Speaking of psychologists, the author, who suffers from various phobias etc., relies on psychological help – the talking cure: he takes no pills (except when he has to fly).  He states:

    That is because I don’t want to be mentally blurred, or assisted, or comforted, or calmed, or eased, or tranquillised. I want all my faculties, even if some of those faculties sometimes turn against me and make me feel anxious. That anxiety is part of who I am, and in order to write books I feel I need all of me, even the parts I don’t want. If I thought that the pills were just curing a physical condition, the way my inhaler takes away the symptoms of asthma when I wheeze, I would take them. But I don’t see my phobia as a purely physical condition. It lives on my mind, and it’s part of my mind, for better or worse. And I need my mind to be the way it is in order to write.

    To put it another way, I think that my phobia has some meaning. It’s trying to tell me something, even though I don’t usually know what. Writing and therapy are linked, because they are both about a search for meaning. To take the fear away with antidepressants would for me be to say that the fear is just a meaningless chemical accident. (p. 368)

     

    The Meaning of Tango

    Christine Denniston. Portico Books, 2007

    This book relates the fascinating history of the Argentine tango. This is my favourite quotation from it:

    Tango took place not on the level of the floor, but on the level of the hearts. The movement of the feet was a symptom of the movement of the hearts. … With a competent leader the follower would not need to pay any attention to the movement of her or his own feet.

    The leader’s feet served only one function in the dance – they were there to stop the leader’s heart from falling on the floor. Anything more than that was pure decoration. (p. 38)

    I also like the assumption that the leader was the more important person in a couple being proved wrong: ‘…the more important person was the follower. Women were precious and rare creatures, heavily outnumbered by the men in any milonga [dance]’ (p. 27.)

    Sweet Poison: Why sugar makes us fat

    David Gillespie. Penguin, 2008

    David is ‘a recovering corporate lawyer’ and father of six children, including one set of twins, who has written a succinct, witty readable book about how we are addicted to sugar and how it causes obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, tooth decay and many other diseases. He lost 40 kilos by giving up sugar.

    The Sweet Poison Quit Plan: How to kick the sugar habit and lose weight

    David Gillespie. Penguin, 2010

    The Sweet Poison Quit Plan is a recipe book with safe substitutes for sugar in cakes, biscuits, drinks, ice cream etcetera and charts of the highest and lowest sugar amounts in common brands of crackers, chocolate bars, health food snacks and other things, for example, the ten highest-sugar breakfast cereals. Because sugar is addictive, manufacturers put it in almost everything, including savoury foods.  With this book you can wean yourself off sugar and still have sweet things when you want. Dextrose is the secret.

    Big Fat Lies

    David Gillespie. Viking, 2012

    Gillespie’s Big Fat Lies analyses the famous diet programs like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. Most of them have secrets and it’s interesting to see what really lies behind them – and why they don’t work! (It’s not the fault of the dieter.) The author claims that there is no proof that animal fats like butter are bad for us. The polyunsaturated oils that every health authority and diet program for the past four decades have been telling us to eat have not improved our health. Manufacturers are constantly reducing the amount of saturated fat in our packaged foods. And we’ve been told to use vegetable oils and skim milk and low-fat everything.

    We’ve been doing exactly what we’ve been told to do and the statistics just keep getting worse. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of obese Australians doubled. Between 1983 and 2000 the rate of new prostate cancers increased by 15 per cent a year. Breast cancer increased by 3 per cent. Melanoma increased by 60 per cent in men and 22 per cent in women.

    David Gillespie draws the conclusion that the dietary advice we have been given is wrong and then outlines the facts about polyunsaturated fat (the so-called vegetable oils, which are really mostly seed oils) and analyses the evidence and opinions for and against. He also presents the facts and figures about sugar since the seed oils and sugar work together in a toxic way. Also, manufacturers can state that their product is low-fat but many add sugar to make the food palatable (since, let’s face it, fat is what makes food taste good).

    Gillespie also presents much evidence that all we get from taking vitamin pills is expensive urine. This book is as well written as Sweet Poison and I’ve given it to our statistics person at work to see what he thinks of Gillespie’s analyses of the research. I’ll keep you posted.

    The Art of Looking Sideways

    Alan Fletcher. Phaidon, 2001

    It is 533 large, square-format pages of quotations, jokes, science, memories, colour, design, history and ideas. It’s a book of creative play and it’s fun, inspiring, provocative and clever. It’s about vision, the imagination, perception, reality and wonder.

    ‘When taken for a drive in the country, Matisse always insisted on travelling at five kilometres an hour – walking pace – so that he could get a sense of the trees.’ (p.305) That resonated with me because I cycled everywhere (in Canberra) for a long time and that allows one to notice the astonishing beauty and variety of the trees. And with walking, one notices every leaf on every tree.

    The author quotes Italo Calveno and that made me think about what one sees around Canberra, which is fortunately not the vision below:

    We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to make every image as form and meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort’ (p. 185)

    When I read that I thought, thank God for the ACT ban on billboards. Then I flipped over and found a sight of the world as it was for millennia, before marketers and advertisers got to dictate much of what we see:

    If the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect, one forgets it in the strange flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight. Charles Darwin’s impressions of a Brazilian rainforest. (ibid, p. 85)

    Energy and Equity

    Ivan Illich. Calder & Boyars, 1974

    In the light of peak oil and pollution the multiple problems caused by our dependence on oil, it’s interesting to go back to this 1974 book. Illich makes such sense – and the world went in precisely the opposite direction than what he was proposing. ‘For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1,300 million Chinese and Indians for all purposes.’ (p. 23.) Of course now, Chinese and Indians are racing to be like the Americans (and English and Australians etc).

    People move well on foot, writes Illich. Modern Americans walk as many miles as ancestors did, they just do it in tunnels, corridors, car parks and shops. On foot is three to four miles per hour. Contemporary transport conditions lead to reduced equality and restricted mobility to a system of industrially defined routes and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. Extremes of privilege are created at cost of universal enslavement.

    ‘The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hrs a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the mthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hrs on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials … The model American puts in 1,600 hrs to get 7,500 miles: less than five mph. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent.’ (p. 30, 31.)

    People work a substantial part of every day to earn the money without which they could not even get to work.’ (p. 50, 51.) Buses use one-third of the fuel that cars burn to carry one man over a certain distance. Commuter trains are up to ten times more efficient than cars. Both could become more efficient and less polluting.

    Someone on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. Bike uses little space. Illich reckons it takes two lanes for moving 40,000 people over a bridge in one hr on a train; four to move them on buses; twelve in cars; and only one lane to move them on bikes. He points out that the US could not defeat Vietnam – ‘A grizzly contest between bicycles and motors has just come to an end. In Vietnam, a hyperindustrialized army tried to conquer, but could not overcome, a people organized around bicycle speed.’ (p. 75.)

    Australian financial advisor Noel Whittaker recently estimated that people pay $100-$150 per week on their cars! (Including paying off the loan? It must be.) The ACT Govt gets a lot of money for every car that is registered plus money for parking spots, parking fines, speeding fines etc. So they have every incentive to downgrade public transport. I’m picking on the ACT one because its public transport is deplorable unless you’re going from Tuggeranong or Woden or Belconnen to Civic – from centre to centre, south to north or vice versa. The routes that service where most people actually live take scenic tours around vast areas, so that the number 2 from Dickson shops, for example, takes an hour to get to Deakin West while a car takes 15 minutes (out of peak hour; in peak hour it’s still less than half the time of the bus). I cycled everywhere here for 25 years but that West Deakin location when I got another job there defeated me. It’s too long and it’s too dangerous to cycle and while it’s good to be able to read virtually a novel a day in the meandering two hours of commuting by bus per day, who can afford that sort of time? Not me: I have to drive now.

    Making the Cut

    Mohamed Khadra. William Heinemann, 2007.

    This is a collection of essays by Dr Mohamed Khadra on aspects of his practice and surgery. His direct, understated style quietly builds up without your realising it at first to some powerful writing on Australia’s medical system and various grimly fascinating conditions and illnesses. The writing is illuminated with a profound humanity.

    It’s an interesting combination, medicine and writing. Chekhov was a doctor. William Carlos Williams was, and there are many others. The Varuna Writers’ Centre now has a Writing Doctors strand. See their website for details (it’s in Favourite websites).

    See Khadra’s novel, The Patient in the Fiction section. (I realise these categories of Fiction and Non-fiction are getting so blurred it almost makes no sense to have them any more but I decided to separate them anyway. A lot of people still do categorise writing in this way; you’d be in trouble in academia in my field if you did but I’m not in academia.)

    Out of Our Minds

    Ken Robinson. Capstone, 2011

    Ken Robinson is a creativity expert. He writes in clear language and is persuasive and often funny. I liked this simple statement: ‘The process of the arts is to give shape, coherence and meaning to the life of feeling.’ (p. 192.) He claims that the arts evoke the quality of experience. ‘Artists are concerned with understanding the world in terms of their own perceptions of it: with expressing feelings, with imagining alternatives and with making objects that express those ideas.’ 191.

    The next two quotations speak for themselves about Robinson’s writing.

    ‘The rationalist tradition has driven a wedge between intellect and emotion in human psychology; and between the arts and sciences in society at large. It has distorted the idea of creativity in education and unbalanced the development of millions of people. The result is that other important abilities are overlooked or marginalized. This neglect affects everyone. Children with strong academic abilities often fail to discover their other abilities. Those of lower academic ability may have other powerful abilities that lie dormant. They can all pass through the whole of their education never knowing what their real abilities are.’ (p. 10.)

    ‘The academic life tends to deny the rest of the body. In many schools, students are educated from the waist up and attention eventually comes to focus on their heads, and particularly the left side. This is where many professional academics live: in their heads, and slightly to one side. They are disembodies in a certain way. They tend to look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads: it’s a way of getting their heads to meetings. If you want real evidence of out of body experiences, sign up for a residential conference for senior academics and go along to the dance on the final night. There you will see it. Grown men and women, writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting for it to end so that they can go home and write a paper about it.’ p. 117.

     

     

    Fiction

    The Patient

    Mohamed Khadra.  Heinemann, 2010

    Dr Mohamed Khadra’s novel The Patient is gripping. The author had found himself on the other side of the medical system, seriously ill and in need of care instead of giving that care to others, and he got a nasty shock. He was inspired to write a novel using some of his experience trying to make sense of health care from a perspective he never thought that he would be taking.

    The Patient takes a fictional tour through Australia’s complicated medical system when the protagonist suddenly discovers that he has cancer and happens to be up to his ears in debt with a huge, posh house and expensive cars and “stuff” and he has let his private health insurance lapse.

    The novel explores family life and values, health, wealth and love. I could not put it down.

     

    The Very Thought of You

    Rosie Alison.  Alma Books, 2010

    This is the first novel of film producer, Alison, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize. I’m not aware of any other novel that has examined the effect of war on children in so subtle and profound a way. A small girl is evacuated to a stately house in Yorkshire to escape the London Blitz and encounters adult behaviour that a child shouldn’t see. It fits into the coming-of-age genre (a favourite of mine) but it’s much more than that. Plastered all over the covers of some editions is its prize-winning status as a romance novel but a romance it ain’t, I’m happy to report.

     

    The American Wife

    Curtis Sittenfeld, 2008

    A riveting novel based on the life of Laura Bush, wife of the ex-President George W. The only things I knew about Laura Bush was that she was a librarian and sported a seemingly pasted-on smile in all the photos of her. The American Wife makes perfect sense of that smile. Once I began I could not stop reading it. The novel is beautifully written, and graced with illuminating insights about morality and the compromises we make in relationships.

    But, if it’s not too late, don’t read any reviews before you read the novel – some reviews and even interviews with Sittenfeld give away the crucial plot point early in the novel, which actually did happen to Laura Bush, and it would be an awful shame to spoil that ghastly surprise, which gives profound meaning to the future decisions of the character.

     

    The Cookbook Collector

    Allegra Goodman,  The Dial Press, 2010.

    Two sisters, Emily and Jess, lost their mother when they were both small children. Emily is the older one, responsible and methodical, the CEO of Veritech, a new dot com company that will soon go public and make millions of dollars. Jess, the younger, rides a bicycle, tries to save trees and works in a second hand bookshop called Yorrick’s Used and Rare Books. Jess is studying philosophy and Latin. The contrast between the sisters is very touching and amusing, with varying measures of love and exasperation colouring their conversations.

    A mysterious woman visits the bookshop from time to time, selling extremely old and rare cook books. George, the bookshop owner, is intrigued and wants to see the huge collection he knows that she must have. The novel weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and the second-hand bookshop with lively wit and panache. It’s an effortless read in the manner of – some critics have said – ‘a modern-day Jane Austen’ about family secrets, materialism versus idealism, food and cooking, music and love. I can’t wait to read the rest of Allegra Goodman’s novels. Perhaps I’ll have to start catching the bus again (see Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity above).

  • ‘The whole quality of cycling is akin to swimming: the economy of effort, the defiance of gravity, the dancing rhythm, and the general need to keep moving, lest you sink or topple. As modes of propulsion, both could safely be classified as environmentally friendly. I enjoy the gliding, swooping motion of the bike as I enjoy the grace of swimming.’  Roger Deakin. Waterlog, p. 257.

    ‘Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.’  Richard Steele.

    ‘Civilisation’s greatest single invention is the sentence. In it, we can say anything.  John Banville. ‘Authors on Writing’ www.guardian.co.uk/books 3 March 2009.

    ‘Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.’  John Updike.

    ‘I quote others only the better to express myself.’  Montaigne.

    ‘Language is the greatest resource of a culture. It is the repository of thought and the expression of dreams. No activity above the level of brute survival can be accomplished without language. When language is raised to the level of literature, one approaches heaven. Creating a program to develop writers is not a mere idyll for an English department. It is an act of cultural integrity.’  Rita Mae Brown. Starting from Scratch, p. 209.

    ‘Art only comes when there is abandon, and a world of dreaming and waiting and passionate meditation.’  Yeats.

    ‘Everything we think and say has a history.’  Andrew Sayers, opening the Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas April 2011.

    ‘Without literature, human life is animal life.’  Randall Jarrell.

    ‘Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic, or merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. … In reading good literature, I become a thousand men, and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and I am never more myself when I do.’  C.S. Lewis.

    ‘Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.’  V. S. Pritchett.

  • For me, books and writing come first, followed closely by the cinema. I’ve always been in love with words. I combined both of these passions by being a film critic for a few years, writing for various local arts magazines and reviewing films on 2XX and local ABC radio stations. I even went to the Cannes Film Festival once. It was while I was travelling in the area and before I started writing but I pretended to be a journalist and managed to get a Press Card, which got me into any film I wanted to see. It was bliss!

    This brings me to travel. I’ve travelled a lot in Europe, mainly in the Mediterranean areas, the former Yugoslavia etc, bits of the Middle East and a little in Asia and more recently in the US. I love boats and the water and I’ve done a bit of sailing, in the Mediterranean and Adriatic and up the Straits of Malacca. I sailed down the Nile in a felucca back in 1985. It’s the best way to travel, followed by the train. I’m also a fan of cycling and walking – two ways to get to know a place in a different way than speeding through it in a car.

    Wherever I go I’m always drawn to art. I’m passionate about colour and texture. I’m good at interior design and have transformed many an unprepossessing place into a harmonious, vibrant and cheerful-looking space. I practised art myself (painting, photography, off-loom weaving) before writing took over when I came to Canberra over 20 years ago. Recently I combined art and writing in my PhD (University of Canberra 2009) where I wrote a novel, Forty Shades of Green, about three generations of women artists and did a great deal of research in art history plus took some art classes for empirical experience. The novel is about history and creativity, migration and family secrets, and the conflict in women’s lives between love and freedom. I’m currently trying to get this novel published. Three excerpts of it appeared in Hecate (Vol. 35, nos 2/2, 2009).

    I also love music and yoga and the Argentine tango. The musician and teacher, Joaquín Amenábar, visited Canberra recently, and he states in his book, Tango: Let’s dance to the music! (2009), ‘…just as a musician in an orchestra uses his instrument to play a tango, we dancers can play the tango with the instrument that is our body.’

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