Paying attention on the Mekong

Several years ago I spent two days drifting down the Mekong River from Thailand into Laos, and still it haunts me. While others huddled down with their books, ate and drank, or chatted, we found a spot in the stern. Mesmerised by life on the ancient waterway, I dared not take my eyes off its banks and streams for even a moment.
People in long narrow river boats tended crops on remote banks or nets strung across rocks. They rowed, or steered motorized river boats, between villages or paths to mountain fields. Large cargo boats passed us regularly, carrying all manner of produce and goods. Families lived in the helms. Children played sure-footed on the decks.
Unusually for me I didn't pick a book up for the entire journey. I pointed sights out to my husband or took necessary subsistence, but mostly I sat motionless soaking the experience in.
How often do we allow ourselves to truly be in the present like this, soaking in scenes and experiences that will continue to affect us years later? With iPhones, iPads, computers, and yes, even books, we allow ourselves to be distracted from our present, that is our lives, for almost every waking moment. I wonder what I will remember of the days I spent fixed to a screen of some kind in ten years time?

Eureka!

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Anne Enright on writing

Booker prize winner Anne Enright nails the reasons people write.  To stay at it is an effort of will and they must really want to write. Writing has become such a habit for her that she feels bereft without it. Self-definition is also a reason for her writing but she insists it all comes down to a strong, almost irresistible need to write.
I've known that urge to make sense of the world through writing and have filled volumes of journals and megabytes of memory with my meanderings. Some makes it through to the public eye as fiction, essay or poetry but much remains as private evidence of my obsession to learn about the world.

The Taste of River Water

I heard about Cate Kennedy's latest book on Radio National's wonderful Book Show. The Taste of River Water is a collection of poetry on every phase of Australian life, but particularly life in rural Australia. A woman's response to bush people and happenings, to the loss of a baby, as well as to experiences of Australians abroad.

Cate neatly captures the stoicism and laconic attitude of country people. I worked with farmers and their animals for the first 30 years of my professional life and know well the kind of people who leave the town photographic competition for:


                                          "the long drive home,
                                          to the big bone-dry expanse of land beyond salvaging
                                          with a second prize certificate
                                          and so few words between them


                                          no speaking up
                                          no protest or complaint
                                          no claim of being wronged, or misrepresented"


She slips her knife of words between readers' complacency and piety in poems about contemporary issues. Irish commissioners too busy eating their dinner to save starving famine victims at their door are compared to our current treatment of refugees in her clever The Poor Commissioners.

"But they are with us,
trudging with the last of their energy,
thousands of miles now, from poorhouses and famine fields,
chilled and exiled, holding pitchforks or children
or unsigned paperwork,
forged, faded identifications, the wrong currencies,
they are with us and we will not see them
as they come through the valley,
spurred by a mirage of lit windows
and laughable hopes of some borrowed hearth,
they are with us, and we are done with them,
we will not meet their eyes."


Every word works to draw us in and make us culpable. The language, alliterations ('forged, faded identifications'), repetitions of phrases ('they are with us'), and metaphors reinforced with the marching rhythm skilfully lead us on.
This is an excellent and consistent collection of poetry available in e-book or hard copy from  Kobo.

Call yourself a writer?

Dean Biron jointly won this year's Australian Book Review's  Calibre Prize for and Outstanding Essay with a rather jaded, if not bitter, piece called The Death of the Writer. In moving to the academy from a life in the police force he seems to have taken on its world-weariness, skepticism and elitism with a neophyte's enthusiasm. While worshipping at the altars of the classics, Kafka, Malouf, Conrad, he disdains and dismisses the writing course and festival attendees who aspire to be writers and who, heaven forbid, actually call themselves writers with what he deems insufficient cause.
Biron agonises over the worthiness of his writing in the"face of the standards set by antecedents such as Conrad." He battles with self doubt (no wonder!) but believes that to call oneself a writer is to pretend to conquer these doubts. Calling oneself a writer is not supposed to be an easy thing, it should be a battle. He does not want to be classed with those who pass themselves off as writers: the journalists, reviewers, soap opera writers, ghost writers, biographers, memoirists and - gasp - bloggers who fill "cyberspace with cliched gossip." The "appellation of writer ... should perhaps remain exclusive to that rare living being who has transcended anonymity and written himself or herself into the greater culture".  And who decides who may be called a writer? Are we back to the glorious days of the canon of literature and the gatekeepers pontificating in their ivory towers? Did this guy not take a unit in popular literature or cultural studies in his entire university career?
I agree with him on one matter: the main trait of writers is "the necessity to write, the requirement to live much of one's life through the prism of writing. To need to write, that is the vital thing." I write to sort out matters in my own mind, to truly understand my life and ideas. My life is not real until I have written it down. Writing nails the day, my thoughts, my reading to paper and is the only way I can  pursue and capture knowledge and understanding.
When Biron gets back to the point of his essay after taking pot shots at all who have ever attended a writing course or festival, he expands on Barthes' death of the author in a convincing and profound way. He examines the paradox that those who want to write well write in order to live but must "figuratively die at the end of each day." The words they have written change them and make them more self aware and self critical than they were before. The person they were at the beginning of the writing has gone, never to return.
His final advice while sound smacks of the fragile male ego: "give up worrying about whether or not you are already a writer. Reject the notion that by classing yourself a as writer you might one day induce others to do the same. Just go ahead and write, damn it." A person who plays cricket is a cricketer, one who paints walls is a painter, one who sings is a singer. Their talent and ability don't come into it. I have written this blog, surely I am a writer.

The Blackwater Lightship

This time in a month I will be on the west coast of Ireland.To get in the mood I thought I would read some Irish novels. Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship was the first I picked off my shelves. Much of it is set in Enniscorthy not far from where I'll be staying and the rest is acted out in Dublin, where I land in early June (following in HRH footsteps?).
Toibin's prose is typically understated, his sentence construction simple, reflecting the tight-lipped characters. He layers character and action deceptively slowly. Not much seems to happen but backstory and shifts in mood and attitude register chapter by chapter until we realise that a turnaround in the relationship between mother and daughter has been achieved.
This gradual unfolding worked for me in The Blackwater Lightship but I tired of the slow pace of Toibin's latest novel Brooklyn well before its anticlimactic ending. His writing is not for sustained reading on a long journey. It works best as bed time reading - a bite at a time, mimicking the tiny portions of story and character he allows us in each chapter.

The Lightkeeper's Wife

Mary the Bruny Island ex-lightkeeper's wife returns to the island off the east coast of Tasmania in poor health and with a secret that she resists revealing to her three adult children. She raised these children in the isolation and wildness of the island before the light was mechanised. Now they live scattered on the mainland avoiding each other and memories of their childhood.

On Bruny Island Mary compels Leon the ranger to take her about and she gradually builds a relationship with him. Part of her story is revealed in her interaction with him and part in her memory of the places he takes her to. As a teenager Mary's parents banished her to Bruny Island to prevent an unsuitable liaison.  She met the steady boy Jack on a neighbouring farm and married him, but the embers of her first love remained ready to burst into flame.

Much of the book is taken up with Mary's attempt to recall, relive and understand the years she spent with Jack on Bruny Island. The difficulties of married life in isolated circumstances, where two people provide the only adult company for each other, are examined and later compared to the Antarctic experience of separation of couples for many months. 

Mary's story is told from a third person point of view but her son Tom's story is told in the first person. All the other reviews of this book see the novel as primarily Mary's story but I disagree.  The first person POV of Tom's story makes his thoughts and pain more understandable and his experiences more immediate. As the book progresses we spend more time in his head than Mary's and at the end the secret that Mary has carried through the novel is the answer to his unsettled and troubled way of being in the world. 

The most fluid writing in this novel is in the descriptions of the Antarctic landscape and life on the bases down there. In Karen Vigger's other life she is a wildlife veterinarian and has summered down in the Antarctic.  She captures the changes in light, human reaction to emerging from the darkness of constant winter and the ephemeral but intense nature of contingent relationships and small community life so exactly that she can only have experienced it herself. 

Although Karen's voice is confident and the story mostly compelling, some of the sentence construction and transitions are somewhat awkward. While she 'shows' most of the story some of it is 'told' and these are the least engaging sections. This is not high literature but it is a good story well told and in the main well controlled. This is a story of life on the margins of Australia, on Bruny Island and Antarctic bases, and of solitary people shouldering burdens and keeping secrets from others who could have shared and eased the load.

A Summer Without Men

Siri Hustvedt  dissects a long term relationship in this literary but highly enjoyable novel. Mia's husband leaves her, puts her on 'pause' as she terms it, to pursue a younger work colleague. After a complete breakdown Mia retreats to her hometown to examine her self and life without him. Through contacts with her mother's friends and with some teenage girl students she begins to understand what has happened to her and how she might respond. As an english professor/ writer she also examines her experience through the lens of literature and poetry.
In the old wedding service a man and a woman leave their family homes to make their own home and become one . Mia discovers the truth of this as she feels herself torn in two by the break. Their memories and histories had become so entwined that to pull them apart means pulling her self apart.
Whatever your interest - philosophy, literature, psychology - you will find something of interest in this novel, although perhaps it is a little too self- consciously postmodern. I enjoyed the consideration of the mature relationship and what it means to live and merge with someone for several decades.

Are you reading more?

Am I the only one who is buying MORE books? The publishing industry laments the downturn in sales; reading is supposed to be in decline, at least deep book-type reading is; and writers are being screwed because there is no market, supposedly...
This morning I heard a review of The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt on a podcast of our fabulous Australian Book Show and immediately downloaded it onto my iPad. I am already half way through this examination of women's lives in relation to men. Many points intersect with my life but wait, a review will come later.
And this profligate book buying is not unusual in my household! Every time someone suggests a book to me I check it out on Amazon and if I like the look of it I download it. Sometimes they are duds of course, but because they are cheaper than hard copies it doesn't hurt so much to put them down. ( I am way too old to waste precious reading time on books I don't enjoy/ understand/ respect!)
Maybe this is just another aspect of my impulsive nature. Or perhaps it is a result of a life of deprived access to book shops. I have lived most of my life in the bush over 100 miles from the nearest book shop and dependant on one or two book buying binges a year to keep me alive.
At the moment I have 3 e-books and 1 real one on the go. How about you?

The Writing Life - Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard does not glamorise the writing life. She tells it as it is - mostly hard work, occasional high flying. Many of the metaphors and little stories she tells to describe the life of a writer are amusing, but hit hard at any romantic notions about writing. The cameo story she tells of an inchworm climbing one blade of grass after another, searching frantically for the next step at the top of each blade, resonated with me. Hammering together lines of words, probing ideas, keeping the whole thing together never gets easier. We just keep blindly on, climbing the blade, searching for the next, leaping into the void in faith.
So often we write into the dark. Even long-published, feted writers like Annie Dillard, fear that no one reads them, except maybe nerds, academics,  or other writers in the same field. Once, after publishing a long and complex essay partly concerning a moth and a candle, she thought that no one but an academic critic had understood it, or even read it. Some little boys came to the door as she was despairing about her wasted life. One of the children noticed a picture of a candle and asked if that was the one that the moth had flown into. Annie was bowled over. A child had heard the story and understood it well enough to tell it back. Such incidents lighten the solitude of writing and make the grind worthwhile.
I highly recommend this small book to any writer or aspiring writer. It is full of pearls of wisdom and Annie Dillard parables. It encourages even as it sweeps the rose-coloured glasses onto the floor.