Author Archives: Angela (Ms LiteraryMinded)
Imagining India
There are two contradictory opinions about the state of the English-language novel in India at the moment, said author Anjum Hasan. One is that books in English are too focused on contemporary middle-class experience in India, the other extreme is that there’s not enough novels ‘of the interior’. These are opinions, largely though, of writers and critics, whereas for Indian publishers, now is ‘a time of great excitement’. Three or four new publishers have cropped up in the past few years, publishing large amounts of fiction. ‘We’re in the pioneer phase’ said Hasan – publishers are taking risks on young writers, and different kinds of writers.
Chair Stephen McCarty, editor of the Asia Literary Review, wondered if the Booker Prize had had an effect. Hasan said, perhaps when Arundhati Roy won in ’98, but later authors like Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, are oft perceived within India as ‘writing for the West’ and there is some resistance to this. Roy, though, became a figurehead for someone who can make it as a writer in India.
Susan Hawthorne lived in Chennai for four months recently and has read widely in the field of Indian lit. She commented that perhaps India now is like Australia was 10-20 years ago, an explosion of fresh publishers and authors. She said this still sort-of went on, but the ‘excitement’ wasn’t as present. I would argue though, with the growth of online literary communities and the ever-growing ticket sales of writers festivals – this excitement has been somewhat renewed in Australia in the past few years (especially here in Melbourne – our UNESCO City of Literature).
Hawthorne praised Hasan’s novel Lunatic in My Head (Brass Monkey Books) – she found it just ‘so contemporary’. She said ten years ago if she read it she would not have perceived India the way it is portrayed in Hasan’s book. But she spoke of now what she saw – an intersection of the old and the new, the ancient and the contemporary etc. ‘Perhaps it wears its complexity more than some cultures do’.
Hasan spoke about how even the external stereotypes of India can become internalised and can impose on the writing. ‘I don’t see myself as writing about India’, Hasan said. She is writing about contemporary, globalised, connected experience. But a kind of perceived ‘India’ is nonetheless a kind of elephant in the room. Someone like Salman Rushdie, she said, attempts to ‘encapsulate Indian reality for the reader’ but Hasan’s generation is ‘not as concerned’. ‘Global’ influences such as rock music and Shakespeare ‘are just there’. ‘We make them our own’, she said. Writers of Hasan’s generation come from all different backgrounds – they don’t have to have studied English Lit to become a writer (in English) as it may have previously been the case. They have ‘always taken from the [English] tradition what appeals to us’. She said ‘we should stop thinking of the colonial heritage as forever destroying us – it’s a two-way thing.’ Writers in India aren’t particularly interested in the idea of the post-colonial anymore. Hasan is interested in globalisation ‘as a lived experience’ – everything as being ‘so connected’.
Why, though, are we still talking about post-colonialism? Hawthorne had an elegant point: that just as a person remembers and goes over things that have been difficult in the course of their life – the difficult things in a culture’s history will be the ones that linger.
Writers who straddle languages in India are the ‘lifeblood’ of their literary culture, said Hasan. ‘You can’t afford to be monolingual’, as it’s a kind of amnesia. The panel did all express some concern about what is lost with English becoming increasingly dominant, worldwide.
One interesting point Hasan made was that in India they liked ‘positive’ stories about themselves – thus something like Adiga’s The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire (the book and film) caused discomfort locally, as do Arundhati Roy’s outspoken, personal and passionate essays. ‘I don’t think we’re used to that in India,’ she said, ‘we’re used to an impersonal voice’.
During audience q time I asked Hasan if there was much of a lit community among young or emerging writers in India. It surprised me how similar it sounded to our own. She said there’s defintitely an informal community online, and that they hold readings in different cities and that’s one way they meet and learn about each others’ work. But she said it ‘seems quite small’, she worried they’re all just reading each other! It sounds a lot like conversations I’ve had with writerly friends in Melbourne.
I will definitely be adding Hasan’s work to my to-read pile.
Black holes are cool: Alastair Reynolds & China Miéville
I love it when the MWF puts on a genre session (Frontiers of the Imagination), not only because authors like China Miéville and Alastair Reynolds are cool, imaginative, erudite, funny and relevant; but also because you see young dudes in the audience! I don’t know what it is about genre fiction – perhaps it’s the ideas, perhaps the intertextuality – have the sci-fi/fantasy genres always been realms of youth? But then I know plenty of old dudes (BTW, this term for me encompasses male and female) who love spec fic – but don’t seem to be as excited about seeing the authors. Or is it when people get older they think they should be seen to be reading ‘serious’ fiction, instead of fiction about monsters and space ships?
But to the authors at hand. Jeff Sparrow began by asking about favourite authors, conscious influences. Some of Reynolds were, early on, Asimov, Clarke, Dick and more recently Lovecraft. In the ’80s, the cyberpunk movement was ‘enormously exciting’. Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix totally blew Reynolds’ head off. He found it ‘forbidding and difficult to get into’ but sees now that it’s those kind of books that often had the most lasting impact. Reading it was ‘like someone had finally found the colour switch’ in a formerly black & white realm.
Miéville cites the New World writers such as Moorcock, Aldiss and Ballard as having an impact; and weird fic writers like Lovecraft. He noted other kinds of influences like Jane Eyre and Enid Blyton. He is ‘constantly awed by’ M John Harrison’s Viriconium Nights.
Reynolds had a former career as an astrophysicist and was a quiet writer of short stories – when the first novel came out the scientific community was very supportive and colleagues who previously ‘seemed very cautious’ of associating with science fiction came out of the woodwork as readers of the genre. Being a sci-fi writer has, oddly, opened up more doors for Reynolds than being a scientist ever did in terms of publication in certain journals, meeting science luminaries, seeing space ships take off and other cool stuff. Miéville complimented Reynolds though on the way his novels play ‘fast and loose’ and aren’t bogged down at all by ‘hard science’. Miéville made an awesome point about sci-fi being a fiction of ‘philosophical speculation’, not just scientific – and that of course there are the human sciences as well – what’s the use of depicting an incredible space ship when the characters don’t talk like real people?
Miéville is super interested in genre – in learning the intricacies of a genre and working within it ‘respectfully’. He did this with crime in The City and the City. Kraken is urban fantasy which has no sparkly vampires – it’s making the urban and the fantasy inexplicable. The city, London, ’as a dream of itself’ he later said.
Miéville is ‘a very neurotic planner’ with flow charts, notebooks etc., whereas Reynolds has a notion of where he’s going but then just ‘bulldozes in’. He does thus paint himself into corners ‘all the time’, but he backs out and tries again, enjoying the process of discovery.
They both spoke on the tradition of kinda ‘riffing’ (Miéville’s word) on classics of the genre. Reynolds says he consciously riffs on things but ‘no one gets them’. Miéville said it’s a very intertextual field but he suspects others might be too, such as crime, romance, lit fic. They’d both love to see their own creations and inventions riffed on well.
Sci-fi as a political genre was briefly discussed. Reynolds says he’s left-leaning, but in a ‘wishy-washy, Guardian reader sense’ which elicited quite a few laughs. Miéville is more politically active and he said in the UK he suspects the genre mainly leans to the liberal left, whereas in the US it’s more apolitical or split. Miéville thinks the genre is kinda essentially political because it throws up questions about things not really being the way they seem. But there’s also a kind of apolitical ‘joy’ in the field. As an example he spoke of gay, black, radical author Samuel R Delaney, but said, his books get read because, y’no, he ‘gives good spaceship’.
‘Thwarted by the general drift of society’: celebrating George Orwell
Yesterday afternoon, Gideon Haigh and Alan Attwood got together with Overland editor Jeff Sparrow to discuss the life and work of George Orwell, 60 years after his passing. Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favourite novels, but I am not so familiar with Orwell’s nonfiction – but I tell you what, Haigh and Attwood’s discussion, and the segments they read, made me want to get to know Orwell intimately. They mentioned such things as the simple and almost timeless language; Attwood mentioned Orwell’s ‘extraordinary grasp of detail’ but also his ‘powerful sense of humanity’; and Haigh noted Orwell’s sincerity and intellectual honesty – as opposed to a lot of today’s ‘phoniness’ and opinion for the sake of having an opinion. Orwell, even in his personal nonfiction, remains disembodied and humble. His consistent enemy was ‘orthodoxy’ and he was aware of contradictions, as in the class systems, but as a writer, ’Orwell never shouts’, the speakers agreed.
I’ll share with you this section that Haigh read from an essay called ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (and I highly encourage you to read it in full) which demonstates the enduring relevance of Orwell’s prose and themes:
‘In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. [Ministry of Information] and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic–political, moral, religious, or aesthetic–was one who refused to outrage his own conscience.’
Attwood mentioned that today, Orwell might in fact be a blogger. What do you think?
You can find more of Orwell’s works collected online, here.
Poetry, music, fire!
Who’d of thought a quiet little writers’ festival panel about poetry and music (Reading Music) would be so full of discord – clanking symbols, a low note sounding beneath some of the words, loud feedback from the audience… It was quite exciting, and Classic FM’s Emma Ayres did a solid job as conductor. On the panel were poets Les Murray, August Kleinzahler, and πO; and author/pianist Anna Goldsworthy.
The panel began with some questions around music and influence. Anna Goldsworthy’s breakthrough pieces included Chopin (and we were treated to some Chopin over the speakers later – where I became quite melancholy and lost); August Kleinzahler’s siblings played badly; πO got all his early music off the jukebox – a combo of Greek music and rock ‘n’ roll; Les Murray enjoyed music as live performance as a child but as he grew the radio became ‘just noise’ and actually turned him off music a bit. Goldsworthy noted then, that there’s a difference between hearing and ‘listening’, though, to which all nodded.
The questions was raised re pulse (which in my notes looks like pube, heh) rhythm, cadence, melody – some properties of music and how they apply to the work. Murray doesn’t consciously use any musical tools like this, but ‘does it by touch’ and when he later read a poem about bats, imitating the sounds of their way of seeing, it was certainly musical. Kleinzahler has been ‘stimulated by a piece of music’, but many things come into the mix when he’s writing – music, musac (that’s popular, noise music), visual arts, emotional states and more. πO demonstrated the way rock and blues came into his work by performing a fantastic poem about work (to which Kleinzahler tapped his foot). It was here I first noticed a kind of antithesis between πO and Les Murray – it seems πO resented something Murray once wrote about ‘ethnic’ writing… and admitted they were on ‘different planes’.
But πO also disagreed with any suggestion of raw talent, of genius – he said it’s all hard work. He said you ‘bathe’ in influences, yes, you learn, but you go through that and then you work hard. Kleinzahler did not agree (tapping πO on the leg). He said ‘you can persist all you like, but if you don’t have talent you’ll persist until you disappear’. What do you guys think?
The last bit of conflict came from an audience member, who, on the way in gave us flyers about a deceased poet whose works had been turned into song. He put up his hand and criticised the panel for not mentioning ‘rhyme’ and folk music – which he said is poetry sang. πO thought he was being very reductive (I think most of the audience agreed). And I’m not sure he really did his friend on the flyers a favour by being so cranky.
So, an entertaining song and dance. And it was a treat to hear each of them read such different, definitely rhythmic, pieces.
Picto-memento post: Dog’s Tales at the Toff
It was dark. Stories and memories were shared. Images remain.
DBC Pierre warned us not to go drinking with lizards and snakes (before shedding his own skin).
Carmel Bird and her grandson shared some fun buns, surrounded by guns.
Josephine Rowe and her father were talking about birds and weren’t talking about birds.
Kalinda Ashton’s shopgirl character was perhaps misinterpreting the signs.
Tiffany Murray discovered music and father figures.
David Carruthers was thrust into a position of fear and responsibility.
And, because of a crush, Elif Batuman judged a unique contest and sat with a canoe.
Complex life (and our plastic brains), a beautiful fluke
Argh! My computer was playing up, now I have limited time, and so much to blog!
In short:
* the universe is expanding
* some people have alien hands
* Michael Robotham and I went to the same highschool
I really enjoyed being introduced to physicist, astronomer and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser yesterday, in conversation with Cosmos editor Wilson Da Silva. Gleiser spoke about the problems with, and reasons why, scientists for years have been going after a theory that incorporates ‘oneness’, a synchronicity to the universe, a ‘theory of everything’ (one reason being of course a religious cultural hangover). Gleiser’s book Imperfect Creation partly argues the evidence for a much more chaotic universe – it’s a kind of antithesis to super string theory. He says matter, and life itself, both came about through’ asymmetries and imperfections’ – a bit of chance, in other words. But on a philosophical level, this is something to be celebrated – ‘life is an amazing phenomenon, but its extremely rare’, and life existing for such an extended period that it can complexify, this is even more of a fluke. So this means we can rethink our role in the universe – as our being here is rare and precious.
There was so much more to this session, and I apologise to Gleiser for my limited explanation. Gleiser’s discussion was animated by metaphor and gesture, so those of us in the audience without a science background could still understand everything. We got to be galaxies, for example. Which was cool. Gleiser was a beautiful speaker (with his Brazilian-American accent) and has such lovely eyes…
Moving on. It was a bit of a mistake to go from one mind-expanding session to another, I think. My lovely boyfriend and I went to see Norman Doidge and Perminder Sachdev speak with Natasha Mitchell (from ABC Radio’s All in the Mind) and it was fascinating, but our brains weren’t feeling very plastic at this stage, just a bit crammed. Doidge’s book has been extremely popular – talking about revolutionary discoveries in neuroplasticity. Sachdev’s book describes his work in neuropsychiatry and tells stories of some of the patients and cases.
Last night was the opening party of the festival - a blur of lovely faces, and so much fun.
I have an hour until my panel A Wordsmith’s Dream, which has moved from the tiny ACMI Studio into BMW Edge! A slightly intimidating thing, but a wonderful one… Can’t wait to see you there.
How Russia changed their lives
I have this terrible habit of becoming interested in too many things, and ending up with massive lists to follow up on – Italian cinema, Australian authors, HBO TV series. One of these things is Russian literature. I’ve done a bit of Chekhov, I’m making my way through some Nabokov, I’ve done a little Tolstoy, a little Dostoyevsky and a little Gogol. Then I read Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (you’ll find my blurb in the Australian edition) and I was overcome with excitement for what I still have to discover.
Batuman as a child growing up in New Jersey was quite enchanted by the idea of Russia – a mysterious other place, a ‘wonderland’. But she was possessed by Russian literature quite by accident. The first novel she fell for was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina - she says, ‘for the first time I had an idea of the novel that can compete with life’, that can run alongside a life. Batuman finds Russian literature richer in some ways than literature in the English or French canon - the way it can be ‘funny and sad at the same time’. Pushkin and Gogol are two of her favourites. Batuman decided to explore Russian literature as an academic, after discovering she wasn’t the kind of writer who imitated, re-enacted or re-lived the books she loved, but the kind who gets out into the world and immerses herself in ‘a metonymic, geographic way’ – like going to Tolstoy’s house, and meeting the crazy relatives of dead authors. Batuman found she enjoyed ‘going through, looking for clues to an absent person’. She added: ‘which is a lot of the time what life is like’.
Also on this panel, chaired by Judy Armstrong, were historian Sheila Fitzpatrick and author Maria Tumarkin. Tumarkin was born in the former Soviet Union, emigrated to Australia in 1989, and her book Otherland charts the journey she made back to Russia and the Ukraine with her teenage daughter. Tumarkin said she had avoided writing about Russia for years, and mentioned the fact that so many great writers only wrote insightful things about Russia after leaving. After living in Australia and inhabiting the language for a while, she then felt she could write about the place from which she came, and what was happening at the time she left. Her books are personal in style, because the journey into the past and into Russia is personal. Tumarkin didn’t want to write a journalistic book or straight historical enquiry.
Sheila Fitzpatrick grew up in Melbourne in the ’40s and ’50s, when the Soviet Union ‘wasn’t generally loved’ by most people. Her father was a socialist though, and Fitzpatrick sees her interests stemming from Cold War tensions. She wrote her final year thesis at Melbourne University on Russian music – at a time when it was difficult to get research materials. Fitzpatrick told a few stories about traveling to Russia and to Uzbeckistan in the late ’60s. ‘Unlike other people who had to get out of the Soviet Union, I had to get in’, she said. She was interested in their ‘extraordinarily uncomfortable and inconvenient everyday’. As a foreigner she was marked. The British Embassy instructed her not to make friends as ‘they’re all KGB’. The Russians, too, always thought foreigners might be spies. Fitzpatrick even started to think ‘how do I know I’m not a spy?’ Fitzpatrick is Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago and an annual Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney. She has written many books on the subject.
After the session I realised I forgot to bring my copy of The Possessed to get signed. Never mind, the Russian lady was present at the Federation Square Book Market and I picked up Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I’ve always wanted to read, and Elif Batuman kindly signed it ‘Fyodor (via Elif)’ for me…
Many ways to be Uuman (a festival diary post)
The festival adrenaline kicked in for me yesterday afternoon. First up, I had my Q&A session with global chameleon Mohezin Tejani. Mo and I had a session together at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali last year (you can enter to win a trip to this at the festival bookshop, Readings). Mo’s life is amazing - from his exile from Uganda during Idi Amin’s reign of terror; to his humanitarian work around the globe; his exhilarating and his terrifying experiences, such as climbing Kilimanjaro and being caught in a tsunami; and his curious and continuing evolution as an adventurer who calls the globe his home. His book A Chameleon’s Tale places the reader and all their five senses alongside Mo in different cultures, in different places and times around the world.
I was running late for one of the sessions I was most looking forward to, a celebration of Albert Camus, and GOD DAMNIT I was locked out, as the venue was at capacity. I cried into my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus then decided to stop waiting outside the door as with a ‘leap’ of hope, and stay lucid. I pushed a boulder back up the escalator.
Which brought me to the launch of DBC Pierre‘s Lights Out in Wonderland at the gorgeous little red-lit Chaise Lounge on Queen Street. I haven’t read Booker-prize-winner Pierre as of yet, but his new book sounds both strange and necessary. We stood around for a while sipping free booze and munching cashews, and just as I thought I’d have to leave to go line up for the Keynote, the book was launched by Pierre’s long-time friend Roger Pike, a winemaker (Marius Wines, McLaren Vale) who is also a character in the book. The speech was so moving – talking about their shady pasts, their long friendship with its inevitable gaps and anagram games which have resurfaced in the book and the name of the Pike’s next wine. Pike had tears in his eyes at the end, and of course, this got me going.
Pierre took the microphone and thanked the small crowd and said, with such genuine gratitude: ‘All that is exaggerated in fiction about comradeship you have today made me feel’.
I had to run off, but I’ve made a note to get the book ASAP and add it to the teetering ‘tower of hope’.
The Age Book of the Year Awards were announced at the first Keynote. The winners were:
Nonfiction: Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth
Poetry: Pirate Rain by Jennifer Maiden
Fiction: Lovesong by Alex Miller
Overall: Lovesong by Alex Miller
For those of you who read me over at LiteraryMinded you’ll know I am so very pleased for Alex!
Alex was one of the authors then reading in the Eight Ways to Be Human Keynote Address. The others included Brenda Walker, who read a beautiful section (one of my favourite parts) from Reading By Moonlight about her father’s actions when their house flooded, when she was a child. Barry Dickins (whom I have nicknamed the Philip Seymour Hoffman of Australian poetry) read from his memoir of depression and treatment Unparalleled Sorrows - a day out on the streets from the ‘unalive’ clinic, a visit from his father (so vividly described). I’d still like to get my hands on this one.
Cate Kennedy was her usual delightful and warm self, speaking of her daughter’s joy in improvising language, in creating meaning, and Cate’s resistance to boxing her in (to ‘proper’ language categories) just yet. I think my favourite speaker, though, was Jostein Gaarder – not specifically for what he said, but the way he said it. I don’t mean his accent – I’m part Norwegian and have traveled there and am very familiar with the accent (it’s really a comfort), but throwing his hands up in the air, orating so loud that certain audience members around me flinched. He spoke of reciprocity, doing good unto others – but carrying that generationally. Doing good for the next generation. ‘Our time has no more central importance than all the epochs that will come after,’ he said, forcefully and animatedly.
The second Keynote was of course, God, as he was called by the chair Sue Turnbull. Anyway, being the first person in the hall, sitting up the back, I got a got look at the cult of Joss Whedon. Fans strutted in, geeks in coats and lace, with boots and fan shirts, pockets of blue and orange hair. The energy was quite infectious. God strolled in on stage and there were squeals and whoops. Whedon was smart, passionate and funny, and very encouraging to the crowd, telling them everyone can ‘make it’ nowadays. What he meant was, everyone can gain an audience through independent means. Whedon was refreshingly immodest – saying he believed from the beginning he’d make shows with cult followings, because that kept him going. But ‘it wasn’t until I started writing television that I discovered I was a writer’, Whedon said. Buffy was one of the shows in the ’90s that became part of a kind of revolution in TV as a storytelling medium. Whedon loves writing for TV, it’s ‘living with a story for years and years, in a collaborative fashion’. And Whedon admitted, as Buffy took off at the same time as the web, its success was ‘definitely related to the internet’. Whedon interacted, early on, with online fan communities. Whedon and the crowd lamented the end of Firefly and there were such sad whimpers when Whedon says he still thinks of the Firefly episodes he could have made.
Whedon doesn’t set out to write to a particular theme, issue, or to create a franchise, but he walks around with the story a bit, then gets the good bits down, filling in some of the exegetical stuff later. The theme of corporate monopolisation runs through his work, and this just occurs, he says, as it is an issue he’s concerned with. ‘The culture of the giant company is here and it’s destroying the fabric of our society’. Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog was a totally independent venture. And it’s heaps of fun.
Now it’s Saturday and I’m about to rush off to the festival again… See you there!
Bodies: burnt or birdseed? Tom Jokinen in conversation
Canadian journalist Tom Jokinen spent 12 months working in a funeral home to learn what happens to bodies after we die. At the beginning of his session Jokinen joked: ‘if things get a little too graphic, have a muffin.’ Things got a little graphic, but they got a lot bizarre. The bizarreness came from learning some of secular, consumer culture’s answers to plugging the hole left by tradition.
Funerary rites aren’t as straightforward as they used to be. Where there once was a coffin, a hearse, a chapel, a grave – there are now plenteous choices on how your ‘remains’ can be taken care of, and how they can be memorialised. Urns with golf clubs on them, basketball-shaped urns and art urns are some examples Jokinen gave on how the deceased are often now ‘identified by their hobbies rather than their religion.’ Hearses are being fitted out with urn-holders so the ashes can still be given a proper send-off, and funeral directors are more becoming ‘event planners’. ‘We are in a wild west, commercially’, Jokinen said.
Green issues are changing the industry too, as traditional burial and cremation both have a negative impact on the environment. One option is to be buried in a biodegradable casket in a burial forest. The forest then becomes the memorial for the person.
One of my favourite methods was the urn-birdfeeder, where human remains are mixed with birdseed!
Jokinen loved reading the obits in the local Winnipeg rag even before he took on the job of apprentice undertaker. Reading them while doing the job both ‘helped and hindered the work’, he said. The obits in Winnipeg are ‘really sweet’, but it was often harder when you knew the person had a dog, or worked at the local supermarket.
Jokinen’s book Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker in Training goes deeper into issues the funeral industry has faced and is facing, such as the sometimes tarred image of the undertaker – seen often as someone who rips people off. But the undertaker is someone, Jokinen learnt in the funeral home he worked in, who provides a caregiver role in society, who helps people when they are vulnerable and provides a necessary service.
Tom Jokinen is on another panel tomorrow, alongside James McNeish, titled Strange Truths.
MWF 2010 authors on… air travel
As lots of authors are flying in to Melbourne, and the festival is about to begin, here is the last in the ‘MWF 2010 authors on…’ series. As always, click on their names for info on their festival appearances. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series!
It is my first flight.
I am 11 months old. We are at Essendon airport. In those days you got to walk out onto the tarmac, right up to the aircraft. All your relatives could come up to the plane and wish you goodbye. We are on our way to Canada. We are going away for a long time. We will stop in Sydney, Honolulu and Vancouver. When we get off the plane in Toronto my father is waiting on the tarmac in the blistering cold. I haven’t seen him for six months. I don’t remember him at all.
Someone ought to write a book on air travel etiquette for international flights (unless it’s already been done and I missed it). It could include such helpful hints as: smile at the person/people sitting next to you, but not too warmly; bring along a blow-up pillow to avoid leaning on some poor stranger’s shoulder; if you have a window-seat, visit the loo before the lights are dimmed for the ‘night’. Other suggestions welcome.
I developed a bad fear of flying as a result of one very bad flight from Melbourne about 15 years ago in which the plane circled Sydney for a long time, unable to land because of bad weather, and in my memory it was actually hit by lightning but maybe that just can’t be true. Since then the fear has receded – I guess I’ve been up and down enough times in a plane by now to have beaten it into my mind that I probably will survive. It’s still a good excuse to enjoy a few hours on Valium, although that has become a real luxury now, something I only do when I travel without my son (international flights with a small child are a whole other story). I am a compulsive eavesdropper so I love the opportunities a plane provides. There’s nothing like the view I saw once, the moon in a night sky on one side of the plane and dawn breaking on the other.
‘On another tip, another trip, another plane/
I think of life and I wonder will it be the same.’ – ‘Hemingway’, Omar Musa, 2009
Omar Musa “Hemingway” (Dir: Tom Spiers) from MRTVIDZ on Vimeo.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
