i just wanted to personally thank the Weekend Australian for this magnificent headline:
a delightful thing to read while your savings are dwindling away and your mind buried in the darker recesses of your next book, if i may say so. if only i had a smidgin of industrial power i'd be on strike too.
the answer was the usual one - that it's some kind of weird pathology. writers are apparently a type born with 'exploit me' tattooed on our foreheads. we're not only powerless to change our society's priorites - we're insane! whee! of course, this is consistent with what i've been posting about here lately. but part of the depressing-hole aspect of the writing life is the fact that you are chronically undernourished by the culture around you.
i just bought the collected works of sylvia plath (yeah, i know, but it was a dollar at the library sale) and every time i look at it i'm reminded of the line in the bikini kill song about how writers (especially women) are constantly told we're supposed to be suicides.
fortunately, amid the horrible pay and conditions there are occasional successes like this:
to keep me from turning into a pathetic parody of a self-harming teenager.
and a lovely publication it is, on first perusal, full of magic and surprises. i'm not just saying that because my name's on the jacket.
i went to a little open mic thing on the lawn in the maul yesterday, a reading of local writers' reactions to The Intervention (i wish there was an html tag to surround certain words with sinister stormclouds). i didn't end up reading - a combination of not having a specific piece and feeling uncomfortable, for various reasons. it was the usual crowd - 99% white women - and the usual storywall backdrop of happy-aboriginal-children videos, which is getting annoying. oh, and the usual apartheid, not in the sense of segregation, but in the sense of two groups of people living in the same space with completely different world views and interests.
a drunk aboriginal woman in a footy beanie wanted to get on the mic, but settled for heckling. some young men walked past and started taking the piss out of us: 'hey, i'm aboriginal!' one yelled; the other, 'merry christmas!' ...and all us educated white women giggled.
we can take a joke, but we still don't know what we're doing here, or how to manage the contradictions of this town, our existence in it. it was a weird evening, even taking my current ambivalence about Alice into account.
but that's a whole other post.
a delightful thing to read while your savings are dwindling away and your mind buried in the darker recesses of your next book, if i may say so. if only i had a smidgin of industrial power i'd be on strike too.
the answer was the usual one - that it's some kind of weird pathology. writers are apparently a type born with 'exploit me' tattooed on our foreheads. we're not only powerless to change our society's priorites - we're insane! whee! of course, this is consistent with what i've been posting about here lately. but part of the depressing-hole aspect of the writing life is the fact that you are chronically undernourished by the culture around you.
i just bought the collected works of sylvia plath (yeah, i know, but it was a dollar at the library sale) and every time i look at it i'm reminded of the line in the bikini kill song about how writers (especially women) are constantly told we're supposed to be suicides.
fortunately, amid the horrible pay and conditions there are occasional successes like this:
to keep me from turning into a pathetic parody of a self-harming teenager.
and a lovely publication it is, on first perusal, full of magic and surprises. i'm not just saying that because my name's on the jacket.
i went to a little open mic thing on the lawn in the maul yesterday, a reading of local writers' reactions to The Intervention (i wish there was an html tag to surround certain words with sinister stormclouds). i didn't end up reading - a combination of not having a specific piece and feeling uncomfortable, for various reasons. it was the usual crowd - 99% white women - and the usual storywall backdrop of happy-aboriginal-children videos, which is getting annoying. oh, and the usual apartheid, not in the sense of segregation, but in the sense of two groups of people living in the same space with completely different world views and interests.
a drunk aboriginal woman in a footy beanie wanted to get on the mic, but settled for heckling. some young men walked past and started taking the piss out of us: 'hey, i'm aboriginal!' one yelled; the other, 'merry christmas!' ...and all us educated white women giggled.
we can take a joke, but we still don't know what we're doing here, or how to manage the contradictions of this town, our existence in it. it was a weird evening, even taking my current ambivalence about Alice into account.
but that's a whole other post.
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