writing as time travel

Ratbags and smartarses,

February 23, 2009 at 6:07 pm | Posted in genre isn't dead yet but it should be, writing | 8 Comments
Tags: all art is performance art, writing as time travel

You’ll find lots of them at sea.
(insert- Don’t say Jackie Chan style)
or give away your lack of education, son.
He says,

balancing the whiskey on the very edge of the piano.
You see this here tiny one is the high ‘C’
haha and Bootsy!, he says turning around just
as the sunglasses prophylactic appeared.

Air.

January 21, 2009 at 7:03 pm | Posted in writing | 18 Comments
Tags: The Philippino Nurse, writing, writing as time travel

There is a constant atmospheric pressure insistently determined to create a sense of smallness. But inside me was an equally constant pressure outward, toward grandness and the large gesture. I wanted to assert that all those names you know, Shakespeare et al, Al who?, Capone?, were mere humans but they did not live in an age where someone had crossed every horizon only to meet someone else crossing in the other direction.

It was the urge to create not merely repeat. As a young man I mistook it for destiny and then in my middle age for arrogance. This sentence should start with the word ‘now’, as in, ‘Now I…’ He coughs. The nurse is from the Philippines.

I thought it was about attaining immortality, not so much a fear of death more a dread of not existing, and as a consequence forgetting to remember would be an invaluable skill. I discovered the complete unreliability of memory. She complains that I should only push the red button if I cannot breath at all but I like to watch her walk away. I had a dog. It died as all dogs do.

There is a constant atmospheric pressure, he coughs again reaches for the oxygen mask. The nurse is from the Philippines, “Still breathing, old man?” as she checks his chart. I liked to watch her walking away.

The Mythology Of Robert

December 20, 2008 at 5:27 pm | Posted in memoirs, writing | 9 Comments
Tags: australian sentences, memoirs, writing, writing as time travel

The great achievements of the modern age, post-Pharoahs, were rarely singular. Generally they were bought with the sweat and blood and lives of ordinary men and women, driven more by need than desire for immortality. You expect me to tell you there was some nobility in their honest poverty but that is a myth designed to comfort you and keep you silent.

There were lamed wufnicks, of course. A beautiful image of the wandering innocents, a handful of redeemers with no thought for themselves, unaware of their purpose. Should one realise their state they would die and be replaced.

And the star vampires of H. P. Lovecraft who consumed not only your life but all trace of your being, memories, mistakes, til the world becomes just as it would have been if you had never existed.

I told her on the telephone that Andrew found him blue. She said I’m sure you did all that you could do, please never contact me again.

I lived by the ocean in a wide bay of mangroves and at low tide vast mud flats stretching off to two horizons, one the line of the shore and one the line of the sky and in between the vast welcoming silence of the sea with ospreys for companions and my shock.

(The story behind the second last paragraph can be found here. A True Story.)

A True Story.

December 12, 2008 at 7:22 pm | Posted in memoirs, writing | 18 Comments
Tags: hello Ms Squirrel, memoirs, writing, writing as time travel

which happened a short time after I had my heart broken the second time. The first time I walked in on my best friend and my first love (and I should point out in the interest of full disclosure that I have no brothers and my father was emotionally absent but I despise Freud.) I was a lonely and difficult child, to see them and here we apologise for our divergence into the hieronymous poetical, fucking
I woke up in a stupor and saw it and wondered if I had encouraged it in some mad fantasy of Berlin in the 20′s vintage which devolves into a drab Catholic graveyard, a grieving mother and us, like his pack, shuffling our feet in the dust in the background.
I don’t know why that war started but I don’t blame her. We just are and things just happen. I said, mate, a shotgun will make so much mess, he said, i love her, i said, mate. His brother, Andrew, found him blue on the toilet floor. Later that night I woke up, in a stupor and saw them sleeping and thought fuck, that’s not the right ending.

Independent Publishing.

December 9, 2008 at 6:44 pm | Posted in writing | 17 Comments
Tags: Add new tag, independent publishing, memoirs, writing, writing as time travel

Squirrels hoard apparently. We don’t have squirrels, we have possums. Sorry, little in-joke there. Independent publishing, as in independent films and independent music, at some point every writer of anything other than cookbooks will consider it. Especially these days. It’s free. You can get a high quality book out on the market very quickly.

The only problem is that people who were schmoozing their way up the food chain will sneer at you without having read your work or your blog. The first thing they will do, is check your publisher and if it is Lulu, they will ignore you or steal from you. Can you believe there are still people in the world who call it ‘vanity’ publishing? Vanity is holding on to it because it might be worth something someday.

Personally I didn’t want to wait and I don’t care how many copies I sell. Just opening that package and holding in my hands something about which I had fantasised for twenty years was reward enough for me.

I’m hopeless at social networking. The chances of me getting published before the day I told some over-educated young ‘editor’ with an MFA that I know better than they do because I spent twenty years writing it? The limit approaching zero degrees.

That’s cool. Have a simply fantabulous day full of tiny miracles like unexpected fields of tulips bursting into joyous spontaneous splendour. I am off to the post office to check for a package.

One Shift Ends.

September 8, 2008 at 6:31 pm | Posted in writing | 17 Comments
Tags: The Phillipino Nurse, writing, writing as time travel

The silly old coot is hammering the wrong buzzer again, she thinks. She had explained to him at least twenty times that the white button delivers more morphine and her buzzer was the red one but either he didn’t care or couldn’t tell the difference any more. By the time she arrived at his bedside he had fallen asleep again. This one always falls asleep with his right hand wrapped around his penis. At first she had thought it was funny seeing as the ugly grey lump couldn’t have worked for at least a decade. Now it seemed so sad to her, less like he was trying to pleasure himself and more like he was trying to protect it from something in his dream.

She checked the monitor and there was the familiar peak of activity just before he had pushed the buzzer. It was reassuring. He had stopped speaking nearly two weeks ago and the occassional blip on the screen was the only sign of anything at all happening inside of him. Apart from the constant buzzing of course. She adjusted the line from the morphine drip which had become tangled in the blanket. Her feet were aching. It was near the end of her shift and she should be looking forward to going home but the lonely empty apartment held its own horrors. She looked down at the shrivelled dribbling husk in the bed and just for one moment felt an urge to climb into the bed with him and curl herself up into some shared dream of morpheus. The urge faded and folded into some lines of poetry she had read so long ago,

“There is no ceiling and no sky
No calming words nor lullaby
This is not dream nor mystery
A passing scene wherein we lie.”

“She gave me water,” Quasimodo.

September 1, 2008 at 7:29 pm | Posted in writing | 27 Comments
Tags: anaethesia and thirst, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, writing, writing as time travel

Australia is a dry country. There is a point at which writing becomes the art of manipulation. At the very least you need to capture and hold the reader’s attention to the end of the piece using some degree of craft. Practice makes the necessary techniques instinctive and the choice becomes only where to lead them. More practice enables more voices, she says. Why should I trust you, peering over her sunglasses and sipping her drink, you’re a writer and I know how unstable you people are, and how clever and cunning.

I, the Paul Squires, was a very normal person. At best he was less ‘good’ than most, being far too lazy and undisciplined to be considered moral. He drank and made a living in a job. He was not poor as some point of monklike honour, he was poor because he was an anarchist with a dislike for authority and a laziness which precluded any position of responsibility. He was lecherous and had been known to indulge in the most pornographic of thoughts concerning the most innocent and unsuspecting passersby. He had poor posture as a result of a broken back caused by throwing himself/falling under a train when younger.

I don’t even consider myself particularly intelligent, he thinks. As a result of many years of slow, monobrained study he knows a lot about a very small area of interest and he trusts his instincts. The one ability he has which he worked very hard for a long time to achieve is to manipulate the language and in so doing to manipulate the reader. He tried to use this skill to make things of beauty and to induce a sense of the miraculous and perhaps divine behind the concept of beauty and to persuade people that social life is not particularly difficult if based on compassion and respect.

These ideas and most of the others you may find drifting around this hospital bed are not particularly original and I don’t think this makes me a particularly wonderful or good person either just more deeply manipulative for one very simple and overriding reason. I like to be happy and it is far easier for me to be happy if the people around me are happy. All the male animals here are fictions because the writer’s voice is always an artificial construct, it is inevitable. And all the female creatures could be the language, the divine other, she who gave me water, nurse, he says, pushing the buzzer again,