G.S. Johnston's Blog, page 5
October 12, 2011
A Funny thing happened
… so there I was, on a sunny spring day walking with my dog, Miss Mia, along Nutgrove Beach in Hobart Tasmania. We were going to one of my reading spots to read Melissa Foster's Chasing Amanda. Up ahead a piece I noticed another black and white, boarder collie mix doing ball work with a chap. As far as ball work goes, Miss Mia's in the bleachers at the moment as she's strained her front paw but this dog was doing fifteen to the dozen, lovely long and lofty strides to the ball.
- "Do you know who owns this dog?" the chap said.
- "No."
- "It just came up to me with the ball." He had an accent. "I think it's lost."
I looked both ways along the beach. Hobart must be one of the few places left in the world where you can be pretty much on your own with the sun in the middle of the city on a beach. But if there's one thing I can't stand it's a lost dog. I have another lead in my car for such occasions but my car's in Sydney. His collar had a medal but he skittish so to calm him down, I put him on Miss Mia's lead. He acquiesced. The medal said Clarence Council.
- "That's on the other side of the river," I said.
I pointed to the other shore, across the broad Derwent River. As we looked to the water, two dolphins broke, coming up for air, only a few metres from the beach. Both the dogs saw them and moved forward. Neither of them barked or did anything, they were just as intrigue as us. For years I'd thought dolphins were like dogs and in fact they are dogs who'd gone back to the sea.. So they were all distant cousins. They broke the water again, lazy and lolling along, no particular place to be.
– "When I was young," I said, "the river was so polluted nothing lived in it."
They broke again but a powerboat had seen them and came towards us and they took a deep breadth and disappeared.
What to do with the dog? Two dogs, one lead, a busy road between me and home.
I asked the chap if he would help me home, at least to carry my dog across Sandy Bay Road. He was from South Africa and had been on holiday in Hobart and was leaving the next day. He carried Miss Mia across the busy road and then left us. I forgot to ask his name but he was very helpful. Thanks for sharing my concern.
Once home, I rang the number on the tag. The man from Clarence Council tracked the number and said he would ring the owner. I locked Miss Mia in doors and took the dog down to the garden. He drank two bowls of water and then I stopped him. Then the owner rang. He was a tradesperson and was working at a house much further along the beach. The dog's tail waged excitedly when he heard the van approach. He took a very deep breath and jumped into the van and they were gone.
Reflections on an image of Joni
This article and photos showed up on Jane Fonda's website in the last few days. It was so great to see an image of Joni whose been out of the limelight for sometime now. She looks great, happy and relaxed and didn't have a cigarette in sight, at least. And she still sounds like she's still talking, even about music which I found odd given that she has now completely distanced herself from that work.
Her work really had a profound mark on my own. I hope she's happy
October 11, 2011
October 8, 2011
New Ideas in Old Places
Recently, my 85 year old mother had to be admitted to a high-care nursing home. Never to do anything by halves, she'd fallen and cracked 3 ribs and 3 vertebrae. For 10 weeks she has to wear a brace to support her back (medieval torture, she describes it) and consequently needs a high-care convalescence period.
The first day we arrived at the retirement village was bracing. An iced wind whipped off the mountain snow. The facility was warm, well designed, a series of wards housed in wings with flowery courtyards between them. It was airy and light. But as we made our way through the wards, the reality of where we were began to seep in. This wasn't The Golden Girls.
Many, well, most of the residents, were prone in chairs, some looking like dentist chairs for a contorted extraction, arranged in front of wide screen TVs playing The Bold and The Beautiful. As I looked around, I realised, for most of them, there was no one home. Largely, these people were barely cognisant.
On my second visit, I took Miss Mia with me. Immediately on seeing her, a woman with a tight-curl, bleached-blonde hair-do pulled some dog treats from her bag and offered her one. She'd met my mother and must have been expecting Miss Mia. She pointed to a man on the other side of the room.
– "Do you know who that is?"
I looked at the man, slumped in one of those dentist-like contraptions and strapped in, unaware of the world. His lower eyelids had turned out, leaving the conjunctiva exposed and red raw and weepy.
– "No," I said.
– "That's your old headmaster."
– Could he be? Whilst I'd never really liked him, I do remember his English Lit classes thirty years ago, forever challenging and animated. He would shriek at us, trying to wring out a response from 16 year-old boys. As we discussed E. M. Forster, Where Angles Fear to Tread, by some obscure route he digressed into an evisceration of the emerging conservation movement, yelling it was obscene the way people drove enormous 4 wheel drives (SUVs) into the wilderness, ploughing down all in their path whilst proclaiming they were enjoying the outdoors and its conservation. I'd often wondered what he would make of Earth Half-Hour when people plunge themselves into senseless darkness and leave the air-con churning. I kid you not.
This man, and his depth of analysis, had been one of the reasons I'd fallen in love with words. Now, here he was, lying in a conserved heap, no words left at all. Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
An animated woman came in to the sitting room. Elsa introduced herself. She came each day to feed her husband. She had a slight accent, although grammatically perfect, and I asked where she was from.
– "Germany. From the south. We came after the war."
– "I've only been to the north," I said.
– "It was bombed terribly."
– "Yes, Keil is all new."
– "The planes – I can still hear them. They would sound different when they came, straining because of their load of bombs. When they left, they sounded light."
What an observation! But much more than that, it was the most perfect piece of information. I'm working on a new novel, set in Hungary during WWII. There's a scene where the bombers fly over Budapest for the first time and someone needed to make a comment which eluded to the fact they were enemy planes, loaded with bombs. Elsa gave me the observation I needed: by the sound of the engines, someone who has been bombed before can tell everyone in the shelter that they are loaded planes.
Inspiration comes when and where you least expect it. When I was writing CONSUMPTION: A Novel, ideas came from everywhere. Writers – Keep your ears open always!
No recognition, neither shadow or light, fluttered over my old headmaster's face.
October 7, 2011
The Slings and Arrows of Self Publishing
01 October, 2011
With the release of the value-for-money Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch, e-readers are now commonplace. A friend of mine is getting one for her elderly, reader-ly mother. E-book sales outstrip conventionally published books. In this rapidly shifting arena, it makes senses that the ground rules for self publishers to market their wares change rapidly as well.
Could self-publisher Godhead John Locke's seminal How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months, published in June 2011, now be hopelessly out of date?
Reduced to a mantra, the book espouses using social media to drive readers to your website/blog and then sales. Does this still work? With more than 200 million people tweeting so much is all that chatter now close to irrelevant? Would the most earth-shattering literary post go unnoticed? And forging all these marketing links draws the author away from their dominion: writing.
The notion of traditional publishing houses has changed, even died. The writing, editing, cover design, actual e-text production and marketing strategies are the realm of the writer. But what needs to happen is that "houses" take over the marketing of a novel, with clout to get reviews in significant online/print journals and into some "e-stores" where independent authors are presently barred and cannot venture.
Trident Media Group have announced they will provide support services to their e-book publishing authors. (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by...) On blog sites, there are endless debates that this traditional agent has now become a publisher.
But hasn't this neat, known world of "agent", "publisher", "author", "bookstore" and "reader" already broken down?
If any company, call them what you will, will put their weight and might to achieve things a single author would never be able to, I don't really care what they call themselves.
And all praise must be given to Trident Media Group for embracing the new world instead of turning their backs on it, hoping it's just a dying trend and we can all go back to the old guard.
New Life in an Old House
05 October, 2011
New Life in an Old House
My parents lived in this house for 56 years. I can't imagine that. After 5 or 6 years I'm restless but a grey bunny has moved in to the front garden the other week, the beginning of spring. I was looking from the telly-room window and saw him/her, tucked in under the broad emerald leaves of a hydrangea. (S)he was small, a mere fist ball, spinnaker ears and well wide-eyed. (S)he picked at the close-range blades of grass and then, for no apparent reason, drew back under the shrub and disappeared.
I've never seen a rabbit in the garden before, although on the near-by battery there's evidence of many. Perhaps my mother's old cat had kept her lair clean but she died in April. But I have my dog with me and she comes in from the garden smelling of aromatics, lavender and rosemary, swept on as she ferrets through the hedges and I'd have thought her blunt hunting style would surely scare off any other tenants.
But the next morning, I saw him/her again but this time on the garden bank that rises up to the avenue. If (s)he was going to be a fixture, she had to have a name so I called her/him Peter(a) Rabbit. All sex options covered. I guess that makes me Mr McGregor, except I don't really mind Peter(a) being there.
I see Peter(a) mainly in the morning and in the early evening, just before sunset. (S)he darts about the front garden bank, sniffs and nibbles this plant and that. One morning (s)he hopped up the stairs to the avenue and I thought (s)he was going to leave but (s)he thought the better of it and turned back to the garden. Another day she was in the middle of the side lawn, playing like a kitten, turning tight circles and angles for no other reason than ecstatic enjoyment.
I put carrot and zucchini out on the bank but they remained untouched for at least a week. Perhaps these are the wrong foods and I should look to fare such as lettuces and some French beans and then some radishes. But after years of drought, it's been raining in Hobart and the normally yellow-grass hills on the other side of the Derwent River glow green. The house lawns are teased high by the first brush of summer, long and juicy. Why would you touch a raw carrot? And if (s)he helps keep the lawns down, they won't need to be mown so much.
I've tried to take a photo but don't have a camera with a decent lens. I'd have to get outside to get anywhere near close enough. Most sounds leave Peter(a) unaffected, the roar of a truck on the street or the noise of people on the footpath, but if I open the front door, camera in hand, the satellite-dish ears hear and in a flash (s)he's gone.
June 22, 2011
On Writing CONSUMPTION:A NOVEL with Dangerous Liaisons
03 October, 2011
On Writing CONSUMPTION:A NOVEL with Dangerous Liaisons
For me, creative writing has always had a large quotient of collation. Taking snippets from here and there – films, books, newpapers, things heard on the street – and weaving them into a story I wanted to tell. In this process, there are certain movies that I'm drawn back to again and again. One of these is Dangerous Liaisons.
There's great danger rewatching movies you enjoyed years earlier . It's probably 20 years since I first watched Dangerous Liaisons. When it was released I saw a trailer on TV and my father let out a proto-Homer Simpson blurt: "Boring!" To me the film looked lush and thrilling, with Glenn Close fresh from her fabbo psycho-turn in Fatal Attraction. I was excited.
Fast-forward 20-odd years and unfortunately it looked tired, not lush and wasn't really all that thrilling. Glenn Close really is the standout, divine as the lead. John Malkovich gets it mostly right as the scandalous lothario, Valmont. His turn as a sociopath, conniving rake is chilling and compelling though I don't find it entirely convincing. Surprisingly, he was passed over for an Academy Award nomination while the tepid performance of Michelle Pfeiffer garnered a nomination. Pfeiffer's role, however, was challenging to play fey against the exuberance of the two Machiavellian leads.
The younger supporting cast, Keanu Reeves and Uma Thurman, lacked focus and shaping. They both seem to be waiting for the director to tell them what to do, almost floundering. Reeves is way out of his depth, though as the character is naïve and dim it almost works. Not suprisingly Stephen Frears didn't pick up an Oscar nomination for his directing, and perhaps this is also where the film just doesn't cut it. People can get snaky when you call a film 'slow'. This film isn't slow per se, it's just dull. The slippery machinations of the Close and Malkovich dominate the first half, and then as we creep to the finish line through the foggy claustrophobia of the cinematography, we're meant to feel sorry for these characters. And the heavy-handed mirror imagery (duplicity anyone?) Yeah, we get it. Hitchcock covered that and did it so much better.
The epistolary novel the film is based on is cited by some as a criticism of the Ancien Regime and the similar moral tone of the film fit the times it was released. Coming at the end of the greed-is-good '80s, Dangerous Liaisons had more resonance. It appeared in cinemas a year after Oliver Stone's Wall Street at around the time President Bush Sr had promised a "kinder, gentler America" in his Republican nomination acceptance speech. I guess, as they say, hindsight is 20/20. We all know the corporate sharks of the '80s lived on and brought us the Financial Crises of the 2000s and the endless consumption of material possession as an enduring edifice with which we construct our public personas. This really was one of the motivations to write, CONSUMPTION. Perhaps the moral I get from the film now is not "the bad guys will cop it in the end", but "history will teach us nothing."
There's some heavy-handed quasi-feminist lines in the film that sound like rococo bumper stickers about how hard it is to be a woman, even an aristocratic one. Close can deliver this dialogue with a controlled malevolence layered over a brittle shell. That line, and it's delivery, of digging a fork into the back of her hand under the table to gain control is thourougly delicious. Close's performance was the stand out for me after this viewing, the steely delight. I also realied how much I had distilled the Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and her machinations into my own character, Martin Blake. How will he stand up in 20 years?
21 August, 2011
Returning to Hejira
On clearing out my parents' house, I found a tatty box of records. Cast iron and frail Joni stared out at me from Hejira. I remembered walking into a friend's kitchen and hearing, "Like Icarus ascending," and being hit by a lightning bolt. God knows, I loved you thirty years ago but I've not listened to you in many years. The volume switch of the record player grazed rusty as I turned it up high. The needle graced the vinyl, bbb-ttoom.
'Coyote' picked me up and I was away again. Gone were the fine melodies of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, replaced with restless chugging, a prisoner of the freeway. Her voice played in and out of the bars, syncopating the bone and the skin and the eyes and the scrambled eggs and yet still related to the whole. Hard to imagine the song without Jaco's bass erupting up into the melody.
'Amelia's' opening shifting from 3/4 to 4/4 does it to me still. Potentially jarring and yet through her hands natural. Only to be followed by a key change, which keeps it all unsettled and at icy altitudes. The delicate vibraphone, up in the sonic clouds, the lead guitar soaring and falling on eddies. As she returned to melody, her voice had a maturity, playing like a silly sea-bird with the lead guitar. How perfect is her bluesy note behind "his sad request of me to kindly stay away". And at the end, Joni pulls into the full and hollow Cactus Tree Motel and questions if she's still up in the clouds of 'Both Sides, Now'. I still hung to hear her guitar playing fall apart in the fade, a hall mark to the authenticity. This is no manicured recording, just an artist performing.
Old Furry swam around me, Neil Young's meandering harmonica, the unresolved verse form, bravely cut free from a repeated tag line like 'Coyote' and 'Amelia'. Whilst I liked the lyric of Strange Boy, musically it never did much for me, not really brought to maturity.
I held my breath. That first note of 'Hejira' and the travelling arpeggio stands out against the other songs, that turning and turning of the road, the sweeps of the overdubbed bass. Only Joni could play the same note on two different strings and make them sound different, hope and hopelessness. How would this song be without the bass lines? They set to travelling so perfectly, picked up years later by Vince Mendoza into the brass lines on the Travelogue version. The for-free clarinet. Her guitar overdub accentuates the song's "truce against the moon" climax, so, so subtle and yet almost over powering.
'Song for Sharon' was always emotion and abstraction for me, brought to life by the Di-da-di-da backing vocals, almost as emblematic at the do-wap-wap-wap of 'Big Yellow Taxi'. I wonder if Jaco ever played bass on this and wouldn't behave himself so she didn't use it? It would be hard to imagine him here.
'Black Crow' back to rhythm flapping again and not a percussive instrument in sight. And the pure blues of 'Blue Motel Room', leaving me west bound and rolling into the reflective précis, 'Refuge of the Road'. Does any one else hear Jaco quote the opening melody of 'Hejira' in the closing bars?
What did I hear, 30 years on?
I realised these notes, struck out so long ago, form the soundtrack of life. In a car, 'Hejira's' arpeggios tumble through my mind, in a plane 'Amelia' floats about the clouds. And how the lyrics, with all their resonating metaphors weaved through the work but out also into the greater body of her work, inspired me to write.
You're still a masterpiece. A friend of spirit. Non, je ne regrette rien. I still love you.
After all these years, Hejira sucked me back that way.
10 July 2011
Since I published CONSUMPTION: A NOVEL, I've engaged with the internet in a new manner; looking for ways to market the novel. Amongst the mass of commercial websites, I've found people offering vast amounts of help for no financial return, just the joy of collating and disseminating information.
One such site was Bookwormink.co.uk. CONSUMPTION is about a young woman, Sara Sexton, looking for a less materialistic and simpler way to live. The BookwormInk website and reviews looked like something Sara would like. I approached the site asking for a review. They declined, saying they couldn't review e-books at this stage. But they offered to "give me a shout" on their Facebook page. On my site, there was a surge of activity from the UK. It made me want to know more about this site and the people who organise it so I asked Laura Williams some questions. So as BookwormInk recommends, pour yourself a cuppa and enjoy a chat.
GS Johnston – Your site is different from other literary orientated websites in that it's not really trying to sell a novel, just promoting good writing. What inspired you to start the site?
Laura – The internet has given people a wonderful medium to share their passions, and books just happen to be mine!
I'm a complete bibliophile and have been for as long as I can remember. Living, as we do, near many, many wonderful bookshops, means we have amassed several thousand books in our house; a fabulously eclectic mix spanning Wodehouse to Austen and Dostoevsky, passing through volumes on pottery, poetry and poultry along the way. I personally find reviews incredibly helpful and I adore reading about news in the publishing world and discovering new authors. Essentially BookWormInk is what I always wanted from a website!
GS Johnston – How long have you had the site up and running?
Laura – It's only been running for just over a month, but I'm thrilled with the initial response. Before BookWormInk I ran a chick lit review blog called 'GirlyScribbles' with my sister, but I really wanted to branch out into other genres, especially children's books. I chose a website rather than a blog to gain greater freedom in its layout, and I particularly wanted to dedicate part of it to my son Christopher's writing.
GS Johnston – How much time do you devote to preparing articles and maintaining the site and what costs are involved?
Laura – I spend a huge amount of time reading the books to review: I read each one from cover to cover, no speeding through allowed! I've got quite a backlog at the moment as BookWormInk has proved to be so popular. It took me a while to design and set up the site as I'm not naturally very good at that sort of thing, but I'm so proud of myself for doing it; I know I'm biased, but I think it looks gorgeous! I aim to put on at least two book reviews and one book chat piece every week, and each takes me a good few hours to write and edit.
Other than time, the costs are relatively low: just buying the web domain and an image I used on the site. My husband designed the logo, but I haven't received my bill from him yet!
GS Johnston – Where do your followers come from? Is there an evident common thread in their likes and dislikes. What ages? Generally how do they find the site?
Laura – A lot of my followers are women, probably between the ages of 25 and 60; I think most find me through Twitter and Facebook. There are all sorts of site stats which I can look up, but I don't tend to; of course it's nice to have lots of hits but, regardless of how many visits my site gets, if I've helped one new author find some new fans I'm happy! I'm trying to keep a wide range of book reviews on the site so it attracts a variety of followers.
GS Johnston – Where do you get ideas from?
Laura – Most of my ideas for the book chat pieces come from places I've been or things I've read in newspapers and magazines- I try to read as widely as possible: I think it's very easy to fall into a niche which it's then hard to climb out of. I want to keep the content of the site fresh, up to date and thought provoking.
GS Johnston – Do you have sponsors? If not, if you were offered would you take them on?
Laura – I don't currently have any sponsors; I didn't initially envisage the site as a commercial enterprise. But I wouldn't rule anything out for the future.
GS Johnston – What, besides your own, is your favourite website and why?
Laura – I visit The Guardian and The Telegraph's websites most days, and National Geographic have an amazing site which I can quite happily get lost in for a couple of hours. For book buying, it's hard to beat either Amazon or the Book Depository.
GS Johnston – Computers have rather taken us over. How long are you away from your computer now? Do you panic if you can't use it?
Laura – I do spend a fair amount of time with my computer on – so I can check things and get the odd bit of writing done during the day – but I don't panic if I can't use it. My 4 sons are home educated so we use the internet constantly to look up stuff, and I use social media, mainly Facebook, to keep in touch with family and friends.
GS Johnston – As you mentioned, your son Christopher has a page on your website. He clearly loves books and reading. How does he feel about e-readers and computers generally? Have you pointed him towards reading? Given half a chance, does he want to veer off towards computer games or TV? How has reading shaped him?
Laura – Books will always come first for Christopher! Last week he picked up the audio cds of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' from the library, we barely saw him for 3 days! He's been read to every day of his life and loves nothing more than cuddling up with his Daddy or I for a story. And of course, now that he's reading himself, he's an even busier busy boy! Books are an intrinsic part of our family life and everything stops for 2 weeks of the year when the Hay Festival of Literature comes to town – last year he met Francesca Simon, the author of the Horrid Henry books, and he still hasn't stopped talking about it! Christopher also loves the computer, he's a real whizz on his favourite websites, and is very adept at adding books he fancies to my Amazon shopping basket.
GS Johnston – Do you have plans to expand the website?
Laura – My main aim is to provide a wide variety of completely honest book reviews so there really is something for everyone on the site. I'm considering having a section dedicated to advice for aspiring writers, which would contain links to useful articles as well as pieces written by established authors.
GS Johnston – What does reading mean to you?
Laura – I've always loved to read, and I can't imagine my life without books. Luckily I made the sensible decision to marry someone who feels the same way that I do. Reading can be an escape, or a comfort, something to while away an idle moment or a meaningful pursuit for a day. It can be entertaining, educating, a window into a world outside of your perceptions, or just a source of frivolous good cheer: there's nothing quite like discovering a really fantastic book.
GS Johnston – well, thanks, Laura, for the opportunity to chat and an insight into the machinations and inspirations of your site. It's great to know that the internet does still inspire people to do these things.
