The Karinthy Connection
Few people know of Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy, but you would know the phrase he coined, “six degrees of separation”.
Every Tuesday after 5.30pm, a music lover is invited onto Drive with Bernadette Young to continue a musical chain called The Karinthy Connection.
Yesterday was my turn. I had to pick up from where Brendan Gallagher left off last week with B.B. King. So here’s my six degrees.
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QWC Blog Tour 2010: Writing Work Space
The Queensland Writers Centre is again touring the blogs of Queensland writers, this time to catch a sneak glimpse into the writer’s world: the desks, benches, or couches where the “magic” happens. While it seems rather strange that anyone would want to look at the pathetic bit of faux timber I call my desk, I admit to feeling more than a little intrigued at what everyone else’s spaces will look like.
That’s voyeurism for you.
Something you should know before you sticky-beak at my desk: it looks clean, perhaps anally so. That’s a bit of a sham. It doesn’t normally look like that. I’ve just moved house, so everything is still more or less still where I put it when I set the desk up. I haven’t had a chance to turn it into a bomb site yet. But, rest assured, I will. Soon.
Anyway, here it is:
It’s a bit compact, I’ll admit, but when space is at a premium—as it certainly is in my house—you write where you have to.
In the interest of clarifying what you’re looking at, I’ll point out a few features I consider essential for banging out a manuscript.
The computer is a notebook. Very important for when necessity calls for a couch or verandah sojourn. Quite a bit of my last novel was written not as my desk at all, but the house we were in was not as conducive to desk writing as this is.
You can’t tell from the picture, but the seat tilts back allowing me to write with my feet on the desk. If I couldn’t do that, I might not write anything at all. I’m a habitual chair tilter. I’ve fallen backwards off a number of chairs, so the tilting chair prevents making it a trend.
A guitar is always handy. Distractions are not necessarily a bad thing.
My notebook is open beside the keyboard. Without it I would have lost a number of stories to the vagaries of my memory. I also use it to map out characters and scenes. Seems to work better on paper than on screen.
Copies of the Macquarie Dictionary and the Style Manual on the bookshelf are primarily for for editing jobs. I’ve also got a copy of the Shorter Oxford, but it won’t fit here. I have to keep it elsewhere. It would make my little bookshelf here sag.
Envelopes for the endless stream of submissions that flow from this space. Sometimes I wonder if writers are singlehandedly funding Australia Post.
Juggling balls—see guitar.
Photos of the kids. The top one is very out of date now, but it’s such a nice picture I can’t quite let it go.
A picture of me, drawn by my son: a blob with stick limbs. I’ll let others judge its accuracy.
Rejection slips. I keep the good ones. Yes, there is such a thing. One in particular ends with “Great writing though.” A lovely sentiment except for the last word.
A Flaming Lips poster for no apparent reason other than I like the design. And the band.
The cover of my story Coda, a piece by the talented photographer Bronwen Hyde. Even in my poor reproduction it still looks cool.
Blank CDs. One can never have too many.
So I guess that’s the 50c tour. I really need to get back to work.
Read MoreQWC Blog Tour
Since Somewhere back in October, the Queensland Writers Centre has been quietly winding its way through the blogs and backwaters of Queensland’s writers. Today the bus has parked outside and a ragtag bunch of blog tourists are welcomed in. Make yourselves at home. The coffee machine is on, but I can only do two cups at a time.
Anyway, to answer your questions…
Where do your words come from?
I could be a smart arse and say ‘the English dictionary’, but instead I’ll respond in the spirit of the question.
The words come from characters and scenes. The better I can imagine those two things, the better the words. Words come easily when I have characters I know well bouncing dialogue off each other. That stuff is fun. Other times I can be moving so slowly through a scene or stretch of narrative that I wonder how the hell I will ever get to some kind of conclusion. Such stretches are hard, but inevitable in a big manuscript. My only hope is that it won’t be obvious in the final draft which bits came in the blink of an eye and which bits contain blood and sweat and other body fluids that no one wants to see on a page.
Where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I grew up in Mitchelton: a standard Brisbane suburb in the shadow of a shopping centre. We literally lived a block away from the thing. I spent much of my childhood watching the place expand like the Blob, devouring land as it went. I went to school next door to it. On weekends I rode my bike illegally through its carparks (ah, those days before Sunday trading…).
Mitchelton has little literary tradition that I know of (though I heard Janette Turner Hospital lived there for a while), but then both my brothers and I have ended up writers. I think it’s a combination of genetic predisposition and clearly some kind of social engineering experiment conducted by the the city council on our suburb during the seventies and eighties.
Right now, I’m in exile by the beach (it’s a nice exile), but in a few short weeks I’ll be back in the city surrounded by good coffee, restaurants, and extended family (that’s not necessarily in order of importance…or maybe it is…let me think about that).
What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?
I don’t tend to decide that stuff until very late in a work’s composition and I don’t usually overload that first sentence with Dickens or Tolstoy style witticisms. I looked up the first sentence of the new novel and it’s not all that flash (and my editor has suggested a new intro anyway). I looked up the last and realised that it will probably remain the final sentence regardless of whatever further work will go in, so here it is:
Brisbane is beautiful this time of year.
At least I can keep that line in now.
What piece of writing do you wish you had written?
Pretty much anything from the Twelves. If I had to choose one, it would probably be To Kill A Mockingbird. If it meant though that, like Harper Lee, I would never write another novel? That I would have to really really think about. That would be a classic deal with the Devil, wouldn’t it?
What are you currently working towards?
A balance of work and life with some kind of writing taking the fore in the work side. Simple.
Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…
…assured. Readers will continue to read. Writers will continue to write. And there will be something in between that we call a “book”.
Read MoreTwelves Part Eleven – Music Videos
I promise this is the last music-related twelve (an easy promise at part eleven). I got thinking about what made me such a music tragic in the first place. For me it was Saturday mornings watching music videos—mostly on Rage, but before that on some sad Channel Nine offering called Clipz (yes, with a Zed—I guess that was still cool in the eighties). A lot of people might have also pointed to Countdown, but I was just that bit too young to see anything half decent on it.
I was eleven or twelve (don’t read too much into the numerology) when I saw Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video. It fair blew my adolescent mind. I’d never seen anything like it and I credit that one video with opening the door to some of the most beautifully intricate and emotionally deep music I’ve ever heard. That being said, I passed over Sledge for this twelve. It’s widely acknowledged as one of the best music videos of all time; it hardly needs the snotty endorsement of some obscure Australian writer. Instead I plumbed for the anti-Sledgehammer. In the place of chirpy animation, Mercy Street plays out in relentless slow motion black and white (mostly black); the perfect visual accompaniment to the song. No performer, no miming, almost no faces. The sequence (from about 1:31) of the boat being pushed out to sea and the focus on the foot digging into the sand: these images have lodged in my mind as almost unbearably sad, though I really can’t say why. No other video before or since has had quite the impact on me as this one, so it really was a simple choice.
As for the rest, I think there’s a solid mix here from visually incredible, highly polished pieces to simple, almost off-the-cuff visuals (though inevitably, ones that are beautifully thought through).
Some of the all time best videos are the ones that play out like a short story (how predictable that I should think such a thing). They are a rare commodity in the industry, which I guess is why only three of the twelve qualify as such: Karma Police, Little Wonder, and the Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (the last possibly a long shot). Each are visuals practically independent of the music and only one actually has the performers miming. Ultimately I suspect a true twelve (one that I didn’t make up from the top of my head) would contain all such videos.
- Karma Police, Radiohead
- Little Wonder, Augie March
- Pumping On Your Stereo, Supergrass
- Mercy Street, Peter Gabriel
- Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)—Eels
- The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song—The Flaming Lips
- Happiness (Rotting My Brain)—Regurgitator
- Lemon—U2
- Walk This Way—Run DMC
- Once In A Lifetime—Talking Heads
- Make You Happy—Josh Pyke
- Whip It—Devo
Twelves Part Ten – Book Covers
Surely by now we all know the adage to never judge a book by its cover is complete bullshit, right? A book can and often should be judged by its cover. When you’re standing in a bookshop what else do you have to go on? The cover contains all the relevant information: title, author, graphic, and on the back some kind of blurb.
As an aside this blurb from Douglas Adams’ first Dirk Gently novel deserves its own mention:
A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic. — The Author
Charming. And strangely accurate.
But, back to the topic at hand. Sometimes I like covers for the way they accurately illustrate what happens inside, but mostly, I like these ones below simply for aesthetics. I love trawling sites like the Book Cover Archive and I’ve pulled a few ofthe examples below from there. Although there are some beautiful and ridiculously creative cover designs that I’m sure outweigh the ones in my list, I’ve tended to go for covers I actually own or at least ones from books I’ve read. Anything less I fear would be cheating.
If I have a rule about covers it’s this: never buy a book with the author’s picture on the cover. I have broken this rule I think exactly twice and both books have been dire. N=2, rule proven.
I’m a big fan of breathing space on a book cover, swathes of black or white or minimalist text. I don’t know if this list really reflects that or not. Probably not. This is probably a list of exceptions.
- The Second Plane (The UK hardcover, not the more celebrated US cover)
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Volcano (Original hardcover…much cooler than the subsequent paperback)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Original paperback edition)
- Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
- If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (First edition…wish I had one of those)
- Zigzag Street (Original paperback edition, not the godawful covers on later editions)
- Death Sentence (You can’t tell from the image, but the black cockatoo is trapped in a cage of embossed buzzwords…beautiful, but better without the review blurbs in white. Too much!)
- The Day We Had Hitler Home (Awesome composite image)
- The Catcher In The Rye (Little Brown US paperback edition: Is there anything simpler than this? What more needs to be said? You cant tell, but it’s also in the tiniest format, smaller than a standard A format, like a pocket book.)
- Diamonds Are Forever (Contemporary designs for all the Bond books, but I like this one best. Maybe I just think this one has the hottest model.)
- True History Of The Kelly Gang (First edition)
A close examination of The Second Plane reveals the image to be not (necessarily) an image from 9/11. There are no twin towers and the image could simply be one of a plane taken through a window. Given the title and the post 9/11 climate though, this innocuous image takes on a much darker tone.
I was fortunate enough to have been given a first edition copy of True History Of The Kelly Gang—one the last copies around before it won the Booker and went into a million subsequent print runs. Pictures don’t really do it justice. UQP went to town on a lavish leather spine and rough-cut pages. It’s an object that wants to be touched. As much as I approve of the digital world, I hope we continue to make books like that one.
The Books
