After four years, I finally reclaimed my domain name from the Russian pornographers and cyber-squatters. It's nice to have it back.
There was once a pretty good blog, here. Reading back through it, I'm sorry I stopped doing it. A lot of people read it, and it was nice to have that way to communicate with people.
I've taken down most of the entries. I'm not quite so comfortable as I once was with revealing things about myself on the internet - actually, I was never that comfortable with it.
What's left is stuff that I felt had some permanent value - and a few things that made me laugh. A few things, like the older archives, would take more effort to recover than I'm willing to put in at the moment.
I don't have any immediate plans to do anything with this blog, but I've learned never to say never, when it comes to blogging.
Al-Qaida Kim Jong-Il Victim or BustTwo weeks! Jesus god. How will I ever get everything done?
At three in three afternoon I go to my call centre job. I’ve been doing this most afternoons for the last few weeks. My call centre is run by a company that contracts out to charities; they professionally raise funds. As the perky trainer explained on my first day, “Of course charities could do this themselves, in-house, with volunteers. But what they’ve found is that they can generate more revenue by hiring us. We’re the professionals at this.”
I’m morally ambivalent about this job. It’s better than selling aluminium siding or Florida holidays, but there’s a lot here that make me uncomfortable: the idea of outsourcing charitable donations, the profit-taking and wages, the guilt-trippy high-pressure tactics I am forced to use, the inhumanly mechanised nature of the operation.
I keep having these moments where something happens, something quite normal for here, and it strikes me as surreal. I blank for a moment, I feel a wild anxiety, and this line comes into my head:
What the fuck am I doing here?
*
I go to my desk. Adam hands me a stack of call sheets. There are 153, and I have to count and sign for them. At the end of my shift they will be counted again by somebody senior to me: a supervisor, a trainer. Should there be 152, I will be fired. You can also be fired for looking at a mobile phone in the office, or making a personal call. Security is taken very seriously, here.
I start dialling numbers. I am working on “Amnesty International Upgrades”. This means I call people who donate on a monthly basis to Amnesty International, and I try to get them to raise their donations by guilt-tripping them. To do this I tell them the story of The Rape of Aisha. The Rape of Aisha was a horrific event that happened in Somalia last year – Aisha, a 13-year-old girl, was raped by three men. The local Wahaabist militia, a seriously unenlightened bunch, then stoned Aisha to death for adultery. Nice. I remember reading about this at the time and being horrified. But by now I have told the story of The Rape of Aisha too many times. At least once each shift I remind myself that it is still a horrific event that happened to a real person. But it has become performance. I pause dramatically at certain moments. And new details have crept into the story along the way. Now, everybody in my “team” refers to Aisha as a “13-year-old schoolgirl”, and she was attacked “while walking home from school one day”. This wasn’t in the original reports, which were not even that definitive about her age. But I’m the only person here who has read the original reports. I know it’s a distortion, but I say it anyway, the same as everybody else.
It could be worse. I could be on WSPA signups. There, they call people who foolishly signed a petition and try to convince them to become regular donors by going on about bear-baiting and the like. At least the people I call are active supporters of Amnesty, and are sometimes interested; the WSPA signups are practically cold-calls, and people really don’t appreciate being told that shit, then asked for money. I hear it’s brutal.
But only a small part of my time is given over to re-telling The Rape of Aisha. Mostly what I do is call numbers and get no response. The call sheets I have been given suck, because Adam doesn’t like me. I think he senses I don’t like him. For a while it seemed like he liked me, or at least thought I might work out. For a while I was getting some clean sheets in with my junk. The clean sheets haven’t been dialled before, and it is easy to get people on the line and talk to them. You need to get six people on the line and talk to them each hour. This is easy with clean sheets, but now I am getting dreck again.
These numbers have been dialled six, seven times. These people don’t want to talk to me. They have worked out by now that it is Amnesty International trying to get them to increase their donations. They are irritated by the daily calls. They see the number come up on their mobile phones, and choose not to answer. They have told past callers to call their home numbers in the daytime, and their business numbers at night. They are always in meetings, or on the freeway, or just stepping out. They will not talk to you.
Of course, they could just say, “No. I will not increase my donation.” But they prefer to give an excuse, or avoid the call, and the callers are happy to let them give an excuse. Because if they give a firm “No,” well – that’s a negative. That fucks up your stats. So everybody prefers the fiction of, “I’m busy, now – try me tomorrow. On my home number. During the day.” And you dutifully note that down on your sheet.
Of the six people I am theoretically supposed to speak to, 2.4, or forty percent, must agree to upgrade their monthly subscriptions. This is your conversion ratio. My conversion ratio is good! I hit a high of sixty-five percent on one shift, but it has declined since then, and now sits around fifty percent. My calls were taking too long, which meant my “connects” – the number of people I speak to in an hour – were too low. So I cut my spiel back, and consequently my conversion ratio took a hit.
There is a lot of crap about Somalia and the United Nations in the official spiel, but nobody does the official spiel. It would take ten, fifteen minutes to get through all that. You reduce it to its essentials, then wing it. You rush through the Somalia and United Nations shit, because nobody cares. You dwell on Aisha. You don’t rush The Rape of Aisha. Aisha brings the big bucks. People don’t care about the logical connection between that, Amnesty International, and the United Nations. They just want to feel they’re doing something to stop 13-year-old schoolgirls being raped and stoned to death on their way home from school.
What the fuck am I doing here?
*
I am OK at this job. People give me money, when I can talk to them.
I’m not great at this job. John is great. John is my hero. John is from Northern Ireland, he speaks slowly and his voice is full of warmth. John’s conversion ratio is seventy percent. People love to speak to him. He hits the same sentences every call, and there is not a wasted word in them. When he first speaks to somebody he is full of warmth, then he charmingly asks for two minutes of their time. And they are happy to give two minutes to John. He starts with a few sentences on the suppression of journalists in Somalia. Somehow when John tells of this it sounds tragic, yet when I do it, it’s boring. He then gives The Rape of Aisha. His voice is full of sorrow and sympathy. He goes for his “first ask” – he always knows the perfect amount of money to request. Should he somehow overreach, he saves it with his “second ask” – and of course they can find that extra five dollars a month for John.
John raises three thousand, four thousand dollars a shift. My high-point was $1800, and that was a freak day with forty clean sheets. John gets nothing but clean sheets.
John is an enigma. This place is full of extroverts; John keeps to himself. When he wins awards at weekly meetings, he seems embarrassed.
I want to be like John.
*
The “second ask”:
An email from my friend Kate: “Huh! I got one of those calls. I only give $25 a month, but I've been doing it forever and want to keep doing it, and if I up it, I might at some point cancel it. Longevity is better. I wonder if AI facor that in when they pressure people to up their monthly contribution? That they might later cancel it altogether?”
My reply: “Yes, Kate, I
do understand. But firstly, what I'd say to you, Kate, is that understand that this doesn't have to be permanent. If you
do increase your contribution and then find you need to go back to $25, it's absolutely
no trouble, and we're happy to do that. But what I'd say to you, Kate, is that even a
small increase, even as little as $1.25 a week - $5 a month - from you and people like you, can make a
huge difference, given the urgency of the situation. $1.25 a week - $5 a month - is
that something which might be manageable for you, Kate???”
Kate: “Ahhh haha! you got me. If they called back I might consider it. Nick.”
The second ask is all about showing empathy, acknowledging the validity of the person’s reasons for not wanting to increase their monthly donations, then turning around and asking for more anyway. Excessive name repetition seems to help – I got that from John.
What the fuck am I doing here?
*
I am pitching to a supporter. I am in full flight. I am doing The Rape of Aisha.
I didn’t have this person’s interest at the start – as usual, my Somalia stuff just got a lot of disinterested “mmm-hmms,” but they perked up when I mentioned how the miltia, “instead of arresting the three men, turned around and arrested
Aisha. They accused her of being an adulteress. This is a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, rememeber, Susan, whose only crime was that she raped.” I then give the fate of Aisha. “She was stoned to death… by fifty men… in front of a stadium of 1000 people.” I pause. “I don’t know how you feel about that, Susan…” I pause again. People like to vent in their own way at this point. All is looking good, and I am pleased. This is a training call, and I know I’m being monitored by Liam.
I go into the build-up for my first ask. My voice is impassioned. I am gesticulating. I’m practically on my knees. I keep using the word “urgent” and repeating Susan’s name. I ask…
There is a pause. You can hear the conflict in people’s minds at this point. They don’t want to give more money, but they don’t want to say no, either. Finally Susan ventures an excuse – she supports lots of other charities.
I am understanding. I ask her, chattily, about the other charities she supports. She tells me a little. I say that of course we wouldn’t want her to stop giving to another charity for us. She feels relieved. She thinks she has convinced me, and that I am nice and understanding. “But Susan, what I would say to you, is that many of our supporters are passionate and give to many charities. And often they find they can’t afford a large increase in their donations. But at this point in time, even
small increases – as little as $1.25 – blah blah blah.” I hit her with the second ask. Another pause. Who can say no to an extra five dollars a month? She isn’t happy about it, would never have volunteered it, but agrees anyway. I thank her profusely – feeling, as I always do, a little guilty. I give her a few moments of warmth, but this call has already gone on too long, and I need to get her off the phone. I wish her a great day;
she thanks
me. They usually do. My wild, atonal, slightly hysterical enthusiasm – they never ask me, as they sometimes do other people, if I’m being paid for this. I am so obviously a passionate volunteer, giving up his time to help out a charity he believes in.
I go for my review with Liam. My reviews are always the same these days, so I’ll tell you instead about the first review I had with Liam. It was on my first day of calling: I was still nervous, still fumbling, but I did manage to get the extra sixty dollars a year on my second ask.
“Come on, let’s have a chat,” Liam says. We go to the staff room. Liam is like many people who work here – mildly extroverted, some university education, good-looking, white, middle-class. These people have the sort of natural bonhomie to do well at this. I always get on fine with this type of person. Such people have usually lived relatively trouble-free lives, they are relaxed and comfortable with others, have uncomplicated internal lives, are rarely mean or malevolent in their motivations. It’s easy for me to get on with people like that. And I like Liam. But I rarely become good friends with such people. There tends to be a gulf of understanding that is mutually recognised.
“So, how do you think you’re going?” Liam says, brightly.
“Alright. I could do better,” I say.
Liam nods. “What do you think you’re doing well?” he asks.
“I’m slowing down,” I say. “I’m listening to John’s calls, and trying to do it more like him. I think I’m becoming more familiar with the material, and I’m engaging better with people. Making it more of a conversation, less of a sales pitch.”
“Yes, exactly,” Liam says. He looks down at his notes. I seem to have thrown him a bit. “That’s exactly what I was going to say to you,” he says, and repeats back what I’ve just told him. “Now,” he says, “is there anything you think you need to improve on?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Liam – my tone of voice
sucks. It lacks modulation. Every sentence sounds the same, it’s sort of excited and flat at the same time, and I need to improve it.”
Liam looks really startled now. “Yes, again,” he says. “That’s what I was going to say to you.” He thinks. “What might you do to improve it?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s a bit of a general problem in my life, actually. It’s one of the reasons I took this job.”
“Oh – give it a bit of a polish-up, huh?” Liam says. He seems more than a little confused by me.
I half-nod, half-shrug. There is a gulf of understanding. Hi, Liam, I’m Nicholas. I’m extremely self-aware; so much so that it is a bit of a problem for me. It makes me sensitive and conscious of the moods of others, probably excessively. I spend a lot of time second-guessing myself. I’m constantly monitoring myself and how people are responding to me. Mostly my self-assesment is accurate, but when it becomes divorced from an external reality strange ideas can bloom in my mind, become excessive, inaccurate, obsessive, harmful. It makes me a writer, makes me who I am, but often it makes me insecure as well. I don’t know how to do what you do, Liam – I don’t know how to just relax and assume everyone likes me. I’m introverted, I spend too much time in my head, and you know what else? I have a more-than-slight phone phobia when it comes to talking to strangers. I didn’t mention this in the interview. Perhaps it’s because I can’t see who I’m talking to; perhaps it’s just that I’ve indulged it, and not confronted it.
What the fuck am I doing here? But we’re getting a little closer to an answer to that question.
These days my training sessions with Liam tend to sound the same. He says, “Ah, your tone of voice is still no good, but it seems to be working anyway. Keep it up.” I think he’s dispirited. It’s true – what I do works, but not in the way it should. I speak too fast, I am full of babbling enthusiasm, I sound like a hopelessly sincere and committed university student volunteering his evenings – and people are impressed by this and give me money. And of course, I’ve learned short-cuts. I cheat. These days it’s all The Rape of Aisha and name repetition. That’s all I really know, all it’s about. It’s a long way from the artistry of John.
Liam’s right – it sucks, but it’s working, so what can you do? But I am not happy either.
I want to say to Liam, “Liam – where have you been all my life? Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it. Follow me around, watch me, listen to my conversations with people, then we’ll do reviews.” I imagine how these would go. Liam would say to me, “Yeah, you seemed engaged. You listen well, of course, and you said interesting things. They seemed to genuinely respond to you and enjoy your company. Now, what do you think needs improving?”
“My nervous half-smile?” I would venture.
Liam would nod. “Yes! And sometimes your laugh is a little nervous, too. It betrays you. And the body-language? It could be more open, less reluctant. But hey, they were laughing, they kept talking to you, obviously they liked you. Keep it up, good job.”
*
I’ve been having lots of epiphanies lately. Things came unstuck for me not so long ago. That was scary. It’s strange: I write here that I am a very self-aware person, and a year ago I would have said that I had a good understanding of myself. Yet over the last six months – gradually, then suddenly – I’ve come to see that in many ways my self-assesment has been shallow, unquestioning, awry. There were great confronting questions which I never thought about at all, because they made me anxious. And there were answers I thought I knew, understandings I thought clever, which turned out to be not-so-clever; that on closer examination turned out to be giant convoluted structures for coping with anxiety. They all toppled over at once, and my sense of self toppled with them.
I closed the bookshop about two years ago, now. At the same time I stopped writing this blog, and even my half-hearted attempts last year were not the same. I haven’t written anything particularly personal on this blog for a long time.
I thought at the time that it was a good idea to draw a curtain across my life. I felt overexposed. I thought that closing the bookshop would be good for me, that it would give me time to write and think, but it gave me far too much time. I made my life so perfectly safe, but looked at another way, I indulged in every fear I had, large and small. And I drew a curtain across it so nobody could see. And behind that curtain I distracted myself from my low-level unhappiness with rituals and elaborate imaginings and took comfort in my safety-from-fear, while in reality I became more introverted, more self-conscious, more self-doubting. I indulged bad habits – didn’t keep my place as clean as I should, didn’t eat as well as I should, smoked way too many cigarettes – and without realising it I was very careful with what I thought about, less I realise the trouble I was in. My excessive introversion affected my manner and confidence.
Epiphanies, a dalliance with the tenets of cognitive behavioural therapy, and then a rejection of some of it – I got gung-ho for a while, then decided that I didn’t want to adopt every thing. Didn’t want to dispense with some aspects of myself that were perhaps less-than-perfectly functional, but which made me creative, humorous, sensitive, ambitious. Still – epiphanies, and CBT, and between them I formed a conception of what I wanted to be. And that I will put down here – not my path to understanding, but the understanding itself. It’s not a bad thing to declare publically.
Put briefly: I want to confront every fear, until I am no longer afraid. And I want to change my thoughts from a raging mix of ill-controlled imagination, regret, self-doubt, and occasional insight into a concentrated and consciously directed stream of focused attention. I want a sort of controlled, creative derangement, when I need it; I want to be perceptive and sensitive and open to people and the world around me; I want the ability to be confidently and sociably in the moment with strangers and friends, with no more self-checking and inter-personal monitoring than is necessary to not act like an ass. I’ve said it before – understanding it, but not always knowing how to approach it, or why it sometimes seemed to move away from me – there is a me that feels like me. Hopefully it is still where I am headed, perhaps more consciously than before, and for sounder reasons. I feel a long way from it at the moment, but am determined to pursue it through practice and engagement with people and situations I might otherwise have avoided. I want to do small things well and with integrity, until those things accumulate and become habitual.
Does this explain why I’m working in an out-going call centre, pitching Amnesty International upgrades to strangers? Or am I just dressing up something mundane in glorious rags?
*
Everything here is measured statistically. At the start of each shift Adam comes across to me and we go through my stats.
Adam is the only person here I dislike; unfortunately, he is my supervisor. His flat affect and cold manner make me wary. There is something of the sociopath about him, and also quite a lot of the anal pinhead. He is English, and uses the word “mate” in that excessive way only English people living in Australia do. The statistics we are measured on are our connects – that is, the number of people we can get a yes or no from in an hour – the average value of our upgrades, our conversion rate – what percentage of people we can convince to upgrade – and our average income per hour. Adam has a little speech which he thinks is clever. He says, “I don’t care about income per hour. I think it’s a stupid statistic. Because – ” and here he pauses – “if you’re hitting your targets for each of the other categories, the
income per hour will take care of itself.”
I don’t mind the statistics. They sit happily with the reasons I am here. Each time I speak to somebody on the phone I try to engage with them, focus, be pleasant and charming. I use the metrics – average upgrade and conversion rate – as a meaure of myself. My goals, and the call-centre’s, happily coincide. And I try to do the same with each real-world interaction, too – each small conversation I have with a co-worker. I don’t have metrics on my success with that, but my guess? About fifty, fifty-five percent. About the same.
For a while I seem to be progressing and doing well at this job. My income per hour is where it should be; my average upgrades are high, and so is my conversion rate. Each day I get better call sheets, which gives the statistical illusion of progress, although it is actually a fiction controlled by Adam.
But Adam is not entirely happy. I am not making enough connects. This is something I don’t give a shit about – it is about how fast you can dial, how quickly you can get people off the phone, how much of your ten-minute break you are willing to give up so that your statistics are acceptable. And more than anything, it is about the sheets you get – how called-out they are. Still, I’m mostly meeting my quota for income per hour, which I believe is the only measure that should matter when assessing job performance. Who cares by which path you get there?
But Adam gives me his little speech, and I make a mistake. I question him. I say to him, “Come on, Adam – surely there’s more than one road to Damascus. If I’m making less connects, but getting higher than average upgrades, then surely it doesn’t make any difference, so long as I’m making my money.”
Adam pauses; a look crosses his face as if a wire has come unsprung. “No,” he says definatively. “You need six connects an hour.” And he explains again about how if I hit each of these targets, my income per hour will take care of itself. I look at him. He looks at me. We don’t like each other.
This is a failed social interraction. A bad one. I stop getting clean sheets. Adam stops telling me, “You’re going to make it, mate.” I am fucked.
*
Here is how it theoretically should work: each team has its targets. Each member of that team has the same targets. The call sheets are handed out randomly. People who do well meet or exceed their targets. People who don’t, don’t.
Here is how it works in practice. The supervisors are under pressure from higher up to make sure their team hits its targets. So they do something sensible – they take the fresh, clean call sheets and give them to the best, most experienced callers. These callers then kick ass, smash their targets, and win weekly prizes. They give the bad, called-out sheets to the new people. The new people break their heart trying to meet targets that are impossible, because they can’t get anybody on the phone. Their supervisors advise them, “call faster,” as if this will solve the problem – because nobody will acknowledge the truth about the call sheets. If the new person seems to be making progress, they are gradually given better data; perhaps, dialling their asses off and hustling like crazy, they can last it out long enough to become relatively senior – about a month – and then they get given decent data. If they don’t seem to make progress, or their supervisor doesn’t like them, they are given dreck until they are eventually told that they are not meeting their targets and are let go, or until they break down and quit. Unfortunately, I figure all this out too late.
Turnover in this place is massive. Every day there are three or four new trainees – and presumably, three or four people gone from the day before. The five people with whom I started become three. Then one wigs out, mid-shift. This happens a bit. I don’t blame him. He’s doing the call-sheets I had the day before, and I felt like killing myself. He turns them in to Adam, declares “This isn’t for me,” and leaves.
There is just me and this one other guy left from my incoming group. I chat with him outside. “I think I’m getting fired tomorrow,” he says. “I’m not meeting my targets.”
“I think I might be as well,” I say. “Don’t quit. Make them fire you.” I am talking to myself.
*
John sits across from me. He is on the phone relating The Rape of Aisha. He looks over to me. I do a supercillious impression of serious concern. I nod, my eyebrows furrowed. He relates a shocking detail. My eyebrows shoot up and I do a little pantomime of aghast amazement. The corner of John’s mouth twitches. He looks away. He doesn’t want to burst out laughing during The Rape of Aisha.
I smile to myself, although I wanted him to laugh. But John is too good at this job for that. Meanwhile I can’t get anybody on the phone. I keep dialling. It is all very Glengarry/Glenross.
*
At the end of our shift, John asks me if I want to get some pub food, have some drinks. I say sure. I am surprised. John is my hero! The only person I’ve met in this place whom I genuinely admire.
We go to the corner pub, have some food, a few beers, talk. We get on well. I’d forgotten this about myself, though I used to expect it. I’d forgotten that when I liked somebody in a group situation like this, that I usually became friends with them. It seems a small miracle to me, until I remember. How have I got to this point, to no longer expect that people will enjoy my company?
John is a traveller, I guess he doesn’t know many people in the city. I don’t think we’re going to become best mates, but we get on well, the conversation flows easily, we talk about work, travel, writing, lots of things. John seems to think I’m amusing and intelligent. I feel better about myself than I have in a while.
*
The next shift I am given call-sheets that have been called so many times that there are no longer spaces in which to write the details of each call. The calls have spilled over beyond their allotted section on the form, they’re scrawled in gaps and margins.
Adam comes to review my statistics from the previous shift. He tells me I really need to hit one hundred percent on this shift. On every measure – not just money. Particularly, I need six connects an hour, which I have never achieved.
There is no way this can be done. I ask him how he thinks that will be possible. “Call faster,” he says. I ask him how the call sheets are assigned. He doesn’t answer; takes offense at the question. He tells me that
he could call these sheets and get six connects an hour. He tells me he has to get on to other things.
I am fucked, and know it. For some reason – pride, maybe – I give it my best shot. I spend my shift dialling constantly. I fill in details while the phone is ringing; I skip breaks. I don’t make my connects, but somehow, scrounging desperately, giving my spiel in two minutes, guilt-tripping like a bastard whenever I can get a human voice on the line – I make my money, or close enough. It is a fucking miracle.
*
Towards the end of the shift, Adam tells me to gather my things. I follow him to the meeting room.
Adam tells me it’s not going to work out. He says I’m not a team player. “We need team-players here,” he says. “Questioning me about call-sheets, questioning me about connects…” He can’t fire me for not making my money, because tonight – somehow – I did. He is left with this. This is my tiny bit of pride.
“We don’t need to drag this out,” I say.
“Fine,” he says. He asks for my swipe-card back, which I give him.
I tell him, “I have to say, Adam – you’re not the most supportive boss I’ve ever had, either.”
“That’s your opinion, mate,” he says. I don’t rile him, though – his affect is still flat, he is coldly dispassionate.
I leave. I’m disappointed. This job was mostly horrible, but it was good for me for the moment, and in a strange way I was enjoying it. I never was planning to stick with it for long. Another month, no more. It was something to practice with, something to keep me occupied. I think I mostly succeeded by my personal measures, although I completely failed to charm Adam. I wonder if it is something self-destructive in me: that the one person with whom I never much tried to get on was the one who controlled my success or otherwise. Still – I think the phone phobia is permanently gone, even if I never did develop a polished telephone manner.
I have something much more ambitious planned for a month from now; the next stage of this journey, this excoriation of fear and self-doubt. I won’t say what it is just yet, because it’s still a bit up-in-the-air and I don’t want to jinx it – but hopefully it will happen, and if it does, there will be plenty to blog about.
A long time ago, in the execrable year of 2002, while I was down at Austinmer, I returned from a walk on the beach one day and announced to my father, "There is some sort of weird bird in Austinmer pool."
"It's a goose," he said.
The goose - known variously as Austin, Goosey, and Charles - had arrived on the beach some weeks before and had happily set up residence at the southern end of the beach, spending time in the pool and on the rock platform there. Contrary to its racial stereotype it did not appear foolish, but instead possessed, on the occasions I saw it, an austere and haughty dignity.
Its welfare was investigated by the RSPCA, who pronounced it a domestic goose or gander of undetermined sex. They had no explanation as to how it had arrived on the beach, but said it was healthy, and as it appeared happy, there was no reason to move it.
The goose was quickly and informally adopted by the local community. The Illawarra Mercury ran several stories on it, quoting local residents. John Roach gave insights on Goosey's habits:
"It's generally very placid, although when old Bill Redfern brought some bread and scraps down to it yesterday it got a bit feisty... It alternates between thinking its a seagull and a dog. One morning it'll be standing among the gulls and the next it'll be chasing them like a dog." He also said, "Of a morning you see webbed footprints where it's been goose-stepping up and down the beach."
Locals looked out for the goose. A woman who ran a local takeaway store claimed to the Mercury that she fed it three times a day with goose food. (This woman was never so kind to customers, in my experience, so I'm not sure what to make of this claim.) Goosey provided a lot of happiness to a lot of people.
On the 10th of October, the Mercury reported that fears had been temporarily held for the safety of Goosey. One morning it was not in its usual place near Austinmer pool. It was soon spotted wandering the suburban streets of Austinmer. Concerned residents tried to shepherd it towards the relative safety of Glastonbury Gardens, but upon being approached Goosey took flight, and headed back to its usual digs near the pool.
Still, residents were becoming concerned - some thought Goosey had grown thinner in recent weeks.
Austinmer beach gets busy in the summer, and perhaps that plays a part in the mysterious fate of Goosey. On the 11th of December, the Mercury reported:
Austinmer Beach residents are mourning the loss of their pampered community pet, Goosey. His many mates fear a loathsome opportunist has swiped the handsome black and white bird for the Christmas buffet. Goosey (pictured) was last seen downing a peanut butter sandwich at the beach on Sunday afternoon ... The Golyas have led a search party to nearby beaches but there have been no sightings.
Residents got together and offered a $400 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Goosey. The Mercury reported that an unidentified person had seen Goosey being bundled into a car. It was popularly supposed that tourists - probably the much-despised Westies - were resposible.
Despite the reward, nothing more was seen of Goosey. On the web he exists in the collective consciousness in the form of a Myspace group -
The Austi Goose Memorial Group, in a painting by artist
Wendi Reis (reproduced below), and now in this blog post. It is probably foolish and sentimental to believe that a goose needs a permanent internet memorial, but nevertheless, I just wanted to say, I remember Goosey Goose.
Goosey in happier times
love how this font, which I knocked together really quickly about five years ago to make a heading for this blog, gets used by people. Check out this
excellent use of it in a vodka ad:
The ad makes more sense when seen in a mirror:
Images from
here, where the ad is discussed.
As usual, people complain that it's not "real" Cyrillic. It's not meant to be! It's a post-modern pastiche, which is another way of saying I don't read Cyrillic.
This article from the Wall Street Journal explains how, since the phase-out of cigarettes in prisons,
pouches of mackerel have become the de facto currency.
I see a few problems with mackerel as a unit of currency. The most obvious, as discussed in the article, is that mackerel bulks a lot. It seems prisoners' lockers are starting to overflow with mackerel.
Another problem, I would think, would be inflation. According to the article, one of the reasons that prisoners like the mackerel as currency is that a pouch costs approximately one US dollar. Thus the currency is pegged against the greenback. But, as the article also mentions, nobody likes mackerel: "few - other than weightlifters craving protein - want to eat it." The result of this would be that over time, the supply of mackerel in a prison would increase, causing inflation. The Mack would come to be valued at a discount to the greenback.
However, this inflation would not continue indefinitely, and prisoners would not end up hauling around mackerel by wheelbarrows. Eventually, Macks would fall to a point where it would be more rational for an inmate to eat his mackerel than to store it for future use as currency. Also, whatever the real value of the Mack, its nominal value would remain $1. That is the price at which prisoners would still have to purchase new Macks from the prison canteen. The subsequent disincentive to buy new Macks would thus help to control the money supply.
The next logical step would be a move to the Mackerel Standard. An enterprising prisoner - presumably one who already has power and prestige within the prison system - could set himself up as a bank. He could take deposits, and issue scrip to the effect that this piece of paper was equivalent to X Macks. He could then put his mackerel to work, probably in some sort of loan-sharking business.
There are some problems with this. One is that the bank would then start to accumulate mackerel pouches. Even with re-lending the money, the profits - in the form of bulky mackerel - would be difficult to handle. The banker, after all, cannot deposit his massive amounts of mackerel in an underground vault, and is constantly at risk of having his mackerel confiscated. No doubt some of the profits would be put back into the economy - as payment for thugs, etc - and some would be re-lent. However the banker would then be vulnerable to runs on his bank, as he would be unable to keep a sufficient supply of mackerels available to cover a run.
The solution here would be for the banker to make an arrangement with the prison canteen. The banker could exchange his mackerels for cash at a discount, and the canteen officer could then re-sell the pouches back to the inmates, thus making a profit. In return, the canteen officer would guarantee to supply the banker with mackerel in the event of a run.
Thus the canteen officer would become a Reserve Bank, the problem of bulky piles of mackerel would disappear, and scrip in the form of paper Macks would supplant actual mackerel pouches as the prison's currency.
That's my thinking, anyway. Of course the article says that due to an increase in the cost of mackerel, the value of the Mack is surging against the dollar. So what would I know?
In fiction, I think I’m not too bad at endings, but in real life I’m not so good at them. I tend to use up my emotions prematurely, or else push on long past when I should have stopped. I never got my finishing end with Plup – there were too many small endings, and eventually I became stupid with them, announcing loudly my last ever spilling of coffee and my last trip to the toilet. By the time I closed the door for the last time the shop no longer felt like the shop to me, with the bare walls and large empty windows and far too much space, and I didn’t feel much at all, although I tried hard to feel something.
I probably should have ended this blog back in February when I finished my series of seriously-written blog entries. I thought about it, and had half-intended to do so, but then I’d enjoyed writing them, and thought I’d found a way to write this blog that I liked, and that was good, and that I felt comfortable with. Still, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, and I seem to have slipped back into old habits with frivolous entries and irregular updates.
On reflection, I really see no reason why my life needs to be on the internet. It’s funny, I’ve done this blog for nearly four years now, but never much questioned why I do it. I suppose in retrospect there were a few reasons – it was a reaching-out to people, and provided an ersatz surrogate for the diary I’d stopped keeping a short while before I started this, and it made me feel I was at least writing something. Things are different now. I’m working hard on my novel – it goes slowly, and I’m not entirely happy with it, but then it’s not meant to be easy. Recently I’ve started keeping a diary again. My life has come naturally to a juncture; I am keen, generally, to make changes; something has to give, and I think it has to be this blog.
This is something I have thought about for a long time now; it’s not a momentary whim of mood. For every good reason I have for continuing this thing, I have an equally good reason for stopping. It allows me to stay in touch with people, but at the same time, as I pointed out accusatively once before, and now note without rancour, I think it does provide people with a superficial feeling that they are in touch with me when they really are not, or only occasionally are. It does encourage me to write on a regular basis, but it also encourages me to be less vigilant about the quality of what I send into the world. In the end I am a self-concious person, not particularly inclined to public demonstration, and I find at least half the things I write on here I end up regretting. Although I am cautious of how much I reveal here, the accumulation of information I provide is something with which I am uncomfortable, and leaves me feeling overexposed. Still, the main reason is simply that I want to spend my writing time working on my novel, and now that I find myself seriously engaged with the process of writing it, time spent doing this blog feels like a waste.
For these reasons and others I have decided to discontinue this blog. The nature of this sort of blog announcement being what it is, it would be stupid of me to say unequivocably that I will never again want to write this blog, or some other, but I really think I’ve had enough. Thank you all for reading. Thank you for the comments, which always meant a lot, and sometimes meant much more than could possibly have been imagined by the commenter. A short reminder of what is obvious – just because I don’t have a blog, it doesn’t mean I have ceased to exist, and should anybody be curious, I can still be found quite easily at the other end of a telephone line or internet connection.
Thanks and goodbye.
I took apart a pen – one of those ones you click on and off – and tried to put it back together again. I couldn’t quite make it right. One of my attempts looked OK, until I clicked the pen on, and half the pen launched across the room like a catapult. I fell about laughing. My last effort still wasn’t right – the pen doesn’t click on or off, and the tip of it retracts and expands as I try to write, as if it is now equipped with suspension. I kind of like it. I unwrapped an easter egg and tried to compress the foil wrapping down into a perfect tiny cube – it was something distracting to do with my fingers. I made it so small – I carried the cube around in my pocket for a week, took it out from time to time, tried to make the cube smaller. I got out candles for Earth Hour, and didn’t put them away again. They appealed to my pyromaniac tendencies. I dripped wax into my ashtray, creating an unpleasant grey waxy lump of ash and cigarette butts, which I eventually disposed of. I made small candles out of the large candles using random things for wicks – pieces of paper, matchsticks – and lit them, they burned erratically: slow, then scarily fast. This is how my mind works…
I finished my professional short story a week or two back. I renamed it my semi-professional short story, and showed it to Tim. It was seven thousand words, in the end, and did a servicable job of telling a story, but failed to soar. I had a long talk to Tim about it – he’s the best reader I know, he has that ability, which I don’t have, to put aside his preconceptions about how writing should be and look at something objectively. He saw the same things in it I did – the same flaws and strengths – which was nice, it’s good to know I can still see my writing as others see it. Hearing somebody else articulate, clearly, what was going on in my writing, helped me realise what I needed to do to fix some problems we both saw: things that have crept into my writing, these arch oratorical flourishes and self-concious mannerisms that detract from the reality of what I’m trying to say. I’m not so much interested in fixing the short story – it is what it is, and I don’t think any amount of work will make it more than that – but I’ll give it a final polish sometime soon and send it off somewhere – it might be publishable.
Last Friday I started writing my novel. I decided I would write one thousand words a day. That was five days ago, and I’ve written five thousand words of it – about two thirds of the first chapter. It’s not much, but it feels like a beginning, it feels alright. Obviously there is a long way to go, but this is how I used to write, back in my late teens and early twenties. It’s not such a hard commitment, one thousand words a day, it just takes discipline. I don’t want to write this thing slowly, I don’t want to spend three years on it, I want to get it down on paper. If I can keep this up, in three months I’ll have a draft of ninety thousand plus words, which would be nice. It might not work out exactly like that, but I’d like to see if I can at least go close. I made a deal with myself a while back, and now I need to fulfill it – if I don’t write now, and write seriously, then the last three years of my life were pointless.
For some reason, I don’t know why, I do feel an obligation to keep this blog updated, at least semi-regularly, if I have anything at all to say. But one thousand words a day is a lot, and I’m not going to put my novel on hold to write this blog. As half-assed as these entries are, sometimes, I do usually put at least some effort into them, and it takes time. If I get a chance, and have something to say, I’ll write this, but if I’m not around too much for the next while, that’s why.
I wish I had better reasons for wanting to be a writer – a more pure desire for self-expression, and less regard for the opinions of others. But a lot of my motives come from self-conciousness and a desire to prove myself. I have these stupid illusions about writing – that if I write well enough everyone will like me, that if I write well enough I can make myself happy. I went down to Austinmer on the weekend, and normally that relaxes me, but I found myself feeling anxious, and I started to recognise other things, symptoms I know well, that suggest things might be starting to go slightly awry in my head, a tilt in my perceptions that if not checked might send me down for a while. It hasn’t happened yet and sometimes I can avoid it, but this is how it happens: first slowly, then quickly; a non-specific anxiety that I know will find specifics if not turned away. I’ve been working hard against this all year, keeping myself busy, staying productive, staying healthy, these small things that seem to help, and possibly I’m overdue.
I probably can’t write well enough to make myself happy, but I do believe that when I write, and write well, I can stay ahead of the moods that sometimes chase me. I know I’m not a genius, not like Shakespeare or Joyce, I don’t have that sort of off-the-scale ability with language, but I do want to be good. I don’t know what happens to me if it turns out I’m ordinary at this. I know there are things I can do when I write – I know that when I try I can put down decently constructed sentences, one after the other, and I seem to be able to describe a scene and make it real in a reader’s mind. Whether I can offer any insight into what it means to be alive, or show the world as I uniquely see it, or make something that is beautiful... I don’t know. But I know I need to stop talking about being a writer and go back to doing it. I need to go do this for a while.
Today was my last rostered day of work at Plup. I didn’t know for sure it was going to be my last day – the rosters were drawn up until tomorrow, when Helen is working, and then there was Thursday, and the weekend, to be considered – but, walking to work, I thought it might be my last day. We’ve been dollar sale-ing for a while now – it started faster than I had thought it would, and help up longer than I expected. Everything good, or even marginal, went really quickly, in the first few days, but then the great accumulated mass of forgetable books, many of which had been shoved to the back of the bookshelves, waiting for this time, or some other need, kept selling as well. The shelves cleared out, we packed the books closer together again, on the middle shelves, the accesible and eye-line shelves, and they kept selling. I made some money, banked a pile of cash that was scary to carry down the street, payed off some debt on my credit card. The books started to sell more slowly, I would look along the shelves and not recognise many authors – the forgotten first novels of authors who never made it (I have a lot of sympathy for those sorts of books) – and the wretched, falling apart books of those once famous authors that nobody reads anymore – Joyce Cary, Erskine Caldwell, Jerzy Kozinski. I’d already made one date for when I would finish up, and it came and went, because people just kept buying books.
It was getting to around that time – the point when it was no longer profitable to pay people to sit in the shop – I knew it was approaching, and I suppose it didn’t matter too much exactly when it was. We could have gone for another week, maybe, or something less than that, but we don’t have the books to last much longer. So I was walking to work – today was the most glorious Autumn day – and I was thinking about whether it would be my last day, and I realised what I was looking for was not some arbitrary point on a declining curve when I would know it was time to stop, but some feeling, some moment of poignancy that would give me an ending.
The problem is there have been too many endings with this thing, and there are still more endings to come – Helen is working tomorrow, and then there is the final packup that is still to be done, the boxing and disposing of those wretched books nobody will pay a dollar for, the dismantling of the shelves, the final cleanup – I am waiting until closer to the end of April for these things, when my mother will be coming down to help me, and I need the help. There have been too many endings, but this was an important ending, and throughout the day I was frustrated by this – by my inability to feel the day as anything other than another day at work. I packed up the hold books that customers had never come to pick up, cleaned up the shelves behind a little. I tidied up the bookshelves a bit, and wondered why I was doing it – force of habit, or a certain residual pride. Talked to some customers, read Google News. In the afternoon Tahlia came by, the afternoon light was so nice, she hung out for a bit, checking her email and playing around with an essay she was writing, and I sat outside and decided that it was as good a day as any to stop.
I called up my father, I called up Tim, I complained about the lack of poignancy to my day, how things were just slowing to a stop with this closing sale, how there was no conclusive crash of cymbals. I wondered aloud if I would get this when I closed the door for the final time in a couple of weeks. “I suppose that’s just how life is,” I told my father. He told me it was, and said that the shop might have burned down – “that would be a final ending.” He’s good at putting things in an unhelpful perspective like that.
I lingered at the end of the day. I didn’t notice what the last book I sold was – hell, it probably won’t even be the last book I sell, I’ll probably sell something tomorrow when I relieve Helen for lunch. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been being lazy, closing up a bit early, going home before it became dark and cold. But tonight I kept going, on past the point when we officially close. And the season saved me – I hadn’t stayed open so late, not since daylight saving ended, I hadn’t seen the store at night since last year. It became dark, a cool Autumn evening, the lights came on along King Street, white crystal lights that sparkled in the crisp air, and the store was all lit up. I’ve always loved the way the store looks at night, this little golden glowbox, the lights softening the dust and scratches, and even with a third of the lightbulbs blown it still had that. It had that quality of the change of seasons, where you remember past times and past seasons. Mostly what I remembered were those times in Autumn and Winter when I’d been out bookshopping while Tahlia worked in the store, and I would come back after five-thirty, when the clearway restrictions ended, and we’d spend that last half-hour excitedly sorting through boxes of new stock, dividing them into internet and five dollar and window and shelf-stock piles. Remembering those things, past seasons, pleasant times, I got my moment of poignancy.
It felt sad, but in a good way; then, walking home, it felt sad in a bad way, for a while. But that’s OK, too. I just wanted to feel it.
This is what I’ll miss. From my smoking spot on the front step of the store I am like a webcam, observing North King Street. From here I engage with the community, and I’ll miss these people, all of them, even the annoying old Greek printer next door, and his sons – the idiot son, who is amiable, and the dapper son who looks like a member of the Mafia. I’ll miss the American architect next door who I talk to about American authors like Phillip Roth, and who always gives me friendly lectures on my smoking, telling me how his father died from it. His own addiction is Coca-Cola – he unloads crates of it every week. I will miss my xerox conversations with Whistle Man, miss hearing my favourite routine, “Whistle Man keeps his eye out for shoplifters and offers them his fist”. I will miss his crazy plans for how I should protect the five dollar books from the wind with panels of clear plastic, and I will miss his estimates of how many books are in the store: “Must be millions, eh?” I will miss the way he terrifies parents by whistling birdsong to their captivated children. The other day he found a magnetic advertising calendar on the footpath and asked me what month it was, was it February? It was March, I told him. The thought of Whistle Man puzzling over the suddenly empty store makes me sad. I will miss the community of shopkeepers: the nice Thai people next door, who I don’t talk to much, but who rescued my five dollar rack the time I idiotically left it out for the night, and who came running in the other day, when there was a blackout, to check if our power was off too. I will miss talking about the state of business on North King Street with Doris at Ice and Slice. I’ll miss Ray, everybody’s favourite customer: an old school gentleman who looks like a broken down roadie, the only customer who ever gave us Christmas cards.
Within these walls I have been through so much, and my feelings about Plup are so mixed. Plup came along at a time when I didn’t know what I was doing and it gave me direction. It helped me to re-engage with people, and then eventually it made me not want to engage with people, and I had to remove it from my mind so I could like people again. What happened was this: I found out that I could never have the store I wanted, that it was too small and the rent too high, so I had to turn over books quickly and cheaply. And mostly what people wanted were the same half-a-dozen books and authors – all those university students I had wanted to please – and those books were all still in print, so you couldn’t ask much for them even when you found them, so I never had them in stock. I found myself telling people constantly, “No, we don’t have that... no, no, no.” I wanted to explain to them that I did understand, that I knew who those authors were, and why they wanted them, and that if I could I would have them available constantly for five dollars. I would try to demonstrate this by answering people’s title requests with the author of the book. “The Vonnegut? No, we don’t have any Vonnegut at the moment.” But this confused people, it elevated their hopes momentarily and dashed them again. And disapointing people, and people’s failure to understand why I couldn't give them the books they wanted, at the price they wanted to pay – the innocent misunderstanding of the customers, which was no different to what my own would once have been – made me turn away from people for a while, and for a while last year it even made me turn away from my friends, so misanthropic had I become. And I had to work to overcome that.
It took me as a person who had romantic ideas about books and literature – a person who would once have been appalled at the thought of destroying books – a person who measured a book’s worth by the merits of the words printed inside it – and overlayed onto that a different value system. The value system was not independent of the worth of the words in a book, because that is always a factor, but there are so many others. For a while I enjoyed this – in many ways I still do – but it changed the way I view books. I developed the bookseller’s gaze – in the presence of a bookshelf I continue talking, but my eyes steadily wander across the shelves, looking for treasures. All booksellers do this.
It gave me a trade that I cherish, an arcane knowledge that I learned well. My knowledge is strong – I am now very good at this, I can find other dealers’ mistakes and profit from them; I can do this in famous second hand bookshops, because everybody makes mistakes, and this is how one measures skill in this trade. Any half-decent bookseller can make money from well-chosen books at a book fair or auction or op shop, but it takes real skill to spot a book that a colleague has grossly undervalued. It is a good thing to have a trade, and I could do this in any English speaking city – give me a few dollars capital, and I wouldn’t starve. Give me an internet connection and I could make a decent weekly wage on Ebay.
It gave me a mentor I greatly value who selflessly imparted to me knowledge, in the manner of trades. And I was a willing and appreciative pupil, and I tried to give back whatever it is that apprentices give to masters that make this timeless transaction mutually worthwhile.
Over drinks one night this mentor helped me work out a plan – a plan to serve my time and gain my knowledge, a plan to acquire a large number of books and catalogue them for internet sale. He told me I was otherwise unemployable, which is his way, and not true, exactly. Except it is, because I wanted to have time to write, because that’s still the thing that is most important to me. And so my plan was to spend a few years acquiring and cataloguing books for internet sale – which is really just an old bookselling tradition made modern, the tradition of the mail order catalogue – so that I would be able to greatly reduce my workload at some future point, and still have a good income based on those years of work, and I would be able to spend my time writing. And it worked, and that’s where I am now, and it’s great. But I didn’t write much in those years, because my head was too filled with work, and I was too tired at the end of the day. And I felt alien to myself for quite a long time. And I don’t know what I might have written in those years if I’d done something else – I’ll never know – and that was hard for me.
And that’s why I have mixed feelings about Plup.
And now the shop is emptying, the catalogued books are all boxed and stored away and we are selling off what’s left of the uncataloguable shelf-stock for a dollar a book, and people are taking it away in great piles. I thought I’d find this sad, but I’ve found myself, the last couple of days, going in to work even when I didn’t need to, to watch it happen. I’ve been more chatty with customers than I have been in quite a while. The acoustics of this place change as the books disapear, it becomes more echoey, and soon this will be distant from me, and this shop will be something new and bland. I have been moved by how many customers have told me they will miss it. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad bookstore after all. There was always something good to read for not very much money, if you were willing to step outside what was currently fashionable with the university set – we were never out of Scott Fitzgerald, J P Donleavy, Lawrence Durrell, and plenty of other people worth reading. And these comments from customers have made me feel good. Sometimes they phrase their appreciation in a specific way that leaves me wordless, an innocent comment that I don’t know how to answer. “It’s a shame you’re going,” they say. I shrug and say some empty platitude; I can’t explain.
ADDED: Apparently my failure to contextualize has confused people a little. This was an email we got at work - I just liked the Berlitz quality of formal construction combined with an orderly mind and slightly askew English. As Tim said, it brings to mind a small village that's just got a single internet connection which has excited the whole town with its possibilities. I wasn't making fun of Nebojsa - I wish every email we got was as polite as this. Also, I don't seem to feel much like blogging, although I'm still writing a lot, so I thought some found art might fill the gap.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Hello from SERBIA. My name is Nebojsa and I'm very much interested in purchasing a book from your stock. The book title is as follows:
The Encyclopedia of Reading Tea Leaves, by Helen Simpson
The purchase on my behalf would be carried out by a friend of mine who lives in Belgium. Yet, I have a few questions for you.
1. Do you have above given title in your stocks?
2. Can the purchase be carried out directly from your site.
3. Do you ship your books to Europe?
4. If yes, what would be the approximate costs of shipping the book to SERBIA?
I thank you very much in advance for your kind hep in this matter. I really need this book and would be very happy if you can help me.
Yours gratefully,
Nebojsa
When I finished that last blog entry I realized I'd finally pushed from the main page the last of my bad, deleted entries from October-November. It made me look at what I'd done. In two months I'd written 16,000 words, and when I looked at them as a totality it felt complete - the story of me and a season, of rediscovering writing, the city, the thoughts and memories those things brought out. I liked quite a bit of it; it had been good for me to write it. It raised the question of what next - did I want to keep doing it? I could have gone on, but I felt sooner or later - probably sooner - the quality would drop. I felt I was starting to develop a particular voice for it and a sort of template that I could use over and over again, and if I did that it would start to become less truthful, more fictional. And I was still uncomfortable with so much public revelation. I've twice had people come in to the shop and say "Are you Nicholas? I read your blog." That's an unsettling moment - to be staring at a stranger who knows so much about you and has all these preconceptions about you, and you know nothing about them...
I thought of making a zine of what I'd written, putting it back in chronological order, tidying it up and making it a unified whole. I felt it was more significant than just a series of blog entries, and deserved to be its own thing. But I've always felt there was something not quite kosher about making zines from blog entries - a bit like novelizations of movies - so in the end I didn't.
It was a product of a time, a bunch of feelings, a frustration at myself for not having written as well as I would have liked. I guess it belongs to the ether now. I hope people liked it.
I haven't forgotten the lessons, but I'm still thinking about what I want to do now with this blog. Still, I felt I should update. We've started packing up the store, and by the start of May I won't have a retail shop anymore. It raises some complex feelings in me - it is so clear a demarkation of the end of one part of my life and the start of a new one. Despite my often expressed frustrations and desire for change, Plup has been good to me and there are things about it I'll miss. I might write some more about this soon. At the moment it is difficult, there is lots to organize and it's the sort of administrative stuff I'm not particularly good at. I don't feel quite as good as I did in January, when my head felt clear and my course certain, and I'm awfully tired - apart from administrative things the main thing I seem to do is move heavy boxes of books - but I'm still swimming at night, and writing, when I can.
I went over to see Tim at Bondi – he was housesitting this cool place – and we went for a swim on Bondi Beach at ten o’clock at night. It had been raining, the footprints on the sand were eroded and dimpled, the beach was almost empty; certainly there was nobody swimming. The sand was cold on our bare feet. We walked along the hard sand down by the water and I taught Tim how to spot rips, how you had to look for the dark water and the small, irregular and choppy waves. We walked along the shore looking for a good spot, and all the talk of rips made me nervous – what did I know of rips on Bondi Beach? It wasn’t like the beach I grew up on...
We found the spot that seemed best. Tim was reluctant – it wasn’t a particularly warm night – but I hadn’t been in the surf all summer. I took off my shirt and made my way in. The waves were gentle, there wasn’t much of an undercurrent, but the water was brisk – I went
weehee!, and
wowsers!, and
zip! I laughed hysterically from the shock of the cold. But it was, as they say, alright once you got in. Tim came in – my rip lesson had made him nervous, he was spotting rips everywhere with his new knowledge, it all looked to him sort of like what I’d described – the whole ocean was dark, all the surf irregular. We bodysurfed some waves, caught a couple of good ones – where the wave takes you, suddenly, and you go woosh off towards the shore – it was really nice to swim.
When we got out the air seemed suprisingly warm. Walking back, there were some disreputable looking teenagers in a huddle on the boardwalk, they made me smile, they reminded me of me. I said to Tim that I wasn’t sure about Bondi Beach – how it seemed somehow inauthentic to me, as if it was all dressed up to look like Bondi Beach. Tim said that was every landmark – he mentioned the Sydney Harbour Bridge – and I guess he had a point.
On Friday night I went into the city to see the final Candle Records show at the Metro, with Tahlia. In the bar area I looked around, and even though I knew nobody, everybody seemed slightly familiar, as if I’d seen them or their dopplegangers at other, similar shows. I tried to explain this to Tahlia, she didn’t understand.
“Look,” I said. “There’s the aging hipster in his thirties who’s going bald and has shaved his head. There he is again! There’s the fashionable Asian girl with the glasses and the scarf. There’s the guy with the brown jacket and the muttonchops.”
She started to understand.
“There’s the weedy guy with the buzz haircut that looks sort of like a butch lesbian,” I continued. Tahlia didn’t think there was such a type, or that this made any sense. “There’s the grey-haired guy with a rat’s tail!” I exclaimed, delighted. There is no such type, although unfortunately there was such a person. I was just being stupid.
We watched a few bands, then snuck a look at the running list and realized there was still four hours to go until The Lucksmiths, and we didn’t really want to see the bands in between. There’s only so much amiable folk-rock you can handle at one sitting, and four more hours of it was entirely too much. My back was hurting, Tahlia’s leg was hurting; we went out to the bar area and realized that while we would like to see the Lucksmiths, we couldn’t see ourselves lasting through all the bands in-between.
We tried to think of something else to do. I suggested we go to Time Zone and play air hockey (I love air hockey). We left the Metro and crossed the street, but Time Zone didn’t seem to be there anymore. We saw, back on the other side of the street, right next to the Metro, something called Galaxy World, and crossed the street again (I suppose this street-crossing will seem like arbitrary detail unless I mention that Tahlia was having difficulty making it across George Street in the time alloted by the little green man, due to her recently broken leg.)
Galaxy World was disapointing to me. I like video arcades, not so much for the coin operated video games as for the sheer thrill of the sensory overload. Galaxy World had that, but it didn’t have an air hockey table. To me this is against the spirit of video arcades – they traditionally have an old air hockey table shoved to the back somewhere, for dinosaurs like me. (There was a single pinball machine in one dark corner – unplugged, and with an out of order sign on it.) Instead they had puri machines – at least a dozen – and twenty or so skill testers. I couldn’t imagine why they needed so many skill testers. There was a giant skill tester, on which for five dollars a go you could try to manipulate the massive robot claw to retrieve for you a stuffed toy the size of a great dane.
I wasn’t tempted, but under other circumstances – when I’m not annoyed at them taking up space that could have been used for an air hockey table – I am something of a sucker for skill testers. I’ve never won anything on a skill tester, have never seen a prize in one that I’d even like to win, yet have wasted an embarrasing amount of money on them in my life. To those who doubt that skill testers actually test any skill, I say this: I once saw the King of the Skill Testers in action. He was at a suburban bowling alley, middle-aged and nothing much to look at. If his life had taken a different path he might have been a skilled surgeon. He had a young girl with him, a daughter or grandaughter, and for her he brought from a skill tester four small stuffed toys in four attempts. The girl wanted more, but through one squinted eye he sized up the lay of the remaining stuffed toys and declared with finality that none of them were in a gettable position. This man is something of a hero of mine. I would give a number of hard-earned skills to be casually brilliant at the skill tester – to nonchalantly step up to it and make the arthritic robot claw do my bidding.
On George Street, again, the kids in from the suburbs were out, the girls in short skirts and too much makeup, the boys in various ethnic uniforms of the night. I tried to think of something to do, difficult because Tahlia couldn’t walk very far. I spied a monorail station and suggested we take a ride. I like the monorail, even though it’s ridiculous, even though it goes nowhere useful and costs too much. Still, you can ride it for as long as you like on a single token. So we caught the lift up to the monorail station. The ticket attendant seemed delighted to see us, as if we were the first people to ride the monorail all night. We caught the monorail and rode it for a while in its giant pointless loop, looking out through the windows and into first floor offices and restaraunts, which is the Great Thing that nobody appreciates about the monorail: it is an informal tour of the first floors of the city centre.
We got off at Town Hall. Still obsessed by air hockey, I got this sudden delusion that there used to be a Time Zone by the police station and Alexander's. I left Tahlia momentarily and went looking for it, but there was no Time Zone – no police station, no Alexander's. It’s been a while since I used to work in the city centre, things have changed.
By the bus station an African busking group was singing Amazing Grace – there was this very small, fat and strange-looking homeless woman, maybe in her sixties, her breasts nearly coming out of her yellow top, who sat on a bus seat – she was so tiny her legs didn’t reach the ground – and she listened to them with her heavy-lidded eyes half-closed. In a novel, I’d never dare have the busking group be singing Amazing Grace, but that is what they sang.
*
There is about the city, now, on certain afternoons and in the magic hour, a feeling of autumn, it is there in the way the light hits the sandstone buildings, and there sometimes on days with clear skies and cool unhumid air. I am looking forward to Autumn, it is my favourite season in Sydney.
I guess nobody has ideas for me, and I probably shouldn’t have asked. It reminds me of an artist I read of once, a New York artist of the eighties, whose schtick was this: he put two ads in the Village Voice, one calling for artists who could generate ideas for artworks, and another for artists to execute others’ ideas. He hired a bunch of starving artists at minimum wage and set up a factory, then signed the results, and that was his art. He was quite succesful, though loathed by many. Anyway, if there are any bloggers out there capable of working up others’ ideas into ripping blog entries, please get in touch...
In the last entry I wanted to write a little about what fiction I’m working on, but the topic kept dropping out as I wrote, so I’ll put it in a blog entry of its own.
In November I worked dilligently if unsuccesfully on my novel. I don’t like to describe the plots of things I’m working on – I find it kills the idea – so I’ll just say it’s an apocalyptic novel. While others were trying hard to turn out 50,000 words of stream-of-conciousness blather for the ridiculous
NANOWRIMO, I was trying, simply, to come up with a voice for my book. I wrote certain paragraphs, then re-wrote them, a number of times. Eventually these paragraphs would become so dressed up with subclauses and clever verbiage that I would abandon them and find some other passage to play with. I even wrote a couple of pages of actual novel, although they weren’t any good. I told myself that I was trying to decide whether the book should be in first or third person, which is not something that should really take a month – and anyway, everything I wrote was first person. I wanted to write it in first person, because first person is so much easier – for me, and I think for most people. I can create some slightly altered alter-ego and let him talk, more or less as I would myself. I can insert my own caustic observations and humour whenever things get a little slow.
I think I secretly knew all along that the novel should be in third person. In December I stopped writing it. I felt bad about stopping, but I think now it was probably necessary. I’ll go back to it eventually.
After that I just wrote blog entries, which as I mentioned in the last entry turned out to be the best thing for me. Then, in the last few weeks, with my interest in fiction revived, I went back and looked at some things saved on my computer. The first thing I looked at was my novel attempts, which seemed, with a month’s distance, to be pretty abysmal. Then I found a couple of short stories – ideas I’ve had for a long time, four years in one instance, five in the other – that I have worked on, over the years, very occasionally and with limited success, but which are still in some way alive for me.
I’m not good with short stories. In truth I haven’t finished one in about eight years. I have written two full-length manuscripts in that time, so it’s not laziness (although as I write that, it doesn't seem such an amazing achievement; certainly I should have written more); I don’t think I’m well-suited to the form. My short stories tend to either remain unfinished, or turn into novels. But I’d like to write a short story now, if only because it would be nice to complete a new piece of fiction, whatever the length, and shorter is easier than longer.
One of the short stories is very important to me, still hopelessly vague in conception, something I only work on when intoxicated, and quite likely to turn into a novel, if I ever get a grip on it. I’m leaving that one alone for the moment.
The other is what I think of as my Professional Short Story, and that’s what I’ve been working on. It is not particularly important to me, nor particularly brilliant in concept – it’s one of those epiphany sorts of short stories, like something from the New Yorker in the fifties. And that’s how I want to write it: with that sort of sinewy prose that some of the American writers of that time had, tough in its nouns and verbs and elegant in its punctuation and grammar and sentence construction. Tight. It is not in danger of turning into a novel, and probably in little danger of turning into a story that will change the world, but it is a serviceable idea that I would like very much to turn into a well-crafted short story.
It hasn’t been going too great so far; it hasn’t been as well-written as some of the things on my blog, and I’m not too inspired to write it, although that’s kind of the point. Instead of nouns and verbs I’m getting convoluted sentences, a general dullness, and innapropriate oratorical flourishes.
Last night after another not-too-succesful session with this story, I got out my copy of Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey. This is something I do a lot when I’m writing, re-read stuff that seems close to what I’m trying to do, to see how others have done it. I should say, not out of brag, but because it’s slightly important to the anecdote, and because I am a trained bookseller, that I have a reasonably nice copy of this book – the second British edition, in a good dustjacket (parenthetically, I’d like to say that I think first editions are a bit stupid, particularly if so valuable and pristine that they can’t be read, but there
is something nice about having a contemporary hardcover edition of a book you like, and when I find these, I tend to keep them.) Anyway I got this book off my bookshelf in order to be instructed by old JD. Like a lot of people, I was hugely enamoured of him between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and he’s probably still the biggest influence on my style. These days I’d admit that some of his ideas are a little sophomoric, but I still love the way he writes. So I opened this nice copy of a great book, and the first thing I read was the front flap, which had a brief introduction by JD Salinger. He was talking about the Glass stories, and he said something in it that perfectly stated how I’m feeling about my own writing, which I’d like to put down here. I could have stopped there, I suppose, but I did re-read "Franny", and it was helpful – I realized how economical his sentences are, how they tend to be simultaneously elegant, and well-observed, and revealing with regards to character. So that’s something for me to attempt, if not achieve, when I next try to write my Professional Short Story. Thanks, JD, for both things.
It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful.
