Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

I have to give Fremantle Arts Press an answer to this question:

What song would the narrator/protagonist of your story sing at a karaoke bar and why?
for their Web and Facebook page for the promotion of The Kid on the Karaoke Stage and other stories.

So I've chosen Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams

The vivid imagery of country driving and living in a remote area, the undercurrent of tension and subtle hint of potential violence and rural decay, this song encapsulates the story Gaye is narrating.  And all to a rocking good country tune!

Still sad about the death of Diana Wynne Jones so indulge me for a moment

I have decided to list 50 of my favourite YAbooks (and some adult books I read when I was probably still too young for them!)  from when I was growing up..most of which I still have and almost none of which I can get the kids to read!  Some are the wonderful books of Ms Wynne-Jones but lots aren't...Not in any particular order...

1.   The Power of Three  - DWJ
2.    My Side of the Mountain
3.   Kim
4.  Swallows & Amazons
5.  A Wizard of Earthsea
6.  The Winter Players
 7.  The Homeward Bounders
 8.  Fire & Hemlock
9.  The many Coloured Land
10.  The Nargun & The Stars
11.  All the Song of Wirrun Books
12.  A Waltz through the Hills
13.  The Sun on the Stubble
14.  A Girl of the Limberlost
15.  The Secret Garden
16.  Z for Zachariah
17.  Dragon Flight
18.  Charmed Life
19.  Alice In Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass
20.  A Wrinkle in Time
21.  The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
22.  Treasure Island & Kidnapped
23.  The 39 Steps
24.  The Hound of the Baskervilles
25.  These Old Shades
26.  The Caravan Passes
27.  Little House in the Big Woods
28.  Dogsbody
29.  Archers Goon
30.  The Harp in the South
31.  Wind in the Willows
32.  The Dark is Rising series
33.  All the Gerald Durrel Books - particularly My Family & Other Animals
34.  Bulldog Drummond & his four rounds with Karl Peterson
35.  Five go to Smugglers Top (my fave Famous 5 book)
36.  Brat Farrar
37.  White Fang
38.  Down the Long Hills
39.  All the William Books
40.  The Little World of Don Camillo
41.  The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings
42.  The Moon Spinners
43.  The Crystal Cave
44.  The Once & Futue King
45.  The Pheonix & the Carpet
46.  The Mango Tree
47.  Lantana Lane
48.  Drinking Cider with Rosie
49.  Charlottes Web
50.  A squillion other wonderful amazing imaginary adventures....  from a squillion wonderful amazing writers..  Thank you to each and every one!!

So I found this on top of the fridge...

.... and I simply HAD to open it!  Anything could be inside a container  with such a label!!!  I mean what is a non-fiction biscuit anyway?  Is it like a hyper biscuit - more real than real?  Some kind of Uber-cookie?  Although the term non-fiction does have a kind of gravitas that belies any super-hero, comic book larger than life shenanigans...  I am suspecting there won't be chocolate....  These will be serious as hell biscuits, biscuits that are deeply pondering the meaning of life and are probably finding a cure for cancer on the side.  HARD CORE ESSAY WRITING BISCUITS!!!  with full referencing and probably their own site on Google Scholar.


I just HAD to open it!  I felt like Pandora as I prised the stiff plastic lid away from the rim.......

Needless to say I was slightly disappointed.











But I was completely right about the lack of chocolate.

Some of Today's Writing....

John:                I drove to the City.  I climbed inside that great grey concrete beast and I drank.  I drank whiskey and never showered.  Stinking and wallowing in the foulness of myself. 

Isabella:           I went to the hills to write.  Leaving everything behind I went to the hills to write of the sea.  Does that seem a strange choice?  But how else to write of it?  I could never write when we were together. 

John:                Some mornings I woke up fully dressed and other times naked but always with the sour stench of vomit in my beard. 

Isabella:           I sat in my cottage in the foothills with the scent of eucalypts and far off bushfires and I wrote.   The air conditioning made me cold so I turned it off and let the sweat come, sat dripping at the wooden desk while ants bit in the dampness behind my knees.

John:                I don’t even remember the writing of it.  The days blurred and I drank and sometimes there was ink and paper and at the end it was done.  I was done.

Isabella:           Outside my cottage an enormous prickly pear bristled with strange red fruit.  They dropped and fermented on the gravel pathways.

John:                As Laocoon I was crushed.  Who knows what sin committed, what Gods I offended.  It was enough that I spoke the truth.

Isabella:           I drank vodka with blood orange and wrote of the ocean.

John:                Grief is a dangerous place from which to write.  Anger, love, fear, jealousy even, these all have form and shape, they are anchored and finite.  But grief, grief knows no restraint, it spills and pours without boundaries, consumes itself and grows larger.  Why grief, grief might say anything.

Tonight's Haiku

Visiting the bees
the hollow trunk hums gently
in the still warm night

I'm Baaackk!!

...after a week away doing Alumni type things..I am finally back at KSP Yay!!!  Two more weeks of writerly shenanigans! Lots to do..I will be hopefully attending more of the local writing groups, I am guest of honour at a literary dinner at KSP tomorrow night where apparently me reading from my works and trying not to drink too much is not only an appetiser but worth paying to see!  Yay me!  Also muchos writing and putting together an application  for the (still mostly unwritten) play to be hopefully produced at the Blue Room Theatre later in the year.  Workshop went very well last week - feedback sheets were reassuringly positive and no one asked for their money back so that's a good sign.  I have to come up with some kind of PR thing for my story that is coming out in May with FACP - I have to choose the Karaoke song my main character would sing and show this in some clever and creative way..I am thinking of doing a visual representation ..inspired by helping Toby with his homework last night... a kind of literary decoupage, only with more blood and Google.  I got right into the cutting out and careful wielding of glue sticks for his visual representation of leit-motifs in the Kite Runner.  Our use of subtle imagery and REAL string was truly masterly..I am hoping for an A+ at least - haven't enjoyed homework so much since I spent an entire night painting a huge fishing float red for his "Mars" project... in grade 2.  It makes up for my ineptitude with assisting his "math" homework. 

The Collection is growing...

Most days here at KSP involve too much coffee and a lot of sitting on my butt typing like a maniac.  Occasionally I drag myself up to the top of the hill to attempt to make a phone call - reception is not great here in the foothills - or maybe that's just Vodafone....

Really occasionally I go for a walk around Katherine's place.  And every time I do (3 times so far - and this is why the Australian Institute of Sport has never offered me any funding) I find something...cute yet slightly sinister... The newest addition has a hole in its mouth and makes a kind of serial killer wheeze when you squeeze it...  But look how perky he is!  And his new friends like him too - or are possibly planning on killing me in my sleep...

Speaking of which.. There is something very odd about the glass door panels here in my cottage. The privacy film they are coated in distorts any lights and makes them huge and glowy and ...to be honest..look a lot like Alien spacecraft when you wake up in the middle of the night (usually needing to wee from too much coffee) and glance out through them..  The first night that happened I actually got a bit freaked..there were four HUGE glowing diamond shaped "things" moving down the hillside towards me...Here is a photo of them:

And THAT is why no-one ever believes abductees...Crap photos! Even with a brilliant camera the light was too pale to record anything. Anyhoo upon opening the door, quite anxiously I must admit - it turned out the lights were just weak little solar path lights magnified and distorted by the privacy film on the glass.  Even so - I'm watching them....

One Tale Told Over and Over

Recognisably musically interesting parts followed by irrational resting parts and finally rational resting parts....

The Mask of the Medusa

Voice One:      And I saw it then, the face of a monster. Like looking into a mirror.  A foul gray moment as she railed and howled, beating at her face and head with closed and furious fists, white spittle frothing in the corners of her mouth, hands, demented, tearing her hair; that thick dark mane that had for so long fascinated me.  Fingers, hooked and ugly with rage, gripping her temples, hair like snakes.  Such a horrid mimicry of my own hands running reverently through those silky tresses that I loved, had loved so much.  And as I watched her beloved face transform, become my own, I was overwhelmed with a sudden shocking indifference. 

Prickly Pear Attack!

So this afternoon..inspired by KSP Treasurer John, I started looking up Prickly Pear Jam recipes..I am obviously suffering from domesticity withdrawal (stupid stupid me!) and had decided it would be so symbolic and lovely and, I don't know something probably pretentious, to make yummy Jam out of the ripening pears at Katherine's Place.  Romantic yes?  Oh How lovely I hear you say..and then she'll invite her dear friends to come over and have homemade scones and her fabulous (and no doubt soon to be Famous!) Prickly Pear Jam.  There will undoubtedly be lace tablecloths and possibly cucumber sandwiches and a high degree of genteel graciousness.  Well that was the plan.

So I start surfing the internet (and YES I have been writing today - 2000 words actually!) and came across some really lovely Jam recipes.  Admittedly the spines and nasty little bristles are a tad daunting but the internet has several helpful hints for dealing with them..including flamethrowers and napalm.  So what could possibly go wrong?!

Well lots actually..and I haven't even started to pick the little buggers yet!  So I'm happily researching Jam...jam jam jam...and then OOOH!  What's this?  A Prickly Pear Daiquiri recipe..Yum!  With a photo..OOOHH!  Lets go look at that shall we..so much more exciting than Jam!  and suddenly POW!  Virus...Crap!  abort abort abort!  Thank God for Norton is all I can say!  And why the hell would anyone think that's a good thing to stick a virus on?  I mean what sane person goes looking for a prickly pear daiquiri recipes for Gods sake????

Anyway I am still a little shaky..it was so sudden and vicious!  I think I need a Daiquiri to calm my nerves...

Prelude

The Ecstasy

“Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all”                                          Jean Genet

Cast

John Leonard (55) – A novelist & poet; distinguished & striking

Isabella Parker (45) – A Poet; a fading beauty

Marsden Parker (22) – A scriptwriter; vividly lovely

Voice One – Male

Voice Two – Female

Prelude

Music – Bartok – Solo Violin Sonata (Melodia) 3^rd movement – plays for 2 minutes & 8 seconds...then fades to a background sound.

(An old flickering slide; such as begins a silent black and white movie) –

“Fathoms”

The length of a man’s arms around the object of his affection

Voice Two:     You saw my desire.  Did it frighten you?

Voice One:      I didn’t notice.  There was luggage to arrange.  .

Voice Two:     I gasped; died a moment in the sultry air.  My face pale under the wide brimmed yellow straw.  You felt my terrible distress. (long pause)

I wrote of it in my journal.

Voice One:      The straps had fallen from one suitcase.  The bus steps were steep.

Voice Two:     Your wife; so brown and strong in her plain cotton shift.  She hated me.  I sensed her malevolence. 

Voice One:      She was unwell.  She dislikes travel.

Voice Two:     No.  Her gaze, that basilisks stare, I was stoned, pilloried, eviscerated, her razor eye sliced through the fragile armor of my chiffon frock.  I felt myself unraveling beneath her suspicion.

Voice One:      It had been a long journey and we were tired.  Do you remember how near a thing it was, our escape.  A matter of days.  We were grateful.

Voice Two:     Grateful.  You heartless bastard.

Music fades....

The Ecstacy

“Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all” 
Jean Genet



Prickly Pears outside my cottage at KSP



So what exactly am I writing up here in the foothills?  Well I'm not sure exactly ...but it is, in theory ... a Play.  Over the last few years I have become interested with the idea of betrayal... in particular the way in which great love can turn to hatred and revenge. Where passion and fire twists into something ugly and vengeful, where any lengths to punish the other seem suddenly  fair and reasonable.  It began with the purchase, on a whim, of a small $1 paperback in a local Good Sammy's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept"   After reading this I began to research the life of the Author, Elizabeth Smart ( here  and here ) and her passionate and torrid love affair with poet and novelist George Barker (here and here )  Barker wrote his own version of their love affair in a novella titled The Dead Seagull.   Theirs is a fascinating love story and one I believe has been told very well through various mediums, including a play "Memories of You" by  Canadian playwright Wendy Lill in 1989.

From there I began to wonder about love and its endings...I know that love, when it sours, can be rapacious, intractable and cruel.   And I began to see a pattern in how this plays out in our society, the way in which institutions support a kind of public horror show of the ending of a marriage or a relationship.  There is a script that is followed of vilification and accusation and such a horrendous tearing apart of all that was once loving and supportive. I have watched as a terrible puppet shows is enacted (over and over again), with  all the parts pre-destined and I have come to realise that Greek Tragedy, with all its excesses and cruelty is alive and well in our Family Court system and in the day to day suburban lives of our society.

What price is it fair to exact upon the Other for the ending of love?  For their indifference, or betrayal?  Medea, at least according to Euripides, murders her own children in revenge at Jason's betrayal.  For a modern day interpretation of this atrocity see some of the comprehensive research into Parent Alienation Syndrome.

So, that's what I am exploring up here in the foothills, modern day Greek tragedies, bohemian poets and the family court - its all terribly cheerful...  I'm thinking... a four hour liturgical musical with interpretive dance and an elephant that nobody speaks of...

As a footnote:  just when you find yourself immersed in something, you come across other projects that lie alongside, or across your own... one such project I have just discovered is 97 positions of the heart an international dance/theatre/spoken word collabaration based on the lives of Barker and Smart!

What's inspiring me today

This is the soundtrack to my play.... .... Enjoy!