whileiwaswaiting: April 2010

Bob Dylan & Johhny Cash – I Still Miss Someone...

http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=video_result&cad=3957961755172153947&ct=res&cd=2&ved=0CAwQtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DNu2BPwOeKls&rct=j&q=You+Tube+-+Bob+Dylan+%26+Johnny+Cash+-+I+Still+Miss+Someone&ei=uYfWS83nMM2IkAWsyajmBg&usg=AFQjCNFCdxxGFhzOLuRSLYWtXoFiWZkYqA&sig2=nIoDNOIK1HO-Dh8YMgqqgQ

What I’m Reading...

INVISIBLE REPUBLIC : BOB DYLAN'S BASEMENT TAPES By Greil Marcus : Picador 1997. Partly because I have an ongoing interest in the troubadour who has been with me all my life and partly out of a loyalty response to a stinging attack by one of my favourite female musicians, Joni Mitchell, where she really laid it in to Bob in a recent interview. I thought she sounded drunk and old and bad tempered and I don't think that any good is ever achieved in life through this kind of attack. They both can do outstanding, insightful and moving work. Let them both do it.

ANNE FRANK : THE DIARYOF A YOUNG GIRL Edited by Otto Frank & Mirjam Pressler : Penguin 1997. Mostly for research on my current novel which has a girl character passing through this time as Anne Frank recorded so well and partly because the poignancy of the cutting short of the life of the girl/woman who was Anne Frank shines stunningly out of these pages and reminds us there are signs in the current world of easy judgementalism, fear and oppression by the rationalist moralists that are downright scary. Remember we have been saying over many decades: Never Again.

And watching...

BLACK & WHITE NIGHT: DVD: Roy Orbison with Jackson Browne, T Bone Burnet (Yes, he did the music for the recent CRAZY HEART movie), Elvis Costello, kd lang, Bonnie Rait, JD Souther, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Jennifer Warnes. Warner Vision / Image Entertainment / Orbison Records 1999. If you need me to tell you more about this with this particular list of names you're no longer alive.

Best. LW.

Anzac Day 2010...

COMPASSIONATE

(For Steve Biddulph - and My Father)

I

I see the old man sitting there.

We must come together over this.

What is he thinking about?

He is thinking about the war

Over and over

And the war has been over

Fifty three years. Fifty three years.

How long has he been sitting there like this?

Fifty three years.

How long has he been asleep?

Fifty three years.

His life has come and gone

While he has been asleep thinking about the war

Fifty three years.

His child has been and gone and come again

Many many times

But he has never really seen his child.

His child is writing this

Forty six years.

His wife

Where has she been?

Sixty years.

I have seen the photos of them

Beautiful young people

Younger than us

Their young faces shining out of the black

And white photos. Fifty three years.

Shining hope. Strong faces. Eaten by the war.

Fifty three years. I see the photo of him with the baby

Taken at the Townsville show. Forty five years.

Where has he been? Fifty three years. He's been in the tunnel,

He's been in the operations room,

He's been in the plane.

He's lived in seventeen cities

And not seen them.

He has a grand daughter

Unseen.

II

My father who saw that plane descend in flames outside of Ceduna who

Dragged those burnt and burning bodies out without thinking about it And now does nothing but think about it. Those young dead boys from The green fields of Iowa with nobody they knew or loved around them Dying here thousands of miles from home and nobody but my father Did anything about it and now nobody remembers the graves Overgrown in the hot Australian summer but he remembers he drives Three thousand miles at the age of eighty-four and he cries as he cleans The graves. Somewhere back in Iowa an old woman looks up from the TV or a sink with the bright day glaring at her out there under the Iowa Sky and remembers a face.

Nobody but my father held the weight of those light spirits

Who flew back to their home in Iowa over the dark and rippling water

I have flown dark of night 37,000 feet high above dark water immensity Down below; the travellers coming

Home from LA, from Disneyland,

From whatever it was they were doing

With their lives but my father forgot to do. He sits there now

But he was taken from us as that plane climbed into the sky and then Seemed for a moment to hang still and defying the laws of gravity

And dropped like a stone trying to be a bird for that brief moment

So full of life and the desire to live but dropping out of the sky onto the Dry Ceduna airstrip. That dry grass the spinifex rolling out to get burnt Up by the eating fire that was so eagerly fed that plane had been so full Of fuel. What were they thinking those young Iowa boys as their lives All ended together there in South Australia I don't know but I know at Least one of them was thinking no, I don't want to go, not yet, I still Have to kiss Bess she is waiting back on the porch in Iowa or back in The back seat of my fathers Ford and I won't let go and he took over My fathers life and he has been trying to get back to Iowa ever since And my father shows us the photos of the graves and of the lonely little Funeral and tells us of how the Americans didn't want to know the Americans who are always so proud of their boys doing their bit way Over there of how my father carried them into the old aircraft hanger in Ceduna their bodies black and twisted grotesque little statues of what it Was like in hell for those few seconds that became forever for those Boys and for my father who doesn't see me crying who I never saw cry All my life who has made this his life which no-one knew about my Father did not tell them what he had been thinking about all these years Fifty three years. My father.

Life and Transcendency....

"Life can be more than the everyday. Or the everyday can become something beautiful and transcendent that then ends".

Narration from a documentary on the life and artistic collaboration between Claris Weston and Edward Weston. SBS. 2007.

A Night with The Man In Black...

Went last night to see The Man In Black (http://www.themaninblack.com.au/ ): Stage show with Tex Perkins doing a very faithful Johnny Cash and Rachael Tidd excels in the June Carter part though with some incredibly eccentric initial note attacks (I don't know enough about the original material to know if this is authentic to June Carter's style) – all of this supported very professionally by The Tennessee Four . Went with a friend of the angel variety who put up with multiple incompetencies from me with unimaginable grace and forgiveness. First I forgot the tickets and had to return to my own abode several suburbs away in peak-hour traffic. This made us half an hour late for dinner which the hotel (Westin Hotel – Allegro Restaurant) coped with with what I can only describe as European aplomb – organising our dining so that we made it to the theatre just as they were about to close the doors. The show I will not say a lot about – the audience were incredibly appreciative, especially of the closing medley – and I will think more before I venture a naive opinion. I liked the repertoire (which included one Leonard Cohen – Bird on a Wire) but Cash himself was not an overly articulate man and tended to play towards the melodramatic end of the human emotional continuum. But the show is more than the sum of its parts. For me the highlight of the evening was a gentle Nick Cave duet (Into Your Arms) we sang on the way home in the car (singing with an angel is not a bad way to end an evening).

All right – for this indulgence and pleasure and happiness I must now do the penance of one page of novel before the end of the day.

http://www.themaninblack.com.au/

LW.

P.S.

People have been asking via e-mail what I have been reading. So...

Last week finished HER HUSBAND BY Diane Middlebrook- Viking, 2003 : A book about the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and its aftermath. Thanks for the loan Lisa.

Last week: JUST KIDS By Patti Smith : Bloomsbury 2010 : Memoir by Patti Smith about her childhood, the relationship between her and Robert Mapplethorpe, his death and her storming of the stage of RocknRoll with the help of some very influential friends. 60's Gossip.

Just Purchased: Thanks Readings: THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED By Primo Levi : Vintage International 1989. Classic. SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE By Germaine Greer : Harper Collins 2007. Germaine's classic academic study and feminist perspective on the woman behind the man.

Current Reading: A HERO OF OUR TIME By Mikhail Lermontov : Everyman's Library 1992. Translated from the Russian by Vladimir and Dmitri Nabokov. Reputedly Robert Dessaix's favourite book. Thanks for the loan A.

LW.

OhMyGod – Feedback....

One of my Blog visitors – another writer – has said that what they liked best was the writing on the Tony Backhouse Gospel singing workshop and that she found the small process note on researching for a week and then writing one page of novel the most boring (this person by-the-way teaches in the creative writing program at Melbourne Uni) So.. I explained that I thought the magical writing the novel process is often mythologised and I wanted to have an opportunity for students etc to grasp that it can often be a hard boring slog that if one is to succeed at one simply must proceed with the everyday foundation work – that it is like a beautiful cool change after three hot days when beautiful inspiration strikes but that those days can be few and far between and that despite this we simply have to keep at it – I nod here to my friends Michael and Rohana (and their two young children) whose whole family is like a little writing factory. I took a leaf out of their book by deciding to send out at least one piece of writing a week – so the week before last I sent three poems off to a writing competition and last week I sent 10 pages of the novel off to an agent to see if she thought it was sellable here and internationally. My feedbacker also found Margo and Catherine's Blogs a bit pedestrian, which I found a bit harsh, because as writers of children's and young adult fiction I think both Margo and Catherine document incredibly well what that can entail these days – stacks of readings and conference presentations – and actually presenting the visible presence of the writer as well as the writing. I also recently heard an editor from Allen & Unwin (Margo's publisher) speaking about how important this was as an integral part of the selling process these days. Also I think Margo's recent tours of the US and New Zealand (and her Blog Tour) were far from pedestrian. So here's one little fan standing on the bank and waving and wishing you all well. Yes, I also think that as a writer then ultimately the writing is the thing, but in the meantime, if you're up to it, the rest of it can also be expected from a writer these days. Go well

LW.

Sound and Colour

I finally managed to quickly find some previous Tony Backhouse Workshop Footage which may give a slight taste of what we got up to on the weekend. Certainly I will post some footage of ours if I can come by it (not the least because in my humble little opinion we were better and clearer and more powerful than any of this...sigh).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy7uZ5aJGtY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RdSNfxZc_w&feature=related

While I'm here I might post up two of the Blogs of Australian Writers I follow on a regular basis. Both Margo Lanagan and Catherine Bateson are writers of Children's and Young Adult Fiction and Margo's last novel Tender Morsels falls out of any boxes and can best be described as crossover bravery.

http://amongamidwhile.blogspot.com/

http://cattybatty.blogspot.com/

See you soon.

LW.

Sigh...

OK – Big mistake – when I uploaded my pretty photo – it immediately wiped out instant access to the verbal blogstuff I have been posting all week – Bummer – probably will have to ask Catherine how to avoid this. And now will make a hodge podge by trying to repost blogs....Sigh

???

Woops – the Brighton Beach photo didn't seem to work – perhaps I will consult blog help about adding photos.

Feeling Slack....

I must admit to feeling a bit slack in that my own website hasn't been updated in about ten years – but then it occurs to me that people would not have the slightest idea of my capacity to write lyrically if I did not include some of my poetry – so I thought I would at least include a link to the un-updated website so that there is instant access to the old poetry; and then if I score any significant recognition for recent poems I will wack them on this blogsite until I can get around to doing a major overhaul of the website.

http://members.ocean.com.au/walkerl/index.htm

The other slackness I considered in relation to this blog was that it does not have some of the beautiful visuals contributed by some of my blog colleagues such as Catherine and Margo (listed previously below) – Isn't the blue in the sky of Catherine's photo of the old Fremantle jail just the best blue???

Anyway – so here goes my first attempt to add a visual to the blog. It's a shot of Brighton Beach where I used to walk every morning before I got a regular job way out in Melbourne's south where I used to drive ev'ry morning (and so I stopped walking L) Now ; today in fact, I am actually going to start walking again! Yea. Anyway – here is my photo of Brighton Beach...

Brighton Beach

Sound and Colour...

I finally managed to quickly find some previous Tony Backhouse Workshop Footage which may give a slight taste of what we got up to on the weekend. Certainly I will post some footage of ours if I can come by it (not the least because in my humble little opinion we were better and clearer and more powerful than any of this...sigh).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy7uZ5aJGtY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RdSNfxZc_w&feature=related

While I'm here I might post up two of the Blogs of Australian Writers I follow on a regular basis. Both Margo Lanagan and Catherine Bateson are writers of Children's and Young Adult Fiction and Margo's last novel Tender Morsels falls out of any boxes and can best be described as crossover bravery.

http://amongamidwhile.blogspot.com/

http://cattybatty.blogspot.com/

See you soon.

LW.

A WEEKEND OFF....

A WEEKEND OFF....

Well, this may not be a very auspicious process, I've just taken the weekend off to indulge in the amazing Gospel Singing Workshop of/with Tony Backhouse here in Melbourne. (Please Google him or I will attempt to insert a link to his website at the bottom of this post. What an amazing process – Friday night began with an introduction to (MSG) Melbourne Singers of Gospel Choir. In the middle of this I realise that those of you who thought that this was going to be a beginning novelist blog might feel a little off the planet at this juncture....however...I will now explain that as I suffered (and I do mean suffered) the last round of institutionalised corpratised employment I simultaneously discovered a little singing group in Elsternwick – Soulsong – led by Richard Lawton (Monday and Tuesday nights – if you are in Melbourne).The other thing I discovered was that this little process was that it had an immediately liberating and uplifting affect on me. So that no matter what beauacratised and oppressive practices we were experiencing at work the little singing group truly set my soul free – so once a week, in the middle of the week, I would feel enormously uplifted, yea verily I say unto you: HAPPY even.

So, as a bonus to this I was introduced to the possibility of attending a weekend long gospel singing workshop with Tony Backhouse – and this has been that overused word an amazing experience. Many of us (from choirs and singing groups scattered all across Victoria) sing simply for the joy of singing but Tony's enthusiasm, vast repertoire, discipline and challenging daring really took all of us to new heights for an entire weekend. Cynics hold onto your hats here it was literally like being surrounded by angels for an entire weekend; only these were like earthly angels, slightly tarnished wings and slipping haloes (I'm not sure I could actually bear an entire weekend with the purely heavenly variety of angels).

At this point I realise there is no point attempting to describe this in words – you had to be there – so unless the Angel Sally and the angel Nerida forward me phone sound bites which (as a technologically challenged person) I can attempt to place on the website – this will have to do. I am informed, exhausted and happy. In this world that's not bad. Back to writing tomorrow.

http://www.tonybackhouse.com.au/

http://cmv.customer.netspace.net.au/WhoWeAre.html

http://users.mullum.com.au/apearl/smcteachers.html

LW.