Felt a little jangled this morning after accidentally intercepting a phone call from my Aunt Who Has Found God. The last time we spoke at length was several years back and she told me I was possessed by the devil. Looking for common ground, for neutrality, I asked her had they had any rain up there. My Aunt Who Has Found God said, barely a sprinkle. She said, the churches in Gympie are praying for rain, but the last time they prayed for rain they got floods! Ah, I said, yes it’s important to be specific hey? Oh yes, she said. Your Cousin Who Has Found God was saying to me the other day, Mum I said to The Lord, Lord, I just need to earn $130 a week. She says now I should’ve been more generous! Cos I found a job and guess how much I’m earning!
I got off the phone. She just talks to him as though he was a person and he’s her only topic of conversation! My companion briskly ripped this thorn out of my paw. God bless him, even if there isn’t a god. I said: Gahhh I feel really weird! My Aunt Who Has Found God kind of freaked me out! And he said: Cathoel, these people are just programming themselves, to cope. Her authority is called ~ God. Yours and my authority, is called ~ Me. The only difference is these are external-authority-craving people, they need god, because they don’t believe in themselves. They don’t think they are higher beings.
We ventured into a very comfy, very shabby secondhand bookshop with couches, because I had read my way through everything in the bedside pile and demolished most of a manuscript someone sent me yesterday afternoon. I am reading too much, compulsively. I’m bored. I miss the necessity to fend with the scurrilous street life of ratty Berlin. While we were browsing in the bookstore a man came in carting a tea chest full of hardcovers. He plonked it on the nearest couch and said to the guy at the till, “Enjoy.”
Within moments a lady in leashed spectacles and with very bright blue eyes had come out from behind her desk to peer inside. “Dave!” she said, sharply. “There are silverfish in these!”
Dave stopped counting out the books I had stacked on his counter and ran. He lugged the whole tea chest back out on the street. As the blue-eyed lady came over to serve he began opening the impaired donations on the flat of his hand and dropping them into the recycling bin.
Sixty dollars later and after my companion had grown bored and wandered further along the street I emerged with two wrinkled plastic bags full of reading material. Books about literature, books about music, books of literature… and a stack of a dozen Mills & Boons. 12 for $5.
“Ah,” he said, “you got your romance novels.”
“Yup!”
We climbed back into my Mum’s car with our straining book bags. “Are you sure you are learning, from reading those?”
About writing? No. “I don’t learn anything from them. That’s the point. They’re my comfort reading.”
I had chosen old copies, published in the 70s and 80s, often with old bookshop stamps inside the front cover: Tweed Book Exchange, 20 cents. One was called The Kindled Fire and a previous reader had carefully filled in the T so it disappeared: He Kindled Fire. Very occasionally they’ll have spidery names inscribed on the flyleaf, Lorna, Myra, Elsie Sommers. As we roared along the curving spine of the hill I said, “I dunno. Maybe I am subconsciously learning something deep down, and one day some huge project will break the surface & get started. But I don’t think so. I think I just like them because they’re familiar. I read them by the thousand when we were kids, when we used to stay on the farm with Nanna and Pa. I would have my half-dozen Puffins that I was allowed to choose for myself every term, and once those were gone, I just read everything in sight. Nanna had fruitboxes of Mills & Boons under the beds. And I read old Womens Weeklys and Family Circles, Womens Days. Readers Digests. I was like a caterpillar, devouring everything I crossed. If I ran out of books I would read recipes.” He cupped his hand round the back of my head. “My little silverfish.”
Brother is staying for a few days & brother and Berliner are sharing a desk. They don’t know each other very well. I walk in on them sitting side by side with their computers open, both are typing furiously and music is playing.
Cathoel: so are you just taking turns between the songwriters and the techno, then?
Berliner: yup.
Brother: and we’ve been making remixes of your songs. Just by playing a song of yours over the top of what’s happening, so that~
Cathoel (sings): Tuesdays I lie in bed with my ex…
Brother: exactly, sometimes it works out perfectly. You should do remixes!
Cathoel: let’s! We can mix them with Tony Abbott’s speeches. Or, you know, sing-song public speakers.
Berliner (still typing): yup.
An Abbott and two Bishops. Are we actually being governed by some weird splinter faction of the Catholic Church?
Berliner to Brisbaner, who has urged him to cross against the lights, at peak hour, right in the middle of the city: Ah no thanks. I don’t like jail walking. Not with so many police around.
Brisbaner: (folds her face into his shirt feeling the weakness of language adoration take hold.)
Two boys scribbling either end of the dinner table. “What are you drawing?” 6yo: “It’s a diamond. With a rainbow inside it.” 4yo: “This is a machine for making everything dead.”
Their mother, breastfeeding, laughs telling us how the 6yo asked her could they play “jumping over Amelia on the couch.” Amelia is three weeks old. She was wrapped and asleep and her brother said earnestly, “It’s okay Mummy. We’re not going to jump on top of her.”
Whenever people ask, So do you make a living from your writing, I feel obscurely coal-hauled, if not outright keel-hauled. Does anyone ask this question of an architect, a dentist? It’s so personal and somehow lip-smackingly censorious. I hear behind it two subtext questions: 2: “So. Is your writing any good?” and 3: “And am I subsidizing it?”
The hundreds of times I have been asked, “So: do you make a living from it?” the question has never once been accompanied by, “Ah! Is your writing for sale? Where can I buy some?” But I answer the spoken and the unspoken questions either to myself or, if asked rudely enough, out loud: 1: No. 2: Yes. 3: No, so you’re not my employer, so you can put those eyebrows down.