Normal service will be resumed shortly ...

... now that the standard November pile of work has been whittled down almost to a reasonable level. (And don't think I'm not grateful to have work. Au contraire, for how else would I ever hope to pay the dentist?)

I heard the most wonderful interview with Paul Kelly on the car radio yesterday and wrote a long post about music in my head but of course it's all gone now. Well, nearly all; hands up anyone else who remembers Peter, Paul and Mary singing 'I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog'. Sigh.

Music and memory

Fans of Jimmy Webb might remember his 1970 album Words and Music (so vividly recalled by the magnificent Ten Easy Pieces 26 years later) on which as well as his own songs, including the wonderful 'P.F. Sloan' which he later disowned after a spat with Sloan himself, he included a track on which he'd overlaid three different songs of the era in such a way -- because they had identical time signatures, similar tempi and similar chord progressions -- as to make it sound like one song with a great deal of interesting counterpoint in it. Let it Be Me, an adaptation of the French 'J'appartiens' from 1955 and best known in the Everly Brothers version, the Addrisi brothers' Never My Love, recorded by The Association in 1967, and Boyce & Hart's I Wanna Be Free, which they wrote for the Monkees (a group for which a very young Stephen Stills auditioned and was rejected for not being good-looking enough, PFFFT)

were all blended by Webb's arrangement into one fairly extraordinary track called 'Three Songs' which is not, I'm glad to say in this instance, sung by Webb himself, whose voice is an acquired taste. I'd post a video or sound file if I could find a postable or linkable one, but I can't; you'll just have to imagine it.

Jimmy Webb being the clever clogs that he is not just with music but also with words, even at the age of 24 when this album was released, the counterpoint extends if only metaphorically to the lyrics, which weave ironically around each other in their varying preoccupations with love ties and freedom.

So anyway, there I was a week or two ago, mucking around with iTunes as you do, and came up with this lovely Christmas song from the Indigo Girls. (Ignore the visuals.)



One of the reasons I liked this song so much was that it sounded very familiar. This familiarity nagged at me. And then last night as I was bringing in the washing before dark, wooden clothespeg in one hand and knickers in the other, it hit me with the proverbial blinding flash:



I think you could get an astonishing effect if you gave these two songs the Jimmy Webb treatment and glued them together. Not least because of the way the refrains both open up into an affirmation of possibility: of surviving some terrible loss.

Southern Gothic

The combined effect of a mention of Bobbie Gentry on the current Lazy Sunday thread at Larvatus Prodeo plus the amazing clip of the equally amazing Barry McGuire singing 'Eve of Destruction' at James Bradley's City of Tongues, with James' comment that 'the great ones never date', produced a kind of chemical reaction that sent me hightailing it to Google to find this:





This was one of the first songs I ever learned to play on my brand-new guitar (which I still have, stained with the blood of my fingers) and sing. I've got a particularly vivid memory of a houseboat holiday when I was sixteen, singing this song as part of the after-dinner family self-entertainment in an exaggerated Southern accent while my parents and sisters threw in a lot of Yee-ha and Lord have mercy in a kind of call-and-response approach, but my dad, half-cut and feeling no pain, and if I was sixteen he must still only have been, what, 42, got a bit more creative and started throwing in responses that acted as a kind of subtext to what is already an extremely veiled and secretive song, its drama residing in its silences. So our version, sung forty years ago in the middle of nowhere on a boat tied up to a willow on the bank a river that now belongs to history and myth, was full of things like this:

That nice young preacher Brother Taylor dropped by today
(Ah hates them preacher men)
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh and by the way
(Here we go, this ain't good)
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
(Ah tole you never go up there)
And she and Billy Joe was throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchee Bridge
(You in biiiig trouble)

Gratitude. We has it.

Ten years ago today I was in the little Austrian city of Klagenfurt, capital of the southern province of Carinthia, teaching a four-week summer school course in Australian literature to a group of faintly bemused but entirely willing students from all over Europe, most of whose English -- their second or in many cases third language -- was arguably better than mine.

I remember this so clearly because my mother had died unexpectedly three months earlier and it was my first birthday without her. Hers was a week after mine and of course Mothers' Day was always in that mix as well; I'd spent a few days in Vienna before travelling down to Klagenfurt and the Austrians make a very big deal about Mothers' Day, so the shop windows had been full of pinkified, treacly tributes to Mutti, in large glittery print.

On the way to Austria there'd been a couple of one-off academic gigs in Barcelona and I'd gone into meltdown there one day because the Spanish ATM wouldn't give me any money when I keyed in my PIN, which was, at the time, my mother's birthday. I told this story of symbolic rejection, sobbing, to a robust Australian acquaintance who happened to be staying in the same accommodation for the same conference and she fixed me with a beady gaze. 'You do know you're not fit to be travelling, don't you,' she said.

She was right, and it made me realise I had to decide: either suck it up or go home. ThirdCat has written a couple of terrific posts recently about grief and its power and weirdness, about what it does to you in the months following a death. You can't ever tell when or where or why it will strike; all you know is that you don't know yourself as well as you thought you did, you're not as tough as you thought you were, and you need to make allowances for coming unexpectedly and completely to pieces for no apparent reason, often in a public place. This when travelling alone in a country in whose language you are not fluent can give rise to all kinds of misunderstanding, and I had reason more than once on that trip to be grateful for my sense of humour. I am not used to feeling weak, but I was too sad for feeling weak to make me cross, which would have cheered me up, so any laugh was welcome.

When I'd first told my European hosts about my mother's death they had both immediately said 'Of course you must cancel and stay home if you need to,' but I'd only given that half a second's consideration when I heard my mother's voice saying 'You get back on that horse,' as sternly, loudly and clearly as I'd heard it eleven years before when I had in fact fallen off an actual horse and was lying winded on some rocks in a dry creek bed in the hills somewhere north of, I think, Whittlesea. And for the third time, there in Barcelona, I heard it again and, in a tired sort of way, regrouped.

So there I was in Klagenfurt on my birthday, prepared to spend it alone (it was Friday, a non-teaching day) in my little room in the modest pension near the university where I was staying. What actually happened was that two huge bouquets arrived together that morning via Interflora, one lot from my father and sisters and another lot from the Bloke. Then my oldest friend L and her partner rang up from the Barossa Valley and sang Happy Birthday. My academic host's lovely wife Irene, chatting about her son's imminent 18th birthday, asked me innocently when mine was and I was obliged to say 'Um, er, actually it's today,' whereupon she whipped up a family birthday dinner complete with cake for me in the next couple of hours, no mean feat for a woman with two teenage sons and a little baby, and they all sang the Austrian version of Happy Birthday to me in perfect three-part harmony. And the next day my best mate (who was working for the UN at the time) detoured through Vienna on her way from Sarajevo back to New York and made the four-hour train trip down the eastern side of Austria to spend the weekend in Klagenfurt and take me out to dinner.

All of which is to say that if you know someone who's recently lost someone, going the extra mile for them in the way of a thoughtful and/or generous gesture might save them a black day. And they will never, ever forget it.

Three dates

1915





1917

See also here.



1935



My dad, aged 8, with his parents. On the back of this little photograph my grandfather has written, in his forceful, beautiful capitals,

HELL FIRE CORNER.
YPRES MENIN ROAD.

One can only imagine what is going through his mind under that Menziesesque hat. And I suppose a few trees would grow back in eighteen years, not to mention the grass.

If you click on the photo to enlarge it you'll see one word on the stone: HIER. Hier means, as you'd expect, 'here', as in 'He is not missing. He is here.' But it's also the French word for 'yesterday'.

The drilling in the wall kept up, but no-one seemed to pay it any mind

Since 7 am yesterday, yes, Good Friday, the renovators have been at it next door, and by 'next door' I mean 'through the party wall of this maisonette/terrace'.

Today the drilling in the party wall itself has taken the place of something I presume was a jackhammer through, as distinct from in, said wall. I'm not sure whether it's better or worse, and anyway the point is moot.

And I can't even complain, because the neighbours (who warned me and apologised in advance, bless them) put up with quite as much from me, in the way of overflowing bougainvillea, tree-roots in the vexatious shared and ancient plumbing, and, I fear, some choice language from time to time across the back fence.

In the meantime, however, the noise has recalled that post title and with it a whole lovely memory that fell into my hand like a ripe peach from the tree of the past: early 1975 and we've just bought Blood on the Tracks and I'm in the living room with the folding doors and panelling in Third Avenue listening to it for the first time and halfway through 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' I sit down on the cheap ethnic rug and burst into tears of happiness.

I do this, as I recall, because the storytelling, character-drawing Dylan I remember from his very earliest years seems, after several years of going what has looked to me a little disappointingly doolally, to be back in force and even better. Which brings in its train a whole slideshow of memories of listening to that album at various times and places and reinforces my sense, as strong now as it was oh my god almost *cough*35*cough* years ago, that Blood on the Tracks is actually the best album in the entire history of the world ever and that's including Blue and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.

All of which reconciles me no end to the bloody noise in the wall, without which none of these lovely memories would have come to the surface in the first place. And anyway, this too shall pass.

Tribal

Since the bride and Ampersand Duck between them have already provided lovely accounts, in one case lavishly illustrated, of Laura and Dorian's wedding on Saturday, I don't have much to add except to agree about the total gorgeousness of the entire affair. Highlights included a ceremony that combined a substantial amount of traditional wedding text with some carefully-chosen and beautifully-read Australian love poems by, if I remember rightly, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe and Lesbia Harford, plus C.P. Cavafy's classic 'Ithaka', in which a finely judged mixture of feeling, philosophy and Homer goes into the proposition that what matters most is not the arrival but the journey.

Poems were read and vows were taken to the accompaniment of a faint but symphonic soundtrack: the gentle crooning of the chooks, the distant popping of the pre-toast corks, and the occasional sniffling noises of the various female guests. The bride was radiant, the ceremony was a wonderful family affair, the garden looked gorgeous, the weather obliged, and the only real disappointment was the bridesmaids, who apparently spent most of the day underneath the house next door getting their collars, bows and faces covered in cobwebs and dust.

Once I'd decided to go to the wedding and had sent Laura my RSVP, I began to make arrangements to catch up with the various Melbourne friends I've stayed in regular touch with since I moved to Adelaide eleven years ago, and by the time I finally arrived at my Lygon Street hotel, I'd lined up three reunions around the wedding.

After a blindingly stressful day of cat-wrangling and ominous airport delays and announcements and closures and rumours of lightning-struck planes, Friday night once I'd finally arrived was homemade gourmet pizza with P and S and the kids, two of whom are now at high school and none of whom was born yet when, already old friends, their parents and I and two other friends spent a week in a villa in Tuscany in 1993. Now we sat round talking, eating and drinking in much the same spirit, except with P and S now happily surrounded by kids, cats and dogs. (Only one dog, actually, but he is so big he could make eight or nine Maltese terriers.)

Saturday night was dinner out with L, who heroically came to fetch me and then took me out for seriously good Italian food and some in-depth catching-up in matters of love and work. Sunday was lunch with J in an old Carlton haunt, after which we strolled up to Melbourne University's Ian Potter Gallery to see a wonderful exhibition of Louis Kahan's portraits of Australian, and particularly Melbourne, literati ('Let's go and look at the intelligentsia,' said J).

Many of these portraits were drawn to illustrate particular articles, poems and stories in Meanjin over several decades; both of us knew (or had known) a number of the people in the portraits and had read the work of most of the others, and I was reminded again that galleries and museums are a lot like computers in that what you get out of them depends heavily on what you put in; both of us had brought a lot of history with us to the gallery, possibly too much. (What with J a former editor, the exhibition's portraits of the two editors before her, the presence of the current editor at the wedding and a screening at the exhibition of a 1961 episode of Panorama exclusively dedicated to the magazine, it was a fairly Meanjin-themed visit altogether.)

We know ourselves by the tribes to which we belong, and I hadn't properly thought through the fact that on this weekend I would be rejoining several of mine. Still, I knew that the wedding would be a monster blogmeet and that I would catch up with bloggers of all kinds: some I'd known for years pre-blogging but mainly in professional capacities (Elsewhere, Sophie); others I'd met recently as a direct or indirect result of blogging (the Baron, and of course the bride herself); and yet others whom I'd never met at all, including two in particular whom I felt I knew very well but had never actually laid eyes on, namely the lovely Zoe and the equally lovely Ampersand Duck. If I'd been able to summon just a little more energy or will, I would have kicked on to the Standard Hotel after dinner on Friday night in order to experience the blogtribe even more extensively, and with hindsight I wish I had, but alas one is not as young as one was.

Stephanie of Humanities Researcher is the only person who is a member of all my non-Adelaide tribes (blogging, Aust lit, old-friends network), and Stephanie has thoughtlessly naffed off to Philadelphia. But there was still one point of overlap: the other S is one of the still-in-touch old Melbourne mates and, though not a blogger, is now a work colleague of Laura's and was at the wedding with her husband and their kids. They have had an extremely hairy time of it lately and the prospect of seeing them all safe and well was one of the factors that tipped the scales when I was thinking about making the trip. And for this weekend they were the hinge, for me, between one reality and another.

Mooching down Lygon Street late the next morning took me even further back, back to the first time I'd ever been on it, one day in the winter of 1980 -- my first year of living away from Adelaide, and Melbourne still a total mystery to me; Sydney was my 'other city' in early life -- when I'd travelled up from Geelong with a man to whom I was in thrall in every possible way, something that had never happened before and has never, I'm glad to say, happened since. So Melbourne-centric was he, so tightly wound and swaddled in the cocoon of his own reality at the expense of anyone else's, that he'd said to me 'I'll meet you in Tamani's' and I had desperately wandered up and down Lygon Street at least a dozen times before I thought to ask someone, and discovered that Tamani's had changed its name to Ti Amo (!) some time beforehand and he just assumed I'd know. (Nor was he apologetic afterwards. Yes yes, I know.)

And over that, layers and layers of other memories, all variously plotted along that spectrum whose bad end is the one where you want to curl up into a foetal ball in the gutter and die of shame. Ah dear me, almost thirty years of Lygon Street, as bittersweet to me as the best of its own imported gourmet wares, and a great deal older than most of them. It was a relief to spot J's familiar back in Readings, and to wander off with her to find some lunch and get each other back up to date on life's important developments since last we met. Why it should be a surprise to us here in our fifties that fate keeps on happening, and not just to us but to such of our parents as still survive, I really have no idea.

This is Your Life

As almost everyone who comes here knows for themselves already, a life spent reading fiction produces a swag of paragraphs that are not exactly committed to memory, more that the memory of the act of reading them stays with you, because they are as useful as proverbs in the help they give you. I remember Hilary McPhee on a panel at some Writers' Week or other in the mid-1980s, saying with passion that one of the reasons we read fiction is to get ideas about how to live our lives.

Now that is not one of my conscious reasons for reading fiction but every now and again I am reminded of how very helpful it can be. I've headed more than one disaster off at the pass by heeding the voice in my ear of E.M. Forster, as channeled by the fey Mrs. Wilcox (not Margaret Schlegel as was, but the older and, as it were, original Mrs Wilcox, Vanessa Redgrave not Emma Thompson) -- 'Separate those people who will hurt each other the most.' Which was also very helpful during the terrible week of my mother's death.

But I appear to have reached a stage of life where some books remind me of other books that have provided these lifelong aids to sanity and quiet reflection. It's bad luck, on the eve of Christmas Eve when I am way behind with everything, that one of this week's work novels is so rivetingly engaging and charming that I feel compelled not only to read it very slowly in order to honour its virtues but to blog about it as well, all of which might mean pulling an all-nighter which I haven't done for several years and may now be too old to survive intact.

Anyway, I'd only got as far as page 17 of Julia Glass's I See You Everywhere when I found this:

Whatever Lucy knew, she kept to herself. When I asked Dad why he didn't get her to tell the whole story, he said "Louisa, we live in an age when keeping secrets is out of fashion, and that's a shame. If she wanted to tell us, well, she would."

Which immediately brought to mind the bit in The Once and Future King that has been my rule for the keeping of secrets since I was twelve:

The morning when they were to set out for Bliant arrived, and the newly-made knight, Sir Castor, stopped Lancelot in the Hall. He was only seventeen.

"I know you are calling yourself the Ill-Made Knight," said Sir Castor, "but I think you are Sir Lancelot. Are you?"

Lancelot took the boy by the arm.

"Sir Castor," he said, "do you think that is a knightly question? Suppose I were Sir Lancelot, and was only calling myself the Chevalier Mal Fet -- don't you think I might have some reasons for doing that, reasons which a gentleman of lineage ought to respect?"

Sir Castor blushed very much and knelt on one knee.

"I won't tell anybody," he said. Nor did he.

(The power of that quotation, I see for the first time as I type it here, may lie in the scansion of that last sentence: three heavily stressed monosyllables, a sound like the slow but firm closing of a door.)

But Glass was (and is; I'm only up to page 55 as I type and have no doubt there are further revelations in store) not yet finished with me; on the same page, indeed in the next paragraph and regarding the same character -- an ancient aunt whose tale in the family lore is that she gave up her whole life to look after her damaged older sister -- there's this:

I believe she was swept along on a tide, like most of us. There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, that currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.

Which for reasons that are about to become apparent reminded me of this, from A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, which refers to a character with a severely autistic son:

" ... But I think it's possible Mrs Haydock'd just come to pieces without him. Having made him her life. Funny thing, the variety of lives, you can't know what accident won't set yours in some very simple terrible deep channel for the rest of its run."

(Again what has appealed to memory, I now see, is the rhythm of one phrase, that unstoppable run of adjectives with its string of insistent stress: simple terrible deep channel.) Byatt has been rescuing me from dark places since 1984, when I first read this and put it, with desperate gratitude, to good use:

She did not see why he should preserve his good opinion of himself at her expense. It was refusing these small encounters that exhausted her ... She walked away from him. She did not think he had expected this precisely; but all that was left, as she saw it, to do, was to uncreate him in her mind. If she could have worked through the relationship, unhindered, if she could have cast him off, and held him as an interesting memory when they had nothing more to say to each other, she would not now feel so stunted, so trapped in his view of her ... There was nothing to do but behave as though he had never been.

As I say, I'm only up to page 55 of the Glass book, which is where I found this next bit, which cracked me up with happiness and recognition so much that I decided I had to blog it and make myself even later with everything than I already am and God knows whether there'll be a decent fillet of beef for the buying anywhere by tomorrow but never mind. Louisa, one of the heroines, makes a living by editing obscure, pretentious, grandiose and/or unreadable essays on art into publishable form, negotiating all the while the internal politics of who follows which school and who is whose nephew or protegé or enemy. Here she is on the beach, working as she wonders with one part of her mind why she hasn't heard from her rat-bastard boyfriend Sam:

"Articulata" was a piece on the proliferation of text in photography. Might we see this as a symptom of visual insecurity, or is it the strident, declarative end to our long-running romance with lensmen such as Adams, Weston, and even Walker? Might we venture so far as to interpret this trend -- nay, this turning point -- as an invigorating divorce of sorts? I looked up to see a gull eyeing my knapsack, venturing so far as to interpret its bulk -- nay, its grease-stained belly -- as a food station. "Well," I said loudly to the gull, "might we indeed?" I squawked, and the gull scuttled away. I lay back and put the essay aside, weighting it down with my sneakers. I fell asleep in the sun. I dreamed that the author of the pompous essay turned out to be Sam. "That we is not royal," he told me angrily. "It's entirely actual. Look in your Chicago." It turned out that somehow I had the wrong edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, that my copy was way out of date. I would lose my job. When I woke, the gull was back, standing at the edge of my towel and staring at me. The obvious question on his mind was Is she edible?

Back to work.

Memory

Caught by surprise tonight, when without warning the opening chords of 'Shelter From the Storm' came on the teeve as part of the drama of the drama.

I don't know what it is about the violence with which music retrieves memory, but I suppose we did play Blood on the Tracks all through the summer of 1975-76, till it wore out (we're talking vinyl here) and I could probably still sing every song for you all the way through. But just those first few bars were enough to bring down a flood of remembrance: white silk dress too much whisky lying on the seagrass matting reading Crime and Punishment in Adelaide heat crazy lover too much whisky singing in the folk club concerts sitting round the kitchen table too much whisky.

Those were the days.

The grandfathers, together in 1947

Leslie Reid Goldsworthy, 1893-1969

Army, 1915-1918: France

Gassed, frostbite.





George Allen Kay, 1897-1970

Army, 1916-1918: France

Gassed, hearing-impaired, shot.




More here.

He's my man, and I don't care how much it costs

This is Leonard Cohen in 1970, the year I was in what's now called Year 12: he was thirty-six and I was seventeen.

It was the year I first discovered him: I read Beautiful Losers, bought Songs From a Room and Leonard Cohen with saved-up pocket money, bought the sheet music and learned to play and sing fifteen or twenty of the songs:



(Question: when did she study for her exams? And does this explain the D for Matric Modern History, which still rankles all these decades later and which her entire undergraduate career was one long attempt to redeem?)

(Also, my mother made that round cushion, which was a kind of steely grey-blue velvet.)

Three years earlier my heart had been broken by my first-ever boyfriend, a beautiful Greek boy, who engendered a helpless lifelong passion for swarthiness in all its lovely forms.

Over the decades, Leonard and I drifted apart. And then one day a few years ago, my friend R played me this and I fell in love all over again.

R texted me today to say he's playing here on Australia Day and do I want to come with her. Hah. It's an outdoor concert at a winery down in the paradisal Southern Vales and he's being supported by Paul Kelly. On the other hand it's going to cost hundreds of dollars and it'll probably be 42 degrees. But I do not care.

Memory

Yesterday a dear friend who lost her husband in August held a quiet afternoon-tea-shaped gathering at her home, a 'one month's mind' to remember him in a less fraught and more reflective setting than any funeral or wake can be. I'd heard of the 'one year's mind' from friends in Austria, but the idea of a month was new to me. It's a wonderful idea though. Forty or so people fronted up yesterday with assorted drinks, lovely food and carefully chosen flowers to sit about for a few hours, catch up, reminisce.

Four large albums of family photos had been stacked up for people to look through, and much looking through did indeed take place. I looked at all of them, and there were quite a few there that I actually took myself. Among them, and on reflection I can't think why this gave me such a shock, were several images of my darling ma, who died nearly ten years ago.

There was one particularly sweet shot of her holding baby M -- who's now 21 and was very much present yesterday, dancing around getting people drinks and making skilful conversation -- on her knee, a picture that knocked me sideways for complicated reasons I am still trying to untangle. It's something about the unexpected conjunction of two people who are very dear to you, which is complicated enough even without the added long-time factor. Some weird triangulation takes place. But in this case it was more a sort of pentangulation, a party of five: M and me looking at the photo; my mum in life; M-as-baby; and the me of 20 years ago to whom that sight was sufficiently meaningful and moving to frame it in my camera lens and take a photo of it.

It strikes me that this is what novelists do, or rather what novelists are for: to write of interwoven webs of intimacy over time, with an awareness of the long view. And the long view isn't usually part of people's daily lives until some emblem of it appears, with the turn of a page, and shockingly, before our eyes.