Running Out of Steam:

I am co-hosting the Arts program on ABC Radio (Newcastle) this coming Friday July 4th. Being a one-off opportunity I have wanted to make it special.

My initial thoughts were to base the program around my music and the music of some pretty talented cats I call friends. However, I found myself attending a support group meeting a fortnight ago that somewhat changed the general direction of what I had foreseen, if only in my minds eye.

I have written a fair bit about Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. A lot of it no one has read for various reasons.  With the exception of course, of my professor Antoni Jach who has very generously issued me with a month extension on my exegesis– I’m inclined to believe, partly for this very reason. (Oh and I have just been reprimanded– With the exception, also, of my Novel Writing class @ RMIT)–

PCOS swallows you whole. Leaves you with little but a running narrative from everyone else who has no idea what they’re talking about.

The majority of my experience with this particular condition has been solitary. Prior to joining the support group I’d not met a single soul who understood what I was talking about when I worked up the courage to explain myself and “my condition.”

I was living in Tokyo when my father sent me the following link: www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1433225.htm

It would be 2 years before I managed to get my hands on a copy of the interview from the ABC AV archives in the RMIT Library.

Juli Stopp is a pretty cool chick and then it hit me like a tonne of bricks during this PCOS support group meeting that perhaps what I needed to talk about on the radio show was not so much myself or my own ego but about something that consumes us all. Perhaps rather than sitting in a room surrounded by women trying to conceive I should get off my own ass and conceive something much less egotistical. That’s where Juli comes in.

Tracking her down was no easy feat. Through a series of searches and a couple of phone calls I made some contacts who made some other contacts, then– I had a text message sitting in my mobile phone 48 hours later from none other than Ms. Stopp.

My fear of phones has often seen me miss out on various opportunities as I struggle to work up the courage to dial a number. Though, thats another story. What eventuated from this phone call last week was a conversation that lasted well over an hour. A conversation I’m not sure I’ve ever actually had. A simpatico. Finally.

The following link is somewhat unrelated in subject matter, though for me, the point is clear. We run out of steam. We chose everyday whether we’re interested in riding it out and throwing it all in. Managing any kind of illness is a full time job. I suppose what I’m getting at is that phone conversation last week and possibly the opportunity to re-invent the Medical Wheel– insofar– as sexing up a long heralded ugly beast– is, from my vantage point, a trajectory worth surviving. A story worth telling. A bloody good read.

So tune in: http://www.abc.net.au/newcastle/

Friday July 4th 0800-1100hrs EST

And this from Finn: www.health-science-spirit.com/iodine.html

Bill Fucking Henson

Well.

I struggle.

Like this.

I do.

With a great number of things.

Let me first begin with the subject of “art.”

I am a Novocastrian by birth. By trade. By class. There are a number of things about this that piss me off. Naturally.

I was, this eve, just now, bouncing around at my local watering hole when at long last the subject turned to all matters Bill Henson.

It was, of course, announced, last night on Media Watch: http://www2b.abc.net.au/tmb/Client/Message.aspx?b=33&m=3230&dm=1&pd=2&am=3230

that the Newcastle Herald were the DASHING media publication that pipped the cops off on all things “pornographic” re: Henson’s latest gallery showing.

Well.

www.smh.com.au/news/arts/models-mother-defends-henson/2008/05/29/1211654225893.htm

It’s tricky for me, for a number of reasons, to write, in the way I’d like to.

My health brought me back to Australia (from Tokyo). And my culture renders me in an environment where I’m having these conversations. I think Newcastle has A LOT of things going for it. But to be frank, I find these “pub discussions”– the same I’ve had in a great number of cities throughout the world– dull as fuck

This is why:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/2048325/Cate-Blanchett-joins-art-censorship-row-in-Australia.html

and this is why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Henson

We. As Australians are big flat brown nation of people that CONTINUE to be the most opiniated while having the LEAST amount of information.

More of this later:

www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2002/10/16/do1601.xml

Fuck I miss my expatriates.

My Americans.

My artists.

chikansen

The Japanese rape fantasy:

 

I’d been working at Tokyo’s leading English magazine—Metropolis—for a good 6 months when I was approached to write a feature about the recently opened venue in Shinjuku– The chikansen.

 

The title being a play on words—a rarity in the Japanese language—a chikan is the colloquial term given to “train gropers”, men with a penchant for boarding crowded trains and pressing hard against unsuspecting women and well, groping them. The remainder of the term makes reference to the shinkansen, or bullet train. 

 

I need to make a few points here about the chikan culture in Japan, Tokyo specifically, as the majority of my experiences during the 4 years I spent living there were of course, in Tokyo and Tokyo, in my opinion at least is somewhat juxtaposed to the rest of Japan. The chikan culture is so entrenched there that it’s not really something you often here people speaking about, so much so, it often goes largely ignored. A nation of those wanting to “keep the peace” renders most victims of anything mute.

 

One such example comes to mind. I was riding the tube home from work, a 13 minute express journey from Tokyo eki (station) to Shinkoiwa eki. The express train is always crowded, to say the least, and of course crowded in the Japanese sense… none of this oh boo hoo I’ve not enough room to rest my feet on the opposing seat.

 

On this particular occasion a chikan was pressing quite forcefully into a young woman standing with her mother. The girl, in typical Japanese etiquette was rising above it—ganbaru. Her mother also adhering true to her own culture was doing much the same—overcoming “the inconvenience.” As the chikan pressed his body harder and harder into the young woman’s she lowered her head, lower and lower, her mother asking intermittently, “daijabu desu ka? daija bu?” Are you ok? Still ok?

 

What has always struck me so profoundly about this phenomenon is the degree to which this kind of behavior is tolerated. Accepted, seemingly. The Japanese are such grand advocators of “rising above” the obstacle, the challenge, the hardship. I guess Western post-feminist culture approaches things from a silently different angle, and as such, I would often find myself reaching a point of no return. In this particular instance I did what anyone would do in a position of power—I pushed back. Hard. Repeatedly. It’s also important to understand how much of this is all so below the belt, under rug swept, so fucking Japanese. You can inflict a great deal of pain on someone standing right next to you in a crowded train without anyone noticing. Sharp elbows, spiky umbrella tips speared into the shoe of an unsuspecting chikan. Anything goes as long as no one notices. There are Japanese women I have known that do this. Not many though.

 

This kind of chikan encounter has happened to me on several occasions; it seldom lasts long, however. I’ve always been exceptionally strong for a woman and exceptionally intolerant of this kind of carry-on. The Japanese are always going to be staring at you so why not give them something to stare at? It may seem arrogant but this kind of change happens slowly and just like fashion, it only takes one person to pull of a feather fedora for the next to think they could emulate the exact same kind of look. For the first few years of my time in Tokyo I was convinced I could change the place in some little way. The slow trickle down effect. Cultural mores, however, are so entrenched that it was during my 3^rd year in the City of T that I came to the conclusion that in order to see any real feminist revolution could take a life time and I’d always kind of had my heart set on living somewhere fabulous in Spain and being celebrated for all that I am, rather than criticized for all that I am not.

 

Which leads me to my next anecdote, but first let me tie up the whole notion of the chikansen.

 

Basically my editor was asking me to go and review this restaurant that had opened—the premise of the establishment being a simulated train venue where by over worked and under sexed salary men could pay 20,000 yen ($US200) to spend an evening riding this makeshift train, the waitresses posing as unsuspecting passengers, ripe for the unwelcome advances of the sexually repressed sarary man.

 

Great.

 

I invite you now to reflect on a scenario I found myself in several years ago in Nishi-Azabu, a rather funky little district of Tokyo (a stones throw from the red light district of Roppongi)—think models and actors and me and my Australian flat mate. To back track briefly my flat mate and I had been flogging Soccer t-shirts during the World Cup in Japan. Looking the way we did meant we made a fucking killing—some 500,000 yen ($US5K) during the grand final game in Yokohama. The stout little English man who’d been distributing these t-shirts had initially asked for a 10% cut of the takings. Upon hearing we’d done as well as we did he deemed it only fair to up the stakes. My flat mate and I spoke with great diplomacy initially, explaining that it was us who’d earnt the additional keepings, not the product itself. Reluctant to accept such a fate the relationship grew rather tumultuous rather quickly. Myself being the more dominant of the two had found that the task of “negotiating” was left largely up to me and he.

 

Leaving Roppongi (where she worked) somewhat tidily one evening my flat mate returned to our apaato (apartment) with the news that he, the stout Englishman had followed her home and now knew where we lived.

 

Great.

 

So begun the lengthy, laborious process of him arriving on our doorstep with vast regularity, pounding at the door, and demanding we give him “his money.”

 

I had, at the time, been learning some 82 Disney songs (for a role I’d nailed with Tokyo Disney) and thus, found myself turning my Disney CDs up to an unacceptable volume (by Tokyo standards) to drown out the sound of being abused by someone who, by this stage, was well out of line.

 

An awkward audition (The Tokyo Disney gig was never going to be a sure deal until I’d shown the advisory board that I could perform all 82 songs without deliberation or mistake—a process which, in itself, took some 3 months). So that kind of pressure and a few other stressors caused my flat mate and I to drink to excess one evening. Not “excess” by Australian binge drinking standards but a bottle each in the midst of a scorching Asian summer. This kind of heat drives you quite mad in next to no time. The thought of wearing clothes, for example is incomprehensible once in the safe confines of your own apaato. So we seldom did. Wear clothes, or answer the door.

 

It was my cigarette addiction that drove me to pop my mamma-chari (typical Japanese bicycles replete with basket) into the elevator, down to the bottom floor where I found myself, as I mounted the bike, confronted by none other than Mr. Nasty.

 

What happened next happened quickly and abruptly.

 

I was called a great number of unmentionables before being hit squarely in the face. The blow knocked me square off my bicycle as my head landed hard on the nearby bus stop post. I recall black but who ever really has any real idea of how long they are unconscious for? I came to, stood up and stared at the man long enough for him to feel some kind of remorse, or at least that’s what his face indicated.

 

What struck me most about this scenario, more than the blow to the head, and my now non-existent ego was/is that by the bus stop stood a procession of people, of all ages, waiting for a bus to arrive. People, who just stood there, watched the whole scenario play out and did sweet fuck all.

 

This is Japan.

 

Under rug swept.

 

The way adults look away when a child falls. If we don’t make eye contact maybe the child won’t cry. This is the rationale.

 

Though, I’m not a child and this kind of behavior is completely incomprehensible, in any culture, according to me.

 

I returned to my apartment that evening somewhat shaken and somewhat enraged. A Japanese girlfriend of mine arrived shortly after and accompanied me to the local koban (police box—on most street corners in Tokyo) to file a report. We spent some 3 hours at the station early that morning. The police officers photocopying everything from my passport to my gaijin (alien registration) card, to my VISA to a transcript of the interview. They asked me all manner of questions and seemed to be taking the whole thing a lot more seriously than I’d anticipated. My first real foray into the Japanese obsession with paperwork, details. questions, signatures and more paperwork.

 

I phoned the Australian embassy later that same day to update them on the situation and to seek further counsel. They insisted I come into the embassy in person the following day for an interview.

 

“You have three options Alexandra Coffey. The first being you pay this gentleman the money he deems owing and be done with the whole thing. The second option being you can file an AVO out on the man– which I must advise– is a pretty serious approach as an expatriate on a Working Holiday VISA. By doing this, as you would in Australia, he will not be able to come within 100m of your apartment or your person. He may also have great difficulty in securing any additional Visas for himself. The third and final option being you relocate back to Australia with a clean record and conscious. Entirely up to you.”

 

I could hardly breathe that day sitting in that interview room at the embassy. I didn’t want to play Good Cop/Bad Cop but I also didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my time in Japan. I’d never been struck by a man before and to say the least, it’d done somewhat of a number on my self esteem. So I opted for the AVO. The embassy also stated that they would be phoning the koban office where I had been interviewed to follow up on the report.

 

I received a phone call the following day from the embassy updating me on the progress of the report. “Your statement has been lodged on behalf of the Australian embassy. We have however, contacted Roppongi koban and discussed your interview and statement with them. Alexandra, unfortunately this is relatively common but they have absolutely no formal record of you ever attending the office, let alone making any formal statement in either English or Japanese.” My chest grew hard and heavy as it had done the day prior at the embassy. This was pretty serious shit. Suffice to say Mr. Nasty flew to Thailand a month later for a “VISA run” and upon return to Japan was refused entry for “no incited terms.” 

 

So somewhere in between the chikansen and the nasty man we find ourselves occupying a lot of grey area. Marijuana procession is a greater criminal offence in Japan than rape. I have far too many stories of this nature too. Later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Inheritence of Loss:

Digital Asset Management:

 

In addition to my mother and grandmother, my book is dedicated to the pricks that broke into my car one evening in Paddington and stole the MP3 recordings I had been annotating my novel on for the past 6 months. The notion of recording my thoughts was born of my frustrations with my own digital assets. My laptop had been playing up and finding the resources and patience to have an ancient laptop repaired in Tokyo takes time, takes everything. So I opted to record rather than struggle to type.

 

I’d found this entire process really liberating. Free to “write” anywhere, anytime. I’d even begun taking my iRiver on jogs with me of an early morning. The thoughts came, long and fluid, perfect. By the time I’d flown home for Christmas (one year) I had some 14 hours of audio evidence that the book was coming along nicely.

 

That was of course, until I parked outside a girlfriends place in Paddington for a wee sleep over. Early the next morning I returned to my vehicle to head back up the F3. What I found that morning was that someone had broken into my car, stolen my MP3 player (which I’d locked in the glove box) some 3 boxes of Mini-Discs and 12 rolls of developed film. The MDs were a devastating blow and I sobbed furiously for most of the morning at the thought of having lost so much all at once. The rolls of film just freaked me out some as they were all shots of me in Asia looking very blonde and not very Asian. I drove home that morning, the smashed window a constant gush of ear bashing reminders of what had taken place the night before—the inheritance of loss.

 

Experiences such as these teach us to back everything up. Make copies of everything and to keep those copies in various places, ideally online. Safe and sound within the World Wide Web. As a part of my course work during first semester I studied a course in Digital Asset Management. Inspired I was to hear leading professional’s anecdotes of how things have gone awry and how one goes about rebuilding themselves and their careers following the loss of data. An artist, it would seem must have an incredible sense of stamina in regards to all things digital asset management and the rebuilding and rebuilding. Over and over.

 

There are few instances for the writer where the shit doesn’t hit the fan right before D-day. I had anticipated some kind of digital asset drama as my Masters submission date loomed. My facebook ‘fortune cookie’ had even suggested I “back up my files” the night before a cat pissed on my keyboard, rendering it incapable of typing complete sentences—rendering me incapable of coping. I’m often being asked to accept the fact I now live in Australia where these sorts of inconveniences are made more so by the fact no one can replace the keyboard on a Mac Book Pro in under 2 weeks! “This would never happen in Tokyo!” I curse as my laptop, some 2 weeks later, is still “being seen to.”

 

So these things happen. Plan b.

 

My sister has an identical laptop– and though incredibly busy with her own career and studies– she did offer to let me use the computer when she wasn’t using it. We had a pretty tidy system going for an entire week until we were broken in to this time last week and the last standing laptop of number 55 became but a memory. Bummer. 

 

So now a fortnight shy of D-Day I am without a computer and slowly, but surely losing the overall will to live. I mean, write.

 

I tap here now on a very beat up old iBook G4 I found in an ancient drawer in my folks office. The W key is missing. You should see how quickly I can copy and paste these days. Phenomenal.

 

This crusty old laptop also refuses to be connected to the Internet in any capacity imaginable. This becomes increasingly frustrating when you have mastered the art of attaching and emailing files while simultaneously writing an exegesis and a novel. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

 

Time management: It’s paramount to the success of anyone regarding anything. Having been an immature student in the past I’d grown quite fond of my ability to juggle tasks and deadlines while stepping on a minimal number of toes—new for me. Alas now, I sit here, attaching an audible expletive to every ‘W’ I find myself needing to type, I can’t help but laugh… A comedy of errors. A final faux pas. A great big, bloody joke. The Japanese have a word for it—shoganai—that which is beyond your control. And that I feel is exactly where it’s going to be at for the next week. And the next. Word.

 

Is The New-Feminism Merely Glorified Soft Porn?

My book deals largely with feminist issues both in Japan and in the West.
Germaine Greer, who has long owned this issue, touched on it again recently in an essay titled “Why do so many female artists put themselves in their work—often with no clothes on?” In a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald written by Elizabeth Farrelly– Farreelly states that Greer herself was never backward in coming forward as often naked as clad, when young. In a career fueled by the volatile mix of intellect and notoriety, in equal parts, her readiness to bare all didn’t hurt. Nor did the defiant gorgeousness of what was exposed (for many people Greer’s was the first published vagina). But her question remains valid why do so many contemporary woman artists insist on rendering themselves nude?

Male art, while often provocative is hardly deemed de rigueur these days, as it is for women; painting, photographing or performing on their own, fully revealed (but often perfected) nakedness. Take for example the recent Spice Girls World Tour. In order to achieve penultimate ‘girl power’ one must lose all their post-pregnancy weight (in the instance of Emma Bunton, within 3 weeks after the birth, prior to the tour) in order to parade around half naked on stage, the world over. We do this to ourselves. But why?

In this weekends essay feature, reporter Elizabeth Farrelly notes that where “men’s art” commonly says “look at this” women’s art commonly says “look at me”. So god help you if you are an ugly girl? Hardly, British painter Jenny Saville ruthlessly exposes her own flaws, that’s her shtick, though a noticeable characteristic of women’s self portraiture is the degree to which the subject self is a perfected one; the sheer shameless soft-focus, air-brush, Photoshop and blow dry treatment that suggests as much narcissism here as art. Is this entire genre then, a kind of avatar-creation Fennelly wonders, a rarefied form of cosmetic surgery whose purpose is not art at all, but me-perfected: self portrait not as revelation but as armour?

Interestingly too, is the cultural divide regarding all things beautiful. While living in Japan my big blue eyes and decent sized bust were an obvious point of difference, something that distinguished me from the crowd. But as any sane single woman knows, standing out from the crowd can be just as detrimental to ones safety and sanity as blending in. Within months of relocating to Asia I began shaving my arms, and cultivating my pubic hair (as they do). I began covering my body much more than I had ever done living on the beaches in Bondi. I ceased bleaching my hair and grew increasingly aware, and to be honest, paranoid of my size and the space I occupy—albeit on the tube, in a shopping aisle or passing through a doorway. I did however; start photographing myself privately with great frequency—more often than not—nude. To me this was and remains a sanction, a celebration of my own female form without the prying, judging eyes of an audience (or a mother). My armour.

Male self portraits, by contrast, seldom play the glamour game. Often they do the opposite, undermining what glamour fame might otherwise endow. Think for example
of famous self portraits by Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh, Hockney, Bacon. Freud and Munoz. All very warts-and-all, striving not for beauty but for depth, and some kind of—dare I say it?—honesty.

So why the need to pose? To pretend to be something we’re not? Even the proto-feminist Frida Kahlo, notes Greer, “Could engage with no subject other than her fictionalised and glamorised self.”

Internationally, Fennelly goes on to say, women’s art is gutsier. Ballsier. Not just Saville’s ruthlessly rendered fat, but Cindy Sherman’s Cinderella, Tracy Emin’s I’ve Got It All, Sam Taylor-Wood’s 1993 Fuck, Spank, Wank T-shirt portrait. The body, argues Fennelly, may be naked and the pose provocative but God help anyone who pins it on the garage wall.”

American academic, Linda Nochlin, wonders “why most women’s art is no good?” Its whether such repetitive, narcissistic, self glamorising is substantially different from the three-year old blonde in pearls and stilettos kissing her own mirror image? Or for that matter, from your common or garden stripper?

Again, to look at Facebook and MySpace, the number of women who pose as raunchy sex objects in their profile photos is laughable. Busty, bleached twits with more “friends” than you or I could count. Tila Tequila (www.myspace.com/tilatequila) is one such inspirational female figure. Famous for being easy and dumb. Excellent. Why do we need to appear fuckable to feel of worth? And don’t get me started on fingers down throats.

Feminism has often wanted it both ways. Wanted to keep women’s sexuality veiled. Out of the question, leaving women unburdened by the gaze. And wanted to celebrate that sexuality, as evidence of difference, especially when this celebration was a female choice. Take that choice away and we land, fairly squarely, slap bang back in Japan where any sort of feminist movement is yet to take place. Cutey cutey is their liberation. Being wanted their sanction. Feminism has often tacitly implied that women should be denied nothing. Why then must we be naked to gain anything?

There is also the presumption that female sexuality is so potent and dangerous—so powerful—that it must at all times be hidden from view. It is a view in which we are all complicit. As John Berger wrote in his famous Ways of Seeing (1972) , “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determined not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.”

My parents, having co-operated their own fashion label for the past 27 years often comment on how women do not dress for men, they dress for other women. This never ending kind of rivalry is detrimental to the progress of feminism. Enter the Burqa.

Men desire and women desire desire. They want to be wanted. Hence the cleavage riddled facebook profile shots and album covers leaving little to the imagination… lest we forget the ubiquitous music video clip (MVC). You only need to sit for 5 minutes to observe the size zero, groomed to perfection women and the obese, often offensively so and eternally under dressed male demographic. Feminism at its finest.

Mills & Boon writer Julie Blindel notes that “in every book… a scene where the heroine is ‘broken in’, both emotionally and physically, by the hero.” This is the origin of the rape fantasy, the urge to be cave manned, which most women feel now and then. Myself I tend to err on the side of deploring such misogynist propaganda. The Rape Fantasy I will explore later with a staunch focus on Japanese manga anime.

Fennelly adds though, that for the female to be overpowered by the male inclines her to the strongest sperm, and the strongest offspring. How charmed. Steven Shainberg’s film, The Secretary, played with this paradox, showing a timid woman empowered by a “submissive” relationship. I’m looking at ways in which I can portray this paradigm within my own work without seeming extremist or whiny. Yep.

The Terrible Labor of Smiling:

Explorations of Defamation and 101 Ways to Lose a Friend:

In this post-modern world of imagined biography and fictional memoir, its harder than ever to tell what is made up from what is real. Of vast interest to me and my process is the ever increasing grey matter of defamation, fact, fiction, faction and fantasy.

In a recent article in the Australian www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23458847-5012694,00.html Australian writer Helen Garner had this to say on the nature of writers and their truths: She (Garner) once cast writers as “voracious monsters, ravening beasts who roam the world seeking whom and what we may devour.” She then continues with; “The desire to preserve or capture something strange, something intriguing, may over ride respect for privacy or dignity, restraint or caution. It may even block out the memory of your rush to squirrel away a moment before it perishes. There’s a helplessness to the surrendering, as if once possessed by an idea or a phrase you’re not entirely responsible for its pursuit.”

Following a criticism of the young Garner jotting down notes beside a graveside at a funeral Garner confessed, “I’m a bit horrified by me at the funeral”, Garner says a little later. “In an awful way I can completely believe I might have done such a thing, but it’s a horrible image of what writers are like. There’s a need to take the observation away and brood on it, sort of steal it. To take notes at a funeral seems appalling.”

Still, I wonder if this is the necessary process of the writer. Throughout the course of my own writing (my book specifically, now in its 6th year of conception) I have lost some 5 friends. Friends that did not want their lives to be documented. Or at least not documented in the way that I see as authentic.

On a similar vein Garner had this to say, “I had an urge to own those feelings. I didn’t make them up. While I was writing (The Spare Room) I thought, “I’m going to look really bad in this book, there’s no redeeming this kind of awful, ugly emotion;, and I thought , “I’m not going to change it. I’ll call the character Helen and admit those feelings.’ I think this is a reason why people write. They want to put a piece of them out there and see if it can be embraced.”

Similar to my own process in that in an age of smoke and mirrors—facebook and myspace come to mind—both social networking tools where photoshop and the advantage of time provide users with the opportunity to edit themselves. To present themselves in a way that may not be entirely authentic. In theory these social networking tools are providing users with an opportunity to express who they are to the world at large, when in actuality what is happening here is users are taking this as an opportunity to present themselves to the world in an idealised way—the way they’d like to be.

It takes great courage and drive to present yourself in a manner that may not be viewed upon fondly—by friends, colleagues, family, what have you.

Heralded for stating that every time she writes book she loses a husband, Garner has now lived on her own for the past decade, suggesting that perhaps …’ the solitude of writing doesn’t sit well with marriage.’

Hillary McPhee, one half of the McPhee Gribble publishing house that launched Garners career thinks Garner is “much more considerate that earlier, when she’d probably say she did blunder in because she was inventing a genre.”

Garner agrees: “I regret trampling through peoples lives. In the past I’ve hurt people, wounded them in fact by writing about them in ways they didn’t like. Other people have loved being written about. You never know which way someones going to take it so that’s been a problem for me right from the start. One person in particular hates my guts… I’ve realised there’s nothing I can do about it. That relationships been destroyed.” There’s another writer who speaks off the record, calling Garner a “scab picker”, a “User who takes everything and gives nothing back.”

This informs my own process profoundly as I mentioned earlier that during the course of writing my book I have “destroyed” some 5 relationships, relationships I thought strong and long lasting. The notion of writing nonfiction brings with it a myriad of problems for those people whom you have invited into your life. A writer is hardwired for details and authentic narrative. A writer choses to live their life in a way that could, at any moment, be documented, is being documented. It can be incredibly hurtful and frustrating as you come to learn not everyone is hardwired that way and not everyone cares to be confronted with a version of themselves they are not yet ready to see.

Similarly, New Yorks art world has been agnosing over the ethics of entitlement since Annie Leibowitz (Annie Clever Bitch, as my mother refers to her) exhibited photographs she took of her partner, Susan Sontag in the days before her death and during the hour immediately afterwards. Sontag’s son, David Rieff, felt his mothers memory was “humiliated”. Critics cringed at Leibowitz’s reckless juxtapositon of painful, private images with glossy celebrity portraits. Garner hasn’t seen the Sontag pictures but reckons Sontag knew that Leibowitz never had a camera out of her hand. “Sontag could not possibly have thought that Leibowitz would not be taking her photograph.”

The artist is relentless, seamless in the persuit of their art.
Similarly Australian photographer Carrol Jenna was often criticised for constantly sticking a camera in the face of unwilling suspects. A penchant that ultimately served her well as she photographed her own demise from a mystery liver inflicting illness. A truly brilliant and brave expose on the voyeurism of the artist and their own sense of self. I have infinite respect for Carol Jenna.

Similarly with the detailed death of Garner’s friend in The Spare Room “She would’ve understood my need to tell the story. She was a person who was not squeamish, she was a person of courage and she was out there. I don’t feel that’s a betrayal.”

Interestingly, however, the ending of a friendship does not secure a safe licence from defamation. The threat of losing a friend is often not enough to impede the writers urgent, necessary need to tell the story. It’s often perceived as voyeuristic cruelty. But is it really that cut and dry?

Garner once defined her work as hyperrealism and now feels the fit of autofiction sits snugly. Quickly bored by “cloudy dreamings” Garner admits that “nothing sets her teeth on edge so much as the revving and grinding of someones imagination as they’re tryig to make things up.”

Peter Carey compared writers to magicians, conjuring “things up that never happened before.” Garner is sceptical. “I don’t believe that anythings totally invented… If you’re completely inventing a story there wouldn’t be an urge to tell it.” Her publisher McPhee points to the space between pragaraphs . “This is when the imagination happens.”

“I used to feel an obligation to invent things, says Garner. I felt I was a failure because I didn’t do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don’t feel that anymore.”

Writer and academic Elizabeth Webby once told Garner: I’m amazed at how much you walk around naked in public. Webby says the writer is “Prepared to reveal intimate, rather shameful things.” Things most of us wouldn’t cough up with a gun to our heads.

We defame ourselves a large percent of the time, it seems only natural to me that during the course of an entire career that same sense of defamation towards others is would become merely inevitable.

The bravery of the photgrapher chosing the photograph over the moment, the human engagement is by the by, ther objective is the photograph. Same also for the writer. No relationship is safe guarded. No anecdote “off the record.” With the exception of course, of those who stipulate strongly that their privacy be maintained or at best, their identities disguised. One of the “5 friends” I mentioned earlier had requested I not detail the specifics of the story she had shared with me of her horrific experiences as a child and a victim of incest. Even in writing this, as generically as I just have, I feel a sense of disloyalty towards her. I have of course, omitted anything of that nature from my book– suffice to say, I had never actually included it– So where do we draw the line? To people actually get off on the paranoid notions of being written about? Do people assume the worst while making too few inquiries? Whatever the answer, it’s a shame. Any kind of loss is tragic.

In end, Garner compares writing to a sickness, a neurosis, a mania. Fellow novelist Roger McDonald ticks off the motives for writing: love, hate, revenge, to win plaudits, or the simple reason that “I couldn’t keep the truth to myself any longer.” Like a primal scream, it boils up and spills out. There’s a therapeutic benefit to the lancing. “Life’s fairly excruciating. Painful things happen, says Garner. “Every now and then you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that’s how I work.”

Reflective Practice in the field of Creative Media.

This blog has been conceived as a contributing document for my Masters (in Creative Media) that I am currently in the process of completing through RMIT (www.rmit.edu.au)

Throughout the course of this semester I intend to make weekly entries focusing on topics pertinent to my studies. For my Masters I am majoring in the field of Creative Writing and thus, am writing a memoir as my Creative Project submission; in addition to a supporting Exegesis document. The exegesis will focus largely on The Death of the Novel. An area that first twigged my interest several years ago when I began writing my own book.

Stefan Bollman’s ‘Women Who Write’ (www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Write-Stefan-Bollman/dp/1858943752) has provided me with the richest source of information thus far on the topic of women and the history of the novel. Throughout this work Bollman examines the feminine culture of the novel and the evolution from Jane Austen to Virgina Woolf to modern feminists such as Germaine Greer as well as post feminist works by the likes of Francine Prose and Nancy Friday.

In short, what I am trying to achieve through the course of writing my exegesis is a further discussion on what I deem to be the death of a certain literary form. To break this down further, I’m interested in examining the social constraints of the writers environment. Jane Austen, arguably one of the most prolific writers of her time, female or otherwise, spent the majority of her writing hours in a shared communal drawing room– where by– the entire family would sit, sip tea, discuss this and that, play the piano and embroider. Austen’s manuscripts were hidden beneath tapestries and embroidery. Her plots, character arches, subplots and subtexts were all conceived in a communal space under the close watch of others.

Not how I write.

From this period in time we then shift to the works of Virginia Woolf, who demanded a ‘Room of Ones Own’ to write in. A place of sanction and liberation. A space devoid of watching eyes and prying social constraints. A place to be free in ones own inventions.

To return briefly to Austen, we find that largely her works were deemed autobiographical, in her novel Persuasion, we find this moving description of one of Austen’s characters, Anne Elliot: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth,” she writes, “…She learned romance as she grew older– the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” This comment is equally true of its author, who might be deemed a “late developer”.

It is within this domain that the mind travels to wild and wonderful places and then returns to cook the evening meal, done the family laundry and further serve the patriarchal divide. The novel, as I see it, has historically been a place for women to escape to.

To return to Woolf and the writers that followed, George Eliot, Simone De Beauvoir and the likes of Sylvia Plath, et al one might begin to see the common thread of experience throughout these works. Women writing largely about how they saw the world, the realities of micro/macro verses the possibilities within a fantastic world.

During the process of writing my own work of literary nonfiction I have grown convinced that all “novels” are indeed, works of nonfiction. The defining genre, however, being dictated by the cultural climate and personal bravery of the individual writer. Albeit the writers own fantasies or realities.

Contrary to this, we may ask what did Austen know of romance as an unmarried, virginal woman? Her nephew noted in his own memoir of his aunt, that she died at the age of 41 when “she was just beginning to feel confidence in her own success.” Had she lived a few years longer, Virgina Woolf wrote, she would’ve emerged from the obscurity in which she lived: “She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to open at leisure”. There is a huge sense, throughout the history of womens writing, that a lot of these lives have been cut short. Stunting the growth of what potentially could’ve been a much more vastly progressive trajectory into the world of established post-feminist writings.

Again, Bollman notes that since Austen’s time life expectancy has increased by 40 years or so, and it is still increasing, thereby making possible developmental processes that require more time because they involved following byways and indirect routes, perhaps even losing the way at times. A person whose early years are unhappy, Bollman adds, or are “not normal,” or are even lived too prudently, needs time to change course; ingrained patterns of behavior seldom vanish with a sudden blaze of revelation, he concludes. “Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?” wrote Silvia Plath in her own journal. Yet, following the separation from her husband, fellow writer, Ted Hughes, who loved another woman, she did not start a new life in London with her two small children, as she had said she would, she instead chose to die.

I’m interested in examining how these women are received by society and how so much of this brilliant writing is plagued by ill health. My own trajectory has been smattered with large, laborious loads of visits to specialists, various surgeries, treatments and inevitably a whole lot of research and writing. I am curious as to the role of ones own fertility in all of these works I have mentioned, and others, that I, as yet, have not. The role creativity plays in the process (or absence) of ability (or choice) to create life. My interest branches out from here to include the various works of Germaine Greer; Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984); and The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), and most recently Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), all of which examine the politics of what it is to be human and female and perceived by the patriarch.

“Let not women write poetry:/ They should try to be poems themselves,” advised the clumsily worded poem ‘Blustocking’ (1887) by Oscar Blumenthal. In an ever increasingly paedophilic time in history, my paper is an attempt to examine the ever present role of younger and younger women in a time where fertility has never been as big an issue as it is currently. And like all grand issues, interestingly, the subject of fecundity and feminism remains largely uncharted.

In a recent interview on ABCs Radio National, Germaine Greer was asked if she was in fact flattered, beyond comprehension, by the fact her first sweat, The Female Eunuch (1970) is still in print. “Not at all,” she responded, “…if anything I’m disappointed. I was certain there would’ve been at least 15 other works of this nature written since but there haven’t.”

“People say I’m an egoist,” wrote Ethel Smyth, “I’m not an egoist. I’m a fighter”.

And as egotistical as it may seem, I’d love nothing more than for my memoir to be an extension of that beacon. Of all of these womens works. Their ill fated sweats, often cut short by social mores and ill health. I’d like to be the women who personifies it now, currently, in a world of popstars and pint sized quasi feminists. I’d like to be the change that I seek, and the kind of the change that doesn’t find myself packing my pockets full of stones and drowning myself in a river… I’d like to be able to write in a room of ones own with the courage and stealth to attach the generific title of “non fiction” to my work, rather than scampering off to a public place to escape my own realities through the novel.

The Death of the Novel: