Non-Fiction

Restlessness

PETERMBALL Journal

Motel_PhotographI’m trying to buy an apartment this year. I’m not terribly good at it.

I can find places I quite like in locations I’d enjoy living, but the response I get when consulting with expert is basically the equivalent of a warning siren and the robot from Lost in Space flailing its arms in a panic.

When I find places that are really quite solid investments, well made and reasonably priced, I look at their location and the streets that surround them and realise, should I live in this place alone, my future will involve unacceptable levels of boredom and self-loathing.

There have been suggestions, in Australian media of late, that we’re far too hard on suburbia. Perhaps this is true. I grew up in the suburbs. I live in Brisbane, which is mostly a sprawling suburban expanse that goes on forever and ever, amen.

I’m not good at that. I like the idea that there are people around, people I can go engage with. I like the idea that I can leave my house and there will be things to do within walking distance, regardless of the hour.

This limits my options, in Brisbane. It limits my options quite a bit.

I started this process expecting to be renting, trying to find a place to move before Christmas.  When I realised I could afford a mortgage, the plans changed but I stayed packed, ready to move at a moment’s notice.

All the advice I’ve been given about buying a house suggests taking your time is the best option. Find the place that’s right, rather than the place that’ll do.

It’s been two years since I last had a place, since I gave up my flat and moved into a friend’s spare room. It’s been two good years, but I’m anxious to move on. To have a space that’s mine again, to unpack all the books.

To think, I’d like to read the opening scene of Less Than Zero again, just to see how Ellis uses the language in that bit, and know that I can find the book on a shelf instead of realising its sitting in a random box and it’ll be impossible to find it.

I’ve had the opening line stuck in my head for days now. People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. It isn’t in a hurry to go away.

My irritation at being nowhere is infecting other parts of my life. You can’t build without a foundation, and right now I’m on shifting sands. Work bugs me. Writing bugs me. I’m sick of being around other people.

And so Thursday comes, and I go look at apartments. Saturday comes, and I do it all again. Slowly, inevitably, my standards get lower, ’cause eventually the need to be somewhere will outweigh good sense.

 

Winter

PETERMBALL Journal ,

All my friends keep moving to Melbourne and I do not. I find this kinda tiring, ’cause I’m not the kind of guy who makes new friends easily. I make new acquaintances. I’m good at new acquaintances. Making friends is harder. I don’t like to impose on people, especially now we’re in our thirties. I need clear signs that acquaintances would like to take things further. I assume, for the most part, that people have their shit down and don’t want me to show up and mess with it. I don’t bother ’cause I don’t want to be a bother. Besides, making new friends is all kinds of awkward.

There are friends who skip Melbourne and just go overseas. I cant even imagine how to migrate like that. It’s not in my DNA to relocate that far. There are days when moving to Melbourne seems all kinds of daunting. I keep saying I’m going to do it, and keep failing to go. At first there is study. Then there is unemployment. Then there is employment and I like my job too much. “When they’re done with me,” I tell people. “When they’re done, I’ll head South and join you.”

Secretly I hope that my friends will come back. I know it isn’t happening, that Brisbane has no appeal left for those who have departed, but I miss them and there are all these nights when all I want is the chance to hang out for a while.

Some days I think that when it comes to Brisbane I’m never actually getting out. And some days, you know, I think that’s just fine. Some days I actually like this city and all the people who remain. Some days I think I can accept living here for the rest of my natural life. I don’t often say that, ’cause that’s not what Brisbane people say. Our rhetoric, when it comes to art, is all about departure. Even now, when we know better, all our stories revolve around getting the hell out.

I’m thinking about this in the local supermarket, just standing there in the cereal aisle pondering between two types of porridge. It shouldn’t be a hard choice, ’cause porridge isn’t fancy, but I’m trying to choose between vanilla flavoured or something that has the brown sugar pre-added. I already kinda hate myself because it’s become something I actually debate, like adding brown sugar to porridge takes an exorbitant amount of effort and time.

It’s eight-fifteen in he evening. The store’s kinda empty. That’s what I get for shopping on State of Origin night.  I pick the vanilla porridge and start heading towards the self check-out counters. I’m humming a Tori Amos song underneath my breath.

It takes me the length of the aisle to remember the name of the song. I makes me think about my first girlfriend, who I haven’t seen in over a decade. We met on the Gold Coast and dated on the Gold Coast and, last I heard, she still lived down there. I find this knowledge both sad and incomprehensible. I hope it’s somehow wrong. We used to catch the trains to Brisbane to see writers, bands, and night-clubs. We hit the book stores that carried honest-to-god non-fiction and novels that weren’t classics or massive best-sellers. And maybe not all of this happened the way I remember it, ’cause memory is unreliable after fifteen years, but I’m guessing that part of it’s accurate. The spirit, at least, if not the letter. I’m guessing we talked about moving here, one day, ’cause that’s what artists on the Gold Coast did.

I reach the self check-out. I scan my box of porridge and pay. I walk the three blocks home and watch people spill out of the local gym. Everyone is wearing jumpers ’cause it’s winter and it’s cold out. I’ve started whistling the Tori Amos song, loud enough that people can hear me. The gym crowd is mostly women who wear shirts in strong, primary colours.

Some of them give me a wide berth. Some of them do not.

When I turn down my street and walk under a tree, one of the local bats launches itself into the night sky. It occurs to me that it’s getting real cold and I should have brought my scarf. It’s the first time I’ve ever thought that on my home turf and, somehow, this convinces me that everything will work itself out..

Things on My Shelf: The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , ,

It’s been suggested that there’s an undercurrent of gloom running through my posts of late, which is one of those inevitable things that happens ’round these parts every Summer. I’m pre-programmed for deep seriousness December through February, largely ’cause it’s too damn hot and I spent the better part of a decade being broke during those months on account of doing session work for Universities. Also, they’re my drinking months. I brood when I drink.

Still, in deference to the fact that not everyone is as fond of embracing their inner gloomcookie as I am, I figured I’d spent a blog post talking about awesome things. Specifically, this awesome thing, which ranks among the coolest books in my collection:

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I picked this up at a Melbourne bookstore back in 2008, although I’ll be damned if I can remember which bookstore it was. A friend of mine took me there, and it was back in the days when I’d never really been to Melbourne, so I didn’t have any real spatial sense of the city (truthfully, I still don’t, but comparatively I’m doing better than I was back then).

Buying it was something of a no-brainer for me: I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler at the time, finally getting around to the books that weren’t The Big Sleep, and I’ve always been fond of reading about other writer’s processes. I figured Chandler’s notebooks would be one of those two-great-tastes-that-taste-great-together kind of things.

Instead, it was this real holy-hell-this-is-awesome kind of experience. There’s a lot of cultural mythology that builds up around writers, particularly hard-boiled writers, but when you go through Chandler’s notebooks there’s a whole bunch of evidence that he’s a guy who has his shit together. Notebooks isn’t big – it clocks in at 113 pages, and 25 of those pages are devoted to the unpublished Gothic romance referenced on the cover – but it’s an odd mixture of private notes, planning ahead, and notes for stories.

Through it all, Chandler is smart. There are pages where he makes notes of the work he wants to get done, planning out the next year or so of writing time and where he wants to get. There are musings on the act of writing, and the detective story. There are lists of titles that he’d like to use, or slang he’s lifted from somewhere to throw into his novels. There are lists of lines he’d like to use in his fiction – dialogue, similes, metaphors, snatches of description – the kind of great sentences that make reading Chandler a pleasure, that are planned in advance and marked off when they’re used.

There is one of the best piss-takes of Ernest Hemingway you’ll ever see, which is funny as hell. And illustrations by Edward Gorey, which isn’t advertised on the cover of the book, but proved to be a pleasant surprise when I hit the Romance at the end.

And when you look close, you can see the bones of Chandlers books in his notebooks, which isn’t always a given. And that’s utterly fascinating.

It’s also kind of heart-breaking, ’cause there will be these little throw-away things, like a note in his list of potential titles that reads Islands in the Sky (an anthology of fantastic stories), and I kinda weep that Chandler never actually wrote a book of fantasy (similarly, I’m always excited when I see that Chandler wrote a story titled The King in Yellow, despite the fact that its only a vague reference Robert W. Chambers collection).

I like to believe that Chandler would have been a kick-ass fantasist. Intriguingly, after reading his notebooks, I like to think the man would have had a phenomenal blog if the technology had been around. But then, I often wonder what dead artists would have been like if they’d existed at the same time as modern technology. It’s all too easy to imagine them being grumpy and hating it, simply ‘case we’re culturally pre-programmed to assume that everyone in the olden-times lived better and did better and didn’t suffer from the evil’s of the internet.

And it’s possible that train of thought will lead us somewhere gloomy. I’ll stop now.

I fricken’ adore this book. It breaks open my skull and messes with my brains, which is all I ever really want a book to do. It also makes me wish I was a different kind of writer, ’cause me and notebooks don’t really have the same relationship Chandler had with his.

C’est la vie.

With that, I’m off to write things, as is required. Hope your day is a good one, and your shelf is abundant with interesting books.