Beyond Selidor

The sun shone all day, I can hear birdsong outside my kitchen window, and the bulbs and fruit trees in the garden are starting to flower: dare I hope that spring is finally in the air?

This week's open thread prompt is sparked by my plans to watch the second Dune film in the IMAX cinema in Cambridge tomorrow:

What are your most memorable experiences of watching a film in the cinema?

(These do not need to involve IMAX or otherwise flashy set-ups — viewing a film could be memorable for a whole range of reasons.)

( Both my answers involve films from the Lord of the Rings trilogy )

I finished six TV shows this month, covering a fairly broad range of tones and genres.

( Six shows )

I'm making a tentative return to Friday open threads, but as is probably apparent by this point, they're probably going to be somewhat sporadic.

Today's question is: what is a strange, illogical thing that you believed as a child? I'm thinking more of something that you spontaneously, independently started believing (without input from others), rather than things like the tooth fairy (which obviously required some input from parents/wider society).

Two weird things that I believed spring to mind. The first is that I thought all traffic lights were operated by an individual human being, who sat crouched inside the lights (don't ask me how I thought an adult human could contort themselves in order to fit inside a set of traffic lights), observed the flow of traffic, and switched the lights from red to green when they deemed a sufficient queue of cars had built up.

The other belief is both weird, and kind of dark if you think about it too much. For some reason, when I was a toddler, I was convinced that puppets had voices. I don't mean that I thought the puppeteers gave voice to the puppets, I mean that I believed each puppet was literally speaking with its own, conscious voice. (I knew that puppeteers were making the puppets move though.)

However, I had my own toy glove puppets at home, and these presented me with a conundrum: they showed no evidence of being able to speak independently. I resolved this conundrum with the perfect toddler logic: if puppets used in professional puppet shows could speak on their own, and my toy puppets couldn't, this clearly meant that puppets destined to be children's toys had had their voices removed before they arrived in the toy shop. So my toys had been literally rendered voiceless. This explanation, which I came up with entirely on my own, satisfied my need for an internal logic, and didn't trouble me particularly. But as an adult, it seems like a horror scenario! A better writer than I am could write a really creepy children's story using this concept — and, like a lot of creepy children's stories, it would probably seem much more horrifying to adult readers than to children, who tend to take this sort of thing in their stride.

What about you? What strange, illogical things did you believe when you were children?

After yesterday's exhausting conferencing, I collapsed into bed around 8.30pm and slept for close to eleven hours. With that sleep debt repaid, today has been a lot less tiring, and in between work, I managed to finish another book in my lunch break: Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold, edited by Carolyne Larrington. This anthology brings together various women writers from the UK and Ireland to retell folktales from around these island with an intersectional feminist twist. The stories have been compared in reviews to things like Carter's The Bloody Chamber, although for me they lacked the requisite bite and sharpness — they were well told, but had a kind of studied cautiousness about them. I found the 'forgotten' descriptor in the title something of a misnomer, given that I recognised most of the original tales from the folklore anthologies I used to read as a teenager — but maybe that's just my own weirdness!

Onwards to today's book meme prompt:

20. A frigid ice bath of a book

( My answer )

( The other days )

It's rained! It's cooler! It's continued to rain, and I am so happy!

The cooler weather cleared away the brainfog which was preventing me from being able to focus on anything, and as a result I read all five of the Hitch Hiker's Guide books in a few hours.

I've been really enjoying a series of videos posted on Guardian Australia, where children's/YA authors answer questions sent in by readers (or in some cases parents). They've only done a handful so far, but two of them are authors whose work I love, and whose books I've been reading in some cases since before I could actually read.

The first is Alison Lester, who started out as an illustrator, and then went on to mostly write and illustrate her own picture books. These are massively popular and beloved in Australia (and in fact I discovered that, in the past week, my mother — who linked the videos to me — had bought a couple of Lester's board books to give to the newborn baby of a school friend of my sister's). She answers questions mostly from young children, and some of the videos are really adorable.



The second is Garth Nix. I was reminded in his video of how friendly and warm a speaker he is. Back when I was a newspaper reviewer, he was the first author I ever interviewed. I was only about nineteen or twenty, I was extremely anxious, and I showed up at his office in Clovelly in Sydney as a complete bundle of nerves. But he was wonderful to talk to — we went to a cafe, the interview was basically just like having a conversation, and the resulting publication read really well.



Highlights for me from this video include:

The anecdote about hanging out with Philip Pullman in Oxford

The story behind how he came up with the lore/mythology of the Old Kingdom books

His response to a question about LGBT representation in his books — where he basically said he had been bad with all kinds of representation in the past, because he had felt it was sufficient for him, the author, to know everything about a character's (marginalised) identities, but never spell it out. He had not originally understood (perhaps because he, himself, had always seen himself in his meaningful childhood stories) that people need to see these things stated clearly on the page, and that if a character shares their marginalised identity it can be extremely powerful.

I'd also forgotten that he was a Canberran, like me, and actually let out a little exclamation of happiness when I remembered that! With prompting, I remember that he had spoken with me about the same things re: his Canberran childhood when I interviewed him, namely that his favourite place was a public library no longer in existence. Since one of my favourite places in Canberra growing up was also a public library that closed,* I can relate.

He's from the wrong side of the lake, though.

This started as a post about books, and ended up on a long rambling trip down Canberran memory lane. I'm feeling quite emotional about Australia, and the distance between it, and where I live now. I'm generally quite happy with the fact that I migrated, and that I live so far away. But the fact that I won't see my mother this year, and probably won't be able to go back at Christmas as I planned suddenly hit me like a tonne of bricks recently. The two videos reminded me forcefully of how much I miss hearing other Australian voices, particularly when they are the voices of people who are good speakers and really clear communicators.

*Amusingly, next to this very old online news article is a link to a fiercely raging debate in the comments section of an opinion piece about whether private school in Canberra is 'worth it' — the author of the piece having gone to all three state/public schools that I also attended (and being roughly in my age group, so I'm wondering why I don't recognise her name). This is one of those perennial Canberra arguments, and I'm kind of dying with laughter that the comments section could have been time-travelling from 1985, 1995, 2005, etc and it would still be exactly the same, with people making exactly the same points about the exact same handful of schools. Canberrans gonna Canberra, is all I can say.

I was watching a documentary about Australian film last night, and George Miller appeared on the screen, and I was overcome with emotion all over again. I made Matthias pause the show, because I had to give words to what I was feeling: this overflow of relief and gratitude and astonishment that this white, boomer male filmmaker had understood, and depicted — mainly without words — how angry so many women are all the time,* and why we are angry.

(Incidentally, I met George Miller, decades ago when I was a teenager at some New Year's Eve party in Sydney hosted by one of my mother's friends. And there were moments of connection like that throughout the documentary, whenever various talking heads appeared: Sigrid Thornton, who once overheard my mother, sister and me talking loudly in English, with Australian accents, in a clothes shop in Paris, and advised me as to which winter coat I should buy out of the two over which I'd been deliberating. Gillian Armstrong, whose daughter? stepdaughter? was at school with my sister. Paul Mercurio, who danced with my aunt back when she was a professional dancer. Said aunt is now an economics lecturer. I don't move in particularly exalted circles. It's just that the arts/media/journalism circle in Australia is extremely small, and was even smaller and more incestuous when my parents and their generation were establishing their careers.)

*I mean, when I say 'all the time,' I don't mean I'm brimming with rage constantly, but it's buried there, and can be summoned at a moment's notice by a news item, an interaction, an anecdote by one of my younger sisters, friends, or a stranger, and back it comes.

Good morning, and welcome to Day Four of the fandom meme:

D: What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?

My answer to this depends on how you define 'a fandom'. Like most fannish adults, rewriting the endings of my favourite stories, or imagining I was a character in said stories was a major feature of my childhood. Indeed the fact that I a) had very poor hearing as a young child until I got grommets put in my ears to unblock the eustachian tubes and b) generally spent my time imagining I was a character from one of my favourite books doing all the things I did in my daily life meant that I was an extremely vague child who found it very difficult to focus on the words coming out of real-life people's mouths. Because I did this sort of thing for as long as I can remember (I have memories of myself as a three-year-old toddler pretending my doll was a character in a picture book I enjoyed at my childcare centre), it's impossible to name my first 'contribution' to fandom if we're counting childhood play as fannish activity.

If participation in fandom as a shared activity is how you're defining it, it would have been some time around the early 2000s, when I first dipped my toes into fan forums for two of my favourite book series: Bridgetothestars, a Philip Pullman fansite with its Republic of Heaven forum, and Obernewtyn.net, a fansite for Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. I made a couple of posts, but at the time was not very interested in the internet and mostly just wanted to be on my own reading books, so I drifted away until 2007, when a combination of intense situational depression, and living away from my support network forced me back online in a kind of desperation. Both sites welcomed me with open arms, and on the Republic of Heaven in particular I racked up a massive post count. Over the years I met most of the people on those sites in real life — the Obernetters were easier, as almost everyone on that site lived in Australia, whereas apart from lowercasename, all the Pullman fans lived in Europe or North America, so I didn't meet most of them until I moved to the UK. I wouldn't be able to track down my first 'contribution' to either site, but it would have been a post replying in some way to some discussion thread about either series.

If your definiation of fandom solely relates to fanworks posted online in shared spaces, that's easy: it's 'Bodies of Clay', the first fic I published on Ao3, back in 2012:

Bodies of Clay (3638 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 10/10
Fandom: Pagan Chronicles
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Isidore Orbus/Babylonne Kidrouk
Characters: Isidore Orbus, Babylonne Kidrouk
Summary:

Ten moments in Isidore and Babylonne's life together. Post Pagan's Daughter/Babylonne.

How would you define 'fannish activity'?

( The other days )

Today is another January talking meme post, this time brought to you by montfelisky, who asked for a significant childhood memory.

Me being who I am, I couldn't narrow it down to one.

( When I was a child the world seemed so wide )

I could go on, but that's probably enough. I have a dreadful short-term memory, but my memories of distant childhood experiences are clear and vivid, and extensive.

I returned to England yesterday, after two weeks spent back in Australia, visiting friends and family with Matthias. I spent most of that time in Sydney, staying with my mum, although I made a flying visit to Macedon (in rural Victoria), where my dad, stepmother and three youngest sisters have recently moved.

It's hard for me to really capture the emotions that I feel whenever I go back to Australia. My trips back there are at once an exercise in nostalgia (dashing around eating, drinking and doing all the things I can't eat, drink or do in the UK) and a stark reminder of the passage of time, of change, of loss, of the person I could have been, had I stayed. This time the reminder was even more tangible: my grandmother was alive the last time I visited; my friends have babies who did not exist the last time I was there; shops and restaurants that had stood for years in various suburbs of eastern Sydney have closed or moved to new locations, disorienting me. I always feel both less like myself, and more like an earlier version of myself, whenever I go back. I always feel like the space I used to occupy has closed up behind me, and is unreachable. I always get that little voice pointing out the things I miss about Australia (the sea, the beaches, the food and coffee culture without the sneery accusations of pretentiousness and snobbery that seem to be levelled at anyone who cares about food in the UK, my close-knit, matriarchal family, the birdsong, the sense of common childhood cultural references), accompanied with the certainty that I was right to leave and that I never, never want to live there permanently again. I always have fun when I visit, but every visit is bittersweet. That's probably the simplest way to explain what it feels like to return.

It was bakingly hot -- over 30 degrees Celcius most days (although the nights in Macedon were freezing), and I swam almost every day, twice in eastern Sydney beaches (Bronte and Clovelly), and the rest of the time doing laps with my mother and one of my aunts in Boy Charlton outdoor pool. This is a saltwater pool located in a beautiful part of Sydney Harbour. Two of its walls are completely transparent, so you have the impression of actually swimming in the harbour itself, and it's a lovely place to swim. I was out of practice, but managed to build up to swimming a kilometre after two days. My mother and aunt (both in their sixties) were faster than I was, though! Here's a photoset I took of the pool, to give you some idea of what it's like.

I could not stop photographing the sea and the sky. suzemetherell, who has just returned to Australia after several years in London, told me she was exactly the same when she first got back: Britain is good at vivid green colours, but its blues leave a lot to be desired. Here are some of my sea/sky photos:

Sydney Harbour as seen from the roof of my mum's block of flats
Sydney Harbour as seen from the balcony of my aunt's flat
The trees in the early morning, outside my dad's house in Macedon
A photoset of burning blue skies and gum trees in Castlemain, an old mining town near Macedon
A photoset taken in Rushcutters Bay, where I met with my Sydney friends for a picnic
Rough waters at Bronte, taken from the Bondi to Coogee cliff walk
Waves rolling in at Clovelly
The sunset over Sydney Harbour, taken during a party with my family on the roof of Mum's block of flats

You get the idea.

As well as catching up with friends and family, and hurling myself into any available water at every opportunity, I read a lot, went to a bunch of craft beer bars with Matthias (I don't drink beer, but he does, and always looks up new places to visit whenever we're on holiday), and took advantage of the fact that my mum lives a short walk away from all the main sports stadiums in Sydney to watch a football (i.e. soccer) match.

It was wonderful in particular to hang out with my three youngest sisters, who I don't see all that much as they're still children and can't travel overseas very easily. My youngest sister, three-year-old Maud, is obsessed with painting and drawing, and spent one evening drawing portraits of everyone in the house. The picture she drew of me was apparently the first picture she'd ever drawn of a person, and I love it to bits. The last time I'd seen her, she was only one-and-a-half, and couldn't really talk, so it was amazing to actually be able to have a conversation with her, and just hang out with her and my other sisters.

The trip was, as always, too short, but I'm glad I went. It's always a very emotional experience for me, going back, but those connections and roots are important to me, and every time I return to Australia I feel them being strengthened and reaffirmed. I'm someone who has a very strong sense of place, of my past, of the landscapes of memory and how they have shaped me, and although I find it confronting, I also feel it's necessary and essential that I return to them and keep them a part of my life.

By a strange coincidence, the Guardian has been running a series on Australian cities. I'll leave you with some links to the pieces in that series that I found most resonant and/or interesting:

The radical plan to split Sydney into three (I'm not entirely convinced, and I think the planners' attempts to connect their proposed division of Sydney with Indigenous ways of demarcating and dividing the region to be disigenuous and appropriative)

The best in the world: a love letter to Australia's public swimming pools (one of the pools mentioned, Boy Charlton, is the place where I swam all my laps during this recent Sydney trip, and, incidentally, I have swum in literally every Sydney pool mentioned in the article)

First Dog on the Moon's guide to Australia's urban stereotypes (This is a cartoon, and is painfully true. I'm a weird kind of Sydney-Canberra hybrid - I grew up in Canberra, and moved to Sydney when I was 18, and always felt like a Canberran when I lived there, faintly horrified by the conspicuous consumption, obessession with real estate, and over-the-top concern with physical appearance, while always feeling somewhat dowdy, staid and suburban in comparison - and let me tell you, this cartoon gets Canberra and Sydney stereotypes spot on)

promiseoftin asked 'What got you into journalism/writing'? This was a bit of a complicated, two-stage process. It's also worth saying that, aside from blogging and the odd bit of reviewing on my reviews blog, I'm not really a writer or journalist any more. But I was for a long time, and for a longer time before that, it was the only career I imagined for myself, and everything I did was geared towards becoming a reviewer/journalist.

I have to admit that, in hindsight, the main reason I gravitated towards journalistic writing as a career was the fact that both my parents are journalists. My father is a very prominent Australian political TV journalist, and my mother is a radio broadcaster; both have been working as journalists for over forty years. Growing up, basically all the adults around me were journalists, so that I developed this unconscious perception that to be an adult with a job meant being a journalist. It helped that reading, writing, and analysing the written word came naturally and easily to me, and that I was encouraged in this, particularly by my mother, who was always telling me that as long as I could write, I would always have a job. By the time I was in my teens, she was pushing me to submit reviews to newspapers and write for student papers, and I was enthusiastically doing so.

That is what underlay my entry into journalism and writing - parental example and encouragement. How I actually started working in this field is quite an embarrassing story. At one point, when I was sixteen, I was having yet another discussion with my mother about books, sparked by what I believed to be a terrible review of my favourite book series, His Dark Materials, in the weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. Mum, who was always one to push and encourage me in ambitious directions, said that I should write a letter to the reviewer explaining why her review was flawed. I wrote an incredibly pompous letter to this poor woman - the children's book editor of the Sydney Morning Herald! - and, to her credit and my eternal shame, she wrote back. Instead of telling me I was being ridiculous (which was very kind, given that in the letter I accused her of not having read the book she reviewed), she asked me if I thought I could do a better job, and offered me the opportunity to review The Amber Spyglass along with two other books that had been my favourites of that year. My review was duly published in the Sydney Morning Herald's yearly roundup where multiple reviewers talked about their favourite books of the year, and I was paid normal reviewer rates. Please, please, people trying to get into writing and reviewing - don't do what I did. I found the letter years later when clearing out my room at my mum's house, along with the letter the editor had written back, and it was absolutely mortifying to read. Most editors are not going to behave like her!

That review was a one-off. I didn't really get a permanent newspaper reviewing foothold until, about two years later, I was having another discussion with my mother about books, writing, and ideas, sparked by a documentary on Roald Dahl that was playing on the TV in the background. I was insisting to my mother that J.K. Rowling owed a debt to Dahl, and that the Harry Potter books were part of a clear tradition of British children's literature that also included Charles Dickens. Mum suggested that I pitch this idea to various newspapers, and, as a new Harry Potter book was about to be published, one paper - The Canberra Times - eventually agreed to publish it. What followed was a ten-year career writing reviews for that paper. They were a great paper to write for, because, until 2013, they had the most amazing literary editor, who was incredibly supportive of her writers, gave me pretty much free rein to write about whatever I wanted, interview whoever I wanted and review whatever I liked in however many words I saw fit, and would make space in the paper for any review, interview, or commentary piece, whatever the length. She was a real mentor to me, and really helped me find my voice as a writer and improve my reviewing skills. I also did a stint on the student newspaper at the University of Sydney, wrote a review of the final Harry Potter book for The Age, and blogged for the ABC Radio National Book Show's blog.

All through undergrad, I was determined to become a journalist or newspaper subeditor. All this writing was intended to get me to that point, and I also did a two-week internship at The Canberra Times as a trainee journalist, where I published scintillating stories on crises in rural dentistry, children's soccer tournaments, amateur theatre productions, and so on. And when I graduated from my undergrad degree, I sort of fell into a subediting job at The Canberra Times by accident, mainly because I was panicking about what to do, asked if they needed any subediting help over the summer holidays, and somehow ended up with first a part-time, and then a permanent full-time job.

And I hated it. I have never been as miserable in my life as I was during that one year as a subeditor. catpuccino and angel_cc will know what I mean, because they had the misfortune of living with me. Looking back, it was the perfect storm of awful working environment (tense, like all newspapers, because of the decline of print media and the resulting loss of jobs), too many changes to my life, and the escalation of the depression that had plagued me since I became an adult, rather than journalism itself, and if I had been less depressed, or could have stayed in Sydney, or worked for a different employer, things might've turned out very differently. But as it was, I didn't last long as a full-time journalist, and fled to the welcoming arms of academia, emigrating to the UK, and thence to the life I have now as a librarian. Throughout all this I continued to churn out reviews for The Canberra Times, as I had done while an undergrad, and as a subeditor, and during the year I worked four other jobs. I only stopped reviewing for them in 2013, when Fairfax (the company that owns pretty much every paper in Australia not owned by Rupert Murdoch) had mass layoffs, including my wonderful editor. We reviewers were offered the opportunity to continue writing for the paper, but, with a drastically reduced features section, and features editing being run out of Perth by an editor who seemed unequal to the task ahead, I could see the writing on the wall. I have not been paid for my writing since. I still love to write, and I miss the ease and fluency with which I was able to put together a review, particular during the middle years of my time writing for The Canberra Times, when I frequently produced multiple reviews in a week. I was incredibly privileged - I got paid to interview Garth Nix, Jeanette Winterson, John Marsden, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Sophie Masson, Gillian Rubinstein, Shaun Tan, and others. Many of those authors were childhood heroes of mine, the writers of incredibly formative books for me, and meeting them as an equal to talk to them about their writing was an unbelievable experience. Making a career out of writing and reviewing was never on the cards - it always seemed to me a very stressful and precarious way to earn money, and even though my former editor has often told me she thought it a shame that I didn't make a huge effort to pursue a career as a freelance writer, I prefer the security of a full-time job and regular paychecks. I really admire those who do - it's a difficult road to follow.

I hope that answers your question, promiseoftin!

I still have spots available for more December posts. You can make suggestions for topics here on Dreamwidth or here on Livejournal. Multiple suggestions are very welcome.