Katherine and Virginia

Sunday 13 may: The Channon Craft Market:

We're there selling pots (you know pots: the things you eat and drink out of). 'Are they keramic?' asks a bearded man from Leichardt, Sydney, using a hard k. Yes, keramic, we assure him. Saw him a few moments later at the bread board stall next door (asking if they were made of wood, perhaps?)

It can be wearying at the market. A bright spot - Trev's Books was there.

Trev has good taste in books, and his stall is like going to a good second hand bookshop. Bought from Trev over the years: Riders in the Chariot, by Patrick White, Novel on Yellow Paper, by Stevie Smith, Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott ...

On Sunday I saw a book by moi there (A Charm of Powerful Trouble). It's funny how distant I feel from it. And how I don't feel like a writer. Oh, I wrote that, I think idly, and pass by.

Bought from Trev for $5 on Sunday: Virginia Woolf :Women and Writing, (The Women's Press 1979), which is a collection of various of her essays and reviews on that subject.  It's nice to dip into Virginia, oblivious of the people wandering into the stall. I take a leaf from our friend Jean, also a potter, and read and ignore them. If they want something they'll let you know.

From a review of The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, 1914-1922, which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on 18 September 1927:


Virginia quotes Katherine:

There is so much to do and I do so little. Life would be almost perfect here if only when I was pretending to work I always was working. Look at the stories that wait and wait just at the threshold ... Next day. Yet take this morning, for instance. I don't want to write anything. It's gray; it's heavy and dull. And short stories seem unreal and not worth doing. I don't want to write. I want to live.

For me, it was like that thing you can do with a favourite book: open a page at random, put your finger on a passage, and it says something relevant to your life.

And yet, as Woolf comments, "No one felt more seriously the importance of writing than she did."

And it's into the attic with you, Franz!

Snail mail: you have to love it. Especially when it brings Franz Kafka

who was 'all alone in the bargain bin of the co-op bookshop at Newcastle Uni' (perhaps too gloomy for them there?)

Anyway, here he is,  dropping in on the likes of Djuana Barnes, Stevie Smith, Gertrude Stein and Eve Langley. I think they'll all rub along all right.

He's a writer I'm unsure I've read. But I'm all for a bit of metamorphosis. And I like it that most of his work was published after he was dead - I'm sure that pleased him.

But I have read Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. That counts, doesn't it?

He bore a quotation: "I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."


As a card-carrying melancholic, I can only agree.

This Compost by Walt Whitman

I'm upset because I can't find my copy of 'Leaves of Grass'. *   It's always in a shelf in the attic, but I can't find it there. I'm worried that in my enthusiasm to reduce the number of my books I may have inadvertently thrown it out. But almost everything is on the net - even someone reciting Walt Whitman's poems. And a new copy of his poetry is available at the click of a mouse - not that I've clicked yet. I may find it in a real bookshop. I'm not particularly attached to my university copy anyway.

 I do like compost. I hate it when I'm somewhere without a compost heap and I have to throw out good vegetable matter into a bin when it could be going into the soil.

 I love our composting toilet, too. When we first got it, I considered making a copy of this Whitman poem to put on the wall.

 To explain my loo: it's called a Clivis Multrum, designed in Sweden, I think, in about the 1930s. When you go to the toilet, you put a handful of wood shavings in afterwards to balance the carbon and nitrogen, in order for good composting to take place. There's a composting chamber where it all takes place, a small electric fan and a vent to extract the smells, and the pedestal looks pretty much like a normal toilet without the U bend or a water holder at the back.

 Simple and efficient! And easy to clean. I just use a squirt of white vinegar over everything about once a week (harsh chemicals will kill the microbes), wipe it down with paper kitchen towels and throw the towels down afterwards. I use a toilet brush if it needs it. It's a waterless system, but you can throw a bucket of water down once in a while to help clean the chute. In fact, sometimes you need to add water if it looks too dry down below - or more shavings if it looks too wet. You shouldn't use it for other compost - don't throw down vegetable scraps. Rake down the poo pile once in a while. Dig it out once a year, put it around trees (not on vegetables).

The resulting compost is rich and odour-free. Good, pure, beautiful organic matter from something we find corrupt and offensive.

 I think Walt would have enjoyed my toilet.

* (added later): Happiness! I have located my Whitman in the Blue Room.

A Day in the Life of a Snarling Woman

There was once this woman. She was in her thirties. She was quite famous, in a way. She hadn't really meant to be famous; it had just happened to her, without very much effort on her part.

So begins Margaret Drabble's story, 'A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman', in the story collection of the same name (2011). The stories were written between 1967 and 2000, and are a representation of her short fiction written over the years (I, like many people assumed she was only a novelist).

You probably know women like Jenny Jamieson, the protagonist of 'Smiling Woman'. Perhaps you are one. A woman with an interesting job, who sits on committees, looks after her family, and has no time to look after herself. She does too much. She's efficient at multi-tasking. A list-maker.

...she read the lists of things to be done that lay on her bedside table. There were several lists, old and new, and it was never safe to read the newest one only. Some of the words on the lists were about shopping: haricot beans, it said at one point; Polish sausage, at another; then vitamin pills; shoelaces for Mark; raw carrots(?); Clive Jenkins; look up octroi. It would be hard to tell whether these notes were a sign of extreme organisation or of panic. She could not tell herself.

She is woman who spends too much energy smiling and being pleasant to people.

Then one night she snaps, and the next morning things do not seem the same. She sees people differently.

There used to be, till yesterday, a little knob that one twisted until these people came into focus as nice, harmless, well meaning people. And it's broken, it won't twist any more.

An 'exceptionally healthy woman', she's been having unexplained bleeds, and that day she finds herself at her hospital appointment. She faces the prospect of death ( but we are told that she didn't, after all,  die from this), and fears for her children's lives without her. But despite this  spiritual crisis she carries on regardless, taking herself dutifully to a school where she is an honoured guest speaker. She gets up and makes a confident, optimistic speech as her boots gradually fill with blood.

For twenty minutes, she spoke and bled.

What Drabble is particularly good at is in observing the ambiguity in people's lives; the accommodations they make in order to make life bearable. And how appropriate is it that Jenny's body is making known its discomfort in a way only a woman's body can, by a disruption of the hormonal system.

This story was written in 1973, in the early days of the women's movement. Even now in my opinion women smile too much, make themselves amenable. It is expected of us. We expect it of ourselves. Would it hurt you just to be nice?

Sometimes instead of being a smiling woman I become a snarling woman - that's a trap as well. Smiling too much or snarling too much - you're letting other people set your agenda.

You need to be a thoughtful woman; an aware woman, a woman who won't be pushed around.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams


I love William Carlos Williams. I think his adage 'no ideas but in things' taught me the most I know about writing. Be specific. Observe. Notice the small things.

I also like plums.

Yesterday I cooked some plums, and had them cold with home-made yoghurt and custard.

They were quite sour, but very delicious.

The best plum jam I've ever made wasn't very pretty, as the pale, mottled skins didn't colour the mix, so the jam was a muddy yellow. But it tasted delicious - which shows that you can't just go by appearances alone.
I've been looking for plums like those ever since, and failed to find them.

Why I like men

I have trouble concentrating on reading novels lately - too much going on in my life and head.

And even music I don't sit down and listen to much any more. But listening in the car is good.

Yesterday when coming back from the coast we put on The National's High Violet, and it was exactly what I needed to listen to. Melodic, unemphatic, almost diffident music at times, very thoughtful and reflective and full of emotion. It's kind of muted, yet strong. And I thought, as the car went up the hill at St Helena, just past Byron Bay, how nice it is that men make music like this. And how much I like (some) men.

Which led me to think of Edith Speers' poem, 'Why I Like Men'.



Why I Like Men

mainly i like men because they're different
they're the opposite sex
no matter how much you pretend they're ordinary
human beings you don't really believe it

they have a whole different language and geography
so they're almost as good
as a trip overseas when life gets dull
and you start looking for a thrill

next i like men because they're all so different
one from the other
and unpredictable so you can never really know
what will happen from
looks alone

like anyone else i have my own taste with regard
to size and shape and colour
but the kind of style that has nothing to do
with money can make you bet
on an outsider

lastly i guess i like men because they are the other
half of the human race
and you've got to start somewhere
learning to live and let live
with strangers

maybe it's because if you can leave your options open
ready to consider love
with such an out and out foreigner
it makes other people seem
so much easier

Edith Speers (b 1949)

From The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, ed Susan Hampton & Kate Llewellyn

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. Elizabeth Bishop