It’s Saturday morning. In fact, it’s almost noon, and the kids and I are still clinging to our jammies. We go on “holiday” tomorrow and there’s lots to do to get ready. Linton is busy with laundry and packing and has already been for a 6 k run. And yet, here I sit clinging stubbornly to a cold coffee and a computer screen. Unable to get up and contribute until I get this blog just right…
I’ve recently been reading the early memoirs of Clive James. They came as a recommendation from my uncle Mike. James is an ex-pat Aussie who made a name for himself as a journalist with the BBC among other things though I had never heard of him until my uncle’s suggestion. Not that that means squat. He is often funny, at times irreverent, impressively well read, and has an eye for how people ”work” that is completely spot on. He is also extremely self-deprecating to the point of making his reader loathe versus like him – though the constant humour and moralizing deemed necessary as a result of years of failure and sloth are so pathetic that they must be part of his ultimate plan. It's as if, he might reason, that “when the reader sees or hears nothing but my own ridiculous failings, then maybe they will actually believe me when I really do have something serious or meaningful to impart" - just 'cause I'm so darn likeable. And human, I might add.
I find James rather Canadian in this regard. Not that I think we share all of the same neuroses or create humour and believability in the same way. But I think that we feel the same need to put our audience at ease before we try to tell them what we think they need to know. Perhaps that is something of a quirk that us “folk” from the colonies share. In our respective need to weigh in against the big boys (aka the US/UK) we both feel the need to spend a moment clarifying that we are not actually trying to be like them, because given our size and history and culture, that would be presumptuous, impossible and undesirable. In doing this sort of tacit declaration of our qualification to pontificate invariably reveals both Canadian and Aussie alike as a people who could achieve much if they would just stop worrying about offending the many. And though James’ memoirs recount the troubles and tribulations of finding his way in London, Cambridge and all points in between, it could as easily be the tale of a similar bloke, or rather Canuck from say, Toronto, trolling and tripping up in the hallowed halls of Harvard.
I raise this issue in light of my increasingly addictive need to blog and provide cyberspace with my very own, Canadian-made reflections about Oz. As I craft, edit, and suffer over just how to describe a uniquely Australian moment, I wonder at how my audience of…(none?)...will read the line and read into the experience. Controlling that concern is another very Canadian thought that is prone to ask – why do I think anyone really might care what I think or how I write it? This is where the words and sizeable experience of James come rushing back into play. In the introduction to his memoirs , James spends almost too much time fretting over concerns that to write one’s memoirs at an early age is both egotistical and asinine. On the subject he writes variously:
“Nobody except an egomaniac expects to find his life interesting…It can be safely assumed that any writer who gives you a record of his own life is nuts about himself…Writers would not go on writing unless they thought they were unique. Their humility consists in, and is exhausted by, their recognition that others are more gifted… But to think themselves unique, they need their conceit. If they recognize this fact, they can write memoirs that evince a delightful and seemingly genuine self-deprecation, as they balance their necessary self-esteem with an awareness of their own failings…But it is remarkable how few writers can do even that much, and somehow those who can’t are the very ones most concerned to write memoirs.”
James certainly offers enough honest and embarrassing insight into his own life and all its failings to qualify as someone who is humble and so I believe him when he says that “All I can claim…is a hope – the hope that what has always been a burden to me will lighten the spirits of someone else”. But I also think that as our own Leonard Cohen, himself something of an expatriate, said recently about his own poetry, that we write because “a poet is deeply conflicted, and that it’s in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. That place is the harbour. It doesn’t set the world in order…and it doesn’t really change anything. But it is a kind of harbour; a place of reconciliation…[it’s (the writing)] the kiss of peace.”
I like that. While I fret and fumble with the ongoing need to blog and the equally insistent concern over why I need to blog, the words and insight of Cohen and James console. One reminds me that a writer writes simply because they need to and the other reassures me that the conceit I feel when writing about our lives abroad is a necessary part of the creative process shared by anyone who has ever tried to describe something for another by placing their own words upon a page.
Now that I’ve finally done both today, I’m off to pack a bag.
I’ve recently been reading the early memoirs of Clive James. They came as a recommendation from my uncle Mike. James is an ex-pat Aussie who made a name for himself as a journalist with the BBC among other things though I had never heard of him until my uncle’s suggestion. Not that that means squat. He is often funny, at times irreverent, impressively well read, and has an eye for how people ”work” that is completely spot on. He is also extremely self-deprecating to the point of making his reader loathe versus like him – though the constant humour and moralizing deemed necessary as a result of years of failure and sloth are so pathetic that they must be part of his ultimate plan. It's as if, he might reason, that “when the reader sees or hears nothing but my own ridiculous failings, then maybe they will actually believe me when I really do have something serious or meaningful to impart" - just 'cause I'm so darn likeable. And human, I might add.
I find James rather Canadian in this regard. Not that I think we share all of the same neuroses or create humour and believability in the same way. But I think that we feel the same need to put our audience at ease before we try to tell them what we think they need to know. Perhaps that is something of a quirk that us “folk” from the colonies share. In our respective need to weigh in against the big boys (aka the US/UK) we both feel the need to spend a moment clarifying that we are not actually trying to be like them, because given our size and history and culture, that would be presumptuous, impossible and undesirable. In doing this sort of tacit declaration of our qualification to pontificate invariably reveals both Canadian and Aussie alike as a people who could achieve much if they would just stop worrying about offending the many. And though James’ memoirs recount the troubles and tribulations of finding his way in London, Cambridge and all points in between, it could as easily be the tale of a similar bloke, or rather Canuck from say, Toronto, trolling and tripping up in the hallowed halls of Harvard.
I raise this issue in light of my increasingly addictive need to blog and provide cyberspace with my very own, Canadian-made reflections about Oz. As I craft, edit, and suffer over just how to describe a uniquely Australian moment, I wonder at how my audience of…(none?)...will read the line and read into the experience. Controlling that concern is another very Canadian thought that is prone to ask – why do I think anyone really might care what I think or how I write it? This is where the words and sizeable experience of James come rushing back into play. In the introduction to his memoirs , James spends almost too much time fretting over concerns that to write one’s memoirs at an early age is both egotistical and asinine. On the subject he writes variously:
“Nobody except an egomaniac expects to find his life interesting…It can be safely assumed that any writer who gives you a record of his own life is nuts about himself…Writers would not go on writing unless they thought they were unique. Their humility consists in, and is exhausted by, their recognition that others are more gifted… But to think themselves unique, they need their conceit. If they recognize this fact, they can write memoirs that evince a delightful and seemingly genuine self-deprecation, as they balance their necessary self-esteem with an awareness of their own failings…But it is remarkable how few writers can do even that much, and somehow those who can’t are the very ones most concerned to write memoirs.”
James certainly offers enough honest and embarrassing insight into his own life and all its failings to qualify as someone who is humble and so I believe him when he says that “All I can claim…is a hope – the hope that what has always been a burden to me will lighten the spirits of someone else”. But I also think that as our own Leonard Cohen, himself something of an expatriate, said recently about his own poetry, that we write because “a poet is deeply conflicted, and that it’s in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. That place is the harbour. It doesn’t set the world in order…and it doesn’t really change anything. But it is a kind of harbour; a place of reconciliation…[it’s (the writing)] the kiss of peace.”
I like that. While I fret and fumble with the ongoing need to blog and the equally insistent concern over why I need to blog, the words and insight of Cohen and James console. One reminds me that a writer writes simply because they need to and the other reassures me that the conceit I feel when writing about our lives abroad is a necessary part of the creative process shared by anyone who has ever tried to describe something for another by placing their own words upon a page.
Now that I’ve finally done both today, I’m off to pack a bag.
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