(The following is cross-posted from the Kill Your Darlings blog - KYD asked me to write a post which would speak to my story 'Shock' which appeared in KYD volume II.)

When I wrote the story ‘Shock’, what was foremost in my mind was the idea of vulnerability and exploitation. It’s a story about age exploiting youth, white exploiting black, male exploiting female. It’s a theme that’s been on my mind again recently because of two non-fiction books I’ve just finished reading: Jonathon Safran-Foer’s Eating Animals — an expose of factory farming and a plea for vegetarianism — and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, an account of the extraordinary cupidity and stupidity which led to the Global Financial Crisis.

KFC and GFC. Although ostensibly about two quite different phenomena, I had the feeling I was reading about two ends of the same exploitative economic machine. On the one hand, the giant, toxic cesspits next to factory-style hog-farms in the US that poison rivers and cause health problems for miles around; on the other mortgage-backed bonds comprised of worthless, toxic loans built on the back of the American poor. The millions of dollars creamed off the top of the economy by bankers and traders on Wall Street are in a sense the final, abstracted product of the same exploitative system that, at its other end, produces cesspits so poisonous that to fall into one is to die.

Both books reminded me that we cannot really escape the systems we inhabit. The interchangeability of money means that, in a sense, exploitative economic practices such as factory farming, clear-felling and greed-driven money markets taint every dollar in the economy - we are always ‘buying in’ to the ethics of the system as a whole.

In ‘Shock’, Smithy - a white male approaching middle age - exploits and deceives a young African American girl who mistakes him for her internet date. It’s the type of interpersonal exploitation that occurs all the time, even if the premise of the story exaggerates the element of deception often involved in sexual seduction. There are internet sites that elaborate complex psychological strategies for the seduction of young women, and to engage in such behaviour (to be a ‘player’) seems to have at least as much dubious macho kudos about it as ethical stigma. And there can be no doubt that much of the widely viewed and circulated pornography on the internet is based on an exploitation that as viewers we can hardly be unaware of, yet choose to overlook.

It’s a scary thing, but the more I look for it, the more exploitation I find. It has become normalised in so many areas. But what drives it? In ‘Shock’, Smithy is driven by a ravenous emotional hunger that turns him into an opportunistic sexual predator. It’s no doubt a gross simplification, but I wonder if such hunger isn’t the driver behind most exploitation: this sense of lack and emptiness, a black hole of desire that both feeds and is fed by the messages we tell ourselves and are told by advertisers and the media.

About a quarter of the way through, I wanted to stop reading Eating Animals. Not because the descriptions of horrific animal suffering disturbed me (though they did), but because I recognised that the ethical argument against meat was irresistible, and it wasn’t a message I wanted to hear. It’s one thing to enjoy the pleasure of moral outrage, another to give up roast chicken forever!

And yet, as of two weeks ago, I’m a reluctant vegetarian. Thanks a lot Jonathon Safran-Foer!

On loving German... and two more translations

There's a scene in '30 Rock' in which Liz is asked by Jack if she speaks German, and Liz replies in German, 'Yes, I think it's the most beautiful language in the world.' Then Jack asks her a question and she replies with a preposterously long outburst of German-sounding syllables, for which the subtitled translation is 'Yeah'. Uh huh: German is horribly ugly and has absurdly long words. That's the joke of course. Here's another: Italian is sung, French is spoken, English is spat, German is vomited. (I can't remember where I heard that one). It's a truism that German is ugly, guttural and harsh. And it can be. It's fortunate for film-makers that the Nazis were German and not, say, French, because those Nazi officers just wouldn't sound right barking out their orders in a romance language. But German's supposedly guttural sound is overstated. The most guttural sound in German is the ch in 'Acht', which is actually a much softer sound than the glottal consonants that one finds for instance in Arabic.

In fact I suspect German's reputation for ugliness is a hangover from World War II: Much of the world was exposed to the sound of German by the hate speeches of Hitler and Goebbels. The ugly, hateful sentiments of these tirades could have made any language sound hideous. Mussolini's speeches in Italian don't sound like a Rossini opera either: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr2swTOI49Q). But it can't be denied that German was a particularly well adapted linguistic vehicle for fascist ideology. There is a line in one of Goebbels' speeches that sticks in my mind particularly as an example of German at its ugliest, when uttered with Goebbel's shrill viciousness: "Wir sind nicht hier, um Kompromisse zu machen, sondern um zu zerstören und vernichten." We are not here to make compromises, but to destroy and annihilate.

And yet I love German and flinched a little at the 30 Rock gibe, because this preconception about German's ugliness actually closes people to the beauty in the language. Good example: the German poetry recited in the 2006 German film 'Das Leben der Anderen' (The Lives of Others). The film also includes a beautiful song version of the Borchert poem 'Versuch Es' ('Try It') which you can listen to here. I'm sure every language has its beauty and I dare say if I'd learned, say, Spanish at school instead of German, I'd probably love that language. But there's something about the rich complexity of German that I just find incredibly satisfying to speak. It's as if the rush of plosives and sibilants satisfies a sort of thirst in me. I am aware of the weirdness of how that probably sounds to someone who hasn't been possessed by a foreign language in that way. Perhaps the fact that German remains a second language - always that slight gap removed - allows me to hear it with a kind of detachment that my complete oneness with English does not permit for my native tongue. I can hear German both as pure 'speech-music', and understand its meaning.

This musical appreciation has its payoff in terms of my facility with the language. Germans often mistake me for a native speaker at first. That is purely to do with vocal mimicry (though my grammar is good) - if I talk for long enough the little idiomatic lapses and vocabulary stutters will eventually expose me. I've only spent six weeks in Germany and that was many years ago, so I haven't experienced the immersion required for complete mastery.

There seems to be a familial thing about this passion of mine: my grandfather Brinley Newton-John was a Welshman with an exceptional facility with German. He was Professor of German at Melbourne University and his German was so good he was used by British Intelligence to interrogate German officers during the war. His technique: to take them out to dinner and loosen their tongues with wine. They would mistake him for a German and soon enough spill the desired information.

Enough on me and my German. Here are two of my favourites from among the poems by Martin Auer I've recently translated. (Auer has translated these two poems into English himself, and you can find his (somewhat different) versions at martinauer.net.)

Tommy

I’m going to have a child, says Tommy
Boys don’t have children, says Annalise
Well I am!

Tommy’s belly gets bigger
What is your child doing? says Annalise
It is growing and getting bigger, says Tommy, I can already hear it talking
Children don’t talk in your tummy! says Annalise
Well mine does!

Why am I alone? says the child in Tommy’s belly
You’re with me, says Tommy

There are houses, says Tommy, and gardens and fences
and there’s the sky
I know, says the child

Do you want to be born? Tommy asks the child
What will happen then? says the child
Everything that is always happening, says Tommy
I want to try it!
But don’t get a fright! says Tommy

Where has your child gone? asks Annalise
It has run off into the world, says Tommy
Little children don’t run off into the world!
Well mine did!

Tommy dreams of a sea that is still dark in the morning
There is the wind, says Tommy, and long grey clouds that are fast
I know, says the child
The child runs to the sea
In the morning he plays alone in the sand
Play with me, says the child to the sea, and the sea plays with him

I died, says the child
I’ve come back into your belly
There are ships, says Tommy, and big machines
I know, says the child

Children don’t come back into your tummy! says Annalise
Well mine did!

I’m a mermaid, she says

I’m a mermaid, she says,
I come through the water mains.
My family lived in the south
before they moved to this town.
They live in a lift
over on second street
and when they eat breakfast
the dentist from the twelfth floor
always dips his coat in their coffee.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

And in the park it’s so bright today,
the air is like silver.
And baby gets an ice-cream
and has a choking fit.
And a little flying camera
takes photos of us with pink bows,
and the man selling pretzels
goes broke before our eyes.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

Well aren’t these glorious times, she says,
there are free vouchers for everything.
And yesterday I had myself insured
against melancholia and fear of death.
And now everyone has a phone in their car,
a credit card and an insurance number.
And even the police
wear valentines in their hair.

And she says: O man o man o man,
O man, how I love you!

I’m a mermaid, she says,
I can never drown.
But whenever I see goldfish
I feel terribly sick.
And maybe tomorrow peace will break out,
then we’ll go paint the town red.
And maybe there won’t be peace,
But we’ll soon see.

Another Martin Auer poem translated from the German

On the day we go over the border

On the day we go over the border,
can you see the city already, over the river?
On the day we go over the border
can you see it?

We will find a boat
tied up, hidden in the bushes.
We will throw a rope with a hook on it.
We will crawl on our bellies in the mud,
dig a tunnel under the river,
and the river will rain down on us,
heavy drops from the dark stone.
We will go over the border.

On the day we go over the border,
can you see the fields already, over the river?
On the day we go over the border
can you see them?

We will hold on under a train,
balance on high voltage wires
at daybreak, high over the guards.
We will leap over the rapids
and if they shoot at us
we will turn into birds
and fly away, over the border
into the other country
into the other time
on the other side
over there
over the river.

Poetry translations

Here are my first translations of some of Martin Auer's poems. More to follow soon. A couple of links for German speakers:

http://www.myspace.com/Martinauer

http://www.martinauer.net/

And completely without a word

And completely: without a word, you know?
As if you’d suddenly been blinded and just hadn’t noticed it
because you were still asleep.
Or drowned all of a sudden in your own dress
Yes: as if you had a dress made of water
and your head was stuck inside it, you know?
you couldn’t get your eyes over the collar.
Or as if — but that’s going too far, nobody would understand —
as if a rose made of air was growing on you
somewhere on your shoulder, but nobody knew,
only your jacket would never sit quite right
because of the rose.
Or as if — listen! — as if you’d already said every word
and there weren’t any more left, you know?
no more words you could say
and the whole dictionary
was empty.

Quiet waters sing

Quiet waters sing,
sing far away, behind the clatter,
behind the noise and the chatter,
quiet waters sing.

Quiet waters sing,
far away behind crying and moaning,
audible still through wailing and groaning,
quiet waters sing.

Quiet waters sing,
behind the laughter and the flurry,
far away, through cold, through death and hurry,
you hear quiet waters.

Get ready for some contemporary Austrian poetry

For some time I've been listening to "Nachttaxi", the German-language podcast of Austrian author and poet Martin Auer. Sadly, the author has been experiencing some health problems which have resulted in the suspension of the podcast for some time. However, I've long been impressed with Auer's voice, with its combination of honesty, world-weariness, and compassion. Auer spent six months working as a driver for call girls in his home city of Vienna and wrote a book about it, "Hurentaxi: Aus dem Leben der Callgirls" that Auer serialised on his literary podcast.

The book offers a deeply moving glimpse into the lives of these disadvantaged young women, largely from Eastern Europe, who come to work as prostitutes in Austria, often for financial reasons - they can make ten times the money they'd earn as waitresses or nannies, and infinitely more than they could earn at home. Auer's reportage is unflinching and unsentimental, revealing the most confronting details without ever devolving into any kind of salaciousness. It documents without judging or theorising, allowing his depictions of these girls' circumstances - enlivened in the podcast by Auer's pitch-perfect impersonations - to speak for themselves. At the same time, the author doesn't try to paint himself out of the picture. He is not afraid to reveal himself and his own weaknesses and conflicts. Auer's compassion for his subjects is evident throughout, and the portrait of the man is as interesting in its way as the picture of Austrian prostitution.

Auer has also written some very fine poetry, which I've long wanted to have a stab at translating, so I could share it with others (alas, I have few German-speaking friends!). I wrote to Martin Auer and he has agreed to allow me to publish some of my translations of his poems on this blog, a prospect I'm quite excited about. I've finished the translations and sent them to the author, whose English is good, for approval before posting. So hopefully within the next few days I'll be able to share with you some of my favourite works of his: little gems that I think work very well in English, though they'll never be quite the same as they are when performed by Auer himself, in his gravelly, soulful German.

If you do happen to speak German, check out his website at www.martinauer.net.

More ideas about ideas...

I was just interviewed by Alec Patric on Verity La on the subject of the ideas that fiction springs from. You can read the interview here. I've had a few follow-up thoughts to that discussion which I thought I'd record here. What sparked this was the experience I had this morning of successfully bringing a song back from inside a dream, something I've never achieved before. I've actually quite often had the experience of hearing music in a dream and desperately wanting to be able to record it - but of course it evaporates like so much mist as soon as I wake up. This time I was actually able to hold onto the tune and the words - even if the words were a little strange upon waking. It certainly aint 'Yesterday', which was also born in the dreamworld, but it still seemed pretty good when I was singing it in the shower... Unlike dream jokes which are always so 'hilarious' at the time... Well, it will be interesting to see what I can make of it with my guitar.

Anyway, the upshot of this was that it caused me to reflect upon the source of ideas again, and the mysterious way they seem to come from both within and beyond us. The power of this song, regardless of whether or not it turns out to be any 'good' in a musical or poetic sense, was that it came straight out of my innermost being in response to certain things in my life I've been grappling with. It was in fact the answer to these questions, a sort of spontaneous soul-song that expressed the powers I needed to call forth in myself in order to overcome those particular struggles. Not an intellectual insight such as we might get out of therapy, but a sort of home-brewed musical-rhythmic-poetic medicine.

When something like that song comes in a dream, the 'otherness' of the creative source is very apparent. I didn't sit down and try to write a song, I just found my dream-self singing it, with intense emotion. The surrounding dream was permeated with a sense of beauty and mystery - that strange aura that Jung called the 'numinous'. I remember seeing white birds flying at an immense altitude, so high I at first mistook them for satellites or shooting stars against the backdrop of the night sky. This sight filled me with awe and joy. It's the sort of compelling vision we try to capture in poetry or fiction, even though our words always fall short.

The vision seems to come from beyond us, and we have the same sense when we are writing with inspiration, "in the zone". Words that give you chills as they come off your hands. But is it really beyond us? Only if we think of ourselves as that part of us that is made of the prosaic stuff of everyday life: our tired old thoughts and motivations and habits, everything circumscribed by the known. But take a look at any child and it is apparent that in our essential being we are made of something far more illustrious than that. We do get so encrusted with the detritus of accumulated life that we lose touch with the living substance that we are really made of. I'm thinking of Joni Mitchell and Shakespeare: we are stardust, we are such stuff as dreams... etc. We lose touch with it, but it is there under the surface, like a subterranean river, like lava beneath the crust: the inner process of our life, always flowing forward.

That is my argument against the notion of the short story writer "living off his principal", this scarcity idea. The literary agent who put forward this theory may well have been a lover of literature, but he was not a writer, he was not a creator. Under the surface there is always the stream of Images. And nor is it hard to find, not really. It's there like a silver vein running through that story or poem or song you're working on, that little glint of the numinous woven into the weft of the thing. You can always tug that thread, follow that vein down.

The thing is it takes courage to go there, because this liquid stuff is also destabilising, transformative, demanding. It undermines our comfortable lives, asks for more, reflects truths we'd rather not see. This is where our wounds and secrets and fears lie. It has real significance and moral weight. That's why we fear it and suppress it even while we pretend to cultivate our creativity as if it were a tame thing. Beware: here be sea monsters! But our folk tales tell us that where the monster is, there also is the treasure.

I recently finished Emmett Stinson's "Known Unknowns" - the latest in Affirm Press' Long Story Shorts series. I enjoyed the book greatly. Emmett writes like a writer, and that is no mere tautology. He's a writer who makes you trust him to the point that when he does indulge in some wild experimental excursion , you're willing to follow along, assured that he is still in control, even if on occasion you might feel a little lost! Emmett's a smart guy and his fiction reads that way: it's clever and challenging and absolutely contemporary in its sensibilities. For me the combination of street-wise edge (shades of Thomas Pynchon's 'V') with elegant, razor-sharp prose is very appealing. I think my favourite story was "The Sound of the Fury". It's worth the proverbial price of admission for the title (understood in context) and the last line alone.

My only gripe with the collection are the few moments when the heavy fingerprints of academia smudge the otherwise pristine prose. Academia is so often about proving you're clever enough to master the argot, and there were just a few moments in this collection where I felt the author was trying to impress me with his cleverness. In the Age Short Story Competition winning "All Fathers The Father", for example, we get a brief serve of Lacan's theory on the role of the father, followed up by the ironical observation that it's all "a load of horseshit". So why bring it up? To dazzle the reader with ideas that the author's dismissal seems to imply he is too clever for? Don't get me wrong, I loved this story in so many ways, but I remain unconvinced that the short story is the right forum for excursions into academic philosophy. By all means, provoke thought, but let's leave Lacan in the Baillieu, please.

Nevertheless, I strongly recommend you go buy the book. It's not always easy, but it is funny, it is surprising, it is intelligent and you'll definitely know you've just read the work of a real writer. Can't wait for Emmett's novel. I just hope he doesn't try too hard.

On my own writing front, jazz-focussed literary journal Extempore will be publishing my story 'The Thief', the tale of a jazz guitarist in the sixties running from commitment into a desolate future. The story was an example of how long it can take to shape a story. I actually submitted the story that 'The Thief' was based on to Extempore's short story competition in 2008, where it got precisely nowhere. I knew it wasn't right, and I think I must have written six different incarnations of the same story before finally nailing down this one. It was a case of fiction winning over over reality. The story started as a sort of melancholy ode to my old jazz guitar teacher Peter Roberts, who died of a stroke probably ten years ago. It ended up as a purely imaginative riff based on something he said to me once about hearing Procul Harem's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" for the first time. That happens to me increasingly these days: a root in the solid earth of autobiography puts forth an entirely fabulous tree.