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.

South America here I come!

So I am off to travel the world in a great story hunt! Some time possibly around September I'm heading off the South America and then maybe Germany to go chasing stories. I'll be armed with my camera and my laptop and I will blog my way through the experience so you'll be able to follow my progress right here. I've always said I'd go to South America and I figure now is as good a time as any. I've played the South American classical guitar for years and I'd love to put a landscape to some of those old favourite pieces - like Antonio Lauro's Venezuelan waltzes. I'm also a big fan of Marquez, Neruda and Louis de Bernieres' South American trilogy. Dare I say I'm partial to a little magical realism? So long as it's not reduced to the formulaic and trite.

Germany is more of a linguistic journey. I love the language. Those who think it an ugly language should listen to Rilke - or to some of the poetry you hear in "The Lives of Others". It can be spiky and harsh, but listen to a pretty German girl speaking it and I guarantee you'll get a different perspective on it! Or maybe that's just me... Anyway, I've spent so long reading German and listening to it (thank you, inventor of the podcast!) that I want to finally get the chance to immerse myself in it. I'll be story-chasing there too, maybe while I couch-surf around Berlin.

On another note, my friend Jon Bauer and I may have the opportunity to start a creative writing school next year. We're still in early negotiations stage, so I won't say too much more. But as a result I have been reading a lot of creative writing text books in order to understand how others teach it, to maybe pick out the ideas and approaches that suit my style an resonate with me. Has anyone read "Living the Writer's Life?" (Eric Maisel) Now there's a dose of gloom to counter any cheerful optimism which "The Artist's Way" may have left you with. Apparently writing is a thankless, penniless, excruciatingly difficult activity which only the insane and the daemon-possessed would consider dedicating themselves to seriously. The proof being that writers are in fact a bunch of manic depressives (or just plain depressives, without the upside) who commit suicide with disturbing frequency. Nah man, I'm going to be sticking with nice, comforting Julia Cameron with her artist's dates and her warming entreaties to leap into the void and fly, fly, fly!!!

My Collection

Having all but abandoned my blog, I'm back again with all good intentions to treat it better in future. The good news is, there may be a possibility of my short stories getting published early next year as a collection. To reach the stipulated word count I had to produce two more stories, which has been an interesting exercise - I've never had to write to deadline before, and it has exposed some home truths: namely that what I've taken for lack of inspiration/writer's block/call-it-what-you-will is in fact more a lack of determination. I'd promised the publisher a story by the 26th of last month, and having got what felt like two thirds of the way through, I hit the famous block. I didn't know how to finish it! I tried this, I tried that. Nothing felt right. Three days I banged my head against the monitor, or cleaned the house within an inch of its life, or had a beer, deciding I'd done enough (read: nothing) for the day. That would normally be the point where I'd go: OK, that's enough, story hasn't worked. But I didn't have that luxury. I'd promised my publisher a story, and my book was depending on it. Nothing like panic as a motivator. So I pushed on through. Rewrote the ending several times. Rewrote again. Cut back from 5500 to about 4000 words. The result? A pretty tight, funny story. Certainly a worthy member of the collection, and a nice contrast stylistically with some of my more sombre and poetically inclined works. What do I learn from this? That "I can't" is just another excuse for avoiding the hard work that is making fiction. Forget inspiration: hack that story out of the recalcitrant rock! Yeah, I know I am totally contradicting my own remarks of a while back about "pushing the river". I'm allowed to change my mind, right?

In other news, my recent story "Shock" will appear in the next edition of "Kill Your Darlings". I posted a few paragraphs from an earlier draft of that story in my last post. That passage has been changed and improved since then.

My writing group (which I still think of as 'the Almaniacs' in my head, since it was originally formed of Sleepers Almanac contributors, though I don't think anyone else remembers the suggested moniker) is continuing to go great guns. We have two new members, having recently lost a couple of old stalwarts. Not sure if I mentioned that four of us are now in the fortunate position of having books coming out this year. Louise Swinn of Sleepers fame has suggested we be the subject of one of the Sleepers salons later this year, which would be great. I've written before about Jon Bauer's book "Rocks in the Belly". It's Scribe's lead title this year and I expect destined to make something of a splash. I hope so, since it really deserves it. Jessica Au's book "Cargo" (tentative title), her short, Wintonesque coming-of-age-in-a -seaside-town story doesn't have a strict publication date at this stage as far as I know, but will also be worth reading, if just for its lovely, graceful prose. Then there's Dan Ducrou's YA title "The Byron Journals", coming out through Text, which I've had less opportunity to sample, but which was short-listed for a Vic Premier's Award in 2008, I believe.

Not really a blogger

So my last post turns out to have been three months ago. Not much of a blog is it? I'm not sure which is cause and which is effect: the pathetic lack of readership, or the pathetic lack of posts. Well, just to keep you all up-to-date, oh great and mighty readership of mine, I am aiming to write 6000 words by February in order to make a submission to publish a collection of my short stories next year. This post is my attempt to procrastinate on making a start...

I had the horrible experience of being forced to jerk an editor around last week. Island Magazine accepted my story "Different Kinds of Heaven" for publication literally the day I was composing a letter to them to withdraw it from consideration. Unfortunately, much as I would have loved to have a story with them, if I let them to publish it, my required word target would have gone from 6000 to 14000 by February, and I doubt I could manage that. Needless to say they weren't entirely thrilled with me, and I can't say I blame them. In this case, inconveniencing an editor was the lesser of two evils.

Just to prove I'm still writing, here's an excerpt from my latest story "Shock", which I'm including in the unpublished portion of my submission:

And Smithy is hungry. Smithy is ravenous. Because two years ago—can it really be two years?—his wife left him, and he hasn’t had a woman since. Not a kiss even, barely a glance, when once they couldn’t get enough of him. What? Does his loneliness stink? Melissa took his best years, sucked the juice, the marrow out of his life and then left him while he was away on a day-trip to the Gold Coast for business. He came back and the house was a shell, doors banging open, that was how fast she’d run, and even the furniture gone. Nothing, just his clothes on the rack, the CDs of his she’d hated. Kids’ rooms empty. In the kitchen on the floor he found a butter knife with a bent-tipped blade that she must have dropped when she was packing, in the bedroom a bra, and in one room the wooden bee on a string that Ryan used to drag about when he was two. With the wings that spun and went clacketty clack.

Those three things she left by mistake haunted him. In the end he was convinced there was no mistake after all. He was sure she planned each one as carefully as the escape itself. Either she plotted it or God did, not that he believed in God. The bee, that was for the kids of course. The cruellest sting. And what could you do about it? Throw it out? How could you? Smash it? No, you sat on the floor and you drank and you pulled the string, over and over, and the wings turned and went clacketty clack. Then the bra. Well figure that one out, Einstein. No prizes. It smelled clean, like a bed freshly made before you roll in it. No trace of her scent on it, just the empty cups, the what-do-you-call, negative space.

And then the knife. That was a good one. That was the punch line. Stick it in and twist. He’d hold it in the venetian striped streetlight shine in the long pissed hours, turning the blade to catch the flash of neon strip and laugh. Thumb the blunt serration where the tip bent from someone’s long-ago effort to prise open a jar of pickles and think, I gotta hand it to you. God damn butter knife. She might have left something sharper.

His brother sometimes visited, Jack the do-gooder psychologist who thought you could make everything better by talking about it. He bought Smithy some chairs, and cutlery, which he threw out, because what Jack didn’t understand was that he wanted it like this. To live in an empty shell was absolutely fucking apt and he didn’t want any stuff around to give the lie to his desolation. ‘It rhymes, geddit?’ he yelled drunkenly at Jack. ‘Inside and out!’ Was this a nervous breakdown? Jack said there was no such thing—a meaningless lay term he said—but he might meet the criteria for a major depressive episode. ‘Meet the criteria’: that was how he put it, like it was something he’d applied for at Centrelink.

Two years later he was working again, back in a retail salesroom selling cameras, and he’d allowed himself furniture again, moved out of the old house into a one bedroom shoebox. He’d gone back to the gym, even signed up on an internet dating site, but whatever it was he stank of, they seemed to smell it via email too. He couldn’t bear the way they all stopped replying to him. He tried a few times, but the only women who showed any interest in him were old and used up, and had their own stink of desperation. The worst time was three a.m., when the waters receded from the reefs of his pain—rage and despair and hunger standing out bare and jagged and completely unchanged from the last time. The immutable bedrock of his life.

Ok, back to work now. I'm hoping to knock over those 6000 words in the one story...

Comrade Vasilii Goes to War

(This story was published in Wet Ink in 2008)

Strike a match out here at night and it’s the only light in a hundred miles at least. That’s if you don’t count the stars, which is a good idea, because if you did, your head would start to spin before you got to ten. You’d drown in stars out here if you were tall enough. Our generator died four months ago and we’ve been without lights or heating ever since. We thank God it’s summer and pray that Captain Sviatoslavich comes good on his promise to send out a repairman before the snow starts to fall. But frankly we don’t hold out much hope. We never believe a word he tells us.

There’s about fifty metres between our outpost and theirs, just a bare patch of dust. No barbed wire or boom gates mark the border. To tell the truth, we’ve no idea where it is. Sometimes, when we’re particularly bored, we play this stupid game, drawing a line through the dust with our rifle butts and taunting each other – step over that line, Comrade, and you’re a dead man! This here is Uzekhstan! And Vasilii – he’s the one that started this shit – he’ll step right over and draw another line ten metres further back and declare that that is the true border, and that we are in fact invaders on the sovereign territory of Ozakhstan! And so it goes, until we get bored with it all and decide to go inside and get pissed on Vasilii’s vodka.

To avoid confusion, I should point out that I, too, am Vasilii. Well, it’s a common name. Not that he is anything like me. He is intelligent, handsome and tall and reads Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He even reads some English writer called Shakespeare. When he’s drunk enough he stands in front of the window looking as tall and desperate as Rasputin and booms out sad English words that make all our hairs stand up, even though we don’t understand a bit of it. I, on the other hand, am stupid, ugly and short, and the only things I read are letters from Raisa, the girl who for reasons I cannot justify, loves me. I’ve been reading the same letters for months, because that’s how often the mail truck bothers to come by.

Vlad isn’t a much better specimen. He’s fat as a pig and has flat feet which stink, so I never let him take his boots off, even at night. Every now and then I tell him to wash them, and then I cross the border to play poker with Vasilii and Anton so I don’t have to be there when he does. Actually I shouldn’t order poor Vlad around like that. Technically he’s my superior officer, but even though I am stupid, he is really stupider. Vlad has no Raisa, or any other girl. He reads letters from his Mama and cries. He is such a baby.

We got sent out here to the border because we were the very worst soldiers in the academy. We weren’t cut out to be soldiers, but everyone has to be a soldier in Uzekhstan. Vlad should have been a pig farmer or a panel beater. As for me, I wouldn’t have minded working in a bar selling beer to western girls in tank tops and short denim skirts who want to ficky-fick with an Uzekhstani boy. Sorry Raisa! I am having dirty thoughts again. It’s this cold, lonely steppe. After a while it starts to turn a man into a wolf.

Captain Sviatoslavich told us the situation was this: we don’t want their bastards coming over here, and your job is to stop them if they try. This was stupid. Ozakhstan is exactly the same as Uzekhstan. Everybody knows this. Escaping from one to the other is like slapping your left cheek because you’re tired of slapping your right. But because we built a border post, they had to build one too. To stop our bastards going over there. Which is Vasilii and Anton’s job.

I don’t know about Anton, but I don’t think they sent Vasilii out here for being a bad soldier. It is obvious to everyone he should probably be a general and lead the whole Ozakhstan army. I think he was sent here for being overheard calling the Ozakhstan president a vodka-pickled, nepotistic, barnyard-animal-fucking, corrupt licker of fat western arses. When a nice secret policeman visited him to ask him about this indiscretion, Vasilii swore he was referring to the president of Uzekhstan (which is incidentally quite plausible) but a week later they sent him here anyway.

When they first arrived, we were such prigs. Refusing to say good morning when we happened to be out having a piss at the same time, spitting at the Ozakhstan flag and all that nonsense. But Vasilii wore us down with his charm and his stupid pranks. He was forever wandering around in the abandoned space between the outposts smoking a cigarette and gazing into the sky like he was working out some problem of astronomical measurement. It drove me crazy that he acted like there was no border there at all, so one day I went out and drew a line in the dirt and told him never to cross it. You can guess what he did. It made me laugh, but I was too angry to show it so I turned my back on him. And then I heard his voice purring right behind my shoulder. Are you laughing comrade? That was how he won.

Sometimes I think he only did it to supplement his miserable wages by luring us into those dreadful all-night poker games. I don’t know how he does it, but it always goes the same. Every time I pick up my cards and there’s a sweet row of queens or something, he folds. In the end you get so sick of it you bluff him, and he pushes you all the way over the edge and rakes in the pot with a pair of tens or something. Vlad gets so furious his face goes purple and he throws his cards and storms out. Then five minutes later, he’ll stick his big sheepish head back in and beg to be let into the game again. Vasilii is always willing to forgive him.

This morning our radio suddenly blared. It was Captain Sviatoslavich. The crisis has escalated! he shouted at us.

What crisis would that be, Captain Shitoslavich? I asked, winking at Vlad.

The political crisis, you idiot! screamed the captain. We are at war with Ozakhstan!

Vlad and I looked at one another, our mouths gaping dumbly. You must act swiftly to engage the enemy!

I breathed a sigh of relief. We were off the hook. I’d thought for a moment we were getting a recall. But for once Vlad was actually smarter than me. What do you mean by ‘engage the enemy’, sir? he asked.

What do you think I mean, you lard-arsed dolt? Shoot them! Now! Over and out.

Then I understood, and the dawning realisation of our situation hit me like a fist to the guts. I went to the window and looked out over the dusty no-man’s-land of the border. I could see Vasilii and Anton playing cards as usual. Obviously they didn’t know we were at war yet, but it would only be a matter of time. We had to act swiftly.

I threw Vlad his gun, which he held at arm’s length like it was a poisonous snake. I could see he was about to cry so I knew I had to take control. Why they promoted him above me I will never understand. We’re not going to shoot them alright? I said. We’re just going to take them prisoner. I looked him in the eye. Okay? He nodded, wide-eyed like a child.

It was only fifty metres from one door to the other, but that lugubrious march seemed longer than any of the exhausting forced marches from our academy days.

When we stepped into the room, Vasilii looked up from his card game and gave me his easy handsome grin. So Vasilii, have you come to shoot me now? he asked, raising an eyebrow.

In such stupid situations as this, it is impossible to be a real human being, so you read from a script, like a moron robot.

Comrade Vasilii, I am taking you prisoner of the state of Uzekhstan, I said, pointing the barrel at his chest. Vasilii’s smile stayed on his face, but I saw his eyes change as the reality of the situation dawned on him. He looked cool as my grandmother’s cucumbers but a drop of sweat ran down his brow and into one of his eyes.

He stood up slowly and as I stood there shaking, he unholstered his pistol and pointed it straight at my heart.

Comrade Vasilii, he said, I am taking you prisoner of the state of Ozakhstan. I don’t know if he thought this was funny. He might have been smiling about anything.

Anton was now pointing his gun at Vlad, and Vlad was pointing his gun at Anton.

Things were getting over my head, so I turned to my superior officer. What do we do now? I asked.