Visual Diary #36
Damp days, Badlands, Persimmons & West Gippsland Joy
Hi Reader.
Happy Winter Solstice!
On this long night I have not much to report. I’m on term break and working on the novel-in-progress. I’m concentrating on getting the words down, and trying not to worry about if they are the wrong words. I think writing fiction used to be easier, but it might also be that the conditions were easier. Luckily there have been enough moments of flow and surprise to remind me that it’s always like this, and if I just keep going, little by little, one day it will be done. It’s been twenty years since my first book and nearly ten years since my last (and I didn’t even write that by myself.) How to explain for this long valley? I guess there was the PhD, and there was Covid, and the mid. I wrote a couple of books that didn’t work and I couldn’t wrangle them. Characters sitting beside broken-into swimming pools wearing face-masks hoping I might write them a reason to be. Articles were easier (good for the bills but not much afterlife.) Novel-writing really is, like someone (Janice Galloway?) said, akin to having a chronic illness. After a while no one wants to ask you how it’s going; they can tell you’re probably all at sea with no land in sight.
Sigh. Onward!
Here are this week’s pictures.
This is my beautiful laundrette where I have been putting in drying time because there isn’t enough sun lately and I am tired of looking for places to drape damp black t-shirts. There is something lovely about the Laundrette. I never want to multi-task there, drying my clothes ($4 for 24 minutes) becomes a way of taking time out of the day. I do bring a book. But usually I just sit and listen to the machines.
This is Holly (Sissy Spacek) experimenting with eyeliner in Terrence Malick’s black and mythic Badlands. Inspired by real life teenage killers Charles Starkweather and his underage, underthrall girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate (still alive! 82!) the film is driven by Sissy’s poetic and flat-drawled narration.
In this interview with Barry Gifford he talks about a moment in the film where Sissy actions her loneliness by drawing signals on the roof of her mouth, something I had forgotten about. Did Malick make this up? What a thing. Here is the dialogue:
“He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I'd stopped even paying attention to him. Instead I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of mouth where nobody could read them.”
Badlands is peak guy/girl/gun film - some of these movies are great, some are abysmal but none match its beauty. Time for a rewatch. Also - the soundtrack is swoony. Points for Mickey and Sylvia (better there than in Dirty Dancing, and Carl Orff’s sublime Gassenhauer from Schulwerk (Music for Children). Later for True Romance Tarentino had Hans Zimmer do something Schulwerky, and I’m surprised no one’s used it on an ad for some arsehole car yet. But everything gets done eventually.
This is a Japanese persimmon tree. Today I went on a tour of a permaculture garden ‘The Plummery’ by Kat Lavers. It is small but mighty, with bounteous fruit and veg all year around. Kat talked pests and predators, ‘chocolate cake’ soil, grey water, edible weeds, rondelle planting and the care of quails. I was very grateful for her time, knowledge and grape juice.
And earlier in the week I was op-shopping in West Gippsland. I bought this vase, which is matt black and feels lovely, currently holding baby gums from my friend’s property. She lives high on a hill; she said the altitude makes for crazy dreams. In one of mine I was in a house that kept expanding into new room upon new room - they kept coming - some shaped like oceanic glass cabins, some that rolled as I traversed them like those old hazardous barrels they used to have at kids playgrounds. It was a great dream, very colourful and when I woke up I had a feeling of boundless optimism.