'My Dog Gave Me the Clap' (No not me, it's ... oh don't worry about it)

Personally I feel sorry for the dog. Maybe dogs don’t care about these things but if someone gave me the clap, I reckon they’d be mortified if I wrote a book about it. Thankfully, Adam Morris deals with Feathers the dog and his main character Saul’s ‘green wang’ problem early on in this hilarious book. Feathers exits stage left at the end of Chapter One and the reader can breathe, smile with relief and move on to Saul’s philosophising about how easy it would be to get laid if he were gay, his negative thoughts about his negative thoughts diary and a series of rather nasty ‘incidents’ involving Akubra hats, shotguns, Russian dancing and a chookhouse.

Saul’s list of desirables is a job, a girlfriend, a car and somewhere to live other than his mate Ralph’s chookhouse.  He had a good job relief teaching once, until a regrettable Hunter S Thompson moment. Thank goodness the students had left or he might have been arrested and sacked. For his next job interview he wrote eight pages of performance criteria on “... learning grids, appropriateness, guidelines, equivalent experiences, team leaders.

Where had all the men gone?”

His last girlfriend was three years ago. Now Saul has difficulties hiding his erection in the welfare office queue. He's getting flashbacks of the porn he watched the night before and pondering on the sex lives of the oddly unattractive couple ahead of him. “Maybe one of them had persuaded the other to do something regrettable in the bedroom last night, maybe there was an embarrassment in the air neither could stomach bringing up ...”

If Saul sounds like a sad, loser, anti-hero, then that's because he is. This is the Australian version of the White Male F*ck-up Novel after all. Underlying most of Saul’s problems and nasty incidents/accidents is alcoholism and the accompanying depression but Adam Morris is deft and subtle enough in his writing to avoid mentioning these clangers. He just concentrates on the disaster area.

 I can recognise some of Saul’s ‘incidents’ (but not the dog one) - his fumbling interior monologues on trains, his disconnect with community - and it makes me wince, just a little bit. My Dog Gave Me the Clap is a very funny book – a giggle-helplessly-in-the-dentist’s-waiting-room kind of funny. The problem with laughing at Saul’s f*ck ups is that any schadenfreude is followed by an uncomfortable niggling feeling that we are a mere shandy away from Saul’s hopelessness. Halfway through a moment of cracking up over another of Saul’s mid-trip, delusional balls-ups, I am suddenly sobered by a vague memory of the day we took those strange pills, went to the buskers festival and offered up our bodies as props ...

After a counselling session with the local priest, Saul's spirit begins to rally. “Saul felt lighter than when the day had started. He felt similar after vomiting from too much drink. That fresh empty feeling, that good empty feeling.”

Sometimes I just wanted to look away. I couldn’t. But I wanted to. 

Saul’s observations of people can be acute and beautiful: the kindness of the lonely farmer who fed him breakfast and told him he was okay after a drinking session/photoshoot/shotgun incident gone horribly awry the previous night: the woman upstairs whose 2 am lover doesn’t argue or put out the rubbish. There is also a strange beauty to Saul’s self immolation. Call it a Flaming Lamborghini kinda beauty, except I don’t reckon he could afford to destroy himself with one of them because he doesn’t have a job right now.

Saul’s creator Adam Morris swears that despite being a musician and lad like Saul, this is not one of those autobiographical first novels. Righteo. Adam Morris’ dog says he resents the implication. Fair enough. Despite these conflicts I found My Dog Gave Me the Clap to be a funny, strange and compelling read.

Adam Morris

My Dog Gave Me the Clap

Fremantle Press

188pp

$22.95

Wooden Boat Tragics

Some weeks ago Aussie rang me from the local arts centre.
"Your boat is here."
"The Pearl? No! I've just taken her to the tip."
"She's here. She's out on the lawn."

A few years ago, I wrote on A WineDark Sea to "stay tuned for the voyage of the Pearl." It seems her voyage these days is less traversing wavy seas than waving clover and now she's bogged in the grass less than half a kilometre from my home as an art installation.
Classic. Pearl's true north always spins south to Toa. She's been following me around town for quite a while now.

At the opening of the Boat Show exhibition, us three past owner/lovers of the the Pearl - the New Romantic, the Mad Frenchman and me - gathered on the grass with glasses of the artists' red wine to toast the Goddess of the Wooden Boat.

We are all still in love with her ... but we three also know that affairs with the Princess are high maintenance and best avoided in the interests of sanity. So it was yet another happy goodbye.

Notes That Survived the Fire

In December, Overland will publish my story about a humpback whale who stranded in the town harbour. He was a year old when he swam into the quiet waters, wriggled onto a sand bank and prepared to die. The sun tore open his exposed, eggplant skin. It was a distressing time for us harbor-dwellers.

My best mate Aussie laughs at me whenever my ears prick up, over gin and tonics in her banana tree garden. "Can you have that line/story/anecdote?" She says.  "Of course, Sarah! It's yours! Take it."

This month I've been writing the first chapter of my exegesis about the Tasmanian women who were stolen from their country by sealers - the women who ended up in my part of the world in 1826. I've been trying to argue that they had some kind of agency, of autonomy, some kind of power over their lives. As words go by, I'm beginning to realise they had none, that what happened in Van Diemen's Land and all over this south coast in the 1820s was just fucked.

But the stories still drive me so I write them down. Sometimes they are so dark and nasty (today I did Lyndall Ryan's 'Mass Killings in Tasmania') that I am exhausted by the day's end. I walk and walk and by the the time I am home, I am almost okay. I light the fire, drive the kid's swim club errands, cook something, behave like a parent (guiltily) and fall into bed with a fluffy novel or the weekend's book reviews.

I wanted to be a writer since I was ten. Back then I had a Temple of Doom style story all mapped out but I needed a getaway car. "What kind of car would baddies drive?" I asked my Mum. "A really expensive car?"
"Mmmm. A Sigma?"
So, in my first novel, the baddies drove a Black Sigma.

By my teens, all the Sigmas about town were rusting and driven by unemployed tuna fishermen. I decided that to produce anything substantial, I needed some life experience. So I set about the research. This involved lots of hitch hiking, random sailing events, cross continental bus trips and drinking in strange places with strange people. I bought journals and diaried who I'd slept with, recipes, taxi rides, landscape descriptions, agonised meanderings, concert tickets, locks of hair, photographs and newspaper clippings. Over fifteen years I had several keeping places for these books and they were broken into regularly by jealous lovers.

The man I was supposed to marry rang me one day at work and asked me to come home. He'd found the suitcase under my bed. He sounded kind of short of breath. He was probably a bit worried about his future. He'd spent the whole day pouring over my journals and when I returned, I had to explain myself. I spent hours backpedalling over my written-down misdeeds. My thoughts later was that he was quite the sociopath. At the time, his suggestion that I burn the lot made sense. So I did, shackles of the past and all.

That afternoon I burnt fifteen years worth of diaries in the back yard. Anyone who has burnt books knows the practicalities. They don't burn like logs of pine. You have to keep stoking them. It was a long night, seeing those locks of hair and recipes and photographs surfacing in the flames and stoking, stoking.

"I was so pissed off with you when you burnt those books," said Aussie.
"So was I," I said to her.

After that event, I stopped writing for a few years. I felt so betrayed that I never wanted anyone to read anything I'd written again. The funny thing is that event shaped me as a writer. Since that day of the fire, I have only written stories for other people to read. I will never write purely for my own navel-gazing intentions ever again, for fear of it being violated. Everything I write now is for the public. Even my journals consist of the workings of new stories.

I still have two of the diaries that I hid where he could not find them. They are wrapped in a silk scarf and I haven't opened them for some time. I transcribed them once. They are on a defunct computer file titled "Notes That Survived the Fire."

I was thinking about all this writing stuff today and doing a kind of fully loaded cost accounting (whatever that means). Here it is: I spend most days on a scholarship writing a thesis on the Tasmanian women. I have a book of creative non fiction accepted by a pretty good publisher. I get stories printed in lit journals a few times a year. I've got three book reviews to write this week and on the weekend I'm talking on a nature writing panel.

I guess that makes me a writer.


Faark.

We Are Apex Critters, Goddammit

Yesterday a prominent Perth businessman went missing whilst swimming near the Indiana Tea Rooms at Cottesloe Beach. Seven hours later police divers found his shredded bathers on the ocean floor. Another hungry Great White is blamed and today talkback radio is buzzing with locals' anecdotes, arguments and philosophies regarding whether Great Whites have any right to exist in our suburban waters.

The commentary today included that of a champion body boarder who said (and summarising here) that the Great Whites are obliged to share the waters with us and not eat us: therefore if they are eating us they should be culled. This considered hysteria reminded me of Val Plumwood's amazing essay. She wrote it ten years after she was mauled by a crocodile in the Northern Territory. Val Plumwood was an environmental philosopher and her essay Being Prey is a rendition of her experience but also a razor sharp examination of how us humans dislike the idea of being eaten.

This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices - the strong coffin, conveniently buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood and alien monsters eating humans. 
 
Here is her essay and here is my original post on Val Plumwood.
Image: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-11/jet-skisjpg/3497442

Alice at Middleton Beach

15

Summer after summer

Alice lived

in the jarrah house

in the sand dunes

when the equinox blew

beached whales

pushed & prodded

returned with the tide

intent on dying

their bodies lay

along the shoreline

till the dark breath

went out of them

& and they stank for days

the beach was ringed 

with mountains

shaped liked resting emus

low scrub grew up

to the edge of the bay

great ships

garlanded with lights

anchored & paused

on their way to the world

a fishing boat

pushed off

& bobbed like a toy

the light on Breaksea

wavered     went out

& blinked again

Dorothy Hewett, Alice in Wormland, Papaerbark Press, NWS, 1987, p. 30.

Night Fishing

Crusher Balls

A few months ago I technologically challenged myself quite drastically by spilling coffee all over my laptop. You may have noticed a slowing in WineDark posts and a complete lack of new pictures ... sorry 'bout that. Here's the first installment in all the lovely pics I've just loaded onto my shiny new toy.