surfing life

I was really fortunate to get to see a pro surf comp at Pipeline in Hawaii, and while I'm not big on crowds at the beach, it was amazing to see pro surfers at this particular break. What was also incredible was the sheer energy of the wave, which I could feel from where I was sitting on the sand.

I love swimming in the ocean and I'm not a surfer, but I love surf watching. Surfing is a great metaphor for life, and generally for feeling alive. Setting my novel Chasing Light at a fictitious beach was a great way to get one of my characters to surf!

Here’s a quote from one of the ‘masters’ of Pipe, Gerry Lopez, from his book, Surf is Where You Find It (2008) that I love and sums up his approach to surfing:

“Surfing is whatever one wants to make it. With the fluid stage and the cast of characters, anything goes is usually the rule...actually there aren't any rules. This is what makes surfing so appealing, But in my almost 50 years of surfing, I've made a few rules for myself [...]The fifth and final Lopez rule: The best surfer in the water is the guy having the most fun. I try to remember that one.”

Meg Rosoff on how to write - or being a medieval apprentice!

Meg Rosoff is a wonderful writer. When I first read How I Live Now, I was utterly captivated by the voice of 15 year-old Daisy, and her story about surviving war; finding family; leaving home only to discover what home really is; falling madly in love and ultimately, figuring out what she truly valued. It was hilarious, heartbreaking, magical and oddly hopeful. I've read everything she's written since.

I've also been an avid reader of what she has to say about writing. Here's a list from her blog post (check out the full post here), where she equates learning to write to being a medieval apprentice shoemaker—it's incisive, funny and great advice.

How to Write

by Meg Rosoff

[...] And so here are a few things I learned in my apprenticeship.

1. READ. Bestsellers and obscure new writers, 18th, 19th and 20thcentury writers as well. Shakespeare. History and fiction, memoir and picture books, everything that’s really good and occasionally some stuff that’s really bad. Ideas come from everywhere, and besides, if you’re not interested in books you shouldn’t be writing them.

2. Marketing is important. If there’s no market, there’s no money (and writing is, after all, a job – a better than average job, but a job nonetheless).

3. But….ignore the market when you work. People writing solely to make money can always be picked out of a criminal line-up. They look cheap, sweaty and desperate. The rest of us just look desperate.

4. Know how to write. Really, it helps.

5. Spend time thinking. Writing’s only about 20% of the job. Sometimes less.

6. There are no rules. Your job is to break the rules.

7. Be wise. Know more than your audience about something — anything.

8. Cut to the chase. The average attention span of the modern human is about half as long as whatever you’re trying to tell him (or her).

9. Get a life. Breadth of knowledge is good, emotional depth is even better.

10. Lie about everything except passion. Chairs can talk. Pigs can fly. But if you don’t care about what you’re saying, no one else will either.

11. Listen to what other people have to say. If fifteen people say that your shoe is dull, heavy and cloddish, it probably is.

12. But…when a publisher says ‘that sort of book doesn’t sell,’ don’t throw it away. No one knows what sells. Until it does.

13. Don’t worry about your connections (or lack thereof). Anyone who’s really good will get there. Blind, dogged persistence passes the time between now and then.

14. Edit ruthlessly. Do not fall in love with your own prose. God invented the delete button to help you.

15. Keep at it. It’s a long game (ask Mary Berry about her 30 years in the wilderness). No one has an easy run from beginning to end.And that goes for life as well as writing.

obey

Artwork: Paste-up by OBEY

Wandering around the city, Friday afternoon Halloween! Happened to look up to find this great paste-up by street artist OBEY (Shepard Fairey).  

small stories: paper cut-out girl

Artwork: lonely_girl by_splinter_ops

There she goes again.

The paper cut-out girl.

She’s wearing the same woolly coconut ice striped beanie, complete with panda ears. It’s something a kid would wear. Except, she’s not a kid anymore. Although, I wonder if that’s what she wants to be—an eternal child—never having to grow up.

She’s buttoned up tight in her wool check jacket, layered with a jumper and shirt so you can’t see her outline; the way her bones are jutting out. A body too thin to carry the weight of so much wool.

I saw her most days. I’m not sure if she’s going to school or work. Her thin legs are clad in tights and her feet—I can’t keep my eyes off the high top pink Converses. She wears them no matter the weather.

 I think she wants to hide, but the hat and the sneakers make her conspicuous. Maybe it’s a way to only get people to notice parts of her, not the whole, because then they’d have to see how sometimes she walks slowly, carefully, and that each step seems painful.

She often carries a red and white backpack, and I can't help stewing over how she manages the weight when she wants to shed so much of her own.   

Once I tried drawing her, but the lines were too faint, too scant as if I couldn’t pin her to the page. So I cut out a space in the paper where the girl should have been.

She was present in the world by the very space she was absent from it.  

© Angela Jooste

The eternal art of Louise Bourgeois

“Art is truth because it is eternal.”

                                           Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

The first time I saw Louise Bourgeois's work at an exhibition, I discovered something that altered my relationship to art profoundly. I remember being mesmerised by her sculpture Spiral Woman, and walking away wanting to write about it, but not with the language of theory or criticism, but with poetry. That stumped me. I was an art history student, used to navigating the discourses that shaped current art historical practice—of writing texts with cross-disciplinary theory, historical methodology, visual analysis—dry, distant and "learned" writing that spoke to academics. But no, I wanted to write a poem, and I did. That was the beginning of my Art Stories project. I later discovered that my impulse to write about art creatively had a tradition after reading art historian Paul Barolsky’s interpretation of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (first published in 1550), one of the foundation texts and primary source material in studying the Renaissance, as being a work of fiction. That was mind-blowing to me. And while I'll save talking about that tradition for another day, it affirmed what I was doing, and that I wasn't alone.

When I came to write about Louise Bourgeois's work Cell (Glass spheres and hands), I delved into some of the recurring themes of her work: the pain of deception and betrayal; the blurred lines of truth and lies; the cut of rejection; how risk is inherent in love and that safety in relationships is a precarious concept. And fear: of being alone, denied, unloved. What is exceptional and challenging about Bourgeois's work for me, is its mystery and how its secrets are not yielded easily, if at all. Her work evades categorisation and simple theoretical or biographical approaches. Her own words might point to a meaning, but she herself once said: “I never talk literally. Never, never, never. You do not get anywhere by being literal, except to be puny. You have to use analogy and interpretation and leaps of all kinds.”

By being so elusive, the openness of Bourgeois's work to interpretation is enduring. And her ability to elicit such an emotional and imaginative response, it makes her art eternal.  

Pipilotti Rist trapped in hell

I've been thinking of writing a story about Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist's installation I saw a couple of years ago at ACCA, I Packed the Postcard in my Suitcase, and I remembered a lecturer at uni mentioned this small, brilliant and hilarious video of her trapped under the floor at PS1—in hell. It's called Selbstlos I'm Lavabad and Rist is swimming in a lava bath crying out, “I am a worm and you are a flower!” This video was first exhibited in Basel, Switzerland in 1994.

metropolis rhino

I love this artwork of the rhino with a city on its back by Mike Maka aka MAKATRON (check out his website: http://www.makatron.com) . I first saw a similar version of this while Maka was actually creating it at an intersection on Lygon St near the Melbourne Cemetery. It also became a fave of the character Jake in my book Chasing Light (forthcoming late 2014).