My contribution to the list was Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, one of the big three modernist city novels – novels of a world in flux and fragmentation in the early twentieth century. The other two, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, have become integral parts of my literary life and I suppose reading Musil would complete the set nicely. It would also fulfil a sense of duty I feel toward him given that he was born in my father’s home town of Klagenfurt in what was then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of present-day Austria. (The only other writer of note I know who was a native of Klagenfurt is Ingeborg Bachmann. And I’ve not read her either.)

But, without putting too fine a point on it, each time I have tried to read The Man Without Qualities (three times by my reckoning) I’ve been defeated by its very monumentality. It’s big, fat (1130 pages in the edition I own) and starts with ‘Part 1: A Sort of Introduction’ and a first chapter titled ‘From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops’ and a description of the weather. Each time I’ve approached it I’ve recognised that it asks from its reader more than simply reading for plot and characterisation. It asks for a commitment, an immersion of being that I haven’t been willing to face. It’s been easier not to read it than to actually read it.

In the Twitter discussion Kylie Ladd nominated W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as a book she couldn’t finish for the reason that its representation of WWII was so utterly boring. I did a double take at that. Sebald? Boring? I parried with feigned offence at Ladd’s slur on one of my literary heroes and she graciously rued the fact that she had made probably me cry. It followed that in the great tradition of the victims of bullying everywhere I teamed up with her The Nile to poke fun at Finnegan’s Wake. (I joked that Joyce himself had probably never even finished it).

While it was kind of fun having a go the great unfinishables, I couldn’t help but feel a little disingenuous. After all I’m fairly committed in my reading and writing to things that aren’t very easy. While it’s difficult sometimes, I do make the effort to read – and to finish – ‘hard’ books, I don’t think I’d be involved with literature and have remained committed to it if I didn’t have a difficult relationship with it, if I didn’t find myself not wanting to get through something sometimes. Finnegan’s Wake is a book a really would love to read one day. Or perhaps listen to. But it’s something, like Musil, that I’ll have to commit a slab of time towards. (And of course we don’t have the time or brains anymore to commit to anything longer than the last tweet, just ask Nicholas Carr, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is another one I haven’t read but, not unironically, know all about because of the his shorter version of the same argument in The Atlantic.)

It’s probably worth noting that novels of great scope and vision are not infrequently left unfinished by their authors. The entire project of finishing is itself a kind uncertain business. We only need to think of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, or The Castle or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 to recognize that some works are not diminished because they are unfinished – that their end comes properly with the dissolution of their authors, whose death catches them unable to settle their work into a final form. Their resurrection – even their first life – is engineered by the work of editors, literary executors and translators.

But to return to the difficult problem of committing to difficult reading, and why I do commit to it, perhaps there are some deeper emotional truths about how the way feel about writing and literature is reflected in my reading. I think that I want writing to do is to destroy some part of me. I don’t want to feel comfortable when I read. I want it to make me doubt what it is to be a human alive today. I don’t want comfort. I want to be rearranged. And when I write I want to be able to rearrange my reader. Perhaps the reason I’ve baulked at committing to Musil is that I suspect, or know, that I will be changed by it but that I just don’t know how.

James Collins recently made some sense of this for me in The New York Times. Concerned about his inability to recall the content of the novels he’d read (something I also ‘suffer’ from: I know I love Sebald but find it difficult to recall him) Collins spoke to Maryanne Wolf who is Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. She told him not to worry. “It’s there…You are the sum of it all.” And she meant this is a very material way; that mental processes are in fact altered by the experience of reading a book. Books change people. When we describe a book as ‘mind blowing’ the metaphor is not all that far removed from reality.This doesn’t mean that you become the book. As I said to Samuel Cooney on the Virgule blog a little while back, I don’t think I’ve become a Sebald in my own writing, nor do I have ambition to become him.

I came to a love of reading literature only in my early twenties and have felt as if I’ve been playing catch up ever since. But I know how much books have changed me. I know that I am a very different person – not just a different writer – today than I would have been simply because I read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The best have disassembled my entire being while I read them and have forced me to put myself together again once I was done with them. It’s something a little like love.

Which is why I really was shocked that there is someone else, another writer in fact, who didn’t see, or feel about Sebald the way I did. Even more shocking is the realisation that there are probably a great many more who felt this way. And properly so. The fact is that Sebald is not a writer for everyone. While his often paragraphless prose is dense and allusive, those of us who love him find it is these very qualities that are so hypnotic and moving. Love, it seems, blinds you to these facts. Love makes the difficult less difficult.

—Rosa? Rosa.

—Rosa. Rosa.

Annie Rivers. Annie laughs. —Annie! Annie Rivers. Annie laughs. —Annie

“And the radio reminds me of my home far away” – John Denver

Look at these kids. They know how to live in their city. Long-haired skateboarders, boys mostly, confident sixteen-year-olds, prodigious ten-year-olds, hurtling blindly in dorky windcheaters and flannelettes down the steep tarmac of newly naked suburban streets devoid of houses and cars, or through shopping centre car parks abandoned for the weekend trading close. The skyline is cut through only with electricity pylons, those goat-headed hangmen that will bring the world and its sting to them in some future time. They don’t know what’s going to hit them. They’re blessed. Bon-Scott-I-don’t-give-a-fuck-on-the-back-of-a-ute-down-Swanston-Street blessed.

This is the music video for the Australian band Youth Group’s version of Forever Young, which was at the top of the Australian music charts in April 2006. The video features footage shot in 1975 for the ABC’s music program GTK. The song is a cover of a 1984 hit by the German outfit Alphaville.

I saw the clip for the first time at two in the morning on the music video program Rage on the ABC and had to catch my stupid nostalgic tears in my mouth. In the last week, I’ve watched it again and again on YouTube and each time I still have to hold back. Some memories persist – even if they’re not my own.

I’m a few years shy of having been the right age and lived in the wrong city to have been in the clip, but by 1978 I had picked up on the skateboard craze. I wore a blue-checked Miller shirt and proto-mullet straight-fringe haircut, carried a green banana board under my arm and trucked up and down the footpath outside my parents’ house for hour after hour. It’s an aesthetic that I still find sublimely seductive, especially when it is replayed with a lyric like Forever Young’s that expresses a 99-Luftballons kind of Cold War fear of the future that can only be forestalled by trying, impossibly, to preserve youth, the present.

Of course, the endless summer dreams of those bowl-haircut kids – especially those like me who had little talent or coordination to begin with – ended with permanently busted knees or an interest in guitars. Or cars. Or school. Or jobs. With the rest of life. Their youth – and, through them, mine – remains uncannily on film. Really it’s the only place it remains, even though it doesn’t, really.

Some of these dream kids have posted to Youth Group’s website. “Elaine” is one of them. She writes: “What a cool video. I show my son’s [sic] how we used to skate without shoes/helmets. Every time I see that clip or hear the song I feel 10 again (not 41) … Thank you Youth Group for making us all feel ‘Forever Young’.”

“Penny” is a little more introspective. She knows exactly which of her nostalgia buttons are being pressed and how it is that age, staring down the hole at youth, is able to pull something out of her heart, despite the fact that she’s got the date wrong by ten years: “Those locks of long blond hair and flannelette shirts floating in the wind could belong to no other than Australian children of twenty years ago … while these children look like they will be forever young and wishes [sic] they could be, the viewer knows that this footage is old and the children are no longer young.”

I imagine it’s exactly this soup of nostalgic fuzziness and existential melancholy that the video’s producers intended to drain from its audience – and it sells records, or CDs, or iTunes. This is nothing particularly new. Marketers cottoned on to the nexus between music, spectacle, memory and desire long ago. Wagner, Hollywood cinema, MTV, YouTube. All part of a powerful nostalgia meme machine. Like “Penny”, watching the Forever Young clip I can see pretty clearly which buttons are being pressed in me when I watch it: youth, naiveté, the thrill of risk. But knowing the genetic code to the virus doesn’t inoculate me. The experiences might be linked into a shared culture, but the original cultural encounter is direct and individual.

It makes me wonder then what is in “Louisa’s” mind when she writes of the song: “I’m a student at school. I’ve never seen the video but I’ve heard it’s really good. Two of my friends and I are also making a video to your song Forever Young and we had the idea of filming us at school having fun and just us being normal and then tying it in with world issues. I love your song, it’s so great and it brings back so many great memories.”

What are the memories she is so relieved to be trundling out again? As a school student in 2006, she’s obviously too young to recall the 1984 original version of the song. “Louisa’s” comments appeared only five months after the song found its way to the top of the Australian charts, spurred by its association with an episode of the US teen-drama The OC.  She seems to be nostalgic for events that haven’t yet happened – great times that haven’t yet been performed for the video that she plans to make with her friends, packaged nicely to wait for her own flood of nostalgia in twenty years or so, complete with its own soundtrack.

This is an impatient time. We are impatient for the future to become the past so we can manipulate it, record it on video as it passes us by so we can demand it on tap later on. I imagine “Louisa” and her two friends posting their offering on YouTube, sharing it and posting comments to each other. Do you remember when? After all it was five minutes ago. It confirms for them what they suspect: that they’d better find some way to preserve the camaraderie and community of the present, because it is fleeting. It has nothing to sink roots into.

I know this thrill. It began for me with the adventure of walking through the television department of the Myer department store in the early 1980s when video cameras were first coming on to the market. I’d be caught in the trap between the camera and the TV screen, each one at an oblique angle to the other, trying and failing to both look into the camera and at myself on the screen at the same time. I felt the thrill of vertigo, trying to erase the present as it was happening, losing my reference points.

For her second birthday, I bought my daughter her first camera, and by three she had become so impatient for the film to come back from being developed that she graduated to the instantaneity of the digital camera. This is the culture of instant memorialisation. It is what I am teaching her.

It goes further. We don’t just want to strangle the future as it comes into view, we also want to remember events we could never have lived through and imagine ourselves into them. Again, back to the Youth Group forum, where we find “Sam” who writes: “I wish I was around in [the] ’70s, looks great, but I was twenty years too late. Looks amazing.”

This is another variety of nostalgia. It is nostalgia for a past that is utterly mediated. Like the pre-Raphaelites yearning for distant, impossible Camelot, “Sam” can only imagine what the ’70s were like through the lens of the well-edited artifice of the music video.

This mediation is the touchstone for the other big pop-music tap on the nostalgia vein this year: Sandi Thom’s I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair), a love-it-or-hate-it but impossibly catchy anthem which in late 2006 spent the better part of two months at the top of the Australian music charts.

The lyrics to Thom’s song are built around a lament that she wasn’t born into the era when she could have been in the midst of those “revolutionary” years of ’77 and ’69. Thom’s 2006 world is one  “that doesn’t care”, one where there is little fellow feeling among people. Here again is the same sunny version of the past that is in the Youth Group video – rendered lyrically this time instead of through image. The first verse is instructive in its composition in that it is almost entirely negative about the present:

When the head of state didn’t play guitar
Not everybody drove a car
When music really mattered and when radio was king
When accountants didn’t have control
And the media couldn’t buy your soul
And computers were still scary and we didn’t know everything

The song beats on with verses that catalogue the comfortable pillow-books in Thom’s dreamscape version of the ’60s and ’70s: sending letters in the mail, children wearing hand-me-downs, vinyl records – all those things that appear to her to have been lost.

I wouldn’t dare to read Thom’s lyrics too literally – I understand the playfulness of mixing the punk and hippy aesthetic – but the point is that they express a desire similar to Youth Group forum contributor “Sam” (even to the point of the overlap of “I was born too late”). It’s a desire to be part of a past which is utterly mediated and inaccessible to her through personal memory.

We often think of nostalgia as a desire to return to a particular time, a past that has been lost. We tend to forget that it also exhorts us to journey to place. Nostalgia is the painful desire to return to familiar ground. It is homesickness.

It’s that homesickness – the yearning for place, for cities that have disappeared from view – that strikes me most about the versions of the past that the Forever Young video and Punk Rocker song present, especially the way children are depicted as occupying the urban landscape.

Here in the Youth Group video are empty streets still full of promise, still humanised, bristling with community and warmth. Streets friendly to the risks of childhood. The Sandi Thom song also favours the local (record shops), the get down and dirty (“playing games meant kick arounds”) that characterise an urban fabric which is much more comfortable, integrated and humanly connected than the fraught, over-controlled and segmented version of the city we have inherited and invented. sprawling urban metropolises snaked with traffic that is corralled into ever more complex networks of freeways; poorly-conceived sub-suburban housing developments that make simple connections between people in physical communities less and less likely.

I’m reminded of Alain de Botton’s appraisal of the function of the built environment in The Architecture of Happiness, where he writes that “in essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants.”

The mood we encourage for ourselves in our cities – and therefore what we accept as reasonable in the way we experience them, how we believe them to be “liveable” – is one of blindness. The shopping centre is a soft space. The attitude to time is fragmented, there is nothing really to look at in the shopping centre, nothing to experience in the sense that we have memory of it. There is only a flashy passing-through. We observe the spectacle but aren’t part of it, our engagements with each other are functional, fleeting, blind. Safe.

The consequences of this blindness are damagingly real. As the October 2006 Report of the Inquiry into Children, Young People and the Built Environment by the New South Wales Committee on Children and Young People has it: “Population growth, urbanisation, environmental degradation, reliance on motor vehicles, fear of strangers and the threat of public liability claims are just some of the factors shaping our built environment … Already the consequences of changes to the built, natural and social environments inhabited by children and young people have been alarming. Australia now stands as second only to the United States of America in child overweight and obesity statistics. Rates of depression and mental illness continue to increase and child abuse reports continue to climb. Despite the general wealth of the country … there is evidence that children and young people are not necessarily faring well.”

I don’t want to disparage the good, imaginative things that are happening in our cities. In Melbourne Federation Square and the children’s garden in the Royal Botanic Gardens are excellent examples of what can be done to create spaces where people can gather and make connections. However, these are still invented, purpose-built spaces – they are not spaces that have been conquered by risk and chance. They are planned, not discovered, and always have this sheen about them.

Parallel with the imagination-dulling built environment is the shift in our attitude toward the proximity of the present. There has been a change in the ease of production and the simple accessibility of a mediated version of the past that makes opting out – ignoring the present, and escaping into a convincing, pacifying, alternative reality – as simple as shifting our attention to something more pleasing to the eye and ear.

In my research for this essay, I watched the video clips for Forever Young and I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker on YouTube. YouTube gifts us with on-tap visions of personal, televisual and musical places and times past. In a culture addicted to video versions of everything, this past-on-demand technology is significant. Look, we can say when we type “1975” into the YouTube search field. Look at the video. Here’s the evidence. It was better. Even to those who were never there. It was better because someone was there and caught it on film.

For Sandi Thom, for Louisa and her version of the Youth Group video, for Sam who wishes he was born in the ’70s, technology has alienated them from their relationship with the immediate present, but at the same time it represses the fact that it is technology that gives back to them a simulacrum of it. It’s the technology that’s created the feeling. It’s the technology that they hope will save them from it.

Soft-spaced and time-distorted shopping barns, banks of iPod drones on trains. People in public places absorbed into floating worlds, or locked in their homes swimming into big ponds of nostalgia for imagined pasts that are as real as YouTube. It all culminates in the paradoxical yearning that is expressed (perhaps not unfairly, after all) in Forever Young and Punk Rocker for the return of some imagined past in a community of people who belong to a place now disappeared. The songs give voice to the sense that community used to exist, that people once came together ”naturally”, without consciousness of being part of a community.

Often the feeling we have about the version of “community” that we hear about – the kind regularly hawked by politicians – is that it is somehow not the real deal, that communities are not functional societal units dreamed up in ideological think-tanks, or somehow centrally administered. (In the 2006 Victorian state election, the Liberal Party had no fewer than sixteen policy statements on “communities” and the ALP’s contributions included ”Developing Liveable Communities” and ”Local Government: The Focus of Strong Communities”).

This is not to say that we don’t have deep attachments to these communities. Most people count themselves as being part of one or another of them – a football team, a religious group, the arts community, a student body. These are usually interest-based communities that form around people of like mind which solidify then evaporate with the end of their function. The football season ends, the arts festival is over for another year. This extends to those communities of like mind that form and fragment on the internet – groups of people who coagulate in the parallel matrix of Second Life, chat rooms and the blogsphere. While blessed with openness of access and a limitless sense of potential, these virtual communities lack the sweat and gesture and drama of community in physical space. They fail to satisfy that tactile sense of belonging. What is too often missing in manifestations of the human commons is the deep feeling of community that happen when there is a confluence of people and place.

The good feeling and preciousness of “true” community can emerge at the most unlikely times and places, given the right conditions. In Radio City: The First 30 Years of 3RRR (Vulgar Press, 2006), his history of Melbourne community radio station 3RRR, Mark Phillips writes of the enormous success of the station’s involvement in the annual Community Cup, a charity fundraising event that by 2005 had grown surprisingly large, with some 22,000 in attendance. He quotes one participant who says that its attraction is “the fact that it’s not governed by a corporate agenda or corporate rules, the fact that you’re allowed to smoke and drink full-strength beer out of cans and bring your dogs and kids”. Phillips goes on explain the success of the event: “In an age of splintering of traditional values, characterised by envy, mistrust and the decline of the fair go, community radio was filling a void – and the Community Cup was the physical manifestation of this. It was a repudiation of the breakdown of community and an embodiment of the spirit of generosity, selflessness and good humour. Sometimes, when it feels as if our social structures are being broken apart, that largely invisible community of Triple R listeners can provide a safe refuge.”

Perhaps it is an irony that, while in the twentieth century it was radio that – by keeping people inside their homes to be entertained and informed – helped to begin the fragmentation of physical communities in a way that was continued by television and the car, now it would appear that radio can mend some of that damage. This is partly due to its unique community format and its dedication to broadcasting outside the structure of commercial formats across a physically discrete area in what is now an even more fragmented world dominated by the technology of the internet. The view from Triple R might be tinged with nostalgia, but it is also living and future-looking.

Interestingly, the political parties in Australia that seem to show the deepest understanding of the close relationship between people and place are the greatest ideological enemies: the Greens and Family First. Both parties stress the necessity of localism in approaching the problem of degraded cities and communities. Both emphasise a reinvention of a kind of village life, of community over corporatism (though Family First is obsessed with marginalising the “Adult Industry”). What divides them, of course, is their attitude to the central institutions that make up a community. For the Greens, communities should be left to define themselves; for Family First, it’s literally blasphemy to think of anything but the big-F Family holding it together.

It’s probably the Greens who recognise most powerfully the connection between community and place. But, even though the party doesn’t try to prop up and clot old social institutions for their own sake, it does indulge in some nostalgia to get its message across. Its housing and urban planning policy – aside from the expected focus on public transport, environmentally sustainable practice and social justice – includes statements about the “re-humanising of the centres through more public open space and attractive urban design” and ”planning of urban developments be focused on the concept of urban villages”.

It’s the terms “re-humanising” and “villages” that are interesting here. The language faces the past as it tries to project the future. Localism in political movements can’t avoid this. Whether it’s slow food, or the return of the village, bioregionalism or primitivism, the vision is always for something – a way of life – that pre-existed the current mess. What we can’t seem to escape is the same old conundrum – is the way forward actually backwards?

There is a sense that the young inhabitants of Australia’s urban environment – and, by function, all of us – are somehow forced into the situation that the late Ryszard Kapuscinski describes in his reading of the Iranian revolution in Shah of Shahs They are “degraded, forced into the role of an object” by the lack of creativity, by the timidity, and purposelessness expressed in it. The natural result of this degradation, Kapuscinski suggests, is that the nation “seeks shelter, seeks a place where it can dig itself in, wall itself off … it undertakes a migration in time rather than in space. In the face of circling afflictions and threats of reality, it goes back to a past that seems a lost paradise.” In short, it becomes nostalgic.

What is missing from the Kapuscinski equation in Australia is the nostalgia for the past taking on a sense of radical provocation, the rediscovery of old rituals that take on magical, all-engulfing meaning – the kind that took over Iran in 1979. The Australian situation is, of course, not as extreme – not as repressive as Iran under the rule of the Shah and his SAVAK enforcers. It could be argued that there is a major problem here, a stealthy legal growth in authoritarianism, a creeping censorship of freedom of speech, but perhaps we just don’t sense the problem as keenly as we should. Here the crystal ball view into the past has not congealed wholesale into a radical ideology. Our collective drift into the past soothes us in the same way the shopping centre does. Nostalgia here remains a relatively benign cultural influence that seems content to picks morsels from consumer memories.

There are exceptions.

The Cronulla riot and the mobs that chased its odour through Sydney during December 2005 provide one. The riot was the product of a group of people favouring the simplicity of the perceived “White Australia” past over the complexity – and ugliness – of the present. Here the motivation was the perception that the moral-historical ownership of land and the proper activities that can take place there had been compromised by the intrusion of people who did not appear in the nostalgised version of place.

Think again of “Penny’s” comment on the Youth Group forum: “Those locks of long blond hair and flannelette shirts floating in the wind could belong to no other than Australian children of twenty years ago.” Whether they like it or not, those skateboard boys are white-bread members of the tribe of urban imagination. The Cronulla riots themselves are part of the YouTube collective video memory bank, which shows glorified scenes of young people – boys mostly – hurtling blindly through the streets, with nostalgia in mind.

The greening left of politics also has its simplistic mythologising of the past with which to contend. While we might read with nodding heads and some sympathy Theodore Kaczynski’s manifesto in Industrial Society and Its Future calling for a return to the rule of nature that says “nature takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for countless centuries many different kinds of human societies coexisted with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage”, its innocuousness is compromised when we identify the manifesto’s author as the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.

In 1969, one of the years when Sandi Thom’s unlived “revolution was in the air”, the Rolling Stones had a hit with Gimme Shelter. Jagger’s opening howl warns that “a storm is threatening / my very life today / If I don’t get some shelter … I’m gonna fade away.”

Martin Armiger, in a cracker analysis of the song published in Meanjin, writes that it “admits that we need help, tells us that nothing is going to be easy, and counts violence and destruction as the cost of our personal salvation”. The present wasn’t a pretty sight for Jagger and Richards in 1969 – especially not at the drug-fucked and murderous Altamont Speedway festival at the end of that year – but they testified to what they could see there, and instead of dreaming of the past sought a place of temporary refuge, a cave of love, a shelter to see them through to the future.

When Sandi Thom uses the word “revolution”, she’s probably thinking of a song like Gimme Shelter, but she’s not really listening to what it is saying. She doesn’t really want a revolution. Revolutions stare hard at the present, and through the shock, disgust, ennui and indifference they find there, seek to transform it. This should be the kind of revolution we hope for in the cities we live in – one that seeks warmth in the creative glow we find in the shelters of anticipation. In savage little radios.

New Matilda picked up my earlier post ‘The Climate Change Slap’  about my six year old’s environment play. The kids performed the play last week with a fine moment of Brechtian verfremdung when they pointed at us parents in the audience charging us with responsibility for dealing with the state of the environment, challenging us to use less energy, walk or cycle instead of driving short distances and (in a lovely anachronism) stop ruining the ozone layer with aerosols. After the performance most parents and kids went happily home in their cars.

My article ‘Berlin: united by the fall’ featured in The Adelaide Review’s November 2009 issue which covered the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And finally the bookish Paula Grunseit invited me to answer some questions on reading in her Book Tweeps series which features writers who have been sucked into the black hole that is twitter. I’ve recently protected my account to lock out the fake accounts but if you’re a real person please feel to follow me here.

For weeks my daughter’s reception level class has been rehearsing its lines for a play in which they are performing the ethics of environmentalism.

As far as I can tell (they haven’t performed it yet) the play is replete with all the reassuring slogans we like to hear kids repeating about not polluting the land and oceans, not using too much electricity because of the associated carbon emissions, preserving the forests and not spraying aerosols to save the ozone layer (OK, this last one is a little anachronistic given that CFCs have been phased out, but the spirit is there).

Her teacher tells me that it’s getting to the stage where the kids are forming into a band of environmental activists who are chiding kids from other classes for even daring to pick leaves from trees. While they’re perhaps a little over-enthusiastic (they are six year olds after all) most of us would probably agree that these are exactly the kinds of values we should be instilling in them.

Yesterday afternoon a link to Clive Hamilton’s recent lecture ‘Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change?’ popped up on my twitter feed. The lecture’s title asks what has pretty much become a rhetorical question of late, and it doesn’t take long for Hamilton to announce that:

‘It seems almost certain that, if it has not occurred already, within the next several years enough warming will be locked in to the system to set in train feedback processes that will overwhelm any attempt we make to cut back on our carbon emissions. We will be powerless to stop the jump to a new climate on earth, one much less sympathetic to life.’

He goes on to back this up with some pretty solid evidence. And he is not the first to have done so.

This morning at school drop-off a parent turned up with the tree costumes for the play. The appearance of the costumes gave me the chance to open up a discussion with my daughter’s teacher about it. I expressed my admiration for the efforts she was making to bring environmental issues into the consciousness of the kids, and then in a round about way I brought up Hamilton’s conclusions. I wondered out loud what the worth of the ‘positive’ environment message and encouraging kids into activism really might be given the enormity of the catastrophe that is unfolding – and the momentum that it seems to be gathering.

‘I worry about the kids,’ I said. ‘They are really going to suffer because of climate change.’

The teacher responded with an uncomfortable look and said, ‘It’s not these kids so much, but their kids, who will really have to worry about it.’

The evidence suggests to me that this is wrong. I was going to make a point of it, but didn’t because I flinched. What I flinched from was the image of talking about inflicting harm on the children we were in the same room with. Admitting abuse is difficult. Better to imagine the problems of climate change being carried by a generation that does not yet exist.

Christos Tsiolkas, in his highly successful novel The Slap, manages to play out in literal terms one of the big barbeque conversation-stoppers of recent years, the polarised debate about the physical disciplining/abuse of children. The barbeque stopper has become short-hand for the way politics is played out beyond media attention. In many ways it’s the real face of politics.

What the uncomfortable exchange with the teacher made me wonder about was whether or not we are ready to have Clive Hamilton’s imminent climate catastrophe on the barbeque menu.

Today the Greens announced that Clive Hamilton would stand as their candidate for the by-election in Peter Costello’s vacated seat of Higgins. Hamilton is someone the converted will no doubt listen to and vote for when he speaks on climate change. His challenge of course is to get a majority in this largely conservative electorate to listen to him as well. His challenge is to exceed George Monbiot’s definition of politics as ‘the art of shifting trouble from the living to the unborn.’ Most people wouldn’t give him much of a chance.

I don’t have much doubt that most people are convinced that climate change is happening, but I wonder whether that most are psychologically prepared to accept that it is upon us. I wonder whether we are quite ready for the real barbecue stopper. The Higgins by-election might be the opportunity to put it to the test.

Track 1. Karl Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana.

Starting big.

Karl Orff scored the music for Carmina Burana in Germany in 1935-36 using a series of 11th-13th century texts about springtime lustiness, love, drinking beer, and the turn of the wheel of fortune. It was poular with audiences at the time and scares my children now. That Orff composed the work and that it was so highly praised in Nazi-era Germany, effectively making his reputation, speaks to how easy it is for creators and artists, seeking anything from bread on their plate to critical approval, are forced to take on the burden of moral responsibility when things turn sour.

The music has become a kind of cliche that signifies anything vaguely epic and has been rolled out for the whole gamut: from Hollywood films to beer commercials. More at Wikipedia on this score.

What I find fascinating and disturbing is that its epic aesthetic is still so powerful. It’s uncomfortable to think sometimes that what appealed to the Nazis also appeals to us.

The version I’ve posted here includes a translation of the Latin text and is useful because its a reminder that its not all about the music.

Track 2. ‘Boys in Town’ The Divinyls

‘Boys in town’ was a hit in 1982, my first year of high school, so it helped define for me the attitude I thought I should take through those years: up-yours rock and roll. (I also started high school soon after Joan Jett’s ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’ a was huge hit – but that’s another story that doesn’t belong in this soundtrack).

In Spiel this song is referenced in a couple of ways that have to do with the character of Annie Rivers who ghosts the narrator through his high school years and beyond. I have Annie at a pub gig where a cover band is playing this song. And perhaps more importantly I compare her explicitly with the Divinyls’ lead singer Chrissy Amphlett.

Amphlett to me was an icon of power. Completely rock and roll. Dangerous, a little scary. Perhaps even a little wrong in the head. Her stage persona, hair over-the-eyes, the pouty lip, all suggested someone like AC-DC’s Angus Young, who I had also thought was a little wrong in the head until I cottoned on to the fact that his stage-schtick thrashing was just that, schtick. There was a rumour current at the time that Amphlett urinated on the stage during shows. That went beyond Angus Young’s apparent on-stage epilepsy and suggested something Nina Hagen-esque (more on Nina Hagen in another post), something wilful and elemental (and gross). Repulsive and seductive all at the same time. It was real.

I saw the Divinyls play just once, at Deakin University in Geelong when I was an aimless first year student there in the late ‘80s. I usually trekked the 70 kilometres down to Geelong from Melbourne two or three times a week by train for the privilege of sitting in tutorials and lectures on anthropology and imperialism that bored me so much that I imposed a gap year on myself the next year, and the year after that, and a few more beyond.

The night the Divinyls were playing was a Friday and I really wanted to go, but there were no trains back to Melbourne that late at night, and because I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a car. The solution came through a friend who I’d had a long and never smooth friendship with who chipped in to rent an ancient Ford Falcon Rent-a-Bomb. The car’s windows didn’t roll up and, well you get the picture. I thought it was a very rock’n’roll thing to do. It got us there and back.

This was toward the end of the friendship with the person I went to the concert with and I remember distinctly hoping that going to the show and, in particular hearing the song would somehow revive it. When ‘Boys in town’ came on we danced and we sang along with all the misheard lyrics and we seemed to be having fun. Soon enough the song was over, and then the show was over and then we drove back home and not long after the friendship was gone.

The Divinyls gig was probably the point when I realised that I couldn’t rely on a song the way I once had to give shape to my life. The show was good, but it was nothing special. Amphlett didn’t urinate on stage, and for that I was glad. I watched her being just another actress up there, playing a character. I saw for the first time that rock and roll was a show.

Track 3. Die Morität von Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife

If I’d never gone to Berlin in 1996 and seen Ute Lemper sing this song in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (which is home to the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company the song’s lyricist Bertolt Brecht established in East Berlin after WWII) Spiel would have been a very different novel. I wouldn’t have become so interested in Brecht’s epic theatre in which the suspension of disbelief is itself deliberately suspended. The audience in epic theatre should be left in no doubt that they are watching theatre and not real life. Spiel tries to play some of these games from time to time.

The music for Die Morität von Mackie Messer, was composed by Kurt Weill for the Brecht/Weill musical Threepenny Opera based on John Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera. It was performed by Lotte Lenya.

It’s a quintessential Berlin song that, despite its being set in London (or, being Brechtian, because of it), perfectly evokes the grubby, underbelly disaster that was the Weimar Republic.

The song is a gritty murder ballad that recounts the victims of the London career criminal Macheath, a list of horrors that includes homicidal arson, knifings and the rape of a minor, who also happens to be a widow. Jolly stuff. It’s a dark and gritty lyric that Lenya sings with a characteristic quiver, and is built on a disturbed dockside carney-rhythm.

The much more playful jazzy version, popularised by Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra and others, is much less gruesome. Macheath is a much more palatable figure who kills people in the course of theft and throws them off the side of tugboats. There’s certainly no rape in sight.

In these versions the character of Macheath ends up playing second fiddle to these singers’ vocal and instrumental acrobatics. In the 1950s and 60s, iterations of ‘Mack the Knife’ became an opportunity for those who sang it to playfully reference its geneaology. Louis Armstrong acknowledges Lotte Lenya (who was there in the studio when he recorded it), as does Bobby Darin. Sinatra cites all three. Ella Fitzgerald made a botch of the lyrics in 1960 so she parodied Armstrong’s growling scat. It became part of her act. I won’t mention the recent Robbie Williams and Michael Buble versions. They’re reverent re-hashes.

In recent years there has been an interest in reviving the versions of the song that try to be more true to the spirit of Brecht and Weill – or at least to Lotte Lenya. The Ute Lemper version that I saw performed in 1996 is the one that is most obvious.

Because the song has been done so often it’s hard to choose a single version, so I’m posting three: the original sung by Lotte Lenya, Ella Fitzgerald’s from 1981 at the Montreux Jazz festival in which she references her 1960 mangling of the lyrics, and one by Nick Cave being Nick Cave.

Track 4. The Magic Flute, W.A. Mozart/E. Schikaneder

For anyone who ever asks how autobiographical Spiel is, one of the stories I tell is about The Magic Flute, (Die Zauberflöte) Mozart’s popular final opera first performed in Vienna in September 1791 less than three months before the composer’s death.

The story I tell begins almost two hundred years later in January 1991 when I travelled to Berlin for the first time, just over a year after fall of the Berlin Wall.

I came to Berlin with little real knowledge about it. Aside from the recent momentus events that had happened there, what I knew of the city was a mash up of a schoolboy obsession with British and American bombers, a bit of high school reading about the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie and a postcard I’d received from a friend in 1988 when the Wall was still standing which described Berlin as ‘a dangerous city’. I imagined it to be somthing like any of the Eastern Bloc capitals I’d seen on late night flim noir television – trains pulling into dark stations and mysterious cigarette-smoking women with ambivalent intentions who greeted their contacts on shadowy street corners.

When I arrived in Berlin it was from Hamburg by train a few hours after sunset, and I wasn’t five minutes from the former border post at Friedrichstrasse station when I was approached by a mysterious and beautiful young woman in a red dress. She asked for a cigarette and engaged me in conversation. It evolved that she was waiting for a friend who hadn’t shown and would I possibly accept a free ticket to see The Magic Flute at the Komische Oper which was just around the corner in Behrenstrasse.

A few minutes later I was handing my large pale blue back pack to the theatre cloak room attendant who was dressed better than I had ever been in my life. Better certainly than the borrowed coat, torn black jeans and blundstones I’d been wearing for the two days since I’d left London. I accompanied the woman into the theatre and just moments after we had reclined into a pair of rich red seats I was overwhelmed by the thrill of the first notes of the overture. It seemed that I had somehow stepped into the romantic and mysterious world of the Berlin of my imaginings: a beautiful woman whose intentions I was unsure of, whose hand was touching mine on the armrest, a soprano lifting an aria to heights I didn’t know a voice could reach.

It all seemed too unreal to be real.

And it was perhaps that very unreality, certainly my naivety, that drove me to do something that still today I don’t understand.

At the intermission at the end of the first act I made some lame excuse about having to find a room for the night, then went to the cloak room and claimed my bag. On the street. the woman and I shared a short polite kiss. I stood back and watched her dissolve into the red foyer in her red dress for the second act. I never saw her again.

This is a story that I have embellished over the years to the point where, happily, I don’t know where the truth begins and my imagination takes over, but the basic shape is there.

One of the results of this embellishment is locked into the plot of Spiel as a young man, an architect, travels to Berlin and, soon after he steps off the train at Friedrichstrasse, finds himself being invited to a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute by a beautiful and mysterious woman in a red dress. At the end of the first act, just after the first appearance of the Queen of the Night, the architect and the woman abandon the performance. They head into an uncertain and explosive future in which the mysterious woman disappears and the architect tries to track her down. The soprano who plays the Queen of the Night in the performance becomes central to the architect’s search.

So Spiel is autobiographical in the sense that its psychological origins are true. What underpins it is the desire to recover a missing person. It creates the psychic space in which the search can take place.

What I think fiction, ok, literary fiction if I’m going to be a snob about it, does so well is to create spaces where echoes between the real world and the imaginary can resound in strange ways. For me these echoes are somettimes things I have shouted into the space myself, that is they appear by design, but sometimes they are noises I overhear, coincidences that emerge from those dark space of the world. When I was telling the story in Spiel,The Magic Flute turned out to be a rich seam for me to mine.

The Magic Flute also gave me a connection to the other cultural figure I wanted to reference in the novel, the neo-classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel who gave the city much of its imperial character in the early part of the 19th Century. Aside from his work as an architect, Schinkel was was also involved with theatre set design and produced a rich series of backdrops of a production of The Magic Flute in Berlin in 1815. The one which struck me in particular was the very orderly but still overwhelming canopy of stars he produced as a backdrop for the Queen of the Night. In my research for the novel I found a text written by Schinkel which spoke of ‘the orderly entrance into chaos’ and this seemed to be a way of thinking about the entire structure of my novel and the image of the backdrop for the malevolent character of the Queen of the Night (who isn’t revealed as such in Act 1 of The Magic Flute) gave me the creative permission I’d been looking for to enter this creative space.

What I also find fascinating is the way The Magic Flute still keeps finding its way back into the way I think about the novel.

An example: In Spiel the woman and the architect are sitting on the pavement outside the theatre at the intermission. The woman makes a case for not going back in for the second act. She suggests that if they were to leave and not discover the fate of the characters in the story, then the fate of those characters could change. Tree falling in forest, etc. The narrator isn’t convinced. He says:

—Once it’s written, it’s written. Doesn’t matter if it was written by Mozart, Schikaneder, or Kermit the Frog.
—Don’t you think that Tamino and Pamina are real living people? she says.
—Of course not, I say. They’re just characters.

Something I’ve just now discovered in my research for this post about The Magic Flute is that in its very first performance in 1791 its librettist Emanuel Schikaneder himself played the role of the birdcatcher Papageno. So for me there’s a nice coincidence here that I have somehow managed to hint at in the novel without knowing that the character and the author actually were much less separate than might normally have been the case.

And finally, something not so much The Magic Flute but the theatre in which my narrator goes to see it, the Komische Oper. The theatre is very much real (it is on Behrenstrasse in Berlin’s Mitte district) but in Spiel I take the liberty of destroying it in an explosion which happens off ‘stage’ sometime during the opera’s second act, after the narrator and the woman have left the building. (Well it may not have happened at all, but that’s entirely another matter.) I was recently doing some reading on Australian connections with Berlin when I discovered that Melbourne-born theatre director Barrie Kosky will, from the 2012/2013 season, become Chief Director of the Komische Oper Berlin. While I was thrilled to read of another Melbourne-Berlin-Komische Oper connection I worried that Kosky’s first order of business might be be to put on a production of The Magic Flute. If you’re reading this Barrie, don’t do it. I don’t like the predicitve power of fiction.

I’ve included three excerpts from The Magic Flute: the Overture, the Queen of the Night’s famous aria Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen and Papageno, Papagena.

Track 5. Nena – 99 Luftballons

It was probably always going to be impossible for me to write a novel set in pre- and post-Wall Berlin without including some kind of reference to Nena’s 99 Luftballons.

There’s something irresistible about a kitschy Europop song with a fat bassy synth that’s set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war that leaves civilisation in ruins, and there isn’t another song that more perfectly marks the intersection between the pop culture and nuclear angst of Spiel’s narrator in the early 1980s. I shudder to think of the other songs I could have made reference to which also mark the move toward the fall of the Berlin Wall (I’m thinking Europe’s Final Countdown, and The Scorpions’ Winds of Change.)

Given that the song is played out in the novel at a time when any political currency it might once have been able to trade off had already been spent in the lolly shop of nostalgia radio, I thought it would be more meaningful to the narrative not to have the original playing anywhere. So the version I imagine Rosa Stumm playing in her apartment with the narrator on drunken vocals is driven by the mourning drone that is the backbone of cabaret-style accordion playing. I imagine for the narrator it’s a nostalgia trip, and does what nostalgia does so well: it masks his conscious knowledge of the awful events of the present, his knowledge that the bomb has exploded in the theatre.

Two versions here. Original and a 2002 version in which Nena covers herself!

Track 6. Nina Hagen and Automobil – Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen

Nina Hagen first came to my attention in the early 80s when the still nascent SBS Television was airing its music program ‘Rock Around the World’ hosted by Basia Bonkowski. More than once Bonkowski played a clip by Nina Hagen. I don’t remember the song but I remember it was somewhere between opera and punk and I thought she was amazing. She was the real deal, anything but factory made.

Hagen was an East German until 1976 when her famous mother, the actress Eva Hagen, followed her husband, the poet Wolf Biermann, out of the country after he was stripped of his citizenship while on a tour of West Germany. Nina Hagen followed.

Hagen already had a following in the East as the singer in the band Automobil with the hit ‘Du hast den farbfilm vergessen’ (‘You forgot the colour film’) which is about the way the vividness of experience is lost in the imperfect technologies of memory. The good times don’t look as good in black and white. The song took on new popularity after it was featured in Sonnenallee (1999) one of the German ‘ost-algie’ films that surfaced a decade or so after the end of the East German state, which imagined that life there wasn’t so bad after all.

Nina Hagen is still going strong, still refusing to fit into anyone’s boxes. Sometimes Hindu, sometimes UFO-believer, and now apparently Christian, she’s always very intense and always dares to be different. This is her very disorderly website.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEnH_niAKWQ

The novel has started to garner some attention from critics and now that there’s a critical mass  (well, three to be exact, with more to come)  I’ve posted quotes and links to them where they’re available on the reviews page.

Last week I also bumbled my way through an interview in German, or more properly Denglish (Deutsch-English), with Christian Froelicher at SBS Radio in Melbourne. Those of you who don’t speak German will possibly be glad that I was flummoxed at the prospect of explaining what a metaphysical thriller was in German (and for those of you do speak it, I suspect you’ll be even gladder than those who don’t.) There’s a link to the SBS podcast here and another one in the Media/Events page.

I’ll be doing some more radio in Perth on RTRfm as well as in Adelaide in the near future.

If the reviews do interest you and you would like to get hold of a book outside Australia it’s available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. In the UK the book is available in a print on demand version which means no prohibitive postage costs from the southern hemisphere.

Storytelling is part of this evasiveness. The joy we take in writing – and reading – a novel is about participating in the deferral of that moment when all a story’s truths are laid bare. This is the game of writing.

And I think the greatest pleasure to be had in playing this game is to involve the reader in it.

Indeed as writers it’s our responsibility to the game that we don’t see readers as mere passive onlookers who cheer or boo from the bleachers, but to think of them as being in there, on the ground, as part of the story.

Our job as writers is to imagine a truth and then to set the luscious and confounding texture of words and narrative before the reader and allow them to navigate their own way through. It’s something James Joyce took very seriously, and that Borges was endlessly fascinated by.

But to think of writing as mere play is perhaps to undervalue the meaning of the word ‘play’ itself. There still remains the problem of truth and how to approach it. This is why we really play the game. We write because we have some larger truth to tell, and it seems the only way to tell it is to tell a fiction about it. If a word is a symbol standing between a thing and our understanding of it, then a story is a symbl that helps us to see larger, more complex truths.

The happy paradox of course is that it is fiction – an untruth – that we use to point at truths.

In Spiel I’ve dealt with this conundrum in quite in a number of ways. The narrator, whose name may or may not be Karl, is on a quest but he is uncertain what he is questing for. Whatever it is, it has driven him, or pulled him, to Berlin where he meets with a mysterious woman whose name turns out to be Rosa Stumm, his long forgotten penpal. A coincidence. And, importantly for the story, perhaps even a meaningful coincidence. Rosa Stumm herself may or may not be blind. They go to the opera and when at the intermission she pulls him away, it may or may not be the case she has saved him from a bomb explosion. And later when Rosa Stumm disappears it’s no longer certain that she ever existed at all.

So what is the truth that lies behind all this may-or-may-notting?

I’ll be typically evasive and answer by saying that there are many answers to the question. But one of them might have something to do with time and its narrative companion – history.

Through the story this narrator, who is an almost-failed architect, from a family with a tradition of being architects, comes to recognise that the truth of history is not always a simple matter of telling what one sees. The truth, if it resides anywhere, is woven into a fabric of convenient lies, of silences and of stories.

The characters in this book reflect something that is I think common to all of us. We are very good at forgetting that we are always directly connected to uncomfortable pasts. What emerges from the story is that no matter how dark, febrile and distant that past might be, there is an inalienable continuity between the past and the present. The present inherits the past and ignores it at its peril.

And it’s reminders of this continuity that keep haunting the architect and which keeps rupturing into his life, the way a dream or a nightmare might seem real during the dream. When he finally comes to Berlin, this truth becomes impossible to keep in check and it overtakes his life in unimaginable ways.

This is an extract from a speech given at the New Voices Festival on 25 July, 2009.

The session is called ‘Beautiful Lies’ and I’ll talking about Spiel and how it plays with truth and lies and the craft of storytelling. I’ll be appearing with debut novelists Gaynor McGrath (Lemniscate), Claire Thomas (Fugitive Blue) and Katherine Johnson (Pescadore’s Wake). Book signing afterwards.

Jane Sullivan, literary columnist at The Age will be chairing.

Entry: $5.00 per session. Full Festival $20.00. Lunch $10.00.

Bookings are essential for each session. To book email ELTHAMbookshop@bigpond.com

Come down and say hi. There’s a link to the full program on my events page

btw, I really like the synopsis of Spiel the folk at New Voices have come up with. 

Spiel – A fast paced trek through the streets of Berlin as a young Australian architect retraces his family’s footsteps in David Sornig’s roller-coaster ride of emotion and discovery. 

 

Berlin, New Years Eve. A young architect abandons the apocalyptic heat of a Melbourne summer for the streets his grandfather once walked. Barely off the train, a blind woman invites him to play a game. The Spiel has begun.

When the pair narrowly escape a bomb blast, the woman disappears, leaving only the name that has haunted the architect since childhood – Rosa Stumm. But who is Rosa Stumm?

In his vertiginous hunt for her obsession and past collapse, dream and destiny are blurred, and imaginations collide. The architect must now face the scars left by the terrible legacy of his ancestry and atone for the life he left in Australia.

‘Spiel’ is David Sornig’s debut novel.

Published by UWAP.