the ’sham

For those of you who have just got your copy of Bilateral Petersham from the exhibition at artspace, perhaps you’re beginning to delve into my adventures of just over a year ago. I’d be curious to know how it reads, what the experience of reading is like for you, where you are when you read…
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I enjoyed reading this go-on-listen-to-my-troubles entry. We were about due for one! There’s a kind of voyeuristic pleasure in watching the author gyre and gymble in his own excrement. Funnily, though, the “problems” presented by this esteemed author don’t really come across as insurmountable roadblocks at all.

Actually, the thing I like about these worry-confessions is that rather than “moving the plot along” they provide a small “breathing space” to reflect on what has been. And this one even foreshadows the events to come in the following week.

I also particularly liked this little excerpt, where I’m trying to create a metaphor for embodied documentary-making:

I’m trying to use text as a documentary tool. My eyes and ears are a camera, my mind the film stock, my keyboard an editing suite, the blog is the cinema where you watch it all played back again (and the comments are the seats from which you heckle).

Listen in to this episode the d word podcast. [mp3, 9min, 4mb].

Or read the original posting here.

This is a “key episode” in the sham: in which I depart the neighbourhood for the day. Plenty of ruminations here about the nature of my experience due to having to be blindfolded the entire time.

Listen in here [26 min, 13mb mp3].

Read the original episode here.

This is an off-the-cuff reflection on the process of re-reading the blog, one year later. I muse that it seems that the further away from the date of the actual events depicted in the blog, the more they become like stories…the less it seems important that they were “real events” which actually occurred. Thinking, also, about the regularity of the really “good yarns” - they don’t seem to happen each and every day.

Listen in here. [2mb, mp3, 2.5min]

I drift inexorably towards my conclusion. I trust less and less the prediction made by Caroline the op-shop lady. Back in early April, she assessed my personality, and judged that I “function better by working towards a deadline”. But here we are, with only two days to go ’til my exhibition, and I’m still blundering about like Mr Ryder, the pianist in Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled.

The entire time I’ve been working on the ’sham, I’ve been reading this novel. And I feel like it’s had some powerful yet subtle influence over my writing, not to mention the way I move through time and space in the suburb. In The Unconsoled, Mr Ryder arrives in an unspecified European city. He’s a famous pianist, and is booked in to do some sort of presentation on “Thursday night”. Trouble is, everyone seems to know what he’s supposed to be do except Ryder himself. Worse still, it appears he’s agreed to countless minor appointments between “now” and Thursday - none of which he can recall. He rushes, flustered and irritated, to make each meeting, only to be waylaid en route by someone who has been expecting him somewhere else. In fact, he should have been at that encounter more than half an hour ago. And so on. Each journey bifurcates, and every subsequent path is itself diverted… After four hundred and thirty seven pages (I’m not yet at the end!) Ryder still hasn’t arrived at Thursday night.

In novel time, less than three days have passed. But for me, it’s been more than fifty days. And although most of my days in Petersham have been nowhere near as frustrating as Ryder’s, to a certain extent I share his feeling, that I’m not quite master of my own destiny. And even more: the absurd sense that the looming deadline is somehow rather meaningless. In my case, all the more so, since my exhibition is going to take place in Camperdown. And still, I allow time to wash over me, moving me closer to the end.
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Vince is a town planner for the Marrickville Council. I first met him at the resident feedback session some weeks back, where he gave me the big printed maps I’ve been using to chart the boundaries of Petersham. I decided to pay him a visit down at the council offices on Fisher Street.

The council has a cool ticketing system for when you need to talk to them about your rates, pay a fine, or get your dog released from the pound [see footnote]. It’s a bit like down at the RTA, except there are only about three chairs, so my guess is that enquiries would be processed just as well with a less sophisticated queueing system. Be that as it may, I was pushed right to the front, given my exceptional foresight in having phoned ahead for an appointment with Vince.

While I waited for Vince to fetch me, I nosed through the array of brochures on display near the incredible coffee and tea machine at reception. I’m serious: it’s the kind of appliance my Dad had at his corporate office in 1982, with individual chutes for tea, coffee, sugar and milk. You turn a knob (a bit like the channel selector on an old TV set) and a measured quantity of your choice of beverage powder shoots out into your polystyrene cup. My visual memory is not sophisticated enough to recall the exact colour of this labour-saving device, but if pressed, I would hazard a guess at solid orange, with brown-tinted transparent plastic holding the powders.
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