Miriam Zolin

So, just when I was about to shut the blog part of my site down and replace it with a Welcome page, I remembered there’s news. About my writing. Ooops!  Isn’t that what this little space is for?  Erm. Yes. Actually. That’s exactly what it’s for.

So here is the news!

I made myself a promise this year that I would start submitting work for publication again. And I kept my promise. Plus had some bits accepted. Recent airings have been:

A submission to the PenTales competition on the theme ‘Connected’ got my little story published and reviewed. This is a vibrant, energetic writing community on the web – an excellent way to spend some time on reading on your screen. Read my story ‘Half a Toast’ here >>>>

…and then Griffith REVIEW accepted an essay I wrote about that tricky question of whether and to what extent it is okay to use a real memory to inform your fiction writing. Read the dog of fiction and the wolf of memory here >>>>

… plus Sleepers Almanac No 7 was launched this month and my ‘New York Story’ was included in it. Purchase the eBook Sleepers Almanac No 7 here from Readings here >>>>, or get your print copy in your favourite local shop!

It’s such a great feeling to see my work in print and thanks to all the people who’ve accepted the  pieces for publication and the readers who’ve enjoyed reading them!

From my notebook – November 2006

I walked today within a block of the World Trade Centre site in New York City but did not visit Ground Zero. I knew it was there, but I didn’t want to see it. I actually searched inside myself for some urge to go and take a look, but found none. I almost tried to feel some compunction. As though by not taking advantage of my proximity, I was betraying some normal human impulse. I suppose in some ways I was. The same impulse that has freeway drivers slowing down to take a look at accident sites.

No matter how hard I tried to think it through, I just didn’t want to go. And it wasn’t squeamishness. I know how I feel when I’m squeamish, and this wasn’t it. I’ve been in New York City four times since 11 September 2001. I was here just days before it happened. I remember where I was when I first saw the footage of the planes and the building and the smoke. I remember the stomach hit. Going to see the site felt enormously disrespectful, for reasons I could not unpack. It just felt that way.

Leaving the apartment I’m staying in, in the West Village, I had picked up my camera and then put it down again, leaving it on the bench for the day. I thought about none of this until I walked down the section of Broadway that’s just a block from Ground Zero and saw tourists everywhere – more tourists than I had seen in the previous day and a half that I’d been in the city. I saw them heading down the streets that led to the place where it happened. Yet I could not walk down those same streets.

What made me turn away from the idea of visiting this important site of a momentous event? The site is real history, isn’t it? A place where something really happened; from which ripples of meaning had spread at impact and continued to spread? A place it would be good to say I’d seen? Wouldn’t seeing it enable me to empathise more, understand better?

In the serendipitous way that these things happen, I sought refuge in a bookshop, escaping from the freezing wind. The New York Times Book Review is a treat at $4.95 US instead of the $15.00 or so I pay from it when I buy it in Australia. In this issue I found a review by John Updike of an exhibition of Robert Polidori’s photos of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In the review, Updike quotes Susan Sontag from her book of essays On Photography “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” she says. And “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” Reading Sontag’s words in Updike, I felt better somehow about being this close to that place, and not taking a look, through a camera lens or otherwise.

As some of youse know, one of my other hats is that of a publisher, and a member of the Small Press Network (SPUNC). I’ve done a couple of blogs over there on their Splog, with more to follow on the same theme.

First Instalment >>>>

I think the value of eBooks is that you can get your books on impulse as opposed to going ‘Oh, I have to get to the bookshop’ Even though I love the bookshop, I find that now I have a two year old, I just don’t get time.  Read more >>>>

Second Instalment >>>>

I need a site that will tell me ‘here are 20 recommendations, here are the links and it’s fifty bucks. Pay and download now’. More and more I think people will want packaged eBook convenience that’s targeted at their buying … but not subject to Amazon buying power. Read more >>>>

Well, if blogs had existed in 1976 then my mother would have been doing this >>> instead of me having to do it. Not that I mind writing about this major life-changing series of events that happened to me at the age of 12, when like all kids at that age, I was on the cusp of adult-hood, open to all of life’s wonderful possibilities, and proudly hopeful of my place in it. We ‘went bush’, you see – ‘homesteading’, to use the more common term at the time. My brother and I were taken out of school – we were home schooled before it became repopularised – and we lived this strange life away from all the addictions of modern life. Science fiction, wood stoves, silver jewellery and wallabies in the dry gully, kerosene lanterns for light and a generator for our power, bio-loo and chooks,  herb garden and home made bread.  Over the next few [insert unit of time]s I’ll be updating the Malemijo blog with entries from Mum’s journal.  At some point there will also be eBooks to download – chapters and excerpts from the Gone Bush periodical that we produced at Malemijo, full of tips and tricks for a sustainable lifestyle in the seventies and eighties, and mostly still relevant now.

malemijo.miriamzolin.com >>>

Who were the drummer and bass player who started the Hypnotic Jazz Ensemble gig last night?  They snuck on and gave us a couple of songs, a kind of sound check maybe? Telling us their names (sorry, didn’t write them down) then telling us that Festival Director Sophie had suggested they come on and do a mini-gig before the real gig. Why not?  Crowds were still arriving for the gig proper. We were all having fun. We liked the idea, and yeah, enjoyed the bass. And the drums. Why not indeed.

The real gig began with a yelled challenge “Make some motherf*cken noise, Australia!”

Yaay! we said.

Disappointed, they exhorted us in like manner once more to voice our enthusiasm.

YAAY! we said. We whistled and stomped. Satisfactory, finally, it seems.

Later, as the crowd is wound up and musicked we are a sea of bobbing heads, raised right hands in a constant, rythmic wave, that makes the inside of the Forum appear like a bed of sea anemones.  I look down and see that the mob down there at the front is no longer discernable as a group of individuals. They are one creature, with about 200 arms and 200 iPhones. And even up where I am, in a booth, up the back, we are all moving with the music. Yes, even those of us who resist the audience participation aspects of this gig.

Speaking of which, at times a little bit too much Oprah Winfrey for my taste (maybe it’s a Chicago thing): after some enthusiastic audience responses we get “Yeah, now you part of the family.”

Passing thought on the sousaphone – I like the idea of an instrument you have to wear.

And was that a mini-tuba?  Three valves or five, I wondered. I may never know the answer

Was it really necessary for all those boys to take their shirts off? (Superior quality washboard abs notwithstanding)

According to their website… (www.hypnoticbrassensemble.com) the HBE came up up with their ensemble name after an incident on the El:  playing on the platform, a man in a suit watched them for hours, missing train after train, till [sic] in the end he walked up to them and said, “You guys just hypnotized me”.

All that brass, all that swinging brass. A lineup of musicians who moved like fluid while they played. The family connection credentials are super-fine (is that what one says?) and there was alot of love in the room – even if a fairly large proportion of it had been whipped up by our hosts.

I couldn’t stay until the end. But hundreds did. And they were having a wonderful time. I learned some dance moves last night – new and exciting ways to use elbows.