Category: Blog

Archive Fever

SoutherlyBlog

by Claire Scobie I’ve often found libraries sexy places to work; none more so than the British Library in London. As you walk up the marble steps, you feel the tension. Everyone is focused, everyone is busy. You can’t dawdle or daydream here. Inside the reading rooms the atmosphere is hushed. It’s this intensity, a combination of intellectual stimulation, furious study and a reverence – for books, for the written word – that fuels the headiness of the creative process. During the four years working on The Pagoda Tree I spent many weeks there. My favourite place to write and read…

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Week Two: History with my feet

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by Claire Scobie On my second visit to Thanjuvar, I interviewed the current Prince, Babaji Rajah Bhonsle, in his palace with its air of fading grandeur. I was hoping for pomp and ceremony, but he arrived in beige slacks and a pressed white shirt. He’s a modern Prince – he’s on Linked-In. As we sat drinking chai in a dark room hung with chandeliers and portraits of his royal predecessors, he mentioned we were sitting in the original harem. I felt a frisson of excitement. My character, Palani, is based on the real Muddupalani, a royal courtesan and poet who…

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In search of The Pagoda Tree: a four-part series

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by Claire Scobie Over the next four weeks I’m writing about the process I went through thinking, dreaming, researching and writing my novel, The Pagoda Tree (Penguin). Set in eighteenth-century India, this is largely told through the eyes of a temple dancer, or devadasi, named Maya whose life is transformed by the arrival of the British. After my first book, Last Seen in Lhasa, was published I suffered from second book syndrome. As with many first-time authors, my first book, a travel memoir, was a labour of love, a story I felt compelled to write because of my years going…

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June monthly blogger – Claire Scobie!

SoutherlyBlog

Many thanks to Tom Lee for his excellent posts. This month, Claire Scobie will blog for Southerly. Her bio is below. Claire Scobie is the award-winning author of Last Seen in Lhasa and The Pagoda Tree, chosen by Good Reading magazine as one of their Best Fiction Reads 2013. She has lived and worked in the UK, India and now Sydney. Claire mentors writers and runs creative writing workshops across Australia and retreats in Italy. She has appeared as a panellist on ABC TV’s First Tuesday Book Club in a travel-writing special and is a regular guest at writers’ festivals. She is a member of the British Guild of Travel…

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The Gerald M. School for The Improved Reliving of Personal Memories

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A fictional interview, by Tom Lee It was in August this year that I first heard about the Gerald M. School for The Improved Reliving of Personal Memories. M. had been a favourite author of mine for a number of years, so when I discovered the school on an Internet search I was intrigued. The ‘About’ section on the school’s website discusses the genesis of the idea. Apparently M. learnt of a design project (http://www.materialisingmemories.com/) aiming to create strategies to assist in the navigation of the vast amount of digital images that people take in order to capture a moment,…

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The architecture of grass

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by Tom Lee In Bill Gammage’s remarkable book on the land care practices of the first Australians, The Biggest Estate on Earth,‘grass’ is among the most frequently indexed words. It’s up there with ‘Europeans’, ‘animals’, and ‘forest’. In the ‘grass’ entry in the index the reader is told to see also “clearings; fire; grass names; plains”, and the subcategories include: introduced, native, beside water, corridors (see also belts, paths), and on good soil. The word’s semantic reach includes more than half the book. Why is this word so central to Gammage’s thesis? Because the first Australians were experts at caring…

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“A solitary game without opponent”: mitigating the anxiety of Judge Holden

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by Tom Lee In the previous post I quoted from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I suggested that the logic of Judge Holden and his war games was perhaps nothing other than maladapted techniques to mitigate bad affects associated with solitude. War doesn’t predict truth, in the sense that it decides the winners of history, as the Judge would have us believe. War is a romantic quest that protects one from loneliness and boredom. In this post I will consider some ideas for an alternate way to think about solitude. In his recently translated You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk…

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The Lonely and Homeless Judge

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by Tom Lee Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in a work of fiction. The Judge is the brains and the brawn of a group of scalp hunters who navigate the hellish terrain of the American South West in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Holden has been convincingly compared to a devilish manifestation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (La Shot, 2009); a god of war, trained equally in martial arts and in the sophistry required to make a case for the inherent truthfulness of the outcomes decided in combat. Holden is a fascinating character, at…

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May Southerly blogger – Tom Lee

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Many thanks to Aashish Kaul for his excellent posts. This month, our blogger is Tom Lee. His bio is below. Tom Lee is a writer, researcher and teacher who works at universities in Sydney. He wrote his PhD thesis on the work of W.G. Sebald. Tom has recently developed an interest in cemetery architecture and the relationship between landscape design and human practices. He is a 2014 recipient of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for the category of prose. 

Comrade Kibalchich

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by Aashish Kaul Marseilles. Late winter, 1941. Icy winds. A boat preparing to depart for Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, a boat with just two cabins and a total of seven bunks for the lucky few. For the rest, the hold with little light or air, with makeshift bunk beds hurriedly assembled. A very long and distressing voyage ahead for nearly four hundred men, women, and children escaping one or another persecution, now being herded into the steamer by armed gendarmes, free with their hands and insults, as if these hapless passengers were convicts in the process of deportation, or…

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The Novel

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by Aashish Kaul There is a line in Alberto Manguel’s With Borges where, reminiscing about his childhood, Borges reveals how in those days he would regularly accompany his father to the National Library in Buenos Aires and, too timid to ask for a book, would often simply pull out a volume of the Britannica and read at random. This is how he said he learned in one day about ‘the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden.’ The brief statement is delivered by the ageing writer in his typical casual manner, but its intent is clear: a reader can derive all of…

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A Fine Balance

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by Aashish Kaul Some months ago, while in India, I went up into the mountains. On a late afternoon, following a walk in the forest, with the day clear and the sun still strong, I came to a café and sat in the open. All around the pines were dark, and there was snow in them, you could see how light tussled to touch the snow that shone very white in the checkered shade. In front, at some distance, stretched from far north down into the east the glacial arc of the Himalayas separating me from Tibet, while to the…

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