writinge

heathen scripture

Jack Laurian Pascoe news views cues, writinge 4 Comments

I know, I know, I’m being really slack at the moment. Bear with me; the novel is powering along under considerable pressure; an online component is likely to emerge in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, let me direct you to Geoff Lemon, a Melbourne blogger that every Australian should read:

heathenscripture.wordpress.com

Thanks to Eug for the link – this dude’s going viral as we speak.

By the way, hope you’ve all seen the footage of the Cream Pie Incident, complete with Wendi Deng getting airborne on the way to delivering the culprit an extremely fast-response whack. Priceless.

I hope she’s a little less volatile with her children.

night and day, switched

Jack Laurian Pascoe news views cues, reading, writinge 5 Comments

As you may know, I’m well into the writing of my first novel, which has rather taken the puff out of my blogging sails. I’ve also moved from one department of the corporation I work for – no wait, backtrack: in March this year I was just starting to think I needed steadier and less physically demanding work than life modelling (at which I’ve made a modest living for the last several years) and I was wondering how the feck, given my sterling lack of qualifications, contacts and networking skills, I might find one. Then in one of those flukey serendipitous events that makes the credulous believe in whichever higher power they feel inclined toward, my sister’s ex offered me a job. Or rather, the chance of a job, which I duly got. Permanent part-time – perfect. I rejoiced in the novelty of sick pay, holiday pay, etc – luxuries I haven’t enjoyed since back in the days when I was on contract to a ballet company. But then it turns out I have to be able to read from a screen while listening to the vilest talkback radio through earphones, and process them both simultaneously…

Now forgive me blowing my own trumpet for just a moment: I am a smart girl – a straight HDs uni graduate. But in this endeavour I suffered a fairly humiliating defeat: I can focus intently on the one pursuit for many uninterrupted hours, but I cannot flick constantly between my ears and my eyes. I struggled with it for six months and made but the tiniest headway – not enough, I could see, to keep my job. So before the axe fell, I applied for a transfer to a department where all I do is speed read and process. Easy-peasy.

But the change of departments came with a condition: the readers’ dept works 24/7, and options on the day shifts go to the night-shift workers before the newbies. If I wanted a reading job, the only available shift was 11pm-7am, Saturday to Tuesday nights. I took it.

It happened to involve eight more hours than I had been doing, plus some quite nice loadings for the overnight work – altogether my income has almost doubled. And – not to be perverse – I’m loving the night shift. It’s been three weeks now, and to avoid jetlag (joblag?) I keep similar hours even on my three nights off, shifting only enough to get business-hours errands done or visit my grandmother. I sleep  8am-3pm, roughly, and have my evenings to socialise etc, and the three nights I’m not working, I’m writing the novel. Well, two of them, actually, since friends of mine run an overnight radio show on skid row, so Friday nights I go hang out with them.

All of which makes me a bona fide night-owl of the blackest stripe :)

heckling the archbishop

Jack Laurian Pascoe news views cues, philosophickal, writinge 6 Comments

Damnit, SMH Heckler didn’t publish my rant about Scripture classes vs ethics classes. (Heckler really only likes trivial subjects; they certainly couldn’t’ve been expected to publish the furious scorpion-strike I sent them; St Andrew’s would’ve wrung Fairfax out.) Fine. I’ll edit it the way I think they should’ve, take a few liberties with word limit because I can, and publish it myself…

Ooh, I do love to see an Archbishop’s dander up. In case you’ve been down a rabbit hole, several NSW state schools are engaged in a 10-week trial course in ethics, learning how to bring evidence and reason to bear when making moral decisions. The course was developed by the St James Ethics Centre and the University of NSW philosophy department as a constructive activity for students who choose not to attend Scripture classes.

Church leaders are expressing grave concern – because up until now Religion has had ownership of that time in the school week. The Education Act states that children should not be offered lessons in subjects which could act as competition to religious classes. But surely such a restriction is unethical these days? Heavens, we’re talking about blind faith, not mathematics.

Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen has been the trial’s most vocal critic. Dr Jensen has been honest about his principal concern: if ethics, as an alternative to religious instruction, is allowed to become part of the permanent curriculum, it will draw numbers away from Scripture class to the point where Scripture may eventually be dropped from the curriculum altogether. Of course there are many who think religious instruction has no place in the public schooling system; naturally the Archbishop is not among them.

Dr Jensen has said he is less than impressed by the thoughtfulness with which the matter has been discussed in political circles. A pity he doesn’t listen to the people then – the airwaves have been thick this week with stories of Scripture classes taught by poor, ill-trained, misguided zealots who tell children they’ll burn in hell if they don’t believe. (Apparently the scrutiny that His Grace says must be applied to the ethics course is not being brought to bear on traditional religious instruction.) Many parents feel the need for some kind of moral training for their children, free of religious doctrine, and the thoughtfulness of their comments has been truly impressive.

Dr Jensen argues that Scripture is important to education whether you’re religious or not, and he’s right in part. The study of world religions and their effect on society and history is indeed important to education, but that’s a long way from Scripture class. I’m astonished to learn from all this that our proudly secular and inclusive society is still teaching Scripture rather than comparative religion. Please, for the sake of education standards, schools must bring in volunteers from universities, not churches.

Dr Simon Longstaff, executive director of the St James Ethics Centre, says all material to be used in the ethics classes will be made available to churches for use in their own classes. I’m sure they’ll jump at it – or maybe ethics isn’t really their thing. Certainly Dr Jensen refused the invitation to have input to the course when it was being developed last year. How much richer and wiser a culture we’d be with both comparative religion and ethics classes in the permanent curriculum. I only wish we could get church leaders to sit in.

adventures in solitude (forthcoming noir zombie vs vampire film)

Jack Laurian Pascoe feel it, miscellany, writinge 1 Comment

adventures in solitude pt 1: fact

A little after dark I am driving a pale blue Kombi down an unlit country road and suddenly I come to a barred gate. Damn, not such a good shortcut. I swing the Kombi into a three-point turn and while I’m facing an open field my lights go out. The darkness around me is immense, shadowy and silent beyond my little engine. I have the parkers, which on the Kombi are negligible, and I can see only by holding the high beam on. I check my phone: no reception. Steering while holding the high beam against the wheel and trying not to turn the indicators on, I head back to the point where I took the wrong turn, remembering houses there. On the way, I see a house I hadn’t noticed before and pull over. I knock repeatedly on the front door; no answer. I step back down into the yard and walk round one side, dodging bits of farm junk. There’s a light on inside, but no-one’s home. Suddenly I can hear my own rough accelerated breathing above the anxious orange clicking of the hazard lights, and the rustling quiet of the surrounding night. This is how horror movies start. Hn. Better get back on the road.

adventures in solitude pt 2: fiction

She stood at the black dresser in the lamplight, twirling a toothpick round the cone and gazing darkly into the mirror. Casey appeared in the doorway, looking insomniac. ‘Casey,’ she growled, low, slow and husky. ‘Go back to bed. Don’t come out here tonight. Forget anything you see or hear, and don’t come near me till daylight. I’m -‘ her upper lip curled slightly ‘- dangerous… I’m in a mood to do some damage; hell, I’m in the mood that will do damage if I’m anywhere near anyone! Please, go back to bed. And shut your goddamn door.’

sissinghurst castle gardens

Jack Laurian Pascoe people, times and places, writinge 2 Comments

We cruise through the hedgerowed English countryside, village to village, till we pass picturesque Sissinghurst and turn in along the track to the castle. Well, to the gardens, actually, since the castle, though it has enjoyed various incarnations since the 1100s, is now little but a gloriously solid Norman-style tower holding two writing rooms in which some of 20th-century Britain’s boldest words were written.

Vita Sackville-West and her family bought the ruined castle – a tower, a decrepit Victorian farmhouse and some outbuildings – in 1930, and turned the tower into studies and the farmhouse into a home – surrounded by what the National Trust calls ‘one of the world’s great gardens’. Within a couple of acres, enclosed by a wall on one side and a moat on the other, there is a series of ‘rooms’ – the white garden, the rose garden, the orchard, herb garden, yew walk, lime walk, nuttery, and so on. It’s a wanderer’s paradise, a place of grand gestures and exquisite detail, colour and shadow, encompassing both ancient stability and constant change. Vita was an intimate friend of Virginia Woolf and the inspiration for the central character in Woolf’s extraordinary novel Orlando, and the romantic, heroic atmosphere of that fantastical tale can be felt around the estate.

Besides the garden there is also, among other things, a working Elizabethan barn, a fine restaurant, picnic and parking areas, cafe, plant shop, etc. The restaurant looks out over the fields, including the organic vegetable plots from which diners’ plates are filled. I’ve promised myself that on my next trip to England, I’ll eat there.

Strangely, though I adored the gardens, my greatest pleasure was the tower – the spiralling climb, the individual writing rooms of that fascinating couple, the view from the parapets. And those exceptionally bold words? Vita’s diaries, published according to her wishes after her death by her son Nigel Nicholson in Portrait of a Marriage, give a frank and searching account of her personal life, centring around her bisexuality, her relationships with women and her passionate devotion to her husband. By allowing for publication, Vita did both the women’s movement and the sexual revolution a significant favour.

Driving away in the scented, tinted late afternoon we chose to linger in the High Weald, and stopped at a pub in Goudhurst. A great many pubs in England are almost psychedelically picturesque; this was one of them. The Star and Eagle is all 400-year-old oak beams and leadlight casements, crooked corridors and quaint but scrupulously modern facilities – gorgeous. We had the place to ourselves; ordered coffee and the local apple cake, and sat gazing out a window over soft green, gold and purple hills, the middle distance dotted with sheep.  Across the valley the contours of the weald gleamed under the slanting late summer sun, and in the pale distant sky four hot air balloons rose lazily, one after the other, and floated westward.