By Mat | Published:
November 13, 2006
The LaTrobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria is possessed of such a tranquil, scholarly ambience that, in order to remind the reader of the perfect serenity he or she is privileged to enjoy, it has had to be randomly seeded with unoiled chairs which scream at the lightest touch like a bed full of climaxing banshees.
By Mat | Published:
April 4, 2006
My friend Iris is emigrating to China, and I have agreed to take some of her things to save her storage costs. In her living room, as I browse her possessions and make my choices, I feel awkward. What does it say that I chose to take her DVD player and her blender that can crush ice, but not her steel lamp or wicker rocking chair? Does she think I think her lamp is ugly? That I mock her set of red shelves with hand-painted pink spots? I decide to overcompensate.
‘Everything is so beautiful!’ I say. ‘I wish I could take everything!’
By Mat | Published:
December 23, 2005
There’s a man coming to fix my TV, which tried to neck itself last week after inadvertently being left on for a whole episode of Threshold, and the repair company is only able to give me an appointment time accurate to the nearest geological epoch.
So I’m forced to spend a whole day stuck inside the house waiting for him to come, a job made much more difficult by the necessity to avoid the fact that it’s a normal work day and I should be inside the house anyway, actually working. Here’s how it goes:
By Mat | Published:
August 12, 2005
There are a number of loose bricks in my front yard, left over from the time I decided to build a garden rockery but didn’t have the maths to work out how many square metres of soil I needed, how many bricks to use or how to get to Melways Ref. 45E9, where the garden centre lives. The wounded pigeon and I eyed them with a great sense of foreboding.
Which is to say, I eyed it with a sense of foreboding. He eyed it with the same expression with which pigeons eye everything, which is mild surprise. Blimey, he was thinking. Bricks. Well I never, eh? Coo.
By Mat | Published:
August 11, 2005
And then, of course, there’s the question of the evolutionary future of pigeons.
A few months ago I reported in these pages that through a series of unfortunate circumstances my editorial consultant had to be confined to the house for reasons of prophylactic hygiene. Consequently, he and I have spent the daylight hours of the last eleven weeks like a pair of isolated lighthouse keepers, which is to say composing sea shanties, threatening to murder each other and periodically going mad.
Today, finally, was his day of release. We parted company after breakfast, I with a promise to stay in touch, he with a placatory wee on the door mat.
In fact, watching him reacquaint himself with the non-carpet universe, I was reminded of how editorial consultants divide their world into four kinds of thing: things to eat, things to kill, plants, and things with which to perform acts which the vet had confidently assured us he could no longer perform, but which every lonely lighthouse keeper dreams of, late at night when the fog is thick and the seaways clear.
It’s possible to forget some things very quickly. Specifically, it occurred to me as I watched him scarper over the back fence that I had forgotten about my consultant’s past habit of turning up to editorial meetings with a pigeon in his mouth.
My first reaction in this situation is always reflexively to wonder if I should have brought a packet of Tim Tams or something.
By Mat | Published:
June 14, 2005
Typing is not writing in the same way that a cocktail shaker is not a jug of margaritas. Discuss.
The more you want to write, the more you will have to type, and the ratio is exponential. A simple email to a colleague can usually be banged off in a single, barely-considered pass, whereas any letter you have to write to your car insurance company will require at least three fully-edited drafts to construct the precise series of logical statements which best explain the entirely innocent physical circumstances which lead you to shunt a Mr Whippy van into a hearse.
By Mat | Published:
June 1, 2005
I did some quick sums a couple of days ago and realised that my final act is now seventy pages long, and I haven’t even got to the really exciting bit yet.
This gave me an excuse to do something I’ve always enjoyed, which is editing in widescreen. Because there’s a lot of material, and the changes I anticipated would most likely involve shuffling big chunks of text around, the best way to do it is to print the whole thing out, spread it out on the floor and scan it from a distance to let the large-scale structures reveal themselves.
Here then is what my living room floor looked like this morning:
Also posted in editing, photos, writing |
By Mat | Published:
May 27, 2005
The following post will contain no transitive or intransitive verbs. Any resemblance to an extract from Bridget Jones’ Diary is purely the result of massive holes in Helen Fielding’s education.
Also posted in not writing, sloth |
