So a few hours ago I walked out of the office that I first walked into in September, 2006.
It felt a bit like this:
Because unlike every other time I walked out of that office, I wasn't looking ahead to the next day, or the day after the day after tomorrow, when I'd have to walk back in again.
Thanks to my having fallen into a big sloshy barrel of good luck and snared the position of daily TV writer for the Fairfax newspapers, I'm now a full-time writer, and no longer a full-time not-writer. This not only means no more eight hour days of reading newspaper reports about suburban graffiti, rural bowls results and grey nomad caravan magazines, but it also means no more driving for 2-3 hours every day to get to work and back, all the time feeling a bit like this:
Such an earth-shaking epoch in one's life can't help but cause a bit of reflection. I started working at my "day job" in September 2006, which means I've been there for seven years and five months, approximately. As dedicated fans will know, my first published piece of writing appeared on November 8, 2007 - this means that my career as anonymous desk-slogger pre-dates my career as online opinion snarker by more than a year. I've been in that job considerably longer than I've been able, even in the loosest sense, to call myself a "professional writer". The fact that I can now not only call myself such, but not qualify it with, "oh but I also have..." is quite exhilarating and something of a relief.
Until 2011 my day job was actually a night job. This means that for around 3-4 years my writing was mainly done in the mornings, after staggering home after the 11pm-7am shift, or else hurriedly banged out at night, after I woke up, before 10pm, when I'd have to leave the wife and kids and drive to work.
Since I switched to days my writing has mainly been done in the evenings after a more civilised shift, but still. always, in the fog of after-work fatigue. I think it's a weariness a lot of writers know, of doing the job you care about in the little narrow slits of time in between the job that you need.
I'm hoping I can now be less tired, and more creative, and more energetic, and that therefore this year will bring forth many magical things from me, online, in print, and on stage and screen. Fingers crossed, anyway.
It is in my nature to forever be pushing to achieve more, so I see this as another step forward, but nowhere near a final destination. But it's a big deal, a huge deal, for me, and I am very very fortunate to find myself in this new position. And if you have ever read, laughed at, linked to, retweeted, listened to, watched, or commented on anything I've done, you've helped me find this stroke of luck.
One of the things I worry about the most while writing is the question of whether I actually am a writer. "Am I?" I ask myself, frettingly biting my nails. "If only I knew the signs to look out for!"
So what a piece of luck that I found this helpful article to let me know the little signs that indicate whether someone is a writer or not. For example:
6. When you hear the words “I’m on deadline,” you immediately burst into action, a Pavlovian response to a) always having something due and b) always being behind on it. You’re certain that if they were able to make your procrastination into an energy source, it will solve our nation’s fuel crisis. Or at least make gas cheaper.
Ha! Isn't that priceless. "Fuel crisis"! Oh my yes, we writers certainly do like to procrastinate, don't we?
Or this classic:
11. You have really weird dreams about writing or your favorite writers — like that you suddenly have a great idea for a story but then your computer eats you or that you’re best friends with Emily Dickinson — which, truth be told, is a little boring. Agoraphobes aren’t great partiers. You also dreamt that you were the manager of a Bronte sisters girl group. Charlotte was the Beyonce, Emily was the Kelly and Anne was the Michelle, the one everyone forgets about.
Oh mercy! Pop culture, eh?
Or how about this:
23. You never stop writing something after you’re done with it, which makes publishing difficult. Eventually you just put a gun to your head and say, “Screw it, I’m done with this.” (Which is how Obama must feel every day.) You’ll later come up with the perfect ending for that piece — a month after publishing it.
Now this is just adorable. And so true, too - every writer knows that it is impossible to finish writing something, until you do. Life is hard, for writers. Yet also cute and whimsical.
But those 25 signs, as irresistibly truthful and hilarious as they are, just aren't enough, you know? There are so many other ways to decide whether you're a writer or not, even if you don't have an erotic fixation with typewriters or waste all your money on awful tattoos. And so to provide further help to my brothers and sisters in words, and to pay tribute to "Nico Lang", I've come up with my
25 MORE SIGNS YOU'RE A WRITER
1. You are, essentially, better than other people.
2. Not only do you carry a pen everywhere, but you constantly hallucinate that there are pens that aren't actually there, and frequently startle passersby with your loud cries of "Ho! Pens!"
3. You are an alcoholic.
4. You write inspirational-yet-incomprehensible slogans on pieces of cardboard like "failure is the first step towards the second step" or "all writing is rewriting" and stick them up on your walls so you can look at them and get a warm glow while you read a magazine profile on Nikki Gemmell.
5. You tell people that you just let the characters take you where they want you to go and don't notice that this makes you sound insane.
6. You literally eat ink.
7. You dress up as your favourite characters from literary history and appear uninvited at strangers' parties bellowing their most memorable lines (see point 3).
8. You slowly begin to metamorphose into a book.
9. You kidnap your editor's children and threaten to slaughter them if they delete a single word from your piece. You do this every week and everyone is used to it by now.
10. You eventually find your typewriter too modern and begin carving all your work into massive stone tablets, which you hurl out your window in a fit of despair after realising you'll never be as great a writer as Kathy Lette.
11. Your name is JK Rowling.
12. When you hear the words "I'm on deadline", you immediately bite whoever said it on the leg, a Pavlovian response to the fact that you used to bite people on the leg pretty often.
13. You have a tattoo of the face of your favourite writer covering your entire face, so you can impersonate them.
14. You often sit in cafes holding a pen against your cheek with a thoughtful-yet-cute expression on your darling little face.
15. You occasionally write something.
16. You are morbidly obese and unable to leave your bed, communicating by hurling Doritos in meaningful patterns on the carpet.
17. You have become firmly convinced that you are a Canadian goose and accuse everyone you meet of stealing your eggs, and I don't know you write a story about this or something maybe.
18. You have an almost insatiable desire to commit acts of violence upon members of your immediate family.
19. You have lost control of your bowels.
20. You keep complaining that sport gets more funding than the arts and so you have no friends.
21. You plan to make everyone pay someday.
22. You own more than fifty high-powered assault weapons.
23. Your muscles have atrophied from lack of use and there is a spider living in your mouth.
24. You can't stop writing lists of signs that you are a writer to reassure yourself that your entire life is not a futile sham concocted by your self-delusive brain in order to avoid facing reality in any way whatsoever.
25. You have just been arrested for molesting a horse.
Simply, the Book of Bloke is the most comprehensive and painstaking survey of Australian manhood ever undertaken. This socio-anthropological epic examines the vast variety of Blokes in our great country, their origins, characteristics, lifestyles, markings and hobbies.
How often have you seen a Bloke in the street, and thought to yourself, "If only I knew what KIND of bloke that was, I would know whether to approach and make friends, or keep my distance, or hit him with a stick"?
The Book of Bloke has made such concerns a thing of the past! As well as an essential reference work for all aspiring and experienced Blokeologists, the BoB acts as a useful spotter's guide for anyone wishing to observe Blokes in their natural habitat. If you wish to be able to tell, at a glance, the difference between a Bogan and a Snag, a Leftite and a Rightoid, a Reticulated Drainpipe and a Crested Kerrang, this is the must-have book for you!
The Book of Bloke is published by Momentum Books, and is delivered in convenient eBook format, thus doing away with the tedious hassle of paper. There are several ways to read the ever-versatile Book of Bloke:
5. On your computer screen, if that's the sort of thing you like to do.
6. Print the whole book out, bind it with string and/or glue, and read it as an analogue book.
7. Copy it out longhand with a biro in an exercise book and then read the exercise book. Remember to print clearly and legibly!
The options are, literally, endless, and what's more, it's only THREE DOLLARS! For the entire book! That's no more than the price of a cup of coffee, or of assuaging your guilt when confronted by a homeless person! And the BoB will give you HOURS more entertainment than either of those things!
Basically, what we have here is a brave new world in ebooks, in gender studies, and in jokes about mullets. YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS OUT!
I am not telling you anything you don't know, but the media is a strange and shifting place. Being a freelancer in the middle of it is an uncertain and slightly terrifying existence. I keep on writing because I happen to think I'm pretty good at it, and that it's a worthwhile career to pursue, but I can't say whether I'll still be doing this in a year, two years, five years. As much as you might do it for the love, money is, sadly, a necessity round these parts, and if there's no money to be made writing, a lot less writing is going to happen.
As a writer, my past, present and future are all bound up heavily in brave, supercool independent media, that have given me a break, given me an outlet, given me an audience and given me a little bit of cash to reward my efforts too. They've been bold to do this, and I'm eternally grateful to anyone who's published me.
But these outlets are just like the mainstream behemoths: they need people to be willing to pay for good content. There's free stuff all over the internet of course, but if we want a world where there are talented people with the time and inclination to really throw themselves into their work, we need to stump up some dollars to give them that chance, and make sure a thousand flowers can bloom in the media desert.
So. With that in mind, here are a few places you could sling a few bucks to - if you're not already - to help them stay afloat and make a go of things. All of these are great organisations that I've written for, will write for in future, and recommend highly.
First New Matilda. This was the first place to publish me at all, when I was, in the most literal and extreme sense, an unknown. They took a chance and I owe them forever for that. They brought my political writing into the world. But beyond me, they have loads of brilliant content, like Ben Eltham's work, stuff about Israel, asylum seekers, the environment and much much more, from an array of talented writers who provide genuinely alternative viewpoints to the mainstream. They run on a shoestring and do it with style and substance, and without paywalling. They rely on the generosity of their readers - why not be generous?
The King's Tribune. Subscribing to the KT not only gets you access to the full extent of their spectacular line-up - and it is spectacular, featuring not just me, but geniuses like Helen Razer, Jo Thornely, Greg Jericho, Tim Dunlop, John Birmingham and many more, plus awesome interviews and features - but also it gets you an actual paper magazine. Can you believe that? In these days of digital chicanery, MySpace etc, the Tribune has shown faith in the beauty of the printed word, while also spawning a snazzy-as website. It takes some balls to push that boat out, and it's resulted in a real high class mag that entertains and enlightens AT THE SAME TIME. Subscribing to the Tribune will be money well-spent, but what will also be money well-spent will be donations to the magazine's indiegogo. After an incredible amount of hard work, the KT is on the verge of making it as a real going concern - it can keep operating. But the proprietor has accumulated debts that need to be repaid if that's to happen, so the fundraising is on, and anything you can spare will be greatly appreciated to help keep alive the brilliant magazine that you'll be subscribing to! The indiegogo site goes into more depth about just what the funds are being raised for, and includes a video which features Helen Razer, played by me.
Lastly, Bide magazine, a brand-new quarterly digital magazine of society, culture, politics, and basically the entire scope of human existence. It is a sophisticated little corner of the web for lovers of reading to lose themselves in, and it's run by my friend and well-known genius Anna Spargo-Ryan. For an annual subscription you pay $10 which is OBSCENELY cheap, and if you help it thrive, I shall be privileged to keep contributing certain whimsies to it.
Of course there are heaps more than these, worthy of support, but these are three that I'm involved in that, if you like what I do, I think you'll find are worth keeping afloat. Sometimes it can seem that the media is asking a lot, when you can get so much content without paying, but really, subscribing to any of these outlets is actually pretty damn cheap - it's just a different payment model than slapping a few bucks down at the newsagent. And all of them will provide entertainment, information, discussion, debate and perspectives you might not have seen before. If you want smart people to keep giving you the benefit of their smartness, you have to play your part. I, and my colleagues, depend on you. Do give it some thought.
Goodness me, I can be a bit lax with blogging at times. It is, sadly, a function of the necessity to write great whacking reams of stuff all over everywhere else, that blogging can be neglected. Hopefully you're still following my adventures at The Drum, where my thrice-weekly election analyses will come to an end on Friday, but my weekly wraps on all things current will continue post-election.
And hopefully, you will at least mull over the idea, if in Melbourne for the Writers' Festival, of heading in to the salubrious surrounds of the Toff in Town for Liner Notes on September 4, featuring the songs of Fleetwood Mac, Charlie Pickering, Clare Bowditch, Hannie Rayson, Emilie Zoey Baker, Sean M. Whelan, Alicia Sometimes, Michael Nolan und mich - gunna go off guys, for serious. If I recall rightly, details are in the events listings to the right.
But ah, the election. Just three more sleeps till the AEC comes down our chimneys and leaves a new prime minister in our stocking! Aren't you EXCITED? It really is thrilling, the whole country is consumed by punditry, commentary, anticipation and generalised disgust.
At the aforementioned Drum you can see how I handle the issues, and how a whole bunch of other people do too - like Crabb (be still my beating heart), Uhlmann, Berg, Eltham, Hardy (be still again), Milne, Ellis (wacky!), et al.
But you can see more all over the shop. The journos, the bloggers, the analysts and the nutbags are out in force and the commentariat is full to bursting. I recommend Crikey (specially the blogs of Possum and Pure Poison), Larvatus Prodeo, A Nonymous Lefty, and of course Antony Green, the thinking woman's irrepressibly unnerving sexual fantasy.
(the unthinking woman's irrepressibly unnerving sexual fantasy is me)
ALSO! Check out http://gatheraround.me for podcasts re: the election. Better yet, join the Gather Around Me Facebook group, and subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an instalment! It's so easy, with the power of interconnected tubes!
I guess what exercises ME about the election is the terrible uncertainty of it all. In 2007, everyone knew Rudd was going to win, and by 7.30 the night of the election it was all over. In 2004, Latham threatened a few months before the poll, but by the big day we realised Howard was going to romp it in. Same in 2001 - 9/11 made it a clear cakewalk. Maybe 1998 was different, but that's ancient history. This year feels, if boring and appallingly predictable in every other detail, at least fresh and original in its closeness and difficulty to tip. It looks like counting will go all night, and we might not even know who won by Sunday morning.
And if we do, if somehow one side somehow crushes the other beneath its boot, that will only be all the more surprising for defying the predictions of squeaking tightness.
So I cannot wait till election night, when I shall rug up nice and warm, channel-surf like a madman, and twitter like the obsessive-compulsive attention-junkie that I am. Hope I'll see you passing by.
And we shall finally find the answer to the question that has bugged us so long: Will people REALLY vote for Tony Abbott? Like, really? Seriously, dude? Tony ABBOTT? Really?
I was asked by someone if there was an archive where might be stored all my articles. Well, all my articles at New Matilda of course can be accessed here, and the ABC Unleashed is where you'll find my weekly wraps - though I don't know how long those stay in the system, but I thought I'd round up what I could of stuff published in other places, and link to it, for anyone who might have come in late and want to browse some of the more exotic corners of Pobjieville:
Also, a couple pieces from the Australian Rationalist Society's Journal - latest one here about refugees and such. And my first here, about becoming an atheist.
Hope you enjoy reading those.
Apart from online, if you were in the mood to buy real paper books you could find my ramblings in the EWF Reader, on the subject of comedy writing. Or the Death Mook, with my short story, "The Black Angel's Love Song".
Or of course, go to http://www.lulu.com/benpobjie for my own collections, or email mrbehemoth@hotmail.com to buy them direct.
Of course, if you REALLY want a handy, nationally distributed collection of my pieces, start lobbying your local publishing house to contact me IMMEDIATELY.
OK, so The Chaser. Everyone knows about it. They'll be back next week, and hopefully the experience will not turn them tame and insipid in any way, but drive them on to more inspired feats of comedy.
Below is something I wrote in the aftermath of the infamous sketch, because every bit of commentary I saw seemed to miss the point by some distance. Some pieces made some good points - I agree with those sticking up for the Chaser's right to make bad-taste jokes, I agree with those who said it's the show's job to push boundaries and test the limits and so forth - but even those mostly missed the point of what the sketch was actually about. And as for those blasting the show for crossing lines, destroying lives, spitting in faces etc, I found it unbearable. Those who claimed the problem is that the show was no longer funny may or may not be right, but it was irrelevant to the issue at hand - which was the only good point contained in what I thought was one of the most ridiculously wrongheaded articles, by Shaun Carney and I'm not in the slightest bit interested in debating whether something's funny or not). And even now, two weeks later, all commentary continues to miss the point, to my mind.
Everyone must make up their own minds, but I honestly think the media hysteria has blinded people to what the sketch actually was, and I also think I'm at least as well-qualified to comment on it as the political analysts and shock jocks that have dominated the debate. And since the piece below was not wanted by a variety of media outlets, I'm having my say here. If you hate The Chaser and all it stands for and always will, you probably won't get much out of it. If not, do read on:
ON THE CHASER
Making fun of sick children? Disgusting. Outrageous. Disgraceful. Unacceptable. For doing such a revolting thing, those terrible Chaser boys should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. For mocking those poor kids, they should be sacked. Blackballed. The ABC should lose its funding. How could they do such a thing?
The only trouble, of course, is that they did no such thing. They never made fun of sick kids. Not in the slightest. And no reasonable person making up their mind based on the actual sketch – as opposed to having their mind made up for them by squawking tabloid headlines – would come to the conclusion that they had.
Now, I admit I do not know any Chaser members personally – as the 800 pound gorillas of Australian comedy to my pygmy shrew, we move in different circles – and so it is, I concede, possible that they sat down and thought, “Bloody sick kids, let’s take them down a peg or two”. However, I consider it susbtantially more likely they sat down and thought, “You know the Make A Wish Foundation? Wouldn’t it be funny if there was an organisation like that, but one that was really, really bad at its job?” I think this is more likey for the simple reason that that is precisely what they did in the sketch.
Contrary to those who saw it as a vicious attack on sick kids, or on the real Make A Wish Foundation, it wasn’t an attack on anyone. It was actually a conventional piece of sketch comedy based on the classic premise of taking a well-known character, situation or institution, and coming up with an absurd, grotesque or incompetent version. The Make A Realistic Wish Foundation is, in fact, nothing more than The Chaser’s version of Monty Python’s Silly Olympics, Saturday Night Live’s male, talentless synchronised swimmers, or even bumbling Maxwell Smart. The humour lies not in laughing at sick kids, but in the very fact that we know how appalling the “Make A Realistic Wish Foundation” is. The fictitious foundation itself is the butt of the joke – in essence, the point is not to mock the sick kids, but to side with them against the dreadful fools at their bedsides. To suggest that the fact that terrible fictional characters do terrible things to others means the creators are mocking the victims is just silly. The Chaser was no more mocking sick kids than John Cleese mocked Germans by making Basil fawlty a racist, or that Ricky Gervais mocked the disabled when his David Brent showed his utter insensivity to a wheelchair-bound colleague. Comedic characters are often terrible people – this is what makes them comedic. We’re laughing at them, not the innocent folk who have to suffer their obnoxiousness.
Please note, this is not in any way attempt to convince those who didn’t find the sketch funny that it was; comedy is utterly subjective, and to try to claim that one’s own opinion on what’s funny is in any way objective or definitive is ridiculous. That, of course, does not stop people trying, and a hundred comedic experts have sprung up since The Chaser aired to claimed that the “real problem” is that the sketch just wasn’t funny. Patently untrue – people don’t call for sackings and funding cuts just because things aren’t funny. Thousands of hours of unfunny material is broadcast every year without a furore. Commentators like to claim that unfunniness is the problem in order to dodge the quite accurate accusation that they are joining a herd of confected moral outrage and self-righteousness. The fact is, whether it was funny or not is completely irrelevant to the question of whether The Chaser was mocking sick kids. If they were, making every last person on earth bust a gut wouldn’t change the fact, and if they’re not, stony silence from every viewer does not give reason for moral condemnation.
I don’t doubt that some were upset by the sketch. That’s unfortunate, but as any comedian or comedy writer knows, if you want any hope of amusing people, you have to risk giving offence. I’ve seen comedy deal with subjects including racism, Nazism, incest, bestiality, sexual assault, domestic violence, murder, war, disease and famine. Any of these and a hundred other apparently tamer topics could cause distress – there’s practically no subject that has no chance of offending anyone. That’s the nature of comedy, and any comedian worth their salt takes that chance all the time. But the fact that a piece of work can strike a nerve with you doesn’t mean it was targeted at you, and the fact a TV show upset someone – however worthy and genuinely long-suffering that someone is – doesn’t mean that they are right and the makers of the show deserve to be cast into the outer darkness. Especially when, one suspects, much of the outrage and offence being expressed comes less from genuine spontaneous reaction and more from the efforts of media hypocrites desperate to whip up a new moral panic to reinforce their self-assumed position as guardians of the public good. After all, sketch show The Mansion did a similar gag last year. America’s The Onion and Australia’s Shaun Micallef have both in the past given their own spin to “make-a-wish comedy”. No howls of outrage there, because they weren’t The Chaser, the enemy that Murdoch papers and “current affairs” programmes alike are just itching to snipe at. The Chaser could act out verbatim re-enactments of Mother and Son, and the Herald Sun would scream about their tasteless assault on Alzheimer’s sufferers.
So it’s a shame if you were offended, especially if you have suffered the trauma of ill children. But be assured, The Chaser wasn’t having a go at you, or your kids, or anyone. And if you are the sensitive type, perhaps you shouldn’t be watching the show (and nor should children, sick or otherwise). Personally, I’m going to go on watching. Because even if it’s not perfect, I know that it’s comedy. If you don’t understand that, maybe you should go look for the remote.
Of course you can't! And that's why you need to get your grasping mitts on The Death Mook, published by Vignette Press. It features a piece by me, as well as myriad other works of art and intellect by a dazzling array of other talented notables. It looks, I must say, freaking awesome, and that's only 70-80% because I'm in it.
I am proud to be part of the Mook movement, which I see as the irresistible wave of the future. Get into it now!
