I took apart a pen – one of those ones you click on and off – and tried to put it back together again. I couldn’t quite make it right. One of my attempts looked OK, until I clicked the pen on, and half the pen launched across the room like a catapult. I fell about laughing. My last effort still wasn’t right – the pen doesn’t click on or off, and the tip of it retracts and expands as I try to write, as if it is now equipped with suspension. I kind of like it. I unwrapped an easter egg and tried to compress the foil wrapping down into a perfect tiny cube – it was something distracting to do with my fingers. I made it so small – I carried the cube around in my pocket for a week, took it out from time to time, tried to make the cube smaller. I got out candles for Earth Hour, and didn’t put them away again. They appealed to my pyromaniac tendencies. I dripped wax into my ashtray, creating an unpleasant grey waxy lump of ash and cigarette butts, which I eventually disposed of. I made small candles out of the large candles using random things for wicks – pieces of paper, matchsticks – and lit them, they burned erratically: slow, then scarily fast. This is how my mind works…
I finished my professional short story a week or two back. I renamed it my semi-professional short story, and showed it to Tim. It was seven thousand words, in the end, and did a servicable job of telling a story, but failed to soar. I had a long talk to Tim about it – he’s the best reader I know, he has that ability, which I don’t have, to put aside his preconceptions about how writing should be and look at something objectively. He saw the same things in it I did – the same flaws and strengths – which was nice, it’s good to know I can still see my writing as others see it. Hearing somebody else articulate, clearly, what was going on in my writing, helped me realise what I needed to do to fix some problems we both saw: things that have crept into my writing, these arch oratorical flourishes and self-concious mannerisms that detract from the reality of what I’m trying to say. I’m not so much interested in fixing the short story – it is what it is, and I don’t think any amount of work will make it more than that – but I’ll give it a final polish sometime soon and send it off somewhere – it might be publishable.
Last Friday I started writing my novel. I decided I would write one thousand words a day. That was five days ago, and I’ve written five thousand words of it – about two thirds of the first chapter. It’s not much, but it feels like a beginning, it feels alright. Obviously there is a long way to go, but this is how I used to write, back in my late teens and early twenties. It’s not such a hard commitment, one thousand words a day, it just takes discipline. I don’t want to write this thing slowly, I don’t want to spend three years on it, I want to get it down on paper. If I can keep this up, in three months I’ll have a draft of ninety thousand plus words, which would be nice. It might not work out exactly like that, but I’d like to see if I can at least go close. I made a deal with myself a while back, and now I need to fulfill it – if I don’t write now, and write seriously, then the last three years of my life were pointless.
For some reason, I don’t know why, I do feel an obligation to keep this blog updated, at least semi-regularly, if I have anything at all to say. But one thousand words a day is a lot, and I’m not going to put my novel on hold to write this blog. As half-assed as these entries are, sometimes, I do usually put at least some effort into them, and it takes time. If I get a chance, and have something to say, I’ll write this, but if I’m not around too much for the next while, that’s why.
I wish I had better reasons for wanting to be a writer – a more pure desire for self-expression, and less regard for the opinions of others. But a lot of my motives come from self-conciousness and a desire to prove myself. I have these stupid illusions about writing – that if I write well enough everyone will like me, that if I write well enough I can make myself happy. I went down to Austinmer on the weekend, and normally that relaxes me, but I found myself feeling anxious, and I started to recognise other things, symptoms I know well, that suggest things might be starting to go slightly awry in my head, a tilt in my perceptions that if not checked might send me down for a while. It hasn’t happened yet and sometimes I can avoid it, but this is how it happens: first slowly, then quickly; a non-specific anxiety that I know will find specifics if not turned away. I’ve been working hard against this all year, keeping myself busy, staying productive, staying healthy, these small things that seem to help, and possibly I’m overdue.
I probably can’t write well enough to make myself happy, but I do believe that when I write, and write well, I can stay ahead of the moods that sometimes chase me. I know I’m not a genius, not like Shakespeare or Joyce, I don’t have that sort of off-the-scale ability with language, but I do want to be good. I don’t know what happens to me if it turns out I’m ordinary at this. I know there are things I can do when I write – I know that when I try I can put down decently constructed sentences, one after the other, and I seem to be able to describe a scene and make it real in a reader’s mind. Whether I can offer any insight into what it means to be alive, or show the world as I uniquely see it, or make something that is beautiful... I don’t know. But I know I need to stop talking about being a writer and go back to doing it. I need to go do this for a while.
Today was my last rostered day of work at Plup. I didn’t know for sure it was going to be my last day – the rosters were drawn up until tomorrow, when Helen is working, and then there was Thursday, and the weekend, to be considered – but, walking to work, I thought it might be my last day. We’ve been dollar sale-ing for a while now – it started faster than I had thought it would, and help up longer than I expected. Everything good, or even marginal, went really quickly, in the first few days, but then the great accumulated mass of forgetable books, many of which had been shoved to the back of the bookshelves, waiting for this time, or some other need, kept selling as well. The shelves cleared out, we packed the books closer together again, on the middle shelves, the accesible and eye-line shelves, and they kept selling. I made some money, banked a pile of cash that was scary to carry down the street, payed off some debt on my credit card. The books started to sell more slowly, I would look along the shelves and not recognise many authors – the forgotten first novels of authors who never made it (I have a lot of sympathy for those sorts of books) – and the wretched, falling apart books of those once famous authors that nobody reads anymore – Joyce Cary, Erskine Caldwell, Jerzy Kozinski. I’d already made one date for when I would finish up, and it came and went, because people just kept buying books.
It was getting to around that time – the point when it was no longer profitable to pay people to sit in the shop – I knew it was approaching, and I suppose it didn’t matter too much exactly when it was. We could have gone for another week, maybe, or something less than that, but we don’t have the books to last much longer. So I was walking to work – today was the most glorious Autumn day – and I was thinking about whether it would be my last day, and I realised what I was looking for was not some arbitrary point on a declining curve when I would know it was time to stop, but some feeling, some moment of poignancy that would give me an ending.
The problem is there have been too many endings with this thing, and there are still more endings to come – Helen is working tomorrow, and then there is the final packup that is still to be done, the boxing and disposing of those wretched books nobody will pay a dollar for, the dismantling of the shelves, the final cleanup – I am waiting until closer to the end of April for these things, when my mother will be coming down to help me, and I need the help. There have been too many endings, but this was an important ending, and throughout the day I was frustrated by this – by my inability to feel the day as anything other than another day at work. I packed up the hold books that customers had never come to pick up, cleaned up the shelves behind a little. I tidied up the bookshelves a bit, and wondered why I was doing it – force of habit, or a certain residual pride. Talked to some customers, read Google News. In the afternoon Tahlia came by, the afternoon light was so nice, she hung out for a bit, checking her email and playing around with an essay she was writing, and I sat outside and decided that it was as good a day as any to stop.
I called up my father, I called up Tim, I complained about the lack of poignancy to my day, how things were just slowing to a stop with this closing sale, how there was no conclusive crash of cymbals. I wondered aloud if I would get this when I closed the door for the final time in a couple of weeks. “I suppose that’s just how life is,” I told my father. He told me it was, and said that the shop might have burned down – “that would be a final ending.” He’s good at putting things in an unhelpful perspective like that.
I lingered at the end of the day. I didn’t notice what the last book I sold was – hell, it probably won’t even be the last book I sell, I’ll probably sell something tomorrow when I relieve Helen for lunch. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been being lazy, closing up a bit early, going home before it became dark and cold. But tonight I kept going, on past the point when we officially close. And the season saved me – I hadn’t stayed open so late, not since daylight saving ended, I hadn’t seen the store at night since last year. It became dark, a cool Autumn evening, the lights came on along King Street, white crystal lights that sparkled in the crisp air, and the store was all lit up. I’ve always loved the way the store looks at night, this little golden glowbox, the lights softening the dust and scratches, and even with a third of the lightbulbs blown it still had that. It had that quality of the change of seasons, where you remember past times and past seasons. Mostly what I remembered were those times in Autumn and Winter when I’d been out bookshopping while Tahlia worked in the store, and I would come back after five-thirty, when the clearway restrictions ended, and we’d spend that last half-hour excitedly sorting through boxes of new stock, dividing them into internet and five dollar and window and shelf-stock piles. Remembering those things, past seasons, pleasant times, I got my moment of poignancy.
It felt sad, but in a good way; then, walking home, it felt sad in a bad way, for a while. But that’s OK, too. I just wanted to feel it.
Possibly the most shocking fact contained in the IPCC’s Second Working Group’s Summary for Policymakers – a fact curiously overlooked in every newspaper report on the release that I’ve read – is this: there is a high confidence that an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity will lead to post traumatic stress disorders. Why the authors of the report felt the need to include this bizarre if logical conjecture is beyond me, but there it is, in a table on page sixteen. I suppose it will also lead to an increase in people getting wet.
Yep, I’ve been reading apocalyptic predictions again. As with my
entry on the last report, this is more about my personal engagement with it, and the curious and overlooked segments of it, than a general summary of the summary. If you want the broad overview, use Google News, or better yet, read the report yourself, which can be found
here.
Regular readers may remember that last time I criticized Tim Flannery for saying that global warming could lead to the loss of between two and six of the world’s species over the next hundred years. I’m pleased to say that I was right and he was wrong – there is no mention of such a dramatic scenario. What the report says, though, is this: “Approximately 20-30% of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceeed 1.5-2.5 C.” So I can’t take too much comfort in being righter than Tim Flannery, because that number is still pretty scary.
The problem, though, is that after I’d digested this, I was no longer sure what it meant. This conclusion has been widely reported, and, I think, possibly misreported. Here’s the Washington Post: “Twenty to 30 percent of the world's species may disappear if the world warms another 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, the authors concluded”. But what does “an increased risk of extinction” mean? It is surely not quite the same thing as saying “at risk of extinction”, which is what the Washington Post says. If a species is at a five percent risk of extinction now, and with a temperature increase of 2.6 degrees is at a ten percent risk of extinction, does that count? Because it is not quite the same thing as saying the species will become endangered, and that’s not the same thing as saying a species will become extinct. I’m not trying to downplay this, I’m just really puzzled by what the authors are trying to say with “an increased risk of extinction”.
Note also that the Washington Post ignores the word “exceed” in regard to the temperatures. This is why it’s always good to try to read the primary sources, I guess, things get garbled.
Any conspiracy theorists? I’m really curious as to why they released the report on Good Friday – it hardly seems an opportune day for getting maximum attention. OK, that’s probably ridiculous, but here’s a conspiracy theory I’ve never heard, that has never previously occurred to me, and that just might be true. One fact of global warming that is rarely made clear in nightmare scenarios, but which is, in fact, simple common sense, is that a global increase in temperature is not necessarily bad for everyone. The tragedy, which this report makes clear, is this: global warming is going to be worst in the third world. The reasons for this, as far as I can infer, are two: firstly, that the third world doesn’t have the resources to adequately prepare for climate change, and secondly – this isn’t clearly stated, but seems to be right – that the cooler a place is currently, the more likely it is that warming will be beneficial, rather than damaging, for people. (An important addendum to this: after about a four degree increase, things start to get fucked for pretty much everybody. I’m talking here about moderate increases in temperature.) So Europe, North America, and Northern Asia don’t seem to cop it nearly as bad as tropical and equatorial regions.
Clearly, Africa is going to get the worst of it, by far: “By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to an increase of water stress… yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%… projected sea-level rise will affect low-lying coastal areas with large populations. The cost of adaptation could amount to at least 5-10% of GDP.”
The irony, of course, is that these are the people who had nothing to do with global warming in the first place. Anyway, onto my conspiracy theory: one guess what continent seems to come out the best from global warming. Yep, North America. An increase of a couple of degrees in North America isn’t so bad at all. “Moderate climate change in the early decades of the century is projected to increase aggregate yields of rain-fed agriculture by 5-20%.” (The warmer regions of North America don’t do so well, but this is an average.) Even the bad things don’t seem so terrible: more floods in winter and less water in summer; worse bushfires and pests in forests, more heat waves, and increased stress to coastal communities. Not so bad, really: keep pumping out the CO2 and you can build some sea walls, your people can afford air-conditioners, and you can make sure drinking water is well-distributed.
It really makes me wonder about the real reasons why George Bush, et al, seem so unconcerned about global warming. It might not be just that they’re friends with oil people – I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some secret CIA report that said the best thing for continued American wealth and world dominance was a couple of degrees of global warming.
Australia is going to have more droughts, and Kakadu and the Great Barrier Reef are in trouble, but everybody knew that anyway. But do you know why the Great Barrier Reef is in trouble? I assumed it was simply as a result of increased temperatures, which is true, but it is also a little more complex – increased atmospheric carbon dioxide makes the oceans more acidic, apparently, which is bad for shell-forming species generally.
I learned of a new concept: the Social Cost of Carbon, or SCC. This is a nifty idea that attempts to put a figure on the actual cost of a tonne of carbon emitted, subtracting the future costs from present benefits. The average assessed value, from peer reviewed papers in 2005, is USD $43 a tonne. But estimates range from minus $10 to $350 – I guess it’s a hard sort of a thing to calculate.
I will give a summary, after all. The weather is going to suck, but we can still be ok, on a global basis, although the third world is going to need a lot of economic help. If we can limit ourselves to just a moderate amount of global warming, food production and timber production can increase globally, and reading between the lines, our current wealth, well-spent, will see us through. However if temperature increases start getting beyond about 3 degrees celsius, we’re pretty much screwed.
Sorry to sound so flippant, I do take these things seriously, but one has to retain a sense of humour. Anyway, that’s what I found interesting, go read it and tell me what you find interesting.
On a completely unrelated note, my @nicholascarvan.com email address seems to be bouncing emails – if you need to get in touch with me, use my first initial and last name, one word, @gmail.com.
