Tag: Amanda Palmer

On the first day of the year

The ‘frog police’ is an expression Amanda Palmer uses in her book, The Art of Asking, to describe those voices in your head that crop up from time to time, voices that say:

‘Who do you think you are?

What gives you the right?

Since when were you a success?

Since when did you think you could write, or sing or paint, or complete any other creative activity, worth recognising?

‘You’re a phoney, an imposter and it’s our job to out you to the world.’

These are my words to describe the frog police but we all know what Amanda Palmer means. I call them the ‘thought police’, your cruel conscience, your superego, which challenge you at every turn.

Just when you think you’re getting on your feet, the frog police come in and topple you over.

And they may not only arrive at moments of achievement. They can arrive when you least expect.  When you’re mid stride trying to get somewhere, trying to raise your standards – in my case trying to get my book published – and they come in to remind you of why it is no one wants to read your work. No one wants to reflect on your ideas. You’re crap, essentially a windbag, a no-good waste of space.

Damn those frog police, I say. Be gone.

It’s time to move onto more positive things.

Even so, I was alarmed at the number of New Years Eve posts on Facebook that tried to turn away from old-fashioned resolutions into posts of gratitude.

They were all sincere and heartfelt – stories of people wanting to acknowledge those others in their lives who’d made a difference – and it made me want to puke.

Not because these posts weren’t sincere and heartfelt but because that great ruler of the skies: Facebook or the twitterers and tweeters, social networking, and the social media intelligentsia, orchestrated them, and I buck under the strain.

I’m as much a part of this trend thing as the next. I use Facebook, I even tweet occasionally, though I haven’t yet mastered the art, but most of all I see the trends drift around.

Sometimes they’re upon me before I can even identify them.

Sometimes they appeal and I want to join the band, but other times they appal me, and fill me with revulsion for the sheep I have become.

When I was a teenager, I railed against the idea of the popular, particularly when it came to music. Not for me the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Not for me the football heroes on the field.

I preferred classical music, the Brahms and Beethovens. I preferred the romantic poets, the Wordsworths and the Tennysons. I preferred the old to the new.

Following the new put me into the category of the tryhards and the wannabes, when I was hell bent on being different, something special, and something above the throng.

Whenever a rock star landed at Essendon Airport, on the television during the news, I saw these girls, pushed up against the temporary fencing erected to keep them out. These girls, who wore mini skirts and make up, who flung their bodies over the makeshift fencing and screamed as loudly as they could whenever they caught a glimpse of their singing idols. The Monkeys, the Easy Beats, Normie Rowe. So many male musicians who found an adoring audience in these young women, who’d lost their minds to their idealisations.

Even then I wondered, how could it be?

I could not pitch myself into the minds of my contemporaries. I could not understand what all the fuss was about. I chose frumpdom over the modern, because the modern took very little time before it became boring and old hat.

 

Every time I sit down to write I hope something worthwhile will emerge, knowing in all likelihood it won’t. Not today. Maybe tomorrow, but I write regardless with the frog police hard on my heels, ready to be caught up in the Under Toad – thanks John Irving for coining this expression – to drag me away on the current and leave me dashed against rocks, broken and battered or else far out deep in sea, unable to find energy enough to keep on swimming or stay afloat, and therefore to drown.

Hang in there, I tell myself, something good will happen. On this first day of the year, a year as new as my grandson’s feet:

IMG_2601

Letters as ‘fossils of feeling’.

‘Letters are the great
fixative of experience,’ writes Janet Malcolm. ‘Time erodes feeling. Time
creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the
fossils of feeling. This is why biographers prize them so: they are biography’s
only conduit to unmediated experience.’
Last week I went to a class about
letter writing.  Although we talked
briefly about the sorts of letters that people write in the privacy of their
rooms, we focussed on those letters written for the purpose of performance.
 Letters
a person might write to some imaginary friend, or even to a state of mind.  For instance, one of our exercises
involved writing a letter to ‘my wake up call’. 
Another to myself in three hours when the class would be over.
Michaela Maguire, who took the class
was clear and focussed.  We
read letters; we wrote our own, with plenty of discussion in between, a group
of about ten woman – always women – it was to do with women writing letters after all, and
there was a sprit of thoughtfulness throughout the room.  All in three short hours. 
But I worried that I spoke up too
much in the class; that I was a show off. 
That I wanted too often to share too much, especially as there was one or
two women who were quiet. 
I have often wondered what it might
be like to be one of those quiet participants in a group.  What it might be like to be shy or reserved,
to keep my thoughts to myself. 
I often keep my thoughts to myself
but I have this instinctive urge when I enter the space of a workshop where a
few of us have gathered to start the
conversation rolling, if it hasn’t already started. 
I’ll introduce myself and some people will
introduce themselves back and we might talk about the space, or the weather or
the fact that so far it looks as though we’ll only be women attending, as
happened yesterday. 
I do this to measure the
temperature of the room, the nature of the people present.  
Who’s here and what they’re like. 
Will I enjoy myself? 
Will I get something out of our
time together?
I divide my experience into two,
the audience and the teacher.  In this
case, the teacher was fine, friendly, though with a reasonable degree of
reserve.  Teachers need this I reckon if
they are to hold the group.  The other women were also friendly. 
If we could go on meeting for week
after week after week or even month after month we would no doubt become better
friends.  We would come to like one
another as a group. 
We would form bonds, but a once
only meeting is never easy.  There is the
quality of what-does-it-matter-I’m-only-here-once-to-get-as-much-as-I-can-out-of-this
time but there is also the sense, for me at least, of wanting to make the most
of it. 
And the business of reading our
writing out to the class is fraught. People hesitate at first and then towards
the end there’s an avalanche. 
I was among the first to read, and
then kicked myself for my solipsistic reading. 
But isn’t that the way of it?  And
the final worry I have in such groups is the fear that I will be judged harshly
for my age. 
Oh her, she’s just an old
fogey.  
Why would they think that?  
Why do I think this?  
Is this how I judged folks older than me when
I was younger? 
I fear it might have been so, until
of course I came to know those older people. 
Even writing about this makes me feel slightly queasy.  Too self referential, too much of what goes
on in my mind.  No story line.  
But that’s the way it goes sometimes.  You get the inside story, or at least some of
it and the rest I leave to your imagination.  
And then I found a copy of the 2013
edition of Women of Letters in my daughter’s bookshelf and read Amanda Palmer’s letter to someone called Anthony.  I imagine he was a friend.  Someone who was dying of cancer and in it Palmer talks about her almost adolescent need to offer people the truth about
themselves, however brutal, and about the time she had surgery on her throat
and couldn’t speak for two weeks.  How
she came to relish silence.
In a much clearer way than I write here, she
seems to confirm something I’ve been wondering about above. 
Why not try being quiet for a while?
Write letters instead.