The Bells! The Bells!
A few weeks ago (funny how many articles begin like that) … anyway, a few weeks ago I attended a literary speed-dating event at The Wheeler Centre, a huge and ancient building that stops Melbourne Central from spreading beyond Little Lonsdale Street. It was once a Roman amphitheatre or something. These days, though, it’s where writing happens. They sent me an email. I don’t know how they got my email address, but perhaps they were alerted by the folks who offer me things like ‘CilaisSoftTabs--_someFueIlForTheSexMacihne’.
It was a free event, and they were short on men. Yeah, all right then, I thought, I’ll help you out.
Preliminary instructions were sent: everyone was to take along a book they really dig. Or a book you figure might help you pick up.
Would I be able to pull off the ruse of being not as strange and moody and nervous as I usually appear if in a place full of strangers? Well, not every place. At soccer games I will hug strangers and scream obscenities at players who can’t hear me, whilst sitting next to families who surely can. I’m fine singing on a stage or doing stand-up, which I did for a little while. It’s the mingling that kills me. It’s out of my control. Small speak. Will computers, should they become self-aware, then become self-conscious? Just a thought.
To make this work I needed an urbane book: a witty comment on contemporary mores; a questing, beautiful, exciting work. A transcendental, godlike, universe-swallowing book.
So I approached the bookcases. John Banville? Tom Wolfe? Cormac McCarthy? What an educated charmer I must be. Then I thought that maybe I should take something a chick wrote, to lend me some equal rights cred. Helen Garner? Helen Zahavi? (Essentially a one-good-book writer, but it was a very good book, and that’s more books than most people write, particularly car detailers and boilermakers.) Austen? Too clichéd. The Woolfe? Wolfe? Hmm … no, back to the masters. Gustave Flaubert? Graham Greene? Salinger? Matthew Reilly? Max ‘Tangles’ Walker?
Suddenly I had it. The Bumper Book Of Insults by Nancy McPhee. (‘An amiable history of insult, invective, imprecation and incivility.’) All the great wits are in there, and they really hate one another.
From the gently jovial ‘I like your music but it just doesn’t sound right.’ (anon.) to the more fervent, such as William Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) on a foe, ‘No-one can have a higher opinion of him than me, and I think he’s a dirty little beast.’ Very cool. But I got the book from a two-dollar shop, and it looks like it, so I suppose I didn’t want to look that cheap.
I like reading 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die more than I like reading more than a few of the 1001 books. The problem is, there’s not much to discuss with books like that – fact books, biographies, non-fiction; books not of ideas, but of things. But I like facts, and things, and something like The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge would suit. The problem is, I would have needed a wheelbarrow to take the weight of that baby, one of the great super-heavyweight tomes of publishing history.
But I think I knew all along what would be in my bag: Experience, the somewhat premature autobiography by Martin Amis. Why? Because it’s the best book I’ve read. Not necessarily the most entertaining, but the most impressive. Hands down. Also – and this is embarrassing – it borders on inspirational. Look what words can do!
When I arrived at The Wheeler Centre – or across the road from it, at least – a gaggle of about ten people was loosely huddled outside the extravagant glass frontage. I went to the toilet in Melbourne Central, dropped a Valium, and got lost trying to get out. When I rebooted my bearings and exited, there was across the road something resembling a queue, which I joined.
I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to talk to anyone else. Would that defeat the purpose of talking to them later, at the allotted time in the allotted location? I had been reading (at home) Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, and her name came up in a conversation going on beside me and, oh wow, what a coincidence, etc. Did the lady want a Mintie? ‘Why not?’ she said, so I gave her one. Was I hitting on someone before I’d even got into the lobby? I spotted, as well, two people clutching copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. This was the literary equivalent, I suppose, of turning up wearing the same dress as someone else.
By now I was padlocked in one of those inert lines, which begins to piss you off because someone who is obviously ill-prepared for what they’re there for is holding everything up. I was sensing a simmering book-event rage. There’s always some cu— oh, okay, here we go, now we’re moving.
My name crossed out and the featherweight bouncer allowing me past, I entered an ice-rink-sized room, trestle-tabled, and nametagged for each punter to find their seat. I wrapped my parka around the back of my allotted chair, and headed off for booze, swilling down several glasses of the white before the seats were even warmed.
As we attendees settled in our places, a very pleasant young woman called Catherine sat down opposite me, and we started chatting in a general ‘What brought you here?’ kind of way. About five minutes later, the MC, Jane Clifton, called us to order and explained the rules: 1. talk for five minutes; 2. write the name of the person you’re interested in on the sheet provided; and 3. the ladies do the shifting, moving one to the right as the men sit there like lazy bastards. MC JC rang a bell. We were off!
So … Catherine and I … did we break the rules by talking before the bell? Had we jumped the start, like bookish Olympic sprinters? What now? Well now, five minutes with Catherine of course, and that was fine, so a good start, I felt. It helps if you’re interested in people. I don’t understand people who are not interested in people, and yet intensely fascinated by, and usually very pleased about, themselves.
A vaguely bohemian woman with sharp black hair and art gallery glasses was next. She’d forgotten to bring a book but said it would probably have been Austen. Which is a pretty prosaic choice, as mentioned. Austen’s devastating talent is inarguable, but aren’t we all a bit Austened out by now? Enough with the film adaptations. To my mind, something more idiosyncratic would be the go for an occasion like this. I was pleased, mind you, not to have had to talk about vampire books.
Briiiiiiiing …. Next!
Then opposite me, a woman in her fifties, altogether nice. So, what had attracted her to this? I knew the answer: you’re single, you like books, and might meet other book persons with whom you might sense a ‘chemistry’, as they say. I had a chemistry/ fart joke thing prepared but let that one go … let it go! See what I just did? Turns out her husband had died, and there’s no good way to respond to that, except change the subject pronto.
Ting a ling a linnnnnnnng. Next! This was going quite well. I felt all grown-up.
Next was bloody Melissa … ooh, she really pissed me off, that one. She was either drunk, stoned or high on paint. We’ve all been there, confronted with the shit-faced sot and, with no way out, copping the dull stare, the absence of presence and, worst, the slightly contemptuous air that suggested in this case that her being whacked out was my fault. Bye, Melissa, sorry you couldn’t make it.
Susan and I talked about shopping at Dirt Cheap Books with a basket to load books into. Nice to meet you, bye. Shelley had brought along Ian McEwan’s Atonement. A barometer book, in my opinion. The object most people there might have held at some point (if not The Book Of Insults). We at speed-lit read a little more than most people, therefore we have read Atonement. A bit posh and yet not undemocratic. Quality upper-middle-brow. ‘Wasn’t Keira Knightley skinny in the movie?’ I said to Shelley. We agreed she was too skinny.
But what of me and Martin Amis? Jaw-dropping delight from my chat pals? Not quite. Several women had no idea who he was. Two women had an idea who he was. One woman claimed to have read a Martin Amis novel but, after I’d nominated almost every one of them without seeing any glimpse of familiarity, I thought she must have imagined it.
Then there was a finger-food, wine-swill intermission during which, ironically, I met a brassy mid-twenties girl who, like me, was there mostly for a laugh. She complained about the several men at her table who resembled Woody Allen. I checked them out and saw a couple who looked more like Goebbels. We arranged to meet at evening’s end but by then I felt like one of the dancers in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. A merry-go-round gone exhausted-go-round.
No bewitching eyes, no carnal signals, no leftfield books. No Mensa member hellcats. My last new-best-friend-for-five minutes was Lucia … well, Lucia, she accused me of being drunk. That one stung, particularly having been tormented earlier by the flamboyantly smashed Melissa. Unless she’d actually seen me get a few under my belt in the early stages, Lucia had no reason to presume such a thing. I was perfectly coherent and alert. I mumble a bit but that’s just me. And my protests were cut short because, all of a sudden, that was that. Last bell. Fuck off, the lot of you. A final sour note sounding on what turned out to be an evening almost as precisely wishy-washy as I’d imagined.
People who had met people who they liked, and had indicated so on their cattle sheet thing, dropped their paper, ballot-style, on the way out. Should two persons be interested in one another, contact details would be delivered. I screwed up my sheet and binned it.
I was unhappy Lucia got away scot-free. Where was my book of insults when I needed it? Melissa too … she deserved a caustic slam-down, but she was probably asleep in the toilet. Hey, Melissa – how could I better sum you up than to quote Christopher Fry, whoever he was, who described someone whose fan club he was not a member of thus: ‘You slawzy poodle, you tike, you crapulous puddering pipsqueak.’ Are you listening, Melissa?
To the rest of you, I can only echo the words of Groucho Marx. I’ve had a wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.
Michael Witheford’s novel ‘Buzzed’ is available on Amazon for $114. Seriously. His band, The TV Set, are playing sunny Sundays next month at the Town Hall Hotel in North Melbourne.
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