Illustration by Richard Tuschman

The New York Times ran an interesting article yesterday about the current prevalence of dreams about homes. The article, “The House of Your Dreams”, claimed that “Americans aren’t just living the real estate collapse. They’re dreaming it,” quoting psychologists who have seen a spike in patients recounting stressful dreams relating to the idea of home – often homelessness itself, which the article describes as “one of the most primal feelings on the emotional spectrum”.

It has long bothered me that I tend not to remember my dreams. In the first few years after my husband John passed away in late 2004, I was disappointed that there were so few occasions on which I remembered dreaming about him, or about the two of us together. Neither did I dream of the house we lived in, either when I lived in it alone, renovating it like a woman possessed, or later, when I had moved to New York and was writing a book  about John and the house and my various sorts of renovation after losing him to cancer. In hindsight, I wonder if there were so few dreams because most of my waking moments were full of thoughts about him. Writing the book took so much out of me that perhaps my unconscious decided to give me a break while I slept.

Recently I was encouraged to begin keeping a dream journal, and while it is proving a difficult habit to form, I have been struck by the number of times that homes of various kinds appear in my dreaming life. So far, I have not dreamed of the house I so thoroughly chronicled in my book, but I have been a visitor or temporary resident of many different types of houses – warm, cosy places; cavernous rooms with huge windows looking on to lush gardens; hard-edged concrete-and-steel apartments; and even a home with an indoor pool that took up the entirety of the top floor. What it all means I haven’t a clue, but if this article is anything to go by, dreams of home have “an especially powerful place in the psyche … symbolizing safety, comfort, identity and – to the Freudians – mother.” If that’s the case, perhaps my dreams of many homes reflect my rather nomadic existence in recent times.

Is anyone else dreaming a lot about home at the moment?

My memoir, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, is now available in paperback (in Australia). It has been included in the 2009 Books Alive! campaign, which means the cover features a sticker declaring it to be “One of the 50 Books You Can’t Put Down”, and I get to do some more publicity during the month-long campaign in September. I am grateful to the nameless book-loving committees around the country who selected my book for inclusion in the campaign, which annually encourages people into bookshops and offers them a guide to “good books” across a range of tastes and ages – fiction, children’s, sports, “true stories”, and so on.

 Those of you familiar with the hardback edition might be surprised at the dramatically different cover treatment for the paperback (above). It’s a fascinating lesson in book publishing and marketing. The Books Alive campaign is unashamedly mass market in its appeal, and this cover is designed specifically to appeal to women readers of fiction and memoir. I’m delighted because it means that some readers will buy my book who might never have given the hardback a second glance. This cover, in the word of a savvy friend, tells them it’s “safe” to read my book, with its soothing colour palette and its superimposed butterflies. That may or not be the case – that’s up to each reader to decide – but if a new approach helps build a readership for a first-time author, I’m all for it. I would be curious to know what readers think about this cover.

 

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut lists these rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root* for. (This ugly Americanism means “to barrack for”, but I am not about to rewrite Vonnegut’s sentence. And it is no less ugly than its non-American usage, I guess.)
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut also points out that Flannery O’Connor, like most great writers, broke all these rules except the first. As someone new to writing fiction, I would say that if you can adhere to Rule #1, then you don’t need to worry about the rest of the rules, although I heartily endorse #3, #4, and #5. I’m trying to be more of a Sadist – inventing terrible things to happen to my characters (as per #6) - although too much of that turns prose into the mush of melodrama.

I’ve been challenged and occasionally thrilled these past months by my weekly classes at The Writers Studio, which encourage playfulness and experimentation in approaching one’s persona-narrator. Fiction writers seek a seamless meeting of narrative style and subject matter. By trying on different writers’ styles through weekly exercises, the Writers Studio method aims to expand a writer’s technical tool-box so that she can make informed choices about how to tell a particular story. I will write about their method in more detail in a future post.

Look at these gorgeous paintings by Evan B Harris. Their whimsical beauty appeals to me. I bumped into them online while searching for something else. (As it is in life, so it is online.) I find particularly moving his literal intertwining of musician, instrument, memory and the imagination invigorated in the act of making music.

For anyone who’s interested, the artist is available for commissions.

Garden Grows Piano Keys

Salt & Sea Piano Keys

I am one of many people in the US and Australia and elsewhere who are always looking for ways to engage more people with some amazing music that doesn’t fall neatly into one musical category. We are still relying on a term called “jazz” that is often a turn-off to many (I liken its impact to the words “feminism” or “poetry” in that regard). Recently I attended a symposium in Harlem on the relationship between jazz music and jazz writing, which I blogged about at the time. The editor of the Jazz Australia website asked me to expand on my blog post for a feature article, which has just been published here. In that piece I wondered why the discussion ignored all improvised music produced outside the US. I concluded that the jazz community – its producers, its consumers and its bureaucrats – was acting as though the rest of the world did not exist, and in this way it seemed to be similar to a mindset of trade barriers and tariffs in a world that increasingly operates (to a greater or less degree) without them. In the piece I write that

The globalization of jazz in the last forty years is perhaps one of the strongest features of its recent history, and clearly a significant part of its future evolution. Yet the myopia of the American panelists ignores the opportunity of global responses and developments of what was originally a uniquely American music. The panellists’ shared impatience with Wynton Marsalis’s approach to promoting and playing jazz, openly vented during the discussion, should make them more open to and aware of other approaches to the music. The critics and musicians alike spoke of their disappointment with Marsalis’s protectionist mindset, yet the opportunities of global influences on jazz seemed not to have occurred to any one of them. One would hope that new types of improvised music, each reflecting other musical styles and traditions from around the world, would help broaden the remit of jazz music and also, importantly, its potential audience. That is certainly my hope, and one I would imagine to be shared by any musician developing his or her improvising skills in any corner of the globe.

My head is spinning after reading some statistics on the sales of music over the past decade. From their peak in 1999, the value of record sales has halved in ten years, according to the Recording Industry of America and quoted in this op-ed by the New York Times’ Charles M. Blow. He quotes other statistics on teenage music-buying habits to conclude that the media consumption of young people is “moving from an acquisition model to an access model”. With so much music available for free streaming on-demand, why would anyone pay for it? The death of the novel has been predicted for a long time, but the starvation of the songwriter may well be upon us sooner than that of the fiction writer. (Or perhaps it’s just that I haven’t yet come across any comparable statistics for books.)

In December 2008, a study by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the UK’s non-profit royalty-collection service, determined that an extraordinary 85% of all albums available for purchase online did not sell a single copy. This frightening statistic seems to contravene the theory of “the long tail” espoused by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of the 2006 book The Long Tail. His hopeful theory championed the internet as a creator of niche markets in which sellers would make money from sales of unique or uncommon products because there would be sufficient numbers of buyers. These statistics seem to confirm, however, that offline patterns of consumption are simply being echoed online, and that neither the creators or sellers of niche products are any better off – certainly not in digital music sales.

What is it about music that makes people – young people in particular – feel that their access to it is a right, and not a privilege for which they ought to pay? I cannot think of another art form in which this is the case. Anyone can go to a museum to view paintings and sculpture, but more often than not you must pay (if not directly, then through some kind of tax). Anyone can read a few pages of a book still under copyright (such as my own) via Google, but they can only read those few pages once. Individual works are still protected in a way that music is not, despite the best efforts of copyright lawyers. I despair for anyone trying to make a living as a songwriter or performer. Is this situation only the result of the replicability of electronic files, or are there more complex cultural factors at work? I’m not convinced that it’s a simple matter of technology, and I wish Walter Benjamin were here to theorise on the work of art in the age of free-streaming audio.

UPDATE: Letters to the NY Times in response to Charles Blow’s original column.