The unvenerable bede

Thursday 11 May 2017

On Monday 23 July 2012, my article 'The Unvenerable Bede' about the perils of social media for politicians and local Wollongong Councillor Bede Crasnich in particular was published in Tertangala: The Environment Issue. Bede issued a response in the subsequent September Gender and Sexuality Issue, and for five years a slightly altered version of the article has been available here. After discussion with Bede in light of the recent announcement of his retirement from politics, I have agreed to remove the article from my blog. If you have any questions, or would like to request a copy of the article, my details are listed on my contact page.

Cover photography by Wilfred Russel-Smith, design by Lisa Diebold.

Moleskinoisseurs, markerholics and penophiles

First written Tuesday 29 December 2009

Tweaked and added to Tuesday  29 November 2011

When I go to Miranda Fair on my own, I go into survival mode. My stride lengthens and my pace quickens. If I get in on the quarter-to train, then by god I'm getting out on the quarter-past. But go with a girl, and I can bet at some point I'm going to get forced, by whatever means she finds necessary, into a stationery store. The thing with stationery though, as opposed to clothes or jewellery, is that I might just enjoy myself.

The near-universal appeal of stationery is a curious phenomenon. It's something to which, I suspect, we can all relate in some way – an infatuation that transcends age, race and gender. But why? Why is it that a virgin notepad, or an electric pencil sharpener, or an eraser in the shape of a bunny rabbit that smells like chocolate (I daresay the office-supply addicted amongst you are exhaling lustily just reading that list) is so appealing?

Well, I've taken it upon myself to find the answer. How, you ask? Through rigorous sociological research and countless surveys? Um, no. That would be a lot of work. I thought, instead, I'd harness the extraordinary power of the internet to solve this great mystery – and from the comfort of my own spinny chair, no less.

I wanted to start at the beginning, and it's a well-known fact that the internet begins with Google.* Once I got past the disturbing fact that 'stationary obsession' returns about thirty thousand more results than 'stationery obsession' (I chose not to waste time on the results of the former search – how obsessed with anything can someone really be if they can't even spell it correctly?), I began my descent into the odd and strangely alluring world of the writing-implement enthusiast. 

*As opposed to the way it ends, according to Irish musical comedian David O'Doherty, the only person I know of who alleges to have 'finished' the internet. Apparently, a smiling Bill Gates appears and you get to enter your initials, although this claim is unsubstantiated.

What I discovered was, I have to say, not actually that surprising, considering the types of people that froth over letterheads and liquid paper – a veritable buttload of blogs and websites that act as 'support groups' for the stationerily addicted. I trawled through what must have been a good ... three or four of them looking for answers. 

My first port-of-call, Stationery Fetish, was decidedly unhelpful, if amusing. 'My love of office supplies', writes blogger Cinderberry in her 'Stationery Fetishist's Manifesto', 'is irrational, but it is pure. Don't ask me to explain it, just hand over the multi-coloured index cards.'

The writers of Heymiki's blog and ich Kalliope, however, do suggest causes as the roots of stationery obsession. '[I]sn't this compulsion just another guise of my incessant procrastination?' asks Miki in 'My Stationery Obsession':

     Can there be any justification for this oft[-]repeated ritual: 

     deciding what colour Uniball Signo DX 0.38 would be 

     most fitting to capture the thought currently scuttling 

     through my head?' 

Kalliope seems to prefer stationery for its distraction value, saying in 'I heart New Notebooks' that it takes her 'mind off the actual thought of going "back to school".'

In her post 'Stationery Heaven' on Style Treaty, blogger Marion proposes nostalgia as the force behind statio-mania, writing longingly of the days of 'smelly paper' and 'fancy pens', adding that she 

     used to love those pencils where there were all different

     colours within the same pencil and you would remove

     the colour from the bottom and stick it into the top, 

     and if you wanted one of the colours that was at the

     top you'd have to keep pulling them out from the 

     bottom and stuffing them into the top

Okay, Marion, calm down ...

I wasn't too far into my stationery wanderings (Geddit? Hardee har har) when I came across an interview with Kristina Karlsson, wanky stationery name: Kikki K. I was beginning to think all statio-maniacs had to come up with funky alternative names for themselves. I mean really, if Kikki K translates to Kristina Karlsson, then what the hell are Marion, Miki, Kalliope and Cinderberry? But surely the Kikki K would have some answers! Well, yes. Yes she did. 'There is something about a freshly sharpened pencil or a new clean pencil case and notebook that signals a fresh start to the year', she says. And this was a recurring theme in the blogs of my specimens. Cinderberry, if that is her real name, says 

     spiral notebooks whisper to me about the promise of a

     new term at school, new things to learn, new things to 

     write. With a spiral pad, with a pen clipped inside the 

     coil, I'm ready to take on the world

which, correct me if I'm wrong, is just a little creepy. But so-called Kalliope says she loves 'the promise of staying organised' that comes with new stationery, which I have to say, I totally get.

At this point, I was starting to feel a bit weird stalking all these chicks' blogs, so I decided to turn to my own friends in the real world (through the medium of Facebook), ahem. I like the way my friend Sonja put it: 'new stationery makes me feel like things will be different that year. Productivity will increase, and I'll be so epic at everything I do. Just 'cause of all my flash new stationery ... It's all lies, though.'

The only other response I got (out of 391 Facebook friends; is that sad?) was actually from a friend, Melanie, who works at kikki.K and, unsurprisingly, hates it. I say unsurprisingly because any reasonable person opposed to conspicuous consumerism of an insane level would hate it – I once got dragged in there by a friend and the only way I could get her to leave was by exclaiming, loudly enough that the cashier could hear, that no A6 notepad was worth $49.95, no matter how Swedish. I shit you not. A6 notepad. $49.95. Anyway, I thought Mel's insights were poignant: 'lots of people now use stationery as a fashion accessory', she said, 'and they like to spend their money on something with the excuse that it is functional.' Agreed.

As for myself, I think I come into contact with more statio-mania than the average person, being an aspiring writer. We are more prone to that sort of thing, and it has been noted by myself and others that an excessive concern with the trappings of being a writer is often the sign of a poor one. It was while I was interning for Hachette Children's Books, I think, that an industry insider told me about a writer whose manuscript wasn't even considered because of the ridiculous letterhead he'd fashioned for his cover letter. 'Anyone who spends that much time on their letterhead isn't spending enough time writing,' they told me. 

So you can imagine my panic in my first Creative Writing class during my exchange semester at the University of East Anglia, eager to meet people and make a good first impression, when I unpacked my bag and realised that sitting in front of me was a Moleskine and a Parker pen. I'd bought the Moleskine ten minutes earlier from the bookshop on campus when I realised on my way to class that I didn't have anything to write in, and the pen, engraved with my writing pseudonym, had been given to me as a twenty-first birthday present by my friends back in Australia just before I left. Luckily I was able to pre-empt any judgement I might've garnered (I think) by declaring when we did the obligatory first-class-of-semester 'go around the room and say one thing about yourself' thing that I was not, despite my try-hard accoutrements, a wanker.

But maybe after that slightly cynical rant, I should end on a nicer, more philosophical note. I do like stationery, after all. I mean, it's not like I'm going to change my name to Lukokobelle and start a new blog about binders whispering to me, but I do like it. I don't think writers, or anyone else for that matter, should be ashamed of their love of leather-bound books and quills and papyrus, they just should be careful not to turn up to their writing classes and announce that they only write using typewriters on brown paper bags (something one of our lecturers told us actually happened once).

A writer's paradise: best friend Gilly and girlfriend Tilly in an Oxford stationery shop.

And don't fool yourself, you like it too. What's not to like? The distraction, the potential for procrastination, the fresh feeling of a new start, the comfort of knowing you're writing on a pad that cost half your week's pay ... In the words of our old friend Miki (Michaela? Maxine? ... Jane?), 

     It has been said that "language is a tool of thought".

     Thus stationery, in enabling us to record and 

     communicate our words, is a conduit of thought! 

     The journey of ideas from the brain to the page is

     no easy task. Thoughts flit and fly. They are 

     ephemeral. Only the best conduit will do. My 

     obsession is not mere indulgence. It is a necessity!

 This article as it originally appeared in Canvas, the 'zine Matilda Grogan, Kaitlyn Carlia (who now has a business crafting greeting cards with Dani Yannoulis) and I put together as an assessment for WRIT216: Introduction to Editing for Practising Writers.

The best kind of people come from austinmer

... is what I realise the day I spend six hours travelling via public transport from Sydney to Wollongong and back. It could've been five, but I misheard the marshal and accidentally boarded an all-stops replacement rail bus instead of an express to Waterfall on the way back. At first I don't mind – I have the latest copy of Voiceworks to read and nothing urgent to do once I get home – but that's before the combination of a two-day diet consisting only of bacon and egg rolls and iced coffee, the electromagnetic energy radiating out the bottom of my awkwardly tilted laptop, and the rollicking of the anfractuous, mountain-hugging coastal road slackens the drawstring of my stomach and drives my eyes up and out the window, to Austinmer.

 

Or, not Austinmer, but that whole stretch of coast and bush between Thirroul in the south and Otford in the noth. It's the kind of place where all the real estate signs proclaim the houses are 'well-appointed'. The kind of place with a lot of houses painted blue, and a lot of (post) modernist architectural statements straight out of Grand Designs. But the mansions are counter-balanced by the shambolic abodes of hippies who bought the land before it was cool, and didn't sell it once it was. The hippies pull the average political persuasion of the area decisively left (and we all know left-wing people are just generally better) so the dead trunks of telegraph poles are hugged by a constant supply of  environmental campaign posters.

It's the kind of place populated enough to have a healthy community, but not populated enough to make its denizens callous to one another. It's the kind of place you can't grow up in without being a surfer. Where you're sensibly non-religious, but still civically active. You did the right amount of extracurricular sports and activities as a kid. You went to scouts but you don't seem like the kind of person who went to scouts.

I think I'm going to spew. It reminds me of occasionally feeling queasy on the Sydney–Wollongong journeys of my childhood between Mum's and Dad's, when one of them would arrive to pick me and my little sisters up earlier than expected and we would rush dinner before scrambling out into the car with packed bags and bare feet. I'm not sure whether you're supposed to look straight ahead through the windscreen when you feel car sick, to try and trick your body into thinking you're not moving, or out the side windows, so your body feels in sync with how fast it's actually going. I can't remember because, apart from those few times, I never needed to know as a kid. 'Doesn't that make you feel sick?' my friends and their parents would ask me as I read or played my Gameboy in the car on the way to their South Coast caravans or grandparents' houses, where I was joining them for their family holidays. 

'Nope, I don't get car sick,' I'd reply proudly.

I seem to remember one of those friends I went away with sitting in the front seat, overriding the 'bags-ings' and 'shotguns' of his siblings with claims that he needed to sit there because he got car sick, so I decide on looking forward. I should Facebook that friend when I get home, I think.

You have Facebook, Austinmerian, but you don't use it often, although you still have between five and seven hundred friends. In part this will be because of your parents' avuncular and materteral attitudes to the children of other people, because of their welcoming of other kids into your home when you were young. Visitors to your house felt comfortable standing around your kitchen island eating from your cornucopic pantries, dripping water from your pool onto the tiles and talking with your parents about the HSC.

Your parents will be twice as old as mine, but they'll pull off their grey hair and thin-rimmed glasses. They accumulated enough money and life experience before you were born to devote themselves to you and your one sibling once you were here, so you got your learner and provisional licenses on your sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays respectively. They're tall and slim and easy and welcoming, your parents. They're doctors, or lawyers, but not business executives. More, psychologists. They'll have an interest in organic living and the arts, with entire walls of their houses devoted to books and season passes to the Sydney Theatre Company in their wallets. You will follow suit and study science, but live art – environmental or veterinary science (the moral ones) during the week and indie folk music festivals and poetry readings on the weekends.

The coach pulls in to Coledale and I consider getting up to ask the driver to unlock the toilet at the back. He looks up into the rear-vision mirror at the smattering of passengers on the bus, but no one gets up. In fact, no one has gotten off since before Thirroul. I wonder if they all made the same mistake I did; none of them look like you, my idealised Austinmer resident. But then, you have a car and a license; you wouldn't need to catch the rail bus. 

I get up to ask about the toilet, but the bus driver sees me and opens the door, watching me, waiting for me to get off. I'd thank him as I alighted and wait graciously for him to ease the bus off the gravel onto the road before crossing and making my way home in the afternoon cold. My parents would be together in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and sipping red wine and listening to jazz and laughing at the border collie watching them hungrily for a strip of meat. But it's obvious. I know when I came in, they wouldn't recognise me.

I stand there in the aisle of the bus for a moment under the driver's gaze before deciding I can make it to Waterfall without being sick, waving him an apology and making as if I was just getting up to take another seat. 

Thirroul–Otford

(Image from Google Maps)

This is the product of the end-of-semester creative high I was talking about in my last post, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. It was just a series of transcribed semi-coherent thoughts initially, then I stripped half of it away and inserted linebreaks to make it a poem, but linebreaks alone do not good poetry make, so I rewrote it as prose and inserted more until I got what you see here. I suppose it's a short story, although I hesitate to call it that. Whatever. It is what it is. And while it's clearly working with a lot of truth, it isn't meant to be taken as an expression of my real thoughts; it's definitely fiction.