The end of Canning St

I made a decision. No more of tomorrow's Canning St parties for me. I mean I will still use the bicycle lanes to get to and from places, under sufferance, but the truths being revealed to me via my gonzo investigations were depressing ones, frankly. You know what I'm talking about. Here I am, at the middle of my life, sitting crosslegged on the median strip of my life, and I am experienced but not cynical. I understand plenty about people and the world but I don't default to hating stuff, not straight off the bat, even when it's stuff that is kind of crying out, oh sensible people everywhere, come here and hate me! Even then I'm still initially hopeful. So a scene that looks like a dismal enclave of smug and immovable self-satisfaction, well, it still deserves an opportunity to unfurl itself, to be known at its best, to let whatever freakish tastes and textures it keeps hidden emerge and spread themselves across our senses. I thought it was worth giving Canning St a chance, so I did, and it turned out to be irredeemable. I have nothing at all to reproach myself with.

I will miss being Diane Arbus and Joan Didion and Don Draper, though, and I've been thinking about who to be next. Then yesterday I turned down the laneway that is almost home and I saw this thing lying on the ground, and then I knew: it's time to be Henry James

Henry James. I haven't even read all of his novels let alone much of the stuff written about him that it's necessary to pretend that one has read. But my incomplete experience of engaging with his work via reading / teaching / writing some minor criticism provided me with a very workable and propulsive sense of what his project was and how it was generated out of his ideas and ambitions about storytelling and also out of deep and utterly intractable features of his personality. A bit like Austen. They both had psychological dispositions of almost pathological curiosity about other people while also pulling back hard into themselves, and from this they made art so powerful and complete that it naturalised their dispositions and disseminated their psychic structures into the DNA of their art form. James at his best has such a generous sense of the ever-expanding folds and filaments and layers of other people's inner lives (even the dumb ones) while at the same time doing such a thorough job of effacing himself that you cannot even see him at it.

This is one of a number of headstones of Henry James's pets which are now affixed to the garden wall of Lamb House in Rye, where he lived in the 1890s and 1900s, I went there in 2013 and it was really interesting and nice but at the same time I remembered that there are many things I hate about literary studies and about people who read novels.

But I'm not going to be that Henry James - the very idea!! - who I will be instead is, alas, not even the cardboard one who is endlessly and ludicrously over-mis-quoted, but the hypothetical aspirant writer who mutely receives Cardboard James's advice to write from her own experience and nothing else, and within that constraint, to insanely wring the last pungent drop from what she sees, to pay attention to everything: "try to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost!" I'll be her.

Dear reader, if you live in Melbourne you saw the black thing and knew instantly what it is. If you live in another place, dear reader, I will tell you what it is. It's part of a bicycle from the privately owned stationless bike sharing scheme we have here. It's the back wheel splashguard and catch for the lock that slides between the spokes when the bike isn't in use. They must be quite easy to break off because I probably see one or two of them every day. When I saw this one I knew it had come off the bike I had myself hired and used on Saturday afternoon and had left locked near this spot. And then I remembered that the last time I had seen my water bottle it was in the carrier basket of this bike that somebody had apparently more or less hotwired and made their clunking getaway upon. And then I turned my head in a direction that I never look, up the branch of the laneway that does not lead to my house, and there was my water bottle lying in the tall weeds and dirt next to a corrugated iron back fence. I picked it up. I saw in my mind's eye a few frames of what somebody else had done, somebody who was doing exactly what they wanted to do and did not care; this person had competently broken the bike, chucked away the bit and the water bottle, and gone where they wanted to go.

You could do something with that. That's all you really need to get something started. So that's my new project: I'll notice things that I notice and draw out what there is to be drawn out.

What I thought first, though, when I saw the black plastic thing, was that it looked like an anchor that has failed at its one job and is now lying pitifully on top of whatever underwater terroir it's supposed to be embedded in. I am still listening obsessively to Moon River (though not exclusively, which is a step forward) and I am feeling terribly tender, unanchored and generally failey at dealing with my horrible emotions and my grief and at pulling myself together and getting on with shit. Yes, I did feel an instant and heartwrenching shock of identification with the unloved piece of shit bike discarded on the road by someone who knows how to live, and thank you for asking. It had been a long day. I rode from home to Footscray then to work then to see the doctor in Collingwood, then home, without having time to eat apart from two apples or any opportunity to get proper coffee. I just remembered too that when I saw this bit of plastic I had actually just turned left for home instead of right for school, ie I had forgotten I needed to pick up Lenny from after school care (it's ok, I've got him now, he's not still there).

It was a huge day. In the morning the chain fell off my bike as I remounted after dragging it up the steps connecting the Moonee Ponds Creek trail to Macaulay Rd, and I came crashing down, smashing my pubic bone on the seat: pain about 7/10. In lovely Footscray I went to a meeting of the education research group which organised the conference in November that I enjoyed so much. There were about a dozen people at this meeting, which was for planning the year's work, and it soon became apparent that the people who had been present for my paper at the conference had remembered it and told others about it, and some of those others were obviously very keen to work with me. It was strange, you know, embarrassing, but exciting. These people are doing some really, really good stuff, and the leader is a quality human being with real scholarly chops, and they appear to be very, very effective as a working group. I am talking about it in this vague way on purpose as you have already discerned. Amazing to have found what might be my people, and to have had my mind blown by what they're doing, and to have more than one immensely appealing project offered to me on the spot sitting there around the table. When the meeting was over and I got up to leave, the leader said to me 'I'll contact you and we'll work out when we can meet and talk about this', and she just gave me this look, and oh my god I realised: I have been needing to see this expression on someone's face for years, and years, and years:

I want to work with you.

I always feel kind of ill at the thought of eating fig jam I made myself. I'm going to turn this into a bakewell slice next time someone at work has a birthday.