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I have a lot of interests. They keep me busy. Sometimes I don’t know what to get to next. I have so many projects on the hop … and I work too being a teacher, and that takes time and preparation.

Right now, I am working on a novel and a script. Both are unfinished. I leave them for a while and then return. But these works are always working in the depths of my mind. 

Sometimes I make notes. Physical ones in little notebooks. I have lots of these notebooks and diaries spanning my entire adult life. I have kept them all. Occasionally I dip into them and see what I was doing and how I was feeling and dealing with life’s challenges. Sometimes I wonder why I keep them, these old dog eared volumes. Who will read them later on? Will they be thrown into rubbish bags or will they mean something to someone in the future?

They mean something to me.

It’s like my books.

I’m not sure if it’s fashionable to collect and read books anymore in the era of the 6 minute read. I have my collections. Graham Green, who famously wrote The Third Man and Brighton Rock and who worked for the British secret service. Check out Slow Horses on Apple TV to understand the fascination with cloak and dagger characters.

The American author and pioneer of short prose Raymond Carver whose stories convey a darkness and depth in sometime everyday occurrences. Like his story, ‘A Small Good Thing’ of the lady that went to a baker to order a birthday cake for her young son. The baker was a cranky man. Matter of fact and short tempered with his customers. He was angry when the lady didn’t return to pick up the cake. I’ll let you read the story. It’s longer than a 6 minute read.

I have a battered and treasured copy of Ukrainian writer, Anton Tchehov‘s short stories. Even though he wrote almost 100 years ago, he is acknowledged as a master of the modern short story his themes are modern and his style flows. They can be deceptively simple in their themes – a lot is left to the reader’s imagination. His plays like The Cherry Orchard about family, debt and social change are classics still being produced.

GREAT AUSTRALIANS

The Australian journalist and poet Kenneth Slessor also means a lot to me, not only because he wrote Five Bells, about his mate Joe who went missing on a ferry in Sydney harbour and drowned one night, but also because he was a friend and colleague of my father Bill Rodie, who was also a journalist in Sydney back then.

NEW GENERATIONS

I have always been fascinated by social movements and Jack Kerouac and his fellow beats had a big impact on America and the world back in the fifties and sixties. They illuminated a different style of living that didn’t fit with the glossy consumer focused perfect families of the fifties with their gleaming cars and happy stay at home moms cooking for the family in perfect, gleaming kitchens full of gleaming appliances.

The beats gave birth to the hippies who also ushered in new sensibilities. The hippies gave birth to the punks who gave birth to the … well you get my drift.

The beats included iconoclasts like the poet, Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs whose writings influenced by be bop jazz took readers to places they’d never been filled with drugs and dealers and humour. Burroughs was droll. Check out his readings on Youtube.

FROM NEW YORK TO PARIS TO BIG SUR

One of my literary heroes is Henry Miller who left New York in the 1930’s to live and write in Paris. Back in those days Paris was a mecca for artists. It was cheap and liberated full of like minded ‘bohemians’ all trying to create something. Henry was so poor when he arrived there that he asked all of his friends to send him a dollar a week. A novel idea that worked while he worked on his novels. Today you’d need a thousand friends. He famously broke taboos with his work. His books were universally banned like the famous Tropic of Cancer. I love his writing and fascinated with his story. later in life he returned to the states and settled in Big Sur. Back then it was back roads and wild. An unspoiled landscape of sea and slopes and wildlife. He thrived there and he influenced the Beats.

Books are important. Writers are too. And in the age of AI, these creators stand out.

“Books, my beloved companions, keep me tethered to the vibrant tapestry of life, love, and the eternal human drama.”

That was written by AI in the style of Henry Miller.

I think he could do better.

Tags: Anton Tchehov, Burroughs, creative, Henry Miller, Kenneth Slessor, Kerouac, Raymond Carver, The beats, writers, writing