Reviving a Passion - The Went Report and its Beginnings

 

Reviving a Passion – The Went Report.

As a primary school student one of my obsessions was to be the first child to finish the work. I still recall the exasperated look on my teacher’s faces when they saw me coming out to show them my work, well before they were expecting someone to finish! Part of this was because I’d been told when I was younger that I was a slow worker and I was still burned about it. The other part of it, though, was that these were days when the concept of free time for children in school was not a laughable one. Being a reader, if my classroom had a decent class library, which some of them actually did – another rare event nowadays – I would read, but in Year 5 I cottoned onto a different activity.

I would ask the redoubtable Mr Wilson for a piece of art paper, skip back to my desk and create a mini newspaper sharing my thoughts about the most important thing in the world – rugby league! I was completely obsessed about the sport then, reading all the stories in the papers every day, harassing my brother David savagely if he failed to bring home Rugby league Week on a Thursday night, David got paid on Thursdays and being a young man who enjoyed a smoke and a drink he often had other plans but even drunk he learnt it just wasn’t worth not having it with him when he got in the door.

So, I would pour out my views about Rugby league and other assorted topics onto the page. But I needed a title for my work – even today, I feel the need to title things that I write. The editor of Rugby league Week was Geoff Prenter and he wrote a column every week called “The Prenter Report.” What better thing to imitate than the elite column in the most important magazine in the world? Voila, The Went Report was born!

So, I would fill the piece of art paper with my scribblings and when I was finished I would proudly take it back to Mr Wilson to show him. Being a league fan and a keen supporter of the Wests Magpies, he may well have enjoyed it but even if he didn’t, he was an experienced enough teacher to make it look like he did!

I assumed he showed it to the class on one occasion although it’s certainly not out of the question that, buoyed by the positive feedback he gave me and my seriously inflated sense of my own worth, that I took the opportunity to show it off to all of Year 5 boys. Sorry girls but at that stage of my life the opinions of the girls was absolutely inconsequential to me!

In response to my capture of writing glory, my future friend Andrew decided he needed to muscle in on the action and one day he created his own mini- newspaper! And the other boys flocked to read it! Scandalous behaviour. I was completely cut. Being an unrepentant know it all and completely unafraid to point out the lack of knowledge of other people about anything I happened to know and a few things that I didn’t, I wasn’t exactly the most popular boy in town.

However, after his successful raid, Andrew lost interest and I continued happily making my own Went Reports for the remainder of the year.

The Went Report went into hibernation until 1985, when my beloved St George Dragons embarked upon what would ultimately fall 2 points short of being the perfect season as they nearly triumphed in all 3 grades, a big deal to rugby league obsessives at the time. Unfortunately, those 2 points happened to be in the grand final against the evil enemy, the Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs, the local team for Picnic Point High School and thus followed by a majority of the kids! The fact we hadn’t lost to them all year didn’t exactly soothe this mortal blow to my ego!

Nevertheless, the thrill of having a successful sporting team to follow fired up my creative urges. My brother David would take Geoffrey and I to most of the games that year, with my oldest brother Peter normally in attendance as well. Sometimes, my father would come but fortunately not too often. He and I weren’t close and his attendance increased the odds of the adults drinking, which added unnecessary stress to the whole event for this budding teetotaller.

Attending all 3 grades was par for the course for us so writing reports about all 3 grades was a logical next step. That became page 1 of the Dragon Weekly, a magazine I created about St George. Page 2 was the Went Report, containing all my views about the team and the game, followed by pictures cut out from the papers, Rugby League week and Big League, carefully captioned by yours truly. I was such an obsessive in 1985 that I would write the new competition table every Sunday night, including for and against and put the page in my wallet! I had been planning an epic edition had St George won the grand final, but the disappointment was such that all I could manage was a game report and a Went Report column.

Interestingly, it was rare for me to show The Dragon Weekly to anyone. My brothers saw the occasional edition, but more in passing rather than me showing it to them. This was to become a theme in my writing. I wrote other magazines about varying topics during high school, but I didn’t show them to people either. Consequently, it never occurred to me or anyone around me that I might have had some potential for journalism.

I get great pleasure out of creating something that did not exist before I made it. I can’t draw, I can’t sew, I can’t make things, I can’t fix things, I can’t sculpt or paint. But I can write. I do it often enough, I just haven’t had the courage to share or the determination to commit to writing regularly for an audience. Reflecting on this past history, I wonder too how much I’ve wanted to have an audience. Still, I always have an audience in mind when I write. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be so meticulous with my word choices and in drafting, re-drafting, then carefully re-reading and editing.

Do I want to make money from writing?

No, not especially. I have a job. I even like it.

How big an audience would I like for my writing?

I wouldn’t complain if something went viral but I won’t consider my writing to be a failure if nothing I wrote ever did. Some regular readers would be excellent.

What will I write about? The short answer: Whatever I fucking want to.

The long answer: Whatever interests me so my family, politics and current affairs, education, history, sport, books, movies and TV shows are all likely to appear should I hook into writing regular blog posts. There’s no shortage of topics.

I would love to write over 100 blog pieces in one year. That would show that I was taking it seriously. But if I managed something every week that would be a vast improvement upon previous efforts!

I tell Cassie that she needs to be creative in her life. The same is true for me and writing has always been how I express creativity.

I just want to write regularly, have a record of what I wrote and to know that some of what I write is reaching an audience.

I want to write with intensity and passion. I want my love for life and my enjoyment of my interests to come through in my writings. I want to be brave when I write. Writing for the public is not for cowards. Cowardly writing is weak, dull and boring. It’s easy enough to be boring without virtually guaranteeing it through a reluctance to be honest. Readers deserve better. As a writer, you’re asking people to devote their time, which they can literally give to thousands of other options at that moment, to you. The least you can do is come to the keyboard with intensity!

 

Reviving a passion

The first hints that I had that writing was more to me than something I did to get good grades at school when I saw how much joy I gained from writing long love letters to Kathryn, my first girlfriend. In late1988, with Year 12 having ended, along with that relationship which I had allowed to flicker out, I spent many hours writing in my diary. It was a long piece about how I was and who I wanted to be. It's a piece of surprising maturity, I knew even then that a wife and family was going to be very important to me and that the type of person that I would share my life with mattered far more than her looks or accomplishments. I look back on it and realise I did not fail myself on that front, once I finally developed the nerve to play the game instead of spectate. My 18 year old self would have been very pleased to know that he would one day have a wife like Kristy and a daughter like Cassie.

What I remember most, though, is how I felt while I was writing it. It was empowering, I was burning with excitement and power, it was a creative flame erupting inside me. The joy of the moment was such that I found myself diverging from my thoughts to record that "I am writing brilliantly at the moment." A quarter century on, I look back at that night and realise just how truthful I was being. I *was* brilliant. Writing was seducing me that night, inviting me to be her lover, to seek her rewards, to take a journey with her. Writing was showing me what was possible and asking me to give myself over to her. She was asking me to commit to her with my heart and soul.

But we know about young men and commitment. Writing, like any true lover, expects much of you in return for stoking that flame inside you. She has her expectations. And her tests. I took the road more travelled by. I refused the temptation. I read obsessively but wrote only sporadically. The fire of that night faded to embers, periodically stoked by an email or a travelogue or a journal post, powerfully written but just a monologue. 

I failed the test. Writing has been a path that I refused to take even though it beckoned to me. I denied who I was and I have kept right on denying it. Not the first time in my life that happened! I would not accept who I was. I wouldn't accept that failure was part of the equation, that one could give everything to a passion and come up with very little to show for it. I never realised that it is the journey that matters, not the destination.

And so here I am, making restitution to my younger self at the keyboard. Can one resurrect a failed love affair? Is it too late to become the person you always wanted to be? 

Who am I now? I am a husband. I am a father. I am an educator. I am a learner. I am a reader. I am a chess player. I am a man trying to live a life that's closer to his dreams.

Along with those things, I am a writer. It's been a terribly private journey, with so much of my writing aimed at an audience of one. That is the thing I seek to change about my writing. I shall continue to write and I shall seek an audience for my writings. I have so much that I want to say and I am going to say it. There are stories I want to tell, there are ideas I want to explore, there are passions and beliefs I want to share. I want to think of this piece when my life ebbs away and know that I didn't pass up the opportunity a second time, that I took the time to pursue my lone creative passion!

I hope you will join me on this path and that my passion for writing will liven up your day from time to time. 

The unread books.

This post has quite the history. I commenced drafting it a year ago and it had quite a different tone from the final version. The post started with this paragraph, "www.goodreads.com have a yearly reading challenge where you set yourself a certain number of books and try to read that many over the course of a year. I don't find that particularly interesting as I read because I want to and don't need to set a goal to make myself read, any more than I need to set goals to breathe."

This arrogant and inaccurate paragraph was composed while I was clearly in denial about the radical shift in my reading habits. Yes, I still read with a voracious appetite, but firstly the Internet and secondly and more powerfully, the smartphone and tablet have combined to revolutionise my reading habits while I wasn't even noticing. I read copious numbers of short articles and longer articles and that time has been filched from my book reading allocation. It's January 28 and I've only completed 3 books in my Year of Books series. For me, 3 is not a satisfactory total and indicates that more time needs to set aside for book reading.

The primary purpose of this post is to list the books that I've had for a long time and failed to read for whatever reason but still want to read. Recent purchases do not count, most of these books have been on the reading list for a decade or more. as of the 28th January 2017, this is

The Unread Books List: 


Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell I read the start of this and liked it but I didn't finish it, I think the pacing was an issue.

The Wizard Knight Gene Wolfe is a great writer, but his works are usually fairly demanding and the first 100 pages of this was no exception!

 Watchmen I have no idea why I haven't read this yet! I've read other great comics.

Master and Commander I wanted to find out if I would be interested in the whole series - I enjoyed the film! Again, it has been tried but not finished. If the next attempt fails, the book will be culled.

The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm: Winston Churchill is my all time favourite biographical subject and William Manchester wrote two compellingly readable volumes in an intended trilogy. Unfortunately old age got the better of him and he was struck down by a stroke which caused permanent damage to his memory, rendering him unfit to finish the book. He chose Paul Reid to finish the trilogy, which has been well reviewed, but I haven't yet started his contribution.

Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch; Parting the Waters was a magisterial account of the civil rights movement and given it's one of my favourite all time books, it does the beg the question of why I haven't read the sequels. A question which I must confess that I have no reasonable answer to.

War and Peace and Anna Karenina by the incomparable Leo Tolstoy. I've read some of Tolstoy's short stories, loved them but his two masterpieces read I have not.

Charles Dickens is another great author whose works I've read comparatively little of. I'm adding David Copperfield to the list as I own the book, but I could add most of his novels.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Another unread classic.

The Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman can safely be added to the unread classics list.

For some additional history books there's Norman Davies' Europe: A History. Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution  can't be ignored and Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy, A history of The Russian Revolution is a critically acclaimed account of that dramatic period.

How about some biography with David McCullough's magisterial Truman or the concluding volumes of Edmund Morris's magnum opus about the most important President of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt,  Theodore Rex and Colonel Roosevelt?

Looking for some modern classics? Try Tim Winton's cloudstreet, Commac Mcarthy's The Road or Garbriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There are some shared characteristics among the books listed here. They're nearly all long and they're generally densely written. They require some effort to read. I found making that effort easier in the pre-Internet age. Also, there were fewer entertainment options for me, there's only so long I can watch television before I get bored, that's not the case when surfing the Internet.

I don't anticipate that A Year of Books will be overrun by these titles but I aim to take four of them off the list this year, that's one every three months. That's an achievable target!

The wisdom of ages.

One of the areas that I have found most difficult over my life has been making a consistent effort at fulfilling whatever my goals at a particular period may be. I have been good for a spurt of effort, particularly at deadlines, but prone to dropping off tasks if they become too challenging or require too much work over a consistent period of time to be achieved.

This trait has caused me problems both personally and professionally as I regularly find myself behind whatever timetable I need to be following. This can be highly stressful and where possible, my favourite response to stress is to eliminate it!

During November last year it occurred to me that the fact my tutoring numbers hadn't reached the level I want was reflecting problems that were going to need more than just a few days work to rectify. I analysed how my business was meeting the expectations that I have of a tutoring business, its organisation, structure, administration, presentation and the overall quality of the service that I was providing.

While there were many good things about that service, it was obvious that the answer to the question "Are you doing the best you can do with this business?" was no. Tutoring's a competitive business and that answer reflected an approach where the pursuit of excellence hadn't been the number one priority. I had developed a business that was, in practice, aiming to be 'good enough'. Unfortunately, good enough isn't always good enough.

My characteristic response was to create a list detailing the tasks that needed to be completed in order to raise my business to a standard that I could be proud of.  I am a past master of creating detailed, well structured lists of tasks that need to be done so that I can achieve a series of personal goals. The lists just don't get completed. With around 50 items, most of them outlining lengthy tasks, this list was particularly long and seemed no more likely to be achieved than any of its predecessors.

Nevertheless, it was completed and I commenced work. While I hadn't formalised an order of priority in formulating the list, there was definitely one in my head. As per usual, the first few days were good, making a well structured list is empowering and generates a burst of enthusiasm in the same way the New Year gets us off to a strong start in terms of fulfilling personal goals.

Historically, a good day for me has been the precursor for a disaster as I get satisfied with myself, think that I'm doing well so I relax, do nothing productive the next day and drift back to the spiral of time wasting, feeling guilty about time wasting, doing less and less because of that guilt and eventually giving up on the project. This time I have been reviewing each night what I have achieved that day, asking myself what I seek to achieve the following day. If I'm stuck for inspiration, I look at the list, which gets added to as relevant items occur to me. It's approaching 70 items now.

Initially, I had to be very tough on myself, guarding against the idea that I was getting somewhere significant and constantly re-iterating that my performances today were what mattered, not yesterday and not tomorrow. I can live quite happily in visions of a future that will never be achieved!

As this has gone on I've noticed those thoughts coming readily to my head, and the process of reviewing the day's achievements and mentally planning for tomorrow occurring naturally, instead of needing to be forced. Similarly, I'm finding that leisure breaks are becoming just that, that there's an actual desire to get back to the main game. This is virtually unprecedented for me. Today I told Kristy I wouldn't be doing much today but I actually am because I have habituated the process.

THE list is by no means completed and I anticipate that there it will take me months to tick off the items currently on it but many items have been completed and completed to a standard that I am proud of.

What's struck me most about the change is that I am internalising the wisdom of Will Durant, summarising the approaches of Aristotle;

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." 

The wisdom of ages.

Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes

This moving and powerful memoir hits home hard. Jimmy Barnes tells the story of James Swan, the son of Scottish parents from Glasgow who emigrated to Adelaide under the ten pound Pom provisions. James Swan's future as a rock star is irrelevant to this story, whose power relies on the drama and tragedy that the boy experienced.

James Swan did it tough, my own family didn't mind a certain amount of dysfunctional behaviour, often fuelled by alcohol, but compared to the liquor-soaked Swan family and their equally alcohol fuelled community, we were the Brady Bunch. Jimmy Barnes tells this stark story with simplicity and grace, not trying to make excuses yet still showing love for his family and understanding of their experiences.

The first volume of two, I look forward to seeing how Jimmy's legacy impacted his career as a rock star and how he learned to overcome his inheritance and become a better man but I cannot imagine the sequel being able to match this raw, beautifully told story of his childhood.

The world without us by Alan Weisman

My first completed book of the year was a re-read of the great thought experiment by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us. The premise is simple, what would happen if humans all died today, in a way that did not involve any collateral damage to the Earth?

Weisman researched deeply and consulted many experts in engineering, biology, nuclear power and other fields to present a picture of what would come next. Fascinating and a brilliant head fake in the Randy Pausch tradition. Weisman's detailed account of a future without people serves to illuminate the impact we are having upon the planet right now as many of the consequences he outlines are consequences that we will have to face up to going forward. It's a book that supports conservation whilst barely mentioning the word.

Clear, concise, elegant, relatively short. A magnificent book and one of my favourite non fiction reads over the last decade.

A Year of books

I inhale words, there's not been a night of my adult life where I haven't read something before going to bed. Once, books held sole place in my nightly Festival of Reading. Those days are long gone, my trusty tablet has intruded into my bedroom and seized control of the reading agenda, just as the Internet bulldozed its way into my daily Reading Festivals and slashed the number of books I read over time. I still read books and by most people's standards, I read a lot of books. For the owner of a rather extensive library, however,  the number has dropped below acceptable levels and my ability to read for long periods of time without stopping has also diminished. Far worse than not being the man I used to be, I'm not the reader I used to be!

It's time, indeed it's beyond time to fight back. I am challenging myself to read more books. I don't know what my baseline is any more, so this year I will set a baseline by recording each book that I read and writing a short review about it.The world, after all, needs to know what my opinions about the things that I read are. Granted, the world isn't aware of this need, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

The ground rules: A book that has been read for the first time or substantially re-read shall be counted and reviewed. Reviews will be short. Picture books do not have to be counted but longer books that I read to Cassie do count. Reviews shall be posted here and on goodreads. This post will be updated periodically with the list of books read and links to the varying reviews.

The use of cliches and other writing shortcuts is permitted.