Gawenda Unleashed

I was lying on a sunbed by the pool—the infinity pool (infinity!) - drinking a beer and reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian which is mesmerising and horrifying at the same time. Suddenly, without warning, I found that I had decided to set up a substack, become a substacker. I think the decision, which startled me, was made partly because I had read that the 80 year old writer Howard Jacobson, had set up a substack with the title Walking With Howard Jacobson. He had set it up in March but I hadn’t noticed until I received an email asking me to sign on to his substack and fork over the equivalent of $300 Australian dollars which I thought was on the high side, even for a Booker Prize winning novelist and in my view, had once been a superb newspaper columnist. When I read this, my first reaction was a bit of outrage—had Jacobson stolen the idea from me and had he covered up the theft by crediting the idea of his walking substack to the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire who apparently did a lot of walking around Paris almost 200 years ago? Sitting in the sun by the pool, the idea that Jacobson had stolen my idea without acknowledgement did not seem far-fetched. When the sun went down, I dismissed it and I thought, that would be the end of it. And then, a few days later, at the pool, I realised I had made the decision to write a substack. This realisation, this decision, did not vanish when the sun went down. It grew more definite. For a few hours, I abandoned Blood Meridian and thought about Rocky, my old dog, 16 years old and grey faced and I thought that I was old now too and that it was 14 years since I had stopped writing Rocky and Gawenda the almost daily blog I wrote for Crikey for more than a year. It was published as a book, Rocky and Gawenda, the story of a man and his mutt, a bad title because Rocky was never a mutt and there was no story, no narrative, but rather there was conversational musings in which I did most of the musing and Rocky steered us along the path he had chosen for our walk. I was still a young man, but back then I considered myself old, and Rocky was two, a young dog, still a puppy. I am back in Melbourne now and I find that I cannot repudiate the decision made in the hot sun when I sat for hours each day by the infinity pool reading Cormac McCarthy novels and so I shall write, 14 years later, a substack, posting perhaps twice a week, a Rocky and Gawenda sequel, Rocky and Gawenda, musing, still walking. I hope people, not just those people, of whom there are quite a few, who love Rocky and who, since his book was published, treat him like a bit of a celebrity, might check out the substack. Source