Drifting Notes

The man who played the shaker (S5, E2)

The setting sun was on my face and catching my attention until the music found my ears, and the jazz tunes pulled us from the golden street through the green velvet curtains. We had been walking up the Via Roma to a dinner appointment, and we had not meant to stop. Tom and I sat down on a velvet two-seater, and my coat stayed over the arm of it. Tom’s whiskey sour arrived on a deck of cards. A chess board was set by the window across the room, a game already in progress. The piano by the bar was already being played. The pianist was a man well over seventy, playing when we crossed the threshold and still playing as we were shown to our table, his hands moving across the keys without looking down. He finished a tune, and in the gap that opened between one song and the next, a woman at a table near the piano leaned forward and whispered one word across to him. Summertime. She was loud enough for our table to hear and quiet enough that it felt like overhearing rather than listening, and he nodded once and began it. She did not lift her head. She sang along under her breath, just loud enough for the man she was with to hear, and he watched his glass, and I was secretly very happy. Summertime is the kind of song a person carries privately and occasionally hands to a stranger. Gershwin composed it as a lullaby for a mother singing to her child, and it has been played so many times in so many rooms that it no longer belongs to anyone in particular. A lady in a jazz bar at sunset does not ask for it the way a person orders a drink. She names a song that has been following her all day, and she asks a stranger to play it back to her. He finished Summertime, and in the gap that followed, the bartender was shaking a whiskey sour at the bar. The pianist heard it first. He turned toward the bar and found a rhythm the ice did not know it was keeping, settling into his own groove, the kind a body of seventy settles into rather than performs, and he leaned toward the bartender the way you lean toward someone you are playing with, and he launched into an improvisation in the same key. The shaker became his percussion. The bartender kept shaking. The drink was ready long before the song was, and the shaker kept going anyway, and the pianist played to the ice and the ice held the time. We shared a laugh, the whole room, the first sound in the bar louder than a whisper since we had arrived. That was the moment I understood what a seventy-year-old has that a thirty-year-old does not. The ear that finds the song already present in the room, rather than the ego that wants to make one. He finished the improvisation, and the bartender poured the drink, and the pianist stood up, not with any ceremony. The maître d’ walked over and closed the piano, and the lid came down without a sound. We clicked our fingers. Someone at another table said bravo, quietly. Clapping would have been too loud for the room, and the room knew it before we did. The pianist walked back through the green velvet curtains and out into the street, and someone handed him a drink at the doorway, and I did not look to see what it was. Only after he was gone did I look properly at the room. Il Club was a high room, taller than it needed to be, walls the green of a very old bottle, with two crystal chandeliers hanging from black twisted cords. The tables were onyx marble. The lounges were deep leather, and ours was a velvet two-seater, the only piece of furniture in the room built for company. On one wall, a grid of small agricultural tools in red-velvet frames. On another wall, wooden tennis rackets with their strings gone slack. On a shelf near the bar, a set of rosary beads. Above the leather lounges, two large oil portraits in gilt frames, a man and a woman in period dress, watching the room the way the painted always watch. The quiet in the room was not an absence of sound. It was the sound of everything continuing without anyone playing it. A man came in through the curtains a few minutes later. He walked to the chess board, studied the position, moved three pieces, and walked out. He did not sit down. He did not order a drink. He did not speak to anyone. The pieces he had moved were waiting for someone we never saw… We finished our drinks and left for the restaurant. On the Via Roma the sun was almost gone, and the stone still held the warmth of the day. Tom took my arm. A pianist I would never see again was somewhere behind us, holding a drink at a doorway. We walked the rest of the way in the kind of quiet that stays between two people after they have seen something they cannot quite describe yet. Thanks for drifting with me. If you pass through Siracusa at sunset and you hear a piano coming through a green velvet curtain on the Via Roma, step inside. The bar is called Il Club [https://www.instagram.com/ilclub.ortigia/], which is the plainest name for the most beautifully dressed room on that street, and the plainness is the point. The room will still be there, the game still running. Tell them I sent you, I would like to know how it goes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com [https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Giovanni padre (S5, E1)

Between one and three in the morning, they leave. We are asleep on Cooee, our sailboat, moored some metres away in the same harbour, and their engines are kept so low and the lines slipped so quietly that by the time the sky begins to lighten the boats are already past the breakwater and out into the Strait of Sicily, somewhere in the dark water between this small Sicilian town and the coast of Africa. We wake to rope ends where boats were, and the faint smell of diesel hanging on still air, and a harbour that feels less like emptiness than like intention. They are out somewhere. They are working. They will be back. Scoglitti is a fishing village on the southern coast of Sicily, and still one, though the fleet is smaller now than it was, regulations changed what was possible some years ago, and some boats didn’t come back from that. But the ones that stayed are still going out every morning before the town stirs, still slipping their lines in the dark, still reading the same water their grandfathers read. That is the fact worth holding onto, and it is the fact this harbour keeps quietly insisting on, if you stay long enough to hear it. Their boats carry the names they were given > Santa Maria, La Madonnina, Giovanni Padre, and Gianni Boy. From saint to patron, from father to son, each name a rung on the same ladder, the same family climbing it in the same water for longer than anyone can clearly remember. The names are not decorative. They are a record of what matters most to the people who painted them there, in plain block letters on working hulls, in a harbour on the edge of Europe where the sea has always been both the livelihood and the love. The harbour itself is clean in a way that feels deliberate, tended. The water is clear enough in the morning light to see straight to the bottom, green with weed, the hulls of the moored boats lying in perfect reflection on the surface, the real and the mirror image so still and close that you have to choose which one to look at. The breakwater holds the sea back and the town holds the land back and between them there is this flat, quiet, looked-after water where the boats rest, held by long lines running back to shore, bounded but afloat, connected to the land without ever quite touching it. The afternoons in Scoglitti belong to the boats coming home. Padre comes back first, around noon, and I watch from Cooee‘s deck as the man in yellow overalls takes his position at the bow before the engine has finished slowing, a long hook already in his hands, reaching out across the water to catch the mooring line his tender has been holding all day. He hauls it in and makes it fast with the easy efficiency of someone who has made the same gesture ten thousand times, and the boat settles in the middle of the harbour, not against a dock, not touching land, but held in open water in exactly the right place. Giovanni Boy comes back around three. By four o’clock the fish market is running along the dock, the last crates coming off the last boat, small vans pulling up in the late light, one of them with a little mermaid painted on the side, and the handlers and the buyers and the people of the town stand together talking and gesturing and sometimes holding a beer while the sun goes long and gold across the water. Giovanni Padre is the formal name, the father boat I like to think. Blue hull, white above the waterline, rust running in long vertical streaks below the lettering the colour of sweat on a brow, which is what it is… the honest visible record of a working life in salt water. Beside him, Gianni Boy, the same boat a generation newer, a little higher in the water, the name shortened the way you shorten a name for someone you love when they are small. Giovanni becomes Gianni and Padre becomes Boy. The boats are the relationship made visible, moored side by side in the same water they have always shared. On the wall of the harbour authority building, which is also where the lighthouse sits, there is a ceramic tile. The lighthouse is a modest thing, a small stepped tower of white concrete, three tiers decreasing upward, rising above blue-shuttered windows that are the exact same blue as Giovanni Padre’s hull, and you would almost walk past it if the Madonna were not there on the wall beneath it, watching. The Madonna of Porto Salvo, patron saint of the sea, rendered in (I think) a hand-painted ceramic tile, standing above two fishermen in a small wooden boat with nets over the side. 180th anniversary,1834 to 2014. She has been watching this harbour for nearly two centuries, through everything it has been and everything it has lost, and she is watching it still. The afternoon I saw the little boy child, Giovanni Boy had come in and was moored and quiet in the flat harbour light. He was small, perhaps five years old, perhaps six, and he was in the pilot house with both arms raised to the wheel, which was too wide for him by at least half, his chin barely level with the instrument panel. His mouth was making the sound, the low diesel rumble bumble he has heard a hundred times lying in the bow in the dark while his grandfather steered them out before sunrise, the sound that means the sea, that means the work, that means the men he loves going somewhere important and coming back. He was not playing, he was practicing. I was walking past on the dock and I stopped. There is a particular kind of joy that arrives without warning, the kind that belongs entirely to someone else and lands in your chest anyway without asking permission, a small boy on his father’s boat, on his grandfather’s water, already inside the mythology that will be told at Sunday lunch for the rest of his life. The adventures at sea. The men who left before the town woke and came back in the afternoon light with the catch that fed the village. He already knows he is part of that story. He is steering himself into it right now, alone in the pilot house, the harbour still, the engine quiet, going nowhere and already on his way. I stood there one breath too long, then walked on… Later, when the market has sold its last crate and the vans have pulled away and the harbour has settled into the particular quiet of a working day finished, I see one of the fishermen climb down into his small wooden tender, lower himself onto the middle thwart, and take a fishing rod from somewhere beneath the seat. He is not going anywhere. The tender rocks once, twice, and is still. He casts his line into the same water he spent twelve hours working before the sun came up, and he waits, and the harbour goes quiet around him, and the light falls slowly across the water, and there is nothing in his posture that suggests he would rather be anywhere else. He is exactly where he wants to be. Thanks for drifting with me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com [https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Objects designed for circulation, not survival (S4, E9)

The first thing that stops you on the fourth floor of the State Library of Queensland is a promise printed across a dark wall. Extraordinary Stories. The letters are large enough to interrupt your stride, which is a clever architectural gesture in a library, because by the time you reach the upper floors you are already walking more quietly than usual, already adjusting yourself to the expectation that something here deserves careful attention. Beneath the headline the institution explains itself in smaller lines. Stories worth telling.Stories worth hearing.Stories worth collecting. It prepares the imagination for heroics, explorers perhaps, standing beside rivers they believed they had discovered. Revolutions unfolding across parliamentary floors, famous names written into the public memory of a place…. But the first object under glass is a cookbook. Not an ornate one bound in leather or gilded with the kind of seriousness museums usually prefer, but a small practical manual typed in straightforward lines and filled with recipes and household instructions for kitchens and cottages, the sort of book I once saw my grandmother read from while cooking dinner, propped open beside a bowl of flour. It is ordinary in the most complete way. The pages promise simple ingredients, simple meals, and the quiet competence required to get through a week without disaster, and standing there I find myself wondering, with a kind of delighted confusion, how a little cookbook full of practical recipes has found its way into a gallery devoted to extraordinary stories. So I move along the glass cabinets and the next display is filled with family planning pamphlets. They are printed in bright colours on cheap paper, their language direct in the way public health advice must be when it is trying to reach people who are busy living their lives. Clinic brochures, sex education leaflets, practical instructions intended to circulate through waiting rooms and community centres and kitchen tables. One poster shows a pair of jeans and a warning printed above the zipper… Open with caution!! It is an image that must once have spoken urgently to bodies and futures, a piece of paper that tried, quite literally, to intervene in what might happen next. Now it sits under museum lighting. For a moment I pause and look around to confirm what the room is telling me. This really is the most carefully protected part of the library, the floor where climate control, sealed cabinets and quiet security presence are all arranged in service of preservation. And all of it is devoted to these small, practical pieces of daily life. My heart skips a beat and I fall in love with the exhibition, because the logic of the room becomes visible. Objects like these belong to a category archivists call ephemera, a word that describes things intended to last only briefly… theatre flyers announcing tonight’s performance, campaign posters pasted to walls for a single season, pamphlets handed out in waiting rooms, instruction manuals that sit beside sinks and stoves until they are replaced by newer ones. Cheap ink, thin paper with a practical purpose. Objects designed for circulation, not longevity. And yet here they are, flattened carefully under glass and protected from light. The room itself participates in the decision to keep them. The air is cooler than the floors below, the cabinets seal the paper away from wandering fingers, and somewhere above the ceiling a system regulates temperature and humidity with a quiet, persistent buzbuzzzzzz, an entire piece of invisible infrastructure devoted to keeping this fragile paper alive. The archive believes in longevity, even though the publications themselves, did not. Annnnnd for each of these objects to arrive here, someone had to let it go. A family sorting drawers after someone died. A theatre packing old programs into boxes when a season closed. An organisation deciding that the contents of a filing cabinet belonged not to them anymore but to the public memory of a place. Relinquishment, it turns out, is the quiet first step of preservation. Once donated, a cookbook becomes record, a health pamphlet becomes evidence. The object itself remains exactly what it always was, thin paper, quick ink and practical instruction. Only the decision surrounding it changes. Standing in the gallery, the promise on the wall begins to feel less like exaggeration and more like a quiet description. The extraordinary thing here is not the stories themselves. They are ordinary stories, really. Recipes, instructions, warnings, advice, the small literature of everyday life. What is extraordinary is the decision to keep them. Someone believed these fragments of daily living were worth electricity, worth staff, worth floor space, worth protecting from the slow, inevitable work of sunlight and time. And suddenly the wall makes perfect sense, Extraordinary Stories. Thanks for drifting with me. Note > This season and episode were produced from within the Queensland Writers Centre [https://queenslandwriters.org.au/] at the Queensland State Library [https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/], as part of the Fishbowl Writers Residency. My sincere gratitude. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com [https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

You can buy a piece of the library for $4 (S4, E8)

You can buy a piece of the library for $4. In the gift shop at the State Library of Queensland, Australia, small bundles rest on a low shelf, each one wrapped in black paper. They are old catalogue tags, used in 1988 when the library moved across the river from a smaller building in the city centre to its larger home at South Bank, tied to journals and books so that every bundle could be identified, lifted, transported, and returned to the correct shelf without confusion. The man behind the counter tells me I can untie them, that I am welcome to open each bundle and select the subjects that suit me, but I decide not to, aware that a library is built upon the promise of locating the precise thing one needs and that my refusal to look is a small reversal of that promise. I pay for a sealed bundle and carry it upstairs without knowing what it contains. At a long wooden table, I loosen the ribbon and ease the stack from its black cover, discovering that the paper grips more firmly than expected, as though the tags have settled into their enclosure over time, and I must gently work them free, wiggling the edges until the cards slide into my hand. Tags emerge…. 614.05 — World Health Statistics Report, Vol. 27.610.5 — Public Health, June 1974.620.105 — Engineering Newsletter, 1951. The handwriting shifts from one to another, blue pen, red marker, typewritten letters slightly darker at the beginning of each line where the ink first struck the ribboned card. Each tag bears two punched holes at its top edge, the white ribbon threaded through all of them so that number, title, and date remain bound together. A printed note explains that in 1988 the old library was emptied shelf by shelf, its volumes wrapped in paper, tied with ribbon, labelled, counted, and loaded onto trucks that crossed the river to this building, which now stretches along the riverbank beside the museum and the performing arts centre. It is not difficult to picture the former rooms narrowing as shelves were cleared, journals stacked in careful rows along the floor, decimals read aloud and checked twice, metres of shelving translated into cubic space, trucks booked and positioned, trolleys rolling across concrete with deliberate steadiness. Number, title, date, truck, shelf. The journals themselves carried reports of disease control and bridge construction, mortality tables and concrete ratios, water quality surveys and post-war engineering diagrams, important documents that once moved through ministries and universities before finding their way to reading desks and, eventually, to wrapping paper. Perhaps the urgency lay in the topics, perhaps it lay in the continuity, the steady issue-after-issue insistence that knowledge accumulates and must be kept somewhere stable. Inside the new building, shelves would have waited already measured, the architecture prepared to receive its cargo so that order could be restored with minimal delay, each tag performing its labour of orientation, preventing loss not through grandeur but through accuracy. The card in my hand bends faintly along a shallow crease where the weight of a journal once pressed against it, and the knot in the ribbon is careful enough to suggest that whoever tied it pulled twice before releasing the tension. The tag has the authority of a former instruction, a small paper command that once told heavy things where to belong. Now it sits inside a black paper cover that cost four dollars. This may be the only thing in a library that does not require return. I line the tags on the table and read the decimals again, slower this time, letting their rhythm hold for a moment before rethreading the ribbon through the holes, not as tightly as before, aware that libraries lend and shelves circulate and books leave only to come back altered by other hands. This bundle does not circulate, I get to take a precious archive of the library home with me. Thanks for drifting with me. Note > This season and episode were produced from within the Queensland Writers Centre [https://queenslandwriters.org.au/] at the Queensland State Library [https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/], as part of the Fishbowl Writers Residency. My sincere gratitude. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com [https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

When colour outranks category (S4, E7)

A book about grief is bright pink. Not muted, not solemn, but unmistakably pink, and it is sitting beside a book with a cartoon dog on the spine. They share the same shade of red. That, it seems, is sufficient qualification. Colour is the only credential required here. It is late summer in Brisbane, Australia, and the sky outside the State Library of Queensland is thick with an incoming storm. The air presses heavily against the glass and I stand under the eaves for a moment before stepping inside. Out there, the floor is white tile and shoes click with authority. Every movement sounds recorded and reading runs on what I think of as the letter-line… number, surname, number again. If you approach correctly, the books respond correctly. The serious system prefers accuracy and it rewards fluency. In here, crossing into the Queensland Writers Centre, the floor turns to red carpet. Sound softens, footsteps disappear into fabric and the room lowers its voice. And the books have changed their manners. There is a large shelf immediately upon entering, and it defies the good behaviour of the library outside. It is not arranged by author, nor by genre, nor by topic. It follows what might be called the ‘rainbow rule’. All the red books together. All the blue books together. All the yellow books together. From across the room, the effect is orderly. Pleasing, even. Up close, it is another matter. A serious political history sits in lemon yellow, looking almost optimistic. A memoir about illness glows in peach. A thriller hides in baby blue, attempting calm. Blue lies, while orange shouts. Green attempts to grow everything at once, placing forests and finance shoulder to shoulder like polite strangers at a conference. Colour has no authority… but it has influence. A thin book of poems is pressed between two thick paperbacks as though under supervision. A glossy hardback with gold lett ering leans into a faded spine that looks sun-tired. A practical manual wedges itself beside a novel in looping script. One spine is cracked clean down the middle from repeated reading, the one beside it has never been opened, its edges still sharp. A severe blue volume in tight typography sits next to a rounded, friendly font that appears to want to be hugged. They share a colour, and that seems to be enough. A slim red paperback about love hides behind a thick red hardcover that occupies more space than necessary. Some books lean into one another, while some hold themselves upright, refusing contact. From a distance, the shelf appears harmonious and up close, it feels negotiated. Out there, I am fluent in ‘systems’, I know how to search, spell, retrieve. I know how to move along the dewy system without hesitation. In here, none of that competence is particularly useful. Someone passes behind me and I shift slightly. The carpet absorbs the sound. My hand reaches, not toward a name but toward a colour. It hesitates over red, then blue, then settles somewhere between certainty and doubt. My hand votes before my head does. I pull one book free… ‘The Search for Galina’. The title lingers with faint irony as it makes me stop searching. I do not know who Galina is, nor what her story entails. I only know that this shade held my attention long enough for my hand to follow. The cover is warm from the room and it feels heavier than it appeared on the shelf. I do not open it. Outside, the white tiles resume their authority and shoes click clack again. The storm edges closer, a low roll of sound behind the glass. Order remains patient back in the library and the numbers are intact while the alphabet is still standing straight. I walk back across the threshold carrying a book chosen by colour rather than category, aware that the serious system will receive it without objection when the time comes to return. For now, the rainbow rule has had its say. Thanks for drifting with me. Note > This season and episode were produced from within the Queensland Writers Centre [https://queenslandwriters.org.au/] at the Queensland State Library [https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/], as part of the Fishbowl Writers Residency. My sincere gratitude. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit driftingnotes.substack.com [https://driftingnotes.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]