Lee Harding has had a mystical experience in a tower. At Geelong. "The Buck Mulligan of the science fiction world," I said. "Who", said Harding, whose brain has rotted from reading too much of that crazy star-wars stuff, "is Buck Mulligan?" "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed," said Damien Broderick, approximately. Damien reads as much SF as Lee does, but he's younger. "You mean Hop Harrigan," said Lee, and went on to tell us about some mystical experiences he'd had as a youth with Hop Harrigan.
Damien and Dianne have acquired a very pleasant house in the better part of Brunswick, that stimulating multicultural suburb where the best phonebox graffiti these days are in Turkish, and we were dining there. The food was heavenly, the conversation almost as good. I'm not sure how the ladies felt about it, but I became a little irritated -- envious may be a better word -- at all the high-powered professional writers' talk that was flying about, so I was forced to admit modestly that I had just made my first sale to the UK. That shut them up, by crikey, for a few seconds. They didn't seem to be pestering me for details, so I volunteered them before they could change the subject. I won four quid in the New Statesman's comp. Look it up. It's the issue for 27 June, vol. 99 no. 2571. "I'm thinking of joining the SFWA," I said. "You can't," said Lee, "it's the Science Fiction Writers of America. Sales to other countries don't count." What a blow! I thought they would let anyone join. The talk moved on to what it's like being a writer-in-residence -- the night was full of that sort of thing, and grants and advances and the avarice of publishers and so on -- so I mentioned that I was considering an offer from Collingwood Tech of an appointment as proofreader-in-residence. A downright lie, as it happens, and it didn't impress them in the least, so I gave up and listened to Irene and Dianne and Sally talking about the real world.

Keats and Chapman often had mystical experiences in towers. One of them happened while they were in Germany doing a spot of proofreading for a local publisher. The first few books they read in their rented tower did not overtax their knowledge of German, but during the third week they were given a job that nearly drove them crazy. It was a very long, intense, convoluted novel by someone named Dan Vinniken about twenty-four hours in the life of an ancient astronaut. This rather improbable being had spent a day in June 1904 wandering the streets of Darmstadt, apparently quite undetected, observing the stolid Hessian burghers and poking about in their minds by some sort of alien psychic means. The story was hard to follow, and the author's style was the most complicated abuse of the German language the friends had ever seen; after a while they gave up checking the spelling, as the typesetters had before them. Altogether they spent six weeks on the book, and for most of that time they were haunted by the feeling that they had been there before, a feeling intensified by the author's frequent use of the mystical term "déjà voodoo" and many other slogans and names that began with the letters DV. At last they reached the end, and were annoyed rather than surprised to discover that the last sentence in the book was the same as the first sentence. "Well," said Keats, "what do you make of that?" Stately, plump Chapman took off his spectacles, dusted them, and said: "Vinniken's fake." Keats fell sobbing on a great pile of galley proofs.

Australian Book Review, 1981