Read, Think, Write

Barbara Hanrahan tribute

2011-07-22T20:38:00.000+09:30

If you're in Adelaide next Wednesday evening and feel like taking in a little Culture, you could come to this event at the State Library. North Terrace, 6 for 6.30. (Click on the image to enlarge it. If you're lucky you might even be able to read the fine print.)

In which the young Harper helps out the old Harper

2011-07-22T09:51:00.001+09:30

Yesterday I posted on Facebook a link to an article about the fact that sales of To Kill a Mockingbird have increased over 100% since David and Victoria Beckham named their new baby daughter Harper after Harper Lee. The bub is in good company, with Paul Simon's son and Gregory Peck's grandson (and who knows how many other less well-connected infants) called Harper for the same reason.

Someone commented at that Facebook link that she wondered what Harper Lee thought about it; my immediate thought, given my own joy when the annual modest but very welcome Public Lending Right and Education Lending Right cheques arrive chez moi every May, was that if Harper Lee was still alive then I bet she was as pleased as all get-out. A quick check with Wikipedia revealed that Lee is indeed still alive; she was born in April 1926 and is therefore 85 years old.

Given its ubiquity and its staying power on literature courses in schools and universities ever since it was first published, I'm assuming that Lee's iconic novel has kept her in cat food and bananas all her life, but the boost to royalties from the Beckham input can surely, to an 85-year-old woman living in a country where people die daily because they can't afford medical treatment and care, be nothing but very welcome.

I didn't know this lovely story from the Wikipedia entry about how To Kill a Mockingbird came to be written, so here it is. Props to Michael Brown or what? They don't make patrons like that any more.

In 1949, a 23-year-old Lee arrived in New York City. She struggled for several years, working as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and for the British Overseas Air Corp (BOAC). While in the city, Lee was reunited with old friend Truman Capote, one of the literary rising stars of the time. She also befriended Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Brown and his wife Joy. Having written several long stories, Harper Lee located an agent in November 1956. The following month at the Browns' East 50th townhouse, she received a gift of a year's wages from them with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." She quit her job and devoted herself to her craft. Within a year, she had a first draft.

In which Ian Rankin does something unusual

2011-06-17T07:37:00.003+09:30

Here's a little puzzle for people who habitually read literary journalism, especially in Australia.

What is quite unusual about this piece by Ian Rankin? What does it have that we don't often see in articles about literary favourites and highlights, or indeed in literary journalism at all?

Cross-posted at Still Life With Cat

Una selva oscura

2011-06-03T12:43:00.001+09:30

This morning I paid the princely sum of $10 for this new book:

I was halfway to the bookshop counter, wallet at the ready, very possibly with Casey's recent lovely post about Dante in the back of my mind and thinking $10 was a really good deal for one of the great classics of literature, even if I did have to read it in unsatisfactory translation (for I've never seen a translation of the opening three lines that seemed to me exactly right, and I don't even speak or read Italian, but I know what I like), when I idly opened it at random to check the print size and found to my great joy that what I was about to pay a pittance for was a parallel text, with Dante's exquisite, lucid, singing Italian opposite the translation.

Five years of excellent teaching and intermittent hard slog at Adelaide Girls' High back in the mists of time has left me with the ability to nut out a little bit of German and quite a lot of French if it is put in front of me, but such Italian as has sunk in, ie almost none (though I still remember the Italian for the first phrase I ever consciously learned: Posso provarlo? 'May I try this on?') has done so by accident and through some sort of process of osmosis.

But it strikes me, not for the first time, that this verse is so beautiful one could teach oneself Italian simply by studying a page of this book a day. A dark wood, in which one has lost one's way: can you think of a better metaphor for middle age?

...Françoise sat down beside me with a volume of Dante and construed
a few lines of the 'Inferno' to begin showing me how the language
worked. 'Per mi si va tra la perduta gente' - 'Through me you go
among the lost people'. A line that crushed the heart, but in the
middle you could say 'tra la'. It was music.

– Clive James, Falling Towards England

The opening lines likewise crush the heart -- 'In the middle of this life we live, I became aware that I was in a dark wood, and the path was lost.' Or words to that effect. Also words to crush the heart, but look at the paper (or whatever it is) that they were written on.

Cross-posted at Still Life With Cat

On not writing about the Miles Franklin Literary Award

2011-04-23T12:32:00.001+09:30

Passing over the irony of the fact that the main reason I've been neglecting this blog is that I've been flat out writing a book, missing my first deadline but absolutely determined not to miss my second (and I didn't, either. It seems that it's still possible in your late fifties to work all night; who knew?) -- passing over, as I say, the irony of that, I've been thinking in the wake of the second Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist in three years to feature novels written exclusively by men about why the very thought of writing another post about this (for if they're gonna keep doin' it then it is up to those of us to whom these things matter to keep callin' 'em on it) (God I love long sentences, I just love them to death) makes me want to lie down in my own bed in the foetal position with the doona over my head and my thumb in my mouth.

The closest I've seen to an answer to this question is provided by theatre critic, poet and novelist Alison Croggon in some online discussion in the wake of her excellent piece on the subject for the ABC's The Drum. Can't find that comment now but it was something to the effect that one way to get rid of pesky feminist critics was to force them to bore themselves to death explaining the same simple points over and over again.

Examples of the simple points in question: What patriarchy is. What 'hegemony' means. Why the idea of 'literary merit' is not an absolute given. How the dominant culture works. Why it's not simply a matter of who has which set of bits. In a word, Feminism 101.

Not only do I not want to bore myself to death going over these things in online arguments with men who think they already know everything, I also don't want to bore myself to death listening to or reading the magisterial pronouncements of people who haven't done the reading. For examples, see the comments thread on Alison Croggon's piece I linked to up there, if you can stomach it, which I bet you can't. And the comments on Jason Steger's piece on the subject in The Age yesterday are much worse again.

The reason one has to explain the same simple points over and over again is that, in general, blokes simply do not listen when women speak, and they do not read what women write. This is circular argument: they will say Oh but that's because what women say isn't good or interesting, and then you say Well that's because you're applying masculine values universally, and they say They're not masculine values, they're universal values, like for example everyone agrees on what literary merit is, and you say Well no we don't, women value some things differently, and they say Oh but what women say isn't good or interesting.

Etc.

I speak from the experience of (a) six years of blogging, in which activity I include reading and commenting on other blogs, (b) 20 years of university teaching and (c) 50+ years of arguing with my father. The exception is (some) male academics in the humanities, especially those under about 50: those who have actually read some of the theory, and into whom some of the theory has sunk. You can practically see the shining light bulbs above these men's heads. I am very fond of all of them.

But as for the rest, I don't know how this is to be got over. Perhaps it isn't. See doona, foetal position, thumb, etc.

Also, in the discussion of this year's Miles F round the online traps, I've been seeing two (in particular) other honourable exceptions to this: The Australian's literary editor Stephen Romei, and novelist and critic James Bradley. So perhaps there is hope.

Apostrophe Corner

2011-03-23T17:16:00.002+10:30

I see there's some sort of genetic link between being a member of the Flat Earth Society and not knowing where to put your apostrophes.

Be careful what you wish for

2011-03-22T21:45:00.002+10:30

I dreamed of a life in which I could make a living reading and writing, and do so independently: a life where I was in charge. I did a number of difficult things in order to make this come to pass. But tonight, years later, as I reap the fruits of same, my life is reminding me of something from my childhood.

TIME: the present

PLACE: my house

CAST:

Water ..... Words
Brooms .... Books
Mickey .... Moi

And his ghost may be heard

2011-03-06T14:46:00.001+10:30

While I was writing the book about Adelaide (which is now finished and sent to the publisher as of last week; hallelujah and so on), I became acquainted with the magnificent Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program being undertaken by the National Library of Australia. Much material of the livelier sort – merely corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative – comes straight from the Adelaide papers of the times, mainly the Register and the Advertiser.

And here's something I just stumbled on (you do an awful lot of stumbling over treasure when you're noodling around at that site) a moment ago while looking for something quite different. It sounds eerily familiar. Nuriootpa is in the Barossa Valley. NOW READ ON ...

From The Advertiser, 21 March 1908

SWAGMAN DROWNED AT NURIOOTPA.

NURIOOTPA, March 19. - An apple-packer, while passing over the North Para bridge, at 6.45 a.m. to-day, saw the body of a man floating in the river near Mr. C. Schelz's house. He called at Tolley's distillery and the police were communicated with by telephone. Mounted Constable Grosser soon arrived on the scene and with assistance took the body from the water.

It was found to be that of a man about 75 years of age, and 5 ft. 5 in. in height. The deceased was toothless and had blue eyes, grey hair, and a grey goatee beard.

The deceased arrived in this town on Tuesday night with a swag and was last seen alive late yesterday afternoon, when he was camping on the bank of the river near the spot where his body was found. He was a stranger in these parts. A paper found on him bore the name of Michael Whelan. The swag, which was neatly arranged, was attached to the body. An inquest was considered unnecessary, everything pointing to accidental death from drowning.

You keep using that word

2011-02-16T10:40:00.000+10:30

Just in case anyone here is confused about the meaning of the word 'love', allow the Australian Christian Lobby to explain it to you:

Brigadier Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby has no qualms about the law. The head of the influential Christian pressure group said a church school should have the right to expel any openly gay child.

"But I would expect any church that found itself in that situation to do that in the most loving way that it could for the child and to reduce absolutely any negative affects.

"I think that you explain: this is a Christian school, that unless the child is prepared to accept that it is chaste, that it is searching for alternatives as well, that the school may decide that it might be better for the child as well that he goes somewhere else. I think it's a loving response."

If you're wondering, it's here.

Work: more smart, less hard

2011-02-14T10:50:00.000+10:30

It was Oscar Wilde, I believe, who once said that he'd done a hard day's work: he'd spent the morning putting in a comma, and the afternoon taking it out. Whenever I have that sort of writing day, spent fruitlessly staring and tinkering and staring and tinkering, seeing a problem down a long vista of tunnel vision and failing comprehensively to solve it, it's Oscar Wilde who comes to mind.

But this morning I'm reading Daniella Brodsky's Vivian Rising and I've just come across this:

'... I'm not getting off the phone with you until I think of a good piece of advice.'

'We might be here awhile. Remember the Pacific Seafood Extravaganza debacle?' I say, recalling the day I was out sick and Wendy stayed at the office till after midnight thinking up a good rhyme for flounder.

'Right,' she says. 'I still don't know how your grandmother came up with "grab a pounder of flounder."'

Next time I'm having a day like that, I won't describe it to myself as the insertion and removal of commas, but rather as an attempt to think of a rhyme for flounder. In my family, any pointless endeavour is known as 'calling a Burmese cat', but the search for an impossible rhyme is a more fitting metaphor with regard to the writing life.

There are three different possible ways out of wasting a whole day in this manner, all of which involve reframing the problem rather than, erm, floundering around looking for a solution to the existing one, whatever it is, that you have idiotically set yourself:

1) Come up with an outrageous Ogden Nashish solution, as per 'pounder of flounder'.

2) Write blank verse.

3) Think of a different fish, but not lobster or oyster. Whiting, say, or shark. Better still, eel.

More on self-editing

2011-01-27T11:25:00.001+10:30

Which actually sounds kind of rude, but is in fact the opposite of any form of self-indulgence; one must be strict with oneself. Here, as of this morning, are the red-pen annotations on the hard copy of what I sincerely hope will be the penultimate draft of the section of the Adelaide book that deals with Don Dunstan and his Pink Shorts, strung together, in the order in which they appear, for your entertainment. Like the parlour game of Consequences, they do in fact provide a surprisingly coherent narrative, thus:

One newspaper described them as 'flesh-pink'. They had a point, and I wasn't sure about it either. CHECK AND FIX THIS. Add something from the PhD on food and drink? You need to paraphrase this info and conflate it with DD's own portrait. MASH UP. Make more of a song & dance about this. Get DJO's permission. There was also a dash of leftover Cold War paranoia, and another of unreconstructed British imperialism. And to have been a little outraged that it was possible for any Englishman to be sacked by an Australian, even the head of the government that had employed him: 'My loyalty,' he said, apparently under the impression that he had come to work in one of Her Majesty's colonies, 'is to the Crown.' NO LEAVE THIS BIT OUT. As Dunstan had written about a different matter. Factor in dates of Royal Commission. ... the reforms in matters of sexual freedom, particularly the decriminalisation of homosexuality ... Say where photo is. Find name of song -- PERMISSION! (Which had made it possible for him to turn up there in shorts in the first place.)

Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Zombies of Sex-Coburg

2011-01-21T09:19:00.002+10:30

Apparently now writers aren't allowed to behave badly or they will be punished. I wonder if this new boilerplate contract contains the phrase 'damages our brand'.

Well, there goes Oscar Wilde. There go Jane Bowles and Jean Rhys. There go Verlaine and Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Colette, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Ashbery and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. There goes Norman Mailer and there, in spades, go William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Add your own. It's a long list, as long as a piece of string.

(There, it might even be argued, goes Virginia Woolf, for here she is, fooling His Majesty's Navy. That's her on the left-hand end: click on the photo to enlarge, or, as we say in the blogosphere, embiggen. Has anyone ever done a proper academic feminist/postcolonial analysis of this affair, against the background of British/African relations c. 1910? I think there's a thesis in it.)

After computers: the art of second-guessing

2011-01-18T09:39:00.000+10:30

The idea of book-as-baby is a common trope, and it applies not only to books but to any piece of writing that is going to be read by someone other than you. You labour to bring forth the object, and then send it out into the world.

In order to prepare a child for the world, you do your best to second-guess the hazards she might encounter. You nourish her, vaccinate her and educate her. Does the parallel with writing still hold? Why yes. It does.

My earliest forays into publication, back in the early 1980s when newspapers and books were still edited wholly by literate human beings and not largely by American grammar-checking programs, involved the then literary editor of The Age (not the current one) parcelling up volumes of poetry in fours and fives and asking me to write 500-word reviews covering all of them. This as you can imagine was no easy task, though it provided valuable early training in the art of saying something useful in a tiny space. (Which may be why I love to bang on at such length en blog. It's because I can.)

This was fine until I realised that as often as not, on publication, the final paragraph had simply disappeared. Which was another valuable lesson in the fact that in the production of newspapers, the measurement of column inches takes precedence over meaning -- as it must; space, like money, is measurable and finite, and doesn't magically expand just because one feels the need to calibrate one's nuances more finely. (As with money, again.)

And some sub-editors, I discovered, will simply physically trim the edges off your copy as though it were cookie dough, sorry, biscuit dough. I developed a strategy of writing penultimate paragraphs that would, if called upon, serve as final ones, for the times when the 500 words I had been asked for and provided happened not to fit into the space around the advertising -- for which the books pages were, then as now, desperate in order to justify their existence to a stern and pragmatic management, and the sub found it easiest simply to lop off the last little bit. It felt - no, don't go there.

I was reminded of this last night when I wrote a sentence I quite liked, comparing Don Dunstan's pink shorts to Cinderella's glass slipper, 'unwearable by all but one.'

The spell-checker promptly 'corrected' unwearable to unbearable.

I constantly see things in print, and I bet you do too, that appear to make no sense until it dawns on me that Word has 'corrected' something and no human eye and hand have intervened to correct it back. And everyone even remotely connected with writing and publishing knows that sometimes literals creep in, or amendments somehow fail to be taken in, or corrections are somehow not corrected back. I had a vivid mental picture of readers sitting down with the book and puzzling over the notion that the Pink Shorts were unbearable to all but one.

(Which has its own strange charm, as notions go, but which we know not to be true.)

And so I have changed the sentence to something less satisfactory but stronger proof against the processes, as they now are, of publishing. The child is now safe from the measles, but one sheds a parental tear over the pinprick of broken skin.

Self-editing

2011-01-10T15:13:00.000+10:30

As I think I may have blogged about before, either here or at t'other blog, I learned after many years of chronically costive writing practices that if I hit a snag in a sentence or a paragraph, what I should do instead of painstakingly rearranging the grammar or rebooting the paragraph or Googling down the highways and byways of the virtual world in search of confirmation or denial before moving on to the next glacially slow sentence was simply to write a short note to myself in the text, saying what needed to be done, and to write it in caps inside square brackets for clear demarcation and easy spotting.

In practice, almost all such interjections consist of either [CHECK], which usually means 'fact-check', or [FIX THIS], which can mean anything from a clumsily structured paragraph through a bungled segue to a sentence that has simply lost its way and its will to live, and has lain down in the dust to die.

But the book on Adelaide that I am currently hustling to finish is both much longer and much more complicated than most of the stuff I write, and the manuscript as it exists at the moment, while indeed full of [CHECK] and [FIX THIS], also has a few longer and more exotic interjections in it. My two favourites to date are [GAH, JESUS, SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT -- REWRITE THIS WHOLE SENTENCE] and [NO YOU FUCKWIT, HARDLY ANYBODY KNOWS ABOUT THIS, WHAT YOU'VE WRITTEN HERE IS JUST COMPLETELY WRONG].

One can only hope that in one's hurry one does not send one of these early drafts to the publisher by mistake.

Australian novels: a quiz

2011-01-04T13:15:00.000+10:30

The multi-talented Ampersand Duck has put together a quiz about favorite Australian novels. I was surprised by how hard I had to think about some of these. It's a magnificent bit of procrastination for those struggling to get back into a work groove, especially seeing that most of the people who read this would probably be able to justify it as work. Sort of. More or less. The quiz is here.

Great 2010 autobiographies and Christmas presents

2010-12-06T01:13:00.000+10:30

Richards.

Kelly.

Hitchens.

But where are the women?

Were they not admitted to the echelons where you can have the sort of life you write this sort of book about? Did they write a book but fail to persuade a publisher? Were they too busy pairing socks?

Askin'.

A new name for books

2010-11-28T21:49:00.000+10:30

Some time in the early 1980s I was introduced by a friend to the work of US cartoonist Garry Trudeau, the first cartoonist ever to win a Pulitzer. I immediately became, and have remained, a rusted-on devotee, reading the cartoons daily, saving favourites, buying the collections and, since Doonesbury went online, reading the strip every day. Most of what I know about the US is stuff that I have learned, or deduced, or intuited, from reading Trudeau's cartoons and the responses to them in the Blowback section of the website.

A friend in Abu Dhabi, apparently as reliant on the BBC World Service as several other Anglophone friends in non-Anglophone countries have been over the years and therefore likely to hear all kinds of good stuff, said today that she'd heard Trudeau being interviewed recently and recommended it. It's here. I recommend it too.

I see at the Doonesbury site that there's a de luxe publication out to mark the 40th anniversary of the strip. Like a lot of the advertising of Trudeau's books in the past, the ad subverts itself and works as a kind of extension of the strip by touting Doonesbury merchandise in mock down-market advertising language, today including a new synonym for 'books': old-media ownables.

Clarification: not a serious suggestion

2010-11-20T09:02:00.001+10:30

A few posts back I made an observation about apostrophes that seems in the discussion to have escalated into a war about editors and authors. In the course of this discussion I said 'If I were a publisher and were hiring an editor either in-house or on contract, I would give him or her a test sheet to edit with thirty different deliberate errors on it, and nobody who got less than 30/30 would ever get a job.'

Please note: I was not seriously suggesting that this actually, in the real world, be done.

This remark was made in the context of a point about changes in education policy and practice over the last 30-40 years that have resulted in professional editors occasionally not having certain kinds of knowledge or skills that would have been taken for granted in that profession thirty years ago. I saw this generation come through university year by year, regularly getting bumptious with me for insisting that skills and understanding with the mechanics of written language (spelling, grammar, punctuation) were important if they wanted a degree in English. Yes yes, I know, it sounds absurd now.

I fear the remark has been taken literally, and it has escalated. This is partly my fault for my partly tongue-in-cheek defence of the proposition in the discussion. Note to self: tone is important.

It was a comment made at the same level of facetiousness as a favourite utopian fantasy of mine, viz: 'When I'm queen of the world, I'm going ensure that every boy, the day after his fifteenth birthday, is confined in a luxury facility with private five-star suites, personal trainers, limitless sports facilities, regularly updated state-of-the-art personal computer equipment for all, six gourmet meals a day and hot and cold running sex workers, and he won't be let out until he's 40.' (The Bloke: 'But darling, why would he want to get out?')

As with the 30-point editing test, it's possible to think that's a genuinely excellent idea without seriously advocating it in the real world.

Patrick White Award, prizes, lists, elephant stamps and so on

2010-11-16T12:40:00.002+10:30

The brilliant David Foster has won the 2010 Patrick White Award, and used his acceptance speech, as he is wont to do whenever he wins something, to attack something or somebody else.

Sigh. Apart from anything else, it's not usually a matter of writers 'putting their hands up' for prizes and awards; usually it's the publishers who put books in for prizes and awards, and I'm guessing the publishers would scream blue murder, and I can understand why, if a writer (a good writer, anyway) these days said No no, leave me out of it. It might even be in some of their contracts. All very well for Patrick White, whose publishers were British and didn't give a toss what was going on in Aw-stralia. Times have changed.

On the other hand, the guy is a genius. There are many Australian writers whose work I admire and some whose work I love, but for sheer power and originality of vision and style I think Foster is up there with (to list them in order of birthdate) Joseph Furphy, Christina Stead, Patrick White, David Ireland, Les Murray, Gerald Murnane, Barbara Hanrahan and Alexis Wright. There's them, and then there's everyone else. And all of them, apart from Alexis Wright, who's lovely, were and/or are known for their intermittently difficult, prickly, eccentric, combative and/or contrary-Mary moments. So I suppose it goes with the territory.

This is my Aust Lit List of writers -- not of 'favourites', for my favourites list is quite different, but of people I think were or are genuine originals and geniuses -- and I can just imagine the trouble it could get me into, but here I stand, etc.

And it's an opportunity to explore a different issue that has been bothering me more and more in the wake of the publication last year of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, which with the exception of such actual scholars of Australian literature as Professors Ivor Indyk and Peter Pierce seemed to be read by critics and commentators not for what was actually there, but rather almost exclusively in terms of who did or did not get an elephant stamp to say they'd been picked for the First Eleven.

But for me, and I'm guessing for most or all of my fellow editors, it was far less a matter of 'who was in and who was out' than of what was in, and what it was for, and how it fitted together with all the other things that were in, within the stern constraints of our word limits.

So while that's my personal Who's Who list up there, my personal What's What list of poems, stories and novels is quite different: individual works that, for whatever reason, and almost independently of their writers, are simply scarily, eerily good, that move and startle and resonate and go on resonating, in a way that defies analysis. If I could teach an Aust Lit course based solely on the texts that I personally think are magical in this way -- not 'representative' of anything or anyone, not there for any educative or ideological purpose, just magical, like a swirling snow globe or a glowing old-fashioned night light -- it would look like this:

Jessica Anderson, The Commandant
Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup
Marjorie Barnard, 'The Persimmon Tree'
Charmian Clift, Images in Aspic
Delia Falconer, 'Republic of Love'
Helen Garner, The Children's Bach
Jack Hibberd, A Stretch of the Imagination
Elizabeth Jolley, My Father's Moon
Baz Luhrmann, Strictly Ballroom
David Marr, Patrick White: A Life
Olga Masters, 'The Christmas Parcel'
Les Murray, 'The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle'
John Shaw Nielsen, 'Let Your Song be Delicate'
Kenneth Slessor, 'Five Bells'
Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians
Don Walker and Steve Prestwich, 'Flame Trees'
Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock

Bad writing, bad reading

2010-11-11T12:44:00.002+10:30

After reading Tim Dunlop's carefully written, very nuanced, complex but clearly explained piece about books, the internet and changing times at the ABC's The Drum this morning I was astonished, and not in a good way, to read some of the comments.

Those who see themselves as Defenders of the Book (ahem: Tim was not attacking the book, as he went to great lengths to explain in his opening paragraphs) are most likely to fulminate about one or both of two things: either the 'impermanence' of online writing, or the argument that goes 'the internet is full of dross'.

The first makes you wonder whether they have any understanding of the internet at all, or whether they've heard of fire, flood and silverfish, and suggests that they are confusing or conflating permanence with materiality, which in turn suggests that they haven't read Fahrenheit 451 which in turn makes you wonder whether they are as hard-core in their bibliophilia as they would have you believe.

As for the second: well, yes. Of course the internet is full of dross, if by 'dross' you mean the sound of people talking to each other. If you don't want to listen to this sound, the thing to do is develop the skills that will enable you to find, quickly and easily, the particular non-dross that you want. Typing 'Charles Dickens' or 'Virginia Woolf' into the Google box should do it. The 'internet, dross' argument also implies that material published on paper is, by contrast, not full of dross, which in turn suggests that these people have never been in a newsagent's shop or an airport bookshop, or indeed don't read the papers. The paper papers, that is to say.

But never mind the arguments themselves, as they have been and will continue to be amply rehearsed, over and over, everywhere you look. The point is that the people so eager to jump into the comments box to defend something that is not being attacked, and in so doing try to demonstrate what literature-lovers they are themselves, are revealing themselves as bad, careless, sloppy readers.

This seems to be because they're in thrall to the siren song of the false dichotomy. But it's not a matter of either/or. Tim explains very clearly in that article that that's not what he thinks -- so clearly, in fact, that you can see he has anticipated this sort of response and has tried, with only middling success if the comments thread so far is anything to go by, to head it off at the pass.

If I have any serious beef with the internet, it's not that it's 'full of dross' (those who make this argument seem to be complaining that some imagined all-powerful cosmic editor has not fixed all the spelling and typing errors made by teenagers communicating with each other, or by male academics for whom it is a point of pride, typing being a girly skill as everybody knows, that they don't know where the shift key is), but that it has revealed to me a number of things about human nature that I didn't want to know.

One of those things is that when a writer trying to make an argument agonises for hours over micro-details in a piece of writing -- diction, rhythm, sentence structure, clarity of argument and position -- it has in the case of most readers been a total waste of time. Because the other thing is the way that readers like some of those commenting on that post at The Drum respond not by taking in what's been said and responding to it point by point, but by skim-reading and then rushing to mindless tribalism. Which is one of the many enemies of truth.

For academics, ex-academics and would-be academics: required reading

2010-10-16T07:52:00.000+10:30

Because I am ~~supposed to be~~ writing a book and the deadline looms, which is also the reason why this blog has been so neglected -- no time to write posts of any substance even when the ideas are there -- I have suspended all forms of income-gathering apart from my regular reviewing job with the SMH, with one exception. The exception is an annual gig acting as second examiner of Honours theses in a university near you, which I am doing again this year for a number of reasons not least of which is to stay in touch with what's actually going on in my discipline in universities; examining Honours theses is a pretty reliable cage canary in this respect. Yesterday I had an email from the co-ordinator saying that they had been handed in and were en route to me.

So I can't work out whether the gods were laughing kindly or unkindly when a link to this blog post turned up this morning on Facebook to a blog whose title all PhDs will get immediately: Not That Kind of Doctor.

The Stage One part is particularly accurate, and has shot down in flames my plan that if I spend all of every morning examining theses, all of every afternoon working on the book and all of every evening reading the fiction that must be reviewed, I should meet all of the deadlines for each of the tasks.

Abandoning the good ship Apostrophe

2010-09-18T15:16:00.000+09:30

So, which major Australian publisher's website contains the following, in a bio of one of its fiction writers?

[Insert name of author here] lives in a partially renovated house in the Dandenong's.

Now, butchers and fruit and veg merchants and so on don't make their living from reading and writing. One expects them to commit the odd apostrophe howler on their specials boards. But a howler as egregiously wrongity-wrong-from-Wrongtown as this on a publisher's website really is not a good look. There's no point in spending a lot of money on classy web design if you can't get someone fully literate to write the copy for it.

Books to the right of me, books to the left of me

2010-09-17T20:55:00.001+09:30

For the last three and a half years my reading has been what my editor Susan Wyndham of the SMH calls 'purpose-driven'; when you read four novels a week for review, pausing only to shoehorn in the entire oeuvre of Peter Temple in order to interview him for Writers' Week, or to write a full-length review or essay, or to read a book written by a friend, it leaves you very little time to read anything else apart from a few pages of crime fiction every night, for Reading in Bed Before the Light Goes Out is sacred to books read entirely for pleasure, although I must say I prefer Val McDermid's Tony Hill books to this new one, and am looking forward to moving on to Tana French and Reginald Hill.

In spite of which, the house is full to bursting with books, but like most people who live in such houses, it doesn't stop me buying more books, and today I went a bit mad and bought or borrowed about ten, including (against my better judgement) a new Kathy Reichs, a rather sensational-looking history of true crime in Australia, the Salman Rushdie collection of essays and criticism Imaginary Homelands, and the most wonderful history of photography in South Australia from the 1840s to the 1940s, which features a double fold-out reproduction of Townsend Duryea's magnificent fourteen-plate Panorama of Adelaide from 1865.

[NB this definitely counts as work done on the Adelaide book, especially since the Barr Smith Library has changed beyond recognition since the last time I was in it and it took me ages to find things and figure out how to work unfamiliar machines and so on. Barcode schmarcode.]

Anyway, from among this largesse, the award for Quotation of the Day has to go to Peter Morton from Flinders U for this observation from After Light: A History of the City of Adelaide and its Council, 1878-1928. Of the period pre-1898, he writes:

Then there were the massive problems of contaminated food and drink, and especially water, meat and milk. The quality of all three in the city was so dubious that it seemed the only citizen likely to live a natural span was a beer-drinking vegetarian.

Storytelling

2010-09-14T08:14:00.001+09:30

As anyone who's ever tried to write anything knows, there is no substitute for slog. And yet the amount of time spent on something doesn't necessarily equate to the amount of progress you've made with it. Sometimes sitting at a desk wrestling a paragraph to the deck is like wading through a swamp of used chewing gum. And at other times, a decision you make or a revelation that's delivered to you by the writing fairies will mean massive progress in the blink of an eye.

That bit in that last post down there, for example, about the 'four types' of writing, and the decision (more of a realisation, really) that this Adelaide book should and would be a Narration-and-Description sort of book, is going to save me an awful lot of floundering around.

When you're writing about a city you keep drifting back into the uncertain notion that you should be giving statistics, dates and facts about drainage and trams and so on. But it's not a history book. Sure I'll give the dates of things like gaslight and explorers' expeditions. But bearing in mind that the thing that has captured the public imagination about Matthew Flinders most enduringly is the story of his cat, I'll be concentrating more on stories: on the way that Edward John Eyre is remembered outside of Australia chiefly as a brutal, murdering bastard who caused the leading intellectual lights of Victorian England to line up on opposing sides and had a lasting effect on the development of international law; on why Captain Charles Sturt gets unkindly called 'a born loser' in his ADB entry; on the evidence that Colonel William Light was a crazy-brave soldier, artist and linguist as well as a surveyor; and on how Robert Gouger was one of the two people who cooked up the whole idea of a convict-free colony in South Australia while they were both in jail themselves.

(All but one of these people were broken in health by the effort and stress of establishing South Australia and died young. The alleged brutal, murdering bastard was the one who lived to a ripe old age; make of that what you will.)

Book progress FAIL

2010-09-13T12:53:00.001+09:30

The attempt to chart the progress on the writing of the Adelaide book tanked almost before it drew breath, as you can see. But progress has in fact been made, albeit in less tangible ways than counting words. My dear friend Lyn was in town on Friday and as is so often the case I found the use of a sympathetic and enthusiastic sounding board a wonderful way to get ideas into shape.

Apropos the book, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how very much of writing, all writing, is a matter of solving problems of technique. What material to use, and which of it to put where, and why. What sort of narrative voice to establish and how to maintain it. For no good reason I found myself thinking of the tenets of Rhetoric as taught in the US, and the notion of the Four Types -- narration, description, argumentation and exposition -- and how useful that conceptual framework is as a way of deciding what you want or need to say and how you want or need to say it. With this book there will of necessity be a certain amount of exposition, but it'll be mostly narrative and description: stories and images of my city.

I don't think enough writers think enough about technique, especially these days when there's a whole generation of writers who spent their education being taught that grammar and syntax and spelling didn't matter, all that mattered was to Be Creative. This and other forces have conspired to convince that whole generation -- or at least this is the case if the general standard of written expression online is anything to go by -- that content is all and technique doesn't matter, and that it's perfectly possible to be a Great Writer even if you have no idea what you're doing when you write a sentence.

Yes of course the inspiration of the moment is important, as are emotional sources and the workings of the unconscious, and indeed all those things are playing a large part in the writing of this book. Similarly, a book like this needs to maintain adequate levels of ideological awareness, understanding and thoughtfulness; power and money flow around a city along complex but predictable channels. And then there's the material itself, the endless texts and facts.

But all those things need to balance each other, to have a shape, to be contained, to be arranged so that some form of continuum emerges, suggests connections between different stories and images and ideas, and provides a navigable pathway from one idea to the next. And they need to be expressed by a consistent and believable voice, be told in a way that's beautiful and reader-friendly.

And all of that means making lists, charts and diagrams, and doing some serious thought about word choice and sentence structure, right down to the rhythm of individual sentences -- which is something I think about a lot, and will often search for a synonym with its stress on a different syllable so that the sentence will be less bumpy and more lilting, or work away at a sentence structure that will end the sentence on a satisfyingly strong stressed syllable. (Unlike that one.)

It's all as far away as it could possibly be from the capital-R Romantic view of writing: that it all comes gushing forth unmediated and unchecked from one's heart, gut, brain and so on. That's all very well as a metaphor, but on a literal level, the stuff that comes gushing forth from one's various internal organs is usually not very nice. And more to the point, that's the stuff that your body wants to get rid of, not the stuff that it wants to keep.

Picture the scene

2010-09-09T07:25:00.000+09:30

I have seen “Dancing with the Stars” and it’s a lot of fun, but the truth is, I have no time so I almost never get to watch television. My dream is to have a new TV show called, “Dancing with the Writers.”

-- Jean Kwok, author of Girl in Translation and former professional ballroom dancer

In the Australian version, I can tell you now who'd win: Shirley Walker, author of The Ghost at the Wedding, former distinguished academic and mother of novelist and scholar Brenda and songwriter Don of Cold Chisel fame. At the inaugural competition for the Frank Moorhouse Perpetual Trophy for Ballroom Dancing (Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference circa 1980), Shirley and her husband Les made the rest of us look really stupid.

Shame: book (lack of) progress

2010-09-08T11:42:00.001+09:30

Yesterday there was no book progress, unless you count a squiz at the River Torrens, on the map and in the flesh, trying to work out exactly where it rises, and what happens to it between Weir 2 and the brewery.

Today we have a regular weekly deadline and a plumbing emergency.

Tomorrow we have our regular weekly hour on the phone with my father, which in the wake of yesterday's events in Canberra will leave me desperate for a strong drink and a long lie down, when what's actually needed is a head start on next week's deadline.

And on Friday my dear friend Lyn will be in town and the day is devoted to hanging out and having fun with her, though some of it will be spent looking at Barbara Hanrahan prints, and if anything qualifies as Adelaide research then looking at Barbara Hanrahan prints must surely be up near the top of the list.

There will probably be extended disruptive follow-up to the plumbing emergency.

Oh well.

Book progress chart, Day 2

2010-09-06T23:59:00.001+09:30

I got ahead of the game again today: wrote 555 words on 'weird Adelaide' plus an hour and a half of research-related book-sorting, web-surfing and wool-gathering.

Also checked the street directory to see that the road really does curve away from the river, and detoured up to Montefiore Hill on my way home from Quiz Night (we, The Betty Boops, came second) to check the statue of Colonel Light and make sure his finger is in fact pointing in the direction I thought it was pointing in, and confirm while I was there that the Adelaide Oval is no longer the world's most beautiful cricket ground since they put stupid futuristic domey-looking things on it.

Bit behind with the book reviews, but.

And as the deadline looms ...

2010-09-05T16:43:00.000+09:30

We're now into September (we're almost a week into September; gah) and that means that I'm getting up towards the pointy end of the deadline for the book about Adelaide for this series. It's time to get serious. Actually I was already pretty serious, but it's time to get more serious.

To that end, I'm hoping that making a public commitment en blog to a daily minimum of work on the book, a commitment that will shame me into actually doing it.

So here it is: starting today, and working around the regular four novels a week reviewing gig, I must also do a minimum of either (a) writing 500 words or (b) two hours of work (writing, researching, self-editing, faffing around with the bibliography) per day. Whichever comes first. Or both.

And not just during the working week but every day. 7/7. It works like flexitime: I can save up for a day off, or make up time afterwards. If the latter, it has to be within that working week. I'll use the appropriate blog to report back, and to shame myself publicly if need be.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

The Sisterhood of the Travelling Anthology

2010-08-05T22:50:00.000+09:30

Here is one of my fellow Section Editors of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, published overseas as The Literature of Australia. It's the lovely Dr Anita Heiss, also co-editor with poet and lecturer Peter Minter of the associated, stand-alone, Deadly-award-winning volume The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. This photo was taken a few weeks ago in the Red Wheelbarrow, a widely-admired and much-patronised English-language bookshop in Paris, where to her great pleasure she found a copy of the book. As you can see.

In which we regret, not for the first time, that Alexander McCall Smith is already married

2010-08-03T10:43:00.000+09:30

'A good choice, Bertie,' said Stuart, as he came in to pay for the petrol. 'And how about some chocolate?'

Nobody had ever said that to Bertie before. How about some chocolate? It was not a complex phrase, but its power, its sheer, overwhelming sense of gift and possibility filled Bertie with awe. Well might more of us say those words to others, and more frequently -- how healing that would prove to be. 'Look, we've had our differences, but how about some chocolate?' Or: 'I'm so sorry: how about some chocolate?' Or simply: 'Great to see you! How about some chocolate?'

-- The Importance of Being Seven

Perspective

2010-07-25T19:21:00.001+09:30

One of the many lovely things about reading fiction for a living is that it tends to make you an armchair (time-)traveller. Just in the last few weeks I've read books set in the 1990s, the 1970s, the 1950s and the 1760s; books set in Scotland, Leningrad, Berlin and Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, the English Midlands, Chennai, Chicago and country Victoria, just off the top of my head.

Many of the novels I read for review are partly or wholly set in times and places of brutal regimes. One juxtaposes 1970s Argentina with the German Democratic Republic (so-called) of the same era. Another is set in Leningrad in 1952, where survivors of the wartime Siege of Leningrad are now living under Stalin, speaking in whispers, fearing their neighbours, watching their own every move. A third is partly set in India, where everything that happens is immediately politicised and a herpetologist knows better than to try to find out who it was, knowing that he would come home that night exhausted and therefore not thinking or moving quickly, who left a deadly snake in a basket on his verandah.

So every time I see people snarling and squabbling over Rudd v Gillard, or even over Gillard v Abbott, much less get irresistibly drawn into said squabbling myself, I think of a phrase that has been much in my thoughts ever since I first came across it, one that has had a calming effect on many occasions and has reminded me again and again how extraordinarily useful and powerful a psychoanalytic angle can be in explaining our behaviour to ourselves: 'the narcissism of small differences'.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Salt Publishing: Just One Book

2010-07-14T23:42:00.000+09:30

Salt are struggling. Can you help?

Stage and screen

2010-07-07T13:50:00.002+09:30

Two wonderfully engaging pieces of critical writing I've seen lately are reminding me that there's a form of cultural commentary that isn't reviewing, isn't academic or avant-garde, isn't straight-up feature journalism and isn't really an essay either. It's written for a general readership of whom it is required only that they care about the subject matter and can follow a complex sentence, and it's written in a space, and in an amount of space, that gives the writers a bit of room to move, to amplify and stretch.

The first is a piece in today's Australian Literary Review by Peter Craven about the filming of Patrick White's 1973 novel The Eye of the Storm. Craven and I do not see eye to eye on many things, never have and no doubt never will, and there are half a dozen things in this piece that I would argue the toss about, especially in his reading of the novel. But as an informative and atmospheric take on the filming process, especially if one loves this novel and has waited many years for someone to make a movie of it, this article takes a lot of beating, and makes me look forward to the film, which for a while I feared might be a dog but it's looking more hopeful since this morning when I read this.

Have a look in particular at that illustrative still, which shows what a stroke of genius it was to cast Judy Davis as Charlotte Rampling's daughter: not only do they have disconcertingly similar bone structure and colouring, but they also have similar default expressions, that look of a sardonic feral cat who knows something you don't.

The other, earlier piece, also courtesy of The Australian, is quite similar in conception: theatre critic John McCallum's really lovely piece from a week and a bit back about Robyn Nevin and William Hurt in rehearsal for the STC's production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

McCallum is one of those theatre critics who can say something useful and illuminating even in the ridiculously small space so often allotted to theatre criticism and without ever falling into cliche, but he's at his best in these longer pieces where (as with the Craven article) straight-up information is amplified into an atmospheric and ruminative piece of writing. McCallum is the more intellectually disciplined and the (much) less magisterially opinionated of the two, but what often comes through in his work, without any self-indulgence and sometimes apparently in spite of himself, is his own feeling about the material -- not just the play, I mean, but the actors, the ideas, the situation, the whole enchilada. In this case, he seems half bemused and half enchanted.

Barbara Hanrahan

2010-06-09T12:25:00.001+09:30

Annette Stewart's new biography of Barabara Hanrahan (Wakefield Press, come on down) was launched by Barry Oakley in Sydney recently as part of this here event (click on image to embiggen):

Which I wish I could have been at. I have now, through sheer serendipity, scored a review copy and am racing through it. It's a straightforward and basic account of Hanrahan's life and work, heavily reliant for its material on her copious diaries, her life partner Jo Steele, and a handful of her friends. There are worse sorts of sources.

And it's reminding me how highly I've always rated Hanrahan. In general I have an intense dislike of literary league tables, 'Best Of' lists and attempts to identify the Great Australian Novel, but in this case I'm willing to make an exception: for sheer verbal and visionary power and originality, I think Hanrahan is up there with Patrick White, Christina Stead, Les Murray, David Foster, and the Jack Hibberd of A Stretch of the Imagination.

And that list in turn reminds me, as the biography evokes Hanrahan's singular personality -- her ferocious fantasies and 'fits', her rages, her jealousies, her depressions and paranoias and interior struggles of many kinds -- that there's no correlation at all between being an artist of genius and being a sociable, urbane, easy personality. No correlation at all.

It makes you wonder whether the nice, by definition, are lesser artists. Which would be very bad news for writers' festivals, because if that were a reliable theory then you'd have to choose, when drawing up the invitation lists, between calm, co-operative, sociable, competent writers with chip-free shoulders who turn up on time, prepare for their sessions, interact nicely with the punters and take organisational glitches in their stride, and geniuses who, erm, don't.

Because we can't all be Carrie Bradshaw

2010-06-09T00:05:00.000+09:30

More thoughts on writers' festivals and other writerly public appearances, this time from somebody else: an entertaining assortment of dressing tips for women writers from Amanda Craig, the British author of a good recent novel called Hearts and Minds. Hat tip to Cassandra Golds for the link.

"If It's Crap, Why Do I Cry?"

2010-06-07T18:58:00.000+09:30

The best seminar paper title I ever saw, hands down, was this: 'If It's Crap, Why do I Cry?' As that suggests, the paper was looking at 'high art' versus popular culture, with specific reference to the lofty dismissal of the latter, and examining emotional response as a deal-breaker for determining where 'high art' ends and whatever the other thing is begins. Anyone who follows Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury and knows the back-story of these characters in yesterday's strip (though Trudeau is so good that I'm sure it stands alone as well: here's some background if not) will have been giving these matters some thought as recently as yesterday.

If you don't or can't cry, then it's unlikely that you're worth a cracker as an arts and/or literary critic. But there's an ongoing mental process of sorting emotional from intellectual responses to a work of art, especially when it's popular culture and you know there will, even these days, be resistance from some quarters to the notion that that's worth anything at all, much less the serious attention of a critic. And it actively damages your capacity to think about a book in a substantial, knowledgeable way if you're too busy laughing, crying or throwing up. You have to wait until you've calmed down before you bring the brain into play, and then your initial visceral response is one of the things you have to think about.

I trust the body's understanding of what's going on in art, as in life, and its responses have their place in art criticism, though I've been mocked before for saying so and no doubt will be again. (Also, the mocker in question is one of those people whose disapprobation makes you think you must be doing something right.)

I occasionally get asked whether my academic reading and training interfere with my pleasure in art; I assume these people mean the sort of spontaneous nonverbal response I think of as wild (or maybe feral) pleasure, pleasure that is bodily and instinctual and has no truck with literary theory and so on, but the answer is that no it never does; it's entirely possible to think rationally about something after you've finished laughing, crying or throwing up, nor do I think of the cerebral and the visceral as a dichotomy but rather as occurring along some sort of sequence or spectrum of response. And anyway, there's also a certain wild pleasure in thinking.

When my mate R offered me a choice of three movies yesterday afternoon, namely Robin Hood, Animal Kingdom and Love Lust & Lies, I went immediately for the last-named. We'd had a sort of plan to see Robin Hood for quite a while, and not only is Animal Kingdom getting rave reviews but R knows that I am a big fan of Jacki Weaver, especially since I saw her onstage in Last Cab to Darwin in 2003 and realised just exactly how gifted an actor she is.

But in the course of work-related reading, I'd just finished a novel about a rape victim who falls in love fifteen years later with a jailed rapist (not the same one), part of a behavioural pattern clearly set long ago. It's a very good novel and the writer is herself a rape victim, so there are very detailed accounts not only of the physical event but also of the even more detailed and painfully frank, self-lacerating accounts of the profoundly complex and tangled internal processes leading towards and away from it, and on top of all that you know she knows what she's talking about because she's been there, and you have some sense of what an excruciating experience it must have been to re-live her experience in order to shape it into fiction.

And because the writer is, as I say, very good, all of this stuff has been very successfully processed into a proper shapely novel -- what Helen Garner calls 'a little machine that works' -- rather than half-baked, which is to say insufficiently transformed, autobiography. So there was the power of the subject matter, of the writer's dark relation to it, and of the crafted work itself.

Having just finished this short but profoundly disturbing novel, I contemplated seeing either Robin Hood or Animal Kingdom and realised that the thought of sweaty, violent masculinity crashing through either the trees of medieval Sherwood Forest or the suburbs of contemporary Melbourne was making me feel quite ill. Sweaty violent masculinity is something I can usually take in my stride, but in the immediate wake of this novel I couldn't face it at all. So off we went to Gillian Armstrong's excellent Love Lust & Lies, which is the fifth and latest instalment in her Seven Up style doco about the three Adelaide girls whom we first met in Smokes and Lollies (1976) when they were in their early teens, whom Armstrong has revisited for a catchup doco several times since, and who are now all cruising for 50.

Love Lust & Lies, of course, made us cry.

Oh well.

Writers' festival question time: thoughts from the chair

2010-06-02T13:20:00.001+09:30

I've just been reading an entry on the Book Show blog about question time at writers' festivals, here. It's an entertaining sampler of Dumb Questions People Ask, but having had very different experiences at Writers' Week in Adelaide I'm wondering what causes the differences.

My guess is partly scale (all but a handful of evening sessions with Very Big Names happen at the same site, which comprises two big tents for parallel sessions plus a terrific book tent and ditto food and wine, plus surrounding parkland and riverbank, some of which is in deep shade and all of which is beautiful, although if it rains you're stuffed) and partly the audience demographic, which in Adders skews middle-aged to elderly, well-educated, and polite but forthright.

Over the years I've chaired a number of festival sessions in two different cities, though perhaps significantly neither of these was Sydney, and am still pleasantly surprised by the level of knowledge, engagement and intelligence shown by about 95% of the people who get up at question time. In Adelaide there are standing microphones in the tent aisles, so if people want to ask a question they have to make the commitment of getting up and making their way to the mic and queueing when they get there. And then when they do get there, they have the beady eyes of the rest of the audience upon them and will feel the heavy weight of disapproval if they bang on, ask stupid questions or show hostility to the guest, like the woman who got up a few years ago and said to Helen Garner, through a big cheery appeasing smile, 'My daughter's friend really hates you, what should I say to her?'

But it's the responsibility of the person chairing the session to make sure the session doesn't fall apart, and there are a number of techniques for this.

* Take notes, mental or paper (but probably not on your iPhone), of what the guest(s) is/are saying, so that you'll be ready with a few Dorothy Dixers -- or, indeed, real questions -- if nothing is forthcoming from the audience.

* If it's a one-writer session and she or he is clearly recalcitrant and ornery, and you are feeling brave, simply end the session early instead of soldiering on asking good-natured but increasingly desperate and laboured questions that the guest either answers in monosyllables, mocks, or ignores. I've seen a couple of hardened Melbourne literary types reduced to helpless gibbering by MWF guests (Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolley respectively, they were, and there's a warning for you right there: never underestimate a festival guest who looks like a harmless little old lady, for she will do you like a dinner. My own worst-ever experience so far was with Ruth Rendell).

You are chairing this session for love, probably neglecting your day job in the process, and you did not sign up to be publicly humiliated. If you get angry enough, there's nothing to stop you taking in a deep lungful of the red mist and saying to the writer 'So tell me, Pommytwit McArrogance, what exactly do you think about the morality of having accepted the Festival's invitation, plane ticket, hotel room and free publicity if you're just going to sit there sneering and rolling your eyes?'

* Keep an eye out for rogue members of the crowd. This year at Adelaide Writers' Week I could see him coming a mile away: elderly, thin, untidily dressed, muttering to himself through a wolfish grin at nothing in particular and apparently having trouble with both his belt and his teeth as he made his way very slowly and ostentatiously across the front of the audience, between the front row and the stage, and my prayers (No no no make him keep going straight out of the tent don't let him turn down the aisle to the mic no no please Goddess) went unanswered. When he finally did get to the mic he unleashed a meandering stream of invective about how outrageous it was that nobody but him understood that Roger McDonald was the greatest Australian writer who ever lived, which he was perfectly within his rights to think but which didn't haven awful a lot to do with the session topic, which was 'Memoir'. (Nor with the guest list, which Roger McDonald wasn't on this year.)

As soon as was both possible and decent, I got a word in at the end of one of his increasingly long and indignant sentences to say 'Excuse me, Sir,' (always address them as sir or madam) 'but there are several people behind you in the queue, so could you get to the point and ask your question, please?' He did, albeit with much resentful tutting and eye-rolling, and Goddess bless Craig Sherborne for answering it, immediately, politely, succinctly and deadpan.

When this sort of thing happens, or indeed any other disruptive sort of thing you weren't expecting, YOU MUST INTERVENE, because nobody else is going to until the audience starts throwing food scraps. Or, if you're in Adelaide, throwing plastic mineral-water bottles, festival programs, tubes of 30+ blockout, Panamas, sunglasses, paper fans, signed copies of Hitch-22 or The Slap and bits and pieces of Zimmer frame.

* With reference to the above, always make sure you know where Security is before you get up on the stage. Also the tent manager and the sound dudes, and it's helpful to ask for and remember these people's names beforehand.

* Speaking of the sound dudes, there'll always be at least one person in the audience who starts jumping up and down and waving his or her arms and disruptively bellowing "Can't hear! Get closer to the microphone!' These people usually (a) date from an age when getting closer to a microphone made things better instead of worse, (b) don't understand that the techs are the people they should be notifying, (c) are almost certainly sitting somewhere out of proper speaker range in any case, (d) haven't caught on that above a certain decibel level the noise from the East Tent will start interfering with what's going on in the West Tent, and (e) don't have their hearing aids switched on.

* We are living in an age where nobody thinks any more that it might be polite to actually ask the participants whether it would be all right if they recorded (audio, footage, still photos, you name it) the session. They just go ahead and do it. Then they put it online, where you can study, at your leisure, every possible aspect of your appearance, voice, manner and general public presentation.

Do not agree to chair sessions unless you think you will survive this process. Especially not if you then have to cope with eminent gimlet-eyed crime writers whose initials are RR instructing you immediately before you get up on stage to interview them (see next dot point) that you must prevent people from taking photos, and somehow stop yourself from asking 'And how, pray tell, do you propose I manage that?'

* If you a chairing a single-author session, almost all of them will say they want to be interviewed rather than give any kind of presentation. Allow three working days for preparation if you want this to go even remotely well, bearing in mind that you won't find out that that's what they want until after they've arrived in town.

* Do not lose your nerve.

Poetry in books

2010-06-01T11:13:00.001+09:30

Every now and again a name will leap up off the screen at me out of news or literary sites and I'll think proudly (or, in some cases, not) 'Aha, former student.' Here's one I remember very clearly indeed: Georgia Richter, now poetry publisher at Fremantle Press, writing about books and poetry and books of poetry.

Georgia is one of the very few people I can think of who could write a villanelle on a serviette and finish it before she ran out of room or the serviette disintegrated from all the crossings-out.

Randolph Stow, 1935-2010

2010-05-31T12:57:00.000+09:30

From the FaceBook page of Nicholas Pounder, legendary Sydney book dealer and self-described 'mild-mannered antiquarian', I've just learned of the death of Australian novelist Randolph Stow. (Link via Geordie Williamson.)

Not known for conviviality and for many years an expatriate, Stow is one of Australian literature's most overlooked and underrated writers, at least these days. I first encountered him when we 'did' The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea at school, and along with the rest of my generation got some early inklings from this book of the beauty and isolation and general weirdness of Western Australia and its coastline, and of the power of poetry to sustain life, and of what might have happened to some of the Australians who fought in the Second World War.

Under his sandals, leaves and nuts fallen from the Moreton Bay figtrees crunched and popped. Beyond the merry-go-round was the sea. The colour of the sea should have astounded, but the boy was seldom astounded. It was simply the sea, dark and glowing blue, bisected by seagull-grey timbers of the rotting jetty, which dwindled away in the distance until it seemed to come to an end in the flat-topped hills to the north. He did not think about the sea, or about the purple bougainvillea that glowed against it, propped on a sagging shed. These existed only as the familiar backdrop of the merry-go-round. Nevertheless, the colours had entered into him, printing a brilliant memory.

Who are you calling derivative?

2010-05-28T21:59:00.001+09:30

One of the criticisms commonly levelled at J. K. Rowling is that her Harry Potter books are 'derivative'. By this people seem to mean that they are like countless other 'off to boarding school' books, in the great English tradition, or that they are like The Sword in the Stone, or that they're like The Little White Horse, or The Magic Faraway Tree, or The Lord of the Rings, or or or.

Why yes. Yes they are. They are a clever and loving pastiche of precisely all those things, and of a whole lot of other things. That, or so I have always assumed, is partly the point of them: that much of the pleasure in reading them, and a large part of the explanation why so many adults love them, is in the recognition factor and the clever play with the texts of the past. For a well-read adult, reading the Potter books is the same kind of experience as reading a good contemporary detective novel that skilfully uses and plays with and echoes all the most established conventions of crime fiction that we the crime fiction lovers have come to know and, erm, love.

In order to secure what turned out to be one of the great conversations of my life, a conversation that I will remember till I die, I once shamelessly manoeuvred until I was seated directly across the dinner table from the late, great and much-lamented Scottish writer Dorothy Dunnett, a Renaissance woman who who went to school with Muriel Spark, married the founding editor of The Scotsman, and in terms of sheer literary talent could hold her own with both of them, which did not stop her in earlier life from making a living as a portrait painter.

I asked her starry-eyed fan questions all through dinner, but she volunteered without being asked (I wanted to ask, but it would have been rude) the information that she had found Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey's mother the Dowager Duchess of Denver a wonderful model for her own Sybilla Crawford, particularly in the matter of her relationship with her heroic son, and was taking it for granted that many of the readers who liked her work would also be familiar with Lord Peter Wimsey and his mother, and would see the resemblance and appreciate it for the playful homage it was.

Part of the point of that characterisation, in fact, is the pleasure of watching Dunnett take a model in a very different genre (though she wrote some cracking contemporary thrillers herself, as well as the historical sagas) and, with an elegant flourish, show how certain archetypes of character and family relationship could be remodelled while keeping their essence in the telling of a very different sort of story in a very different sort of way.

But I digress, because actually this isn't a post about Harry Potter, or indeed about Dorothy Dunnett: it's about the reclusive British writer Jude Morgan, whose 'novelisation' of the lives of the Brontës under the unpromising title The Taste of Sorrow, published last year, turned out, against all (my) expectations, to be really good. Normally the 'novelisation' of real people makes me very squeamish, but Morgan somehow -- I'm not sure quite how -- manages to overcome the very real and very obvious disadvantages of this kind of writing, to the point where he's made a successful career out of it and is clearly on a roll.

For, less than a year later, he has a new novel out. A Little Folly is set during the Regency (he began his career with Heyeresque Regency novels) and again 'derivative' not only of various 19th century novelists -- there's one character straight out of Dickens (who was a year old in 1813, at the time the novel is set), one straight out of Thackeray (who was two), one straight out of Charlotte Bronte (who was born five years later), one straight out of Henry James (whose birth was still 30 years in the future), and pretty much everything else is straight out of Jane Austen, who was 38 and at the height of her powers: a pastiche of various Austenesque characters, situations and conventions, as well as some pretty impressive imitation right down at the level of sentence structure and the way Austen uses grammar in the service of her wit.

Not only is it homage to Jane Austen et al, it's also, at the meta-level, homage to Georgette Heyer, who herself, of course, in a way only historical novelists can (and must, one way or another), was attempting to echo in her style and characterisation the era of which she wrote.

The word 'derivative' applies only when the deriver doesn't really know what she or he is doing, as with the numberless hordes of Candace Bushnell wannabes, vampire novelists who don't get the metaphor(s), historical novelists whose fashions in skirts and dialogue quirks are from the wrong century, and humourless fantasy writers whose furry and leathery characters all talk like Yoda and have names full of gs and ths. And neither Dunnett nor Rowling nor Heyer nor Jude Morgan could for a moment be thus described. When you write, you're placing your work into a set of traditions that already exists, whether you like it or not; even writers who pride themselves on being innovative or original are doing so in conscious resistance to what has gone before. Writers like Morgan aren't 'derivative'; they're entering into a conversation with literary history.

But wait, there's more

2010-05-26T00:25:00.000+09:30

A sub-genre appears to be emerging from the vampire revival, as more and more vampire writers go for series instead of just the one-off, with very deliberately open-ended plots, and given the extraordinary post-Anne-Rice, post-Buffy commercial book-to-screen successes of Stephenie Meyer's sparkly teenage vampires and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse, why wouldn't you.

David Wellington did this (again) with his most recent novel 23 Hours, in which the fiendish 300-year-old vampire Justinia Malvern escapes in the end to drink blood another day and the righteous Laura Caxton likewise survives and escapes custody, presumably to chase Justinia down through the next volume and so on ad infinitum.

And now we have Jasper Kent's Thirteen Years Later, sequel to Twelve (they do love their numbers, these vampirists) and second in a projected 'quintet' (Kent is a composer and musician as well as a novelist). It's as though the 'vampire novel' form were declaring itself, like its subject, conditionally immortal; I guess stories of the undead just naturally lend themselves to open-endedness. I haven't read the Kent books, but they look like classy generic hybrids: historical horror fiction, up the literary end of 'genre'.

My friend and former colleague Prof Ken Gelder published a book about vampires in 1994. Given the current crop of vamp lit in all its diverse flowerings, he'd be crazy not to be thinking about a sequel himself.

Oops

2010-04-22T09:25:00.000+09:30

Whoa, sorry about accidental posting, all whose feeds picked up what was actually a first draft of some opening remarks of a long post about the Miles Franklin and why I think there's this constant fussing about the bloody thing. (Miles F. herself, of course, would just love the constant fussing and be extremely sardonic about it.)

So pay that false start no mind, please. Fellow-users of Blogger will know that the SAVE NOW button is right next to the PUBLISH POST button, and so far this morning I'm not sufficiently caffeinated to tell the difference.

Miles Franklin shortlist

2010-04-21T11:30:00.000+09:30

Clearly I have lost my Miles mojo.

Contrary to my prediction here the other day, the shortlist does indeed again contain six books (the length has varied over the last decade or so, usually from four to six), rather than my predicted five. I only picked two and a half of the six: Brian Castro's The Bath Fugues, Sonya Hartnett's Butterfly, and a two-way punt on Alex Miller's Lovesong. And my predicted winner, David Foster's Sons of the Rumour, hasn't even made the shortlist.

I'm glad to see Truth there. As I said, the five I picked were not necessarily my personal favourites -- they were predictions rather than choices.

The list:

Lovesong by Alex Miller
The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster
Truth by Peter Temple
Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett

Another year, another Miles Franklin shortlist prediction from Mystic Mog as was

2010-04-15T18:53:00.000+09:30

The Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist, according to the official website, is due to be announced on April 21. Having had some success in the past, though way off base last year, I feel emboldened to have a go at predicting the shortlist and winner again this year.

These are not necessarily my own picks, just what I think might get up, on what I think will be the standard shortlist of five: Brian Castro's The Bath Fugues, David Foster's Sons of the Rumour and Glenda Guest's Siddon Rock plus two of the following: Sonya Hartnett's Butterfly, Alex Miller's Lovesong and Tom Keneally's The People's Train. I don't expect Peter Carey to make the cut and I'm guessing Alex Miller might not either, but I'm not as much of a Miller fan as most people so I might be off base there.

Foster the incomparable to win.

The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

2010-04-14T11:30:00.000+09:30

My longtime Australian Lit colleague and recently acquired FaceBook Friend Susan Lever has suggested I link to the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, published by the National Library of Australia: it's here. You have to register, but you don't have to pay. [UPDATE: no, apparently you don't even have to register to read it!] There are full archives and an excellent, detailed search function.

The Association for the Study of Australian Literature was formed in the late 1970s and an extraordinarily successful venture it has been and remains; for some of us the ASAL conference was and is the highlight of the academic year and I think many people felt as I did that ASAL, rather than their own university department, was their real -- or at least their main -- intellectual community.

It was also, usually, a riot, though these days it seems more seemly. I have particularly fond memories of Townsville 1986, when Prof (well, he is now) Ken Gelder won the Parody Competition with a masterly mashup of classic texts, conference papers and conference conditions, notably the so-called unisex toilets and the conflation in one paper of the work of Catherine Helen Spence and Karl Marx, thenceforth referred to as Marx and Spence.

JASAL was set up by a small group of dedicated ASAL members after it became clear that the opportunities for publishing scholarly work in Australian literary studies were getting thinner and thinner on the ground. The current issue is a tribute to poet Vincent Buckley and includes articles by his friends and fellow-poets Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Jennifer Strauss, plus reminiscences and scholarly articles by friends, former colleagues, former students and specialists in Australian poetry.

Glenda Guest and Siddon Rock

2010-04-13T09:28:00.000+09:30

What's she doing writing a blog post about a book she hasn't read, you ask. Well, for one thing I'm waking this blog out of its five-month coma to try yet again to get some order into my thoughts on the topic I know better than any other, that of Australian writing -- though the idea of 'Australian writing' gets more and more problematic as the intertubes kick internationalism along. (On the other hand, I did hear some very nasty, and stupid, nationalist stuff coming out of Central Europe on the radio yesterday so there is obviously resistance to the inevitable.)

Anyway, I'm trying a trick that's often successfully used by bloggers who want to kick-(re-)start their sites and that's to vow to post something -- anything, no matter how brief or glancing -- every day. There's something about the discipline of this that I really like; blogging is not so far away from meditation. And staying in regular touch with developments in my own main skill set can't possibly be a bad idea.

What's inspired me to start today, though, is the news this morning that first-time novelist Glenda Guest has won the Best First Book prize in the Commonwealth Literary Awards for her novel Siddon Rock.

There'd been a bit of a subdued buzz about this book, and Guest herself, after the novel was shortlisted, and I expect her and it to get more publicity in the wake of the win. What with her success there and the brief synopsis I've just read at the website of her publishers, Random House, I'm now curious and enthusiastic enough to seek it out and make the time to read it:

When Macha Connor came home from the war she walked into town as naked as the day she was born, except for well-worn and shining boots, a dusty slouch hat, and the .303 rifle she held across her waist.

Macha patrols Siddon Rock by night, watching over the town’s inhabitants: Brigid, Granna, and all of the Aberline clan; Alistair in Meakin's Haberdashery, with his fine sense of style; Sybil, scrubbing away at the bloodstains in her father's butcher shop; Reverend Siggy, afraid of the outback landscape and the district’s magical saltpans; silent Nell with her wild dogs; publican Marg, always accompanied by a cloud of blue; and the new barman, Kelpie Crush.
It is only when refugee Catalin Morgenstern and her young son Josis arrive in town that Macha realises there is nothing she can do to keep the townspeople safe.

On hearing of her success, Guest told the Guardian that she was 'standing here like a stunned mullet', an epithet that no doubt left English punters bemused at the strange ways of colonials. 'It's not about the money,' she said, 'it's not about the credit, it's about being given verification that this is any good, that I can actually write."

'We must sit down and work'

2009-11-14T13:05:00.000+10:30

If you have 25 minutes to watch it, this is just lovely: two of the most elegant and eloquent women I know, Helen Garner and Anna Goldsworthy, at the launch of Anna's memoir Piano Lessons at Janet Clarke Hall where Anna is Artist-in Residence. Watch the whole thing if you possibly can; after Anna speaks, she plays a Chopin nocturne and then there's a quick snippet of her teacher, the extraordinary Eleanora Sivan. The heckling baby you can hear is Anna's son Reuben, born last summer.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

The price of books: on the one hand this and on the other hand that, and anyway, nobody really knows

2009-11-14T13:02:00.000+10:30

In the wake of the federal government's decision the day before yesterday to reject the Productivity Commission's recommendation on Australian books and maintain the status quo on parallel importation, there's a fair amount of passionate discussion around -- here, for example -- about whether or not it was a good decision.

The free marketeers are really going to town on it, apparently unable to see it as anything but a straightforward market issue -- books as pure commodity, as in 'I'm not giving you a book for Christmas, you've already got a book'. Most of their arguments are based on the unspoken assumption that the producer/consumer relationship is at once symbiotic and fundamentally adversarial in literature (as it truly is in so many other activities), something they would know to be far from the truth if they had enough interest in literature to hang about at a few writers' festivals and observe the behaviour of the crowds.

I've always had a lot of respect for Allan Fels, but if he has anywhere actually addressed the concerns of those who feared damage and loss to Australian literary cultures, subcultures, infrastructures, practitioners and readers, instead of just saying the same thing over and over again, then I have yet to see it.

The free-market types are scornfully trashing the articles, essays, explanations and submissions from authors and publishers (including this particularly lucid piece by Text publisher Michael Heyward) as mere expressions of self-interest and therefore to be ignored. But whatever self-interest might have been involved (as if it were necessarily desirable, or even possible, to be both knowledgable and neutral on such a matter), these literary types addressed a broad range of concerns and explored various intricacies: of national and international publishing; of publishing contracts; and of the probable effects of the proposed changes on the ability of Australian writers to make a living -- and on the probable survival, or not, of the Australian literary culture that so many people have worked so hard for so long to establish, maintain and expand.

Since reading, writing, teaching, scholarship, reviewing, editing, interviewing, anthologising, prize-judging, blogging and what-all else inside said literary culture have been my life's work, I did have and still do have just a bit of a stake in whether or not, in literature as in so much else, the local and the national get subsumed in the global and every aspect of Australian history, landscape, cityscape, vernacular and regional variation disappears from our literature in an attempt to compete in the global market.

(I myself, for example, am working on a pitch to publishers involving the tale of a teenage sparkly vampire from Rivendell who finds an ancient piece of parchment, inscribed with mysterious mathematical formulae, wedged into a secret panel at the back of the wardrobe in the Master of Ormond College's bedroom, which is guarded by a T. Rex and an albino hippogriff called Layla, creatures past which she manages to slip with the combined aid of Heathcliff, Mr Darcy and Captain Jack Sparrow. Wish me luck.)

Anyway, such were the arguments of authors and publishers and they looked pretty reasonable to me. Among the submissions to the Commission I can see the names of at least 40 writers, booksellers, publishers and agents I've known and respected for decades -- Frank Moorhouse's submission is worth reading for its own sake just as an exceptional piece of writing -- but then I read this most excellent blog post by that most excellent blogger Bernice Balconey, who has written several subsequent posts on the subject, and is an energetic participant in the discussion at Larvatus Prodeo linked to above; Bernice's original post was the first argument for change I'd read from someone with insider knowledge of the Australian book industry and it is still the most persuasive. Some of her points have been convincingly answered by various commentators but the one I can't go past is her summary point: 'the cat is out of the bag. The consumer exists in a truly global market'. Or perhaps I'm just a sucker for metaphors about cats and bags. There are some things there I don't agree with and others I wish I didn't agree with but Bernice very clearly knows whereof she speaks and as a blogger and commenter over the years she has given me every reason to trust her judgement, especially in such matters as this.

So once I'd read Bernice's post I gave up any ambition to take up a position on this. There are too many variables and too many unknowns, and the issues are too numerous and too complex and in some cases too self-contradictory, and there are too many possible computations and permutations and too many things have been brought into the argument, things that may or may not turn out to be relevant -- though I was struck by the clarity of two very different points made today on Crikey in a piece by one Michael R. James:

E-books. Utterly irrelevant to the argument, even if the statements about them being the death of printed books within the decade may come true. So what? Let’s pre-emptively destroy our local publishing industry before e-books do?

Copyright territoriality. Abolishing the PIR abolishes this. Australia would be removing it unilaterally while the UK and the USA have absolutely no intention of removing theirs. [My emphasis.] As bloggers have shown, [Guy] Rundle’s argument about Eire and earlier ones about New Zealand actually demonstrate the opposite: i.e. the loss of any publishing industry in countries that remove all restrictions.

As James suggests, many of the arguments being made on both sides are to do with the unforeseeable changes in the technology -- imagine yourself in 1985 trying to explain to someone else what a Kindle was. But the only thing in the whole tangled web of argument that seems even remotely clear is that nobody really knows what will happen, or would have happened, either way.

Even the Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs (among other things), Craig Emerson, who was behind the push to lift the restrictions, admits (all quotations from here) that

The Productivity Commission report acknowledged that removing these restrictions would adversely affect Australian authors, publishers and culture.

He also went on to say

The Commission recommended extra budgetary funding of authors and publishers to compensate them for this loss.

Yeah, yeah. Show us the money, Craig. Core promise, is it?

And furthermore,

The Government has decided not to commit to a new spending program for Australian authors and publishers. The Australian book printing and publishing industries will need to respond to the increasing competition from imports without relying on additional government assistance.

So yah boo sucks to you, eh? This sounds like a totally empty retro-threat to me -- "We'll say we were going to, although we didn't tell you that, but now we're not, so you've bitten off your noses to spite your faces. Or maybe not. You'll never know now, will you, so nyerdy nyer." This particular dummy spit looks to me like the words of a man whose ego has been bruised by the failure of his pet proposal to get up.

It's bizarre to see the free-market types joining forces with consumer advocates like Fels (apparently not an advocate of consumers of Australian books) while sneeringly dismissing the other side as 'economically illiterate', a phrase many of them are using to mean 'they don't share my world view, which is, of course, the only possible one'.

In my own case, why yes, it is indeed perfectly true that I know next to nothing about economics, having, like most people, spent my adult life studying and practising other things. And that is why I have refrained from forming, much less expressing, an opinion. What a shame those who know nothing about literature don't think they need to take the same precautions. The culturally illiterate blithely using a metaphor about reading skills to diss their perceived opponents is a very neat irony, the more so since -- being fundamentally uninterested in literature and its effects -- they're not equipped to notice it.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Code for 'We don't care'

2009-11-14T13:00:00.000+10:30

When I first saw this article about Publishers Weekly and its all-male-author Best Books of 2009 (ah yes, it's that time of year again), it took me a minute to work out the title: 'Why Weren't Any Women Invited to Publishers Weekly's Weenie Roast?' I'd always thought 'wienie' as in 'wiener' as in 'frankfurter' was spelt with an 'ie' not an 'ee', and it's not clear whether 'weenie' is used here as a variant or a disparaging pun (though I'd like to think the latter), but either way it is, in this context, American for what we in Australia call a sausage fest. Boys' Own, if you like.

It was only yesterday that I was looking around the nation's various literary-cultural-political mags, blogs and websites and noticing with growing dismay that the general ratio of male to female writers represented -- both the people writing for the journals and blogs and magazines and the people being written about -- seems to have nose-dived*, even just since the beginning of this year, back to the good old days where 'male' meant the norm and 'female' meant some lesser variant; yet again I was reminded of the great Simone de Beauvoir, than whom nobody has ever described this phenomenon better. 'There are two kinds of people: human beings and women.'

And it was only last night that an otherwise apparently intelligent commenter on a literary blog referred disparagingly to 'the worst kind of 80s PC', apparently meaning that all that silly nonsense about considering the presence in the world of female people and black people and gay people that we used to have to bend the knee to is merely a memory of a now-despised fad , like satin jumpsuits and big hair, and it's über-cool in 2009 to have sunk right back into our straight white male supremacist good ole boy ways, as into a comfy yet manly chair, clutching the remote in one hand and a stubby in the other. (I'm sorry, I would have liked to have put that another way.)

And then up will go the passionate cry of 'But never mind all this gender nonsense, isn't it just about literary merit??', and back will echo faintly for the nine millionth time from a chorus of exhausted feminists that 'literary merit' is not an exact science, but is rather assessed by the values of the dominant culture, and if the dominant culture is a sausage fest, then, well, you know.

(Though one must look on the bright side: that list of ten books by blokes may ignore the fact that Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro have both had books out this year, but at least it doesn't include the most overrated writer and sausage fest ornament of the 20th century, Philip Roth.)

I wrote here earlier this year about how gobsmacking it was that the Miles Franklin Literary Award judges didn't notice that they'd come up with an all-male shortlist in a year when there were at least five realistic female contenders for the prize, and apparently this kind of 'human beings and women' thinking is once more rife in the US as well. After pondering last night with such disquiet on the turn things seemed to be taking, I wasn't as surprised as I wish I had been this morning to see a feminist Facebook Friend linking that post about the Publishers Weekly list. Here's that post's hook, a line strongly recommended as the default comeback next time some bloke -- or rogue girl trawling for the boys' approval -- accuses you dismissively of being 'just PC':

So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that.

* It is however a relief to see that the November issue of Australian Book Review, which arrived today and which I just finished reading, does honourably buck this trend a bit: writers/reviewers include an Alison, an Andrea, a Belinda, a Claudia, a Gay, a Jacqueline, a Jane, two Judiths, two Kates, a Kylie, a Melinda, a Rosaleen (the lead article), a Sarah and a Stephanie, while the written-about include an Anna, an Emily, a Jan, a Jeanette, a Jenny, a Jeri, a Mandy and a Ruth.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

The Prime Minister's Literary Awards winners ...

2009-11-03T09:22:00.000+10:30

... were announced yesterday. Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann shared the nonfiction prize with Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake's Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, while Nam Le's The Boat, to no-one's surprise despite the quality of the shortlist, won the fiction prize outright.

There's something unusually coherent about this set of winners; together, qua winners, they have about them the feel of a viewpoint new in Australian literary prizegiving, a strong whiff of post-nationalist awareness. Drawing the Global Colour Line is, as its title suggests, global in the scope of its analysis, while The Boat has been widely praised for its cosmopolitanism and its range, containing stories set in several countries. House of Exile is a 'group biography' of author and activist Heinrich Mann, his partner Nelly Kroeger and their several overlapping circles of acquaintances and friends, including Virginia Woolf (about whom there are some beautiful and surprising stories) and Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, who despised and looked down on Nelly as a schreckliche Trulle which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

So congrats to the 2009 nonfiction judges Phillip Adams, Peter Rose and Joan Beaumont, and fiction judges Peter Pierce, Lyn Gallacher and John Hay, for taking the long, broad view of what, within its official brief, an Australian literary award might encompass. Especially a Prime Minister's literary award, the judging process for which one might have expected to be somehow more rah-rah but is glad it wasn't. This is not for a moment to disparage more nationally focused awards, which have an important place, but only to be pleased that there's also room for books like these to rise to the top of the pile.

I've owned all three for yonks but to my shame haven't read any of them yet, except for Nam Le's story 'Halflead Bay' for a review of Mandy Sayer's anthology The Australian Long Story. It's not quite a question of not having the time. It's more that books of this quality demand an answering quality of mind in their readers, a sharpness of focus and subtlety of attention that it can be very hard to bring to non-work reading when reading is what you do for a living. Because you need to be in a particularly alert and receptive state of mind to do any of these books proper justice as reading-for-pleasure.

'This new work took on fresh urgency with the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany in the 1930s and the pitiless application of eugenic principles and racial technologies -- many of which had been rehearsed under colonial regimes -- in the heartland of Europe, the results of which were to finally scarify the conscience of the world.'

'Keep a straight back, Mrs Sasaki says. Wipe the floor with your spirit.'

'But the party was in full swing, the atmosphere rippling with anecdotes and laughter, so much so that a button popped off the decolletage of Nelly's red velvet dress to reveal the splendid contours of her lacy bra. I like to think that the little red velvet button described a perfect arc across the table and landed right on top of Thomas Mann's Charlotte surprise.'

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

The Kiss

2009-10-21T23:55:00.000+10:30

Last night I went to the premiere screening of a new short film by young local filmmakers Sonya Humphrey (producer) and Ashlee Page (writer-director). Adelaide's Mercury Cinema was filled to capacity, no mean feat at 6.30 on a warm Tuesday evening, by a crowd that included some well-known faces.

The film is an adaptation of Peter Goldsworthy's short story of the same name, 'The Kiss', a story I know very well because I chose it to include in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aust Lit and have therefore read it about eleven times, if you count repeated proofreadings. Not to be giving away the whole plot, but it's a chilling tale in which two teenage boys, the worse for drink, decide to go for a swim in an isolated underground tank and realise only after they have jumped in that the water level is too low for them to be able to reach the ladder.

Considering that in Page's screenplay the characters are girls instead of boys, which you'd think was a pretty substantial change and a most disconcerting one at first, the film is actually one of the closest and cleverest adaptations of a piece of fiction that I think I've ever seen. Page gets a couple of extraordinary performances out of her two young actors, and a lot of mileage out of the look of rural Australia at night, simultaneously sinister and glorious.

What I've always admired most about Peter Goldsworthy's work (NB if you're wondering, he may or may not be a distant cousin, so this is nepotism five times removed if it is nepotism at all), in any genre, is his ruthlessness in following the logic of the body to its often bitter end; to me at least, all of his best work is firmly grounded in his experience as a GP over several decades, pitting the detailed abstractions of moral dilemmas against the stark, simple, unrelenting clarity of the body and its processes and frailties. The film is very faithful to this particular take on the mind-body problem. One of the most interesting things about watching it was that although I was all too familiar with the story's events and therefore knew what was coming, I still felt chilled and wired by it -- tense muscles, racing heart -- which makes you wonder about the nature of suspense. Another kind of mind-body problem.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Brother, sisters and anthologies: oh the irony

2009-10-09T15:17:00.000+10:30

So when I got home this afternoon from fifteen rounds with a sibling -- the ferocious upfront one, all teeth and claws all the time, and no backing down until one of you dies -- so stratospherically stressed out that my eyeballs and teeth were aching and there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth that no amount of medicinal chocolate would shift, I found two things in the mail.

One was a copy, kindly sent by Allen & Unwin, of Charlotte Wood's new themed anthology of specially-commissioned stories by Australian writers about siblings, entitled Brothers and Sisters. The other was my copy of the current Australian Book Review, in which critic Peter Craven continues his attack on the team of scholars of Australian literature (of which he is not one) who edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, including moi, that he began in his magisterially and savagely opinionated review of the anthology in the previous issue.

I've been a fan of Charlotte Wood's since I read her novel The Children, in which she shows great interest in the sibling dynamic and great skill in representing it, an impression further borne out by the brilliant, funny, moving introduction to this new book. And after reading the ABR correspondence pages I'm considering the possibility that one way to understand the shifting, endlessly complex dynamics of the literary scene and all its tortured interrelationships is to think of it in terms of sibling relations, where the keynote is intensity for better or worse, and where endless fights for territory, dominance, independence, sentimental vases and Mummy and Daddy's approval all take place in the hothouse arena of shared interests and common experience.

At the very least, I find that thinking about these things anthropologically and psychoanalytically helps me to get some distance on them, to back away from the rage. It's that or the bottle shop, and I have too much work to do tonight for the bottle shop to be an option. Besides, I want to be fully alert when Germaine takes on Planet Janet on Q&A.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

... and a bad bad review ...

2009-09-15T10:29:00.000+09:30

There are four kinds of book review. There's the good good review, which is both favourable about its subject and skilfully, knowledgeably written on the basis of a careful, thorough reading of the book in question. There's the good bad review, which is well executed in all respects but unfavourable. There's the bad good review, which is favourable but a bad example of the book review genre.

(There are many ways of badly writing a review: not reading the book properly, making opinionated and magisterial assertions instead of properly arguing your case, getting your facts wrong because you haven't actually read the book, pushing your own pet writers and ideas at the expense of the book you're supposed to be reviewing, blowing your own trumpet about your own achievements, not distinguishing between your personal opinions and the actual facts, making wildly offensive statements, and so on and so forth.)

And finally there's the bad bad review, which is ... Well, you know.

A few years ago I was invited to participate in a forum at the University of Sydney on the subject of book reviewing. Allotted a generous amount of time for my talk, I needed to come up with an infinitely expandable structure for it, something with a strong backbone that I could sketch out and then amplify here and there, both at the keyboard and then again, if called for, on my feet.

In the end, I came up with a way of doing it that meant I had a single central line of argument and organising principle: the text of the talk was a heavily annotated list of the people and entities to whom/which I believe a book reviewer has a responsibility. It was a list whose length surprised even me (for over the decades I have given these matters a great deal of thought), as I thought about just how many people and things I have at the back of my mind, or even halfway to the front, whenever I review a book. The list looked something like this:

1) To the readers of the review, to

(i) describe the book accurately,
(ii) tell the truth as you see it, and
(iii) provide entertainment and useful information.

2) To the potential readers of the book (some overlap there, obvs),

(i) not to mislead them about its contents, and
(ii) to save them $30+ if that's what you think.

3) To the writer(s) and/or editor(s) of the book,

(i) to read the book carefully and comment on it thoughtfully,
(ii) not to misrepresent it, and
(iii) not to say anything that will actually make them want to slash their wrists.

4) To the literary editor who saw fit to commission the review from you, to

(i) justify her or his faith in your (suit)ability and expertise,
(ii) write to the word length you were given,
(iii) provide clean copy in the requested format (e.g. not phone it in, say) and
(iv) provide said copy on or before the deadline you were given.

5) To the publication for which you are writing,

(i) to pay attention to its house style,
(ii) to fit in with its general editorial approach and standard of writing,
(iii) not to write anything that will either require extensive and expensive legalling, or, in the absence of said legalling, get the publication sued, and
(ii) not to compromise, or indeed trash, its reputation.

6) To the people who are paying you to do a decent job of work, to be worthy of your hire.

7) To the literary culture in particular and indeed to the culture in general, to make a worthy contribution to it and not demean or devalue it by adding junk rather than good useful stuff.

8) To yourself,

(i) to maintain your standards, not just professional but also moral (say, turning down editorial requests to review books by friends, rivals, enemies or old lovers),
(ii) to refuse to say anything you don't mean, and
(iii) not to make yourself look like a wanker or a dickhead, or both. 'Both' is possible but not attractive.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

And a new art form emerges: the YouTube trailer/preview of the novel

2009-09-07T16:27:00.000+09:30

Sent off my review of Andrew McGahan's new novel Wonders of a Godless World this morning to Australian Book Review, in whose October issue it will appear. One is not supposed to talk in advance about novels whose embargo dates are still three weeks away, so I'm not going to -- but do watch this strangely beautiful little animation, which appears to have been done by the same person who did the cover, one James Gulliver Hancock (check out the weight-lifting lorikeet).

When I found this the other day I thought it was a one-off, but a quick Google confirms that these book trailers are everywhere.

New books: Cate Kennedy's The World Beneath

2009-09-01T17:32:00.000+09:30

In tomorrow's Australian Literary Review I have a piece reviewing four new (or, in one case, newish) Australian novels. They only have two things in common really -- they're all intensely region-specific, and they're all by women. Of the four, it's Cate Kennedy's The World Beneath that I confidently expect to turn up regularly in the longlists and shortlists of next year's literary awards.

Kennedy is an experienced and much-admired writer of short stories but this is her first novel, and of course inevitably someone has asked her about what far too many people see as the 'advance' from the short story to the novel, as if, in moving from the former to the latter, one had succeeded in one's OWLs and was now tackling one's NEWTs. Kennedy's answer to this, as quoted in the detailed, engaging interview that the SMH's Susan Wyndham published last weekend, appearing also in her Undercover blog, is maybe the best riposte to this short-story v. novel thing that I've ever seen in the whole thirtysomething years I've been being annoyed by it:

"I heard someone once say, 'You must feel different now that you've moved to the big pool from the toddler pool,' " she says of her change of form. "I quite bridled at this because I don't think the short story is a toddler pool. In a way it is more like the beautiful diving pool - it's not the shallow pool, it's the smaller pool that takes a lot of practice to do the one entry perfectly."

'The beautiful diving pool' -- how Katherine Mansfield would have loved that. And Chekhov, Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Grace Paley, Alice Munro and who-all else.

The novel is reviewed in the new issue of Australian Book Review by Jo Case, who kind of likes it but says it's hard to get carried away by the plot because you're too aware of the structure. I can't agree with this. What I kept thinking was that the structure was intensely cinematic and was carrying me around the circuits of feeling among the characters while at the same time moving them and the action forwards. Topspin, as it were.

There are three main characters: the dizty leftover hippie Sandy, 45, henna'd devotee of decaf and hand-turned coffee mugs, still bravely making jewellery and selling it at a market stall in between massages and earnest conversations; Sandy's former partner Rich, a restless, rootless middle-aged man with a ponytail, a string of dead-end jobs and a long-held but never-realised ambition to be a successful professional photographer; and their daughter Sophie, fifteen, sullen, watchful, clever, tagged 'emo goth', whose father scarpered when she was a baby and therefore knows her not at all.

Both Sandy and Rich, even now, live in the faded glory of the high point of their lives: participation in the Franklin River Blockade 25 years earlier, a story to which Sophie has been subjected over and over while, she thinks bitterly, other kids got the Three Bears. (There's a stern message here for Boomers endlessly reliving their illusory glory days, though frankly all the Boomers I know, including me, are all too aware that the glory days were actually not all that glorious and are firmly focused on the present: on our financial survival in interesting times, on the longueurs and woes of our young adult children and our aged parents, and on our own increasingly unreliable and wonky bodies as bits and parts of them play up and wear out one by inexorable one. Types like Rich and Sandy are by no means unknown, but they're not typical, either.)

Anyway, the plot gets into second gear on Sophie's fifteenth birthday, when Rich rings her to wish her a happy birthday and suggests that he take her on a Tasmanian wilderness hike and bonding exercise on Cradle Mountain. Off they go to catch their plane to Hobart: third gear. But then things start to go wrong. Vroom.

From this point the narrative alternates between scenes of Rich and Sophie on the hiker trail and scenes of Sandy first at Mandala Holistic Wellness Centre and then, very worried after Rich and Sophie turn out not to be on their scheduled return flight, back at her own house surrounded by well-meaning alternative-living friends who keep trying to give her back rubs, read her tarot cards and help her think positive thoughts. Running in tandem with these changes of scene and the increasing tension and suspense they generate is the increasing subtlety with which everyone has begun to see everyone else: all three have been seeing each other in the light of cliché and caricature, and Kennedy manages very expertly the small shifts by which the characters begin to see each other as human beings with unexpected or hitherto unnoticed strengths and complexities.

In some ways Kennedy is working the same territory as Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap: contemporary domestic realism focusing on parenting and on conflicting cultural values. But there's less cultural diversity, fewer characters, less sex, more social history, and a better plot.

Northern southern southern northern Southern Gothic: Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate

2009-08-28T10:00:00.000+09:30

*SPOILER WARNING*

American writer Newton Thornburg's 1982 novel Beautiful Kate is set during a cold winter on the outskirts of Chicago, where a once-prosperous family farm has been swallowed up by suburban development and all the farm land sold, the family in decline in a way that manifests in that classic trope of inward-turning decay, incest.

In Rachel Ward's film version there are similarities and differences: the setting is now the forbidding beauty of the Flinders Ranges, in South Australia's rain-deprived north, where the dominant spatial note is not increased urban crowding but overwhelming isolation. But the story is essentially the same and in some respects follows the novel closely, including the chronological jumps that Thornburg thought might cause trouble for any writer wanting to adapt it for the screen.

Perhaps because it's the story of a family, it has translated with surprising ease from the chilly north of the US to the dry, hot north of South Australia. The Kendall family, once comprising patriarch Bruce, his wife and the four kids, now exists only as a fragment: the dying Bruce ('congestive heart disease'), played in a bravura performance by Bryan Brown, and the dutiful youngest daughter Sally, played in a most beautifully understated and quiet way by Rachel Griffiths, are all that's left in the decaying farmhouse.

Sally keeps Bruce clean and fed and the farmhouse in some sort of order before trundling off to her day job with the Aboriginal community. The really lovely thing about Griffiths' character is the sense that she's happy to be this person. Wears old no-nonsense jarmies, loves her job, loves her dad, gets on with it.

So when her big brother Ned, a more than usually tortured-looking Ben Mendelsohn, arrives at the farm after a twenty-year absence to say goodbye to his dying father, she looks uncomplicatedly delighted to see him and he looks at her as though she's the only real person he's seen for a very long time.

The other siblings, we slowly learn, are dead. Something happened twenty years ago to Cliff and Kate, and now there is only photography and memory. The family's been clinically, even symmetrically, cut in half like the carcase of a beast; the barn is full of junk; the dam is empty.

You sort out your thoughts about movies, I find, while the credits are rolling. What an excellent movie, does a lot of new things, super-dramatic subject matter handled with delicate thoughtfulness. Screenplay by Ward, wow, that is the first Australian movie I have ever seen whose dialogue does not at any point let it down, and it took a British aristocrat to write it, what's that about, Ward's a very experienced actor, rare for screenwriters, she knows what words will work in the mouth. Ooh look, music by Tex Perkins, might have known. God the Flinders are unearthly and gorgeous and terrifying. Wasn't Rachel Griffiths excellent, actually Griffiths and Brown and Mendelsohn were all brilliant, who would have thought they would look so convincingly, when you put them together, as though they were all related. Got rural South Australian life visually down to the tiniest details of light along verandas, no romanticisation, no gross grot either. Southern Gothic but which kind, not McCullers, certainly not Flannery O'Connor, maybe a bit Welty, oh right, Faulkner. Lovely incidental unobtrusive symbolism, the patriarch with his congested heart, the screen door, the now-empty dam, blighted, revealing its history, the junk and mire beneath the smooth surface of water no longer available for playing in, playing games with your drunk teenage brother, on the farm, in the dark, all that sexual energy and burgeoning life and nowhere to put it, nowhere for it to go.

'... a homeless man reading under a streetlight ...'

2009-08-28T08:54:00.000+09:30

Jessica at the Meanjin blog Spike has a great post up today on the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library, a scheme established in 2003 by Sarah Garrett for distributing books to people living in hostels and on the street. So far the library operates only in Sydney and Melbourne but Garrett hopes it will eventually be set up in every Australian capital city. The Footpath Library website is here.

Peter Temple's new book ...

2009-08-18T19:58:00.000+09:30

... is under embargo until September 28, so although I have an advance copy I'm really not supposed to talk about it. It's called Truth and it's a sequel to The Broken Shore. Cashin's in it, but only (as far as I can tell from a quick flip) marginally, with flashes back to what happened to him. Dove's in it. Villani's in it front and centre.

At a glance its style looks even more compressed and elliptical than last time; Temple is the kind of writer who makes extensive demands on the reader's intelligence and no concessions to any momentary lapse of concentration. His writing reminds me of Dorothy Dunnett's and the way that she, too, cavalierly leaves vast tracts of information unexpressed and unexplained, and makes the sorts of jokes that depend largely on what is not said, making you howl with laughter but only after a longish internal silence while you work it out. Reading them both is a sort of chairbound steeplechase, a series of wild attempts to get to the next paragraph with your understanding fully intact. The epigraph is a haunting, abstract scrap of Rilke:

But because truly, being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Sydney, and other stuff

2009-08-08T19:11:00.000+09:30

Wow, a two-week hiatus. I don't think I've not-blogged for that long since I started in October 2005. For some reason this time of year, anything between August and November, always seems busier than usual. Spent a week and a half attending all-day Arts SA meetings and doing my real job at night before leaving for three days in Sydney last week for the launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (UPDATE: Angela from Literary Minded, who I see shares my taste in images and the placement of images, went to the Melbourne launch a few days later), thus:

Thursday, June 30, 11 am: sample Adelaide Airport long-term car park. Discover walk from farthest reaches of car park to shuttle bus slightly longer than bus ride to Virgin terminal and daily rates add up to exactly two taxi fares between my place and the airport. Write experience off to experience.

1.30 pm: hear slightly panicked air crew member come on, somewhere over the Hay Plains, and ask if there is a medical practitioner on board and would the rest of us please stay in our seats. It's times like this I'm glad I'm not a doctor, and that Virgin Blue offers only Mr, Mrs and Ms as choice of honorific when booking one's flight, the old days of being asked 'Miss or Mrs?' and enjoying replying 'Dr' being mostly gone and a good thing too; 20 years ago, having habitually done this with Qantas and the dead-and-gone Ansett, I used to worry occasionally that I'd be called upon to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a biro and a coathanger at 30,000 feet and have to explain that I couldn't, but if they needed an impromptu history of the Australian short story or an emergency fisking of a Clive James poem then I was indeed their woman.

2.30 pm: arrive Sydney, where the sky is a flawless blue, literally and metaphorically. Whenever the cab pulls out of that airport drive and into the sunshine made lacy through the subtropical vegetation, I can actually physically feel my heart lift. Never having managed to get a job in Sydney (applied for three, shortlisted for all of them, didn't get any of them, message in there somewhere) is the single biggest regret of my life, which is saying a great deal.

5 pm: arrive Admiralty House for the launch of the anthology by the Governor-General. Mill around on footpath in growing crowd that, by the time the uniformed dudes on the gate start ticking off our names and letting us in, includes David Malouf, Drusilla Modjeska, Peter Rose, and about twenty people I used to teach, research and/or go to conferences with, including former longtime Melbourne U colleague Prof Chris Wallace-Crabbe and the lovely Prof David Carter from U of Q, formerly a Melbourne boy, whom I haven't seen for many years.

5.30 pm: have surreptitious look around and confirm that I have dressed appropriately for the occasion. Just as well.

6 pm approx: listen to the Governor-General make her nicely personal and informal speech. Listen to David Malouf read his lovely poem Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian, in which the body addresses the departing soul at the moment of death, and which begins with the Emperor Hadrian's own actual words, which are, naturally, in Latin.

Wonder how long it's been since the sound of Latin poetry being read has been heard in Admiralty House or indeed anywhere else in Australia.

Wonder what degree of mischievousness informed David's decision to choose for this occasion a poem about death.

Am flooded by a sudden awareness of the history of this spot, and wonder about past ceremonies here and their participants' private thoughts as the sun set outside with ludicrous magnificence, then as now.

Reflect that the last time Australian literature got this much attention at this level of politics must have been the 1957 occasion, of which there is a photograph in the David Marr biography (an except from which is also included in the anthology), on which Patrick White was presented with the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award by the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, with the Leader of the Opposition in attendance and looking on.

Wonder if current PM has been presented with a complimentary copy. Think must remember to suggest it. (Discover later that he apparently got the No. 1 copy of the signed and numbered Collectors' Edition. Hope he dips into it from time to time. Have my own collectors' copy, courtesy of Allen & Unwin, which I hardly dare take out of its box.)

7 pm approx: Mill about some more, as various sweet and discreet boys weave through the crowd bearing crystal jugs full of liquid rubies that turn out to be iced white rum with cranberry juice. Watch William Yang, whose writing is featured in the anthology, taking photos (the pic in that link will give you a good idea of what the gathering was like). Reflect that what I should really do is get out my iPhone and take a photo of William Yang taking photos. Many photos being taken, as you can see in this nice (though not by William Yang: see below) shot of SMH literary editor Susan Wyndham and me.

Photograph by Sam Begg

Note the way our drinks are colour co-ordinated with my necklace and Susan's shawl.

Friday, July 31, 9.30 am: arrive at ABC studios in Sydney, half an hour early because (a) nervous and (b) have forgotten that in Sydney if you want a cab you simply step out into the street and hold your hand up, and one will pull over. Do 40-minute live-to-air segment on anthology for Radio National Book Show, being interviewed by Ramona Koval with fellow editor Nicole Moore and Sydney U Professor of Australian Lit Robert Dixon. This goes much better than I was expecting it to.

Friday 4.30 pm: meet up in Gleebooks with the lovely Viv aka Tigtog from Hoyden About Town, whom I have not previously actually met, and add her to my ever-growing collection of bloggers I've met in person. Decide we will go next door to soi-disant 'Chocolateria' (and so it proves to be, with a vengeance) and have a hot chocolate: thick hot chocky with chili and cinnamon, oh my goodness.

We have barely sat down when in come a couple of literary types I know, closely followed by two young women whom Viv knows and introduces to me as Wildly Parenthetical and Zero at the Bone. I thought this sort of thing only happened in Adelaide but clearly not.

Friday 6.30 pm: second and more informal, though still very structured, launch of anthology upstairs at Gleebooks. This includes wonderful readings by featured authors, and as Michael Gow reads a speech from Away and Michelle de Kretser a passage from The Hamilton Case, I remember very clearly why I chose those passages to put into the book.

Friday 8.30 pm: arrive at a most lovely restaurant in Rose Bay with my dear friend L who has come up to attend the one-day symposium the following day that has been arranged around the anthology launch. We have a quiet mates' catchup while we savour our duck and spinach, and look out at the festively-lit ferries crossing the harbour and the white birds swooping through the pools of light outside.

Saturday, August 1, 10 am: start of all-day symposium at the beautiful State Library of NSW, where I look around and regret for the millionth time my ongoing failure to score a job in Sydney. The symposium is programmed around the anthology and titled 'Australian Literary Futures'. My session is the one after morning tea, where the editorial team lines up on one side and, on the other, the country's two Professors of Australian literature, Robert Dixon and Philip Mead, plus co-editor of Southerly and immediate past president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Elizabeth McMahon. They ask us questions and we do our best to answer them. This session also goes much better than I was expecting it to, and everybody on the panel and in the audience seems to enjoy it.

Saturday 2 pm: Professor Ivor Indyk of UWS, holder of the Whitlam Chair in Writing and Society and a living national treasure to all who value Aust Lit, which makes this moment worse, gets up to speak in the session on 'Australian literature on the international stage' and shatters the good feeling that has prevailed in the room thus far by getting quite emotional about his view that there are not enough migrant writers represented in the anthology. For some reason I am reminded of the sight of Our Gough fifteen years ago as he launched the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature by making a speech in which he pointed out all the errors he'd found in it so far.

Given how conscious I was of this 'migrant writing' issue in my role as section editor, and how hard I and the other section editors worked to do it justice among the many other claims on tight space in the book, this accusation makes me cross -- cross enough to count a few stats, later after I get home, and ascertain that just in my own section (fiction and drama since 1950), ten writers out of 48 (ie more than 20%) were not born in Australia; eleven came from partly or wholly non-anglophone backgrounds; and thirteen of these stories or extracts specifically and directly address (and were carefully and deliberately chosen so to do) some aspect of the migrant experience.

In his address to the symposium Ivor acknowledges some of these, but argues item by item that each is somehow not legitimate, or not good enough. Or something. Can't quite follow his reasoning here. His real beef appears to be that none of his particular five favourite migrant writers -- two fiction writers who would have been my responsibility, and three poets who would have been that of my fellow-editor David McCooey, between us responsible for the period 1950 to the present -- are in the anthology.

All five are European. The many included writers with their roots in Asian countries, including a number of first-generation immigrants, have scarcely been mentioned; nor is there any acknowledgement of the entries by Elizabeth Jolley and J. M. Coetzee, both brought up in bilingual households in other countries and both adult emigrants to Australia. Can't help thinking Ivor has a few blind spots of his own. One of the poets he names as an 'omission' is someone David simply thinks isn't very good. One of the novelists he names is someone whose one novel available in English, a translation from her original Italian, I found unpleasantly hysterical and practically unreadable.

Saturday 4 pm: David McCooey and I have an extremely lively conversation in the cab we share to the airport.

Saturday 8 pm: Arrive home where am greeted ecstatically by cats behaving like dogs. This is quite new; usually they punish me for going away by doing that cat ignoring thing.

Saturday 8.05 pm Crack spine of first of four books that must be read and reviewed by Wednesday. Thank God and my editor that a couple of them are very short. Unlike this post.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Biblical world view legitimised: Australian feminist icon turns in grave

2009-06-18T18:52:00.000+09:30

What with first the longlist and then the shortlist, I'm not really all that surprised that the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award has been won by what was by far the safer choice of the two front runners, a novel in which a bitter, twisted woman called Eva (geddit? geddit?) corrupts the young hero, takes away his innocence and warps his psyche for life with her nasty dangerous bent sick non-missionary sexing-on ways. She robs our hero of Paradise, that's what she does; she pushes him into his fall from grace.

Because, as we all know, that's what women do. The Bible tells us so.

I reviewed Tim Winton's Breath for the Oz and I bent over backwards, to the point of indecency really and no it's not something you'd like to see, to be fair. I have great respect for Winton's considerable fiction-writing skills, and I wouldn't like to seem to be dissing the people who like his work. Yes it's a 'good novel', no argument there from me. But. But. Butbutbut.

It's completely incredible to me that in 2009 there are still people who don't get this, but looking at comments around the blog and MSM literary traps there clearly are, so let me spell it out once more:

It's not just some simple-minded essentialist thing about equal numbers of men and women. It's not a case to be met with 'We don't need feminism any more because we're equal now' (I assume this lot are actually unconscious, or trapped in a big plastic bubble, or living in some parallel universe like the Magic Faraway Tree). It's not about 'But can't they just be chosen on literary merit?', a common bleat that begs the question of what literary merit is, whose values infuse it, whether it can ever be objective or absolute, who decides what it is, and what sorts of values have dominated literature and the judgement of literature and the formation of its canons for centuries. A quick read of A Room of One's Own is all that's needed for answers to most of these questions.

No, it's this: that the masculine world view is still the norm, the feminine world view a lesser variant; that the masculine representation of women is still accepted as the truth, while female resistance to that representation is seen as some kind of wilful rebellion; that masculine values are still (mis)taken as universal values, and feminine ones seen as aberrant and unimportant in the world. Simone de Beauvoir still puts it best, even after all this time. 'There are two types of people in this world: human beings and women.'

And spare a thought for the dedicated, hardworking feminist Miles Franklin, who scrimped and saved and ran herself short to amass the capital for the establishment of this prize in the 1950s. In her name, let me record here that in the chronological catchment area for this prize, the following excellent novels, most of which have won at least one major literary prize, were published (NB Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog was eligible last year, not this year, but likewise came nowhere):

The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
Vertigo by Amanda Lohrey
The Good Parents by Joan London

All were eligible for the prize, within the terms of Franklin's will: of 'the highest literary merit', and dealing with 'Australian life in any of its phases'.

None of them even made the longlist.

Yes, as anyone who's ever been on one knows, the judging panels for prizes of all kinds are weird beasts, and their ways are a mystery even to themselves. Goddess knows I know that this is true.

But still. But. Butbutbut.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Teaching writing

2009-06-15T18:49:00.000+09:30

Some important aspects of the craft can be taught, but the art of writing must be taught in the same way that art is taught in art school, and music in music school. Nobody would dare turn up to the door of a music school saying ’I’d like to be a guitarist, but I don’t have a guitar, I don’t have time to practice, and I don’t listen to music’, but people do that in writing courses.

From here, a long and detailed interview with novelist M. J. Hyland and a great read.

*The title I've given this post has reminded me of a particularly fraught staff meeting in my former workplace, where we were hammering out, at glacial speed and temperature, all the new subjects that were to be taught the following year, all aspects of all of which had to be subjected to the democratic process and agreed upon unanimously before proceeding. We spent at least three hours on the title of a new first-year subject that eventually sported the title 'Reading Writing', and then moved on to the question of a title for another new subject about literature and religion. Quoth the then head of department: 'Well, if we're going with the double gerunds, how about 'Seeing Believing'?

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

On editing

2009-05-26T18:44:00.000+09:30

I started this post two days ago and have been dithering about putting it up ever since, but I've counted no fewer than five articles and posts online today on the subject so I might as well toss in my two cents -- Ed.

The new editor of The Monthly started work yesterday. 23-year-old Ben Naparstek, who first offered publisher Morry Schwartz his services as editor when he was eighteen, doesn't seem from my idly curious and fairly desultory Googling to be the kind of chap who thinks he needs any luck, nor indeed the kind who will be too bruised to cope with whatever eventuates, but I wish it to him anyway. If Duke University Press is publishing a book called The Jacqueline Rose Reader co-edited by Naparstek and Justin Clemens, then there is no question but that he is every bit as brilliant as people are saying.

Still, for the peculiar job of magazine editor, at least of this or any national and/or culturally-based mag, not even brilliance will always get you over the line. Schwartz's remark that he himself was 23 when he started his own business was touching but not entirely to the point. Different skills are required. As an editor -- at least of a magazine like this -- you need to have very broadly based general knowledge in order to save your contributors from making ridiculous or expensive mistakes (including an eye for what might be against the law), and you need to be able to communicate tactfully but effectively both with your editorial board and with your contributors, many of whom (in both groups) are delicate flowers.

And both of these things can be acquired only by glacially slow accretions, through experience of the kinds it's very difficult to just target and then go out and get. When, for example, a past-it politician and author of a dull, dud book asks you on television whether you will publish an essay by him, your mad debating skillz and general chutzpah should easily get you through that quagmire of a moment, but the only thing that will get you unscathed through its aftermath, whatever that might prove to be, is life experience.

A number of commentators appear to think that it is somehow the Monthly editor's job to 'stand up to' editorial board chair and heavy-on contributor Robert Manne and publisher Morry Schwartz, something to do with a vague notion of editorial independence. I don't think people have thought this through, quite. Unless her or his magazine is a declared organ of either, an editor needs to be independent of (a) corrupt financial interests and of (b) the state, both for obvious reasons. But in the case of The Monthly, as Morry Schwartz has recently had cause to point out, it's his mag and the editor is his employee. If people don't like a magazine, they are entirely free not to read it. Critique the content qua content by all means, but criticising an editor for lack of 'independence' on a project like this doesn't really make much sense, and indicates a lack of understanding about what an editorial board is for.

That said, it's clear from recent events at The Monthly that the new editor is going to have to fight very hard for things that he wants but that Schwartz and/or Manne are less enthused about. He's also going to have to make allowance for commissions that have been put in place without his knowledge -- and nothing screws up the pre-planning of an issue quite like a long, topical piece by a big name that you didn't know was in the pipeline. In general he's going to have to keep one eye in the mirror, through the doorway and over his shoulder while focusing the other on the four issues that must be thought about simultaneously (the one about to go to press, the one you're in the process of marking up, the one you've mostly commissioned, and the one whose contents are in the planning stages) when running a monthly magazine.

The other place I think the new editor might run into some trouble -- as most editors do anyway, but extreme youth can only exacerbate it -- is with contributors and their contributions. Most writers are fairly highly literate, strangely enough, with decades' worth of experience in working, as professional readers and writers, with language and ideas. And most writers' attitude to being edited approximates something the late great Angela Carter once said about it: 'As if one would not have written it that way in the first place, if that was what one had wanted to say.'

So my very first thought -- as so often -- on hearing of Naparstek's appointment was of a passage in my perhaps all-time favourite ever book. I found it immediately to quote here because it's flagged with a yellow sticky and identified by pencil marks. The pencil marks date from 1968, when I was fifteen, so anyone thinking I'm being anti-yoof here can think again. To me, at fifteen, this passage was both a warning and a reassurance. The intervening decades have borne out its truth and wisdom.

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can't teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically -- she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. ... And then ... she can go on living -- not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She ... continues henceforth under the guise of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense ... and now she has the seventh one -- knowledge of the world.

The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy -- this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognised without a cry. We only carry on ... riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do. ...

Guenever was twenty-two as she sat at her petit point and thought of Lancelot. She was not half-way to her coffin, not ill even, and she only had six senses. It is difficult to imagine her.

Yes. Yes it is. I'm sure we all wish we could be 23 again, except somehow magically armed with the knowledge of the world that we have so slowly and painfully acquired since. Being 23 has all the myriad advantages of being bright of eye, bushy of tail, and young enough still to believe that the world is one's oyster, and contains a pearl.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

A note on Australian cinema

2009-05-10T18:40:00.000+09:30

Neil Cross's novel Burial (which is neither Australian nor cinema, but bear with me) made me feel sick for the same reasons some of the Barbara Vine ones do and it was not a good thing to be reading in the same 24 hours as watching Wolf Creek, about which I kept thinking the allusions to Picnic at Hanging Rock were very well and subtly done, not least the riveting presence of John Jarratt in two movies over 30 years apart. That thought was a kind of distancing/defence mechanism, I think. Thank God I watched it on commercial TV with ads to break it up or my heart would have given out.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

The chalice from the palace has the pellet with the poison

2009-05-02T14:44:00.000+09:30

For a raft of reasons, some of them going back many years, I have been following the saga of (ex-) editor Sally Warhaft's precipitate departure last week from The Monthly -- most recently in a piece by regular Monthly contributor Gideon Haigh in today's Age -- with feelings not so much mixed as puréed. Let us say that I can see both sides of this story, and that I would very strongly recommend that the urgers on the sidelines saying 'Oh, it's only a storm in a teacup' (or saying anything else, really) when they don't actually have a clue what happened should treat themselves to a nice hot cup of STFU.

But two phrases keep running through my mind: there's the old maxim 'Least said, soonest mended' (the only person who appears to be paying any attention to this one is Warhaft herself, and more power to her, especially since she is apparently being ambushed at her own house by bottom-feeding paparazzi, among other things); and then there's that potent phrase 'poisoned chalice'. Whoever succeeds Warhaft in that editor's chair is going to have to be very flexible, very grown-up and very laid-back. And only one of these things makes for good editorship.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Miles Franklin and the Mystery of Talent, or, Don't Mention the War

2009-04-18T14:37:00.000+09:30

Because I am supposed to be a grown-up, and because I made a promise, I'm not buying into the question of the ~~literary stag night~~ 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award all-male shortlist beyond offering the odd brief neutral fact in other people's comments threads, and observing here, because I really cannot help myself, that if what spokesjudge Morag Fraser says is true and the judges did not realise what they had done until their shortlist was already set in stone, then the gender-blindness we thought we had diagnosed and exposed by about 1985 is actually still as bad as it ever was, even at these upper levels of cultural and intellectual endeavour.

But otherwise the howling restraint is making my ears bleed, so here by way of self-distraction is a little material on a related question: not what makes a good book, but what makes a good writer, since they are frequently not the same thing. Being a good writer is a non-negotiable condition of producing a good book, but by no means guarantees it.

I've read three books since Tuesday. All of them have been the author's first book of fiction: An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, and John the Revelator by Peter Murphy. Here in that order is a sample from each, demonstrating that when somebody's a good writer it does actually leap off the page at you and grab you round the neck, and that writing talent lies as much in the quality of pre-verbal observation as it does in what ends up on the page.

Jennet loved her husband, she liked and she disliked him, and she hated him as well.

She thinks that merely by being forceful and independent she can make a decent life, but that just isn't true -- life is tended and weeded and watered, is created out of effort, and is made from other materials than oneself.

Rows of stalls and tables laden with cheap jewellery, gimcrack stuff, necklaces and rings and charms and amulets and stones. Caravans with signs in the windows advertising Tarot and palm and crystal-ball readings. I counted my money and went up the steps to one of the caravans and knocked on the open door. A woman in a baggy jumper and a pair of sweatpants was watching a portable television blaring some sort of game show. She turned the sound down and waved a hand at an armchair beside a flimsy table.
'Fiver for your palm, tenner for the cards,' she said.
I gave her a tenner. She donned a pair of glasses and took my hand and pulled my fingers apart and peered at the lines. Her head jerked up. She stared at my face.
'Out,' she said.
'What?'
'Out.' She pushed the tenner across the table. 'And take your money with you.'
I stood and stammered, but she reached for the sweeping brush. I backed out the doorway and stumbled down the steps and into the night. The door slammed and the blinds came down. The funfair whirled around me.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

A find

2009-04-11T23:04:00.000+09:30

I'd not heard of Maria Quinn before her first novel The Gene Thieves turned up chez moi for review, but I spent the first hour of this morning reading the first 50 pages of it while my coffee went cold and I've sure as hell heard of her now. Go check out that link, if you haven't already.

I usually read a little faster than that, but it's small print (= more words per page. You'd be amazed, if you ever get down to actually counting them, which most people have no reason to do, at the variation in number of words per page from book to book), and I needed to read some passages twice in order to make sure I fully understood what was going on.

In this job I read a lot of genre fiction and the awful truth is that I prefer some genres to others, with crime of the variety that Val McDermid's Tony Hill calls 'messy heads' a long way up the top of the list. If spec fic and fantasy come lower down, it's partly because you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. The facts that (a) with these genres the central idea is often valued way above fiction-writing skills, and (b) both genres have a large and hungry readership (read: 'market') means that a lot of what gets published in these genres is virtually unreadable to someone outside the fan base. And many novels in both these genres are reminiscent of A.S. Byatt's (now that's what I call a novelist) Frederica Potter and her reader's reports for the publisher in Babel Tower: 'It is a curiously vacant work, whose driving force appears paradoxically to be the desire to create and people an imaginary world.'

Many fans of fantasy and spec fic are understandably defensive about these tastes so I hope they are still with me thus far, because the corollary is that when novels in these genres are good, they're very very good and some of them are mind-bogglingly fabulous, in both senses of that word. (Please note that by 'good' in this instance I mean 'couldn't put it down and neither could most other people', so let's not get into dreary backlash quibbles about Harry Potter and so on.)

This particular futuristic novel rises above the pack partly because of the many long, fat, juicy, healthy roots it has in the fertile soil of the present. Much, indeed most, of the science and technology is already with us, as are many of the ethical concerns and the directions in which they seem to be going. There's a magnificent imagining of a not-too-distantly-future Sydney featuring among other things a 'vertical sky garden' that produces fruit and veg for self-sustainability, a taken-for-granted reliance on geothermal energy among other kinds, and this particularly fabulous idea:

Years before, over a million ceramic tiles were overlaid with transparent photovoltaic cells, painstakingly matched to the profile of the unique originals on the amazing pre-cast concrete 'sails' of the roof. Jørn Utzon's masterpiece now powered much of the city that worshipped it.

Memo to HarperCollinsPublishers: Maria Quinn has an excellent website (see above). Why is it not mentioned in the media release?

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Literary prizes revisited: a simple case of misidentification

2009-03-24T12:21:00.000+10:30

Thanks to some up-to-the-minute Facebooking by Judith Ridge of Misrule, I have just seen the shortlist for the 2009 NSW Premier's Prize for Fiction, the Christina Stead Award. It consists of five of the six books I predicted, utterly wrongly, would make the shortlist of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, plus one extra: Helen Garner's The Spare Room, Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant, Julia Leigh's Disquiet, Joan London's The Good Parents, Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole and Tim Winton's Breath. The one I did not predict is the Julia Leigh; the one I was wrong about in the other direction was Murray Bail's The Pages.

I feel that at least a little of my shattered cred has been restored. They were the right books -- I merely backed them for the wrong prize. Hmf, details.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

In which ThirdCat's book is launched

2009-03-23T12:16:00.000+10:30

Finally at 2 am ~~this~~ yesterday morning I put this book down, about half-finished in one hit, and went to bed, but I didn't want to.

It's the story of two women, loosely and obliquely connected through family ties, and their complicated relationship with the South Australian town -- regional and industrial -- to which they are very attached, but which they fear may be making their children sick. It's a poet's novel, but it's also an activist's one.

Longtime readers of ThirdCat's blogs, especially the unique and wonderful 'blogopera' Adelaide Sprawls, will be familiar with her style and technique: restrained, almost minimalist, but with a turn of phrase and of observation that nails something you sort of already knew but would never have thought of putting quite like that.

They will be familiar, too, with her subject matter: the lives, circumstances and feelings of 'ordinary people' and all the stuff that seethes under the surface of their days and the physical objects and actions of daily life, the tea-making, the hair-washing and the car-fixing; the unresolved tensions, the suppressed exclamations, the half-understood feelings, the quality and complexity of emotional responses and transactions, the tiny fluctuations of feeling between people, the mysteries that reside in what is not said.

... she had not needed a card to know who the roses were from. But she didn't know what they meant.

Even going over the words they had said on the phone she couldn't work it out. They could mean sorry or I miss you or goodbye, because in the end she had pushed him to say, I will get over you, if that's what you make me do.

(Recycling disclosure: I have said some of this about Tracy's writing before, and it will look familiar to her if not to anyone else.) It's all there in Black Dust Dancing, though less concentrated and intense, making more room, as is proper in a novel, for the story and the setting.

So this afternoon at Sturt Street Primary School, icon and symbol of all that is best in the history of South Australian education and school to both of Tracy's boys, an assortment of family, friends and fans assembled to celebrate her achievement, buy her novel, and queue up to get her to sign it,

and then to see it officially launched by Adelaide's Sheridan Stewart, artist, comedian, radio presenter and MC of the comedy show Titters, which featured Tracy in her other life as a standup comedian and which was practically booked out for the duration of the Adelaide Fringe.

(Sheridan Stewart attended by Wakefield Press publisher Michael Bollen, behind whose left hip you can just see a bottle of the fabled Fox Creek Verdelho.)

Sheridan made a funny, warm speech but was upstaged by Tracy's boys, who came purposefully up to the bar behind her and fetched a cup of what was probably apple juice, but looked a lot like white wine, each, and melted back into the crowd, to its general appreciation. Tracy then made an excellent thank-you speech,

dividing the thankees into thoughtful categories instead of naming names, which is always a minefield.

Before and after the ceremonials I had a nice talk with the lovely Deborah from In A Strange Land and met her beautiful daughters.

Tracy and the boys and the mister have to fly back to Abu Dhabi tomorrow morning. I'm guessing she might try to have a bit of a nap on the plane.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Miles Franklin longlist: how wrong can you be?

2009-03-12T12:06:00.000+10:30

Well. There goes my cred.

Utterly contrary to my predictions -- and my confidently nominated winner hasn't even made the longlist -- here is the actual longlist for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award:

Breath - Tim Winton
A Fraction Of The Whole - Steve Toltz
The Devil's Eye - Ian Townsend
Ice - Louis Nowra
Addition - Toni Jordan
Fugitive Blue - Clare Thomas
One Foot Wrong - Sofie Laguna
The Pages - Murray Bail
The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas
Wanting - Richard Flanagan

More in a bit.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

It's that time of year again

2009-03-11T10:35:00.000+10:30

Over at Matilda, Perry Middlemiss has compiled a list of eligible and likely contenders for this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award. The longlist will be announced tomorrow. The shortlist is usually announced in late April and the winner some time in June.

Emboldened by past successes, I'm going to have another go and predict a longlist, a shortlist and a winner. Please note that these are not necessarily my picks -- I've read fewer than half of these books -- but rather my very early predictions based on what I know, think, feel or guess about the books, the writers, the judges, the prize and the general tenor of the times.

Naturally, I reserve the right to change my mind.

I think that there will be a longlist of between ten and twelve, chosen from among the following novels:

The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide
The Pages by Murray Bail
His Illegal Self by Peter Carey
The Biographer by Virginia Duigan
Wanting by Richard Flanagan
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
Addition by Toni Jordan
The Good Parents by Joan London
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Breath by Tim Winton

I predict a shortlist of six:

The Pages
The Spare Room
The Lieutenant
The Good Parents
Breath
A Fraction of the Whole

(with the possible, but unlikely, substitution of The Slap for The Lieutenant

And a winner:

Joan London's The Good Parents

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Illustration, obfuscation

2009-03-01T10:21:00.000+10:30

This post began life as a comment on this post over at Helen's Cast Iron Balcony, but once I'd violated the three-paragraph comment rule I decided to bring it over here. There are, at last sighting, no comments yet on Helen's post. My guess is that we're all too horrified to speak.

In brief, Helen links to two recent newspaper articles by conservative antifeminist Miranda Devine and shows the two really vile caricatures of women that were drawn to illustrate these articles. In her post, Helen asks among other things whether the writer has any influence in what the illustrator draws.

I've had two experiences of what might loosely be called the opposite. The first occurred in 1983 when I edited a book of Australian short stories that included far more than the (then) usual number of stories by women, as well as stories about cities and migrants, and focused, in the detailed introduction that I wrote, on the traditional idea of the 'Australian' as a white Anglo-Celtic bushman or Anzac being something we needed to move on from. I was then horrified to discover that the publisher had chosen, for the cover of this anthology, the Tom Roberts painting 'The Breakaway', which shows an apparently white Anglo-Celtic male on a horse chasing a sheep with a lot of native trees in the background.

When I brought this up with the publisher he literally did not understand my point (it was 1983) and just kept saying over and over 'But it's very Australian, and it will sell the book because it's an image that people will recognise.' If I'd been older and more experienced I would have tried harder to explain how his response was exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, and was trying, in terms of cultural stereotypes, to move beyond, but I still don't think I would have won. (I love that painting, which didn't help.)

Two years later I wrote a conference paper on media and other cultural representations of Lindy Chamberlain (who was still in jail at the time) that got picked up by one of the dailies for the weekend features and given to an artist to illustrate. I certainly had no say in the illustration and I assume this is the norm, at least with newspapers where there simply isn't time for such consultation.

The illustration, which I didn't see till the paper came out, exemplified all the sexist media habits and assumptions that I was attempting, in the article, to deconstruct and undermine. It was a head-and-shoulders caricature of Chamberlain looking bloated, ugly and malevolent, wearing a lurid orange tent-like dress patterned in ironic little hearts. It's possible that it was a kind of meta-comment, but frankly I doubt it.

Now I was, and remain, a fan of the artist in question as a usual thing, but this particular drawing was unfunny as a caricature, unsuccessful as a portrait, and -- most importantly -- wildly misleading as an illustration of the text that it was supposed to be derived from. To this day I don't know whether he and/or the dude from the publishing house were either just so impermeable to feminist ideas that they were incapable of processing what I was saying, or whether their responses constituted active (conscious or subconscious) resistance to what I was saying, attempts to use their images to undermine my words.

'Illustrate': to illuminate, clarify or shed light on, to add lustre. The drawings shown at Helen's post certainly illuminate and clarify Devine's meaning and line of argument in both cases. But sometimes illustration can, in defiance of its name, be used to obfuscate: to conceal, confuse, darken, cover up.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

What's the difference between Australian literature and a woolly mammoth?

2009-01-30T10:01:00.000+10:30

Peter Carey has a really excellent, impassioned piece in today's Age on what the elimination of territorial copyright will mean for Australian writers and writing, here.

I am reminded of a passage in Other People's Words, the memoir of former Australian publisher, general enabler and all-round legend Hilary McPhee of McPhee Gribble as was, who apprehensively noted the straws in the wind back in 2001. If the reader will forgive a bit of egregious self-quoting, here's a summary from my review of the book for Australian Book Review:

... she deploys single, sharply focused images as motifs to link up different epochs in her life and different eras of cultural history, motifs positioned in the text both to herald and to echo its central concerns and themes ... there are the immigrant children at primary school in the late 1940s, 'the boys with their straight backs and red cheeks and the girls in full skirts and wooden clogs' being encouraged to sing and dance in national dress for their classmates -- an image in sharp contrast to the flattening-out of cultural differences that she finds herself fighting against forty years later.

And her image for that erosion of local difference in writing, the effect she fears globalisation has already begun to have on literature, is the glittering annual party thrown by the publishing giant Bertelsmann at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair: 'And the food tastes of nothing at all.'

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Quadrant and Wimminz: lies, damned lies, and statistics

2009-01-13T22:18:00.000+10:30

In the wake of the Windschuttle hoax there's been a lot of discussion around the online traps, in the course of which I observed as part of an argument about something else that Quadrant was not a particularly woman-friendly space.

Along with other people who have been familiar with Quadrant for decades, I should have though this observation on a par with 'The sky is blue' or '2+2=4', but of course there was angry reaction from the sorts of people one expects to react angrily to any mention of gender whatever, a phenomenon fascinating in itself.

One of these people worked himself up into such a monumental tis-was that one would think he had been personally insulted, though he has no visible connection with Quadrant apart from reading it. So much so, in fact, that he could have done (as we all so often could in life) with a gentle reminder that this was not all about him.

Then, in the course of a discussion with a far more reasonable chap whose interest is in statistics rather than in defending Quadrant, I discovered that Quadrant does in fact publish more poems and fiction by women than I would have expected, although the same names recur again and again even within single issues, and I retracted accordingly. The reasonable statistics chap used a comparison with Meanjin to make his point, saying that in the respective current issues of Meanjin and Quadrant there were more poems by women in the latter than in the former, which was true.

In the course of this exercise I spent a bit of time at the home pages of the respective magazines, and it gave me an idea: each mag has a 'current issue' page listing all contributors, and it was reasonable to expect that other magazines would as well. So here are some numbers I gathered, as at last night, from the 'current issue' pages of Australian magazines -- monthly, quarterly, bi-annual -- that are partly or wholly literary in content.

In one or two cases there was one name on the page whose gender could not be determined by even the most assiduous Googling -- but no more than one, which is nowhere near enough to skew the order in which the mag titles appear here. Each contributor has been counted only once, though occasionally the same name appears twice or more. Let me repeat that these numbers are based on the contributor names listed in the magazines' own online home pages, on the evening of 12 January ~~2008~~ 2009.

(*Sighs and reflects that one always does this at least once in the first week or two*.)

Please note that this does not claim to be an exhaustive list of magazines.

The numbers show the ratio MEN:WOMEN. I offer them in a spirit of scientific curiosity, without comment.

ISLAND MAGAZINE 1:2

HEAT MAGAZINE 11:13

SOUTHERLY 9:7

CORDITE POETRY REVIEW 17:13 [update]

OVERLAND 4:3

MEANJIN: 23:16

GRIFFITH REVIEW 3:2

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW 9:5

THE MONTHLY 2:1

QUADRANT 13:4

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

A very long post about Charmian Clift

2009-01-09T21:52:00.000+10:30

Over at Pea Soup, Suse has a lovely holiday post including a snap of her summer reading, Nadia Wheatley's superb biography of Charmian Clift.

I reviewed this book for ABR, along with a couple of reissued volumes of Clift's writing, back in 2001. Because I am currently too mired in work to blog properly and because I quite like this review and because Suse's post has reminded me that I think everybody should read Clift's writing and Wheatley's biography, here it is again.

No Comfort in the Stars

'At night,' wrote Charmian Clift one summer in the late 1950s on the Greek island of Hydra where she lived with her husband and children, where the harbour village had been invaded by summer tourists, where teams of local Greek matrons invaded the kitchen in relays to monitor the foreign woman's housework and mothering techniques, where the water supply was rapidly drying up, where she and her husband George Johnston worked too hard and worried too much about the inadequate royalty cheques that continued to fail to arrive — `At night,' she wrote,

the water slides over your body warm and silky, a mysterious element, unresistant, flowing, yet incredibly buoyant. In the dark you slip through it, unquestionably accepting the night's mood of grace and silence, a little drugged with wine, a little spellbound with the night, your body mysterious and pale and silent in the mysterious water, and at your slowly moving feet and hands streaming trails of phosphorescence, like streaming trails of stars. Still streaming stars you climb the dark ladder to the dark rock, shaking showers of stars from your very fingertips, most marvellously and mysteriously renewed and whole again.

`Pagan' was one of Clift's husband's favourite words for her, and one of her favourite words for herself. But it was precisely her own passionate capacity for nature-worship that made her such an empathetic observer of Christianity as practised in Greece. Transcendence and ecstasy were real things for her and, when she uses words like marvel and mystery, that is exactly what she means. `In the strange, still world of hot noontime,' she had written on Kalymnos three years before,

the burning grey beach is deserted, and the sea is still … Brilliant against the dazzling stairs a barefooted woman climbs slowly up from the sea, her head erect under a pile of black and crimson rugs … Without lifting my eyes I can look directly at the gilded cross surmounting the green dome of Agios Nikolas. The sound of chanting that wells up with the wide ascending stair seems inevitable, a vocal utterance of worship to the source of this pure incandescence that is pouring down on the world — Be still and know that I am God! The fringed brazen standards, the spindly black-ribboned cross are molten gold, drawn to the source of light, defying gravity, flowing up the cracked concrete steps.

Mermaid Singing (1956) and Peel Me a Lotus (1959) are Clift's two `Greece' books, generic hybrids somewhere between `travel' and `autobiography'. She wrote them in time stolen from her duties and pleasures as the mother of three small children and the junior partner in the marital, collaborative writing team. These two books have now been published together to form one of two companion volumes to Nadia Wheatley's biography. The other, Selected Essays, contains an assortment of Clift's columns and articles written between the family's return from Greece in 1964 and her death five years later. Most of them first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, where her weekly column rapidly acquired cult status. In choosing eighty from Clift's 225 published essays, Wheatley has tried, she says, `to give a representative sample of her concerns and interests'.

This must have been more easily said than done, for Clift writes about everything from conscription and the Vietnam War and the shabbiness of the education system and the repressive and sexist liquor licensing laws (she was passionately opposed to all these things) to the sight of her old friend Sidney Nolan unpacking paintings he hadn't seen for years:

I had one of those strange flashbacks that everyone has some time, to a hot, dusty, workaday street in the Piraeus in 1959. There was a big trench dug in the street, and shovels leaning everywhere, and out of the trench … came an archaic Apollo, lost for two thousand years.

It wasn't Apollo who came out of those wraps, though, but Sergeant Kennedy, dead at Stringybark Creek. Mr Nolan looked surprised, as though that wasn't what he had expected. He said the pink hill had got a lot pinker in the twenty-one years since he'd seen the painting last. He ran his fingers exploratively over Sergeant Kennedy's spilt blood and suddenly grinned and said `Still fresh'.

Reading these essays, it's easy to see why Clift became a cult figure. The chatty, charming and sometimes slightly dippy persona distracts attention just enough from the steely intelligence, the sophisticated sentence structure and the passion for causes that characterise these pieces but might otherwise have rather alarmed her readers.

As it was, she showed them that it was possible to be properly `womanly' and at the same time to care passionately about things beyond your house, beyond your city, beyond your borders, and not just to care but to do something. In an era that hadn't yet thought too much about these things, her columns demonstrated that a woman, even a comfortable Australian woman hedged about by the legal, social and cultural restrictions of her time, could and should be an active citizen of the world.

Towards the end of Nadia Wheatley's massive and complex biography, she comments on the critical response to Garry Kinnane's George Johnston: A Biography (1986):

A tendency to retell the myth would emerge in reviews of Kinnane's book, in which the subject under review would by and large be the life of Johnston and Clift, rather than an assessment of the biographer's presentation of it.

Wheatley is referring here to the accumulation of sensational stories that grew up around Johnston and Clift; her comment is part of a larger argument about the way that media representations of them have always tended to focus on the sensational material at the expense of their achievements as writers, helping to produce and prolong the `myth' to which the title of her biography refers.

And it's clear, though she doesn't spell it out, that Wheatley fears not only a similar reception for her own book, but — even worse and even more ironically — that it might have the opposite effect to the demythologising one she has worked for two decades to produce: that it might precipitate yet another round of rehashed tutting in reviews and articles, a further reinforcement of the myth.

As a reviewer of this book and a reader who honours the gifts of both Clift and Wheatley, I am determined not to fall into this trap. Unfortunately, the sensational material needs to be sketched in order for the story to make sense, so let's get it over with. Clift was a beautiful young woman who in 1946 began a scandalous affair with her journalist colleague George Johnston — an older man with a wife and child — which resulted in their joint departure from the staff of the Melbourne Argus (later The Age). Four years earlier and long before she met Johnston, Clift had already, at nineteen, given birth to an illegitimate daughter who had been adopted out. Clift and Johnston married and left Australia; they were away, living mainly in Greece, for ten years, during which time Johnston was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would finally kill him in 1970.

They wrote a number of books, some collaboratively and some individually; they had three children; they were often desperately worried about money; and progressively wilder stories came drifting back to Australia with returning travellers about the marriage disintegrating in a fog of alcohol and infidelity.

They returned to Australia in 1964, partly to capitalise on the runaway success of Johnston's novel My Brother Jack. With Johnston critically ill and in hospital for long stretches of time, Clift was obliged to run the household on her own and largely to support the family; for four years, she wrote a weekly column which rapidly acquired a huge readership and generated a flood of fan (and, occasionally, hate) mail. On 8 July 1969, at the end of a day of heavy drinking and bitter argument with her sick husband, Clift took an overdose of his sleeping pills and died at the age of forty-five.

Wheatley evokes the complexity of Clift's character with the care of a mosaicist, and often with much the same technique: she builds up a portrait partly by amassing and arranging fragments of testimony in patterns of complement and contrast. `I mean,' says a female colleague from her days at the Argus, `every man who looked at Charmian just, you know, wanted to go to bed with her. You didn't put it like that in 1946, but that's how it was.' The ABC's Storry Walton, who worked with her on the production of the 1965 television series of My Brother Jack, said: `Had she lived longer, Charmian Clift would have been one of the best screenwriters that Australia has ever produced.' And Leonard Cohen's memory of the Johnstons on Hydra in the late 1950s, when he was a poverty-stricken and unknown young poet, places Clift somewhere different again from these extremes of siren and genius:

They had a larger-than-life, a mythical quality. They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more and they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration. They had guts.

Their `mythical quality', however, was something at which they both worked quite hard, for both Johnstons were self-mythologisers from childhood. Clift wrote and rewrote an idealised version of her childhood all her life: the story of the wild little girl running free on the beach at Kiama, her small home town on the south coast of New South Wales. Johnston's myth of self is the Golden Boy of My Brother Jack, the oppressed child from a shabby suburban Melbourne house who became the glamorous, much-travelled war correspondent. They both kept the habit of incessantly rewriting the stories of their own and each other's lives and selves. They dramatised what was already dramatic, romanticised what was already romantic, and edited out the bits that didn't fit the stories they wanted to believe about themselves.

And it's this dense accumulation of different versions — and the multiple Clift-masks those versions produce — with which Wheatley has to deal, quite as much as with the periodic waves of sensationalising media interest. The prefatory Author's Note is itself an intriguing piece of intellectual autobiography that could easily have been three times as long as it is, and still have done this already excellent biography nothing but more good; but, as Wheatley explains in it, she was determined to keep herself off the pages of the book as much as she could.

This biography has been a long time in the writing; after its genesis in Wheatley's partnership with the Johnstons' older son Martin, with whom she lived for seven years, there were numerous setbacks, dramas and unexpected developments. One can only guess how Wheatley felt (for she honourably does not say) when Clift's first child, the adopted Suzanne Chick, discovered her birth-mother's identity and decided that she wanted to write a book about Clift herself; Chick's Searching for Charmian was published in 1994, predictably provoking another round of tutting in the press.

Wheatley is a trained historian and an award-winning writer for children, which means, among other things, that this book is both eminently readable and exhaustively researched. She makes no rhetorical fuss about her own politics beyond stating what they are in the Author's Note and making the occasional quiet point in the course of the story. She explains her position and her methodology in a way that reveals just how much intellectual sophistication went into the decision to write a traditional biography with an invisible narrator and a straightforwardly linear chronology, a `sober accumulation of information'. Her Author's Note manages to indicate the complexity of her position while remaining lucid, modest and brief. The book glows in a subdued way with the intelligence and style of its author quite as much as with those of its subject; the writing itself is as finely crafted as Clift's own.

The final section, the fifteen-page Epilogue, is a brilliant feat of lucidity and compression: Wheatley sums up the stages of the `myth', managing neither to shy away from nor to be judgmental about the fact that Clift herself was the myth's first and most ardent architect, beginning with the idealisation of her childhood. One of the things Wheatley has had to struggle with in the task she has set herself of disentangling myth from fact is that most of the myth is factual; it's not a simple case of, to pinch an image from Peel Me a Lotus, `sorting through the lentils for the stones and black beetles that always make up a quarter of the weight'.

But the thing she's stuck with, the thing that will not go away, is that Clift's whole being — the things she said, the things she did, the way she looked, the effect she had on other people — lent itself irresistibly to myth-making. What else are you to make, after all, of a child in small-town Australia in the middle of the Depression who would go down to the rockpools at night while her father and brother fished, take off all her clothes, lie down in the water under the clear night sky and `starbake in the confident expectation that she would turn silver'? The starbaking ritual, says Wheatley:

expressed the sense of being at one with the universe, which was part of Charmian Clift's own pantheistic religion of childhood: throughout her life she would remain to some extent a spiritual mystic, who worshipped the elements of the landscape around her.

I remembered this passage when I came to read Peel Me a Lotus, where Clift records that in March 1956, heavily pregnant with what almost everyone assumes is her third but is in fact her fourth child (and how haunted a woman like Clift, or indeed any woman, would have been by her absent first-born), wide awake in the middle of a Mediterranean spring night, she finds herself back under the stars:

My face is cold turned up to the cold stars. Inexorable and orderly they move across heaven, star beyond star, nebula beyond nebula, universe beyond universe, wheeling through a loneliness that is inconceivable. Almost I can feel this planet wheeling too, spinning through its own sphere … There's no comfort in the stars. Only darkness beyond darkness, mystery beyond mystery, loneliness beyond loneliness. Wrapped in its own darkness and mystery and loneliness the child in my body turns, as though to remind me of mysteries closer to hand. And I go spinning on through space ...

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Hard to believe now

2008-11-28T18:53:00.000+10:30

And as if the subject of the previous post were not enough gobsmackery from the headlines for one day, here's another: Rolf Harris telling Aboriginal people they need to get over themselves. The context: his attempts, decent in themselves if largely failed, to erase from recordings the verse of 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport' that goes 'Let me Abos go loose, Bruce, let me Abos go loose / They're of no further use, Bruce, so let me Abos go loose.'

I am old enough to remember when this was universally regarded as funny. By 'universally' I mean, of course, 'by white Australians'. (Compare and contrast with Barry Humphries' brilliant and savage line about the word 'Moomba': 'It's an Aboriginal word for "Let's get together and have fun". They didn't need it any more.') The real point of even mentioning this unpleasant little lyrics-based episode in Australia's cultural history is to express my admiration for the headline on this item, the best headline I've seen for quite a while, courtesy of some inspired sub at the Sydney Morning Herald: Cut the Bigoted Verse, Perce.

Even so, it was quite a contrast to the event I was at last night: a brilliant lecture on 'The Many Futures of Our Digital Lives' by Adelaide's newest Thinker in Residence, anthropologist Genevieve Bell. The event began with a Welcome to Country by Kaurna elder Auntie Josie Agius, who after demonstrating her expertise in bending the mics down to her diminutive level, lifted her head and ringingly addressed the audience in Language. We were smack in the middle of Kaurna land and you could practically see the shimmering electric line connecting the words to the ground.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

And here's a book to buy/read

2008-11-06T09:41:00.000+10:30

Not that I've read it yet; I'm not even sure it's in the shops. But it's being launched in Melbourne on November 11, and here's the (much more than usually thoughtful and substantial) blurb:

THE SLAP
By Christos Tsiolkas
Category: Literary Fiction
Published by Allen & Unwin 7 November 2008, RRP $32.95 Tpb

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. For those who witness the incident, the consequences have reverberations that will affect all their lives, splintering families and friendships. What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. Told from the perspective of eight people present at the barbeque, the slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.

Christos Tsiolkas is a writer who loves to take on taboos, and believes his writing to be a form of activism. His work is often controversial, but it engages with and challenges the reader in a way they WANT to be challenged, forcing them to see a new perspective.

In The Slap, Tsiolkas dissects what “middle class” means in Australia now, and questions their aspirations and fears in this post-feminist, post-political, post-multicultural era. What are the responsibilities of parenthood? What are the limits in relationships between adults and youth? Is a slap ever forgiveable? What future are contemporary families creating?

Tsiolkas's writing gets up people's noses and shocks them badly, but he's an excellent writer and a passionate thinker, and this book sounds like a ripper. As someone with no kids I've often found myself on very shaky ground with OP's: the kind of behaviour that one parent has thanked me for ('It's such a relief that you have your own relationship with him and deal with him directly and don't expect me to do it or implicate me'), another parent has reacted to with suppressed outrage and sarcasm ('Rebuke administered?' Translation: 'That's quite enough from you, how dare you not let my child get away with being outrageously rude to you!')

Both of these women were close friends. It mattered, quite a lot. I'm a big fan of Helen Garner's novella Other People's Children, which examines similar dilemmas at the height of the 'alternative' age, and it looks as though Tsiolkas is picking that baton up from the same Melbourne backyards in which Garner put it down, though from a very different personal perspective, and a generation later.

UPDATE (with props to Mindy who called it to my attention): there's a cracker of a review by Tsiolkas's fellow-novelist Gerard Windsor, an excellent read in itself, here.

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

2008-09-30T10:04:00.000+09:30

My review of this book was in the Age on Saturday.

New books

2008-09-19T12:18:00.000+09:30

Amanda Lohrey's Vertigo, newly out, is one of those beautiful little hardback novellas where the design of the book-as-object seems entirely of a piece with the writing. Lohrey seems more and more to be formally separating out the writing of fiction and non-fiction, and finely negotiating the nature of ideology and its manifestations in each.

Like her two previous novels, this one is about a couple: here it's a pair of relatively young tree-changers (tree and sea, actually), both with the kind of working life you can pack up with your laptop as long as you're going somewhere that has broadband. They quickly realise that they need to change the shape of their own sense-of-self to adapt to a different kind of place: the house, the landscape, the geography, the town and the dangers are all different. I've reviewed this for the October issue of Australian Book Review.

Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant comes out in October and I'm halfway through it for a review for the Age. Like her last, The Secret River, it's set in the early years of the settlement of New South Wales and it revisits the subject of contact history and conflict. Grenville found the material for this one while researching The Secret River and in some ways it seems like a part of the same project, material not so much rehashed as approached from a different set of angles.

This historical novel is based on a number of real people and its climactic episode is an unspeakable punitive expedition -- also historically documented; it took place in 1790 -- on which the men in the party are given hatchets to remove the heads of Aboriginal 'offenders' and sacks in which to bring back the heads. There's an easily recognisable fictional portrait of Watkin Tench, and the main character is also based on a real person, a mathematician and astronomer called Lieutenant William Dawes, whose diaries Grenville discovered in her research for The Secret River.

(Five-Greats Grandpa Marine Private Thomas Chipp, who arrived in the First Fleet and served in Tench's company, appears to have gone to Norfolk Island in October and thus been spared the possibility of being ordered to go on this murderous expedition, but it's not beyond doubt.)

Although I haven't yet read them, I've also been intrigued by descriptions of the two books that won the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Awards, The Zookeeper's War by Stephen Conte and Ochre and Rust: artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers by Philip Jones. Intrigued enough, in fact, to plan to go out and buy them both; it would be particularly interesting to read the Jones in tandem with the Grenville. From all accounts, the judges seem to have made a couple of inspired choices; among other things there's a lovely balance, no doubt serendipitous, between an anthropologist examining the very objects that symbolise the complex beginnings of post-settlement Australia, relics at the heart of contact, and a novelist with the confidence to branch out beyond the 'Australianness' boundaries that for various reasons still make themselves felt in the writing of Australian fiction.

I could be making a fortune

2008-06-19T21:50:00.000+09:30

I predicted in that last post two days ago that Steve Carroll would win the Miles Franklin Award and I have just discovered that he did.

*Does Grace's "I told you so" dance from Will & Grace*

2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award

2008-06-17T17:21:00.000+09:30

Without Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog on the shortlist I've kind of lost interest in and therefore track of the Miles this year, but have been reminded today that the dinner at which the announcement will be made (by Geoffrey Rush, I believe) is on Thursday night.

There's a shortlist of five -- Gail Jones' Sorry, Steven Carroll's The Time We Have Taken, David Brooks' The Fern Tattoo, Alex Miller's Landscape of Farewell and Rodney Hall's Love Without Hope. I'm tipping Carroll.

So you want to be a book editor?

2008-06-16T14:15:00.000+09:30

If you want to be a book editor then one of your jobs will be fact-checking. This includes making sure the writer has not misspelled any proper names, including place names.

For example, 'sienna' is the clay pigment used in oil paints; the colour comes in two varieties, raw and burnt. It is not the name of the beautiful walled city in Tuscany where they make panforte and have the annual medieval horse race. That is called Siena. (NB neither of these is to be confused with senna, which is a naturally-occuring laxative.)

Similarly, the boot-shaped peninsula in South Australia is called Yorke Peninsula, not York Peninsular. 'Peninsular' is an adjective, meaning 'peninsula-like'. Cape York Peninsula, without an 'e', is the big pointy one in Queensland.

These errors should not have made it past a first read-through by the author, much less all the way through successive MS drafts and proofs re-read by the author and two different editors into a finished book and a Penguin book at that.

It is your particularly bad luck if they happen to be two of the book reviewer's favourite places on the entire planet. And I'm only on page 125 out of 450; who knows what sloppy horrors are yet to come.

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat.

Australian Book Review: reviewing competition

2008-06-03T12:14:00.000+09:30

Press release from ABR:

2008 ABR Reviewing Competition – entries close 30 June

It's on again – the 2008 ABR Reviewing Competition – and the first prize is now worth $1000!

First prize: $1000 and publication of the review in ABR and at least two future commissions
Second prize: $250
Third prize: a set of Black Inc. books, valued at $200

All reviewers are eligible – including past and present ABR contributors. This competition is a particularly good opportunity for younger and emerging writers and students who wish to establish a career in reviewing.

All categories of books are eligible, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s and young adult books. Reviews should be 800 words. The book being reviewed must have been published since January 2006. Please click here for full details in the entry form.

Entries close 30 June 2008. Winners will be announced in the October 2008 issue of ABR.

Please pass this on to interested colleagues and students.

For further information, e-mail: abradmin@vicnet.net.au; telephone (03) 9429 6700 or visit the ABR website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Absolutely revolting!

2008-05-27T22:30:00.000+09:30

In an article in last Saturday's Australian, Beth Driscoll reminds us that the Prime Minister will be the final arbiter of his new and lucrative prizes for literature. The man who thinks Bill Henson's beautiful, powerful, emotive photographs 'absolutely revolting' will be having the last word on which books represent the country's best literature.

The judging panels -- Peter Pierce, John Marsden and Margaret Throsby for fiction, Sally Morgan, John Doyle and Hilary Charlesworth for non-fiction -- were, if their response to this news was anything to go by, invited to be judges without being told that their decisions would be subject to Prime Ministerial approval and/or veto, and were apparently not told until after they had already accepted and could not get out of it without looking bad from a number of angles.

That was a piece of appallingly bad management on the part of the administrators. And while one understands why the PM might want to have a say about the winner of a prize with his name on it, the inclusion of this very unusual and highly contentious condition suggests to me that whoever was developing this project behind the scenes knew less about literary prizes and the administration thereof than was required not to stuff it up before it had even got off the ground.

Pierce and Marsden voiced their disquiet at the time. Think how much worse they must be feeling about it now that we have so much more precise an indication of the Prime Minister's taste and discernment when it comes to judging the arts. What a good thing Vladimir Nabokov doesn't qualify for this prize, what with being Russian, not to mention dead. Clearly he wouldn't stand a chance.

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat

On reading The Spare Room, part 1: Friendship

2008-05-24T00:47:00.000+09:30

NOTE: this isn't a 'book review'. Nor is it 'literary criticism', within the meaning of the act. It's a blog post. (Warning: a long one.) It's also the first of a planned several posts about this book, talking about one thing at a time. There is a highly specific and quite long set of (mostly unspoken) conventions in the writing of book reviews, and another, surprisingly different, set in the writing of literary criticism. But blogging is an activity and a medium, not a literary genre, and it does not require those conventions to be kept. So here are some non-reviewy, non-criticismy thoughts on The Spare Room and some of the things it's about.

But first, a plot summary:

The narrator Helen, who is a writer (yes yes, more about this later), lives alone in a settled, domestic way next door to her daughter and the daughter's family in a Melbourne suburb. Helen is preparing the spare room for the arrival of Nicola, her friend of fifteen years. Nicola is dying of cancer, but is convinced that her life can be saved by a Melbourne clinic offering 'alternative' treatments that will be fiendishly expensive. Nicola has asked if she can stay with Helen for three weeks while she has the treatments.

Nicola is ill enough to need close attention and periodically intense, full-on nursing, but is still convinced that the clinic's treatment will cure her. In the course of her stay, Helen becomes more and more enraged: by Nicola's behaviour; by the behaviour of the people at the clinic (and by extension the clinic's disgraceful ripoff behaviour, and by further extension all exploitative quackery, and by even further extension all exploitation of other people's weaknesses); by Nicola's impending death (and by extension death in general); and, finally, by her own rage.

Helen's own rage enrages her, and dismays and weakens her. 'The one thing I was sure of,' she thinks later, remembering the afternoon before Nicola was due to fly home to Sydney and back into the care of her long-suffering niece Iris, 'was that if I did not get Nicola out of my house tomorrow I would slide into a lime-pit of rage that would scorch the flesh off me, leaving nothing but a strew of pale bones on a landscape of sand.'

Finally the treatment ends and Nicola goes home to Sydney, not a moment too soon for all concerned; Helen is left not only exhausted but also bewildered and appalled by the feelings that the visit has brought to the surface in her, and the gap between the ideal and the real on several fronts.

FRIENDSHIP

This whole novel rests on what's actually a highly unusual set of circumstances. People with stage four cancer are usually not well enough to travel alone, much less to invite themselves to stay with a friend in another city, or to want to do so. Everything that happens in this novel happens because the dying Nicola is in profound denial about her condition.

She is, of course, not well enough to travel alone either, and goes into a state of near-collapse in the airport after what is, for the well, an easy hour-long flight from Sydney to Melbourne. The reason, we discover later, is that she has had, just before her trip, one of the ridiculous-quackery Vitamin C treatments ("High dosage Vitamin C will kill off lumps of cancer -- most doctors don't know this stuff") to which she knows she always has an extreme reaction.

One of the most distressing moments in the book (and there are many) occurs at this point, where the narrator Helen is forced to choose, in a public place, between the distress of a dear friend who is too weak to stand up and the distress of a five-year-old granddaughter:

Nicola couldn't sit up straight ... she was shuddering from head to foot like someone who has been out beyond the break too long in winter surf.

'Bessie,' I said, 'Listen to me, sweetheart. See that lady over there, behind the counter? Past the toilets? I want you to walk up to her and tell her we need a wheelchair. Right away. Will you be a big girl and do that?'

She stared at me. 'What if they don't have wheelchairs in airports?'

'Bess. I need you to help us.'

Nicola turned on her a smile that would once have been beautiful and warm, but was now a rictus.

'But I don't want to go without you,' said Bessie on a high note.

'All right. You stay here with Nicola, and I'll go.'

'Nanna.' She gripped me with both hands.

'We have to get a wheelchair. Go to that lady and ask her. Otherwise I don't know how we'll get out of here.'

I pushed her away from me. She set out along the carpeted hall with stiff, formal steps. I saw her rise on to her toes and try to show herself above the counter's edge.

This is maybe the first moment of rage, though it's not spelled out. Garner has always left spaces in her writing for the reader to come in and feel whatever he or she might feel, to think whatever he or she might think. One of the things that may well be happening for a reader -- certainly for this reader -- here, between the lines of dialogue and its frightful airport silences (for many is the silent moment of horrible dawning realisation that has taken place in an airport lounge) is rage with an adult for allowing the development of a situation in which a child must be pushed to her limits.

A similar moment occurs again when Bessie comes next door into her grandmother's house, where she has never been unwelcome, to do her flamenco dance for her Nanna and her Nanna's friend, and she's a few steps in when they notice her nose is running:

'Oh shit.' Nicola got off the stool and backed away. 'I'm sorry, darling, but you can't come in here with a cold. I've got no resistance left. Helen, you'll have to send her home.' She shuffled as fast as she could down the hall into the spare room, and pulled the door shut behind her.

I picked up a pencil and took a breath to start explaining cell counts and immune systems, but Bessie didn't ask. She stood in the centre of the room with her arms dangling. Her face was blank.

The rage isn't simple and isn't always about Nicola; sometimes it even goes in the opposite direction and manifests as ferocious protectiveness. 'I thought, I will kill anyone who hurts you. I will tear them limb from limb. I will make them wish they had never been born. Almighty God, I thought, to whom all hearts are open.' In a most Garner-like way, she doesn't tell you for what purpose God is being invoked in this prayer, so I looked it up: it's Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts. In this context that unspoken plea is very ambiguous indeed.

Friendship can be far more durable than marriage, and can sometimes involve feelings quite as complex and as strong, but it isn't a relationship that was meant to withstand living in the same house, as everyone who has spent time in shared households knows. This is not to say that no friendship survives it, only that it can be very testing, and the longer the stay the harder the test, even when you are both young and well and have no close family, much less when you are both of an age to be grandparents.

In the flash-forwards at the end of the novel, Helen demonstrates how much easier it is, by comparison, to take it in turns with others to help Nicola through the last stages of her life, and to stay in loving, sardonically realistic postcard-and-email contact with her when they are in different cities: 'I would write to her on a postcard: "I miss you. I'm bored. I'd rather be scrubbing shit off Iris's bathroom tiles."' It's the unrelenting domestic proximity to Nicola and her deluded self-(mis)management that stretches the friendship to its limits, not least because Nicola's delusional state means she needs constant monitoring, chauffeuring and nursing, sometimes all three at once.

We conduct our friendships in accordance with some internalised ideal of what friendship is; and we judge our friends and ourselves by the same ideal. But it doesn't get tested in this kind of extreme way very often. There are probably far more one-off acts of demented bravery or sacrifice performed in the name of friendship than there are protracted episodes of steady, grinding endurance, where our life's work is hijacked, our granddaughters dismayed, our washing machines given a serious workout and our patience worn so thin you could read the paper through it.

Friends make room for each other in their lives, especially when one of them is in desperate need of help, but there will always be strong competing claims. Those sorts of moment-by-moment and inch-by-inch negotiations are the lifeblood of fiction: the way we endlessly shift, this way and that, between the people in our lives, between love and responsibility, between inclination and obligation, making room here, cutting corners there, making unsatisfactory compromises and horrible painful decisions that please no-one.

One thing this book brings out very strongly is the difference between the physical demands of carer-duty -- Helen carries these out gladly, even when they become heavy, as she has always known she would -- and the far more onerous and treacherous burden of one's own feelings about the caree, about her behaviour and her situation.

As so often in her work, Garner sets this conflict up in such a way as to evoke from readers their own similar experiences (like feeling your brain blow up as you stand by in the role of officially designated carer to someone who has been told they must not be left alone after surgery or treatment; say, the sister who reverts to ancient childhood patterns of sibling-rivalry strategies even when drugged to the eyeballs and unable to walk straight, or to the friend, also still full of drugs, who point-blank refuses do any of the things she's been told by the doctor that she must do. Ahem.)

And everyone who's done it knows that the wet sheets and vomit bowls are the least of it, that they are, indeed, nothing: it's the rage, and the helplessness of the rage, in both carer and caree. If you are sick and helpless, you hate the dependence and lash out (though Nicola is not like this; indeed, her sense of entitlement is one of the things that brings this character so vividly to life, though she has moments -- which, again most readers will recognise from their own lives -- of saying with a kind of noble woundedness whenever the carer's exasperation shows, 'No no, this is too hard for you, I'll go and stay in a hotel.'). But as a carer, you cannot yell at a sick person and you feel monstrous if you do. They are already suffering enough, and they will probably cry. And that will make you want to shoot yourself.

You do these things for family because you are, at the deepest level, stuck with them, as they with you. Robert Dessaix, in his review of The Spare Room for The Monthly in April, was harsh in a glancing way about what he sees as the book's implication that if Nicola had got married and had a proper family she wouldn't need to be impinging on someone else's.

But I see it more as a tension that is there in almost everyone's life: the dues to family are monumental and non-negotiable, while those to friends have invisible, expanding boundaries, 'like gold to airy thinness beat'. The boundaries might go on stretching forever. Or not.

Next -- Part 2: FAITH

When dogs go missing

2008-05-23T11:32:00.000+09:30

Apropos the recent posts here on Michelle de Kretser's novel The Lost Dog, someone at Club Troppo's Missing Link observed the other day that 'cats were always going to favour novels where dogs go missing'.

And how true it is.

NSW Premier's Literary Awards: The Lost Dog gets (some of) its deserts

2008-05-20T13:06:00.000+09:30

Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog has won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Book of the Year Award in the 2008 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. I'm hoping this will be just the first of many. Previous raves about this book are here and here. Thanks to Ampersand Duck for this news.

David Marr on the Patrick White papers

2008-05-19T13:32:00.000+09:30

For anyone who's not seen it yet, David Marr's lovely piece on the recently-unearthed Patrick White letters and manuscripts is now up at The Monthly's website, here. Australian Book Review editor Peter Rose interviewed Marr about these discoveries during Adelaide Writers' Week where Marr was his usual urbane and entertaining self, so I'd heard some of this material before, but it's enlightening to read it again at leisure.

One of the issues it raises for me is the question of an unfinished manuscript called The Hanging Garden, which White put aside to work on something else some time in the early 1980s and never got back to. Marr says this manuscript may in future be published but I'm not sure I want to see it; there is something quite violent about being wrenched away from a novel in the middle, especially when you know there is no end. And in these days of fanfic I bet a number of people would have a go at finishing it, which would be more than some of us could bear. If it must be done at all then I propose it be done by a committee made up of all those who have in their time presented a Patrick White parody on Parody Night at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature's annual conference. We would be each other's sternest critics.

Also for those who missed it last time (as I did), here's David Malouf's 'reappraisal' of White in the TLS at the beginning of last year.

Breath, by Tim Winton, and the May issue of Australian Book Review

2008-05-03T23:49:00.000+09:30

My review for The Australian of Tim Winton's Breath is here. I've been interested to note that more than one person has picked me up on my mention of Winton's Christianity, as though that were somehow unusual or odd, but I can't imagine how it would be possible to review his work without mentioning it: it is the world view from which his work proceeds, and it would be an impoverished, misshapen commentary that didn't at least acknowledge it.

James Ley, a critic I have come to admire more and more for the unerring way he can remain engaging and lucid while working with abstruse ideas, not to mention his willingness to lay about him with the jawbone of an ass if he thinks the occasion demands it, has reviewed this novel at more length in Australian Book Review, where with the extra space he has been able to write more reflectively; the image I have is of spreading ripples in a pond. There's never space for that kind of leisurely expansion of ideas in newspaper reviewing, though I was very glad to have a 12-1400 word limit, rather than the more usual 8-900, for my own review. One paragraph of James's in particular is a wonderful encapsulation of what's going on in Winton's writing generally, and pinpoints what he sees as a mismatch of content and mode:

What distinguishes Winton's recent work from a number of other writers with metaphysical leanings -- Flannery O'Connor, say, or Cormac McCarthy -- is that it does not try to evoke a palpable sense of evil ... characters are sometimes damaged and violent, but not irredeemably bad. "People are fools," observes Pikelet [the narrator-hero], "not monsters." This empathy can be double-edged when it is combined with Winton's visionary instincts. There is a generous humanity, an exultation of the ordinary, informing the celebratory domestic scenes of Cloudstreet ... But it is also why a self-consciously dark book like The Turning can seem dour and mean rather than tragic. Its air of fatalism appears confected and tendentious, because Winton is a high symbolist working in a realist mode. [My emphasis.] The same element that elevates his best writing can encumber it: meaning is forced upon his characters whether they like it or not.

Now that bolded clause is the most insightful thing I have ever read about Winton's work and it explains to me exactly why I have never been fully comfortable with it. I would have paid the cover price of ABR to read that paragraph alone. As it is, there is some fabulous other stuff in this particularly good (and, if I am not mistaken, unusually fat) May issue, beginning with a review essay by J.M. Coetzee on Fredric Jameson's The Modernist Papers that asks what is for those of us who have spent a goodly part of our lives in university English departments -- and that includes Jameson, Coetzee and me -- a very scary question:

... it is not hard to come up with materialist explanations ... for why there should have been a shake-up in literary fashion in and after the 1960s. What is not so obvious, what we need the assistance of the historian to understand, is why departments of English, in which overwhelmingly monoglot bodies of students gathered to read products of fancy written in their mother tongue, were ever called on to act as an accrediting agency for entry into the middle class.

Why indeed, she asked as she mentally rewrote a bit of her hypothetical autobiography. There's also an insightful and fair-minded but intermittently tart review of Helen Garner's The Spare Room by ABR editor Peter Rose (full text online at that ABR link), and a review of the Tony-Jones-edited collection The Best Australian Political Writing 2008. Other highlights include reviews of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds' Drawing the Global Colour Line, which is one of the few books I've bought in the last few weeks, of Joan London's new novel The Good Parents (also fully readable online), and of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by one of my favourite bloggers, the brilliant New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.

There's also a lengthy continuation in the letters page of an increasingly unseemly wrangle between rival biographers and their supporters over whether or not Martin Boyd's death was suicide. Given that most people die of being themselves in any case, surely the line -- that distinction between suicide and whatever the other thing is -- is often greyer and fuzzier than most people are prepared to admit in any case. Martin Boyd was a unique figure in Australian literary history and part of a unique family in its cultural history, and the manner of his death is not one of the important things about his life. Let him rest in peace.

New Chair in Australian Literature at UWA

2008-04-14T21:30:00.000+09:30

I should think the former Prime Minister will be spitting chips that the new government is smoothly taking the credit for the new Chair in Australian Literature, rumours of which began blowing in the wind in the second half of last year after a campaign waged mainly in The Australian about the perceived decline in Australian studies, particularly Australian literature, in universities. If I have understood the sequence of events correctly, this all started with John Howard's nationalist agenda and now the Rudd/Gillard team has scooped it up and run with it. Neat.

Much talk about the 'death of Australian literature' was generated and much was made, during this campaign, of the fact that with the retirement of Professor Peter Pierce from his chair at James Cook University, Australia was left with 'only one' dedicated Chair of Australian Literature, as though there had once been many such Chairs but the numbers had been steadily dropping off for years, as with an endangered species. Those in the field, however, knew that until the original appointment of Professor Pierce, there had only ever been one to begin with: the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, formerly held by Professors Leonie Kramer, GA Wilkes and the redoubtable Elizabeth Webby, and currently by Robert Dixon.

In fact, Australian Literature is a relatively new discipline, established in universities only tentatively in the late 1960s, by the stalwart likes of Vincent Buckley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe at the University of Melbourne and Brian Elliott at the University of Adelaide, after years of sneering resistance by the exiled English or Australian Anglophile academics who dominated Australian university English departments at the time, clutching their well-thumbed copies of Leavis and Lawrence. ("Aw-stralian Littah-rachoor? That's an oxymoron, haw haw.") The Association for the Study of Australian Literature -- still going strong, I'm glad to say -- wasn't even founded until 1978; before that there hadn't really been enough people teaching it to justify the establishment of a professional body.

Australian universities were invited to compete for the establishment of this new Chair and a number of proposals were submitted, but the University of Western Australia was the unanimous choice.

Barbara Jefferis Award, continued; Aust Lit; the lives of animals; various other stuff

2008-03-29T23:23:00.000+10:30

The Barbara Jefferis Award, discussed in the post before last in the context of a rave about Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, was in the event won by poet Rhyll McMaster for her first novel Feather Man. Which is indeed a fine book, as I've said at some length already here, and which certainly addresses, directly and on a literal level, the empowerment of girls and women.

But.

I don't know, maybe Michelle is one of those writers, like Elliot Perlman, whose work violently divides those who read it. (Perlman, whose very very long and very very detailed novel Seven Types of Ambiguity was treated to an absolute stinker of a review by Peter Craven of the kind Craven had hitherto reserved for Simon During's book about Patrick White, is regarded -- mainly on the strength of this novel -- by the French in particular not only as a very important Australian writer but as a very important writer, period. Other critical responses were dotted all along the spectrum between these two positions. Perlman's book has a dog in it, too; his name is Empson, which is one of the things that enraged Craven.)

Or maybe people think if there's an animal in the title it can't be a serious book. If so, this is sad, for there is a time-honoured and honourable tradition in Australian literature of writing about animals and putting them in your title. A quick trawl through the colourful history of the Australian short story yields the following by-no-means-exhaustive list of titles: 'The Dog', 'The Cow', 'The Bull Calf', 'The Jackass', 'The Dingo', 'The Donkey', 'The Ant-Lion', 'The Galah', 'The Pelican', 'The Seahawk', Tell Us About the Turkey, Jo', 'The White Turkey', 'The Grey Kangaroo', 'The Grey Horse', 'The Black Mare', 'Wild Red Horses', 'The Red Bullock', 'The Red 'Roo', 'The Rainbow Bird', 'The Powerful Owl', 'Singing Birds', 'The Woodpecker Toy Fact', 'The Three-Legged Bitch', 'The Loaded Dog', 'The New Australian Dog', 'Thylacine', 'Serpents', 'Snakes', 'A Snake Down Under', 'The Turtles' Graveyard', 'Goldfish', 'The Mullet', 'The Snoring Cod', 'Getting to the Pig', 'The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats', 'My Bird', 'His Dog', 'Hawkins's Pigs', 'John Gilbert's Dog', and 'Nobody's Kelpie'.

Perhaps some people may think The Lost Dog "about" (and only about) a dog, and "therefore" can't be Art. Perhaps some people may have forgotten the extraordinary power of the animal symbolism in the work some of the 20th century's great writers -- Lawrence's foxes and horses, Woolf's spaniel, Hemingway's bulls and fish, Les Murray's magical animal poems, Coetzee's dogs and frogs and other critters of all kinds and the absolutely deadly serious life philosophy behind his representations of animals and our relations with them.

For we are lucky enough to have in Australia not just one but two truly great thinkers and writers who can elevate these matters to a place where no intelligent reader can ignore the dilemmas they represent even with respect to that most alien of creatures, the bat: Coetzee as a man who fearlessly follows a trail of logic with no failure of nerve and arrives at a radical point of understanding, Murray from a point of view profoundly spiritual, a conception of being and presence arrived at via Catholicism, observation and imagination all at once. Here is Coetzee's tough nut (an old bat, even) Elizabeth Costello, in full flight, on bats and being:

What is it like to be a bat? Before we can answer such a question, [philosopher Thomas] Nagel suggests, we need to be able to experience bat life through the sense modalities of a bat. But he is wrong; or at least he is sending us down a false trail. To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. Bat being in the first case, human being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

Now if one were not aware that Les Murray had written 'Presence: Translations From the Natural World' some years earlier than this, his bat-poem would seem for all the world like a direct response, or amplification, of it, as though in conversation with Coetzee which for all I know he has been, in fact it seems very likely. I wish I'd been there.

Bats' Ultrasound

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.

Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening's a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:

ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry -- aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat

Carn Michelle

2008-03-29T23:14:00.000+10:30

I see from the current Sydney PEN newsletter that Michelle de Kretser's novel The Lost Dog has been shortlisted for the inaugural Barbara Jefferis Award, and the winner will be announced tomorrow.

(This is the prize that caused such a fuss last year when first announced, mainly because it's for women writers only. [UPDATE: My bad, my very bad, for this is completely wrong: it is open to novelists of either or indeed any sex whose book represents women and girls in a positive light; see comments thread.] Oh noes! What about Teh Menz Liberation, huh? Huh? Etc.)

As you can see if you read the link, this is a very handsome prize. Quite apart from the $35,000, there is the warm glow of winning an award named in honour and memory of a woman who contributed so much for so long to Australian literature -- and associated also with her husband John Hinde, long-standing and much-loved ABC film critic, whose will provided for the establishment of the award in his wife's name.

Peace and all to the current Miles Franklin judges, some of whom are mates of mine, but it's a matter of absolute gobsmackedness to me that The Lost Dog didn't even make the longlist for the 2008 Miles F award. It fits the award's criteria (which de Kretser's previous novel, The Hamilton Case, did not), and it's one of the best Australian novels I've read not just over the last year but for a very long time. I've got nothing against the other books that made the Miles F longlist; I just think The Lost Dog is better than most if not all of them -- for all kinds of reasons, but mostly, I think, for its delicate balance of intellectual sophistication and genuine, intense, beautifully realised feeling. That, and the fact that by about three pages in you find yourself thinking 'Oh my, this book was written by a grown-up.'

This is the review of it that I wrote last year for the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Lost Dog
By Michelle de Kretser
Allen & Unwin, 364 pp, $35 (hb)

Tom Loxley is on a kind of rural retreat when his beloved dog goes missing in the bush. Over the course of the story his search for the dog is interspersed with episodes of back-story: the story of his early childhood in India, his cramped teenage years in Australia, his unlucky and thwarted parents, and most of all his strange, tender relationship with the mysterious Nelly Zhang.

Tom is an academic working on a book about Henry James; he has anchored his racially complicated heritage in English literature. This novel is haunted by James in all kinds of ways, not least by a preoccupation with the idea of haunting itself, as well by the idea of yearning. On the surface Tom’s yearning is for the lost dog, and for the beloved who refuses to become a lover, but these things are situational and remediable; what can’t be changed is Tom’s family history and geography, the complex fate of the post-colonial.

This book is so engaging and thought-provoking, and its subject matter so substantial, that the reader notices only in passing how funny it is. At one point Tom goes to ask the neighbour Corrigan to keep an eye out for the dog, whereupon the narrator produces a sentence worthy of Patrick White: ‘When the Australian desire to provide assistance meshed with the Australian dread of appearing unmanly, it produced the bluff menace that was Mick Corrigan’s default setting.’

Michelle de Kretser is one of those rare writers whose work balances substance with style. Her writing is very witty, but it also goes deep, informed at every point by a benign and far-reaching intelligence. She is still winning prizes for her 2003 novel The Hamilton Case and she is certain to win a few more for The Lost Dog. Publishers Allen and Unwin have shown their faith in her by publishing this novel as a beautifully-designed hardback.

But I only had a 320-word space and they're meant to be brief, lively, accessible shorts; if you want a good, serious, insightful, detailed critical response, go and have a read of James Ley's full-length review in the Age. (Whenever I hear someone say 'Oh but Peter Craven is the best critic in the country', I have a little smile to myself, because while there are things about Craven's writing (not his criticism, so much) that I do admire very much, it's quite obvious to me that the best critic in the country is in fact James Ley.)

And just as an added bonus, that beautiful cover and design are courtesy of the lovely and talented Ampersand Duck. What more could any reader possibly want? Here is A. Duck's fabulous post about working on this novel; give yourself time (a cup of coffee, say) to read and savour this lovely detailed post.

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat

Back from the Bahamas

2007-07-27T22:36:00.000+09:30

The Sistahs have been on holidays, where they bathed, from bathing-machines, in voluminous yet child-sized bathing costumes. It was all very good for their lungs. Getting away from their father didn't hurt, either.

Many questions have been asked in their absence, so let us begin to catch up.

MINDY ASKS:Is it still easier to get published if you write under a male moniker or is the playing field level now?

Charlotte says: There are two parts to this question, and they do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. Of course it is easier for a woman to get published than it was in my day, but then everything is easier than it was in my day, and particularly than it was for me.

Anne explains: We were careful to give ourselves names that did not actually indicate that we were of the stronger sex. 'Currer', 'Ellis' and 'Acton' are not gender-specific names; we were merely counting on people opting for maleness as the default position. If people were silly enough to fall for it then that was hardly our fault. We did not mind hoisting people with their own sexist petard, but we did not wish to lie.

Emily adds: Not like that coward soul George Eliot or that pathetic cheat Mrs Henry Wood or that complete sooky la la Henry Handel Richardson, whom I believe was one of yours. Pffft.

It's all been a terrible mistake

2007-06-11T19:35:00.000+09:30

A ground-breaking, nay, earth-shattering new discovery has revealed that the Brontë Sisters were not shy, retiring, tiny, slender, mouse-coloured Irish/Cornish hybrids from Britain's remote and mysterious Deep and Wuthering North at all. No! With the slip of a keystroke, Melbourne's Sunday Age has re-identified them as the Bronti Sisters.

This bombshell has been brought to my attention by the distinguished scholar and blogger Professor Stephanie Trigg of Humanities Researcher, in the course of whose work the discovery was accidentally made.

And in a heartbeat the mind's eye transforms the Sistahs into proud and fiery Italian heroines, statuesque of stance and flashing of glance, raven of lock, pneumatic of bosom, and altogether quite unrecognisable in every way. Reader, I give you the Bronti Sisters: Carlotta, Emilia and Anna.

Literary history will have to be rewritten.

Ouch

2007-06-05T14:16:00.000+09:30

Next time you're thinking a book reviewer's lot must be a happy one, if ever you are so foolish as to think such a thing in the first place, bear in mind that as a reviewer one has two choices: one can either (a) say everything that crosses one's desk is just brilliant, or (b) do the job one is being paid for, call things as one sees them, and lay oneself wide open to retaliation from the wounded, angry author.

Particularly if you have a blog with an email address in the profile. Just ask me.

Memo to the negatively reviewed everywhere: in all but a tiny minority of cases, and certainly always in my case, it's not personal. It's about the work. Reject the judgement of reviewers by all means, but pause to reflect that if it were a positive judgement, you'd drink in every word and call it 'feedback'.

Also, as Helen Garner has said more than once about her own work, if you're going to stick your head up above the parapet then you have to expect to get it shot at. Or, as my mum used to say, if you can't stand the heat you should maybe stay out of the kitchen.

Your questions answered

2007-06-04T10:02:00.000+09:30

THIRDCAT ASKS: How can it be that you have all the ingredients there: the idea; the motivation; the inspiration; the knowledge that life is short; the external encouragement...and yet, in the small amount of quiet, uninterrupted time you have available you find yourself vacuuming the cutlery drawer because there's just no other way to get that pesky dust out of the corners??

Charlotte says [in the at this point thinly disguised persona of Jane Eyre]:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings or knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

This does not, I know, directly address your question, but as it is the most specific thing I am known ever to have said about housework, I thought I should put it in. Emily used to prop up her German grammar before her in the kitchen so that she could study while she made the bread, but in the case of cutlery drawer dust I should think you would need to attend to what you were doing.

Your dilemma as I perceive it is that in taking up the 'vacuum cleaner' (exactly what this may be I find it difficult to say, but the general principle is apparent from its name -- top idea) you are waging war against yourself, an activity with which I am all too familiar.

Once I was happily married, of course, it became, as became me, my first priority to ensure the domestic comfort and happiness of my dear Arthur, as was expected of me and as I expected of myself. But this is no help to you either, is it.

It is my understanding that women in the 21st century are less oppressed than I. But then, everyone is less oppressed than I.

I do not really know how I can help you. Perhaps it is the same kind of problem that people have with computers: labour-saving devices produce in their wake an expectation that you will get more done. Temptation by vacuum cleaner was never a problem at the Parsonage for reasons that one hopes are obvious.

Besides, in the era before electric light, dust in the corners of the cutlery drawers was something one had to go out of one's way to see.

PC adds: Does it surprise you to hear that this is a very common problem? Not down to the specificities of dust and cutlery and so on, but generally. I know a man, and a gay man at that, who says the only time his house is ever clean is when he has an urgent deadline. Displacement activity is an extremely powerful thing, especially where writing is concerned.

I do it a lot and my reasons are legion. They include:

(a) Fear that whatever I have in my head will look like pathetic nonsense once I have actually put it down on the page.

(b) Not being in the Zone (do not underestimate the importance of this and try to ignore how flaky it sounds -- it's a very real problem) and/or not being able to get into the outer Zone from which you can access the inner Zone. The thing about the Brontës, Emily and Charlotte in particular, was that they were in the inner Zone most of the time. I think this had something to do with being half Irish.

What I've learned painfully over many years is that (1) it's bloody hard to get into the Zone when you know you have to snap out of it at five past three, but (2) this is not a reasonable excuse to pick up the vacuum cleaner instead. My experience is that there are two writing modes, dream and slog, and slog is the one most writers spend at least 70% of their time in.

(c) I find writing (not blogging or emailing -- 'writing' as in either 'I might have to still be looking at this in print twenty years from now' or 'I have to figure out a way to develop this idea in exactly the right words and the logical order' or 'I am being paid for this so it has to be as good as I can make it') an intensely painful activity. I am slow, reluctant and fiddly and my words are written in the proverbial bodily fluids, mainly blood. It is much, much easier and less painful to get out the vacuum cleaner and attack the corners of the cutlery drawers with it.

Perhaps you could stick a Post-It on the vacuum cleaner: PUT ME AWAY AT ONCE.

Or you could recall the words of Australian writer Carmel Bird in her book Dear Writer: 'You have the choice of a clean house or a finished story. The choice is yours.'

They're everywhere

2007-05-31T13:07:00.000+09:30

Since I began this blog it has been repeatedly and forcibly brought to my attention that the Brontë sisters permeate modern life on an almost-daily basis. There I was the other day, reading a new crime novel by a new writer -- young Irish actress Tana French -- called In the Woods, which is incidentally an absolute cracker, the kind of book that makes you understand why the Irish are just better than the rest of us at this literature business (the Brontës were of course half-Irish) -- anyway, there I was, deep in this grim and very contemporary tale of murdered children, a story with the mist of the supernatural glimmering around its edges, when I came upon this:

'In a little bookshop off Grafton Street I found a beautiful old copy of Wuthering Heights -- thick pages browning at the edges, rich red binding stamped in gold, 'For Sara, Christmas 1922' in faded ink on the title page.

... Cassie was already at her desk. "What's this?" she demanded.

"An apology. I am so, so sorry ..."'

See what French is doing there? Not just the force of Brontë books as message and gift from one detective to another, but also the most casual and effortless spin off into a very Brontë-ish narrative moment: another time, another place, faded relics of lives lived (clearly) intensely: a bit of mystery from the past that heightens this book's own use of past mysteries as part of its plot.

And who, thinks the reader in half a heartbeat, was Sara? Who gave her the book, and what sort of message was it conveying, as a gift? What has happened to these people? French momentarily positions her readers as a lot of Lockwoods, trying to decipher the messages from the past: scratches on a windowsill, scribblings in a margin, dates carved over farmhouse doors and ghostly visitations in the middle of the night. What's going on here in one apparently trivial little scene is a transaction heavily freighted with meaning and history, a complex exchange that tells you a massive amount about these two characters and their relationship.

It'd be a great Creative Writing exercise in characterisation, especially if you were trying to establish the nature of the relationship between two of your characters. What books would they give each other? Under what circumstances? What messages would those gifts convey, and how would the transaction enrich and kick along your own story?

Sorry

2007-05-29T22:36:00.000+09:30

Since the Federal Government continues to behave like a sullen and solipsistic small boy on the question of an apology to the Aboriginal people for the way this country has failed them over the last 219 years, and since it's unlikely to change its mind between now and the end of Reconciliation Week, individual apologies while we wait are, I hope, better than nothing. So here is mine.

My own passage along the road of sorriness steers perilously between the all-encompassing Mea Culpa on the one hand and the cry, on the other, of Bunty from Seven Little Australians -- 'I never, it wasn't me, it wasn't my fault!' -- both of which I reject.

From within the pro-apology camp, I don't buy 'We're white, therefore we should feel guilty', but I'm not having 'We have merely to express our sorrow that something bad happened, it's not really an apology', either.

A note on the so-called 'black armband view of history': the meaning of Geoffrey Blainey's phrase, like that of Donald Horne's 'lucky country', has been politically appropriated and badly mangled in its transition to popular rhetoric, and, in both cases, not by accident. But black armbands, as any student of history knows, actually have nothing to do with 'guilt': they are about mourning and remembrance. Happy to wear one, on both scores.

For me at least, there are some fairly direct implications. The Narungga man in the photo a couple of posts back was probably -- nobody knows for sure -- my great-great-grandfather's son. From what I can make out, he stayed with the family because he wanted to, part of one of those loose and shifting constellations of single men that move seasonally round any farm. The patriarch in question, himself a penniless young Cornish immigrant who had worked eight years on the waterfront to qualify for a colonial land allocation, was one of the white men who took advantage of the colony's land policies to displace the Narungga people from Yorke Peninsula in South Australia.

I have benefited directly from that, in ways too numerous to count.

Last winter I stood in the foyer of the Adelaide Festival Centre looking in horror at a huge, brilliant, angry painting by a Narungga artist of dead bodies in the ocean being nibbled and chewed at by sea-creatures, with a little exposition alongside about the old stories of Aboriginal people on Yorke Peninsula being murdered and thrown into the sea, washed by the tide into rocky places where crayfish and crabs lay in wait to gobble them up and dispose of the evidence.

I don't know whether this story is true or not, but I hope to God it isn't. If it is, 'sorry' doesn't even touch the sides.

At that family level, I am sorry for the land-taking, which definitely happened; for the sexual exploitation of Aborginal women, which might have happened; for the murders that I want to believe did not happen -- or not, at least, at the hands of my family, 'not at all' being too much to hope for.

For whatever happened in that place, which for better or worse is also my place, that was exploitative, destructive or cruel; for whatever such activities my ancestors may have taken part in or done nothing to prevent; and for all the histories, all around the country, that are similar or worse: for all those things, on my own behalf and on behalf of my family and my country, I am truly and deeply sorry.

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat.

Mixed metaphor of the month

2007-05-28T13:11:00.000+09:30

A crikey.com.au reader comments today on the departure from federal politics of Jackie Kelly:

'... she’s been used as the velvet glove to disguise the iron fist of dog-whistle race-politics ...'

Your questions answered

2007-05-27T22:49:00.000+09:30

BABUSHKA ASKS: If I write something and read it soon after, I often think it's OK. After a very short while, reading over it makes me horribly embarrassed and sad. So how do you ever tell if something's finished?

Charlotte says: If you were not a creature of strong feelings, then you would not be any kind of artist at all. On the other hand, strong feelings by their nature are apt to overcome one.

Emily says: 'Embarrassed'? 'Sad'? Pffft. Never apologise, never explain.

PC adds: There are two possibilities here. One is that your later reaction is the right one, in which case the piece is either not finished or not working. If you think the latter is the case, grit your teeth, throw it away and start again or write about something else.

The other possibility is that your embarrassment and sadness aren't about the quality of what you wrote, but maybe to do with some other aspect of it -- like the experiences you're writing about, or maybe ambivalent feelings about writing at all.

I think there are three things you could try:

(1) Give it more time -- sure, look at it a day later, but then put it away and look at it again a week later.

(2) Ask yourself exactly what is making you embarrassed and sad. Particular words or sentences? The tone? Too big a gap between what you wanted to write and what you've actually written? Se if you can pin it down, and, if you can, whether something can be done about it.

(3) Give it to someone whom you trust to be a good reader and give you a straight answer, and ask him/her what s/he thinks.

Sometimes you'll write a sentence or a paragraph and you will know straight away that you have absolutely nailed whatever it is you wanted to say, and that you are never going to be able to say it better.

But the same piece of writing will mean different things to different people, or to the same person on a different day. You don't ever really know when something's 'finished', because writing's not an absolute thing, or a finite or a finishable one. Writing's like water. It's not going to keep still for you.