Barbara Hanrahan tribute

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.)

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

 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.

Book progress FAIL

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.

Shame: book (lack of) progress

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

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 ...

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

Writers' festival question time: thoughts from the chair

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.

The Kiss

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

In which ThirdCat's book is launched

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