Stage and screen

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.

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

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.

Sydney, and other stuff

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

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

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.