Work: more smart, less hard

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.

After computers: the art of second-guessing

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

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.

Bad writing, bad reading

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

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.

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 a bad bad review ...

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

Teaching writing

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

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.

Your questions answered

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.'

Introducing 'Ask the Bronte Sisters'

(Posted last week at Pavlov's Cat.)

Yet again today, as it now seems pretty much every day, I am hearing more public talk of 'education' as though it were simply a buy-able commodity, rather than what it is in fact: an abstract and infinitely complex process of self-development, where responsibility for the process rests equally on student and teacher, and where neither the acquisition of knowledge nor the ability to process it can possibly be measured in money or in any other material equivalent.

And so, in protest against this drift in general, and in particular against the allocations in the Federal Budget for lavish university funding provided the universities in question teach what the Liberal Party wants them to teach, call it 'education', and commodify in it in such a way that its content becomes 'client-driven' and thus freed from all responsibility to truth, or indeed to responsibility -- in protest, as I say, I am starting YET ANOTHER blog.

The exclusive purpose of my new blog is to provide a free-of-charge advice and education service to aspiring writers.

At 'Ask The Brontë Sisters' you can put your questions about any aspect of writing -- characterisation, grammar, manuscript preparation, how to write your Creative Writing thesis exegesis, whatever -- to Emily, Anne and Charlotte.

All three worked as schoolteachers or governesses as well as writing Timeless Classics -- no Satanic postmodernist marxist cult studs relativism for the Brontës, I can tell you -- so they have experience in this area. Their patience with students is, however, limited, as is shown by the immortal words of Charlotte in a letter to a friend, describing her reaction to being interrupted by a small pupil needing help one day while she was in a creative daydream at her teaching desk: 'Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.'

And Charlotte is a pussycat compared with Emily. Sympathetic they are not. Nonetheless, they will respond to the best of their ability.

(If they feel like it, that is. They are all very highly-strung.)

I shall be available to provide a contemporary persepective on matters that they could not be reasonably expected to be up on. For example, I've supervised and/or examined quite a few MAs and PhDs in Creative Writing, so have a bit of an advantage over them in the How to Write Your Exegesis department, for example, though it's something of which I'm not sure they would approve.

For all your Advice to Writers needs, go here.

New prize for writers: the Barbara Jefferis Award (part 1)

From Susan Wyndham in last Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald:

'... the Barbara Jefferis Award ... is launched today by the Australian Society of Authors.

Offering prizemoney of "at least $35,000", the award will be given annually from next year to "the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society. The novel may be in any genre and it is not necessary for it to be set in Australia."

Among the country's most generous book awards, it is funded by a $1 million bequest from Jefferis's husband, John Hinde, the ABC film critic who died last year. Hinde has also funded a new film script award for the Australian Writers' Guild.

Rosalind Hinde, a Sydney biologist, said her father established the Jefferis Award in his will with "the very clear and strong intention to honour my mother's writing, her feminism and her devotion to other writers".'


I'd hoped to have a long, considered post about this award up at this site before I went to bed last night, but the more I think about it, the more worms -- big fat wriggly ones -- I realise there are in this particular can. Here are a few of them:

What is an Australian author? What does 'positive' mean, and what 'empowers'? What is a level playing field, and why do we need one? How are women currently represented in Australian fiction, how were they in the past, and why is it more complicated than a simple 'for women only' literary prize? Why do people think it's their right to condemn and interfere with what other people choose to do in their wills with their own money?

So I am working on a long post trying to tease out all the different strands of our assumptions about writing and writers, about essentialism and feminism, about nationalism and whatever the other thing is, that are woven tighly up in this new award and the discussion about it. But I may, as Captain Oates remarked, be some time.

Reading notes: We Need to Talk About Kevin

The other day I bought a copy of something that everybody else read two or three years ago but that had passed me by. I hadn't realised it was a novel -- I thought it was some kind of dreary earnest American soul-searching self-help kind of thingy -- or I would have read it sooner.

I'm talking about Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Now I have been putting in marathon efforts to get up to date with the piled-up Magic-Puddingesque workload (I cut, it comes again) of other work apart from the weekly fiction reviewing, and have actually been making tiny inroads here and there -- ensuring in the meantime that I do not actually forget what my friends and family look like, run out of clean knickers, or die of botulism or bubonic plague.

But all such efforts have been blown out of the water over the last 48 hours. Because when I haven't been asleep or out, I've been reading this appalling, brilliant book.

I gather there's some amazing twist at the end. DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT TELL ME WHAT IT IS and if anybody does I will stalk you down the Interwebs for all eternity. (Has it got something to do with her very very wonky 'handwriting' in the signatures? Are the husband and the daughter, in fact, both dead?)

In the meantime, here's how to win the Orange Prize: write a passage as good as this, and then keep it up for 468 pages.

'But I have a theory about Dream Homes ... Regardless of how much money you lavish on oak baseboards, an unhistoried house is invariably cheap in another dimension. Otherwise, the trouble seems rooted in the nature of beauty itself, a surprisingly elusive quality and one you can rarely buy outright. It flees in the face of too much effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by accident. On my travels, I became a devotee of found art: a shaft of light on a dilapidated 1914 gun factory, an abadoned billboard whose layers have worn into a beguiling pentimento collage of Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, and Burma Shave, cut-rate pensions whose faded cushions perfectly match, in that unplanned way, the fluttering sun-blanched curtains.'


UPDATE, LATER THE SAME DAY

Ah.

Ooooo-kay.

Well, there's an almost Shakespearean breadth and transcendence at the very end, that looking-family-matters-in-the-eye-no-matter-what business that you get at the end of the four last plays, and quite a few of the others as well. 'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.'


Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat

New prize on the horizon (with the inevitable segue to Patrick White)

Susan Wyndham at Undercover has some advance knowledge of a new Australian literary prize to be announced at the end of this month.

If it's as lucrative as the Miles Franklin and its terms 'are likely to be inspiring to some but also controversial', then it should get a lot of press when the official announcement is made on March 31. What the 'controversial terms' part suggests to me is that the prize may favour a particular demographic. The young? The female? The gay or lesbian? The *gasps, makes sign of cross* multicultural?

If that's the case, here in the land of literary hoaxes, such a substantial offering will no doubt attract people out to make some sort of point. I know other countries have literary hoaxes too, but it seems to me that what with Ern Malley, Gwen Harwood, Helen Demidenko, Paul Radley, Wanda Koolmatrie, Wraith Picket and that's just off the top of my head, we are punching well above our weight.

I've been on a few judging panels for literary prizes over the last decade or two, and in that capacity have kept an increasingly jaded and suspicious eye out for anything that looks as though it could be a hoax. Most of these things are perpetrated by people out to either get around the terms of the prize in order to (a) win it (Paul Radley's uncle wrote the book he won the Vogel with), (b) fight skirmishes in ideological/aesthetic flame wars (Ern Malley), or (c) (closely related to (b)) make various ideological/political points (Demidenko, Koolmatrie, Harwood, Picket. Spot the real person in that list).

The 'Gotcha!' impulse behind this kind of thing has always struck me as a bit of a double-edged sword. If the motivations of the people behind the Wraith Picket/Patrick White hoax (and I still think that if they were going with anagrams then they should have called him Keith Crapwit) had been different, they could have spun that puppy 180 degrees and said 'Look: no fewer than twelve literary experts have said this guy isn't any good. Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate him. Perhaps his work was mediocre all along.'

Not that I would ever claim such a thing myself, believing as I do that literary value is not absolute, and belonging as I do to the generation for whom Patrick White's work was a major formative experience, for whom his literary gifts are self-evident, and for whom his ideological freight was and is a great deal less simple and more radical than was claimed in Simon During's correct-line little book. But it's something that they could, if they'd been on the other side of the culture wars, have very easily done.

As it is, the conservative hoaxers seem to have shot themselves in the foot. What they wanted was to cause further damage to all those naughty lefties who are trying to destroy "our" heritage by not teaching Australian literature in "our" universities. (Which is, of course, factually quite wrong, as with the claims from other conservative culture warriors that "the feminists" have been silent on the subject of repellent fundamentalist-Islamic practices and beliefs regarding women. When in doubt, make stuff up.)

What they have created instead, quite unintentionally I'm sure, is a new upsurge of interest in White himself: there's now a blog devoted specifically to an online Patrick White reading group, an upcoming conference devoted specifically to his work and reputation, and an all-day event at the National Library, where Friday March 30th will be Patrick White Day.

But creating this new wave of interest in a writer who was an acknowledged homosexual and whose work introduced the country's fiction readers to new ways of thinking about Aborginal Australia, about class relations, about multicultural issues long before that was what they were called, and about autonomous, unforgettable female characters at the centre of a story (Theodora Goodman, Laura Trevelyan, Elizabeth Hunter, Ellen Roxburgh ... the list goes on) may not have been quite what the conservative elements had in mind when they set out to humiliate the contemporary literary left and score points in the culture wars.


Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat.

Let's just try that again

Oh dear, look at this poor shockingly neglected blog.

For some reason, posting about things literary on a separate blog got much harder after the Google/Blogger upgrade made it impossible to keep this blog completely separate from Pavlov's Cat. That and the flat-strap workload since Boxing Day have kept me away from here, but I'm going to have one more go at keeping this as a separate reading/writing blog, rather than merging it with PC completely.

I wouldn't want the people who are only here because they're interested in literature to have to wade through all the other stuff at PC (photos of cats peeking up out of shopping bags or sound asleep on piano stools in front of the opening movement of the Moonlight Sonata, long raves about movies, bits of song lyrics, short raves about the lies of politicians, recipes for gingerbread, polemic, garden photos, cultural analysis, smart-arsed remarks about Ralph Fiennes, Peter Garrett, Dolce e Gabbana and so on, tales of What I Did on My Holidays, hymns of praise to the ripeness of the tomatoes, and various other such grab-baggy threads and patches as daily life is made of) just to get to the bits about books and writing. So I will try to write here regularly at least once a week.

Let us begin, then, with the ongoing task for which I've been trying to get into a method and a rhythm (though perhaps not the rhythm method -- productivity is the goal here) of reading four novels a week to write short reviews of them for the Sydney Morning Herald. I've been doing this job since Boxing Day and it is, as I was warned by my editor, gruelling -- especially as it would be suicidal to give up any of my other gigs, even if I wanted to -- but it is also quite exhilarating.

There's the excitement of finding unfamiliar writers whose work I really like, the discipline of reading the occasional book I hate and then writing a fair review of it in 180 words, the sanity-enhancing requirement of the routine necessary to meet a regular deadline, and the pleasure of being able to pass on the books when I finish them to people I know will really appreciate them.

(I'm trying to remember when it was that I stopped collecting and hoarding books and began to do desperate, frequent culls in order not to get pushed out of my own house by the encroaching piles. Probably about 1990.)

But the best thing about this gig is the astonishing breadth of subject matter and material in the books that arrive at my door. In only two months of doing this job I've read books set in France, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, Botswana, Nepal and Wales; in Beijing, New York, Canberra, Oslo, London and Vienna; in 19th-century Louisiana, 1940s East Germany, the Arctic in the 17th century, and in various fantasy worlds both futuristic and medieval-derived.

I've read novels translated from the Norwegian, the Spanish, the Danish and the Dutch. I've read crime fiction, romance, fantasy, chick-lit, high-lit, low-lit, lit lite, and lit extremely heavy. I thought I knew a fair bit about fiction, but it turns out I only knew a fair bit about the fiction I knew a fair bit about.

People who don't "get" fiction no doubt think that it teaches you nothing. But I know a hell of a lot more than I did eight weeks ago about Cuban refugees to New Jersey in the 1960s; about the state of Christiana (old name for Oslo) in the late 19th century and the fact that the Missing Link between Crime and Punishment and The Trial is Knut Hamsun's Hunger; about the forced evacuation -- Die Flucht, 'the Flight' -- by the Russian Army of twelve million East Germans in 1945; about the Sri Lankan civil war and the methods and motives of the Tamil Tigers; about class tensions in the town of Syracuse in upstate New York; about octopusesque corruption in contemporary Beijing ...

You get the picture.

During my life as an academic, fiction was what I mostly taught and a lot of it was 19th-century fiction at that, so reading two, sometimes three novels a week, some of which were six or seven hundred pages long, was the norm -- and as all academics know, reading or re-reading the things you have to teach is the most pleasant part of the work and is merely the tip of the iceberg.

So by comparison, this job is heaven. Occasionally when I'm whingeing about my Wednesday deadline, my best mate reminds me that what I do for a living is read stories, at home, and, more often than not, lying down on the sofa.

It's a hard life, but somebody's got to do it.

On the Difficulty of Teaching Creative Writing

Cross-posted at Pavlov's Cat


I've been teaching creative writing on and off for 25 years and have written and spoken many, many words on the subject. But this -- from a short story called 'WritOr' in a book called Touchy Subjects by Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue, of whom I had not previously heard but of whom I most certainly expect to hear more in the future -- says it better than anything I've ever said myself, or anything I've ever read or heard. It doesn't quite cover all the bases -- but it covers most of them.


The writer considered whether to tell BJ that to print five hundred copies of his so-called coming-of-age novel was a criminal waste of trees as well as his ex-girlfriend's money. That it would never get reviewed, stocked, or bought. Instead he dragged the dog-eared manuscript towards him and opened it at random. "This sentence doesn't have a verb."

The gilt shades looked back at him blankly.

"If you don't know what a verb is, BJ, why the fuck do you imagine you can write a novel?"

Tears skidded down BJ's face. The young man tried to speak; his Adam's apple jerked. He bent over as if he'd been stabbed. There were salt drops on the writer's desk, on the manuscript.

"I'm sorry," the writer said, breathless, "I'm so sorry --"

But BJ didn't seem to hear him.