reeling and writhing

what a picture

Emdashes reports regarding a new blog at the New Yorker that has a rather apt provenance: as one of its authors says, "We like to think of the book bench as a state of mind, too: a place for considering literary matters great and small—and for occasionally baring our teeth." I'm subscribing.

Over at Libraries Interact Kathryn Greenhill (of Librarians Matter) announces a prize for the booklover or librarian whom the Gale publishing company decides can best justify their love for books in song and video.

And this is just here because it's a damn good read, being something of a classic post from a great Australian blogger. Note the blog saving the accommodation crisis, slap bang in the middle. Rock and roll will satisfy my soooo-oul.

prized above others

The shortlist for the ASL Gold Medal has been announced:

    * The Lost Dog (Michelle de Kretser, Allen & Unwin)
    * Not Finding Wittgenstein (J S Harry, Giramondo)
    * Feather Man (Rhyll McMaster, Brandl & Schlesinger)
    * Typewriter Music (David Malouf, UQP)
    * Landscape of Farewell (Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin)
(From Bookseller and Publisher Magazine).

The winner of the award, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year and is the oldest literary prize in Australia, will be announced at the 2008 Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference in Wollongong in early July.

e-read or e-don't read

I've been wandering around Guy Kawasaki's emerging book blogs section on Alltop.com, and I found this fairly comprehensive discussion going on around e-readers.
Sometimes an opinionated blogger (writer?) can get a lot more out of people than you realise.

David Prater's latest project, which received funding in late '07, will be posted here as time goes by. (From the Netherlands, where he now resides and from whence I believe he still edits Cordite Poetry Mag). Humorous.

Regarding the objections of some to Helen Garner's use of real people and places....look no further than this link, via Maud Newton's blog.

Ain't they pretty. Link via ReadySteadyBlog. (These are attractive too.)

Finally - I forgot to go to Clunes. And I'm a bit miffed, as it looked pretty good, and others have reported likewise. So I hope the BookGrocer posts another instalment (link via the Reasons You Will Hate Me person, she of Tuesday BookClub fame.)

But if I had gone, I probably would have missed a most convivial pub drinks (winding into dinner for some) with El (of The View from Elsewhere), Laura, David T. of Barista fame and Sophie Cunningham, whose first Meanjin comes out in June.
So I count myself lucky this time around, and look forward to Clunes '09.

 

faber finds - a new audience for out-of-print books?

In breaking news over at The Guardian, Faber launches an exciting print on demand project tomorrow. (There will be is more coverage in the Guardian Review.) This article provides a brief summary of the emerging market in POD and Amazon's attempts to get a slice of it in the US, among other things.

say a prayer for the dying

Peter Rose's ABR review of Helen Garner's first novel for fifteen years, The Spare Room, is online and (as a less refined person might say) SMMMMOKING.

This is probably the toughest review Garner's story about caring for a dying friend has had so far, opening as it does with the tart observation that this novella could easily have been written as nonfiction.

Hel’s pride is easily stung. As long as she has practical tasks – beds to strip and change, ‘straightforward tasks of love and order’ – she is composed, but soon she is worn out, anxious, resentful. There is no acknowledgment of her literary obligations or of her solitary nature. Hel seems most alive when she is on her own. The best writing in the book depicts sentience in solitude. A violent thrill runs down her arms and ‘seethes’ in her fingertips. Night noises lull her: ‘Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing: to groom itself.’

Hel is almost professionally observant. Like Isabel Archer, she is ‘constantly staring and wondering’. Nothing escapes her: the neurosurgeon’s fat, penile Mont Blanc pen; the sort of men who can crack their spine and ‘make it crackle all the way down’...

When Nicola’s niece and her boyfriend pay a visit, the young woman is appalled by Nicola’s presumptuousness and her lengthy stay. Hel wants to sob with gratitude: ‘They were young, they were sane, and they were in my corner.’ While Nicola sleeps, the three of them laugh at her demands and swap stories about the inconvenience of it all. Not all readers – not all carers – will relish this Hobbesian pugilism.'

These are tough words for an uncompromising book which I am yet to read (doing that tidy thing that some of us do of getting my review reading out of the way first and saving TSR for 'afters'). Intriguingly, Rose seems to be looking for some respite himself from Garner's somewhat relentless evocation of anger as the enervating emotion it can so easily become, noting that this does not dissipate or evolve towards the novel's end.

Which makes for a powerful review from one of our best critical readers, and increases the pull of the unread book even more at my end.

(And yes, I'm also leaving it on the kids' shopping list for you-know-what day. Why do the bookshops parade all those pastel coloured books around for the day of buying big for female progenitors? Sussann's has BLACK japonaise-patterned flannel pyjamas this year. Get with the program, folks, get The Lost Dog out there for starters.)

Finally I must congratulate ABR for having such a sterling piece of criticism online for us linking folk. Luminous and numerous gold stars for you.

emerging to write around Melbourne this May

I was really only going to write three posts today. And then I remembered this pic of Adam Phillips' writing room, and these terrific pieces by all the bright movers and makers involved in pulling together that annual write-fest that is so important to Melbourne's up and coming literati - The Emerging Writers' Festival. I really enjoyed reading these chunks of 'writing about writing' - like a nicely risen batch of scones, they are. Make a cuppa and enjoy. (And don't forget to check out the program.)

On next weekend, so be there.

MMUVE IT

A press release from the Australia Council has landed in my mailbox regarding their latest venture into virtual arts, MMUVE it!
Application information can be found here.

From the media release:

The Australia Council for the Arts today announced its latest virtual world initiative – MMUVE it! – offering up to $30,000 for a collaborative arts project in any massive multi-user virtual environment (MMUVE).

Following its groundbreaking Second Life artist residency, MMUVE IT! will see the Australia Council cast its virtual world net wider, offering a team of up to three artists the opportunity to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork engaging the human body in a MMUVE of their choice.

With more than 73 million participants in  MMUVEs such as EverQuest, Second Life and World of Warcraft, and the recent introduction of motion-sensitive controllers such as the Nintendo Wiimote, there is great scope to develop innovative artworks in a highly networked environment that incorporates body movement and its relationship to real and virtual environments.

Australia Council inter-arts office director Andrew Donovan comments that:

‘Creative professionals worldwide are using these platforms to create cutting edge artworks; MMUVE IT! offers Australian artists a timely and valuable opportunity to explore and build the sophistication of art and physical movement in virtual worlds.’

writing Australian (with a Virago segue)

I loved Antonia White's Frost in May when I first read it about fifteen years ago, but I did not know it was the reason for the start of the Virago imprint. Carmen Callil recalls the early days in this story from The Guardian.

Oh WOW.
From 2008, articles for inclusion in the latest Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) will be available online as they are finalised, for study and comment. 
Web 2.0 hits the study of Australian lit. And jolly good too. (Members of ASAL, of course, continue to receive the journal twice a year in print form.) To sample what's currently available online (volume 7, 2007), see here.
ASAL has a conference coming up in June-July, its thirtieth, with a theme to suit - Australian literature in a global world. The final program will be available soon.

Brian Castro, author of The Garden Book, Shanghai Dancing and other works, is moving from the University of Melbourne to teach writing at the University of Adelaide, replacing Nicholas Jose, who will be based at the University of Western Sydney before taking up a chair at Harvard in 2009.

In this report, from the Higher Ed section of The Australian, Bernard Lane reports that as chair of the creative writing program, Castro will seek to introduce regional fellowships, to raise the level of debate over Australian literature, and to hopefully produce a school akin to the renowned East Anglia program in England. He will be joined at Adelaide by award-winning Sydney poet Jill Jones.

Scheherazade in Sydney

This project came to its culmination in a symposium at the Performance Space in Sydney recently, and was the subject of a review on Arts Hub by Talya Rubin:

'The impetus for the work came out of the sudden death of Barbara Campbell’s husband. The opening screen of her website reads: “In a faraway land a gentle man dies. His bride is bereft. She travels across continents looking for a reason to keep living. Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey. She does so for 1001 nights.” As a way of coping with grief, Campbell undertook a period of enforced public mourning and used as her tools the daily paper, focusing on stories about the conflict in the Middle East.'

Rubin's review is available to Arts Hub subscribers here. Campbell is a member of the  Electronic Literature Organisation, and the text archive of the stories, which are otherwise only available at the time of performance online, is here. At GrandTextAuto she was taken to task for her rather severe approach to presentation, but nonetheless the frame concept and performance aspect of the project, as well as its duration over nearly three years, is remarkable.

surviving the wallpaper

The editor of a new collection of notes on Beckett's early lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, Brigitte Le Juez, introduces his youthful approach to Balzac and Flaubert to the 21st century for the Guardian.

HarperCollins is trying to change the publishing model for novels. Good luck with that - I agree with Rosemary Sorensen of The Australian's weekend Review that the model they are considering does sound quite mysterious. This article also mentions that the Weidenfeld & Nicolson imprint of Orion Books has written off advances to some writers rather than incur the full costs of producing their books, in an effort to save money when the fiction list was slashed by half:

One agent who has had clients affected by the Weidenfeld & Nicolson cuts told the Bookseller magazine: "My conservative estimate is that they are writing off contracts in the multiples of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Partly, I suspect it is because books were bought and now they do not have the editors in house to champion them."

Is he hip to the now or what? Stephen Fry has sent us a podgram called Wallpaper, on Oscar Wilde's thoughts on American violence and you-know-what. Fry is all for Web 2.0 neologisms - he has already invented the 'blessay', which I take to mean an essay from the Guardian that he has republished on his blog.

Do take the time to visit Nicki Greenberg, illustrator of a stunning graphic novel version of The Great Gatsby, and see how her illustrated Hamlet is coming along.

A private equity firm in New York called Quadrangle Capital has announced that newspapers need to work out how to connect with younger readers if they are to survive.

And finally, the Guggenheim fellowships for this year include a clutch of interesting literary projects, according to The Complete Review. They also report that the April issue of Poetry Magazine has translation as its theme, and is worth a look.