reeling and writhing

it's all good news

Simon Sellars, as a travel writer, can see the utility of Houllebecq's Platform, over at the revamped Sleepy Brain.  Seems they forgot to let me know that the new site was up, but it's great to see you back, guys. Sibling site Ballardian, of course, has been pushing on steadily during the hiatus for the mothership.

Someone who was speedy in her alarums, however, is Jo Case of Australian Book Review, who has emailed to let me know they have changed their blog address and format - comments are ON.  Even nicer, she's noted my remarks in the previous post and Ivor Indyk's essay will be featured online in November as part of a Web Archive section on the ABR website - I'll revisit my post accordingly at that time, because there's more goodness in that particular egg.

In the meantime, on the ABR website this month in their new ABR Critics section (link on the main page), there's a profile of esteemed academic, critic, former ABR editor and Oz litblogger Kerryn Goldsworthy, one of our most seasoned campaigners in the cause of Australian writing - and easily one of the most generous in her online incarnation. Here are just some of her remarks on reviewing (there are others in the comments to an earlier post on this site, which show you the accomplished teacher behind all this easily worn erudition):

Thoughtful and simultaneous engagement with content and context is one of my main criteria for a good review: the other is a structured argument.

I like a review that works in two ways at once, bouncing back and forth between the text and its various contexts, and at the same time working its way forward in a shapely fashion towards some general conclusion about the book.

I don't much like rough play or over-the-top cattiness and spattiness: if one must put the boot in, one should attempt to do so with quiet elegance.

Read her elegant and shapely review of Andrew McGahan's new novel in the October issue of ABR, and see practice made perfect, people.

talking about word of mouth

Death of the author or birth of the reader? You choose.

Blogging with a disclaimer here - (never thought I would see that day!) as I have been published in The Australian's new lit supplement recently. But otherwise....
Barely do I hear via Mark Sarvas of TEV that the Times Literary Supplement is inviting readers to comment on reviews published therein (indeed!) when I find that the Australian Literary Review is doing the same for some selected articles.  As they are published from the same global behemoth/stable, this is no surprise really - more of a well kept secret, which I had to google to find out.

Nearly ten years ago, Ivor Indyk (who recently gave a very decent impersonation of Imre Salusinzsky at the Melbourne Writers' Festival) wrote an incisive National Library essay, 'Literary Authority,'  which you canNOT  find here at Australian Book Review - you have to find a library with a paper copy, or go to the State Library. Tedious and annoying, as it is all about The Market, The Reader, The Writer and Their Lovers, and deserves a wider audience in these times.

I'm going to use it in an upcoming article on book blogs because it discusses, among other things, his perception of the growing exclusion of the reader from the 'commonwealth of letters' late last century (not so very long ago).

Professor Indyk publishes remarkable fiction, non-fiction and poetry by Australians at Giramondo Publishing, and clearly understood the forces that were shaping publishing when he started up his publishing career  in the mid-90s alongside the one he already had, teaching Australian literature. Here's a snippet - talk of hiding our brightest lights under a bushel (of paper and miniscule copying payments, in this case)....

'We are at the end of that period which was in the first flush of its power in the early eighteenth century, when the dissemination of the printed word, the growth of a concentrated reading public, and a burgeoning middle class all conspired to turn the writer into a particularly compelling social figure. Well, perhaps not so far from the beginning as we may like to think. The dissemination of Australian books in Australia has been occurring on a scale we haven't seen before; and the delights of the bourgeois 'lifestyle' exert an ever-increasing allure. Perhaps, in Australia, because of our unique historical circumstances, it is possible to be at the end of a period, and at its beginning, at the same time.'