reeling and writhing

in other news, the laziest blogger on the planet posts even more links

Alex Ross calls this 'a magnificent and generous use of digital technology'. And it is. And I'm going to tell my brother to get broadband so he can spend more time there.

At BoingBoing back in July (yes, I've been saving this one up), Cory Doctorow is wild for the wikified library at the Internet Archive:

I think this project (which right now seems to point to almost half a million books) is very cool -- it's going to be a major addition to the world's open cultural infrastructure. I have a hunch that it's going to be the primary way many if not most people access books, and I see it becoming an always-open window on the desk of every librarian.

(Please note that the BoingBoing link is to the demo version only, which will give you the full story on how this project has been built from the ground up. You can also follow this link instead to the current Open Library, which really deserves a post all on its own.)

Wandering further down the page at TechMeme, this report from TechCrunch40
led me to "U"vatars. They look a bit dull to me - I thought avatars were supposed to be imaginative, not just dressup dolls. (Also thought I'd seen a few of these around before). Check them out in beta at befunky.com.

And as you can see I have been spending far too much time reading feeds and collecting links instead of reading and writing my own stuff. Such is life. I do have plans for some longer pieces, but I have to reconcile myself to writing them in pieces first - and then putting the pieces together. I also have plans to read over 100 articles I've saved on del.icio.us - so if any of those are any good, you can't count on me giving up on linkdrops anytime soon. There used to be a "sorry" category here somewhere...

One original piece of reporting I do have to make, however, which is published here as I left it too late to send a letter to the Editor, is that Peter Craven claims in the September Australian Book Review ("No Jude Law, No Money") that Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is out of print.

Not so - during this month I did two checks on Global Books In Print, the industry database available through most public libraries in Victoria, and found that only the 2006 Australian Scholarly Publishing edition of this trilogy (published here as one volume)* is unavailable at present, as of yesterday to be exact. The 1998 Penguin edition, however, is alive, kicking and ready to be ordered.

* And the reasonable explanation for ASP's slowness is to be revealed in editor Clive Probyn's letter to ABR, which Rosemary Sorensen has read and reports on in today's Australian, and which I won't see till it hits my mailbox sometime next week. The scholarly edition is in three volumes, and Vol. 3 will be ready next month, when all three will be released. (Doesn't explain why the entry in Bowker's shows 2006 as a publication date, but I'm sure there's a reason for that too.)

all together now

Those lucky youngsters at the National Young Writers Festival have a great panel happening on collaborative writing, here.
What a timely idea - the sites mentioned here are probably worth a gander.
NYWF is on in Newcastle this weekend ( see here for venues, more info.)

A US initiative launched online brings booklovers, shops and writers closer and closer together. Link via the Speakeasy blog, at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online.

Hey, did you know that the used and antiquarian bookselling site ABE Books has a bookclub? with a good moniker too. Very much a one stop shop - join the club, find a bookstore that can sell you the book secondhand, get reading and talking.

continental shift

There's an excellent piece (aren't they always?) by Louis Menand in the New Yorker, on Jack Kerouac and the influence of On The Road. This excerpt is taken from near the end of the article, which talks at length about the history and influence of Kerouac's seminal novel, his place in the Beat movement, his sensitivity and shyness and the 'risky, exposed' nature of his work:

'Years ago, I taught in a Ph.D. program at the City University. One semester, Allen Ginsberg, who was affiliated with one of the CUNY colleges, offered a graduate seminar. He was nearly seventy, small, neatly dressed in jacket and tie and gray flannel pants, totally adorable. He once sweetly sidled up to me and said, “I heard that you are teaching Gertrude Stein.” Then, in a lower voice, “I have some tapes of Gertrude Stein reading”—as one might say, “I have some photos of Greta Garbo in the nude.” I said to the graduate students that I thought it must be amazing to take a seminar with Ginsberg, to be around someone who had been around so much. “Nah,” they said. “He just keeps saying that Kerouac is the most important American writer.” Possibly, they didn’t think that knowing a great deal about Kerouac was going to give them much of a professional edge.

Possibly, they were right. “Lolita” is in the canon; “On the Road” is somewhat sub-canonical—also a tour de force, like Nabokov’s book, but considered more a literary phenomenon than a work of literature. On the other hand, it has had an equivalent influence. Nabokov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent. He made America a subject for literary fiction; he de-Europeanized the novel for American writers. Kerouac’s influence is all over Thomas Pynchon’s books: the protagonist in Pynchon’s first novel, “V.,” clearly alludes to Sal Paradise—his name is Benny Profane. Don DeLillo’s first novel, “Americana,” is Kerouac in spirit if not in style.'

salt from the earth

There is a wonderful post over at Chris Boyd's blog celebrating the life and deploring the untimely loss of Tanja Liedtke.

Salt Magazine is now relaunched online as a free journal! Wow. The first issue is truly beautiful - poems from a galaxy of stars.

From Anne, Woolf scholar, at Fernham, a spin-off that looks quite good, all things considered. (Being wise, of course, she has.)

Beware of jealousy, the greeneyed monster - when you look at this cleversocks. He has an online game that's been played by over a million people. Talk of convergence. Now Nation States is being cited in cross-media journals.

in case of vanishing journals

Here's another report at Critical Mass, the National Book critics Circle weblog, this time by Jane Ciabattari, about literary magazines going electronic in large libraries.(An earlier post giving some essential background on what's been going down in academic libraries with regard to this appeared about a month ago, from K.G. Schneider of Free Range Librarian fame.)

A  September 13 NBCC panel, "Literary Magazines Go Electronic: Now Where's the Print Edition in the Library," cosponsored by Library Journal is the subject of Ciabattari's report. Susan Thomas, a librarian on the panel, suggested that the dissolution of print journals into electronic databases can be halted by lobbying librarians and academic staff to ensure a supply of literary journals on the shelves for browsing. One panel member, Kevin Prufer, the editor of Pleiades, was inspired to set the evening up after he went to the University of Central Missouri library to catch up on poetry reviews and found that several important journals had vanished from the shelves.

Literary journals are not always easy to absorb as screen based artifacts: it can be done if needed, but it's more pleasurable to handle the magazine in paper if that's how it was designed to be handled. (Some of course are online productions, and their design is a different concern altogether.) 

Susan Thomas notes in this post, "Reading a literary magazine is such a relief after hours at the computer screen," she said. "My job is to encourage young people to become lifelong learners. They lose interest in reading on the computer. If I can put an exciting literary magazine in their hands, it can be important."

hey, enough already

HAHAHA!!
That didn't take very long. Or hurt much. Did it.

september I remember

World's longest INSTALLED novel. (Link via Ben Dooley at The Millions.)

I saw Lee Miller's photos at the Monash Gallery of Art recently. Among several that were astounding, the shot of Miller in Hitler's bath, with the dust of Dachau rubbed firmly into the bathmat, was the one I returned to more than twice. Ali Smith discusses Lee Miller's photography and writing in The Guardian this week.

Speaking of light and shade - Grand Text Auto comes recommended by Christy Dena of Cross Media Entertainment, and I am really enjoying this addition to my RSS reader, especially when catching up on things like this.

The State Library of Victoria gets a mention in here, just after a shot of the Sorbonne's library.
Way to go. And yes, the crowd at Curious Expeditions do credit Candida Höfer's magnificent tome for some of these pictures (which is where I've seen them before.) As well as offering a link to a Flickr account. (Link from the ALIA New graduates mailing list.)

I'd like to see Nabs try this.

In the last of the Melbourne Writers' Festival news, David Prater covers his session with John Tranter, and the Speakeasy at AWM Online is going to be a regular reporting spot for writers' festivals down the coast -they did Byron a few weeks back, and now they're doing Brisbane. So do watch that space.

keeping that drowsy emperor awake

Three things I really enjoyed reading over the past couple of months, and have only noted here now:

Delia Falconer's beautiful essay in the August ALR on the spaces we cannot afford to lose within our classics, here.

Richard Neville's terrifying piece in the September ALR on the future. I don't know how I managed to read anything else after this. It was like being dipped in a pool of fire; reading outside on a beautiful spring morning, I looked around at the trees and wondered why I was still there when I'd finished it. Dick's in fine form, building from a quiet start to a relentless elegy for the planet that he dares to top off (as only he can) with a savagely ironic question. That takes some nerve.

The last was from Text Publishing's founder, Michael Heyward, was in last Saturday's Age and is on Australian writing and publishing. Unfairly characterised by the editor as a 'lament', it is more correctly read as an unerring and surprisingly positive analysis of the state of Oz publishing with some very useful recommendations for the future (of publishing, that is) which I seriously hope the Government adopts:

The next step is to invest in our editors. A program with a five-year life to help publishers hire and train a dozen editors would cost less than $1 million a year. It would be a great investment.

It would soon enough allow 100 or more books to be published each year that either aren't published now or are brought to market too soon. Given that each year a maximum of about 50 novels enter the Miles Franklin it is easy to see the potential.

If those 100 books sell 5000 copies each at about $22, each will generate $10,000 in GST. Taxpayers will not only get to live in a cleverer country but they will get their money back.

And if you want to make more money overseas you need to build your publishing capacity.You can't sell international rights in books that don't exist or aren't good enough.

Back in 1990 it wouldn't have made sense to propose a scheme like this. We have spent a couple of decades assembling a publishing infrastructure and it's time to finish the job. The writers are waiting for us.

after muggles, stiggles?

This may be the next big thing.

Melbourne Writers' Festival 2007 - a little blog music

I enjoyed lurking at MWF this time around - highlights included David Prater's launch and Paul Hardacre's interview with Tom Shapcott, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida's terrific session with Louise Swinn, who asked some excellent questions, Victoria Glendinning talking to Sophie Cunningham about Leonard Woolf, the new media presentations at ACMI from the Story of the Future and LAMP labs, and Alexis Wright and Tony Birch discussing the genesis and publication of her prize-winning, seminal work Carpentaria. I also caught Les Murray, at a very convivial session where all listeners were content to hear him read poem after poem, only briefly stopping for a few questions before they asked him to 'read some more - read the Weeping Man'. (You can hear it there, too.) I was going to blog Eggers and Vida, but Ariel has done a much better job, and you can catch that meaty slice of the conference here.

I wasn't the only punter surprised at the size of the venue allocated to Wright's session - others remarked that a bigger crowd could easily have been accommodated elsewhere. Only 100 odd people can fit into the Tower theatre. This should have been a free session, in the Beckett. At least there was a good long signing session afterwards, as those 100 people obviously had plenty to say to this passionate and remarkable writer, storyteller and advocate.

Carpentaria will be released in the UK next year. This book is not just on the crest of the world literature wave, it is connecting the very lifeblood of our country to it, adding an ostinato to that movement that is sublime and compelling. It will be translated into many languages and read and studied for a very long time. So don't miss out. You have been told.

This festival largely had a good strong vibe, although as Lisa Dempster from Locus Press has pointed out in her constructive and comprehensive list of suggestions here, the prices still put it out of the reach of younger people and students. I get a bit sick of seeing hordes of middle-class couples, walking in a ring, myself - I don't have anything against them, it's great that people are coming with partners and friends of course, but it would be nice to see people from further afield than Camberwell occasionally.

Ian Syson has put it nicely in another context in a review in Saturday's Age, quoting a fictional character from Mont Albert saying that 'Melbourne is the city whose east I know better than its north or west'. Syson adds in a gritted dentural parenthesis that ' if there's a better 14 word critique of the Australian publishing industry than the one able to be inferred here, I am yet to read it.'

That's only going to change for Victoria's festival when the Brumby government comes good with the $250,000 needed to bring MWF's funding up to the level of the Sydney outing, and then Rosemary Cameron can continue the good job she has started of ramping up the diversity of her programming. All those devirginated middle class ladies should have enjoyed themselves at Second Life, when they were over the strangeness - I am looking forward to checking with Jeff Sparrow how that session went, having felt a bit of biblio-tech anxiety over the fact that it was held in a tent.

There's other MWF reports at graphic novelist Eddie Campbell's blog as well, including this salutary note on signing books.

Carpentaria a shoo-in for Vance Palmer prize

I was sitting in the Latrobe Reading Room yesterday and got the vibe that prizes were in the offing when photographers snapped Alexis Wright and two other writers sitting on the desks in the row in front of me.
So if she gets in the paper with two other writers on a row of desks, I'm (hopefully invisibly)BEHIND THEM.
Decided to be an eminently sensible blogger and wait till today to write about it, though.
(Where's our picture, anyway?)
I know Perry will cover this too, but I thought this was a really good opportunity (a) to show I am not a pooper-blogscooper (b) complain about the photo, which of course could always turn up tomorrow...

Anyhow, here's the judges' report for the Vance Palmer Prize (also known as the Victorian Premier's Prize, collectively) for fiction: other prizewinners can be found here:

Alexis Wright, in Carpentaria, has created an epic centred on the town of Desperance, in the vast Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. Where lives are shaped and measured by the annual destructive cyclonic floods and the daily cleansing tides. At the novel’s heart is Norm Phantom, patriarch of his family and leader of the Pricklebush people.

Carpentaria demonstrates that Wright is an inventive writer of great reach. Indeed, it is almost audacious in its scope and ambition. In her marrying of the oral tradition with the written word Wright takes a bold stylistic risk, but it has paid off with a complicated net of stories coming vibrantly alive on the page. Wright has created a strong, confident and vivid voice with a healthy dose of sly humour.