reeling and writhing

a pretty mixed bag

You know where they live - now put them on your bookshelf.
Congratulations to Australian blogger Peacay on his magnificent collection of digital images, all published with permission for that browsing we like to do outside without batteries.

Here's an exhibition worth checking out, and the quality has been vouched for by Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb.

An Australian Gothic collection will be published by Equilibrium Books in December. Link via HorrorScope.

It looks like a lot of little French Potter fans have been waiting for a while. I like the heading on this article. And I liked the pics here too.
The Guardian has been trainspotting in Paris, too. (Just in case you were wondering which nation reads more books on the train.)

Cyberjournalist.net now lists nearly 250 blogs from news sites. (Link via ReadWriteWeb, where Josh Catone also notes the release of the "Mobile Journalism Toolkit" by Nokia and Reuters.)

And finally, from the Global By Design blog, this link to an article in the Online Journalism Review on Africa's levels of Internet participation.

ALL UR INTERNETZ WILL BELONG TO US

But who would have thought that social network would have had so much blood in it? 15 billion?? Is Facebook just a big.... blood orange, waiting for an exceptionally large set of choppers?

Analysts said Microsoft paid a steep price on a bet that the three-year-old company would be able to transform itself into a hub for all sorts of Web activity.

"The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users' operating system on the Internet -- everyone logs into Facebook every day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future applications that will be developed for it," said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran.

Facebook, a social network that lets friends share information, allows outside developers to create games and other applications for its site.

The popularity and depth of knowledge Facebook has about its users makes it valuable to companies like Microsoft and Google which want to sell advertising targeted to individual preferences. (Reuters)

in which the seasoned blogger is content to fail picture posting class

There was going to be a linkless post here about The Abbey, which started on the ABC last Sunday.

I did a draft which did not please me on a second reading a day later. So today marks a foray into posting pictures, not something I've done much on this blog.

Two things prompt this: my admiration of the efforts of others (who actually take pictures worth blogging) and my daughter's Danish Deluxe chair and rather extraordinary opshop cushion, my snap of which came up better than could be expected.

The occasion? The acquisition of a larger bookcase and plenty of shifting and dusting last week. And the discovery that the viewing window on the camera is not broken, it had simply been turned off. Doh.

Fun times. A few tingles in the forearms at the end of the day, though. And I am ashamed to show the double stacked books on the old bookshelf on the other side of the computer, though the CD stack just out of the picture there is stupendously well balanced.

Suffice it to say that once the big 'un was filled and a bit of weeding done, the double stacks were no more. Yep, a modest collection, but bigger than some in these parts. What we lack in quantity we make up for in quality, though - speaking of which, if anyone is after a copy of Sir Ian Botham's 1995 biography, it's looking for a home.

Funny how friends accidentally fall together when you're lumping them from one room to t'other prior to the final shelving dance  (the only other travel books I have are by Bruce Chatwin).

This chair was a begrudging addition to our family room, as it's not a big house, and the colour scheme is egregious enough without those seventies shades clogging up the palette (basically mid-90s pale green, cream and grey, with badly scarred mountain ash floors and a few toffee and rust bits and pieces.) There's a story behind the brown one, which my daughter carried up the hill to our house when her father refused to take it from the hard rubbish collection - she has a GESOH to realise it is funny that he now sits in it all the time.

Nice kid, great collector. She helped me buy the bookcase, and picked up a bakelite phone for a bit of a bargain price at the same time. She is aggrieved that her mates think she sounds tinny on it, however.

In other news from the 'hood, I walked down the hill to snap this slice of urban history this morning.

Being a very ordinary photographer, I've neglected to provide sufficient foregrounding - this block is about 80 - 100 ft deep, and until three or four days ago had a post-war home on it of some fibrous substance, which was of some concern to me as it's about the third home in the street recently to be barricaded off with metal fencing, and one of them had collapsed stumps and had sunk in the middle. (Dear little weatherboard it was, too. Perfect writer's house, with a magnificent garden. That block is still bare.) Needless to say, I wasn't worried for long. But I was delighted to see the date palm at the back of the block and stopped to speculate with the bulldozer's driver on its age (maybe 70 years old, we decided) and provenance. He was a useful source of information, telling me first that the palm will be moved to the front of the block, and also that there were brick foundations under the removed house, suggesting that an older home had been there and maybe had burned down, with a new home being built over the top post-war.

As the nearest orchardists lived behind my place, and the oldest house in the area is a couple of streets away from me (1870s cottage), the date palm was interesting. They sometimes grew near older homes because people were eating fresh dates and threw the pips out the window - that's the claim made up at Mont Delancey in Wandin, anyway, which sports several splendid specimens.

Enough alliteration. Keep your eyes out for pips, you never know where they'll end up.

* Okay, so the fookers won't move. I'll be playing on Typepad help this evening. Please pray for me.

today Melbourne, tomorrow magazines conquer the nation

Well, I guess it's all horses for courses in the book marketing game - Justine Larbalestier tells it like it is but nonetheless makes it sound pretty enjoyable whilst touring with husband Scott Westerfeld, while over at ReadWriteWeb, making the net side look like damn hard work is J.P. Kenyon, with this guest post on Internet novel marketing.

There's a good roundup of Australian independent magazines in today's M Magazine in The Age, including the new 'mook' from Vignette Press (there's a sneak preview to download at that link). Editor Michelle Griffin gives print a lusty plug in her column this week, all power to her!

As someone who loves magazines in all their myriad forms, it's quite thrilling to see the form enjoying such a vigorous revival right here in my hometown. And we're not talking about amateur productions here, even if so many of their talented creators do it for love rather than fat profits. Magazines such as Is/Not, Sneaker Freaker and Wooden Toy are coveted and collected all over the world. And it makes sense. We've got a thriving cafe culture. A great creative scene. Melbourne needs mags to complete the picture. Internet kill print? Hah! There's still something about magazines that your BlackBerry will never give you.

(Hear, hear. I bought a 4ft by 212 cm bookcase last weekend. It's not only full, but I can put all my journals and magazines in mag files in a smaller bookcase now. And God, they look pretty too.)
Let me just say how much I enjoy this Sunday paper lift-out (in fact it's the only bit of the Sunday Age I read), and full marks to Griffin for steadily turning it into a showcase for all that's interesting about Melbourne, including the recently introduced Eco Life section, the only feature of its type across the MSM in Melbourne to my knowledge. It's turning into something I could happily keep reading for almost as long as I've read Epicure and the EG.

Finally, Eddie Campbell's posts on composition in the last week have been quite riveting stuff, and I give you the link to a couple there, where you'll find the lowdown on the creation of a page from Alan Moore's graphic novel, From Hell.

Banyule chicken calls election

Oh my word. As the man says, please don't sue him.
Link via Christy Dena, who also provides a link to the list of the films included by its creator, Alonzo Mosely. I AM peeved I didn't pick the Blues Brothers the first time around.

There's a great review here from ReadWriteWeb of a movie recommendations site, giving you the lowdown on how to check the recommendations ghost in the machine.
And also from RWW, it seems that social networking has been part of the BBC's enterprise solutions for at least eight years.

John Freeman has a good post at Critical Mass this week introducing Sign and Sight, Europe's answer to the Complete Review, and has also been talking to people from Eurozine, a collaborative site for more than 60 cultural journals, while he's been at the Frankfurt Book Fair (all his posts from Frankfurt are worth a look).

Ho hum. Tomorrow I write (or at least start) a post without a single link in it. Treely ruly. I don't have a Caladrius bird in my yard, unfortunately, but I'll think of something.

it's about reading and writing

Lisa Dempster at Locus Press picked up some good reading at the TINA (This Is Not Art) festival in Newcastle, and has a roundup of the National Young Writers' Festival up as well.

Want to talk to an agent? log into this forum at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online from  October 8-11 to talk to Agent Sydney.

From LISNews.org, this link to a Long Island librarians' panel on the graphic novel may be of interest to some.

Read all about the speedy adoption of ketai, novels published on mobile phones in Japan, here in the Telegraph. Talk about convergence:

Out of the top 10 bestselling fiction works in the first half of 2007, five started as keitai novels and boast average sales of 400,000.

Crude in style and basic in characterisation, they tend to be written by first-time writers - usually in their teens or twenties - for a young audience equally wedded to their phones.

Several have been turned into real books. Love Sky, a story about a boy with cancer who breaks up with his girlfriend to spare her feelings, has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is to be made into a film.

Many of the novels are influenced by comic books which are very popular in Japanese. Consequently, they are heavy in dialogue and really short paragraphs which fit neatly on a small screen. Large empty spaces between sentences are used to imply that the characters are thinking.

Link via the Speakeasy blog at AWM Online.

publishing first for Oz from Aduki in November

Aduki Press is about to become the very first publisher in Australia to give a book away online, in addition to selling it in hard copy. Tristan Clark's Stick this in your memory hole is due for release on November 1st. Its publisher, Emily Clark, wants to see it read and freely quoted:

The book employs biting satire and insightful critique to engage in a discussion of Australian politics and society. It comprises thirty-seven essay-style chapters covering a range of topics including politics, economics, consumerism, media, food, oil, logging, water and transportation.

Stick this in your memory hole carries a strong message in support of free speech and launches an unprecedented attack on an atrophied political system and those who comprise and support it. The title is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, the ‘memory hole’ being a hole into which documents deemed to be conflicting with ‘official truths’ were placed for disposal.

She also hopes that if overseas experiences with free downloads of published material are reflected here, some mainstream publishers will one day take the plunge. Read more about the Creative Commons licensing arrangements for this publication at Locus, here.