reeling and writhing

how blogging can nail one of the best short stories evah

This is how she did it. Not only that, Tracy has a grant for a second novel and companion blog in the bag. That's called creative industry, children.

Now I'm off.

summer interregnum: in which Australia's Best Small Publisher discovers Web 2.0

Well, speaking of holidays, I'm certainly having one. No action here until late January. Come what may, I am going to wrestle this To Read tag in del.icio.us to the ground. Either it goes, or I do. (Well, half of it, anyhow. Half of me....ecch.)

We have a camp for oldest son planned, and some time down the beach without him - bless my in-laws for having a house, and keeping it nice for us. In the meantime, there are links, here, here, here - all down in the right sidebar too. Have a great holiday season, everyone.

And even if you are not a Victorian, don't forget the State Library's Summer Reading program. Here's a post on their blog by Michelle de Kretser, author of The Lost Dog, on Kris Hemensley's truly great poetry shop, Collected Works, well worth a visit, on the first floor of the Nicholas building in Flinders Lane. It's right next to the Victorian Writers' Centre's current offices, at least until some time in 2009, when the VWC will move to the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas at the State Library.

Not quite sure exactly where I'm starting with my summer list (which contains the De Kretser title), but my daughter tells me I must watch Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep. And I am telling myself that I will read youngest son's gift of Best Australian Poems 2007. And mebbe some French lit, now that Figaro's warmed me up. And The Orphan Gunner, since Jo Case gives it such a glowing review in the summer edition of ABR that I've put in a Christmas request for it. And and and....

BTW, there be some busy fellows at the best Small Publisher for 2007, Black Inc. Wouldja just look at this! all the Web 2.0 goodness hitting Oz Publishing! Jeeminy. (Incidentally, this was recorded at Collected Works in early December or thereabouts.)

It's only a small request, but in addition to this amazing development (first vlogged Melbourne publishing event, isn't it?), links to individual catalogue titles would also be good, guys. I really enjoyed Helen Garner's speech at the Newcastle launch of Best Australian Stories, too, and you can watch that here.

Not sure if it's just my computer struggling with the visuals, as we do have some kind of passive-aggressive relationship with Media Player - but the sound is all good, and I look forward to seeing more Black Inc launches publicised in this way, if just for the sheer joy of being able to listen to an appreciative audience lap up the words of Oz lit luminaries like Rose and Garner. If you want to find the text to the bulk of Peter Rose's launch speech, most of it appears in his introduction to Best Poems '07, which he reads to the audience in confident (and totally unwarranted) apprehension that they will inevitably fail to do so. He ends with a passionate call for wider reading of new poetry, not simply in the 'sleek digests' of annual anthologies:

    We delude ourselves if we say that Australian poetry has never been so robust. When was the last time you heard a poem being discussed around a dinner table? New films, plays, novels, biographies, exhibitions, magazine profiles - they crop up all the time. But a poem? Inconceivable.

What is going on here? Why has the public lost faith in contemporary poetry - all poetry perhaps? Why is so little said and written about this defection? Poetry is the great fillip and inheritance. A culture that is indifferent to poetry is deficient and derelict. No young person's education can be deemed complete without a rich and active appreciation of poetry, but how can they hear about it if we don't voice it and feel its force - if it is not a potent feature of the culture in the first place?

I encourage readers who enjoy the poems in this book to seek out the collected works of the poets that interest and speak to them. Anthologisation, despite my resistances and frettings, is a reward for poets, but a wide, intelligent readership is a much greater one.

a year of first lines - 2007

Now I think this is a neat meme: it's done the rounds of library land, and  I first spotted it here (thanks Constance!) - but like this person, I'm going through the year from the beginning. Bear with us both for being ornery, everyone else is going backwards, blog-style.  Please adopt it if you like it - and do let me know, so I can have a look.

Each month links to the post from which the first line only is quoted (well, all right, one of mine has two lines). It acts as an overview of your year in (journal/blog) writing.

January Elsewhere's Telly Meme - has been everywhere. I refuse to start a TV category as this will be a lonely post. But it's a good meme, worth a run, and thanks to Ariel for getting me started. (Now if I'd picked up Gravity's Rainbow, I'd be back in bed asleep by now...)

February Congratulations are due to Will Elliott whose first published novel, The Pilo Family Circus, has won the Golden Aurealis award at the annual Australian awards for genre and young adult fiction, held this year in Brisbane.

March Gabrielle Lord will be available for Q&A on crime writing in all its forms, the evolution of the genre, the essential value of research and her new book, Shattered. 

April If you live in Melbourne, Victoria, then you are invited to a 'massive bash' this Thursday. Sleepers Publishing are holding a salon to launch Conceived on a Tram: A
Book of Cartoons, Illustrations and Graphic Stories Done in Melbourne.

May News of Don Burrows' recent admission to the Jazz Hall Of Fame has jogged my memory about a fabulous evening I had last year...I'm ashamed to have filed it away and forgotten about it, but it was a magnificent occasion and I was delighted to find I hadn't deleted the post I did write later that year.

June This article (link from Miriam Burstein, the Little Professor) points to a range of difficulties emerging with the Google Books project, including poor cataloguing.

July  Not quite sure how this will blog up - we are Internet free this week, and this news has come to hand from Victoria McClelland-Fletcher from the Australia Council, so I'm posting it in only slightly edited form in at the City Library.

August
Found 'in an unguarded moment...'investigating NoveList, a database for selecting books based on readers' preferences which is syndicated to Victorian public libraries and has some intriguing subject headings, I found that under "Elvis Presley impersonators" there are 21 books listed!!

September 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.

October 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.

November I got my act together and finally went to my first, and the last, Sleepers' Salon for 2007 on Thursday last, at the Trades Hall bar.

December Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine?

Happy New Year, everyone. A new year, a new government. Hopefully a new decision on water recycling for Melbourne...

birthdays and panels (and novels) and webisodes, oh my

Constance informs us that the word weblog will have its tenth birthday on the 24th (or thereabouts). Goodness. More on that here from one of the big guys.

Someone is taking a real holiday from blogging. A big decision from a formidable presence in US litblogging, who fortunately will continue to run his podcast interviews with writers over at the Bat Segundo Show (and, one assumes, to write for US papers on matters literary.) Goodbye Ed, and thanks for all the kind advice and interest in my own stab at MSM down here - both the blog and the correspondence were appreciated.

Wow. Who'd a thunk? There will be a panel on litblogging at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York in February.
After a year in which US bloggers have often been in the news, a panel will examine some of the following issues:

From web sites that trade in publishing industry gossip, to blogs that teach you how to get published, literary bloggers have created a whole new world online that is quickly proving as indispensable as its traditional print-based counterparts. And now that they’re here to stay, what can we learn from literary bloggers? How are they not only participating in the publishing discussion, but changing it? And what effect are these bloggers having on the industry (not to mention its content)?

And Mr Gomez, after all, says Print Is Dead. I must remember to pass this link on to some US bloggers. The session with writer Alison Norrington, on blogging fiction, looks fabulous.
Ben Vershbow, from the Institute for the Future of the Book, is also presenting.

Prior to the announcement here, I received news from Mark Sarvas that Text Publishing is delivering Harry, Revised to Australia in June next year. Harry is certainly bursting forth from some impressive stables....first Bloomsbury, then Canongate and our own (simply terrific) Text. Congratulations are due as the world opens up and welcomes the first novel from one of my favourite US litbloggers.

And finally, Hammer Films will ride again in cross-media format, with a series of four-minute 'webisodes' on MySpace for its new film, Beyond The Rave.

Carpentaria is 'simply the best' and coming to the UK soon

While I'm really not crazy about the whole BEST BEST BEST thing, I would like to share some news I picked up at a recent book launch, from no less a person than Miles Franklin winner Alexis Wright herself. It's official - Constable and Robinson will publish Carpentaria in the UK next year. Here's my earlier review of my Book of the Year.

Others of note, cheerfully disregarding dates of publication, were (including non-fiction):

Adamson, Robert. The Goldfinches of Baghdad

Cheever, John. The World of Apples

Farmer, Beverley. Body Of Water  (writer's journal and stories, my review notes here)

Goldsworthy, Kerryn. North of the Moonlight Sonata

Jach, Antoni. Napoleon's Double

Lofthouse, Jacqui. Bluethroat Morning

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow (HA! Finished.)

Stow, Randolph. Visitants

(here's the non-fiction, now:)

Farmer, Beverley. The Bone House

Garner, Helen. The Feel of Steel.

Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Life.

Koch, C.J. Crossing The Gap: A Novelist's Essays.

Knowlson, James and Elizabeth (Eds.) Beckett Remembering:Remembering Beckett

Moretti, Franco (ed.) The Novel (vol 2.)

Nehamas, Alexander, Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty In A World of Art.

Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.) Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling

I did read a bunch of other stuff, some quite new, and all listed here, if it interests you. Also if it interests you, I have just subscribed to Publisher's Lunch, where I followed my nose to this news regarding Helen Garner's latest (due 2008). Apologies if you already knew, but it is news to me.

If you're more interested in what the English think about the French, however, then over at Figaro, Bruno Corty is keeping an eye on the TLS's review of best books for 2007 and noting that French writers are on the Brit critics' lists.
And if you're still greedy for lists, (you absolute glutton, you), there's an exhaustive list of best US books (and others) of 2007, over at the Millions book blog.

from 800 items in the Google reader...

From AWM Online, there's notification of a Digital Futures in Publishing forum to be held on December 12th (that would be Wednesday!) at 1pm AEST, featuring writer Sherman Young and publisher Dr. David Reiter:

Sherman Young is a Media Studies lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney and author of The Book is Dead, ‘a provocation designed to further the conversation about the future of books’. Check out Sherman’s excellent blog and companion to the book at:  http://shermanfyoung.wordpress.com/
Interactive Publications publish books, e-books and multimedia under four imprints and is now in its 10th year. Specialising in quality Australian literary work, it is a leading publisher of digital titles as well as conventional books. Director Dr David Reiter is also well known for his published works of poetry and fiction. See more at the IP website www.ipoz.biz

You will need to obtain a quarterly subscription (at least) to participate in this forum, at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online.

If you write spec fic, don't delay to consider this new national program, set up by Hachette Livre Australia and the Queensland Writers' Centre. Applications close January 23.

Stephen Mitchelmore has read Gabriel Josipovici's review of Peter Gay's book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, and is in agreement with his view that the book is 'appalling'. Elsewhere, in fact written a whole year ago, he has a remarkable essay on Richard Ford's Bascombe trilogy that I am quite taken with, especially this kind of thing:

The implications of Bascombe’s abandonment of creative writing have themselves been ignored by the experts. Recently, James Wood said “the major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism”, yet from the reception of the trilogy one would imagine the struggle is over already. Writing is a report from the real world directed through the craft of fiction. Richard Ford has written such a book. That’s it. Frank Bascombe, however, isn’t so sure, and Wood’s question is thereby placed not over realism, nor even over fiction, but writing iself.

The essay, for ReadySteadyBook, tackles the seamless reflexivity of these books in an impressive fashion. Also Mitchelmore is uncomfortable with the intrusion of shootings and faux action set-pieces in at least two of the books - in one case I agree with him, at the end of The Lay of The Land I was mightily annoyed. At first. Why, I ask, didn't I find this piece earlier? Shoot.

Reader, I killed him off

Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine? (Afraid to title this "A l'esprit de l'escalier', it's not fair to Googlers of idiomatic French.)
This is a post of afterthoughts, which came to me in an unguarded moment alone with books and good food at a spot outside Melbourne this week.

Last week at the Capitol Theatre, Germaine Greer put Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting Of Wisdom together fairly arbitrarily, perhaps with an eye to getting the punters in to discuss at least one book they have all read.
It's possible that not everyone in the space had read Mansfield Park all that recently, apart from the academics, as an absorbed silence hung over the assembly while GG dissected it for the most part of her lecture, leaving only ten minutes or so for Henry Handel Richardson's popular bagatelle, perhaps more a companion piece to her first novel and true bildungsroman, Maurice Guest.

In the spirit of the staircase I am sitting on a verandah in the bush today, turning over in my head, and admittedly practising out loud in the still house as well, what a question on Maurice might have produced in the assembly last week. Here's a fin-de-siècle female writer who adopts a male pseudonym to write a rich, overblown, rotting rose of a book about a young music student who blows his brains out for love, claiming at the time that she 'wrote many of my own [agonies of youth] out in the book, and came up a quieter and saner person.'
It could have been fun to go into HHR's need to get a boy to shoot himself for love (spoiler aside, Jane devotees might have enjoyed being alerted to the darker side that Richardson's own bildungsroman explored), leaving aside the concomitant issues of Louise Dufrayer's characterisation as a festering lily, for which there might not have been any time at all once Richardson's subversion of the genre into a suicidal downward spiral had been covered. Now I'd have liked to see that. Given Greer's brave opening about incest fantasies, it would have been fun to consider the gap between not marrying the heir to Mansfield Park, and killing off male protagonists under a pen name, wouldn't it?

Just two quotes from Michael Ackland's recent bio of HHR, on the reception of both novels, and then I'm done here: firstly, of The Getting Of Wisdom, H.G. Wells wrote to Richardson,

expressing his 'enormous admiration' for her novel ('your little rag of a girl is a most admirable little beast...I don't think this particular thing could have been done better')

and of Maurice Guest, the Times reviewer wrote:

' a fine achievement, thought it is too long and too full of morbid self-analysis and too relentlessly cruel in its denouement to be widely popular,'

while John Masefield remarked he could scarcely find its equal in the preceding decade

'for strength of purpose...[and]truthfulness, of execution and power, not of observation (since many animals observe more sharply than man) but of survey, as from an intellectual watch-tower'.

These are very much the afterthoughts of an idle mind, and I'm getting carried away. The theme of the Austen conference for which this lecture was the opener, after all, was "Jane Austen and Comedy".

And accolades are due to my bloggy colleague, Laura, of Sorrow at Sills Bend fame for a terrific evening, for which I understand she fielded last minute calls from television producers who thought they might like to film it (Ahem.) The story reads like a Frontline script and you can read it here.