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This is one of the more sordid things book bloggers have gotten up to in recent times.
And then there's this- it started here, and then got ginormous very quickly.
In other news for bloggers, there's a new plugin for photos available on Wordpress that enables you to find Creative Commons-licensed photographs and publish 'em way quickly. Link via Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb.
Graham Rawle's collage novel, Woman's World, is reviewed at if:book by Dan Visel.
In a sense, it puts off serious readings: it's constructed from women's magazines of the 1950s and 60s, which society accords little value to: magazines are ephemeral, fashion magazines inherently so. But such readings, inevitable as they may be, are unjust to Rawle's book, which deserves to be read as a novel. While emphatically a work of print, the way Rawle uses text can shed light on the way we use text online.
What goes on in Woman's World? Rawle's raw materials suggest his subject matter: it's a novel about clothes, specifically women's clothes. It's not a stretch to imagine that his working method suggested his plot: Rawle, a mail artist, uses women's words to construct a book; his male protagonist garbs himself in women's clothes. Clothes become language: Rawle stitches words and phrases together to make something new.
One other reason I liked this review is that Visel is able to riff from my favourite scene in The Devil Wears Prada to give substance to his musings on recycled (should that be re-associated?) writing. He concludes that while it is very difficult to see where all the pieces of a Wikipedia article come from, Rawle's work is far more eloquent and doesn't show its stitches. (There's also a review at The Guardian.)
The idea of a chair merited further exploration in Dan Green's first post - Maryann Burk Carver raises a dissenting point of view about the Lish-Carver editing relationship here. She and Raymond Carver's upcoming biographer Carol Sklenica can also be read at Pinky's Paperhaus commenting on the New Yorker article about Tess Gallager's release of unedited material by Carver.
And this latest memoir of Ballard's sounds like something I will definitely buy. As a single parent after the death of his wife, he was apparently never in the least bit fazed by the pram in the hall.
There are some nice remarks about Gerald Murnane and Chris Koch's latest awards over at Susan Wyndham's blog at the SMH:
Murnane, 69, lives in "modest, frugal comfort" in Melbourne and this award is "a release from anxiety". Royalty payments, he says, have usually matched his gas and electricity bills. A few years ago he decided to stop writing his poetically repetitive prose but several recent awards and rediscovery by Indyk's Giramondo Publishing have encouraged a new outpouring.
A 20,000-word story has grown into an 80,000-word book, Barley Patch, still in the rewriting phase, and Murnane has plans for another "20,000-worder" that might also become a book. He is equally pleased by Giramondo's reissue this month of his first book from 1974, Tamarisk Row, to be launched at Adelaide Writer's Week.
and go for a walk in the summer rain.
(and yes, I did bring them some bread.)
Thanks for the picture from the original reports, PC.
And Beth has a great post here, with a shot of the Parliament as well.
$85,000 from lending rights to one Australian author is not too shabby, is it?
Susan Wyndham is enjoying speculating who that author might have been in 2007. (The Age rather drily informed us on the weekend that said author remains anonymous).
And while Max Barry certainly isn't English, he might be pleased to hear about this.
A spokesperson for MLA, the UK government's advisory body for libraries, claims that due to the cheaper prices of books,
"people who couldn't afford books before and borrowed them are now buying them on the high street."
I occasionally worry about what will happen when all the old Australian Book Reviews crumble to dust, as there is no comprehensive digital preservation policy operating for it at present. I'm not quite sure I should be so concerned after reading bits of the Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004) which has been published online.
In chapter 37, a general introduction to issues of preservation in humanities computing, Abby Smith writes:
Preservation by benign neglect has proven an amazingly robust strategy over time, at least for print-on-paper. One can passively manage a large portion of library collections fairly cheaply. One can put a well-catalogued book on a shelf in good storage conditions and expect to be able to retrieve it in 100 years in fine shape for use if no one has called it from the shelf. But neglect in the digital realm is never benign. Neglect of digital data is a death sentence. A digital object needs to be optimized for preservation at the time of its creation (and often again at the time of its deposit into a repository), and then it must be conscientiously managed over time if it is to stand a chance of being used in the future.
(Link via Grand Text Auto, where the publication of a new Companion to Digital Literary Studies is also announced.)
I first came across this last November, and I have found it impossible to throw away. The title of this post, I hope, says it all. How unlucky could you be, having Henry James review your first novel? Even if he does recommend you have some chance of future success if you stick to writing what you know?
At the daily Arts Journal blog, About Last Night, that stalwart of US literary blogging, Carrie Frye (usually to be found at Tingle Alley when she is not writing for Terry T.), subjected James' review of Louisa May Alcott's first novel to a rereading:
Mr. Adam Warwick...is one of our oldest and most inveterate foes. He is the inevitable cavaliere servente of the precocious little girl; the laconical, satirical, dogmatical lover, of abut thirty-five, with the "brown mane", the "quiet smile", the "masterful soul", and the "commanding eye." Do not all novel-readers remember a figure, a hundred figures analogous to this? Can they not, one of his properties being given,--the "quiet smile" for instance,--reconstruct the whole monstrous shape? When the "quiet smile" is suggested, we know what is coming; we foresee the cynical bachelor or widower, the amateur of human nature, "Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard", who has traveled all over the world, lives on a mysterious patrimony, and spends his time in breaking the hearts and the wills of demure little school-girls, who answer him with "Yes sir", and "No, sir."
Miss Alcott has probably mused upon Warwick so long and so lovingly that she has lost all sense of his proportions. There is a most discouraging good-will in the manner in which lady novelists elaborate their impossible heroes. There are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society. We speak thus devoutly, not because Warwick is a vicious person,--on the contrary, he exhibits the sternest integrity; but because, apparently as a natural result of being thoroughly conscientious, he is essentially disagreeable. Women appear to delight in the conception of men who shall be insupportable to men.
James did have some nice things to say apparently. But as Carrie notes, they probably rang faint in Alcott's ears. Link via Maud.
From Jessamyn West, this link to a post by Rochelle, a librarian in the States who is asking some very sensible questions about the download system on the Kindle, and how its digital content management affects lending between family members, or in libraries.
Bud Parr reports that a Brooklyn bookshop employee has won the Brooklyn Public Library's startup competition grant of $15,000 to start her own bookstore.
On visiting Jessica's blog to read about this happy news, I find she's added a section to her links list of bookseller blogs.
(In usual Blogger style, the links list is not visible on separate post pages, only on the home page.)
So if there are bookshops out there wondering how they do it in Brooklyn, I recommend you start on this page, on the right, and work your way down.
From a terrific looking blog for Chin Music Press comes this link, which I wanted to post a while ago, to the top business report of 2007.
(The following scrambled post is a very good example of how not to blog when your handicapped son is drying dishes loudly and would really like some attention...)
Very pretty, personalised and highly detailed. The Feltron chart is the personal activity report for 2007 (including coffees, taxi trips and burglars confronted) NOT of Henry Sene Yee, Picador book designer, as I reported erroneously earlier, but of this guy. And he's written a few of them before too - see his site index.
My apologies to Mr Feltron, who has taken the trouble to pay for his own domain and does not deserve such misappropriation of his fine work.
The category of 'Literary Things and Otherwise' at Chin Music Press is worth checking on a regular basis - actually I reckon nearly all their categories are worth following.
And serendipitously, as I opened Google Reader and subscribed tout de suite to their feed, I found a link to local news on one of their latest publications.
This is what happens when families have Friday parties - you don't read the main part of the paper till Monday morning, online, and you hear the good news that has been announced in other places.
Congratulations are due to Sophie Cunningham, new Meanjin editor, a publisher and novelist who blogs here and there. She replaces Ian Britain who was editor for six years, and her plans for the iconic journal include longer essays and expansion of online content. Brava.
It's that time of year already: here's Sleepers No. 4:
Could you ever really love a guy who speaks in comic sans? What does survival mean when the whole world has cancer? What happens when the relationship with your lecturer begins to echo the short story form he's teaching you? Would it be fun to have Jesus round for beer and pizza? What's the best way to kill a mouse? How do you memorialise a hunting-obsessed father when you're a vegetarian? Is marrying into a family of lawyers really a good idea? Where do you find the most exciting, the funniest and most moving short stories in the country collected together in one tight volume?
Sounds enticing, doesn't it. This is where you need to be to hear Max Barry read, and to launch the fourth collection from Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner's Sleepers outfit - there's poetry and cartoons as well as fiction involved.
At: the Bella Union Bar, @ the Trades Hall, cnr Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton
On: Wednesday February 6
Time: 6pm for 6.30
Otherwise, do pick it up from a good bookshop soon.
The second Calibre Essay Prize from Australian Book Review, a new competition for non-fiction pieces which carries a prize of $10,000, is to be shared by two winners for 2008.
Judges Kerryn Goldsworthy, Paul Hetherington and Peter Rose chose Rachel Robertson's essay, 'Reaching One Thousand' and Mark Tredinnick's 'A Storm And A Teacup' from a longlist of eighteen essays. Robertson's essay is about her family's experience with autism:
Rachel Robertson’s short fiction, reviews and articles have been published in Australian print and on-line journals. She has worked as an editor, researcher, policy officer and adult educator. Her essay is ‘Reaching One Thousand’, an impressively subtle study of autism and of its consequences for the child and for the parents alike. With dry wit it also introduces readers to an eccentric family of professional and amateur mathematicians. Ms Robertson’s adroit depiction of a family recognising and responding to autism is as impressive as her anxious care for her son ‘Ben’ (all names in this essay have been changed).
Dr. Tredinnick's essay is reported to be a personal meditation on ecology and the writing life(which I'm sure is also very good, if the high standard set by last year's winner is anything to go by):
It begins in a deluge, as it were: the heavy rains that flooded parts of south-east Australia in June 2007. These falls and the general inundation fail to alleviate Dr Tredinnick’s concerns about ‘the driest continent’ and the need for a profound reassessment of how many resources we all need individually to live sanely and sustainably. Tea and its harmonising ceremonies and literature provide the key in this elegant, succinct essay, which also deals with the literary life in the twenty-first century.
Once more the narrow focus of our new Prime Minister's new literary prize is exposed - it would have been good to see some of that money going to poetry and essay writing as well. So it is good that ABR and CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) joined forces in 2007 to provide this prize to essayists. It would also be exciting to see some of the shortlisted essays online at ABR, or in hard copy, at some time - even a list of names and topics covered would be of interest, both to the public and to aspiring writers.
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