reeling and writhing

added to the reading list

This is from a sobering review of seminal Irish historian R.F. Foster's new book by Colm Toibin, in Bookforum:

It is possible that the money has created full employment, and this has, indeed, made a difference: Irish people can do their suffering at home. But on some level that even a historian as subtle and ingenious as Foster cannot measure, Ireland may have remained the same. We cannot ask historians to open windows in our souls.

And a brief if stimulating discussion of prizes for Australian writing about women can be found this week at Pavlov's Cat, along with a reprint of Kerryn Goldsworthy's Sydney Morning Herald review of Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, which is up for the inaugural Barbara Jefferis prize  (still no news on this today, though it was announced yesterday - must have just missed the papers, and the ABC news, by a whisker). Kerryn has the news on the winner too, Rhyll McMaster for Feather Man, though it's not on the ASA website yet.

Both of Kerryn's posts indicate that I must get The Lost Dog read pronto, (well, after Toni Jordan's Addition, which I've just started, anyhow) and that leaving it to one side for most of the year has been an error I will correct as soon as possible:

This book is so engaging and thought-provoking, and its subject matter so substantial, that the reader notices only in passing how funny it is. At one point Tom goes to ask the neighbour Corrigan to keep an eye out for the dog, whereupon the narrator produces a sentence worthy of Patrick White: ‘When the Australian desire to provide assistance meshed with the Australian dread of appearing unmanly, it produced the bluff menace that was Mick Corrigan’s default setting.’

Michelle de Kretser is one of those rare writers whose work balances substance with style. Her writing is very witty, but it also goes deep, informed at every point by a benign and far-reaching intelligence. She is still winning prizes for her 2003 novel The Hamilton Case and she is certain to win a few more for The Lost Dog. Publishers Allen and Unwin have shown their faith in her by publishing this novel as a beautifully-designed hardback.
(Kerryn Goldsworthy)

*To update further, I have some not-so-humble remarks from an earlier date on Feather Man (which I have read) here.

file under whimsical

Tssk. If only the specs had gone missing instead. It's a wonder The Great Gatsby survived my HSC in 1979 sometimes. Link via Maud.

I can haz a book with train ticket?

Tom Cho reports on his blog that he has a book of stories coming out with Giramondo next year.

If:book reports that the first of Penguin's interactive fiction publishing projects is complete. Charles Cumming has produced a mashup of sorts of John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps, entitled The Twenty-One Steps.

David Prater, poet and Cordite founder and editor, is now ensconced in the Netherlands and has the buzz on a terrific prize awarded if you buy a book in National Book Week. One free day's travel on the train!! 200,000 Netherlanders can't be wrong. David also has an article in the Weekend Australian on self-published poetry where we are told that Walt Whitman wrote his own reviews to his first, pretty much self-published and very famous book, Leaves of Grass - a song of himself, indeed.

Missed the inaugural Booktown event at Clunes last year - but I am going to try to get to this one.
Link via Louise Swinn, who also broke the very good news that Delia Falconer is editor of the Black Inc short story collection for 2008.

I really enjoyed Margaret Throsby's interview with Germaine Greer on ABC Classic FM the other week - but I think it will be off their website soon and we'll have to wait for a repeat. In the meantime, there's always the podcast of her evening at Readings to enjoy.

Finally, fighting words from Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe in the Age on Monday, over UK publishers' neo-colonial attitude to "Commonwealth" rights for US titles. Contentious, what? He's posted a shorter version of the article on his blog, where comments are currently closed, unfortunately.

on a half-readable web, directories still rule

I will leave it to Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb to tell you that the aggregator site Alltop  is something you could get non-tech people to use very easily, described by its founder as an 'online magazine rack'.

But there's more. Apart from the GLARING OMISSION OF BOOK BLOGS (and here I note that BritLitBlogs displays very similarly to AllTop, snapshots and all), I found plenty of top sites here I'd never heard of. So if there are subject areas where you would like some choice  blogs selected for you, you could do worse than treat Alltop as a kind of blog subject gateway, as librarians might say.
It is the kind of thing libraries could use in an 'Introduction to blogs' page for the public. Quite impressive in its design, nice and simple. But one cannot help thinking - after all this time, here we are back at directories.

* I stand corrected. Guy Kawasaki has taken my suggestion for the inclusion of book blogs on board, so there will be a bookblogs section on Alltop in due course. Groovy.

overland prizes new novels

Please note that Louise Swinn, one of the publishers of the excellent Sleepers' Almanac, has joined the literary bloggers of Oz (and the even more select group of Australian editors who blog) and is excited about the following news too.

To wit: Over 2008 another initiative to foster new writing is to join the ranks of Australian lotteries for writers, but in a very good way.
Overland magazine, long a champion of marginalised and/or progressive writing, has announced an inaugural novel 'prize' consisting of publication of the winning novel as an issue of the magazine.

Aiming to build on a distribution model it established in its early days as the journal of the Australasian Book Society, when it "created an alternative literary infrastructure that, at one point, was publishing half of all novels produced in Australia in a particular year", Overland wants to support new fiction as it did in the fifties.

The editors will be accepting submissions of novel manuscripts throughout 2008, with an announcement of the selected novel in early 2009 and publication towards the end of that year.

The website announcement stresses that "This is not a competition and there is no deadline as such. We plan to read manuscripts throughout 2008; we will, however, accept an appropriate novel whenever we find it."

The selected novel will have a guaranteed readership exceeding that of most literary novels in Australia, by virtue of Overland's subscription base.

Interested? read here for further instructions.

on your ABC, and UTS

I wonder if this kind of thing approaches what the ABC has in mind for its new Compendium project, which I read about here in the Austlit newsletter of June-July '07. (That's right, I'm backdated.)

Rosa B is a bilingual online arts and design journal published in multimedia format - so there are filmed interviews along with articles and essays. It is very beautiful to look at, and a good place to practise your French if you are so inclined. (Over at if:book there is a profile of something else like this, called Issue - and yes, I read about Rosa B there first.) Issue has built more interactivity with the audience into its site by enabling comments, though I think the layout is a bit busy. There is not as much interactivity in the Rosa B site, which is perhaps where it diverges from a new Australian project in the works.

The Australian Literature Compendium, for which the ABC and UTS have received a $150,000 grant, will include an e-journal, podcasts and documentary features on one site, along with teaching resources.

sonya the world has a crush onya

I have been busting to mess about with Frank Woodley's line for a very long time. And that time has arrived.

What fantastic news this is, that Australian writer Sonya Hartnett has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the largest children's literature award in the world (and the second-largest literary prize after the Nobel, according to that report). I just found it on the State Library blog, Read Alert, (thanks Mike), and it hit The Age an hour ago. Now I must send the news to my daughter, who introduced me to Hartnett's work in the first place. The Astrid Lindgren award website has more news, and here's a report from The Guardian.

I don't go for prize-winning news much, but this is genuinely exciting (not just because of the Woodley connection either). Hartnett has had international nominations (and some overseas prizes) for her award-winning work over the years, and deserves the recognition as a distinctive and powerful storyteller for all ages.

As the prize report says, "Astrid Lindgren’s works are permeated by an empathy with children living under difficult circumstances. Hartnett’s original and provocative writings take this subject matter into a new era."

ern is alive, well and painting up a storm

If you're going through or around or near Bendigo on or before March 18, make sure you catch this.

I had a bit of R+R up there the other weekend, and enjoyed it very much, as well as a trip to the Bendigo art gallery itself just across the street, and a good hike around the city (AND A RIDE ON A COUNTRY TRAIN for the first time in about thirty-four years. Why have I left it so long? Added to list of excellent 3/4-hour writing spots - the cafe at Southern Cross Station, overlooking the country platforms. 'I had not thought death had undone so many', AND IT'S CLEAN AND SHINY and there's bloody good coffee.)

I lifted a quotation from an installation of winebottles at the exhibition I was in town for, to give you a taste of the Heide-mentary flavour artists Kahan, Johnson and Burder infused it with. See this as a bottle label, of course:

Grunge Hermitage

Grunge Hermitage is generally regarded as Australia's
most influential red. Full bodied and spicy, it is the
ideal accompaniment to any art of a modernist
flavour. This great wine is made from selected
hermitage grapes grown on the rolling hills of
Bulleen in Victoria. Matured in small and exquisitely
crafted Murrumbeena ceramic ramekins prior to
bottling, Grunge Hermitage will appreciate with
additional historical perspective. During bottle
maturation it may show a slight crustiness -
therefore it is recommended that it be debunked
prior to serving and imbibed with due irreverence.

Worth seeing for the cheeky kitchen and modernist en plein air photos alone. And I didn't even mention the 'Chorus Line of Images of Evil Plus SpaceHopper', did I? Or the 'Stoush in the Kitchen Garden', or the Ned Kelly wallpaper? Even Max Harris' hair is not immune from the  mockumentary treatment. This is the show's second outing so far: to top it all off, it was created at Bundanon when all three were on a residency there. There were even a few penguins in view...

in which an australian book is reviewed - Feather Man

When Christina Hill reviewed Australian poet Rhyll McMaster's first novel, Feather Man, for Australian Book Review last year, she placed it in 'the disturbing genre of Amy Witting's I for Isobel and Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra By The River.

In so doing I think she has perhaps not made enough of  how a disjointed, sometimes dissonant style communicates the protagonist Lyce's precarious grasp on reality in this book, and of how deeply shocking the behaviour of the abusive neighbors is (first Lionel, the abuser, and then his son Redmond, whom Lyce later marries). While Witting's Isobel is capable of devastating observations, Witting has never opened with something that could compare with the first chapter of Feather Man, in which twelve year old Lyce is deliberately, quietly and methodically raped in a dirty chicken shed by her neighbour Lionel.

Lyce, whose nickname is Sookie, is observant and articulate, but is constantly under threat of collapse from within. (For most of the book we do not know what her real name is, although it is quoted teasingly in an epigram at the beginning.)

Understandably, after this event the narrative fragments into a series of vignettes, clashing with each other in time and perspective, often sliding between tenses, as she distances herself from her own pain by acutely observing her family and the very few friends she manages to collect. We can only guess that Sookie is hardening over like a tortoise, building a carapace against the world, for most of the book focuses on what she notices about others.

I felt at times the style in this book was quite rough, almost clunky. It took me half the novel to realise this was deliberate and significant, and for that first half I felt quite impatient with the author. There are some disjunctions that, if they are not deliberate, are just plain careless - on page 58 the child Sookie quotes Goethe, even though she is speaking in the present tense, where in the next paragraph she is reading a children's book, Saggy Baggy The Elephant. But perhaps this is in character for this unstable, rather than unreliable narrator. Everything she tells us does hang together and make sense - but it is a bit jumbled at times, sometimes giving the sense she is talking aloud to herself.

The ending also reflects this play on instability, rather than a straightforwardly unhappy ending. This is a bold and assured debut effort which maybe could have been even more powerful with stronger editing, introduced by an epigram from classical literature about Lyce, the nymph who bound Daphnis to be faithful to her upon threat of blinding. Though in Feather Man, it is debatable whether Lyce manages to blind anyone but herself.

we need to talk to Kevin

Melbourne independent bookseller Readings is now posting reviews online, which give a fairly substantial taste of their excellent monthly newsletter, which you can have posted to your home, or your email address, if you apply on the homepage. There are feeds, so subscribe to keep up with reviews of new stock, including new Australian fiction.

There's a news tab on the overhauled, freshened up website, and here's a roundup of the events hosted by the independent bookshop chain in 2007 - over 230, with support from Asialink, Deakin University, Cinema Nova, Sisters in Crime, the Midsumma festival and the Royal Women's Hospital, to name just a few.

Here's their interview with the author of the next thing I want to buy. I foolishly flipped through the weekend newspaper review sections last week, thinking Toltz was yet another international writer - let's face it, the Australian titles hitting the papers are few and far between this time of year. And he did look remarkably like this fellow - what was Jason Steger (Age books editor) thinking, putting them on the same page? We're not all awake on Saturday morning...

I can see where Steger's objections to Kevin Rudd having a decisive influence over the Prime Minister's prize are coming from, I guess - but hey, when did we ever, ever have a Prime Minister who would pledge the time to make such a judgement? Surely that's something to crow about.

Not so good that there are no publishers going to the summit, though. Michael Heyward should have had an invite, at the very least. But looking at this, I wonder, did anyone nominate anybody? As Tony and Mick used to say, "What's that all about?"

and now for some of our favourite things

Teh blog T-shirt. Thanks Boynton for teh link. (Gee those mousepads are a bit costly though.)

For Laura, another local, this story of a rooster. Beautifully told, as always, by Dervala Hanley.