reeling and writhing

Scheherazade in Sydney

This project came to its culmination in a symposium at the Performance Space in Sydney recently, and was the subject of a review on Arts Hub by Talya Rubin:

'The impetus for the work came out of the sudden death of Barbara Campbell’s husband. The opening screen of her website reads: “In a faraway land a gentle man dies. His bride is bereft. She travels across continents looking for a reason to keep living. Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey. She does so for 1001 nights.” As a way of coping with grief, Campbell undertook a period of enforced public mourning and used as her tools the daily paper, focusing on stories about the conflict in the Middle East.'

Rubin's review is available to Arts Hub subscribers here. Campbell is a member of the  Electronic Literature Organisation, and the text archive of the stories, which are otherwise only available at the time of performance online, is here. At GrandTextAuto she was taken to task for her rather severe approach to presentation, but nonetheless the frame concept and performance aspect of the project, as well as its duration over nearly three years, is remarkable.

surviving the wallpaper

The editor of a new collection of notes on Beckett's early lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, Brigitte Le Juez, introduces his youthful approach to Balzac and Flaubert to the 21st century for the Guardian.

HarperCollins is trying to change the publishing model for novels. Good luck with that - I agree with Rosemary Sorensen of The Australian's weekend Review that the model they are considering does sound quite mysterious. This article also mentions that the Weidenfeld & Nicolson imprint of Orion Books has written off advances to some writers rather than incur the full costs of producing their books, in an effort to save money when the fiction list was slashed by half:

One agent who has had clients affected by the Weidenfeld & Nicolson cuts told the Bookseller magazine: "My conservative estimate is that they are writing off contracts in the multiples of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Partly, I suspect it is because books were bought and now they do not have the editors in house to champion them."

Is he hip to the now or what? Stephen Fry has sent us a podgram called Wallpaper, on Oscar Wilde's thoughts on American violence and you-know-what. Fry is all for Web 2.0 neologisms - he has already invented the 'blessay', which I take to mean an essay from the Guardian that he has republished on his blog.

Do take the time to visit Nicki Greenberg, illustrator of a stunning graphic novel version of The Great Gatsby, and see how her illustrated Hamlet is coming along.

A private equity firm in New York called Quadrangle Capital has announced that newspapers need to work out how to connect with younger readers if they are to survive.

And finally, the Guggenheim fellowships for this year include a clutch of interesting literary projects, according to The Complete Review. They also report that the April issue of Poetry Magazine has translation as its theme, and is worth a look.

free to read, freely written

Robert Olen Butler gets down and dirty in all the voices in the latest Narrative magazine. In his piece, "Little Fuckers" he recasts some improbable and actual sexual encounters between historical figures in a stream of consciousness riff which occasionally does violence to the style of the originals.
I liked the Oscar Wilde with Walt, hehe, shades of D.H. Lawrence (though if you do not include full stops it is hardly Oscar at all, more like a fingerprint lifted from his half-empty champagne glass), I liked Aimee McPherson, I DID NOT like him channelling Peter Carey's Ned Kelly in the middle of Clyde Barrow though:

Here is my honest declaration to you, Miss Parker, I am a dangerous man to anybody who gets in the way of me taking what I want and pissing on the shoes of the government that has took everything the working stiffs have got, which also means that nobody messes with any woman who is with me.

Ahem. A subscription to Narrative, where you can read stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Tobias Wolff from time to time, is free.

julia funds a new Ozlit chair in the west

What a busy old Government it is, not unlike those at the top of the team. Not content with apologising to those we have wronged, positioning itself to stand up to China and founding Prime Minister's literary prizes, is it. No, there's more...

The Education, Employment and Workplace Relations media centre announced yesterday that funding for a new chair in Australian literature, which was open to applications by universities around the country, will be awarded by the Rudd Government to the University of Western Australia:

Though a number of universities submitted impressive proposals, the six member selection panel unanimously found the University of Western Australia to be the strongest candidate.

UWA’s proposed strategies to promote Australian literature both nationally and internationally as well as the support of the Western Australian Government were identified as strengths in the application.

As the University’s application noted, UWA has pioneered and remained constantly committed to the teaching and research of Australian literacy studies and is today at the forefront in this field.

The University of Western Australia is to be congratulated on its achievement.

The University of Western Australia has been recognised for its long-standing commitment to the promotion of literature and culture in the community.

The decision follows a competitive process which was open to all Australian universities.

Link via Australian Writers Online.

new Australian songs in a book near you

From Giramondo Press comes news of the launch of Alan Wearne's latest book of poems.
The Australian Popular Songbook, 'a collection where Wearne has tapped deep into our musical culture',will be launched by Melbourne poet alicia sometimes at Readings Carlton bookshop tomorrow evening.

Thursday 10 April, 6 pm start please, at Readings, 309 Lygon Street, Carlton. (Readings advises that no bookings are required.)

world class reviewing in the Weekend Australian - read all about it

Time to subscribe to Luke Slattery's blog. This is one of the best reviews of James Wood's How Fiction Works you will ever read. I have missed your literary journalism, Mr. Slattery; I used to ask myself, where did that lovely Francophile Slattery person go? And assumed, rather foolishly, that perhaps he had managed to slip away from us all. To la belle France.

And now feel rather silly that I don't read other bits of The Australian, or I would have known, wouldn't I? Hopefully he won't let all that great extra-curricular critical reading go to waste before he hits fifty, and will give us more like this review soon. We could do with a few more philosopher-journalists who write this well down here. Or anywhere else, for that matter. The opening lines will give you a sense of the crackling brio with which he tackles this much-praised book, and you won't stop:

James Wood's brilliant career -- though still in his early 40s, the English-born literary critic is a professor of critical practice at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker -- registers the rising cachet of high cultural capital in a pop cultural age.

It's anyone's guess whether, by the end of his career, Wood will have become a stronger critic than his illustrious mid 20th-century predecessors such as William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Edmund Wilson. But he is already an establishment figure enjoying the sheen of minor celebrity, bestriding the prestige end of the academy and literary journalism.

Yet his new analysis of fiction's interior workings, though bright and occasionally brilliant, is not entirely convincing. Animated by a restless speculative energy and a bravura style, it aims to march literary criticism into an engagement with moral philosophy.

I do hope this courageous and beautifully written review is widely read.

i do love a good book deal

I went and commented on this post when I first saw it in my reader, then revisited after Maud linked to it. There are now 350-odd comments, and they make for good reading for anyone who was interested in the State Library's Text Appeal literary speed-dating events in early 2007.

I have managed to find Marieke Hardy's fabulous article about this too - no surprise that our royal Ms Fits has cracked an International Bloggie, either. About bloody time. And what a funny blog awards page, no permalinks??? that freaking page goes on forever.

Anyway. Rachel Donadio's NY Times article, which she refers to in her post, is also quite funny:

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”

All important material to consider, if you feel a row over The Corrections is brewing between you and a loved one sometime soon. (And I'm not suggesting that's the subject of the last link, either - it's just a damn good post on that book, and other matters.)

a constellation of editors and publishers

First Lisa Dempster and Emily Clark of Vignette and Aduki Press, and Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe Publishing - now, Sleepers editor and publisher Louise Swinn and Readings (and former ABR editor) Jo Case, are all down in the right column for you to seek out and add to your feed readers.
Jo has kicked off with five terrific posts here at Read All Over.
Her story of Germaine is a beauty; surely someone will do a roundup of anecdotes like these one of these days.

Now if Peter Rose would just write a few more posts over at the ABR blog, we'd have close to a Pléiade of blogging editors.