reeling and writhing

observing a respectful and awe-filled distance...

From a link on her blog comes this story of M.J. Hyland's in October's Manchester Review. It reminds me of something Tobias Wolff might write, if he was in a flinty mood and inclined to be a little less lapidary. I long for her memoirs - or do I? perhaps she is taking the more interesting road, after all.

And best of all, a NEW BOOK IN 2009. Thrilling.

blogs all over every day

From Creative Economy Online comes a link to this story from the New York Times about a Chicago news publisher who has decided to hand out blog stories as free newspapers, splitting profits from advertising between himself and the bloggers. Claire Cain Miller suggests that some (though not all) free dailies are still in a good position as print news battles to stay afloat across the globe, thanks to the relatively constant value of local advertising:

'Ads from local businesses are one reason that free dailies have been a rare bright spot in the newspaper industry. Unlike struggling car companies and department stores, which are mainstay advertisers of metropolitan dailies, small businesses have increased their ad spending during the recession, several publishers said.

“All growth in the newspaper industry for the last 20 years has been in free papers, and the fastest-growing segment of that for the last five years has been in free dailies,” said H. Harrison Cochran, publisher of The Aurora Sentinel in Colorado and past president of Suburban Newspapers of America.'

And the name of this new paper? Oddly enough, The Printed Blog.

going deeper into reading at Summer Read - Fiona Capp on surfing

As I reviewed Musk & Byrne a while back elsewhere, I did not comment on Fiona Capp's post on reluctant blogging on the State Library's Summer Read blog, but I am going to quote her here on writing and writers' festivals because I think she has written something rather fine about the matter.

I have been nattering there to Nam Le, who has written at length about  blogging and festivals, but Fiona's come up with a physically evocative simile that begs to be shared more widely. (Also there's a commenter on this post who has a ripper suggestion for festival promotions, too.)

I love writing because it’s a solitary activity and because I don’t have to be there when other people read my books. I love surfing for similar reasons. You can be sitting out in the water with a bunch of other surfers, everyone quietly waiting for a set, and you can enjoy the company of your fellow surfers without having to say a thing to them. Everybody knows why they’re there. Everybody knows why they love it. Occasionally, I do fall into conversation with other surfers. Once, a surfer told me about the death of his daughter. But most of the time, I’m happy to remain silent. To treat the whole experience as a form of meditation.
The thing that puzzles me about Writers’ Festivals and similar events is that writing and reading, like surfing, are silent activities in which one loses oneself, and yet these festivals are all about performing and talking. What I would love to see is a Readers’ Festival where everyone gathers – if they want company – at a particular venue and sits quietly reading, and occasionally talking to people around them about the books they are reading.

As in the work of Robert Gray where simile is deliberately favoured above metaphor, we are left to consider for ourselves deeper questions posed by this perfect picture - are readers, then, surfers on an ocean of writing, waiting for a wave?
And with regard to  Fiona's Readers' Festival, I can't help wondering if that's what we do when we talk about books online. Is it?

an old prize for a new year

Here can be found a poem from the T.S. Eliot prizewinner for 2009, Jen Hadfield, whose second collection has snared her the gong. Shetland, where she works, is well pleased.

There seemed to be quite a lot of Scottish poets in the lineup - here's a poem from Robert Crawford. Here, too, is one by US poet Mark Doty, just for people who are a bit thingy about clipping their nails.

And here is something else from the Guardian website that at first I was completely horrified by, then realised it's not as bad as I thought. This link better be permanent, though.

in the pre-Christmas rush, an old pony called Southerly

So I updated my Australian Litjournals page, as you do when Christmas is approaching and you've decided to duck down the coast to miss the rush.
And I was surprised and delighted to find that Southerly mag now has an online archive called, rather appropriately, the Long Paddock, bringing to mind that splendid collaborative piece of Lee Kernaghan's and Slim Dusty's:

Leave him out there in the long yard, do not rush him,
Leave him out there with his mate, the baldy bay;
With his mates that he can graze and he can laze with,
Leave him there and we will turn him out today.

(It is a Slim Dusty tune, apparently. Recorded here.)

We have had four of the six birthdays in our little family here, all within sixteen days. As well as Christmas.
Which is why lists like these make me long for a St Hubert's 2006 Merlot and a good lie down. Or this, which I haven't finished watching yet. Perhaps I need to be out in the long yard too.

I have been simultaneously horrified and thankful over the holiday period that I am not required to be as alert and alarmed as Bernice of Viminalis, though, whose fire-blogging posts have been riveting reading. It is still not quite clear if there will be a definitive change up there at Bundanoon soon.

Do check in: regrettably she has not tagged all posts FIRE (this link has most of them in a line, though). But I guess she has more important things on her mind (this from eleven days ago):

More raking, and a friend returned my call, a friend who is a RFS member in the Blue Mountains. She kindly answered my inane questions for about 45 minutes, til we both reached the likely conclusions the fire was not likely to pose a significant threat to my location, but but but if it did, I would have very little warning it was running up the gully behind me, and would be best therefore to ride the fire front out by staying in the house, rather than trying a last minute escape by car.

So tomorrow promises a bit more raking, a last bit of mowing and a lot more waiting. I'll use the time to write a submission to the state planning authority, demanding that the standards for gutters needs to be revised. Particularly in fire-prone areas. Do not, dear reader, assume that gutter guards work. They do not and in fact cause a whole lot of problems much more difficult to fix than arming yourself with a banister brush, ladder, bucket and hat-enclosed head to clean the damn things regularly. And the view from the roof is fantastic.

secondhand news, but expensive enough

Happy New 2009, everyone.

I don't know if this link to AbeBooks 'Most Expensive Books' list will stay put - I receive these via email, not sure where else they are filed on the Abe site once they're old news though. I will keep an eye on that. To add to that, here's a list of books with unusual bindings that are currently passing through the enormous online secondhand booksellers' hands. (There's a rubber book with a zip down the bottom...)

Down at Queenscliff last week, I saw a pretty dark orange, green and cream Spode platter that was also expensive. And prior to that, we dealt with a kitchen island bench in the rellies' holiday house that was pretty busted (and is going to be considerably more expensive).

We emptied all the crockery out after the small, late-sixties legs on the bench had withstood the cracking of the particle board base of the cabinets away from the framing base, and the subsidence of the whole seven foot long bench and cabinets straight into the floor. Three glasses were broken and that was all - fortunately no one had their toes under the cabinets at the time. The plumbing still works, though one sink will not drain properly at an angle of 15 degrees. Funny, that.

This happened at my in-laws' beach house. Moreover, on Christmas Day an entire trestle table gave way at my sister-in-law's house, covered in food in sensible plastic dishes. Nothing was lost.

A week has passed and I have no news of a third thing about to fall, though the family is large enough to be its own population sample...the balcony on the beach house has just been replaced, so at least it won't be that.

When not wrangling kitchens (including cleaning out my own prior to the holiday to make it less welcoming for bugs that like to come over when I'm not there to squash 'em), I am currently trying to read Foster's History of Ireland 1600 - 1972 - I am up to the Famine and some more familiar names, and just about ready to retire and leave the rest for later.

I have finished and found Antigone Kefala's Sydney Journals deeply refreshing, and now want to read this. I was sent two Mini Shots by Lisa Dempster, having mentioned a couple of her authors here, and thought they were terrific, and particularly liked the miniaturised format.

A Vignette Press Mini Shot looks like a story crossed with a zine, designed to high publication standards and produced with its own graphics, and neat enough to feature in cafes or slip into a bag or glovebox, to have handy in a dull moment. I don't know enough about zine culture to make judgments here, but has this been done with short fiction in other states? looks very Melburnian to me, and of course, great fiction too.

I am also lining up to read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, on loan from eldest daughter, and really enjoying browsing this, my own Christmas present to me, purchased on the advice of the lovely Daniel at Artisan Books.

If you are ridiculously well off, then here's a link to some of the originals in a gallery. Those, I cannot afford.

The book is a beautifully produced and quite adequate substitute, for the price, and has an absorbing introductory essay about the garden at Eichstatt, the production of the florilegium and its early publishing history. And it's available from the brilliant Artisan Books in Gertrude Street, next door to Vixen (full of more things I can't afford) and just up the hill a little from Arcadia, whose incredible brekkie burgers I can afford.

Be nice to your kitchen cupboards, y'all. Unless you like cardboard boxes, that is.

Today is also incredibly special, windy and hot as it is, as I have (gasp) no more teenagers in my family. How did that happen? I blinked and there it was. Happy birthday, Pat - and many more.

not really blogging at all, resting up a treat

Interrupting the interregnum to report:

(a) you can vote for the best literature blog in the Weblog Awards for 2008, but be warned - the field is very limited, and one person has a ridiculous number of fans voting. (Gee, I wonder who that could be...)

(b) some terrific blogging over at the State Library's Summer Read, from Ann Blainey (from a boat, no less), Greg de Moore and Dennis McIntosh, whose posts on his memoir of life as a shearer, Beaten By A Blow, are quite affecting.

(c) the flowers at Cloudehill gardens in the Dandenongs are looking amazing.

As we were.