reeling and writhing

is the warwick prize the moving edge of the prize economy?

Is the Warwick Prize a prize with a difference, detecting, as China Miéville suggests here, the 'moving edge' of writing?

Is there such a thing, and can it be detected simply by throwing all kinds of writing against a wall and telling judges to take their pick? News on the inaugural award, to Naomi Klein for The Shock Doctrine, is here.

"At a time when the news out of the publishing industry is usually so bleak it's thrilling to be part of a bold new prize supporting writing, especially alongside such an exciting array of other books," Klein said on learning of her win.

She beat a hugely varied shortlist which ranged from scientific theory to Spanish fiction to take the award, seeing off strong competition from Mad, Bad and Sad, Lisa Appignanesi's intricate study of the relationship between women and mental illness, and Alex Ross's Guardian first book award-winning history of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise.

Francisco Goldman's investigation into the murder of Guatemalan bishop Juan Gerardi, The Art of Political Murder, Stuart A Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred and the solitary novel on the shortlist, Enrique Vila-Matas's study of an obsessive writer, Montano's Malady, completed the line-up.

what is past, or passing, or to come

It sounds like this is going to be a massive hit, and I have ordered my copy (and what a great title for a first novel). I am enjoying Sleepers Almanac no. 5 as we speak.

In other news, a journal of epistemology has published a special issue on Wikipedia, with an article by an ex-founder, Larry Sanger, 'The Fate of Expertise After Wikipedia'. Link via if:book, the blog at the Institute for the Future of the Book.

It looks as though the ABC Radio National Book Show has a listeners' blog of sorts - not sure how long this project, LetterVox, will run, but it includes audio and video as well as text. Publishing can be done through the ABC's online publishing space, Pool. Clever.

This is not really good news for cataloguers, I suppose, but it's still laudable activity on the part of said flash crowd. There are worse things they could do than catalogue a bird or two.

And here's my obligatory sample from that priceless news filter that does magnificent service also as Maud Newton's blog. Don't laugh at my jokes too much, people will say we're in love...

till human voices wake us, and we drown

As Angela has already announced (damn!), Stephen Romei, the editor of the Australian Literary Review, has followed his counterpart in the UK's example and started a blog at the paper. The title is neat.
He has stiff competition in Mr Stothard, who has been remembering Dante in the newsagent's: but I think he'll pull up pretty well if early posts are any indication.

I did not know Kate Eltham, CEO of the Queensland Writers' Centre, has a blog, nor that it covers digital publishing matters assiduously.

She has a goodlooking list of digital publishing links in her sidebar, and last month was following the development of a POD arm at Harper Collins' new social networking site for writers, Authonomy (not quite as 'authonomous' as we might have thought, she seems to be saying here.) She got a response from HC overnight, and others are commenting to the effect that HC should watch the bloggers, and 'kick softly.' Sounds like a fair warning to me.

wall to wall intelligentsia at the Potter this summer

Update: hear more about this exhibition at Radio National's Artworks program for the rest of March, here.

Intelligentsia, a retrospective exhibition of Louis Kahan's celebrated portrait series for Meanjin, has opened at one of my favourite art spaces, the quietly shiny Potter gallery at Melbourne University. A goodly crowd turned out in searing heat last Wednesday on February 29 to hear guest curator Vivien Gaston and writerly/academic representative and poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe speak on the singular experience of standing in a room full of 'faces with thoughts inside' as Wallace-Crabbe so succinctly put it.

One of Kahan's portraits of Patrick White is on display - another garnered the Archibald Prize in 1962 - as well as many fine ink drawings of top writers and thinkers published in Meanjin from 1955 to 1974, including a couple of people I used to know and barely recognised, as of course they were MUCH younger then. Also on display is a video of writers included in the portrait series talking about Meanjin - I did glimpse Dame Mary Gilmore, but will return to watch it in a quieter moment as I could not hear very much of what was said.

Of the process of sitting for Kahan, historian Geoffrey Blainey is quoted as saying, "When I left, I had a slight feeling that I had been x-rayed."
Poet Fay Zwicky is quoted in Gaston's notes, which can be found on the Potter site:

'it seemed an easy thing to do, to sit

and let the master work his miracle,

humming away over black pots and nibs,

the sunny room, the light, the harmless ease of it.'

There are some beautiful photographs of Kahan at work in his studio too.*

This is quite a show, and I am assuming that some of these were among portraits by Kahan collected in a volume by Melbourne University Press in 1981, Australian Writers: the Face of Literature. The mind boggles at the thought of the cost of similar commissions for such a journal today. Many thoughts, many voices, indeed, and Kahan's inimitable style, fluid and emotionally intelligent, unites them all.

My favourites at first viewing I think are the captivating, surprisingly angular Patrick White portrait, the Miles Franklin, Francis Webb, Marjorie Barnard, Alan Marshall and the series of dinner sketches capturing Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray-Smith and a bunch of others at Meanjin's 21st anniversary dinner. There's a sense of listening in over their faces, rather than their shoulders, that's quite arresting. (So nice of Ms Gaston to pop all the notes on the website like this. Made to blog, and I hope they stay there.)

Louis Kahan was born in Vienna in 1905, and had a rich and fascinating creative life in Europe, North Africa and the US before coming to Australia in 1950. He was qualified as a master tailor, like his father, but used his father's customers as his first artistic models before taking on portraiture in the Army in the Second World War, where he felt his true artistic apprenticeship was served:

From 1943-5 Kahan began his personal contribution to the war effort, drawing thousands of portraits of wounded allied soldiers, mostly Americans, signing them modestly "by a guy from Paris". Copies of these portraits on 'Victory Mail' were sent to loved ones back home and many of the original drawings are held in War Museums in Australia and the United Kingdom.

In 2005 several hundred of these were presented to the Red Cross Museum in Washington by his family. Through these portraits, Kahan honed his skills and his ability to capture the essence of his subject with economy and speed. These qualities proved useful on his return to Paris after the war, when Kahan was employed as a staff artist by Le Figaro to cover the war trials of Pétain and other collaborators and they remained the hallmarks of his work.

(http://louiskahan.com)

He designed sets and costumes for the National Ballet and Sadler's in the UK as well as for Australian theatre and opera productions, and on his 90th birthday his peers awarded him the Australian Painters and Sculptors Medal, an honour given only to a handful of artists. More about his remarkable life and work, here; I hope to borrow Lou Klepac's 1990 bio soon from a public library near me.

Kahan drew painters and musicians in Australia as well as writers, and clearly had developed the art of capturing the face of creativity, if that's not too hackneyed a way to come at it. My thanks to Dena Kahan for inviting me to the opening, a truly moving and momentous occasion in Melbourne life and letters.

The exhibition will be at the gallery on Swanston Street (near the corner of Elgin Street) until April 22nd.

fire: a brief journal

(Sunday a.m., the morning I got up, opened the browser, read about Marysville and made these notes)

When I was in Healesville for a week late last year, doing some quiet stuff on my own, I kicked over the traces on my last day and hired a car and drove to Marysville.
Today  I hear it's the last time I will see it. There is possibly one building standing in the town. We stayed there on a hot Easter weekend once, one of the very first holidays we had away as a family that we paid money for (yes, we've been borrowing houses for evah.)

On the last day I was there, I bought lollies in the lolly shop, bought some antipasto bits and bobs to put in my pasta for my final dinner alone that night, walked into the model toys shop and asked questions about the road to Woods Point,  met a young fellow who quite probably had Asperger's who asserted that Wicked would finish now 'because Rob Guest is dead', and ambled along the river through one of the prettiest caravan parks in all Victoria, thinking it might be nice to come back and camp there sometime.

I walked back to the Information Centre and out through Gallipoli Park, where the entire population of the township is sheltering this morning,* and admired a wisteria colonnade in full bloom. Unfortunately I took no photographs. I can't believe that now. I went off then on the Woods Point road for a little bit to look at some myrtle beech thickets along there that I'm fond of, at an old culvert in the forest, and an old settlement at Cambarville that I hadn't been brave enough to drive up to the last time we were there.

I am crying for Marysville. It was full of guesthouses and holiday cottages, including the landmark Cumberland convention centre, and as pretty as a picture: there is a spot near the bridge and the main road that was magnificent. It is horrible to think how it must look this morning (and later that night, as first film emerges, I cannot look).

The Black Spur area no doubt has a history of burned out establishments - there is a History of Healesville Guesthouses book in the library at Healesville where every third or fourth place was burned down due to lack of water to put the fire out (this was a problem till the Maroondah Dam was built sometime around the '20s.)

Notes later in this week of horrors:

I heard later on Sunday that Marysville missed the fires in '39 and '83. I'm still numb. I will always miss it and its kind people. Kinglake, too, I know fairly well - I've driven through it on foggy days and marvelled at how high it sits above the northeast.
Where are we headed with all this?
Still on Marysville, harping in my distress, I find that fortunately a fellow called Ben took photos a while back, on the Net for all to see. I was going to post one, but I think the conversation there is a better resting place for this story.

This was all I could come up with this week. David has come up with something much more lucid, here. It is overwhelming.
One more post, which I drafted last week before all this, and then I'm having a blog rest, letting the shock settle. If it ever does.

I think I'll get my youngest son to string my old guitar back to right hander, I have a difficult young man living here who has no idea what's going on in the world, and I feel the need.

*Unfortunately, fewer of them than was first thought. And regrettably there is much more to read here about all the Victorian fires.

of writers who blog

Margo Lanagan's advice is dispensed at Summer Read this week, and all the rest of the time here. What a writer, what a blogger.

Susan Johnson has been making writerly notes here, also, following up some leads on that struggling writer par excellence, Richard Yates.
 I like the quote from Mr Porter at the end very much.

And author and critic (and contributing ABR editor) James Bradley has been blogging here for the last couple of months. Do note his discussion of book reviewing, carried on from a post on Matilda. I have a brief response to his questions in the comments scribbled in a notebook...I will get back there eventually.

one book to bring them all

From Constance, at Ruminations:

One book you’re currently reading: The Broken Shore by Peter Temple (and a nice change it is, too!)

One book that changed your life: Anne Kotzmann's Listen to Me, Listen to You

One book you’d want on a desert island: Dictionary of Literary Biography, although it would be a bit of a fucking tease after a while as none of the source materials would be available, would they?

One book you’ve read more than once: Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

One book you’ve never been able to finish: Never say never...

One book that made you laugh: The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi

One book that made you cry: Little House on Rocky Ridge, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, for children, by Roger Lea MacBride. Something sick and twisted inside me admires those frontier landgrabbers, Charles and Mary Ingalls. Because they were cheerful - grand daughter Rose speaks here of spending time with Grandma and Aunt Mary in their later life and their indefatigable ability to stay positive - 'doesn't the rain sound good on that nice warm roof over our heads'. That Pollyanna thing, only tougher, more Fordian around the edges. 

Somewhere in that book a family friend or relative recounts that the older Ingalls were never really the same after Mary was disabled. They had counted on her to be the 'clever' girl, the schoolteacher, and their self-esteem, that insouciant restlessness that Laura celebrates in every book where her father features, apparently took quite a beating. It is quite hard to reread the books in that context, especially The Long Winter. She was a flinty chronicler, that one.

One book you keep rereading: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One book you’ve been meaning to read: The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

One book you believe everyone should read: not known to me. I was given a hard time for failing to embrace other people's recommendations when I was young, and I'm still in recovery.

five floors of books - imagine

Kim has been exploring the Queen's bookshop, as you do. This is a great post, and I am glad she got in before the snow show.

“First publication is a pure, carnal leap in the dark which one dreams is life.” If this was all she had said, I think she would still be noticed. Hortense Calisher died a few weeks ago, aged 97, in the US.
There is an obituary here.

Something else to read - as well as Stephany's blog all the time, which is magnificently good.
(This I salvaged from last year's news, it was too good to throw away.)

I agree with the eds at the Literary Saloon that the US cover of the Penguin reissue of The Vivisector is indeed a shocker.

And I think there would be whole epics in Naked Man. But let New Yorkers have their fun.

interview with Tsiolkas at LiteraryMinded gives the lay of the land

'Richard Ford reminds me to look around at my world anew, to take nothing for granted. He is the best antidote for this false culture of celebrity and excessive materialism that I know.'
Christos Tsiolkas spoke to Angela Meyer at LiteraryMinded last week. It's a terrific interview so do set aside half an hour and read it.

The interest in Ford is quite significant, when one thinks about it - Ford is also quite happy to let his own racism be queried, to leave nothing uncovered in the quest to understand modern life. It is not a connection I would have made on my own, so a fascinating one to unearth in such a discussion, and thanks are due to Angela for getting this down. Great stuff.