reeling and writhing

in which the master cheers up a bit

"A girl home from America is different from a girl home from England," he says. "She will go as one person and come back as someone else, with a new wardrobe, a suntan and new manners, even a new confidence."

-Colm Toibin, speaking to Robert McCrum (he didn't link to that post, though.)

Tagged to:buy on delicious, then - Brooklyn, and MJH's newie. (And why the hell didn't he just talk to her, then? old enough to know better, I think.)

the concrete islander is no more

R.I.P., and three cheers for the man who, like Elizabeth Jolley after him, was told his writing was fully sick.
Via Martin Edmond at Luca Antara, this 1997 article for Salon on William Burroughs, where J.G. Ballard famously wrote that:

'The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.'

Touchingly, Neil Gaiman (he of #Neil Webfail fame) writes that he felt if he said nothing on his blog, it might keep Ballard alive a little longer.
 And speaks feelingly of how terrifyingly ordinary the man was:

"... I don't know what or who I had been expecting, but Jim Ballard, then, and whenever I met him after that, was terrifying in his ordinariness, like the protagonists of his high-rises and drowned worlds, like the man on the motorway island."

The Guardian is all over it, demonstrating with minimal effort how an online newspaper space can do all the book news work if it really wants to. Stories I enjoyed included this one, where Ballard describes his writing space, which included a painting he looked at nearly every day,(fittingly, a copy of a destroyed original), and a chair he probably sat on as a child.
Here he tells how the pram in the hall saved his writing.

I haven't checked yet, but this interview with music writer Simon Reynolds at Ballardian in 2007 may have assisted Reynolds in compiling his recent article for Salon.
Here's a fine excursion from some time ago by our very own David Tiley into Ballardian landscapes - don't forget to look at the Detroit Blog link.

And finally, let the true believers speak. Here's the opening of Simon Sellars' interview for Ballardian in 2006.

Here’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels; instead he devours ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, it’s Robson rather than Ballard who puts me in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

The whole of the Ballardian site is a treasure trove, enjoy.

now gods, stand up for carnies

Maud has reviewed Will Elliot's terrific debut novel, The Pilo Family Circus, now published in the US by Underland Press, for NPR. (I reviewed it for the Australian Literary Review when it was published here, in the October issue in 2006.)

Maud's review is at NPR in the Books We Like segment.

She quotes from its introduction in which a 'literary bigtop master', Katherine Dunn, compares the book to 'Kafka, Chandler, Swift, Orwell, King and The Three Stooges.' There's an excerpt to read.

I called The Pilo Family Circus " a fiery allegory for our times, a Jungian dragonfest in which there is a kind of twisted honour amongst slaves, thieves and carnies." (Not online, unfortunately.) So I am mightily pleased to see it's being read by the haute bloggerie and hope it rises to attention elsewhere as well in the States, having attracted some strong notices in the UK on its publication there in 2007.

Elliot has written an essay for Largehearted Boy's Book Notes feature, too, and you can read it here. He has a memoir coming out with ABC books next week, and is currently at work on a fantasy project, The Pendulum Trilogy. I shall have to start a category called 'Go You Good Thing'.

(belated) happy birthday to the Complete Review

Ten candles for the Complete Review.
Ten years old. My word.  Michael Orthofer muses on a decade, and resolves to sign his name to more reviews in future.

The Complete Review (founded in 1999) and its attendant blog, The Literary Saloon (around 2002), continue to set a very high benchmark for all literature blogs with an international readership. It's hard to believe one person is behind most of it - he does have a team of multilingual readers and reviewers, I know, but claims responsibility for the architecture and (gasp) the enduring URLS therein.
Then there's the eclectic news service - where else would I find a report like this straight from an Indian source on railway book stalls? (regrettably Outlook India has killed their own link within that story.)

Bravo, Michael and team, long may you run.

we are the slow bloggers

There be a Meanjin blog, with name Spike, where high-quality content is just pouring in, including editor Sophie Cunningham's top-notch travelogue pieces. Google Reader has discovered its feed - just look at that! how pretty! so I can kill the Twitter feed now.(Well, I might...and I might not.)

Recently George Dunford has posted there on blogged novels (I hear also that Max Barry is publishing his latest online in serial format; the indefatigable Angela Meyer of the fabulous LiteraryMinded site at Crikey has interviewed him here. Links via Matilda.)

At the Overland blog it is business as usual, with a spirited post from Jeff Sparrow about writers being ...well, generally boring folk.

In other Australian blog news, Perry is going to work through Jamie Grant's 100 Australian Poems on a weekly basis, which will make for some excellent reading. Go, you good thing. And Sarsaparilla Lite is well and truly in place pending the resurrection of that original flavour of cultural commentary.

And at Ragged Claws, comme d'habitude, there's plenty to talk about. Not always strickly Orstralian, but lots of commenters and a great new talking space. I am grateful to James Bradley who first alerted me to its presence at his excellent blog, City Of Tongues (word is on the street that it's having a makeover, so watch that space for a possible name change.)

With all of this sparkling, nay, champagne blogging going on (including everything on The Rachel Papers), it makes me wonder, in a Bex-and-a- lie-down context of course, what could I possibly be missing about Australian books and writing on Twitter?

It does feel funny to be old media in a twinkling like that.

(ReadWriteWeb says Twitter has grown faster in Oz than - well, anywhere, recently. Just look at that graph. I assure you, my brain is way too small and wizened, and I am no part of it.)

Poetry reviews: Kate Middleton, Adam Aitken

Review copies provided.

Poetry is the only whole thinking - Les Murray, being a tad essentialist.

Discuss. (Only kidding.) I'm commencing an irregular feature here, which you will see belongs to the plain-with-links school of poetry reviewing. My efforts are guided by the instructive and plain-speaking reviewers at the excellent online poetry magazine, foam:e, and by good poetry reviewers - well, everywhere. But especially by Derek Motion and Louise Waller, whose straight talking ways I admire.

Kate Middleton, Fire Season. Giramondo, 2009.

Kate Middleton is a Melbourne poet, musician and librettist. According to ABR, in 2002 she wrote the libretto for the opera Lapse, by Alan Lee, which was performed at Melba Hall and the Museum of Victoria.

In 2005 the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra premiered Natalie Williams's orchestral suite Scheherezade's Nights based on her poems.

In the spare, sinewy title poem of this collection she suggests, with some clairvoyance, that fire is 'something about heroism and the weight of stone /Something about ash.'
Her poem, 'Rainbow's End', published in this collection, won the 2006 Bruce Dawe poetry prize and you can read it here.

This is her first book of poetry, though she is widely published - these two poems on the ABR website are both in this collection, whereas 'Dispatches', at Cordite, is not. Clearly there was plenty to select from - the volume comprises 36 poems and one suite.

The arrangement of the poems reflects the publishing process - they have all clearly appeared as solo items, or maybe in the occasional duet. Nonetheless there are recurring preoccupations with old American film stars, minotaurs, satin, Italy, flowers and love reticulated through classical and literary heroes' lives. The poem 'Desdemona', sitting between a minotaur and a film star, is, like the play, really about Othello, and stunning:

He sings: gentle Moorish notes.
Discerns: the fineness of Canterbury lace. (Who
evern dreamed of such a man?)

Lowering hand over flame
enclosing the fire
within.
A special pleasure
and squalor,
                        blood in the fingertips. Pain
is not pain. Put out
the light.

It is not surprising that a graduate of composition might allow images to reverberate through her first collection, like counterpoint. As with most contemporary poetry, it is necessary to make imaginative leaps sometimes (and here I agree with Derek Motion, writing of Michael Farrell here, that this is not always an easy thing to do, but that nonetheless we should try.)

The poems I enjoyed the most were:
'Fire Season', the sly humour of 'Morning Sonnet', all the film star poems which are very dry, 'Scheherazade's Nights', though I do not understand why bullets are indulged in section 4, 'The Lovers' Holocaust', 'Your Feet', and 'Penelope on the Night of Odysseus' Homecoming'.
There are a couple of poems with wanting at their core that are remarkable, and while a trifle overdecorative ( probably the whole point), 'On A Bronzino in the Uffizi, Florence', finishes with a clever flourish arising from what must have been an irresistible line to play with, if it's original (help me out here, if you know! who does this sound like?):

                                    Her eyes
enumerate a decalogue of sorrows

In another humorous poem, Fat Ben Jonson, she speaks wittily of the "slender line", and certainly is able to cast a wider range of muscular phrases than that undernourished description might suggest.
I'll leave you with the enjoyable thought of this not so new poet counting  down that decalogue:

great riches and heavy fabrics, silence,
soft lips, ribbons and rings, books and bows,
white knuckles and eyes looking down the centuries
that never shed a tear.

Adam Aitken, Eighth Habitation. Giramondo, 2009.

To Mr Aitken, then - this is his fourth collection and though I have read some reviews I am not familiar with his earlier books. Works in this collection have appeared in a whole swathe of publications from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Australia and the US.
Of particular merit within this book is a long suite of poems about Cambodia. Aitken introduces the accounts of French colonial diarists as more than simply padding in his Cambodian poems – that of naturalist Henri Mouhot is a rich reworking, even though Aitken claims:

Let’s be modest, your notes were
hasty, rough, with no claim to any merit
but to record the truth.
Destined as good books are
to see the light.

And also destined, I think, to give Aitken a poem where he can revisit l'Indochine:

These days it is not so easy
to discover anything
or to re-discover anything
let alone die looking...

Now we will know how the hunter
was once truly beautiful…

Though he is quick to counter Mouhot’s seductive influence with a brief homage to the deeply cynical trade commissioner Louis de Carne, who predicted India would fall into the hands of Australians:

…I could write all night in my tent
Cobwebbed in ennui and
Sucking on the leg bone of an iguana,
Or recline under the implacable serenity of the heavens,
The all-powerful constraints
Of influences so fatal to human personality
That thought dies away by degrees
Like a flame in a vacuum.

(You can read the whole poem and another, 'Francais', here.)

There is almost nothing of landmines here save the fearsome 'The Scream', but chilling echoes of cruelty are everywhere – try ‘The Wearer of Amulets’ on for size. This suite of poems (has it been published on its own?) builds tenaciously into an indictment of the '70s reign of terror in Cambodia, punctuated by a curious set of aubades (no less than six of them), probably worth reading in sequence themselves, in one of which Aitken wearily complains:

There are poets you know
who hardly sleep.
Your method is different.

The last poem in this sequence, addressed to a Cambodian writer as the person speaking throughout these poems leaves the country, suggests that not enough people can speak of the terror even now (he was last in Cambodia to work on these poems in 2008). The writer he addresses was married off, "let's say at gunpoint":

To forget or not to,
to write or not to – therefore live –
to forgive the monster
is this impossible question

Those who do not read
are still with us
and so few of you who write
with any skill or beauty

We move forward all the same, dear friend
back and forward
across the moat
one more time.

The opening sequence is titled Broken/Unbroken (echoing Jill Jones' prize-winning collection Broken/Open) and contains a poem on fire 'in the Sydney style' in which he pays tribute to Robert Adamson's denims, a poem about relatives and war, a beautiful, resigned poem on Gallipoli ('Ionian'), and the pellucid and quite mysterious 'Force Zero'.

Crossing Lake Toba contains other poems about South-East Asia - Malaysia, Singapore and post 12/02 Bali all accounted for at various points in their histories, as well as a great nine page conversation in tercets with his mother about the niceties of a retiring life in Cairns.

Though I did not, one might read the Cambodian poems first, and then work back - the intensity of that suite certainly lends its power to rereadings of the whole collection. I'm sure it's a part of Eighth Habitation I will visit again. Aitken has a travel and poetry blog with many photos of his Cambodian sojourn, here.

Kate Middleton, Fire Season: Adam Aitken, Eighth Habitation. Both from Giramondo Publishing, 2009.

news flash: Readings shop to open at State Library of Victoria

This news, just to hand.

And this as well - I've read three of them, for once, and loved The Pages and Breath as well as this. Might just pick up Ice anyway, because 'I'm worth it'.

(If you'd like a chance to win them all, enter the Readings competition.)

if it ain't broke...

At nine minutes to midnight, please consider the arguments against lifting copyright restrictions to the parallel importation of books in Australia, currently being proposed by the Productivity Commission. The impact upon authors is described persuasively by Alison Croggon (with links to others), here at Sarsaparilla Lite.

There is a small but significant fact that is being glossed by booksellers’ blithe claims that authors “still earn their royalties”. I earn a significantly higher percentage of royalties from books sold in Australia than from those sold overseas. Books that are published and sold here earn me the full 10 per cent royalty of the cover price. Books that are sold in overseas markets often have a smaller royalty – ranging from 6 to 8 per cent – and after that, under the agreements from my original publisher, I lose from 25 to 50 per cent of the gross royalty to the original publisher. This is a standard agreement which publishers all over the world use to ensure that their initial investment in an author is financially recognised....
Territorial copyright is a right for all authors in the United Kingdom and America. Neither of those countries, for good reason, is considering abolishing this protection for their own authors.

This is a clear and incisive post which lays out the case against lifting the copyright restrictions after 12 months, as proposed by the Productivity Commission, very clearly indeed.
The Empty Pages blog at Queensland Writers' Centre reports that there will be a demonstration outside Dymocks in Brisbane by children's authors tomorrow in response to the unusual step taken by Dymocks last week in asking its customers to sign a petition in favour of the changes proposed by the Productivity Commission.

A recent update from Bookseller and Publisher magazine here provides a link to a petition form online for the public's use at the Australians for Australian Books website, in response to the Dymocks customer petition. The AusBooks petition will form part of the APA's final submission to the Productivity Commission.  Most of this news from B&P is freely available. Read on.

subversion on the cover

Europeana reports that its interactive features are now fully functional. If you haven't yet checked out this mammoth digital project with search tentacles reaching across Europe's museums and archives, maybe it's time.

Beautiful writing from this lady, as always. Not as frequent as she was, but Dervala Hanley is still close to the best of my web in the life writing category.

As Ron Hogan noted last week, it was Helen Sweetstory's birthday and she is 59. That would have been a swell party.

Haven't been reading Mr Rosen for a while, but hey, he's sure been busy.

I do not think we will be able to ignore this book when it comes out. Talk of putting colour back into your life (or your books)!!

Finally, more of Waugh from Picador. Amazing.

help! there's a comedian in my family and she still collects McDonald's toys

Very kind review from Mr Watts.

Go Mighty Ducks. And their hats.

(Google alerts for A Lot Of Bread are to be avoided, by the way. A Lot Of People write about Bread on their blogs.

Hats and ducks, on the other hand bring up all sorts of rural posts with quite a bit of character.)

Also the Breadsters won themselves a Trades Hall competition with a kooky video last night, about fax machines that play the Fireman Sam
theme. There's still time to catch them with two weeks of shows left, Wednesdays to Saturdays, 9.30pm at Trades Hall.

And here's last year's Age review from the Fringe anyway. Because I Can.

The Age, October 5 2008.

Coen brothers will have a second pass at True Grit

The excellent new book reviews site
The Second Pass has told me that a Coen brothers (should that be Brothers?) adaptation of True Grit is in the offing, and that it will be closer to the book than the earlier very famous film with this chap.

Which sent me back to a post from Papercuts, the New York Times blog, about an earlier review of Charles Portis' novel, where I was thrilled to find an extract from Donna Tartt's introduction to a new edition which makes it clear that this book is right up Joel and Ethan's alleyway:

Portis is such a genius of a literary mimic that the book reads less like a novel than a first-hand account: the Wild West of the 1870s, as recollected in a spinster’s memory and filtered through the sedate sepia tones of the early 1900s. Mattie’s narrative tone is naïve, didactic, hard-headed, and completely lacking in self-consciousness – and, at times, unintentionally hilarious, rather in the manner of Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters.”

And like “The Young Visiters” (which is largely delightful because it views the most absurd Victorian crotchets as obvious common sense), a great part of “True Grit’s” charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses.

She quotes scripture; she explains and gives advice to the reader; her observations are often overlaid with a decorative glaze of Sunday School piety. And her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters – lawman and outlaws alike – to richly comic effect, as when Rooster remarks austerely of a young prisoner he has brought back alive to stand trial: “I should have put a ball in that boy’s head instead of his collarbone. I was thinking about my fee. You will sometimes let money interfere with your notion of what is right.”

Can't wait.

Review: The Diamond Anchor by Jennifer Mills

Review copy provided.
The foreword to the peripatetic Australian   
writer Jennifer Mills' first novel, like the opening lines of a tale from Hans Christian Anderson, sets up the framework for the whole book, though we do not realise it until we are about two-thirds through.

May McCabe and Grace Harper have wrestled in their adult lives to forget their early passion for each other, and the book is framed as a tale told by one of them in her old age, the one who stayed behind and seems to have melted into the cliffs of Coal, a fictional mining town somewhere in New South Wales.

    May, the proprietor of her family’s hotel, the Diamond Anchor, tells most of the story, as she did in childhood. She is responding to a letter from Grace, long gone from Coal, writing to May that she wishes to open up the past once more, to find out:

“who broke whom, who pushed whom away, who cast the first stone, who can say what split our path into two distinct forks like the tongue of a snake?”

Although the retelling is at length and as detailed as a tapestry, I believe the space taken is warranted, unlike some reviewers who feel this book has overstayed its length. When you pull back at the end and start to reconsider the imagery, the frame, and the movement of the story back on itself like a swallowing snake, the length is justifiable, and signalled clearly at the beginning when seventy-year old May says she is trying ‘to find the thread of the story, to place the lines. To pick up the end of the rope that will pull you home.’ 

Mills allows space for the kind of detail familiar to readers of that great ethnic storyteller of Nova Scotia, Alistair McLeod. Even though she may not be writing of her own people, as he does (is she? I don’t know), the world she creates has a texture that reminds me of his work – toughly lyrical, clean cut but able to incite smoke, mist and seascape to deliver colour and sensuality at an instant. The effects are quietly intoxicating, if slow to build at times - but then, so is McLeod's best work.

I  have been watching Ms Mills for a little while and asked for a review copy of this book because I knew it would be worth investigating, and I am not disappointed. It is important to be patient with the slow building towards the final moments of the book, and with the elusiveness of Grace throughout. Mills has set herself an exacting exercise in allowing one protagonist to both deliver what is essentially a two-hander and to build a place and its people, and the way she carries it out is impressive. Her writing of country is quietly, sombrely magnificent, and her intelligent braiding together of politics of several kinds with their histories and her characters is impressive. This is somebody to keep watching.

Update - this fine interview with Mills at the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Diamond Anchor, by Jennifer Mills. UQP Press, 2009.