reeling and writhing

Inaugural Stella Prize: speeches and reports

The Wheeler Centre's daily posting provided terrific coverage of the recent awarding of the inaugural Stella Prize to Carrie Tiffany, for Mateship With Birds. 

So far this is the best summary given anywhere of Helen Garner's "unexpected...generous and insightful" speech:

....instead of celebrating the concept of prizes, she talked about the ‘terrible anxieties’ they provoke in the potential contenders and their ‘bizarre effect … on people’s idea of their own worth’.

She also spoke of ‘the undeniable fact that every girl who writes needs a bucket of cash to be thrown over her at least once in a lifetime so she can soldier on, and even to make her feel for a while that it’s been worth the torture’.

Garner said she would steer clear of explicitly defending the existence of a prize for women’s writing. But she did talk about the need for its existence, referencing a former writer-husband who told her ‘women can’t be artists’ and gender issues to do with cover design.

‘How wonderful it would be if one day, such a prize no longer had any use. If doctors and lawyers no longer said to me, 'Nice to meet you Helen, my wife’s read all your books.’ If designers no longer reflexively put a vase of flowers on the front of a woman’s book, even a book that is about hypodermics and vomiting and rage.'

‘We know in our hearts that women can write, can be artists,’ she said. ‘But we’re so easily disheartened and sabotaged, even by ourselves.’

The Stella Prize website has posted remarks by Kerryn Goldsworthy, chair of the judging panel, on the winning book:

If you go to Carrie Tiffany’s website and click on ‘Gallery’, it will take you to some images of small, delicate, mysterious sculptures made of plants, creatures and written words. Follow the link from there to ‘Soil Box’ and you can see the most complex and detailed of these sculptures, and read her detailed description of how this artwork was put together. In this account, she writes, ‘Art starts with noticing.’

Her second novel, Mateship with Birds, is a triumph of noticing and, having noticed, of carefully, meticulously assembling the things that have been noticed into a novel that shows, on almost every page, not just an eye for detail, but also a conviction that every detail is in some way connected and that the connections have meaning. Mateship with Birds seems like a natural extension of Tiffany’s sculptures: her skills in the meticulous piecing-together of fragments are apparent in this novel, where she uses several different kinds of text – letters, diaries, homework, nature notes – to weave a single strong narrative showing the interconnectedness of all things, and supported by a broad and generous world view.

Mateship with Birds is a deceptively gentle-looking novel whose calm surface belies its many sharp and frank observations about the world.

Read more, and then please read both of Tiffany's novels: they are both inviting, fascinating works which approach rural life with attention and intensity. The whole Stella longlist is well worth your consideration and invites us all to read more Australian women's writing. I've already earmarked/purchased Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel and Courtney Collins' The Burial, but there is plenty of fine reading to be had from that list.

Randolph Stow around the webs

I have noticed two fine articles on Randolph Stow's life and work in the last month.

One, at Overland, by Alison Croggon, is a review of The Land's Meaning: New and Selected Poems which places Stow firmly as an important, even singular poet of solitude and silence:

 Stow’s poems have a resonant quality of speech forced out of solitude, a sense of intense privacy that has all the fascination of enigma, but they are nevertheless public acts. As Stow says in his novel Tourmaline, ‘I find there is no speech that is not soliloquy. And yet, always, I sense an audience.’

Audiences, of course, are multiple and unexpected. One never knows where the message will wash up, what meanings will ripple out from the motion of the poem, ‘under way’ in all its different voyages. As Kinsella says, ‘his writing itself did its own things, and forever remains the zone of those who read it’. This is true of all writing: but it seems particularly apt of Stow, whose starkly painful lyricism seems to carve out and inhabit a space of pure metaphor that has the capacity to strike deeply into the silences of others.

The second is an essay by Gabrielle Carey from Kill Your Darlings no.12, free to read online. Carey is writing a book on Stow and her essay is partly based on the inaugural Randolph Stow Memorial Lecture, which she gave at the University of Western Australia in 2011.

The lecture bore the title  "Getting to Know Randolph Stow:  towards a portrait of the artist as a young man", and the essay deals in part with how he struggled to be understood in Australia. I am looking forward to reading her book.

a pile of stuff #32 (including launches I missed, books you can buy)

Ron Hogan, a stalwart of the US book blogging scene, has launched a video recommendations site called The Handsell, which will match different authors and publishers with readers every month. Via Melville House.

Luke Beesley launched Brett Dionysius' new collection, Bowra, on Friday 12 April at The Alderman in Brunswick East. Purchase this new  Whitmore Press publication here.

Once more, my daughter treads the Comedy Festival boards, this time with her snappy little Fringe show, Olympik Phever.

By a stroke of luck, it's at the Forum, which warranted some family shots of the massive poster outside. 

If you want to know what she is doing in this picture, you'd better catch the show before it finishes this week. 

Melbourne writer, editor and reviewer Jo Case was interviewed on Life Matters at the ABC last week, so listen here to her talk about her memoir on parenting her child with Asperger's. Boomer and Me is life-writing I have been very eager to read, particularly as some of it took shape on a blog I used to read a lot, not so long ago. Here's the first chapter, courtesy of the publishers. Congratulations Jo!

As well as being a well-known published writer, Jane Gleeson-White is such a fine blogger! one of the few soloists out there now writing longer posts for us, and I am saving up these beautiful posts on a lecture recently given by Margaret Wertheim for later. I think you would love them too.

 

 

Peter Porter poetry prize ceremony on 27 March:book your place

The Peter Porter poetry prize will be awarded on 27 March in Southbank, Melbourne at a ceremony at Australian Book Review's offices at Boyd.

The work of five poets has been selected and can be read in the latest issue of ABR, so you'd better pick one up, or subscribe, if you want to find out what Nathan Curnow, A. Frances Johnson, Dan Disney, John Kinsella and John A. Scott have entered.  Go on and put yourself out of suspense...and in the meantime enjoy making an educated guess at who may win out of that distinguished field.

Invitations to the ceremony are open to all, but bookings are required:

The ceremony will be held in Studio 2 at Boyd, Southbank, Melbourne at 6 p.m. on 27 March. This is a free event but reservations are essential:rsvp@australianbookreview. com.au or (03) 9699 8822

Zoe Dattner finds shiny tools for change in New York

I enjoyed reading Zoe Dattner's conference report a couple of weeks ago in Bookseller and Publisher magazine (now known as Books and Publishing, thanks!) Zoe was present at the eighth Tools of Change conference, convened recently in New York by O'Reilly Media.

While commenting on the depth and breadth of the US book market, she noted some things that she felt were pertinent to the Australian market, in particular the scope for greater support to book events from booksellers, and a better understanding in Australia of the potential of POD (print on demand).

At some length she reported on a session with GoodReads, discussing a survey of 1000 users they conducted recently (I would have loved to know if they have presented at TOC before).

For discovery, Twitter and Facebook score very low. Friends’ recommendations (word of mouth) is the highest. (It is not known, unfortunately, if the word of mouth people refer to comes from social media or person-to-person. My guess is that Twitter and Facebook are actually far more influential, but people consider this the same as word of mouth.) Following this, the best discovery comes from Goodreads itself, and then from media (presumably reviews and media discussion). Discovery via bookstore and the library ‘hold list’ is also very good. (A separate session that gave some fantastic data about libraries made the brilliant point that a library is really a showroom, and one that publishers and booksellers should advocate for.) On the question of why someone buys the book after hearing about it, the top answers were: friends telling you to buy it, general hype, and book clubs. Over 50% of readers said Goodreads reviews helped to convince readers to buy the book.

One of the most valuable points I took away from the Goodreads session was the statistic that 69% of people want to discuss the book with friends after they’ve read it, making me think how much better the industry could get at providing special deals on multiple copies (specifically ebooks) and that there should be better, and stronger, calls to action at the end of the book. Considering the technology available to us—particularly with ePub 3—the possibilities for a ‘What should I read next?’ page at the end of a book are vast.

A last interesting thought from this session was that 49% say they’d be interested in reading a book in serial form instead of waiting six months for the release, but only with an established author, or someone they like, not at all with an unknown author.

Read more here. 

Zoe has kindly supplied the link to the keynote library session she mentions, 'The Library as Ebook Discovery Zone: More Lessons from *Library Journal's* Public Library Patron Research' delivered by Meredith Schwartz. A video link is supplied.

 

 

in The Blue Corner, a striking image of time management from Paul Mitchell

From that well-named blog at Going Down Swinging comes a very good post by poet Paul Mitchell, on how to manage that burning problem  shared by so many Australian writers. I speak of the problem of  failing to build your house in the desert, or in other words, writing for a quid instead of staking all on your masterpiece... oh, you know, working more than one job at a time.

I like the image in the second paragraph here.

Ah, that’s why he hasn’t written a bestseller. Can’t concentrate.

Well, I’d like to. But unlike that icon of writing, Cormac McCarthy, I’m not prepared to build my own stone house in the desert, eat little more than potatoes for several years, and have a series of ‘housekeepers’ type up my manuscripts. I’ve got a youngish family. School bills. All kinds of other bills that are far more creative in pricing than any of my writing.

So I’m a switcheroo.

A friend suggested recently that I am also a ‘spaghetti thinker’. I can pull out a strand of spag (writing) from my saucy brain, work it round in my fingers, gobble it, and then pull out another strand. All without disturbing the whole bowl of pasta. Maybe that’s true. Or I’m just good at time management. Or I am good at switching on and off in short periods. But the question of how switcheroo writers do what we do is probably not as important as how we do it without going insane.

There's also Megan Anderson's terrific looking interview with female Beat poet Hettie Jones, which I am yet to read.

 

James Ley on the virtues of criticism

A question for James Ley, editor of the new Sydney Review of Books, at the Wheeler Centre's blog recently:

Who are some of the critics you admire, and why?

There are lots of them. At a pinch, I would probably nominate William Hazlitt as my favourite critic for the sheer vitality of his prose. But I’d hesitate to choose. The twentieth century produced an extraordinary number of great critics and they all tend to have different virtues. A brilliant close reader like Christopher Ricks can be inspiring, but a bluff journalistic critic like Edmund Wilson can be great on his day too. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has always struck me as a major critical achievement. There are critics I admire because they have taught us to think about culture in new ways, critics like Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes, but in general I tend to be drawn to critics who can combine depth of knowledge with an accessible style, people like Frank Kermode or Susan Sontag, or some of the old New York intellectuals – Elizabeth Hardwick or Lionel Trilling, for example. A lot of the literary theory that was a big deal when I was at university resulted in some very interesting thinking but it didn’t produce much in the way of good writing.

One of the fascinating things about criticism, I think, is that an individual critic’s obsessions, weaknesses and blind spots can be important too, because in their way they can also help to clarify certain arguments and distinctions. I often disagree with James Wood’s criticism, for example, but I invariably enjoy reading him. His anti-‘hysterical realism’ campaign was wrong-headed in all sorts of ways, but it identified a faultline in contemporary fiction and got people talking. Daniel Mendelsohn, Adam Kirsch and Laura Miller are good contemporary critics, and I think Andrew O’Hagan’s cultural criticism is always excellent. There are music critics I like, as well, particularly Alex Ross, Jon Savage and Jim DeRogatis, though of course when it comes to rock criticism you can’t go past the doyen Lester Bangs: fearless, passionate, brilliant, slightly crazed and completely hilarious.

James Ley is the editor of Australia's newest literary publication, the Sydney Review of Books, our (online-only) answer to the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. This is an excerpt of a longer interview.

- The Wheeler Centre: Books, Writing, Ideas

(crossposted at the usual place...)

Prepare The Cabin For Landing: Alan Wearne is ready for take-off tonight at Collected Works

Apologies for not broadcasting this sooner, 

but Alan Wearne's new book of poems,

will be launched tonight at Collected Works bookshop by Owen Richardson.

6pm-8.30pm.

1st Floor, Nicholas Building,

37 Swanston St, Melbourne.

Giramondo & Collected Works Bookshop invite you to the launch of Alan Wearne's new collection of poems, PREPARE THE CABIN FOR LANDING. The launcher will be esteemed Melbourne book reviewer Owen Richardson. 

We quote from Giramondo's blurb :

"Wearne is Australia’s poet-moralist, a master of its idioms, the recorder of its pretensions, and the scourge of its big-noters, con-artists and crooks. In ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’ he pays tribute to Samuel Johnson and Juvenal, ‘who knew that combination of bemusement, annoyance, anger and despair to which your country can drive you, though always aware of its entertainment value and dramatic potential’.

The collection includes an affectionate portrait of three Melbourne high school teachers in the early 1960s, and a saga which records the destinies of their pupils, satires on the world of finance and drug-dealing, literary academics and the libertinism of baby-boomers, and seven new poems based on Australian pop songs.

Alan Wearne’s verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers received major literary awards; his recent collection, The Australian Popular Songbook, won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. He is the publisher of Grand Parade Poets, and teaches poetry at the University of Wollongong."

For further information do not hesitate to contact Kris Hemensley at Collected Works on 9654 8873.

Stay informed of further events and new stock at this brilliant, unique poetry bookshop by following it on Facebook. 

Kris Hemensley, the bookshop's founder, also writes about poetry,his work and life here.

what I will be reading on Australian writing in 2013: the Sydney Review of Books and The Writer's Room Interviews

Last weekend was a great one for reading about Australian writing, with the launch of two new e-publications.

The University of Western Sydney is supporting the brand spanking new Sydney Review of Books, which launched with several articles on Friday. There will be fresh reading every week for the next two months of this pilot project headed up by critic and editor James Ley, so get along there.

First postings include critical essays and reviews by Kate Middleton, Evelyn Juers, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Peter Pierce, Mo Yan and Nicholas Jose, as well as a call to arms for a watch on criticism by Ben Etherington.

Charlotte Wood, author and essayist, has begun a series of interviews available by subscription, The Writer's Room Interviews. You can sign up for them here, at an annual cost of $27.50 for six issues. The first interview was with Tasmanian writer and Patrick White prizewinner Amanda Lohrey, and I found it completely absorbing, probably because I love her work.

There were two things from the interview, among many, that struck me.

Firstly, I liked what Lohrey had to say about how taste affects the reading of fiction:

CW: A painter friend of mine says people think they don’t know what good art is, but that in every show he’s ever had, the best pictures sell first. You don’t understand it,but you know it.

AL: You do know it. It’s instinctive. But at the same time I think that’s more true of the visual arts than of literature. For it’s also true with fiction that there is no single standard of excellence. A book is a meeting of subjectivities and the subjectivity of one writer will speak to one reader but not to another. There are some writers who don’t speak to me at all but I can see why they speak to other readers, can see that they are in the same zone in terms of their preoccupations, and their conditioning, what’s important to them. It’s just not important to me and I’m not interested. So I don’t mean to say — I’m not trying to posit an idea of excellence that everybody responds to. I think literature is very much a one-to one conversation, which is why I cannot argue with someone who says The Alchemist is their favourite book when they’ve obviously got a lot out of it.

Secondly, Lohrey made some useful remarks about what she called 'inventive' realism:

I’ve always been interested in exploratory and inventive modes of realism, not for their own sake but because each new project demands its own aesthetic. I could get very technical on the subject but this is probably not the time or place. I would say, however, that one of the important functions of university writing courses is to encourage students to interrogate taken-for-granted modes of representation. If you decide to write in a conventional way, at least know why you’ve made that decision. Traditionally, film-makers have been much more concerned with issues of representation and more innovative. And to be fair, the camera gives them more scope, but that doesn’t mean that we as writers shouldn’t think about it. You don’t have to be obviously ‘experimental’, you don’t have to write like Gertrude Stein or James Joyce — small unorthodox manoeuvres can have potent effects.

Small and unorthodox. I like the sound of that.

I've been so busy reading these two publications that I did not have time to blog about them at the time. Which speaks for itself. Go, enjoy, be enlightened or enraged, as you will.

subjected to sleep deprivation: artists in residence at ANAT

To mark its 25th anniversary, the Australian Network for Art and Technology is presenting an intriguing residency, The Subjects, at a sleep research institute:

Acclaimed author, Sean Williams, will be joined by artists Thom Buchanan and Fee Plumley and writer Jennifer Mills for a week-long residency at the Appleton Institute, Central Queensland University’s Adelaide-based sleep research centre.

Isolated from contact with the outside world, The Subjects will experience severely disrupted sleep patterns, loss of subjective control and constant surveillance. Each day – or is it night? – they will produce creative accounts of their experience. These will be posted to the project blog, enabling those of us on the outside to respond directly with comments and questions.

As the residency progresses we expect The Subjects’ to become increasingly stressed by their privations. Will they go mad – quietly or otherwise? Will they lose their creative mojo? Will they find new ways of expressing themselves, personally and creatively? You be the judge.

The Subjects and The Scientist (that's Professor Drew Dawson) will also be participating in a special panel discussion for Adelaide Writers’ Week.

All four participants have started posting, and I'm looking forward to reading about their time at Appleton.

in which library items' circulation rises, thanks to a book bloggers challenge

Not only that, the bloggers wrote over 1000 reviews of books by Australian women writers. Yes, we're talking about the Australian Women Writers' challenge, people.

Elizabeth Lhuede has been running this reviewing challenge since early this year Recently, at the Huffington Post, she summarised the reasons for staging a blog-led intervention to raise the profile of Australian women writers in their own country:

Last year when I went hunting for books by Australian women at my local library in the World Heritage area of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, I couldn't find any. The librarians weren't much help. They said, "Look for the kangaroo on the spine."

I asked friends. Like me, they'd heard of Geraldine Brooks (who lives in the US), Kate Grenville (who won the Orange Prize), and multi-award-winning author Helen Garner. Familiar, too, were names like Shirley Hazzard, Janette Turner Hospital and Kathy Lette (all non-Australian residents). But what about women living and writing in Australia - women of my own (younger) generation? Their books weren't being reviewed in Australian literary magazines.

She goes on to discuss the foundation this year of the Stella Prize for Australian women's writing, which will be awarded for the first time in 2013.

Around the time that her entry at the Huffington Post blog was posted, she also discovered that the librarians at Nowra library had noticed a rise in the circulation of books by Australian women since they had promoted the Australian Women Writers' Challenge at their library. 

That is the kind of story I just love to hear. Bloggers and librarians making a difference for a group of writers who deserve more attention. Very, very cool stuff, and every one of you must take a bow.

And on top of that, there's a massive database of reviews at the Australian Women Writers' Challenge website, and a new challenge planned for 2013.  So all interested bloggers and librarians should go and have a look around, and consider joining up.

And here's two posts from the site I've saved for later: 

Overland fiction editor and writer Jennifer Mills, on classics 

WTF is women's fiction? by author Paddy Reilly

Sydney Review of Books to launch online this month, while Murnane chafes at the bit

 I found some very welcome news in the weekend Age on Saturday in Jason Steger's Bookmarks column. A university-supported online reviews publication is on its way:

The idea, according to editor and critic James Ley, is to create a critical journal that ''takes up some of the slack from the shrinkage of coverage of books''. The SRB is being produced under the aegis of the University of Western Sydney's Writing and Society group, run by Ivor Indyk (the man behind Giramondo Publishing), novelist Gail Jones and professor Anthony Uhlmann. Ley says it will be a ''literary journal with an Australian emphasis but not exclusively - hopefully it will be a bit more catholic in its tastes''.

Ley is an appropriate editor of the new journal. His recent PhD thesis was called The Secular Wood, which is about literary criticism in the public sphere. He says he has plenty of articles for when the site launches this month. Among them is what will be a regular feature called ''Critic Watch'', in which all the commentary on a particular book is scrutinised.

Read more.

Not only this, but an exquisite review from Gerald Murnane was also published in the books pages. There was much rejoicing chez nous, particularly over the opening line: "I must confess I wasn't eager to read this book." A very fine tease in store if you haven't read this one.

Few people take me seriously when I say that I've got more out of horse racing than from Shakespeare or Beethoven. Even fewer believe me when I argue for the existence of an afterlife on the grounds that we must be able one day to properly compare the champions of different eras.

Surely, on some vast, green racecourse in the Elysian Fields, on one of those incomparable autumn afternoons that settle over Melbourne in early March, we will watch one day the Newmarket of Newmarkets; we will rise to our feet as the field approaches the grandstands; and while Black Caviar is about to break clear, Bernborough, far back in the ruck, is about to make his move.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/off-my-high-horse-20121102-28orf.html#ixzz2BKovlXjp

 

Bumper list of poets in Tranter's Best Australian Poems 2012

I'm amazed that it's that time of year already, however it's good to know that Best Australian Poems 2012, edited by John Tranter, draws work from a long list of poets, noted here by Andrew Burke.

And Cordite editor Kent McCarter has remarked upon poems therein published in the last three issues of Cordite.

You can hear Josephine Rowe read "Atlantic City" here, and read Tiggy Johnson's "Photograph" as well.

as the man says, the elephant has left the room

At Jacket2, John Tranter has posted an excerpt from his recent article in the JASAL journal on the Internet and the history of Jacket magazine. Here's the abstract.

Australian poet John Tranter trained in all aspects of publishing, from hand-lettering to editing, from litho platemaking to screen printing, and developed an early familiarity with computers. The development of the Internet in the 1990s found him armed with a formidable array of skills. He published the first issue of the free international Internet-only magazine «Jacket» single-handed in 1997. «Jacket» quickly grew to become the most widely read and highly respected literary magazine ever published from Australia. In late 2010 John Tranter gave it to the University of Pennsylvania, where it continues to flourish. This memoir traces John Tranter’s publication of literary materials on the Internet including the technical and literary problems faced by «Jacket», and outlines the many other projects he embarked on that resulted in the Internet publication of over fifty thousand mostly Australian poems, articles, reviews, interviews and photographs. 

You can read more, and download the full article, here.

Eleanor Hogan's book on Alice Springs launched this Monday

Note also that Eleanor Hogan's Alice Springs, the latest in a series of books on Australian cities published by NewSouth Publishing, will be launched at Readings in Carlton on Monday night.

Eleanor kept the popular blog The View From Elsewhere during her time in Alice and has drawn on her experiences there in writing this account. She also wrote for Sarsaparilla, a space some of you might remember.

Hogan’s uncompromising narrative is based on her experience living in Alice Springs between 2005 and 2010 to work as a policy officer in Aboriginal services. Looming large is a disparate population. Some residents are non-Indigenous expats from capital cities who have relocated to ‘make a difference’ as part of the town’s welfare economy. Others are the Aboriginal recipients of this welfare, many of whom Hogan shows to be living in serious disadvantage born from dispossession, and made even more difficult by seemingly unending cycles of alcohol, violence, poverty, bureaucracy and exploitation.

These depictions are not based on idle impressions, but are supported by a public servant’s eye for statistics and policy documents and a journalist’s skill in interviewing prominent community members. Lives led in this place of extremes are difficult, but are cross-cut with the pleasures of community that exist in regional centres, and the importance of sport, art, friendship, family and culture.

A tough portrait of life in a beautiful but harsh landscape of contradictions, Alice Springs is as much a series of general questions about living ethically as it is Hogan’s memoir of being an outsider looking in.

Alison Huber, Readings.

Here's a review at The Australian, and an extract from the book at Inside Story.

 

another review at The Ember: Tarcutta Wake

A busy time of year chez nous. And I am not blogging much, more's the pity.

However I do have a review of Josephine Rowe's new story collection from UQP, Tarcutta Wake, up at The Ember. Here is a taster:

I think when Josephine Rowe is older, we will be approaching these early collections as extended prose poems, reaching into each other. Reflecting on her second collection of stories, How A Moth Becomes A Boat, words like ‘painterly’, ‘highly visual’, and ‘cinematic’ spring readily to mind. Even on a repeat reading, where one is more receptive to small nuances, three stories is all it takes before you are seized once more by the urge to swallow that book whole.

Perhaps there are already academics out there sharpening their pencils at the prospect of tracking plot devices and mood shifts, shadows and shapes, as they roam through Rowe’s early works, including this latest collection, Tarcutta Wake. Rowe is that rare thing, a poet completely at home in prose which asks to be read aloud (like poetry should be). While facing down cliché, Rowe is capable of compounding an astringent and powerful vocalism from closely observed moments and often percussive sounds:

It is understood that a second key will not be cut, just as it is understood that you will not be staying long enough for it to matter. But three weeks now, most of February, and you’re wearing his clothes, smoking his cigarettes, sharing his bed and his razors. From his kitchen window you watch the freight trains thunder past, headed west. By the time you’ve eaten and dressed it will be twelve or one, hot as hell. You’ll listen to the telephones ringing out over the loudspeakers of the factories and Joe’s Storage from across the highway and, grinding your first cigarette of the day into his stainless steel sink, you will not understand why the sound of the freight trains breaks your fucking heart. ‘Stay’ - How a Moth Becomes A Boat

Read More

Life and work of the cosmopolitan Shirley Hazzard, glimpsed from behind a paywall

In the Weekend Australian Review, Geordie Williamson has a fine review of what must be an engrossing academic title which deserves a discerning readership, Margaret Olubas' new book on the life and works of Shirley Hazzard. As Williamson writes, this title is "astonishingly" the first of its kind. The review is behind a paywall but I liked these sentences enough to excise them. (There is a free 28-day trial on the website if you wish to read further.)

Her monograph argues that liberal humanism does not have a geographic home; it is not fixed in space, does not emerge from a single source. Rather its fragile decencies are founded on connections between disparate individuals, creative artists and people-smugglers of the intellect who carry other people's words around inside their heads.

 

 

Toni Jordan's Nine Days highly praised

If you buy the Saturday Oz, there is a cracker review for Toni Jordan's new book Nine Days from Peter Pierce, so I am going out to buy that at the first opportunity:

Dickens' exuberant example happily infects the speech of several of the characters, while the grisly scene in which Jack Husting's parents introduce him to a prospective marriage partner is worthy of Patrick White.

Motifs are artfully woven into the narrative, such as "the bitter-sweet of twin-dom". Jordan's story gives free rein to chance and to coincidence. So much is packed generously into Nine Days as to belie its considerately moderate length...This novel is a triumph. Another signal career in Australian fiction is well under way.

named for a Harwood acrostic, the So Long Bulletin is a must-read

All right, I know most of my posts in the past couple of reloaded weeks have been about poetry.
But.You.Must.Visit.This.Tumblr.

Found via the newly launched Haplax, in turn mentioned in the Writers Victoria weekly news email, the SoLong Bulletin Of Australian Poetry And Criticism is edited by Elizabeth Campbell,  LK Holt and Petra White.
LK Holt's posts in particular look snappy and fun, though there is an illustrious bunch of contributors already. It seems to have been here for some time.
 
The search box on that Tumblr theme is more effective than some I've played with too.  (All blogging platforms have their Achilles heel.)
Go, enjoy. It's a fine surprise.

dark diamonds discovered

  Barbara Temperton reports from Cordite on poetic activity in her new neighbourhood, and includes a shot of a beautiful new book to be launched at the end of August:

Graham Kershaw (Hallowell Press) has been working for some time now on the production of the poetry anthology: Dark Diamonds: poems from the south coast of Western Australia. Dark Diamonds has been printed on a treadle platen press – an Arab, designed in the 1870s – using traditional letterpress techniques, with Centaur metal type imported from a foundry still operating in California. The books are hand-bound, as cloth-lined hardbacks. Alison Kershaw’s illustrations are copper relief etchings printed on the Arab. Dark Diamonds will be launched at 3pm on Saturday, August 25th, at the Butter Factory Studios, 8/12 Mt Shadforth Road, Denmark.

Notes from Narrogin and the Great Southern | Cordite Poetry Review

in which Steele is illuminated

His verse was omnivorous, one could say, ranging tonally from the church fathers to forthright Willy Sutton, the habitual bank robber. It came in chunky stanzas, buoyed up by his delight in the English language, and its American cousin. Peter wrote verse about kitchen herbs and airlines, Assyria and Scrooge McDuck, Jimmy Durante and Montaigne, even the remembered air force bullring of his youth. Latterly, the birds and bush of seaside Anglesea made their appearance more often, as in these rejoicing lines:

On the eggshell rink above us all they are wheeling
       in Lincoln green or burred gold,
hanging from wings that hang from nothing, and stealing
      the apple of grace from air’s hold.

via meanjin.com.au

This beautiful farewell from Chris Wallace-Crabbe at Meanjin is one of several fine things written about Australian poet and academic Peter Steele over the last month, since his death.
Read it all, it is splendid. Here also is Brendan Byrne's eulogy, at Eureka Street, and a piece from Morag Fraser.

Peter Rose reports from Booktown

From the Editor's Desk (now the blog at ABR):

A few weeks back I headed to Clunes Booktown with thousands of other readers and bibliophiles. Away from the dozens and dozens of antiquarian book displays and the brass band in the quaint rotunda and the ferocious Punch and Judy and the hay-bale maze in the main street, Tess Brady and her colleagues presented an interesting program of interviews, panels, and workshops. I chaired one of these sessions, a tribute to Patrick White, and was joined by three friends and colleagues: Peter Goldsworthy, Michael Heyward, and Nicholas Jose. We began by discussing our first encounters with White. Peter Goldsworthy, borrowing The Tree of Man from the Glenelg library, thought White was from South Africa. For Michael Heyward, it was The Aunt’s Story. ‘It changed the shape of your mind.’

 That’s exactly how I felt when I read White for the first time. This was earlier, in 1973, when I was seventeen. I bought a copy of The Aunt’s Story for about a dollar and read Part One in a single gulp. I don’t think I’d ever been so stirred by anything in my life, especially that last, inexpressibly tragic paragraph:

Theodora looked down through the distances that separate, even in love. If I could put out my hand, she said, but I cannot. And already the moment, the moments, the disappearing afternoon, had increased the distance that separates. There is no lifeline to other lives. I shall go, said Theodora. I have already gone. The simplicity of what ultimately happens hollowed her out. She was part of a surprising world in which hands, for reasons no longer obvious, had put tables and chairs.

I recall having to put the novel aside for a couple of weeks before I could read the other two parts. I couldn’t bear much more of that knowledge.

Read more...

stumps

photo by Brian Yap - found via Trove.

The time has come, a fact's a fact. Though Peter Kenneally has gently accused me of being all Farnsey about it*, I am  pulling up stumps here, and decamping quietly to my internet scrapbook at Mulberry Road. (It's okay, you can all come...if you like. But it will be quieter.)

*I have misremembered that - it was somewhere else, regarding something else. Sorry for taking your name in vain, sir. I do feel like Farnham though.

I did try to manage my internet habits so that I was no longer a purveyor of links. But...I think I actually got worse before I got better.

Let's face it - the news is all around you now, from SPUNC, City of Tongues, Kill Your Darlings, LiteraryMinded, Kerryn's new offering Read, Think, Write, Meanjin, Overland, the Wheeler Centre, Unwakeable, the Oz, even the Paris Review - so all good Ozlit news junkies know where to go.

As I say goodbye (though this site will stay here so links will be maintained), I want to note that the death of Randolph Stow in the age of digital publishing is as good a time as any to say goodbye. The last post will remain at the top of the page here as a memorial, because I can, because I'm a fan

I hope you won't mind keeping an eye out for news about the National Disability Insurance Scheme during the Federal election (and the State, if like me you are unlucky enough to have two this year). I've created a page with  some links and information for interested parties - click on the tab above for details if you'd like to know more.

Thanks to all who have visited, commented, sent me books, and invited me to events or made me welcome at their gatherings, and above all, been friends through some testing times. It's been a great ride, and I've enjoyed your company. Take care.

Randolph Stow 1935-2010: two poems

THE LAND'S MEANING
For Sidney Nolan

The love of man is a weed of the waste places,
One may think of it as the spinifex of dry souls.

I have not, it is true, made the trek to the difficult country
where it is said to grow; but signs come back,
reports come back, of continuing exploration
in that terrain. And certain of our young men,
who turned in despair from the bar, upsetting a glass,
and swore: "No more" (for the tin rooms stank of flyspray)
are sending word that the mastery of silence
alone is empire. What is God, they say,
but a man unwounded in his loneliness?

And the question (applauded, derided) falls like dust
on veranda and bar; and in pauses, when thinking ceases,
the footprints of the recently departed
march to the mind's horizons, and endure.

And often enough as we turn again, and laugh,
cloud, hide away the tracks with an acid word,
there is one or more gone past the door to stand
 (wondering, debating) in the iron street,
and toss a coin, and pass, to the township's end,
where one-eyed 'Mat, eternal dealer in camels,
grins in his dusty yard like a split fruit.

But one who has returned, his eyes blurred maps
of landscapes still unmapped, gives this account:

"The third day, cockatoos dropped dead in the air.
Then the crows turned back, the camels knelt down and
       stayed there,
and a skin-coloured surf of sandhills jumped the horizon
and swamped me. I was bushed for forty years.

"And I came to a bloke all alone like a kurrajong tree.
And I said to him: 'Mate - I don't need to know your name -
Let me camp in your shade, let me sleep, till the sun goes
       down.'"

LANDFALL

 And indeed I shall anchor, one day - some summer morning
of sunflowers and bougainvillea and arid wind-
and smoking a black cigar, one hand on the mast,
turn, and unlade my eyes of all their cargo;
and the parrot will speed from my shoulder, and white yachts
      glide
welcoming out from the shore on the turquoise tide.

And when they ask me where I have been, I shall say
I do not remember.

And when they ask me what I have seen, I shall say
I remember nothing.

And if they should ever tempt me to speak again,

I shall smile, and refrain.

(Both in A Counterfeit Silence. Angus and Robertson, 1969. And I do wish Typepad would leave my spaces where I bloody put them.)

Updated: Age obit here, and The Australian's is here. 

From Stephen Romei's fine post at the Australian Literary Review blog, Ragged Claws, comes this beautiful tribute from John Kinsella, with news of Stow's last published works, posted in the comments by his partner Tracy Ryan:

“This is a great loss. I also consider Stow one of Australia’s greatest writers. For those of us living and schooling in the West, he was inevitably a huge influence, along with Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis (see next comment) and Kenneth ‘Seaforth’ Mackenzie. I did my high schooling in Geraldton—I knew his merry-go-round well (it is still there), and one couldn’t write without being saturated in his consciousness of light, space and issues of ‘belonging’. I always liked the partially ‘surreal’ quality of his work, especially the poem ‘Dust’ and the novel Tourmaline. I met up with him at Harwich about 12 years ago and he showed me a variety of notebooks which had a large amount of new poetry and other work in them. I managed to convince him to allow me to publish 2 of those in an American journal around the year 2000. I’ll never forget sending him a letter early on in my writing life, and receiving a really positive, handwritten response. He was generous that way. It became a guiding light for me.”

There's a comment from Robert Adamson as well:

Randolph Stow was a great writer, ‘A Counterfeit Silence’ is one of the most important and powerful books of poetry written by an Australian. I love this book and have been reading it constantly since 1969 when it was first published.  Stow, with his sly humour and indelible images, beautifully written lines and stanzas, will continue to sustain readers and poets for as long as there are copies of his books available. He lives on in my imagination and I see his world expand each time I take a look into the dark tide of his poetry. 

As another commenter notes,

Then the wind died down, and the voices faded, and at last Midnite fell asleep.

Good night, beautiful writer.

June 2nd Update: some final words that are more fitting come from Roger Averill, whose longer comment is below:

Although an intensely private person, Mick (as he was known to his family and friends) laughed at the way he was sometimes portrayed in Australia’s literary pages as a recluse, for he was in daily contact with people in Harwich and welcomed frequent visits from relatives and old Australian friends.

I am heartened by the attention Stow's death has received in the media and hope it helps him posthumously gain the readership his work deserves, particularly among younger people. I think only fitting that I give him the last word, words from a remarkable passage in 'The Girl Green as Elderflower' which offer some counter-balance to the alienation and despair of Cawdor in 'Visitants':

'Truly there is in the world nothing so strange, so fathomless as love. Our home is not here, it is in Heaven; our time is not now, it is eternity; we are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly. Why should we love these shadows, which will be gone at the first light? It is because in exile we grieve for one another, it is because we remember the same home, it is because we remember the same father, that there is love in our island.'

news to me (that it is June tomorrow? aaargh)

So many books, only one life...I thought at first Mr Deaver was a serial killer, which is why I clicked on this when it came up in my reader. Got him confused with someone else....It is, after all, a fine name for a crime thriller writer .

From last week, there are five book reviews up on the blog at Overland. What a great platform for blog reviews - good to see this.

Included is a review of Lisa Dempster's Neon Pilgrim, Alec Patric's poetry collection which has been released as an e-book, and Emmett Stinson's short fiction collection, Known Unknowns, from Affirm Press.

Academic librarian Constance evaluates the Kobo reader, recently sold out at Borders stores across Australia.

Maud noticed this, and I thank her for it.

Not in a book group? try this one on for size. If you're not in the States, you might like to use it as a reading list later on. With notes.

The Duck has found us all something really good and silly to finish on.