reeling and writhing

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.

reading: Glissando by David Musgrave

Musgrave, David. Glissando. Sleepers Publishing, 2010.

Glissando is remarkably close to its name in its inception and execution: a ripple across strings previously played by others, to largely dramatic effect, with a melancholic afterglow.

The strings have been noted by others - Murnane and White come to mind (think plains, hidden properties, maps, remarkable houses, Voss-like travels, a melancholy narrator.)

The problem with this book to me, if there is one at all (and I think I'm nitpicking when I say this), is that dipping into such a potent mix carries the hazard of producing a pastiche from the contents. I think Musgrave manages to avoid this, but it is a narrow escape.

I do like the central conceit of the lost wager of the National Theatre, tying Murnane and White together with a bond of pure whimsy. And the empty house, Glissando, with its library containing the narrator's grandfather's journals, reminds me of another house in another book, by Alex Miller. But perhaps all that means is that Australia is full of empty settlers' homes with mouldering libraries in them.

So the worry for someone like Musgrave, following in these people's steps, is not pastiche, but simply, how to make this a memorable excursion, when one's fabric is shot through with so many other threads? Madame is a good start, as is Reggie, the narrator's disturbed brother and maestro pianist, travelling the world like David Helfgott. But I am concerned that I will mainly remember this book because it reminded me of others (and pasting in all of the travelling company from Voss doesn't help with this.) It would be better to be able to take away the deeper satire at the expense of theatre, notably at a Rabelaisian feast later in the book, but regrettably that has not stayed with me.

Nor do the notes of sadness struck in the coda act as a satisfactory recall of earlier themes for this reader - Archibald Fliess is first and foremost a narrator, and doesn't quite emerge as a full character, so it's a bit late in the day to start giving him a personality at the end, I think. Though this is not unknown in literature, of course, as many great satirists play outside the margins, do they not? Once more, the aptness of that title springs to mind.

It is pretty much imperative that one has read Voss before reading this, and reading Gerald Murnane's The Plains wouldn't hurt either. Having read David Marr's biography of Patrick White just prior  was, for this reader, one of those remarkable reading coincidences - is it accident that the Fliess grandfather is a great collector, as was one of White's uncles at the fabled Belltrees? I don't think so. That music has a dying fall indeed.

there will be one week in September we want to remember

It is a busy busy town we live in now, with our centre on wheels of books and writing.

I saw the great man, Colm Toibin, last week, and thoroughly enjoyed all he had to say about writing in general - not so much what he politely supplied in answer to questions on his latest book, as I had read an awful lot of that kind of thing already. (Keep an eye on this link as there will be a video of the evening at some point (YES, THERE IT IS now).  Also keep a very keen eye on LiteraryMinded for Angela's upcoming interview.)

However, as anyone who listened to La Throsby last Friday can attest, whatever he has to say about writing is like gold. I have been thinking all weekend why that might be so - he is very quick, I think, to respond concisely to any questions about craft and clearly has plenty of insight into his own work, which is not always something available to writers, or something they are happy to share . I was interested to hear that it was reading the work of Alistair McLeod that brought him to the realisation that it would be good to revisit Ireland as a subject for his fiction.

News that came to hand with Throsby's interview is that Toibin's limited editions press, Tuskar Press, picked up The Slap and is running hot with it in the UK at present. If you start listening to the Throsby interview at the 48-49 minute mark, you will find out why.

Meanwhile I am insanely jealous that the Sydney crowd got to hear a whole Catalan song from him at SWF (thanks to Charlotte Wood for that news), but it serves me right for being too mean to go up there.

I am very close to rocking up to hear Louise Swinn, indie publisher extraordinaire, interview Peter Carey (Le Carey?). So I guess this rambling introduction is a way of letting you all know that the Wheeler Centre's second programme for the year is up on the site, in the email box, et cetera. The coverage the Centre is aiming at is impressive - not all things I would necessarily attend, but still, something for everyone there, as Michael Veitch used to tell us so long ago.

Things of note include Richard Flanagan's mix tape (though I am being a bit silly there as of course I'd rather hear him talk about writing), a night of erotic fan fiction which has been borrowed from SWF (worth seeing just to hear Marieke H.'s contribution really), Kate Jennings in conversation with Hilary McPhee, a night celebrating Chekhov, conversation between Jennifer Byrne and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a lecture from no less a personage than Jonathan Mills on the state of the arts, a visit from Fatima Bhutto and, finally, the promise of a week in September where the judges of art get well and truly rolled.

A WHOLE WEEK. The critics must be nervous already.

reading more and more and then some

The 'forthcoming publications' list is up at Giramondo. TASTY, especially the Gig Ryan collection and the short fiction collection from Jess Huon later in the year.

The last book I read from this press was Judith Beveridge's latest collection, Storm and Honey. I am pleased to see that it will not be long before I read another.

I have been enjoying an essay by Barry Hill in the latest HEAT mag on Pound and his pseudo-sinology, and am very pleased to see a fragment of it online:

...the paradox then was that Pound’s voice was not connected with ‘life’ in any direct way – not like Lawrence’s, for instance. It was still the product of a masking, an immersion in an act of projecting himself into something else. The Metro poem was an omen. It pointed to the extent to which Pound’s life and work, his angry heart and visionary yearnings, would be close to an enactment of Eastern aesthetics and philosophy, a translation voyage that would shape his modernism.

This paradox is deepened by the fact that Pound never travelled East: in 1914, he passed up a chance to go to China and was thereafter out of touch with crucial events as they unfolded. His China was a construction: what he got out of it was always literary and thus partially dead, even as he could breathe a life into it for aesthetic and political purposes. He hoped that China – or his Confucius, at least – would save Europe from itself, but it no more did that than his Chinese dictionary saved him from a crack-up when he was caged at Pisa in 1945.

A shame more of it is not there, as there are some penetrating remarks on the tone of Cathay, a book of translations from the Fenollosa archive which Pound published in 1915:

he sent a copy of two poems to his friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska who was in the trenches. The 'Lament' begins:

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,

Lonely from the beginning of time till now!

Trees fall, the grass grows yellow with autumn,

I climb the towers and towers

to watch out over the barbarous land;

Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert,

There is no wall left to this village

Bones white with a thousand frosts,

High leaps, covered with trees and grasses;

Who brought this to pass?

Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?

Who has brought the army with drums and kettle drums?

Barbarous kings...

and sorrow, sorrow like rain.

Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning...

'They depict our situation in a wonderful way,' Gaudier told him. The whole book was organised to do so.

Hill states that a recent biographer, Moody,

'rightly praises Cathay as brilliantly ahead of its time - anti-war poems that jumped the gun on Wilfred Owen and others. Pound, who never went to the front, did not out of respect for the soldiers attempt to render the war directly. Cathay is momentously strong partly because it provided a godsend of deflection for Pound, a grand way of making an impersonal art, its classical mode, matter.' I was surprised to learn that Pound could not read Chinese when he produced this collection.

HEAT 22: The Persistent Rabbit is in independent bookshops now.

writers are emerging all over Melbourne this weekend...so be there

The Emerging Writers' Festival is kicking off in Melbourne this weekend, with the official opening tomorrow night at BMW Edge (at time of writing, there were a couple of tickets left to this.)

The First Word is …
A celebration of writing, writers and the word.

A night of performance, comedy, spoken word and burlesque.

The official opening of the 7th Emerging Writers’ Festival.

The First Word is …

Dance, comedy, readings and…

The Call to Arms – the Emerging Writers’ Festival’s unique keynote address, this year delivered by romantic fiction writer Toni Jordan.

The Glory of Love – Craig Schuftan.

Love Vs Angst, what makes a better writer? – top writers Josh Earl, Kate Mclennan and Michaela McGuire battle for supremacy in our 2 Sides of the Coin debate.

For a bunch of fascinating events this weekend, scroll down that page, or click here for the full and burgeoning program of festival events over the next nine days.

If you're struggling to get to everything you want to, check out the EWF Online program to see what you can do via your modem. The festival events are, as usual, very moderately priced - and of course, the online program is completely free.

Let the games begin...

who listens to paper radio

A radio of paper. A fine new thing of audio podcasts on a monthly basis, of new writing.

After mountainous hours of pixel shifting and finger tapping – and countless more wrestling sound waves – we are extremely relieved and excited to announce that Paper Radio has now arrived. For those of you visiting for the first time we should explain that Paper Radio is a sonic interpretation of the unique culture of Australasia – in the shape of a podcast.

The first episode from the FM (fiction) channel, Chris Somerville’s The Drowning Man, is the story of an aloof teacher whose life is defined and dominated by the irascible temperament of water. In our next edition, a documentary for the AM (non-fiction) channel, Georgia Moodie rewinds to the 1920s and tails the experiences of the first African American jazz musicians to tour Australia.

The near future holds audio productions from Rachel O’Neill, Benjamin Law and Thomasin Sleigh.

Paper Radio has been created by a team headed by Jessie Borrelle and Jon Tjhia, working out of Melbourne.

I'm subscribed.

Calibre prize is shared again

The news is out and about. The winners of the Calibre Prize for essay writing awarded annually by Australian Book Review were officially announced at a conference in Canberra yesterday.

The $10,000 prize, judged by ABR editor Peter Rose and James Ley, will be once more shared between two winners, Doctor Lorna Hallahan for her essay "On Being Odd" and Doctor David Hansen for "Seeing Truganini". (2010 marks the third year in a row that this fairly new prize has been shared.) The media release is here.

In other ABR related news, editor Peter Rose will read his poetry at Readings bookshop on May 10 as part of Readings' regular poetry event, Pages to Poetry, along with fellow poets Susan Hawthorne and Michael Farrell.

it's (all) news to me 27.04.10

The Emerging Writers' Festival program for 2010 is up and at 'em, so go and see what you will be attending towards the end of this month. Thanks to a website revamp under the eagle eye of new director Lisa Dempster, it's a lot easier to see what's going on this year at this incredibly well-priced festival, and I will be posting later on the week on events that have caught my eye.

This is now fairly old news, but... the graffiti artist Banksy had a film opening in the US on the 16th of this month. 

Fresher news comes via Bob Stein of a new article by CraigMod on e-readers, Embracing The Digital Book, following up on his widely read piece on books and the iPad last month.

Most of the news this Tuesday centres on that celebrated member of the linkerati, George Dunford. George has very graciously blogged his Big Issue profile of Anna Dusk at Hackpacker, and has a few remarks on the future of graphic novels up at Readings, where I found out that Paul Auster's City Of Glass also exists as a graphic novel. By the time this is posted I reckon a copy will be on its way to me, thanks to Visa.

George ran a couple of panels at the Wheeler Centre's graphic novels events on the weekend. And introduced me to Oslo Davis last Thursday at the Emerging Writers' Festival launch, to which I swear I went to support my blog friend-the-director, not to meet graphic arts heroes. It is not news, either, that Oslo's Sunday cartoon for the Age, Overheard, will soon appear as a book. One of the finest Christmas presents you could buy.

The calendar at the Wheeler Centre now includes full details of the Deakin Lectures for 2010, focussed fairly and squarely on climate change (there was a splendid two -page spread on this in the Saturday paper as well):

Curated by Professor Tim Flannery, we’ve gathered 30 of the best people addressing the climate problem now. These aren’t the usual suspects spouting fixed positions. At the Deakins you’ll hear from practitioners, from fresh informed voices with practical experience of achieving emissions reduction. These are people working to innovate in policy, business, finance and new technologies to help create a brave, new, low emissions world.

Finally, for those of us who haven't already seen Curious Pages,  here's what John Williams at the Second Pass had to say about the blog on 'recommended inappropriate children's books' earlier and later this year.

Shaun Tan at the Wheeler Centre this weekend

via wheelercentre.com

Where else, I ask, will you get to hear Shaun Tan give a free keynote address on graphic novels and attend a weekend of graphic storytelling related events?
At the Wheeler Centre on the Anzac Day weekend, that's where.

Saturday sees a bunch of panels led by luminaries of the art such as Bruce Mutard, Nicki Greenberg, Tan, Dylan Horrocks and Oslo Davis, while on Sunday there are some very reasonably priced workshops with practitioners such as Bernard Caleo, of Tango fame.

I'm only providing a couple of links today - I would love the Wheeler Centre to provide 'one link to rule them all, one link to find them' - somewhere in that calendar AND Thank you for your comment, Mim, for THERE IT IS NOW!! and doesn't that look a lot better. I like that.  I'll just begin at the beginning, and You can scroll down to find the rest.

a shortlist of a certain calibre from Australian Book Review

The shortlist for Australian Book Review's CAL-sponsored Calibre Prize for an essay, carrying a prize of ten grand, has been announced. From the media release:

SHORTLISTED ESSAYS
Lindsay Barrett: 'The Shadow on the Steps'
Janene Carey: 'Retreat to the Castle'
Eleanor Collins: 'Ill-Timed Remarks: A Pathographical Essay'
Lorna Hallahan: 'On Being Odd'
David Hansen: 'Seeing Truganini'
Colin Nettelbeck: 'Kneecapper: A Trip to Happiness'
Jessica White: 'Hearing in Other Ways'


The winner will be announced at the conclusion of a day-long symposium on
the art of essay writing to be held at the National Library of Australia on
Friday, April 30.
Robert Dessaix is the keynote speaker. The five previous Calibre winners
will all speak: Kevin Brophy, Jane Goodall, Elisabeth Holdsworth, Rachel
Robertson and
Mark Tredinnick.

This is a free event, but bookings are essential: (02) 6262 1271 or
bookings@nla.gov.au

online selections

This is a very good thing to find and keep online. Thank you, ABR, for your marvellously renovated 21st century website with its bewdiful archive of feature articles. Just what the web ordered.

While on the subject of the lost Booker nominated writer Shirley Hazzard, Susan Wyndham at the Sydney Morning Herald's Undercover blog has warned us to look out for the next issue of Narrative Magazine, which will carry an excellent interview with Hazzard by Lacy Crawford. You can register at Narrative for free and enjoy reading a great deal of good fiction and non-fiction there, or you can become a supporter of the magazine and read extra features with a 'Backstage' pass.

It also now comes in a hard-copy version - I'm not certain that it always did, as I have mainly known it as a web mag, but Narrative appears to swing both ways successfully. I'm guessing it's the print version that found its way to the Sydney Morning Herald, as that issue is not yet online, or available on the Kindle. Guess the rest of us will just have to wait a little bit...

New Australian Stories 2.0 partnerships announced at Scribe

Australian independent Scribe Publishing is involving Varuna Writers'Centre and the Ned Kelly crime writing awards in its selections for their next volume of short stories, to be released in February 2011. There's a stellar cast of contributors in the first volume, which you can read about here.

For New Australian Stories 2.0 we are collaborating with two partners.

Firstly, our friends at Varuna, the Writers’ House, will be running the Varuna/NAS national short story competition, with the winners (judged by Peter Bishop, Cate Kennedy and Aviva Tuffield) to be published in New Australian Stories 2.0, and/or to be awarded a week-long residency at Varuna to work with Cate Kennedy, one of Australia’s finest writers of short stories.

Submissions to the Varuna/NAS competition open on 1 June and close on 30 June. Visit the Varuna website for more details: www.varuna.com.au

Secondly, we are teaming up with the Ned Kelly Awards to publish the winner of the S.D. Harvey Short Story Award in New Australian Stories 2.0. This award was established in 2009 in honour of Sandra Harvey, a respected journalist who worked both for the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC’s Four Corners program, and was fearless in her pursuit of the truth.

Applications for the S.D. Harvey Award close on 31 May. For more information about entering the award, go to: www.nedkellyawards.com/SDHarvey.html

a little news for the not so new year

Some writing news: the Queensland Writers' Centre has moved into the State Library of Queensland, joining a hub of writerly organisations which will also house the Queensland branch of the Institute for the Future of the Book when it opens. Details here.

It's official (and reworded, yes, thanks for the correction): the Emerging Writers' Festival  director for 2010 is Lisa Dempster. Hearty congratulations to editor, publisher and author Lisa, whose travel book Neon Pilgrim  I wrote about last year.

Richard Nash has been writing on what publishing will look like in 10 years time, for Galleycat.

From writing, to film - we all got our fill of 2009 lists I'm sure, over the break - however Mr Celluloid Tongue has more, probably some lists you will like. Good to see Spotless Mind and The Proposition up there - the much-praised film of Sweeney Todd I have yet to see, though I saw a bloodcurdling amateur production in 2008. Gore in operas I can handle, but I do not like my musicals steeped in it, I'm afraid.

Finally, thanks to John Williams of The Second Pass for this site, which he says is updated 'far too infrequently for my taste, but it's always worth the wait'.

goodbye noughties, then

It can't possibly be almost the end of the year, can it? Christmas shopping is in progress.In that spirit there's a list of top reads from the past year after the jump, in no particular order other than abecedarian, arranged by type.

If you're still hungry for selections and suggestions after trawling through mine, there are other lists, by other people, covering all five (six?) Readings stores and beyond. And there's a very comprehensive US/international roundup at The Millions, of course. I might not be back for a little while, as there's plenty of good book news around - follow the blogs here (scroll down for the feeds) and you won't be bored.

What I want for Christmas: Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier, Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, botanical prints I've had framed, which will be ready to pick up next Friday, a bottle of brandy and a month's supply of Zero lemonade.

AND...safe holidays for everyone.

subscribing all over the land

...just in case you did not know, there is a subscription drive at the literary journal Overland - and the fancy button below will take you to that esteemed journal's blog to read guest posts around and about good Australian writing (as well as occasionally urging you to read the current issue and SUBSCRIBE).

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Abbotts and Bishops, it's an

                        

and I am supporting it because its editorial team have their eyes (and get their hands) firmly on well-written, readable essays on public issues, in short it's worthy of your attention, and above all, EXTREMELY good value for money - the cheapest literary mag around. I don't know how they do it for the price - essays, fiction, poetry, reviews. Incredible.

(There's also some very attractive subscription packages with other Oz mags - package deals with Island, Griffith Review, Wet Ink and Meanjin.)

sun comes up today on a city of books (live here on RW)

The Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas website is well and truly alive today: from Twitter there is news of the media launch this morning, and some programming is already up on the website, as well as a NAME, "The Wheeler Centre" - which is not as clunky as CBGBWI, I know - news of their opening for the masses in February, and other great things in the associated pipelines, including a Reading The City program next March.

I am hardly surprised to read that such a program is in the waters, as the State Library's Summer Read program has downsized itself for a snugger fit with local libraries (it's going online in early December, so keep an eye on that here.)

On first glance, this is a really nice looking website - I like the site map down the bottom. There will be news posted daily on the site from the "Dailies" section, which has an RSS feed? yes. You can also subscribe to Events from that page. Excuse me now, I've liveblogged a website (not the media event, I hasten to add - there are pics of that on Twitter) and I'm off to play.

*Later today - Michael Orthofer has heard the news, and spread the word, but also speaks of ANOTHER Wheeler Center, in Montana. Zut alors.

all the news that's left before Santa comes

This story is astonishing. Some entrepreneurs are just whitewater rafters, through and through, aren't they?

Ramona snaffled Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and had a chat to him about newspaper book reviews a couple of weeks ago.

Lynne is a brave, brave person and I hope podcasting will enable me to listen to her broadcast on teh Beeb when it happens in a week or so, and drink champagne.
If there is anyone out there who wouldn't mind translating that Latin from the BBC's head office in the picture for me, I'd be most grateful.

As Jessamyn West says, will these books get all messed up? Via librarian.net, from Vogue Italia.

And if there are librarians out there looking for a testdrive of things to do with the library's new Kindle before it's released to the users, Kathryn Greenhill has a ripper list here.

Finally - Anne Beilby reports on the Text website that the French rights to Gerald Murnane's The Plains were sold to P.O.L. just before he won the Melbourne Prize. One more country besides Sweden in which Murnane can be enjoyed.

hardest working Barry in OzLit has a film deal

Grracious. The hardest working man in online serialisation has already had his work 'in development' signed for a film deal.

Max Barry is the author of traditional fiction titles Syrup, Jennifer Government (which comes with its own online game, downloaded by thousands), Company and Machine Man, which he is publishing online as a feed which carries a fee past a certain number of pages.

I first heard a chirp about this on Twitter a couple of weeks ago - and now it's in the open, and has been written about in Variety and on the Wall Street Journal books blog to boot. Looks like MM is now on my holiday reading list. He has some thanks for a mentor and friend on the latest post on his website:

I have to mention (again) my Machine Man muse/tormentor M.I. Minter, the guy who essentially provoked me into doing this, because his response to this latest development was:

It’s amazing the fantastic things that happen when you regularly produce work.

Three hearty virtual cheers!!! I look forward to seeing this solidify.

Melbourne Prize runaway for Murnane, Le

Readings bookshop had the announcement up before the Melbourne Prize Trust did. Congratulations to both winners: richly deserved. I am sure Mr Miller will carry it off another day.

(Note: I'm sure the reference on the Readings website will be rephrased speedily, but not all of Murnane's works are actually available from the Readings catalogue at this point in time. There are two other titles available as POD from Sydney University Press, here,  but at least two other short story collections, Emerald Blue and Velvet Waters, are currently out of print. I do hope plans are afoot to change that tout de suite.)

PS I won't re-edit this again - apologies to readers of feeds, I'll be a cleaner blogger from now on.

other reading, other writing

At the Varuna blog, Cate Kennedy talks about the need for feedback during the writing process from other writers and editors, and her appreciation for readers' remarks on her work.

It’s one thing for a critic to praise your deftness with imagery or whatever, but when someone feels moved to write that they’re planning on staying alive to read what you might come up with next…well,  that’ll get you back to the desk – elated and close to mysterious tears, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

There's a review of Judith Beveridge's latest collection, Storm and Honey, by Libby Hart up at Cordite.

Here's another beautiful bit of writing from Ampersand Duck, this time on some of her own work. What a fine photo-essay this is, on the story and making of pillow books. Get her into Black Inc tout de suite.

Looking for something silly? John Williams' personal collection of personals from the LRB is a hoot.

And here is something rather gorgeous I will get in my letterbox at some point, as a subscriber. John Williams comments that "It looks stunning. Not sure how it’s supposed to make the newspaper business feel any better, though. Not exactly a feasible model . . ."

Finally here's a great post by Alec Patric about the latest issue of Page Seventeen, and the life of small mags in general.

Patrick White award to Beverley Farmer

Ralph at Currajah was very quick off the mark last weekend! picking up the news of Beverley Farmer being awarded the Patrick White prize, and spreading the love, along with her misgivings (see Susan Wyndham's report, here).

(If you cannot read that bio on Austlit because you are not a subscriber, you should be able to join using a public library card, or a State Library one. Or you can read this older bio by Laurie Clancy, with some good notes on her books, which does not include her latest publication, The Bone House.)

One of my favourite books is Farmer's collection of diary extracts and short stories, collected mainly around their writing, A Body Of Water. There is a story about a Buddhist retreat in that volume, complete with a diary account of the retreat, that provides a magnificent study in how to render fiction out of memory.

Farmer is a prose poet in many ways - from her notes from October in that book comes this account of reading at Mietta's, a fine restaurant with literary leanings, at some time in the eighties:

Heat and sun for the first day of daylight saving. I read a story in the "Readings with Readings" program in the Lounge at Mietta's, among the fringed lamps, clustered gold bubbles of light overhead, black statues bearing flowers - heat and smoke drifting. The dappled grey marble of the round tables, bright with the light of wineglasses.

At seven o'clock tall buildings still reached up into the sun.

In the livid night sky - never black in Carlton - a crescent moon lay on its back holding a smaller moon clasped, a dim full one. (On top of a stupa they have an orb in a cusp.)

Further up that page, she writes of a house she had rented by the coast, somewhere near Lorne:

Skirting the full frog pond with a chilly scud across it, over the road and dunes you go down onto the surf beach. The tea-trees up there in the dune-folds are whiskery knuckles, leafless and lichen-splattered, scraping the sand. Though the sea is so near, there's not a whisper of it, as if this really were another time.

I liked living back there, deep in the tea-tree. Glaneuse Road: after the French barque Glaneuse, wrecked off the surf beach in 1886 with her bottles of contraband cognac. (And Glaneuse, gleaner: what I was and am.) For those six months I was suspended out of time in a glass lantern, not swinging - still, somewhere between two seasons. An old life, a new.

From A Body Of Water, UQP: 1990, p.188 (the one with the Matisse painting on the cover, yesss. Iss mine, preciousss.) A volume of Farmer's longer, meditative essays on art and life, The Bone House, is available from Giramondo. I don't know how many of her other books are in print - her Collected Stories have been on school reading lists from time to time. She spoke with Clive Hamilton and Alfred Yuson on Radio National's Book Show on the art of the essay in 2006 and a podcast is still available, here. I have also found an essay in Island from 2005, 'The Dog Of The Work', in my travels...Enjoy.

the seventh 'page' from Page Seventeen is out today

Issue 7 of the evergreen anthology, Page Seventeen, will be launched today at Burrinja Cafe (part of the gallery) in Upwey from 1 pm.

Work from seventeen (heh) new writers is featured, along with stories and poems by Sean M Whelan, Emilie Zoey Baker, Graham Nunn, Maxine Clarke, Amelia Walker, Ashley Capes, Peter Farrar, Christopher Currie, and David McLaren. There will be a regular poetry gig, The Word Tree, to follow, and an invite with some cover art can be found here. Just so you can find it easily in the shops (scroll down), if you don't get along today.

Prime Minister's literary awards are in

Finally. The news is out on this year's PM's literary awards.

Minister for the Arts Peter Garrett has just announced the winners of the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

The winner of the 2009 Fiction award is Nam Le for his book of short stories The Boat. The judging panel was impressed by the daring scope and excellence of its execution, the generous breadth of its emotional and social traverse and the excitement generated by every story.

In 2009, two books and three authors share the Non-Fiction award. The winners are Evelyn Juers for House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds for Drawing the Global Colour Line.

Both books explore important racial, moral and political issues of Australia's past. The Non-Fiction judging panel said "With great intellectual authority and international research Evelyn Juers, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell their stories magnificently."

The link for this Bookforum review of The Boat comes from Nam Le's reviews page on his website - scroll right on down...

The most recent Latrobe University Bulletin  carried these remarks on Reynolds' and Lake's prizewinning book, here, and the Cambridge University Press catalogue entry includes (somewhat chunky bits of) reviews. 

And my March '09 review of House of Exile, with links to other sources, is here.