reeling and writhing

manuscripts on the way at LiteraryMinded

Recently I have added Angela Meyer's blog, LiteraryMinded, to my roll down there on the right, but have not yet subscribed to her feed. That's due to change right now - Lisa Dempster from Locus has alerted me to Angela's series of posts there, The Best Unpublished Books (the freshest at the top), on books which she knows are in progress but which for all kinds of reasons have yet to find the right publisher.

This kind of news feature is something blogs are eminently suited to, and it's great to see someone as well informed as Angela delivering her tips on who's out there, and what they're working on.

Lisa posted recently on articles about book reviewing and a whole bundle of other interesting publishing news, with an emphasis on independent presses and fresh publishing ideas.

While a Google Reader of 120 odd feeds is the nicest customised news reading you could possibly have, especially if you have mates' news and thoughts scattered throughout,  I struggle sometimes to remember what I've read, and got a big shock at a family function a few weeks ago when I added ten years and a new identity onto a young relative, simply because she had changed her hair (very becoming, but the alteration was significant, and the rellies numerous and fast-growing): so some of the filtering service I offer here from time to time with these links posts will inevitably become recommendation and referral only.

There are quite a few people out there doing this web-monitoring thing much better than I am currently, 'specially with my computer doing the Dying Swan like it is at present.

So I'm offering my strong recommendation for Angela's LiteraryMinded and for Locus, where Lisa Dempster and Emily Clarke of Vignette and Aduki presses write regularly on Oz publishing and writing, and read far more widely than I can on my lonesome here.

Check these blogs out: if you are a writer with published work you would like reviewed, think about whether Angela is someone you might send it to (see the bottom right hand corner of the homepage for details); and check out the eclectic and growing blogroll at Locus while you are there.

Sydney and Melbourne have poetry in motion

In real time, and at rather short notice (I am sorry, Kris!!) you can hear plenty of live poetry read tonight at Kris Hemensley's bookshop, Collected Works. New books by Greg McLaren (The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead) and Meredith Wattison (Basket of Sunlight) are being launched, in a showcase for Sydney press, Puncher & Wattmannn. Supporting poets include Carol Jenkins, David Musgrave and Simon West, for a 6 pm start at the First Floor of the Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street (entrance just in from the corner off Flinders Lane), Melbourne.

In Margaret Throsby's beautiful Classic FM interview series, the latest download on this page will be up in a couple of hours (and I will update it then). Don't miss it, it is today's broadcast is a repeat interview with choreographer Meryl Tankard and is up to the usual standard of brilliance, including music from the work she is presenting with the Sydney Dance Company in Melbourne from next week, Inuk 2. The only thing missing is being able to see some of the dance.

Justine Larbalestier has been listening to the radio too - I haven't had a chance to check this out yet, but she says the poem that this program from Ramona Koval's Book Show featured is the last thing she read that made her cry for home. (In Justine's comments, Garth Nix pops up and tells us something startling about the copyright on that poem - Kenneth Slessor's famous  'Five Bells'.)

And it looks like Perry Middlemiss of Matilda's stint on the Book Show was put ahead a bit  - I found it here. He sits in with John Derum and academic Phil Butters in a segment on C.J. Dennis' verse satire, The Glugs of Gosh. So another thing to listen to over the weekend. I do hope Perry hasn't been trying to hide this from us...

prized above others

The shortlist for the ASL Gold Medal has been announced:

    * The Lost Dog (Michelle de Kretser, Allen & Unwin)
    * Not Finding Wittgenstein (J S Harry, Giramondo)
    * Feather Man (Rhyll McMaster, Brandl & Schlesinger)
    * Typewriter Music (David Malouf, UQP)
    * Landscape of Farewell (Alex Miller, Allen & Unwin)
(From Bookseller and Publisher Magazine).

The winner of the award, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year and is the oldest literary prize in Australia, will be announced at the 2008 Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference in Wollongong in early July.

say a prayer for the dying

Peter Rose's ABR review of Helen Garner's first novel for fifteen years, The Spare Room, is online and (as a less refined person might say) SMMMMOKING.

This is probably the toughest review Garner's story about caring for a dying friend has had so far, opening as it does with the tart observation that this novella could easily have been written as nonfiction.

Hel’s pride is easily stung. As long as she has practical tasks – beds to strip and change, ‘straightforward tasks of love and order’ – she is composed, but soon she is worn out, anxious, resentful. There is no acknowledgment of her literary obligations or of her solitary nature. Hel seems most alive when she is on her own. The best writing in the book depicts sentience in solitude. A violent thrill runs down her arms and ‘seethes’ in her fingertips. Night noises lull her: ‘Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing: to groom itself.’

Hel is almost professionally observant. Like Isabel Archer, she is ‘constantly staring and wondering’. Nothing escapes her: the neurosurgeon’s fat, penile Mont Blanc pen; the sort of men who can crack their spine and ‘make it crackle all the way down’...

When Nicola’s niece and her boyfriend pay a visit, the young woman is appalled by Nicola’s presumptuousness and her lengthy stay. Hel wants to sob with gratitude: ‘They were young, they were sane, and they were in my corner.’ While Nicola sleeps, the three of them laugh at her demands and swap stories about the inconvenience of it all. Not all readers – not all carers – will relish this Hobbesian pugilism.'

These are tough words for an uncompromising book which I am yet to read (doing that tidy thing that some of us do of getting my review reading out of the way first and saving TSR for 'afters'). Intriguingly, Rose seems to be looking for some respite himself from Garner's somewhat relentless evocation of anger as the enervating emotion it can so easily become, noting that this does not dissipate or evolve towards the novel's end.

Which makes for a powerful review from one of our best critical readers, and increases the pull of the unread book even more at my end.

(And yes, I'm also leaving it on the kids' shopping list for you-know-what day. Why do the bookshops parade all those pastel coloured books around for the day of buying big for female progenitors? Sussann's has BLACK japonaise-patterned flannel pyjamas this year. Get with the program, folks, get The Lost Dog out there for starters.)

Finally I must congratulate ABR for having such a sterling piece of criticism online for us linking folk. Luminous and numerous gold stars for you.

writing Australian (with a Virago segue)

I loved Antonia White's Frost in May when I first read it about fifteen years ago, but I did not know it was the reason for the start of the Virago imprint. Carmen Callil recalls the early days in this story from The Guardian.

Oh WOW.
From 2008, articles for inclusion in the latest Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) will be available online as they are finalised, for study and comment. 
Web 2.0 hits the study of Australian lit. And jolly good too. (Members of ASAL, of course, continue to receive the journal twice a year in print form.) To sample what's currently available online (volume 7, 2007), see here.
ASAL has a conference coming up in June-July, its thirtieth, with a theme to suit - Australian literature in a global world. The final program will be available soon.

Brian Castro, author of The Garden Book, Shanghai Dancing and other works, is moving from the University of Melbourne to teach writing at the University of Adelaide, replacing Nicholas Jose, who will be based at the University of Western Sydney before taking up a chair at Harvard in 2009.

In this report, from the Higher Ed section of The Australian, Bernard Lane reports that as chair of the creative writing program, Castro will seek to introduce regional fellowships, to raise the level of debate over Australian literature, and to hopefully produce a school akin to the renowned East Anglia program in England. He will be joined at Adelaide by award-winning Sydney poet Jill Jones.

Scheherazade in Sydney

This project came to its culmination in a symposium at the Performance Space in Sydney recently, and was the subject of a review on Arts Hub by Talya Rubin:

'The impetus for the work came out of the sudden death of Barbara Campbell’s husband. The opening screen of her website reads: “In a faraway land a gentle man dies. His bride is bereft. She travels across continents looking for a reason to keep living. Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey. She does so for 1001 nights.” As a way of coping with grief, Campbell undertook a period of enforced public mourning and used as her tools the daily paper, focusing on stories about the conflict in the Middle East.'

Rubin's review is available to Arts Hub subscribers here. Campbell is a member of the  Electronic Literature Organisation, and the text archive of the stories, which are otherwise only available at the time of performance online, is here. At GrandTextAuto she was taken to task for her rather severe approach to presentation, but nonetheless the frame concept and performance aspect of the project, as well as its duration over nearly three years, is remarkable.

julia funds a new Ozlit chair in the west

What a busy old Government it is, not unlike those at the top of the team. Not content with apologising to those we have wronged, positioning itself to stand up to China and founding Prime Minister's literary prizes, is it. No, there's more...

The Education, Employment and Workplace Relations media centre announced yesterday that funding for a new chair in Australian literature, which was open to applications by universities around the country, will be awarded by the Rudd Government to the University of Western Australia:

Though a number of universities submitted impressive proposals, the six member selection panel unanimously found the University of Western Australia to be the strongest candidate.

UWA’s proposed strategies to promote Australian literature both nationally and internationally as well as the support of the Western Australian Government were identified as strengths in the application.

As the University’s application noted, UWA has pioneered and remained constantly committed to the teaching and research of Australian literacy studies and is today at the forefront in this field.

The University of Western Australia is to be congratulated on its achievement.

The University of Western Australia has been recognised for its long-standing commitment to the promotion of literature and culture in the community.

The decision follows a competitive process which was open to all Australian universities.

Link via Australian Writers Online.

world class reviewing in the Weekend Australian - read all about it

Time to subscribe to Luke Slattery's blog. This is one of the best reviews of James Wood's How Fiction Works you will ever read. I have missed your literary journalism, Mr. Slattery; I used to ask myself, where did that lovely Francophile Slattery person go? And assumed, rather foolishly, that perhaps he had managed to slip away from us all. To la belle France.

And now feel rather silly that I don't read other bits of The Australian, or I would have known, wouldn't I? Hopefully he won't let all that great extra-curricular critical reading go to waste before he hits fifty, and will give us more like this review soon. We could do with a few more philosopher-journalists who write this well down here. Or anywhere else, for that matter. The opening lines will give you a sense of the crackling brio with which he tackles this much-praised book, and you won't stop:

James Wood's brilliant career -- though still in his early 40s, the English-born literary critic is a professor of critical practice at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker -- registers the rising cachet of high cultural capital in a pop cultural age.

It's anyone's guess whether, by the end of his career, Wood will have become a stronger critic than his illustrious mid 20th-century predecessors such as William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Edmund Wilson. But he is already an establishment figure enjoying the sheen of minor celebrity, bestriding the prestige end of the academy and literary journalism.

Yet his new analysis of fiction's interior workings, though bright and occasionally brilliant, is not entirely convincing. Animated by a restless speculative energy and a bravura style, it aims to march literary criticism into an engagement with moral philosophy.

I do hope this courageous and beautifully written review is widely read.

I can haz a book with train ticket?

Tom Cho reports on his blog that he has a book of stories coming out with Giramondo next year.

If:book reports that the first of Penguin's interactive fiction publishing projects is complete. Charles Cumming has produced a mashup of sorts of John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps, entitled The Twenty-One Steps.

David Prater, poet and Cordite founder and editor, is now ensconced in the Netherlands and has the buzz on a terrific prize awarded if you buy a book in National Book Week. One free day's travel on the train!! 200,000 Netherlanders can't be wrong. David also has an article in the Weekend Australian on self-published poetry where we are told that Walt Whitman wrote his own reviews to his first, pretty much self-published and very famous book, Leaves of Grass - a song of himself, indeed.

Missed the inaugural Booktown event at Clunes last year - but I am going to try to get to this one.
Link via Louise Swinn, who also broke the very good news that Delia Falconer is editor of the Black Inc short story collection for 2008.

I really enjoyed Margaret Throsby's interview with Germaine Greer on ABC Classic FM the other week - but I think it will be off their website soon and we'll have to wait for a repeat. In the meantime, there's always the podcast of her evening at Readings to enjoy.

Finally, fighting words from Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe in the Age on Monday, over UK publishers' neo-colonial attitude to "Commonwealth" rights for US titles. Contentious, what? He's posted a shorter version of the article on his blog, where comments are currently closed, unfortunately.

overland prizes new novels

Please note that Louise Swinn, one of the publishers of the excellent Sleepers' Almanac, has joined the literary bloggers of Oz (and the even more select group of Australian editors who blog) and is excited about the following news too.

To wit: Over 2008 another initiative to foster new writing is to join the ranks of Australian lotteries for writers, but in a very good way.
Overland magazine, long a champion of marginalised and/or progressive writing, has announced an inaugural novel 'prize' consisting of publication of the winning novel as an issue of the magazine.

Aiming to build on a distribution model it established in its early days as the journal of the Australasian Book Society, when it "created an alternative literary infrastructure that, at one point, was publishing half of all novels produced in Australia in a particular year", Overland wants to support new fiction as it did in the fifties.

The editors will be accepting submissions of novel manuscripts throughout 2008, with an announcement of the selected novel in early 2009 and publication towards the end of that year.

The website announcement stresses that "This is not a competition and there is no deadline as such. We plan to read manuscripts throughout 2008; we will, however, accept an appropriate novel whenever we find it."

The selected novel will have a guaranteed readership exceeding that of most literary novels in Australia, by virtue of Overland's subscription base.

Interested? read here for further instructions.

in which an australian book is reviewed - Feather Man

When Christina Hill reviewed Australian poet Rhyll McMaster's first novel, Feather Man, for Australian Book Review last year, she placed it in 'the disturbing genre of Amy Witting's I for Isobel and Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra By The River.

In so doing I think she has perhaps not made enough of  how a disjointed, sometimes dissonant style communicates the protagonist Lyce's precarious grasp on reality in this book, and of how deeply shocking the behaviour of the abusive neighbors is (first Lionel, the abuser, and then his son Redmond, whom Lyce later marries). While Witting's Isobel is capable of devastating observations, Witting has never opened with something that could compare with the first chapter of Feather Man, in which twelve year old Lyce is deliberately, quietly and methodically raped in a dirty chicken shed by her neighbour Lionel.

Lyce, whose nickname is Sookie, is observant and articulate, but is constantly under threat of collapse from within. (For most of the book we do not know what her real name is, although it is quoted teasingly in an epigram at the beginning.)

Understandably, after this event the narrative fragments into a series of vignettes, clashing with each other in time and perspective, often sliding between tenses, as she distances herself from her own pain by acutely observing her family and the very few friends she manages to collect. We can only guess that Sookie is hardening over like a tortoise, building a carapace against the world, for most of the book focuses on what she notices about others.

I felt at times the style in this book was quite rough, almost clunky. It took me half the novel to realise this was deliberate and significant, and for that first half I felt quite impatient with the author. There are some disjunctions that, if they are not deliberate, are just plain careless - on page 58 the child Sookie quotes Goethe, even though she is speaking in the present tense, where in the next paragraph she is reading a children's book, Saggy Baggy The Elephant. But perhaps this is in character for this unstable, rather than unreliable narrator. Everything she tells us does hang together and make sense - but it is a bit jumbled at times, sometimes giving the sense she is talking aloud to herself.

The ending also reflects this play on instability, rather than a straightforwardly unhappy ending. This is a bold and assured debut effort which maybe could have been even more powerful with stronger editing, introduced by an epigram from classical literature about Lyce, the nymph who bound Daphnis to be faithful to her upon threat of blinding. Though in Feather Man, it is debatable whether Lyce manages to blind anyone but herself.

writers' occupational hazards list - prams, chairs and electricity bills

The idea of a chair merited further exploration in Dan Green's first post - Maryann Burk Carver raises a dissenting point of view about the Lish-Carver editing relationship here. She and Raymond Carver's upcoming biographer Carol Sklenica can also be read at Pinky's Paperhaus commenting on the New Yorker article about Tess Gallager's release of unedited material by Carver.

And this latest memoir of Ballard's sounds like something I will definitely buy. As a single parent after the death of his wife, he was apparently never in the least bit fazed by the pram in the hall.

There are some nice remarks about Gerald Murnane and Chris Koch's latest awards over at Susan Wyndham's blog at the SMH:

Murnane, 69, lives in "modest, frugal comfort" in Melbourne and this award is "a release from anxiety". Royalty payments, he says, have usually matched his gas and electricity bills. A few years ago he decided to stop writing his poetically repetitive prose but several recent awards and rediscovery by Indyk's Giramondo Publishing have encouraged a new outpouring.

A 20,000-word story has grown into an 80,000-word book, Barley Patch, still in the rewriting phase, and Murnane has plans for another "20,000-worder" that might also become a book. He is equally pleased by Giramondo's reissue this month of his first book from 1974, Tamarisk Row, to be launched at Adelaide Writer's Week.

whoops - bless this ship

This is what happens when families have Friday parties - you don't read the main part of the paper till Monday morning, online, and you hear the good news that has been announced in other places.

Congratulations are due to Sophie Cunningham, new Meanjin editor, a publisher and novelist who blogs here and there. She replaces Ian Britain who was editor for six years, and her plans for the iconic journal include longer essays and expansion of online content. Brava.

jesus don't want me for my pizza

It's that time of year already: here's Sleepers No. 4:

Could you ever really love a guy who speaks in comic sans?

What does survival mean when the whole world has cancer?

What happens when the relationship with your lecturer begins to echo the short story form he's teaching you?

Would it be fun to have Jesus round for beer and pizza?

What's the best way to kill a mouse?

How do you memorialise a hunting-obsessed father when you're a vegetarian?

Is marrying into a family of lawyers really a good idea?

Where do you find the most exciting, the funniest and most moving short stories in the country collected together in one tight volume?

Sounds enticing, doesn't it. This is where you need to be to hear Max Barry read, and to launch the fourth collection from Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner's Sleepers outfit - there's poetry and cartoons as well as fiction involved.

At: the Bella Union Bar, @ the Trades Hall, cnr Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton
On: Wednesday February 6
Time: 6pm for 6.30

Otherwise, do pick it up from a good bookshop soon.

it's the calibre of the essays that counts

The second Calibre Essay Prize from Australian Book Review, a new competition for non-fiction pieces which carries a prize of $10,000, is to be shared by two winners for 2008.

Judges Kerryn Goldsworthy, Paul Hetherington and Peter Rose chose Rachel Robertson's essay, 'Reaching One Thousand' and Mark Tredinnick's 'A Storm And A Teacup' from a longlist of eighteen essays. Robertson's essay is about her family's experience with autism:

Rachel Robertson’s short fiction, reviews and articles have been published in Australian print and on-line journals. She has worked as an editor, researcher, policy officer and adult educator. Her essay is ‘Reaching One Thousand’, an impressively subtle study of autism and of its consequences for the child and for the parents alike. With dry wit it also introduces readers to an eccentric family of professional and amateur mathematicians. Ms Robertson’s adroit depiction of a family recognising and responding to autism is as impressive as her anxious care for her son ‘Ben’ (all names in this essay have been changed).

Dr. Tredinnick's essay is reported to be a personal meditation on ecology and the writing life(which I'm sure is also very good, if the high standard set by last year's winner is anything to go by):

It begins in a deluge, as it were: the heavy rains that flooded parts of south-east Australia in June 2007. These falls and the general inundation fail to alleviate Dr Tredinnick’s concerns about ‘the driest continent’ and the need for a profound reassessment of how many resources we all need individually to live sanely and sustainably. Tea and its harmonising ceremonies and literature provide the key in this elegant, succinct essay, which also deals with the literary life in the twenty-first century.

Once more the narrow focus of our new Prime Minister's new literary prize is exposed - it would have been good to see some of that money going to poetry and essay writing as well. So it is good that ABR and CAL (Copyright Agency Limited) joined forces in 2007 to provide this prize to essayists. It would also be exciting to see some of the shortlisted essays online at ABR, or in hard copy, at some time - even a list of names and topics covered would be of interest, both to the public and to aspiring writers.

in the beginning was Tamarisk Row

I don't know if this is news to anyone else or not, but Giramondo Publishing has begun a Classic Reprints imprint, kicking off with a reissue of Gerald Murnane's first novel, Tamarisk Row, which has been out of print for quite some time (almost twenty years, according to the website.) The recent success of Alexis Wright's prize-winning novel Carpentaria, which has sold over 25,000 copies in Australia, seems to have left the small independent publisher buoyant and optimistic.

Last year saw no less than eight titles from this house, run in his spare time, it would seem, by academic Ivor Indyk, including four collections of poetry, a book of essays and three novels. 2006 saw the publication of Carpentaria, poetry and essays, and 2005 was even busier. 

And I haven't even mentioned HEAT magazine, have I - my favourite Oz litmag has gone from two to three issues a year. What excitement. But back to Mr. Murnane's reissue.

Murnane's most recent collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, was published by Giramondo in 2005. He spoke about memories connected with Tamarisk Row in this article, 'A Detrimental Education', published in The Age last June.

I assume there will be more reminiscing and media coverage of this happy event happening around release time in March, though I doubt any of it could top the poignant account of Murnane's first exposure to seventeenth-century French music recorded at the very end of this article:

When Mr R learnt that our school lacked a library, he generously brought some of his own books to school and made them available as background reading for his students of history.

He did more. Having implied politely that our education had been previously somewhat narrow, he took his dozen or so students of modern history one afternoon to his home to learn what our textbooks could not teach.

Mr R was unmarried and lived with his widowed mother in an inner-suburban terrace house. We students saw no more than the large front room, which was Mr R's study. Two sides of the room were lined with books. Against another wall was a device that would seem primitive in the extreme today but was the first of its kind that I had ever seen: a three-speed record player. Mr R owned not only hundreds of books but dozens of long-playing records. I had never suspected that one person could own such a treasury.

Do read it all - I feel bad stealing this silver thunderbolt from the end of a measured, spare and desolate reminiscence which will have to serve for now as an introduction to Murnane's singular body of work (which has an international reputation) if you haven't read him before.

how blogging can nail one of the best short stories evah

This is how she did it. Not only that, Tracy has a grant for a second novel and companion blog in the bag. That's called creative industry, children.

Now I'm off.

new victorian sunscreen is a book

And it's on again - Reading Victoria has a new name and a smart new blog. The Summer Read at the State Library of Victoria has been launched for 2007-8.

There are no huge surprises on the program, apart from a reduced Celebrities and Critics section, nicely repackaged and retitled as 'Reviewers' Views', and including, this year, Good Reading Magazine editor Alison Pressley and ABC books interviewer Ramona Koval. (I note however that there is a "Celebrities Reading Day" slotted in for Australia Day.) But first prize for most evocative contribution to the Reviewers' section definitely goes in my book to Claire Sutherland, books writer for the Herald Sun:

My teenage summer holidays always meant a banana lounge, sunglasses and an eventual book-shaped white patch on my torso. The white patch could have been left by anything from Stephen King's latest frightfest to a George Orwell novel (I devoured his entire canon in an Orwell orgy one Christmas holidays. Geek? Moi?).

Bless her boots, she also states a firm preference for the meaty, rather than the escapist, summer read, and has named Matt Condon's recent Snowy tract, Trout Opera, as her seasonal viand. (She could, of course, follow that up with Dorothy Porter's El Dorado from the list, if the brain is still feeling undernourished. What a pleasure to see a verse novel on a list like this.)

Along with the books (of course), the best new feature, in my opinion, is the introduction of author posts to the Summer Read blog, which augurs well for a continued increase in popularity in the application of this special new sunscreen called  Victorian reading (as well as some respite from UV rays while people are online posting comments.)

the players have forgotten the writers...again

Rocky Wood has had a useful article on writers and the election published in Eureka Street this week, in which he claims that the film industry is subsidised at the expense of writing and publishing.

In this list of proposals for the next Government, he includes support for the training of editors, an idea also floated by Text publisher Michael Heyward in this passionate and incisive article in The Age back in early September.
Wood asks for the following, (and to the editors' training scheme I'd definitely add his proposal for more oomph to our genre writers):

Funding across the board should be at least 10 per cent of the Arts Budget and no less than that provided to the film industry. This should include an immediate increase in funding for the ELR and PLR schemes.

Writers of genre fiction should be given financial support. Australia has world-leading writers of science fiction, graphic novels, horror and fantasy, but they receive almost no support from local publishing houses. The Literature Board needs restructuring to include genre groups with proper funding, including for Executive Officers.

Our highly-successful book festivals should receive more funding and the Books Alive campaign be extended to cover specific areas, including children's fiction and short stories.

Publishers should be offered project based funding through tax rebates, as offered to the film industry. One hundred writers could be offered a two-year living wage 'scholarship' for around $5 million per annum. An accredited and subsidised training scheme for editors is well overdue.

And Australia needs broadly-based prizes along the lines of America's National Book Awards. It is particularly indefensible that Australia does not have a major prize for non-fiction.

He describes shadow Arts minister Peter Garrett's call for greater support of writers rather than the film industry as "hearkening back to the Whitlam era, when new investment in the writing arts and public debate harnessed to rapid social change invigorated Australian literature,"

and says that

"Another such burst of creative investment is overdue...Today's writers, given voice, could establish a deeper cultural independence, truly engaged not only with America and England, but also with Asia and the broader world community."

(Link via Australian Writers Online.)

Dymocks kiosk for books, not muffins

From The Australian, a few days ago - Dymocks is to offer e-books, boosting its catalogue to more than 4.5 million titles. (Its largest store, in George Street, Sydney, can hold about 350,000 hard copy books.)
The e-book project has been in development for two and a half years, with Dymocks management keeping a close eye on what has happened in the music industry and recognising that Internet sales are slowly eating away at shopfront distributors' figures. At present it is claimed that 'many...titles would be sold at a discount to their hardcover cousins.'

Update: There is more news on this over at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online, at their Speakeasy blog - it looks as though Dymocks are claiming a world first on this one.

slightly cool news, or slightly warm?

Okay, Perry and HorrorScope have pipped me with this one, which was going to read last week:
"And hot on the heels of my last post on the Sleepers Salon which featured alumni and students from RMIT's Creative Media program comes" news of a new literary journal to hit Melbourne streets next year courtesy of the RMIT Professional Writing and Editing department.

It's called harvest, (probably lower-case is intended there), will be published quarterly, and is seeking submissions before November 30 for its first issue.

See here for more information and to join the mailing list - provisions for subscriptions are still under arrangement. That will teach me to sit on hot news, won't it.

In other secondhand but noteworthy Australian writing news, not only Debra Adelaide has a six-figure deal for her next novel, but Melbourne writer Toni Jordan has snagged one as well. Susan Wyndham has all the details at the excellent Sydney Morning Herald bookblog, Undercover, here.

And graphic novelist Eddie Campbell is enjoying Thurber's biography, particularly the 'begat' section.

To finish, two things that (frankly) stink.

Of sleepers, writers and Napoleon

I got my act together and finally went to my first, and the last, Sleepers' Salon for 2007 on Thursday last, at the Trades Hall bar. I've yet to visit the refurbished corners of Trades Hall (that was, admittedly, quite a few years back now): suffice it to say that the one I visited has yet to have its makeover. (Must go back and visit the International bookshop sometime, though).

Creative writing courses in Melbourne were the focus of this salon, presented as usual by Sleepers publishers Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn. Antoni Jach, writer and Creative Media lecturer at RMIT, did a session with Sonia Orchard, a published writer who is also one of his students and is close to finishing her first novel, work on which comprised part of her studies at RMIT for a master's degree in creative writing.

Second half of the night consisted of readings by writing students from an array of courses across Melbourne, and was savoured by an appreciative audience of about 120.

I did take some notes when Jach and Orchard were having their parley - I will be looking out for Orchard's novel, as her research involved talking to music industry veterans from '40s and '50s London, and sounds terrific. However I will confess I took a lot more notes when Jach was talking about his latest novel and his experiences with the publication of his other works.

today Melbourne, tomorrow magazines conquer the nation

Well, I guess it's all horses for courses in the book marketing game - Justine Larbalestier tells it like it is but nonetheless makes it sound pretty enjoyable whilst touring with husband Scott Westerfeld, while over at ReadWriteWeb, making the net side look like damn hard work is J.P. Kenyon, with this guest post on Internet novel marketing.

There's a good roundup of Australian independent magazines in today's M Magazine in The Age, including the new 'mook' from Vignette Press (there's a sneak preview to download at that link). Editor Michelle Griffin gives print a lusty plug in her column this week, all power to her!

As someone who loves magazines in all their myriad forms, it's quite thrilling to see the form enjoying such a vigorous revival right here in my hometown. And we're not talking about amateur productions here, even if so many of their talented creators do it for love rather than fat profits. Magazines such as Is/Not, Sneaker Freaker and Wooden Toy are coveted and collected all over the world. And it makes sense. We've got a thriving cafe culture. A great creative scene. Melbourne needs mags to complete the picture. Internet kill print? Hah! There's still something about magazines that your BlackBerry will never give you.

(Hear, hear. I bought a 4ft by 212 cm bookcase last weekend. It's not only full, but I can put all my journals and magazines in mag files in a smaller bookcase now. And God, they look pretty too.)
Let me just say how much I enjoy this Sunday paper lift-out (in fact it's the only bit of the Sunday Age I read), and full marks to Griffin for steadily turning it into a showcase for all that's interesting about Melbourne, including the recently introduced Eco Life section, the only feature of its type across the MSM in Melbourne to my knowledge. It's turning into something I could happily keep reading for almost as long as I've read Epicure and the EG.

Finally, Eddie Campbell's posts on composition in the last week have been quite riveting stuff, and I give you the link to a couple there, where you'll find the lowdown on the creation of a page from Alan Moore's graphic novel, From Hell.

it's about reading and writing

Lisa Dempster at Locus Press picked up some good reading at the TINA (This Is Not Art) festival in Newcastle, and has a roundup of the National Young Writers' Festival up as well.

Want to talk to an agent? log into this forum at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online from  October 8-11 to talk to Agent Sydney.

From LISNews.org, this link to a Long Island librarians' panel on the graphic novel may be of interest to some.

Read all about the speedy adoption of ketai, novels published on mobile phones in Japan, here in the Telegraph. Talk about convergence:

Out of the top 10 bestselling fiction works in the first half of 2007, five started as keitai novels and boast average sales of 400,000.

Crude in style and basic in characterisation, they tend to be written by first-time writers - usually in their teens or twenties - for a young audience equally wedded to their phones.

Several have been turned into real books. Love Sky, a story about a boy with cancer who breaks up with his girlfriend to spare her feelings, has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is to be made into a film.

Many of the novels are influenced by comic books which are very popular in Japanese. Consequently, they are heavy in dialogue and really short paragraphs which fit neatly on a small screen. Large empty spaces between sentences are used to imply that the characters are thinking.

Link via the Speakeasy blog at AWM Online.

publishing first for Oz from Aduki in November

Aduki Press is about to become the very first publisher in Australia to give a book away online, in addition to selling it in hard copy. Tristan Clark's Stick this in your memory hole is due for release on November 1st. Its publisher, Emily Clark, wants to see it read and freely quoted:

The book employs biting satire and insightful critique to engage in a discussion of Australian politics and society. It comprises thirty-seven essay-style chapters covering a range of topics including politics, economics, consumerism, media, food, oil, logging, water and transportation.

Stick this in your memory hole carries a strong message in support of free speech and launches an unprecedented attack on an atrophied political system and those who comprise and support it. The title is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, the ‘memory hole’ being a hole into which documents deemed to be conflicting with ‘official truths’ were placed for disposal.

She also hopes that if overseas experiences with free downloads of published material are reflected here, some mainstream publishers will one day take the plunge. Read more about the Creative Commons licensing arrangements for this publication at Locus, here.

Melbourne Writers' Festival 2007 - a little blog music

I enjoyed lurking at MWF this time around - highlights included David Prater's launch and Paul Hardacre's interview with Tom Shapcott, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida's terrific session with Louise Swinn, who asked some excellent questions, Victoria Glendinning talking to Sophie Cunningham about Leonard Woolf, the new media presentations at ACMI from the Story of the Future and LAMP labs, and Alexis Wright and Tony Birch discussing the genesis and publication of her prize-winning, seminal work Carpentaria. I also caught Les Murray, at a very convivial session where all listeners were content to hear him read poem after poem, only briefly stopping for a few questions before they asked him to 'read some more - read the Weeping Man'. (You can hear it there, too.) I was going to blog Eggers and Vida, but Ariel has done a much better job, and you can catch that meaty slice of the conference here.

I wasn't the only punter surprised at the size of the venue allocated to Wright's session - others remarked that a bigger crowd could easily have been accommodated elsewhere. Only 100 odd people can fit into the Tower theatre. This should have been a free session, in the Beckett. At least there was a good long signing session afterwards, as those 100 people obviously had plenty to say to this passionate and remarkable writer, storyteller and advocate.

Carpentaria will be released in the UK next year. This book is not just on the crest of the world literature wave, it is connecting the very lifeblood of our country to it, adding an ostinato to that movement that is sublime and compelling. It will be translated into many languages and read and studied for a very long time. So don't miss out. You have been told.

This festival largely had a good strong vibe, although as Lisa Dempster from Locus Press has pointed out in her constructive and comprehensive list of suggestions here, the prices still put it out of the reach of younger people and students. I get a bit sick of seeing hordes of middle-class couples, walking in a ring, myself - I don't have anything against them, it's great that people are coming with partners and friends of course, but it would be nice to see people from further afield than Camberwell occasionally.

Ian Syson has put it nicely in another context in a review in Saturday's Age, quoting a fictional character from Mont Albert saying that 'Melbourne is the city whose east I know better than its north or west'. Syson adds in a gritted dentural parenthesis that ' if there's a better 14 word critique of the Australian publishing industry than the one able to be inferred here, I am yet to read it.'

That's only going to change for Victoria's festival when the Brumby government comes good with the $250,000 needed to bring MWF's funding up to the level of the Sydney outing, and then Rosemary Cameron can continue the good job she has started of ramping up the diversity of her programming. All those devirginated middle class ladies should have enjoyed themselves at Second Life, when they were over the strangeness - I am looking forward to checking with Jeff Sparrow how that session went, having felt a bit of biblio-tech anxiety over the fact that it was held in a tent.

There's other MWF reports at graphic novelist Eddie Campbell's blog as well, including this salutary note on signing books.

Carpentaria a shoo-in for Vance Palmer prize

I was sitting in the Latrobe Reading Room yesterday and got the vibe that prizes were in the offing when photographers snapped Alexis Wright and two other writers sitting on the desks in the row in front of me.
So if she gets in the paper with two other writers on a row of desks, I'm (hopefully invisibly)BEHIND THEM.
Decided to be an eminently sensible blogger and wait till today to write about it, though.
(Where's our picture, anyway?)
I know Perry will cover this too, but I thought this was a really good opportunity (a) to show I am not a pooper-blogscooper (b) complain about the photo, which of course could always turn up tomorrow...

Anyhow, here's the judges' report for the Vance Palmer Prize (also known as the Victorian Premier's Prize, collectively) for fiction: other prizewinners can be found here:

Alexis Wright, in Carpentaria, has created an epic centred on the town of Desperance, in the vast Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. Where lives are shaped and measured by the annual destructive cyclonic floods and the daily cleansing tides. At the novel’s heart is Norm Phantom, patriarch of his family and leader of the Pricklebush people.

Carpentaria demonstrates that Wright is an inventive writer of great reach. Indeed, it is almost audacious in its scope and ambition. In her marrying of the oral tradition with the written word Wright takes a bold stylistic risk, but it has paid off with a complicated net of stories coming vibrantly alive on the page. Wright has created a strong, confident and vivid voice with a healthy dose of sly humour.

nothing still and small about these voices

I'm not a live blogger, and probably never will be. So here from the good folks at Spirax and Uniball, and the tiny brain cells of yours truly, is a brief report on the session rather misleadingly entitled, "The Still Small Voice" featuring Emily Ballou and Cate Kennedy (with an unexplained scratching from Dorothy Porter) at the Melbourne Writers' Festival on Thursday.

After a blistering start where she interrogated the title of the session with some brio, Ballou spoke of voice not just as polyvocal (that's my word for it, not hers), ranging across accents and idioms, but as 'a gift, or a beautiful visitor' rather than 'something you can practise or pick up at the shops'. I chuckled loudest when she asked whether said title was meant to describe the panellists' voices, or worse still, their booksales, and what male writers might have said had they been invited to present on such a topic.

She noted that perhaps true voice is a myth, that the 'rhythm of voices will shift and grow as I do - not a style, but a heartbeat.'  Reading from her latest book, Aphelion, set in the Snowy Mountains, she delivered a story from within the novel written in the voice and unerring idiom of an elderly Australian man, arguing the case for the polyvocal writer most successfully therein in a musical Milwaukee accent. (Perhaps it's only when we hear an American say 'bugger' that we realise what a peculiar expression it really is!)

Cate Kennedy described how the importance of having something to say has shaped her work, that all form and no content irritates her wherever it is found, whether in politics or the posturing of celebrities. There is 'a collision, a letting go of anxiety and letting words fall onto me', whenever authentic subjects/stories are found. As she says in her travel book, Sing and Don't Cry, from which she read a spellbinding passage about rain in the Mexican desert, "I want to record this, and let this record me."
She asked,"How can I create a voice that is doing what I want it to do?", suggesting that voice is shaped by details, by substance and content first and foremost, and noted a preoccupation with these concerns in all her work to date when she was preparing for the session.

Despite the absence of the main drawcard for me, poet Dorothy Porter, this session was nonetheless well worth the entry price, thanks to the powerful voices of the remaining speakers. There's some great reporting on MWF from Lisa Dempster of Vignette Press over at Locus, the combined blog of Vignette and Aduki Independent Press, including a pretty thorough  SWAT analysis of the festival, complete with a comment from Rosemary Cameron (the organiser) and some remarks on the independent publishing session. I may well have more to say after the weekend's sessions - Louise Swinn's interview with Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida last Saturday was superb - but do keep an eye on Lisa's site in the meantime.

*Some coverage of Cory Doctorow's session on copyright, here and here. (Google Blogsearch has turned up better results than Technorati on MWF. Fancy that.)

words are bullets...

...speaking of which, I have published recently at Cordite on the continuing online development of Australia's literary journals, alongside the upcoming issue, no. 26, "Innocence". Get over there and take in all manner of good things, with poetry selected by guest editor M.T.C. Cronin.

David Prater, the general editor of Cordite, will have his first collection of poems, We Will Disappear, launched at the upcoming Melbourne Writers' Festival. He also has had the improbable pleasure of bumping into the reclusive Thomas Pynchon on the New York subway not so long ago, when Against The Day was still in pieces (and apparently Mr. Pynchon was carrying them around.) His account (and review of Against The Day) is here.

writers I like to read (and read about)

Thanks to Jill Jones for pointing out this feature on Australian poetry at British poetry site Metaroar, which developed organically into a group interview by New South Wales writer Angela Meyer with Jill, David Prater and Paul Hardacre. I will read more of it later, but partly due to my recent communications with him, I have to say I was tickled by David's answers to the questions of the role of poetry in society ('Sometimes I fail to see what role poetry has, other than to keep poets sane'), and things poetry should be able to do but cannot (' I wish it could bring down a government').

I really enjoyed Sophie Cunningham's great piece in The Age this weekend on writers and blogging, where she draws skilfully on her personal blogging experience and then weaves that of others into the article to give a broad and detailed picture of how blogging and writing do and don't mix (among other things). I especially liked the ending quote from fellow Ozblogger Boynton, which first appeared here:

I wonder what writers can learn from blogging? (the electric speed of playful language for one, where ideas seed).

Australia Council gets a second life

Not quite sure how this will blog up - we are Internet free this week, and this news has come to hand from Victoria McClelland-Fletcher from the Australia Council, so I'm posting it in only slightly edited form in at the City Library.

Pioneering Second Life artist to inspire Australian artists

On 12 July, the Australia Council for the Arts, in partnership with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), will host its first ever artist forum in Second Life.
The in-world event, to be moderated by ABC’s Sunday Arts reporter/producer Fenella Kernebone, is for the Australia Council’s inaugural Second Life artist residency.

In an open forum at 7pm (EST) on ABC Island, Paris-based artist and architect Brad Kligerman - one of the first artists in Second Life to complete an in-world residency - will present his work, discuss ideas and answer participants’ questions.

Brad, an architect and teacher, completed his 11-week residency with US-based Ars Virtua , a new media centre and gallery in Second Life, where he questioned the idea of materiality in the rendered environment and the nature of image.

Australia Council chief executive officer Kathy Keele said the partnership with the ABC was a great fit with the Australia Council’s Second Life initiative. ‘The ABC was the first Australian media organisation to establish a presence in Second Life and we are excited about working with them on this project. We hope that Australian artists gain valuable insight from Brad Kligerman’s successful art interventions in Second Life and that they will be inspired to create innovative works in-world that will place them at the forefront of this groundbreaking practice.’

The Australia Council has also set up an artist’s forum in Second Life for artists looking for other artists with whom to collaborate. The moderated artists forum can be found at ABC Island and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) Island, Esperance.

Places for the 12 July Second Life event are limited. To register email slrsvp@ozco.gov.au with your Second Life Avatar name. The event will be streamed live at http://slcn.tv . A vodcast* of the event will also be available on the ABC Sunday Arts website.

* video podcast

why Carpentaria is a winner

It's probably not the first time an author has provided an explication in essay form of his or her latest work, but the announcement last week of the 2007 Miles Franklin award reminded me that I had yet to fully read Alexis Wright's essay in HEAT 13 on her winning novel, Carpentaria.

I read Carpentaria for myself and reviewed it in 200 words for the Big Issue here in Melbourne four months ago now, after extracting a promise from the books editor that I could review it here as well later on. I'm sorry I've let so much time slip without organising my thoughts on this exciting work at greater length - 200 words is indeed haiku when it attempts to speak of a novel that reaches effortlessly across cultures, mines contemporary cultural research and resonates as extensively through collective memory as this one.

It was helpful to go from my first reading of Pynchon's seventies opus, Gravity's Rainbow, into this gorgeous Rainbow Serpent of a tale. There are stylistic issues common to both which are easier to handle if you're already in the groove of reading across many voices and viewpoints, although Carpentaria is more approachable than that other, not much heftier Rainbow. In her essay for HEAT, Wright speaks of her attempts to create an authentic storytelling style using local voices and rhythms from the Gulf area of Northern Australia resulting in heavily visual storytelling and writing. She evokes a powerful, probably perfect image to describe the results of her efforts:

...the written form is also visual in that it looks something like a spinning, multi-stranded helix of stories...The helix of divided strands is forever moving, entwining all stories together, just like a lyrebird is capable of singing several tunes at once.

journalese

In a recent post on Ozlit blog Sarsaparilla, Sophie Cunningham has mentioned that it is not as easy to find writers who have blogs as she expected, while Laura Carroll commented that '  Blogging isn’t for everyone, any more than any other genre or mode of writing is...'

I have oversimplified her point, but why writers do or don't blog is not the point of this post - what's interested me recently is the creeping back of the diary and writing journal into local literary journals, and my recent discovery of a book I had never read before, Beverley Farmer's journal, A Body Of Water: A Year's Notebook, written while she worked on poetry and fiction twenty years ago in 1987.

In HEAT 12 Fay Zwicky allowed large chunks of her journal from 2004-2005 to be published, giving us more or less unfettered access to the late growth of her poet's mind, and some poignant insights into ageing and writing along the way. There is a neat observation of the boundaries between the conversational style of diary writing and the normal feints and blows of academic discourse in the Letters column of last month's Australian Book Review, where Chris Wallace Crabbe and Ken Gelder parse the rights and wrongs of Wallace-Crabbe's snitches about Gelder in his diary entry in the previous issue, which has quite a bloggy feel about it.

things you will not find on Wikipedia (or elsewhere for that matter)

Recent additions to the Literary Encyclopedia include this entry on F.S. Flint, the Imagist poet, by Michael Copp from Cambridge University.
I thought I knew quite a bit about Aldington, Pound, Hilda Doolittle and Ford Madox Ford, but know absolutely zip about Flint, who was the second eldest of twelve children, left school at 13 and did not discover his exceptional language skills until he learned French and Latin at night school at the age of 19:

'Flint was a complex and contradictory character. The writer Richard Church, a colleague in the Ministry of Labour, underlined one side of Flint’s character when he described him as someone who was a “furnace of nervous passion”, an “unrestrainable companion”, and an “inflammatory creature”. Church witnessed at first hand the effects of Flint’s childhood of extreme poverty, and said he could see “that Flint’s wounds were still bleeding. This extravagant self-pity was the result. So were the recoil, the loud and aggressive histrionics. . . . Flint never found serenity. . . . He never lost his resentment at the miseries of his childhood”. John Gould Fletcher, a fellow-Imagist poet, saw Flint’s character as much more passive and submissive: “His dominating characteristic was a pathetic sincerity. . . . Regarding himself as a badly educated man, ashamed of his own cockney antecedents, he could easily be talked down by Ezra [Pound], or by anyone who appeared to be better educated, and who was capable of making flat, dogmatic assertions”.'

I like the layout of the Encyclopedia, and it only costs $15 a year to subscribe, as it is  aimed at students. It's populated by entries from scholars from all over the world, the editors for entries on Australian writing being Chris Wallace Crabbe, Amanda Nettlebeck, Peter Pierce and Paul Sharrad.

While some Australian writers are not yet represented, upcoming articles and profiles include Deleuze, Terry Eagleton and Lewis Carroll, among 809 entries in progress. (Miles Franklin's entry is being written by The Editors, possibly reflecting the regular dribble of search queries across the 'Net for her work and her prize.)

best theatre notes here

The uncertain border between art and life permits art its special extremity, and life its proper respect. If it were true that, as George Steiner speculates, it is as morally culpable to murder a fictional character as it is to kill someone who exists in the “real” world, what novelist would dare to write the first page of a story?

But who polices this border, and where is it to be found? If the artist lives in the world, the world too lives in him; she, like everyone else, moves through quotidian existence. The artist is a human being like everybody else, neither above nor beneath the world, but simply in it. And if this is true, how can what an artist makes not be part of the world as well, how can an artist’s work be separate from the materiality which is, in fact, the condition of its existence? How can there be, in fact, any border?

You see the lamentable effects of having a literal mind: it brings one bang up against contradiction. Art is literal, perhaps most literal in its ironies (as Hamlet says, “Madam, I know not seems“) and The Nature of Things seems to me to be literal-minded to the point of the poetic. In this work, the duo who make up IRAA, Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bosetti, draw as close as they can to the border between art and life; and the closer they come, the clearer it seems that a border does, in fact, exist: a shadowy border, to be sure, and open to constant dispute, but all the more perplexingly visible for its closeness.

This excellent, affecting post comes from Alison Croggon at Theatre Notes (and also on Sarsaparilla ) - poet, critic, fantasy author and all round contributor to Australian letters. And her influential, international theatre blog comes with one of the most beautiful tag clouds I've ever seen. Check it out, along with her article on arts blogging, for Arts Hub, here (which contains a list of the best theatre blogs you will ever read.)

Barbara Jefferis prize is announced

A new prize, with a bit of a twist. Australians already get het up enough about prizes with conditions, but this one is long overdue (thanks are due to Kerryn Goldsworthy for the tip off this morning as it is not in my paper at all, at all).

A quizzical report here, from Susan Wyndham at the Sydney Morning Herald, suggests that Australian women's novels do not portray female characters in a very positive light and so may have difficulty fulfilling the requirements for the prize.

As long as we don't have a crew of judges whingeing in a few years' time like this, I'll be happy. In the meantime, may all the gods bless John Hinde and Australian writers thank him for his ability to commemorate his wife's life and work in such a generous fashion.

ready for reviewing at SLV this weekend

Mike Shuttleworth, of the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria, informs me that he has put together a workshop on review writing, to be held at the library this weekend.

It has been designed with reviewers of young adult fiction in mind, but has equal application to anyone either interested in, or already engaged in writing reviews for publication.
WHERE and WHEN?

Saturday, March 17th
Conference Centre Lounge
State Library of Victoria
Entrance 3, La Trobe Street
1.00–4.00pm
Cost: $30.00, Subscribers to BookTalk: $25.00

For booking enquiries phone 8664 7262 or email youthlit@slv.vic.gov.au

In other Victorian book news, it's great to hear that the Australian Book Club at Readings bookshop is going so well that they will be running two full meetings a month. For March, members will be meeting to discuss Rodney Hall's Love Without Hope, with new books by Deborah Robertson and Gail Jones to follow.
Email Aviva  for further enquires at avivatuffield@yahoo.com.au.

Finally, I heard some humungous figures at the Library Unconference last week for SLV's incredibly popular program, Text Appeal- as Paula Kelly now knows, my previous remarks were firmly tongue in cheek. They had over 800 participants in the last sessions, have been invited to provide considerable media commentary on the program, and people keep ringing up to put themselves on a waiting list for the next one. Books are much bigger than we all think, even in tooled up Australia, where Internet use is the highest it is anywhere in the world.
Now, if Apple had an iPod Speed Dating event, knowing what I know about music and lists, I think it would be - well, mayhem, actually. Much wiser to stick to one book per session per person, isn't it. (Which is a nice spot from which to nod to Sophie Cunningham's piece on blending book collections, over at Sarsaparilla.)

I had the very great pleasure of co-presenting at the Library Uncon with Paula and her web project manager Lili Wilkinson (she of the excellent YA blog and website, InsideADog), on books and blogging. I've had a bit of a rave about it all over at Library Sputnik (and got a bit carried away, I think - but judge for yourself. That's the kind of day it was). Thanks again to Christine Mackenzie of Yarra Plenty Libraries and her wonderful team, for running a very inspiring event, may there be many more opportunities for Victorian libraries to pick each others' brains using this highly creative format.

the queen of Oz crime hits the forums

Gabrielle Lord will be available for Q&A on crime writing in all its forms, the evolution of the genre, the essential value of research and her new book, Shattered. (Note my link there to a funky new Australian crime fiction website, y'all.)
 

Where? Admission is by subscription (starting at $19.95 per annum) at the Live Forums at the Australian Writers' Marketplace Online.

When? Tomorrow evening, 7 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) - for other Oz times, click here. These forums are popular and well worth the investment. If you're an Australian writer reading this who has ever bought AWM in the paper format, at least check out this highly searchable website, which has been warmly welcomed by subscribers.

Upcoming April guests for the AWM Live Forums include Liz Bysrki (Gang of Four, Bellydancing for Beginners) on writing for and about women, and biographer and novelist Susan Johnson.

victorians vote for three dollars

Victorians have spoken, and on Saturday Mrs. Terry Bracks announced the results of the voting for the 'all-time favourites' on the State Library's summer reading program, Reading Victoria.

In descending order from a list of 20 novels set in Victoria, readers placed  the following five:

Perlman, Elliot, Three Dollars

Birch, Tony, Shadow Boxing

Lindsay, Joan, Picnic at Hanging Rock

Johnston, George, My Brother Jack

Ham, Rosalie, The Dressmaker

Tony Birch, Rosalie Ham and Elliott Perlman were present to accept their awards, with publisher Lisa Berryman accepting the award for My Brother Jack. 

Reader recommendations for the reading list next summer include the work of Carole Wilkinson, Peter Mews, Raimond Gaita (nonfiction), Luke Davies, Tom Griffin, Peter Temple, Lily Brett, Gerald Murnane, Hal Porter, Dorothy Porter, Maureen McCarthy, Wendy James, Maurilia Meehan, Martin Boyd and Brian Castro. So it looks like this excellent interactive reading program will be with us for some time yet.

how can you tell me that you're lonely

Lynne Hatwell of dovegreyreader goes from strength to strength - don't miss her interview here with Ralph McTell, talking about the inspiration he has drawn from the novels of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie.
Make me a bed right down on his floor, anytime. I am too late this year, but I've registered myself for the Port Fairy Folk Festival, where he is visiting as part of his last world tour later in March.

This blog, from the Kenyon Review, comes highly recommended by Kim of Reading Matters. From there, it's an easy jump to here -Armavirique is the blog of the New Criterion, I did but see it passing by, and managed to find my way back.  Not an easy task when the blogosphere continues to expand.

And wow - I rejigged my bookmarks in Firefox to include the Britblogs' excellent  headlines page, and look what I found on Peter Stothard's blog at the TLS - an early modern philosophy blog! just the thing to keep Alzheimer's at bay for a few more years, and it has a great moniker too.

The British Library's amazing London:A Life In Maps exhibition is also available in a Google Earth format. What a blast.

Found quite by chance on Technorati - TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, a website and blog 'advocating well-stocked national digital libraries.' Tele-Read is coordinated by David Rothman of Virginia, Monica de Leon of Mexico and Vivek Bhagwatkar of India. Wow. There's one very good article here, admittedly eight years old, by a reference librarian from Tampa, John Iliff, on the implications for libraries of affordable e-books, prompting me to ask, are they simply a good idea that will never happen?

From the Patrick White Readers' Group comes notification that a conference will be held in conjunction with the Sydney Writers' Festival on the man with the beanie. "Patrick White Remembered" will be held on the weekend before the festival, 26-27 May 2006.

Finally, in speaking of those passed more recently, two lovely reminiscences of Elizabeth Jolley ha