reeling and writhing

meme-a-rama

They are coming out my ears. This one, from Mark, is the 'open the book nearest to you at page 123 and write down the fifth sentence' meme.

"Verstehe nicht, she said."

Now if I was a really tough individual, I'd say, 'guess what it's from, HAHA, HAHA!'

But no. It's from Tim Parks' Cleaver, which I am ashamed to say I picked up for a song from the Melbourne University professional bookshop's sinbin on Monday, along with a copy of Gail Jones' Sixty Lights, A.L. Kennedy's Day and a book by David Malouf which I was going to use for this meme before dinner, but which my son has decided belongs elsewhere.

I can't remember the name of it, and now I can't even see it. I loved The Great World so much when I read it earlier this year that the Malouf came easily into my hand - and has gone walkies, but the point of this activity being that the book must be close to you has to be maintained. So, Cleaver, from the new bargain books pile, it is. (He tried to swipe Cleaver while I was typing this, too, but I said "OI." )

Tim Parks is someone I became interested in after reading a profile that described him as a writer who has managed to build a reputation without appearing at festivals or being interviewed for (ahem) profiles.

He eschews giving bits of himself away, arguing that they distract from the books, which include 'narrative' and other essays, a study of Italian translations of the English modernists, many English translations from Italian and three other books of non-fiction.

There is some information on his website about five of his eleven novels (where are the others? one wonders), including this from the Irish Times about Cleaver:

' Never has the need to empty one's mind been as convincingly, or as brilliantly, illustrated as in Tim Parks's full-blooded Cleaver. In a career spanning more than 20 years, and 13 novels, this most deliberate and underrated of English writers has consistently entered the more unattractive corners of human consciousness, with increasingly sophisticated and mature results.

Never overly concerned with style, he is instead a no-nonsense writer who invariably has something to say and tends to say it with robust candour, few apologies and a mastery of controlled indignation.'

There's also news that he is preparing a new translation of Machiavelli's Prince for Penguin, due for publication in 2009. What an intriguing fellow. I am excited, it's almost as good as Brian Moore coming back to life. I can hope so, anyway. The mise-en-scene of Cleaver has more than a sniff of the peerless Moore about it.

I have only read 35 pages of Cleaver, as I am still finishing Hanif Kureishi's Something To Tell You. So I have not read the rest of page 123.

But if the next 87 88 pages are as terse and compelling as the first 35, I will get there very speedily indeed.

(The Malouf is Child's Play. I've just found it in a completely different spot - maybe it was me?) Do consider yourself tagged, if this is your fancy.

oh what a feeling for a man with no qualities

Jon Faith excerpted quite a bit of this on his blog, and it looks like we can read it all for free anyhow. I know Joe Queenan wasn't de rigueur amongst the US bloggers a while back, but I can't remember why. So here it is.
Pretty funny.

The Speakeasy blog at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online pointed me at this lovely article about collecting books in the Wall Street Journal by author and writing teacher Luc Sante.

They've quoted one paragraph - I'm going to quote another, because this article appeals to me for its notes on weeding and the underlying reasons for collecting in the first place:

For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas.

I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it's ever truly complete. When I'm truly passionate about a subject, anything can be grist for the mill. Poetry can be as materially informative as journalism, and railroad timetables can be as evocative and lilting as poems. I derive nourishment from the copyright pages, from the publishers' ads in the back, from even the most misguided attempts at cover design.

things I have and haven't read

Well, as for TBRs with web-links (distinct from the head- or notebook- links), this is where I keep 'em. When I can be bothered listing links and recommendations, that is.

Keeping a list is, I think, often as much about where it resides as anything else. (The 'foine woines' list lives in a textfile on the desktop. And I like it like that.)

As well as making this link available here on the blog, I promise myself I will try not to write posts about books I am yet to read. I will probably fail though.

And what HAVE I read, apart from books I need to read for the July ALR? I have been poking around in sundry journals - GoingDownSwinging 26 looks and sounds positively glamorous, HEAT is up to its usual scintillating standards, the poetry in Emma Lew's collection Anything The Landlord Touches (UK reprint, also available at Giramondo though) is being slowly sampled, and I've been rereading bits of that old essentialist W.B. Yeats, from whom I need a fix every now and then. I'm dipping into Kundera's celebrated Curtain, which is a tonic and a half, or should that be seven? ten minutes in already and I've found something I can use. So clear, so easy to read. If only all literary criticism was this lucid. (Do note that at the end of that Washington Post review of Kundera's essay, Michael Dirda gives us his gmail address. Indeed.)

Delia Falconer had a terrific review of James Wood's YOU KNOW WHAT in the May ALR (it is almost time already for another.) I will also add at this point that Kerryn Goldsworthy's brief note about the tensions of meshing fact and fiction comes attached to her review of three books in the same issue of ALR, and opens up some issues in recent Australian fiction for reflection (not available online, unfortunately.)

I read almost in its entirety an enthralling article on creative industries and Marxism in Arena Journal by Paul Magee, which I was supposed to be indexing for the Australian Education Union, where I have been a temporary library techie recently. I'm unlikely to be doing that in my current temping position, where I'm cataloguing titles like Outlines of Employment Law. But I do have a room with a view, possibly the only office in my life I've ever spent more than five or six minutes in with a free view attached. I try to look out the window and stretch my eyes away from the screen as much as I possibly can. I can see the Bolte Bridge, Telstra Dome, the licorice allsorts AFTRS building, even a bit of the bay. It's amazing, and the secretary in the next cubicle comes in to get her coat from the rack and lingers, saying, 'Wow, this is such a nice office.' If I close my eyes I can imagine jazz ballet rumbles on the roofs nearby. Perhaps I shouldn't close my eyes too often.

I have read, at two sittings, the US edition of my blogger friend Mark Sarvas' Harry, Revised  (prior to receiving Garner and Kureishi's new books for Mother's Day; so now they have to wait). HR will be released in Australia by Text around June (there is a Readings review here.)

I found some things to my liking there, including little echoes of one of my very favourite books, Billy Liar, whose unreliable, unforgettable narrator ("Shaddy-shaddy-SHADDERS!") I fancy Mark could have emulated rather successfully. There are certainly glimmers of the mordant Billy in there at times.

Part of me admires Mark (of Elegant Variation fame) almost pulling off a Billy Liar persona in a middle-aged man. Part of me wonders why such risks should be taken (though there is a case to be made for a film somewhere in all that). That's the part that would have liked to read a rerun of Billy Liar, I think, rather than a modern tale of LA life and love loosely entangled with The Count Of Monte Cristo. Billy, of course, had his own rich inner life and did not need (ahem!) to seek literary inspiration. But I did dally over a huge copy of the Dumas in an op-shop. One book inevitably, ineluctably leads to another.

When all's said, it is, after all, much more exciting that Tim has revived Sterne, where he writes quite often about things nobody will ever read. So get over there.

what a picture

Emdashes reports regarding a new blog at the New Yorker that has a rather apt provenance: as one of its authors says, "We like to think of the book bench as a state of mind, too: a place for considering literary matters great and small—and for occasionally baring our teeth." I'm subscribing.

Over at Libraries Interact Kathryn Greenhill (of Librarians Matter) announces a prize for the booklover or librarian whom the Gale publishing company decides can best justify their love for books in song and video.

And this is just here because it's a damn good read, being something of a classic post from a great Australian blogger. Note the blog saving the accommodation crisis, slap bang in the middle. Rock and roll will satisfy my soooo-oul.

i do love a good book deal

I went and commented on this post when I first saw it in my reader, then revisited after Maud linked to it. There are now 350-odd comments, and they make for good reading for anyone who was interested in the State Library's Text Appeal literary speed-dating events in early 2007.

I have managed to find Marieke Hardy's fabulous article about this too - no surprise that our royal Ms Fits has cracked an International Bloggie, either. About bloody time. And what a funny blog awards page, no permalinks??? that freaking page goes on forever.

Anyway. Rachel Donadio's NY Times article, which she refers to in her post, is also quite funny:

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”

All important material to consider, if you feel a row over The Corrections is brewing between you and a loved one sometime soon. (And I'm not suggesting that's the subject of the last link, either - it's just a damn good post on that book, and other matters.)

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.

file under: world, Barthes, collage and cerulean

Graham Rawle's collage novel, Woman's World, is reviewed at if:book by Dan Visel.

In a sense, it puts off serious readings: it's constructed from women's magazines of the 1950s and 60s, which society accords little value to: magazines are ephemeral, fashion magazines inherently so. But such readings, inevitable as they may be, are unjust to Rawle's book, which deserves to be read as a novel. While emphatically a work of print, the way Rawle uses text can shed light on the way we use text online.

What goes on in Woman's World? Rawle's raw materials suggest his subject matter: it's a novel about clothes, specifically women's clothes. It's not a stretch to imagine that his working method suggested his plot: Rawle, a mail artist, uses women's words to construct a book; his male protagonist garbs himself in women's clothes. Clothes become language: Rawle stitches words and phrases together to make something new.

One other reason I liked this review is that Visel is able to riff from my favourite scene in The Devil Wears Prada to give substance to his musings on recycled (should that be re-associated?) writing. He concludes that while it is very difficult to see where all the pieces of a Wikipedia article come from, Rawle's work is far more eloquent and doesn't show its stitches. (There's also a review at The Guardian.)

borrowers alive, and occasionally buying as well

$85,000 from lending rights to one Australian author is not too shabby, is it?
Susan Wyndham is enjoying speculating who that author might have been in 2007. (The Age rather drily informed us on the weekend that said author remains anonymous).

And while Max Barry certainly isn't English, he might be pleased to hear about this.
A spokesperson for MLA, the UK government's advisory body for libraries, claims that due to the cheaper prices of books,
"people who couldn't afford books before and borrowed them are now buying them on the high street."

I occasionally worry about what will happen when all the old Australian Book Reviews crumble to dust, as there is no comprehensive digital preservation policy operating for it at present. I'm not quite sure I should be so concerned after reading bits of the Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004) which has been published online.

In chapter 37, a general introduction to issues of preservation in humanities computing, Abby Smith writes:

Preservation by benign neglect has proven an amazingly robust strategy over time, at least for print-on-paper. One can passively manage a large portion of library collections fairly cheaply. One can put a well-catalogued book on a shelf in good storage conditions and expect to be able to retrieve it in 100 years in fine shape for use if no one has called it from the shelf. But neglect in the digital realm is never benign. Neglect of digital data is a death sentence. A digital object needs to be optimized for preservation at the time of its creation (and often again at the time of its deposit into a repository), and then it must be conscientiously managed over time if it is to stand a chance of being used in the future.

(Link via Grand Text Auto, where the publication of a new Companion to Digital Literary Studies is also announced.)

oh, an impossible person

I first came across this last November, and I have found it impossible to throw away. The title of this post, I hope, says it all. How unlucky could you be, having Henry James review your first novel? Even if he does recommend you have some chance of future success if you stick to writing what you know?

At the daily Arts Journal blog, About Last Night, that stalwart of US literary blogging, Carrie Frye (usually to be found at Tingle Alley when she is not writing for Terry T.), subjected James' review of Louisa May Alcott's first novel to a rereading:

Mr. Adam Warwick...is one of our oldest and most inveterate foes. He is the inevitable cavaliere servente of the precocious little girl; the laconical, satirical, dogmatical lover, of abut thirty-five, with the "brown mane", the "quiet smile", the "masterful soul", and the "commanding eye." Do not all novel-readers remember a figure, a hundred figures analogous to this? Can they not, one of his properties being given,--the "quiet smile" for instance,--reconstruct the whole monstrous shape? When the "quiet smile" is suggested, we know what is coming; we foresee the cynical bachelor or widower, the amateur of human nature, "Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard", who has traveled all over the world, lives on a mysterious patrimony, and spends his time in breaking the hearts and the wills of demure little school-girls, who answer him with "Yes sir", and "No, sir."

Miss Alcott has probably mused upon Warwick so long and so lovingly that she has lost all sense of his proportions. There is a most discouraging good-will in the manner in which lady novelists elaborate their impossible heroes. There are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society. We speak thus devoutly, not because Warwick is a vicious person,--on the contrary, he exhibits the sternest integrity; but because, apparently as a natural result of being thoroughly conscientious, he is essentially disagreeable. Women appear to delight in the conception of men who shall be insupportable to men.

James did have some nice things to say apparently. But as Carrie notes, they probably rang faint in Alcott's ears. Link via Maud.

New Year for all us vague hicks

From the to:read tag in my del.icio.us account, in the holidays, this little Christmas gem fell, perfectly formed:

It doesn't matter to my husband, this social self; he doesn't care that I am Irish in an old-fashioned way, with a new lick of French. My Agnès B cardigan, and my vaguely hick Hermès scarf: these are certainly not the things that make me beautiful to him. Sometimes I would like to be understood by him, in a venal sort of way, but mostly I am content. I do not know why my husband chose to love me, but I know that, for both of us, it is a great romance...

Another great line...

We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.

That's it. I went birthday shopping for youngest son on Tuesday, and just had to pick up The Gathering while I was there. I'm not going to get to it quickly - the reading list for the year is about to be written, it's been weighing on me somewhat while I've been having a so-called 'break'.

I also grabbed Garrison Keillor's anthology of Good Poems, mainly because in his introduction he discusses the editorial principles used to select poetry to read on the radio. Irresistible.(yep, I am vague, and I have  corrected that mispelling. NOT a typo. A genuine mis-remembering. It's a very dark wood I live in.)

And to get back into the swing of things, and remind myself that yes, the calendar did get changed, I also wish to share with you this great New Year's Day photo my daughter took as we walked in Albert Park earlier this month.

I hope she enjoys some fireworks this year, whoever she was.

summer interregnum: in which Australia's Best Small Publisher discovers Web 2.0

Well, speaking of holidays, I'm certainly having one. No action here until late January. Come what may, I am going to wrestle this To Read tag in del.icio.us to the ground. Either it goes, or I do. (Well, half of it, anyhow. Half of me....ecch.)

We have a camp for oldest son planned, and some time down the beach without him - bless my in-laws for having a house, and keeping it nice for us. In the meantime, there are links, here, here, here - all down in the right sidebar too. Have a great holiday season, everyone.

And even if you are not a Victorian, don't forget the State Library's Summer Reading program. Here's a post on their blog by Michelle de Kretser, author of The Lost Dog, on Kris Hemensley's truly great poetry shop, Collected Works, well worth a visit, on the first floor of the Nicholas building in Flinders Lane. It's right next to the Victorian Writers' Centre's current offices, at least until some time in 2009, when the VWC will move to the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas at the State Library.

Not quite sure exactly where I'm starting with my summer list (which contains the De Kretser title), but my daughter tells me I must watch Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep. And I am telling myself that I will read youngest son's gift of Best Australian Poems 2007. And mebbe some French lit, now that Figaro's warmed me up. And The Orphan Gunner, since Jo Case gives it such a glowing review in the summer edition of ABR that I've put in a Christmas request for it. And and and....

BTW, there be some busy fellows at the best Small Publisher for 2007, Black Inc. Wouldja just look at this! all the Web 2.0 goodness hitting Oz Publishing! Jeeminy. (Incidentally, this was recorded at Collected Works in early December or thereabouts.)

It's only a small request, but in addition to this amazing development (first vlogged Melbourne publishing event, isn't it?), links to individual catalogue titles would also be good, guys. I really enjoyed Helen Garner's speech at the Newcastle launch of Best Australian Stories, too, and you can watch that here.

Not sure if it's just my computer struggling with the visuals, as we do have some kind of passive-aggressive relationship with Media Player - but the sound is all good, and I look forward to seeing more Black Inc launches publicised in this way, if just for the sheer joy of being able to listen to an appreciative audience lap up the words of Oz lit luminaries like Rose and Garner. If you want to find the text to the bulk of Peter Rose's launch speech, most of it appears in his introduction to Best Poems '07, which he reads to the audience in confident (and totally unwarranted) apprehension that they will inevitably fail to do so. He ends with a passionate call for wider reading of new poetry, not simply in the 'sleek digests' of annual anthologies:

    We delude ourselves if we say that Australian poetry has never been so robust. When was the last time you heard a poem being discussed around a dinner table? New films, plays, novels, biographies, exhibitions, magazine profiles - they crop up all the time. But a poem? Inconceivable.

What is going on here? Why has the public lost faith in contemporary poetry - all poetry perhaps? Why is so little said and written about this defection? Poetry is the great fillip and inheritance. A culture that is indifferent to poetry is deficient and derelict. No young person's education can be deemed complete without a rich and active appreciation of poetry, but how can they hear about it if we don't voice it and feel its force - if it is not a potent feature of the culture in the first place?

I encourage readers who enjoy the poems in this book to seek out the collected works of the poets that interest and speak to them. Anthologisation, despite my resistances and frettings, is a reward for poets, but a wide, intelligent readership is a much greater one.

Carpentaria is 'simply the best' and coming to the UK soon

While I'm really not crazy about the whole BEST BEST BEST thing, I would like to share some news I picked up at a recent book launch, from no less a person than Miles Franklin winner Alexis Wright herself. It's official - Constable and Robinson will publish Carpentaria in the UK next year. Here's my earlier review of my Book of the Year.

Others of note, cheerfully disregarding dates of publication, were (including non-fiction):

Adamson, Robert. The Goldfinches of Baghdad

Cheever, John. The World of Apples

Farmer, Beverley. Body Of Water  (writer's journal and stories, my review notes here)

Goldsworthy, Kerryn. North of the Moonlight Sonata

Jach, Antoni. Napoleon's Double

Lofthouse, Jacqui. Bluethroat Morning

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow (HA! Finished.)

Stow, Randolph. Visitants

(here's the non-fiction, now:)

Farmer, Beverley. The Bone House

Garner, Helen. The Feel of Steel.

Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Life.

Koch, C.J. Crossing The Gap: A Novelist's Essays.

Knowlson, James and Elizabeth (Eds.) Beckett Remembering:Remembering Beckett

Moretti, Franco (ed.) The Novel (vol 2.)

Nehamas, Alexander, Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty In A World of Art.

Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.) Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling

I did read a bunch of other stuff, some quite new, and all listed here, if it interests you. Also if it interests you, I have just subscribed to Publisher's Lunch, where I followed my nose to this news regarding Helen Garner's latest (due 2008). Apologies if you already knew, but it is news to me.

If you're more interested in what the English think about the French, however, then over at Figaro, Bruno Corty is keeping an eye on the TLS's review of best books for 2007 and noting that French writers are on the Brit critics' lists.
And if you're still greedy for lists, (you absolute glutton, you), there's an exhaustive list of best US books (and others) of 2007, over at the Millions book blog.

Reader, I killed him off

Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine? (Afraid to title this "A l'esprit de l'escalier', it's not fair to Googlers of idiomatic French.)
This is a post of afterthoughts, which came to me in an unguarded moment alone with books and good food at a spot outside Melbourne this week.

Last week at the Capitol Theatre, Germaine Greer put Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting Of Wisdom together fairly arbitrarily, perhaps with an eye to getting the punters in to discuss at least one book they have all read.
It's possible that not everyone in the space had read Mansfield Park all that recently, apart from the academics, as an absorbed silence hung over the assembly while GG dissected it for the most part of her lecture, leaving only ten minutes or so for Henry Handel Richardson's popular bagatelle, perhaps more a companion piece to her first novel and true bildungsroman, Maurice Guest.

In the spirit of the staircase I am sitting on a verandah in the bush today, turning over in my head, and admittedly practising out loud in the still house as well, what a question on Maurice might have produced in the assembly last week. Here's a fin-de-siècle female writer who adopts a male pseudonym to write a rich, overblown, rotting rose of a book about a young music student who blows his brains out for love, claiming at the time that she 'wrote many of my own [agonies of youth] out in the book, and came up a quieter and saner person.'
It could have been fun to go into HHR's need to get a boy to shoot himself for love (spoiler aside, Jane devotees might have enjoyed being alerted to the darker side that Richardson's own bildungsroman explored), leaving aside the concomitant issues of Louise Dufrayer's characterisation as a festering lily, for which there might not have been any time at all once Richardson's subversion of the genre into a suicidal downward spiral had been covered. Now I'd have liked to see that. Given Greer's brave opening about incest fantasies, it would have been fun to consider the gap between not marrying the heir to Mansfield Park, and killing off male protagonists under a pen name, wouldn't it?

Just two quotes from Michael Ackland's recent bio of HHR, on the reception of both novels, and then I'm done here: firstly, of The Getting Of Wisdom, H.G. Wells wrote to Richardson,

expressing his 'enormous admiration' for her novel ('your little rag of a girl is a most admirable little beast...I don't think this particular thing could have been done better')

and of Maurice Guest, the Times reviewer wrote:

' a fine achievement, thought it is too long and too full of morbid self-analysis and too relentlessly cruel in its denouement to be widely popular,'

while John Masefield remarked he could scarcely find its equal in the preceding decade

'for strength of purpose...[and]truthfulness, of execution and power, not of observation (since many animals observe more sharply than man) but of survey, as from an intellectual watch-tower'.

These are very much the afterthoughts of an idle mind, and I'm getting carried away. The theme of the Austen conference for which this lecture was the opener, after all, was "Jane Austen and Comedy".

And accolades are due to my bloggy colleague, Laura, of Sorrow at Sills Bend fame for a terrific evening, for which I understand she fielded last minute calls from television producers who thought they might like to film it (Ahem.) The story reads like a Frontline script and you can read it here.

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.)

all our elvises have come at once

Found 'in an unguarded moment...'
investigating NoveList, a database for selecting books based on readers' preferences which is syndicated to Victorian public libraries and has some intriguing subject headings,
I found that under "Elvis Presley impersonators" there are 21 books listed!!

So for all those fans of the Elvis masqueraders, wherever you may be, here's a taste of what's out there. (Abstracts from NoveList, except where reviews are acknowledged.)

Duff, Gerald      
That's all right, Mama: a novel (1995)
Publishers Weekly Review:

'Serious literary fiction about Elvis? You bet! Duff's (Graveyard Working) transcendent prose swings and sways, whoops and moans in pulsating cadences reminiscent of the King. The hilariously pedantic introduction is a setup for the "manuscript" that follows: the wry, gritty and profoundly moving autobiography of Elvis's identical twin brother, who allegedly died at birth. Jesse Garon Presley relates how, from his earliest childhood, half-crazy mother Gladys lavished all her attention and affection on Elvis. Brought up as Elvis's "cousin" (although Mama calls on Jesse to stand in for his twin from time to time), Jesse is left to his own devices-tinkering with cars and, later, hanging out in juke joints in Memphis and nearby Alabama. Jesse tells how it was he, not Elvis, who made the first recording at Sun Studio, and how, much the better dancer, he doubled for the burned-out "Bubba" on the Ed Sullivan Show and in the performance of the title song in Jailhouse Rock. Although he hides from Elvis for years at a time, Jesse can't keep from filling in for him-even as a husband to Priscilla-when asked. The ultimate irony is that, after his famous twin dies, Jesse is still not free to be himself: he ends up as an Elvis impersonator. A rich and well-realized tale, even for readers to whom August 16 (Elvis's death date) is just another day.'
 
George, Anne   
Murder boogies with Elvis (2001)
'Enjoying their golden years, amateur sleuths Mary Alice and Patricia Anne are delighted to be invited to a benefit, but their fun turns deadly when an Elvis impersonator takes a fatal dive into the band and the sisters must find a killer before it is too late.' New York: W. Morrow, 2001, 243 p.
 
Henderson, William McCranor   
Stark raving Elvis (1997)
Byron Bluford is a down-and-out factory worker with a dream--to somehow recapture that one shining moment of his life when he debuted his Elvis impersonation at the high-school talent show
 
Douglas, Carole Nelson   
Cat in a jeweled jumpsuit (1999)
(Sounds like a suitable sequel for "That Darn Cat" - GT).
'Midnight Louie, feline detective, and his human partner, Temple Barr, take on a mysterious case involving death threats, ghosts, and the King himself--Elvis Presley.'

Christie, Amanda (Children's book)    
Lucy's angel (2001)
In which one of the protagonists ends up riding around Vegas with an EI.   
   
Levy, Elizabeth, (Children's )   
Mystery of too many Elvises, The (2003)
'When they decide to hold an Elvis impersonation act starring Fletcher, Jill's hound dog, for the school pet talent show, Gwen and Jill are shocked when Fletcher goes missing, thus beginning the search to find the culprit.'

Koslowski, Rich   
The King (2005)
'A very enigmatic Elvis impersonator takes the Vegas strip--and the world--by storm, but when a former tabloid journalist makes it his personal mission to find out The King's true identity, he discovers much more than he bargained for. Mature.'

 
Macpherson, Suzanne
She woke up married (2005)
'In Las Vegas to "celebrate" her dreaded thirtieth birthday, Paris James wakes up after an evening of overindulgence to discover herself in bed with--and married to--a sexy Elvis impersonator. Original.'

And that's not all. There's a subject heading in NoveList for 'Barbeque cooking' (of course it's listed near 'Elvis impersonators'. Of course.) Not to mention 'Women restaurateur detectives'...

please don't miss this

This keynote address from Professor Sasha Grishin of ANU, at a State Library of Victoria seminar held to open the ANU Book Studio's Dantesque exhibition of prints and artists' books, How I entered there, I cannot truly say, is available as a download (what! no transcript, guys?) along with several forums and discussions held around the opening of the exhibition in March.

(Needless to say there is no download available of the grogblog held in Russell Street around that time to celebrate the trip south of one of the exhibitors, who is a wellknown Oz book blogger - however some pictures of her associates with a certain pollie of ill repute are, here.)

I revisited it briefly two days ago, having had a very pleasant couple of hours there back in March, and was impressed this time around by how easy it was to be less imposed upon by the contributions of the head curator, Diane Fogwell. Last time her work seemed to be everywhere, whereas this time I went back remembering what I wanted to see and held most clearly in my memory, notably the work of Helen Geier, Katherine Nix and Caren Florance. I also enjoyed the older collaborative works between Bruno Leti and Chris Wallace Crabbe, and the Counihan print on show.

This is a beautiful exhibition and if you haven't seen it yet, then get a scurry on as it closes on Saturday Sunday. It goes to Horsham gallery to finish its tour very soon, after which it returns to ANU as part of the ANU art collection at ANU Drill Hall Gallery.
(More about the exhibition here, at the Book Studio blog.)

ned, ned, there's more to be said

Plagiarism can now be uncovered, up to a point, using Google Book Search, according to this post at LISNews.
The companion piece to Paul Collins' article for Slate magazine is an earlier essay by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books (which he quotes) on the nineteenth century practice of 'anti-plagiarism', here.

All of this is a good fit with the book I read this weekend, Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story, an absolute ripper of a book which I enjoyed enormously and will write about at a later date. (Now for My Life As A Fake, and maybe even a revisit of the less digestible Illywhacker.) When Mr. Carey gets voices right, he is unputdownable.

Both the Bones were completely on the money for this reader, especially Hugh, the idiot savant, even in spite of his savant condition which was carelessly but effortlessly manipulated to suit the plot. I had a similar buzz during the first reading of Ned (as I have christened it). I could hear and smell him, it was a truly compelling reading experience. (Must reread that too. A personal CareyFest is on the way. Might even have another go at Illywhacker before I die, if only to see why it is not as good as these two.)

e-write, e-read, e-publish

I was intrigued by Monica Dux's article, 'Bound To Please', in The Age last week on electronic books and readers. (Aaargh, the link has drowned under subsequent Writers' Festival coverage. You'll just have to take my words in good faith today.)

There was no suggestion anywhere in her rather upbeat piece that Dux had actually test-driven e-readers or had a good look at the software - I'm in the position of being able to make some comments on that simply because I'm studying electronic publishing as we speak, and have been looking at a few of these things in the last few weeks.

I' d really like to see a Sony Reader: unlike the Hiebook which is now almost defunct, it doesn't come with an MP3 player of sorts, however it appears you can 'download' blogs and RSS feeds onto it to read (ahh, but how do they update without an umbilical connection to the desktop? Stored feeds? what kind of feeds be those?) And photographs can be stored and viewed as well.

ABR ready for blogging business

Astride of the grave an' all that jazz...Here it is at last, Australian Book Review has a blog (albeit with only an email comments facility).

The inaugural post (sorry, there is no permalink provided - it's simply titled 'Blogspot') has been delivered by deputy ed. Jo Case, and includes her notes on five new Australian titles, as well as a solid commendation of the choice of books for the first episode of the ABC's new book show, First Tuesday Book Club:

The success of the inclusion [of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho] is confirmed on the ABC message board, where to date there are sixty-two posts on American Psycho and just eight on The Ballad of Desmond Kale.

Case announces a change of books for the ABC show for next month - Helen Garner's The First Stone has now been dropped  in favour of Melbourne Writers' Festival visitor Dava Sobel's Longitude.

And someone at ABR is certainly reading other Australian literature blogs, as Case acknowledges in her final paragraph:

Speaking of book clubs, literary 'bloggers' community' Sarsaparilla (whose rollcall includes ABR senior contributor Kerryn Goldsworthy) have started their own informal book club in reaction to the Australian/Patrick White imbroglio. Interested members will actually be reading a Patrick White novel. After much democratic discussion, the chosen novel was The Vivisector. Why did no one else think of this refreshingly sane response?

If you'd like to join the Patrick White Readers' Group (not known as Vivisectors just yet), the site is here.

*UPDATE August 13 - the ABR blog is also home to some current reviews and poetry, which have been added over the course of the week and add greatly to the interest of this part of the site. (Well, I think so, anyhow.)

all the cool dudes

David Mitchell talked to Robert Birnbaum over at The Morning News recently:

'I live with the greatest respect for people who may or may not read what I write. I can’t afford to care about audience and readership when I am working on it. My curiosity dictates that this is the book that I want to do next.'

He also discusses the need he had to approach Black Swan Green (his fourth novel), as a 'first novel', to backtrack in a way when drawing on his experience as a person with a speech impediment:

'Some people will think I have succeeded and some will think I have failed, but I wanted to see if I could do that semi-formulaic first-novel genre-type of a book, but in a non-formulaic way. And to not make it ordinary. Inevitably some will think it’s not that extraordinary a book, but I hope at least that between the gaps it isn’t an ordinary first novel. '

so much to tell you

If that's not a misleading title in Google terms, I don't know what is  - it's also the title of a very popular children's book from the '80s by top Australian author John Marsden. Sorry about that if you've come by looking for a review. Check out Libraries Australia to find out where to get an audio recording by the author, here. If you're a university student, talk to your librarian about the Austlit database sometime, and if you're from a public library, ask your librarian to show you book reviewing sources in the databases they subscribe toOne day I may even review those sources of information. But today is not that day. (See also this link at Leisa Reichelt's blog, for further discussion on this and other matters.)

In other words, there is news about, and here it is, printed in bits and bytes...

academic blogging time is now, says McConville

Found on Templedata, Georg Hibberd's excellent tech blog for the University of Sydney, and crossposted to The Weblog Repository ( that's another blog of Genevieve's with a crappy name).

This article from Online Opinion, an Australian site, is by James McConville, a Senior Lecturer in law at La Trobe University.

It is probably still the case that, at least in Australia, blogging is considered a distraction from true scholarship rather than an exciting addition to scholarship. This was the case also in the United States, but the attitude is rapidly changing...

In Australia, most academics are happy to pump out their one or two journal articles a year and the occasional book. Academics cannot be criticised for this, as it is what is expected of them - just as workers in the Cadbury factory are expected to pump out the Freddos and family-size blocks.But surely it is time to open up this traditional approach to examination. Surely things can be done better.

Australian novel not quite dead yet - feeling rather better

Two things, no. 1 being:
In the Saturday  Australian, that tired old chestnut about the dear departed novel rears its ugly head again. Some of this article is useful, some of it is just bloody annoying really. After all, at least four new independent presses have put up some great new stuff for 2006 (I'm after going to the shed right now to look in the family Age archive for the list, given I won't be able to link to the online list at all.) Plus Jane Palfreyman of Random House assures us again that they have ten exciting Oz titles upcoming, including five new writers' first novels (four more than last year). It does appear we are executing our tall poppies a little early in the piece, people. Let 'em print the f...ing books first, eh?

(Note to overseas readers: The rather bitter tone of the above paragraph is designed to reflect the fact that Australians are prone to cultural navel gazing and cynical attacks on their high achievers. The second behaviour being enshrined in the national demotic as 'cutting down tall poppies'.)

Secondly:
The digital demagogue McKenzie Wark , prominent in Australia in the 90s and now teaching in the US, is publishing a networked book soon. Preview over here at if:book, the book blog at the Institute for the Future of the Book. The title is GAM3R 7H30RY Version 10.1, and it looks like fun. May even come out as a syndicated serial via RSS. I rather like the topic graph for the nine forums which will occupy half of the site on which the book will be published - a designer's version of a tag cloud (View this photo ). And the idea of publishing an intertextual piece in Wordpress 'with a custom-built card shuffling interface' sounds compelling too, and is hardly likely to push any tacks into the novel's coffin anytime soon. I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to bring out my dead just yet.

another year, another Miles Franklin shortlist

My life is whizzing past me - is it really 12 months since I posted on the last one?
Seven out of twelve nominations for the Miles Franklin award are Victorian authors. However I have a strong suspicion the winner will come from elsewhere - in a very healthy field, The Secret River is probably a shoo-in and has just won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for author Kate Grenville. ( I dare you to go see how long the link holds up, there is a part review at the other end of it.) Winner to be announced in June.

Brian Castro  - The Garden Book

Alex Miller  - Prochownik's Dream

Joanna Murray-Smith - Sunnyside

Peter Rose  - A Case of Knives

Carrie Tiffany - Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living

Peter Temple - The Broken Shore

Christos Tsiolkas - Dead Europe

Anne Bartlett  - Knitting

Kate Grenville - The Secret River

Steven Lang  - An Accidental Terrorist

Roger McDonald  - The Ballad of Desmond Kale

Brenda Walker - The Wing of Night

four books I'll never receive

I'm looking forward to donating to Michael Palin's Reverse Book Club after reading this short story published in the Guardian as part of a celebrity auction being held shortly in Britain to raise money for Book Aid.

As far as I know there is nothing like it down here. What I like about this effort is that direct donations are converted into appropriate, often purposely published materials for recipients, and donations of surplus books are only taken if they meet stringent requirements...

slight pickings

On this site I've just managed to collapse four categories into one - Media and Technology is where you will find all the blogging meditations from now on. If my work at a new site bears fruit, future posts on that topic will be over there ( TBA), but we will see how that goes...In the meantime, I'm sick of offering links instead of something I've taken time to think over, (and that's one of the reasons the tidy - up is taking place), but this is all I have this week.

Over at Corporate Engagement, Trevor Cook notes that spending on Internet advertising has risen 34% in the last quarter, giving increased returns of 5 % and pulling dollars away from other advertising areas such as TV and newspapers. (From Reuters.)

In other news from Reuters, the Library of Congress has sought assistance from Google for its World Digital Library  documentary project:

The Library of Congress will contribute its own body of works to a blended collection with other countries. More than half of the printed volumes in the Library of Congress are in languages other than English.

"It will deal with the culture of those people rather than with our contacts as Americans with those cultures," [librarian James] Billington said.

Web search company Google has agreed to work with the Library of Congress on developing standards for indexing the digital collections and by providing computer equipment.

It's anticipated the existing American digital library at LOC, the American Memory Project, will act as a model for the collection of unique objects from the world's collections such as manuscripts, pictures, photographs, recordings, maps and books.

Divertissement du jour: Over at Rhetorica, a list from Andrew Cline (updated in September this year) of Professors Who Blog.

And coming close behind that, the Guardian's list of Top Twenty Geek Novels (link from Barista).

leave a bible on the train today

C.Max Magee of The Millions shares an interest with me in what people read on the train. He's pointed us to this story about what happens to the books they leave there as well.

Let's face it - sometimes other people just read better stuff. Miss Snark on the masterpieces she is currently lifting out of the mire. An interesting blog I hadn't visited before my checkout of Jimmy's stuff tonight.

This snarkpost and comments attempt to deal with the burning question of whether novelists should blog. Watch the novelists squirm with annoyance as she flicks the whip - I think blogs are winning by a few lengths.

And one of Dervala's mates wants to know if a picture really does paint a thousand words - he's thinking of entering NaNoWriMo in the graphic novels category. Some interesting comments on the power of constraints are made in this post and the responses therein: I think there will be a few starters there.

it helps to start with As I Lay Dying

A great article (link courtesy of Tingle Alley) in Slate magazine by Meghan O'Rourke about the Oprah Faulkner Book Club:

...reading Faulkner in the land of Oprah drives home a point likely to get obscured in our difficulty-obsessed, postmodernist culture: that as radical as Faulkner's experiments with the representation of consciousness are—and they're far more radical than any contemporary novel I've read over the past five years—they are ultimately undertaken in the service of telling a story of great immediacy.

For all his brilliant obscurity, Faulkner was obsessed with speaking in a language of mythic essentialism. His religious vision was an austere version of relic-worship, attached to place and to objects. In writing about the South he knew, he was trying to articulate a story of doomed consciousness, of pain, of being hyper-cognizant of the demise of not only family but of an entire culture established in bad moral faith.

Out of these pressures are forged the self-made flaws of characters who collide with their families (and their culture) as violently as wrecking balls.

This flash of literary analysis is embedded sneakily in the middle of an article that aims deliberately at the Faulkner reader manqué;"and I too thought Faulkner was boring and heeeyy!! Oprah hath unveiled my eyes." One suspects O'Rourke of writing down a little there.

That aside,the program sounds as though it has lived up to its promise (being laid out in accord with the best online learning principles helps), beginning at the beginning with As I Lay Dying (which it sounds as though Ms. O'Rourke may have skipped. Tsk. You only have yourself to blame if you start in the middle with the heavy stuff and have trouble catching up, lady.)

What O'Rourke is surprised to discover is how democratic a storyteller Faulkner is. Now if she had read the first chapter of AILD, watched Jewel's back walking through the dust... I was told about As I Lay Dying by a friend in first year at uni., pretty much along the lines of 'This book is a scream.' Not to put too fine a point on the anecdote, Dame Edna's (Barry Humphries') niece made the recommendation actually. (When you are 44 you like to believe it was made on the same day she was sporting an 'I love Dame Edna' badge. But it probably wasn't.)

I didn't get around to reading it till much later on. I reread it a while back and the first pages struck me forcefully, having since read Faulkner's creditable stab at a straight novel, The Soldier's Tale. The angel ( as Sherwood Anderson first described him when he was looking for a publisher) could pretty much write any which ways, it seemed. And thanks to Oprah a whole new bag of readers has gone out to meet the challenge.

returns on books

Here we are told that Australians bought 80 million books last year and spent 1.5.billion dollars on them. Also that 98% of them were printed. What a useful distinction.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics link is here (in case the Courier Mail gets proprietorial.)

Supermarket sales made up for only 8% of sales: according to the report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, they were pipped thoroughly by department stores at 19%, with booksellers way out front with 67% of sales. That's a lot of Harry Potter and Dan Brown, isn't it? But on the other hand if they get people into bookstores who might not otherwise bother visiting, they may well return. (That's my hopeful inner librarian speaking, I think. She's a bit tired today.)

Genesis and flowers of evil to go

If the bookshops are shut and you must have that copy of Les Fleurs du Mal immediatement - here's your answer. (Thanks to the gang at ALIA again.)

Also following a link from The Little Prof,  a site of free databases mainly focussed on library science, but with some material covering other topics as well. (The Library Stuff typelist is coming.)

wickedest woman in the world dies

Jocelyn Rickards, a Melbourne-born costume designer who was closely linked with A.J. Ayer, Graham Greene and John Osborne, has died at the age of 80. I'm interested in what she had to say about the role of costume in films, rather than who she slept with and where - if you want to know about that, check out her autobiography, The Painted Banquet, as well as the Telegraph obit.

Rickards' first gig designing costumes for films was on The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, which she described as "like being at a civil war...both stars had rival entourages of sickening sycophants." She was responsible for designs for Ryan's Daughter, From Russia with Love, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Blow Up, The Knack and Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment (for which she received an Oscar nomination).

Apparently Antonioni's brief for her contribution to his work was

...a real test of strength. (Antonioni) wanted me to predict fashion for two years ahead and create clothes which would just be verging on fashion when the film was released.

To quote verbatim from this obituary from the Telegraph (which The Age obdurately refuses to link to at all),

On designing clothes for films she said:"If clothes are well designed, they are probably unnoticeable, but should carry within them a number of messages, like what kind of school the character went to, what newspapers he or she reads, what political affiliations he has, what his sexual inclinations are, whether or not his financial position is secure - and if insecure, whether or not he cares. All this saves valuable minutes of screen time."

And to think that there were critics and bloggers protesting some months back that film was somehow a poor cousin to the novel in portraying details of character. If a detail is so carefully designed that nobody should notice it, does it still exist?

three days wait, or three months?

The Potter book is so eagerly awaited in some circles that junior bookbuyers are concerned online ordering will be less efficient than standing in line at midnight.

I commented on a post at Conversational Reading yesterday that an Australian library corporation ordered as many copies as they had requests when the fourth (?) book in the series was published, reasoning that it was a good marketing ploy to get people into their libraries who might not otherwise visit. Similar enthusiasm in Boston  for the latest book has led to a library group ordering roughly 1 copy per 4 holds placed - their patrons are in for a much longer wait than the young 'uns whose mother doesn't like night queues.

This has me wondering if I need to get busy and inquire into the matter of some surprise extra copies for some young relatives - though I guess they coped with the first five volumes without my help (I think one family has read a couple together! Sweet.)

I'm not terribly impressed with the small number of new release titles ordered by our library corporation as a general rule, actually, and get quite impatient about it sometimes, but I'm a pretty impulsive reader - to see young people this impatient about something cultural makes one wonder if availability is the issue or whether it is simply the capitalist imperative at work. "Later won't do, Daddy, I want it NOW."

De l'éducation sentimentale...

Over at The Elegant Variation, a compelling discussion about sentimentality in Nicole Krauss's new book The History of Love, reviewed by James Wood in the London Review of Books and held up to the light by Mark Sarvas in an attempt to uncover the truth about emotion in literature. 23 comments and rising... it's not essential to subscribe to LBR to follow the discussion between Carrie of Tingle Alley, Dan Green, Justine, Ed Champion, Outer Life and others, all that's required is a basic sense of what it means to willingly suspend your disbelief. So to speak.

The wicked thought occurred to me to start fireworks at comment 24 or so by accusing Mark's cherished Shirley Hazzard of failing in her conception of the central young female characters in both her major novels, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, for one of the reasons unearthed by Wood in the aforementioned review. Then I thought, dammit, let's have private fireworks over at da blog.

I guess for me, disconnected as I am in time and space due to family commitments and sundry small insurrections, it's time to have what passes for a "proper' post about all this: I told Mark early on in my blogging career that I had a problem with old Shirley and young girls, so here we go at last.

Viz.: There is a disconnection, perhaps the same type of irony discussed all through the comments to Mark's posts, in the two major Hazzard novels between the writer and her female characters.

Perhaps she is not naturally close to younger women, maybe she struggled to recapture the young woman she was once when writing both these works - it is most marked in her portrayal of the fourteen year old in love with an older man in The Great Fire, where her conception of this young woman veers wildly between nursemaid and  companion to deathly sick brother, and soon to be liberated prisoner of youth and desire. I found the whole thing rather unwieldy and the management of feeling throughout uncomfortably detached in much the same way I felt it had been in The Transit of Venus.

But as Mark finds when dealing with his favourite critic's fall from grace ( surely temporary!), I have to concede that there is a thin line working here. It's a personal matter perhaps - some view the young clinically, almost fearful of getting it wrong, others are warmer and more enthusiastic, more vivid perhaps in their reconstruction of youth ( for it always is a reconstruction once that fleeting time is gone. Unless you are St Exupery, that is.)

I probably need to be nicer here - but I don't think I can. For me in those novels an almost perfect reading experience is marred by the writer's need to disappear behind her beautiful work, particularly when she needs to show her young heroines feeling something.

There is something cold about the whole activity; at one point in Transit she is seemingly transfixed by Paul Ivory's view of the slash of cream skin in the front of Caroline Bell's red dress, when there is other work to do - she tells us what Paul sees and doesn't seem to give a hoot how Caro feels. There are similar examples scattered through Great Fire as well - for me it marks a tendency to iconicise the female rather than connect with her, which I find quite alienating really. So there, I've said it now.

vital statistics moving through

Thanks to Mr. Waggish for passing this quiz through:

Total number of books I've owned: That's tough, because I still haven't learnt how to stop lending them to people, and how to stop expecting them to return them! and now that my daughter is collecting as well, we tend to swap stuff. It's nowhere near a ton, but it is better organised than it used to be, thanks to library school...

Last book I bought: Make that the last two, because I bought For The Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke this week, as well as Elliot Perlman's newbie, Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Last book I read: Nearly finished John Banville's The Shroud.

Last book I finished: The Last Days of Publishing - Tom Engelhardt

Five books that mean a lot to me:

• The Fortunes of Richard Mahony - Henry Handel Richardson
• Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, (tying with Eliot and Pound here)
• The Siege - Clara Claiborne Park (ties with The Rose Boys by Peter Rose)
  
• A Fence Round the Cuckoo and Fishing In The Styx - Ruth Park's two-volume biography
• Songlines - Bruce Chatwin ties with Woman's Inhumanity to Woman - Phyllis Chesler (Probably the only time that's ever going to happen anywhere.)

I don't think I'm very good at this type of selection...

Five people I would like to see do this:
Jill Jones at Ruby Street
Anne at Fernham
Bud Parr at Chekhov's Mistress
Amanda Mann at Confessions of an Author
Jory Des Jardins at Pause

Miles Franklin: the short short list

Now I know why there was a 'list' of 12 - so there could be a list of 5 a week later. Poor Engwerda's book (that's Backwaters, people) has been dropped, all the more reason to read it then, innit?

Nominees: Salt Earth, Sarah Armstrong

                The White Earth, Andrew McGahan

                The Submerged Cathedral, Charlotte Wood

                Sixty Lights, Gail Jones

                The Gift Of Speed, Steven Carroll

I have finished Kureishi's Black Album. I had the germ of a post about Kureishi leapfrogging on the back of Rushdie with considerably more elan than poor ole Salman - but a comment is sufficient as I doubt I can be induced to re-read any Rushdie. Dammit, Hanif is simply more economical and covers similar ground effortlessly - with Salman one hears the gears crunching.

Kureishi certainly has a much better ear for dialogue, as one might expect from a playwright, and my second hand guess is that he probably cares more about his characters as people. Having successfully, then, damned Salman once more in the privacy of my own blog, I only need to acknowledge that the finale of The Black Album is splendidly seedy. Highly recommended...

group blogs are GO

Another great offering, this time from a conglomerate of litbloggers who are not necessarily academics. Sorry, that should read Co-Operative. My fave blogger Mark Sarvas has rounded up all their strength and sweetness into one...umm, the Marvell parody just ran out of juice right there. But you should have a look, it's a useful space which should work very well.

Both this blog and The Valve will provide the interested reader with constant analysis of the phenomenon of litblogging. So I will be pointing you in the direction of a few titbits from time to time, saving myself the task of said analysis, as well as hanging around 400 Windmills, Chekhov's Mistress, the Australian blogs listed on the right, and The Elegant Variation.

I'm enjoying the travel to work on the train as an excuse to indulge the charming Melburnian habit of reading on the rails ( apparently not very common on public transport in the States, some bloggers claim).

Recent reading: Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album, interspersed with literary mags from the Victorian Writers' Centre ( one of which published two articles from weblogs), chunks of Don Quixote and the Phoenix Book of Irish Short Stories 2003 ( okay, I read that one at home in bed like a good Melburnian). And speaking of bed...

free and for nothing

The contents table of the London Review of Books. Articles available online at this time appear in red. I’m not sure how much goes into the archive so that is worth a look too. I did check the subscription for this once and it is pretty expensive – a pleb like myself will have to go to the State Library ( or maybe the Carlton or City Library ) to photocopy other interesting titbits.

I decided to blog this because one of the online pieces for March 17 is called “Some of them can read” and is a review of a book on rats, specifically those in the city of New York. ( Parochial, non?)

One of the most chilling articles I have ever read in Granta magazine was about the rats Werner Herzog employed for his remake of the silent classic Nosferatu. Simply entitled ‘Rats’, in Granta 86: Film. (Unfortunately not online –get thee to a good library, go.) The sad thing is that it is probably not the worst Werner Herzog story out there either…

a nose for these things

A compelling review by Brenda Niall appeared in The Age today ( sorry, registration is required for this one already). I will get this book, Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing, after I’ve got hold of Sebald's Campo Santo and there will be much rejoicing ( as was remarked when Robin’s minstrels were eaten).
This is Lee's second book to include material on Woolf ( this one appears in the Amazon catalogue as Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography) and she apparently has ' sharp things to say' about the film The Hours. Niall says,

As the reflections of a professional biographer, Body Parts will have special interest for anyone who attempts that craft. Yet it has an unexpected breadth of appeal...the occupational risks of biography, which include narcissism and possessiveness, are everyday hazards in human relationships. Among many wonderful stories about the living and the dead, a few are disappointing...it is a pity Graham McInnes' portrait of his mother Angela Thirkell in The Road to Gundagai was not taken into account in Lee's chapter on the snobbish world of Thirkell's novels. Thirkell's brief exile in Melbourne brought out the worst in her. "Mother was awful," McInnes wrote, "but I loved her."

Brenda Niall has written several bios of Australian writers and artists, and I’ve yet to digest her extended treatment of Martin Boyd’s family, The Boyds. Dipping into it quickly I did find much I had already read in her book about Martin himself.
(For State-siders reading this, Martin Boyd was a lively and urbane recreator of late nineteenth century Melbourne life in his novels, the most famous being the four books known as the Langton Quartet. I adore all of them. More on A Difficult Young Man another time.
By the way, I didn't know Amazon provided citations via email.)

Visitors from Blusterhead, on the other hand, are highly likely to know exactly who Martin was and how famous his nephew Arthur and other family members are in Australia. One of my regrets ( among several, not an extensive list) is that I did not visit Bundanon before Arthur died a few years back. Imagine seeing Australia’s greatest living painter at work, as he was wont to do for visitors... and yours truly missed the opportunity.