reeling and writhing

the whale has, thankfully, done a lazarus

What a golden project this will be.

Eddie Campbell has news of the Cisco Kid's shirt pattern, and of his origins as well - O.Henry, no less. Now that I did not know.

One of the original literature blogs (though it was more of a news site than a blog to my recollection) is back, now firmly attached to its founders' thriving press. (Via Three Percent.)

And from that venerable organ, I have been able to find Garrison Keillor on fire here at Salon, upset by Governor Palin:

She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain's first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for 40 grand a pop, and she'll become a trivia question, "What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?" And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.

Dennis at Mobylives has also located some very up to date commentary on Google's effortless sidle into digital publishing.

opening bash - MWF 2008

Although Jan Chamberlain (or was it Rosemary Cameron? I can't remember) was dismissive of this article in The Australian at the opening of the Melbourne Writers' Festival last night, it is not a completely unfair appraisal of the current situation. It is damn unfortunate, let's face it, to have aspirations of this kind if the Government will not fork out more dollars and provide more free events at the main literary event for the year. Two tents in Adelaide, some people near me at last night's keynote address said, and 107,000 visitors, says the paper. I think the move to Fed Square will have to show Mr Brumby what a splash a good festival can make, and hopefully provoke him to make it even better. The title of that article is fair enough as far as this writer is concerned.

Cameron suggested prior to Germaine Greer's keynote address last night that Andrew Jaspan, the editor-in-chief at The Age, was instrumental in getting Melbourne's pitch to UNESCO off the ground and happening, having worked in Edinburgh, the only other UNESCO literary city, before coming here.

I might be going to a few more things at MWF if there were more international writers there, though I'm not sure who or why. I am only going to four or five things this time. It's a fairly broad program, but thanks to the carbon footprint and the price of travel, among other things, a lot of it is homegrown or less prominent writers than usually travel to Sydney or Adelaide. To be honest, I wonder who I would go and see if they did come - I'm the sort of person who looks at the PEN World Voices website and gets quite stressed immediately, so  I don't think programmers should take much notice of me - but maybe there are others who feel the same.

I am looking forward to hearing David Malouf next Thursday though, and Philip Gourevitch on literary journals - and I will go and hear Orlando Figes and Alison Croggon talk about Anna Akhmatova. I would also have gone on the rag trade crawl, which sold out like a flash - so I do hope that happens again sometime soon. And I will try and drop by the Lit Remix in Fed Square on Saturday - it will be interesting to see how that works on the screen.

I am rushing this post today to make the point that I hope the session with The Age Book Of The Year, fiction and poetry collection winners today is on the big screen too - it's at 5.30 in BMW Edge, which only sits about 450, and is free. Something like that could be beamed outside as well, as Winton is complaining in the paper today that overseas travel means he has less time to visit homegrown festivals. So it would be good to beam him up today, hey?
do drop a comment here if you're passing by and have news on that.

megalogenius watch

At the Speakeasy at AWM Online, there is a lot happening as their bloggers take on the Byron Bay writers' festival once more.

I am very happy to report this report on the place of blogs and new media, chiefly because George Megalogenis was there, and his comments have been faithfully recorded by Jane.

I have subscribed to Mr. M.'s blog because he is one of the most articulate economists I have ever heard speak - so clear that even my resident 17 year old , watching ABC's Lateline on the teev a couple of years back, could take in  his lengthy yet precise and informative sentences, and get the drift. A genius with one letter missing, he had this to say at Byron about social media and the last Federal election:

Megalogenis...considers today’s media very fragmented; back in the day when everyone read the same five or six newspapers, to a large extent everyone got the same message. Now, with blogging and internet resources and the thousands of different media that assault us all daily, everyone receives different messages, or different parts of the same message.

He also commented on the fact that newspapers are still a source for news, but they aren’t the same gateway they used to be. Blogs talk directly to their audience, unlike the opinion columnists of 10-20 years ago. And with the Kevin 07 internet campaign, the Labor party bypassed the papers and spoke directly to the electorate on a massive scale, in a way that hadn’t really been done before.

AWM blogger Jane also noted a difference of opinion between audience member Mungo McCallum and Megalogenis and other panellists about the potential in political online forums for echo chamber effects. An informative report, and there is plenty more on the festival from the AWM team, so if you couldn't get to Byron, have a look.

at last

Thanks for the picture from the original reports, PC.

And Beth has a great post here, with a shot of the Parliament as well.

shelving demons

The old brain is, if not reeling this week, occasionally struggling to recalibrate. Liberals falling like mountain ash in a high wind, people openly denouncing WorkChoices in post offices - who'd a thunk it this time last week? David has written one of his finest to mark the occasion (and Ampersand Duck has drawn for it as well.)

Till the end of the year you can cast your vote for a book cover at the Book Design Review blog. Some speccies there, including Marina Lewycka's latest, Strawberry Fields. Link via Chekhov's Mistress.

From Alex Ross's blog comes this extract from a book on pop which gives some background on Roberta Flack's classical training.

I would demur, however, at this writer's claim that Flack 's 'distinctively spare arrangements, predilection for spaciousness, and cool reflective tone' stem from an understanding of Lizst - spots of Bach, yes, but Lizst?

The Free Range Librarian, K. G. Schneider, (who contrary to my earlier posting, is not interchangeable with Jessamyn West, no matter how wonderful I believe they both are) will tell you here why Library Thing is the goods, and why authors should be members. (Don't go anywhere near Shelfari.)

Visited:

Lisa Gorton's launch, Thursday 29 November and heard Chris Wallace Crabbe say that her work in her first collection is 'an achievement that glides so smoothly that you get out of winter in a day,' a line from one of the poems in her first collection, Press Release.
I am surprised it is the first, I seem to have been reading her poems around the traps for ever.

And finally, was delighted by:

this post, book designer Ampersand Duck again, at Sarsaparilla on the design of Michelle de Kretser's new book, The Lost Dog.

keeping that drowsy emperor awake

Three things I really enjoyed reading over the past couple of months, and have only noted here now:

Delia Falconer's beautiful essay in the August ALR on the spaces we cannot afford to lose within our classics, here.

Richard Neville's terrifying piece in the September ALR on the future. I don't know how I managed to read anything else after this. It was like being dipped in a pool of fire; reading outside on a beautiful spring morning, I looked around at the trees and wondered why I was still there when I'd finished it. Dick's in fine form, building from a quiet start to a relentless elegy for the planet that he dares to top off (as only he can) with a savagely ironic question. That takes some nerve.

The last was from Text Publishing's founder, Michael Heyward, was in last Saturday's Age and is on Australian writing and publishing. Unfairly characterised by the editor as a 'lament', it is more correctly read as an unerring and surprisingly positive analysis of the state of Oz publishing with some very useful recommendations for the future (of publishing, that is) which I seriously hope the Government adopts:

The next step is to invest in our editors. A program with a five-year life to help publishers hire and train a dozen editors would cost less than $1 million a year. It would be a great investment.

It would soon enough allow 100 or more books to be published each year that either aren't published now or are brought to market too soon. Given that each year a maximum of about 50 novels enter the Miles Franklin it is easy to see the potential.

If those 100 books sell 5000 copies each at about $22, each will generate $10,000 in GST. Taxpayers will not only get to live in a cleverer country but they will get their money back.

And if you want to make more money overseas you need to build your publishing capacity.You can't sell international rights in books that don't exist or aren't good enough.

Back in 1990 it wouldn't have made sense to propose a scheme like this. We have spent a couple of decades assembling a publishing infrastructure and it's time to finish the job. The writers are waiting for us.

one dress, one year, one powerful statement

Hanging around BlogHer, just found out about the Little Brown Dress project, and guess what? someone 'appropriated' said dress, worn by performance artist Alex Martin for a whole year, at the Un-Dressing party in July 2006. (It's believed to have ended up in recycling somewhere in Seattle.)

Martin spent her 365 days in brown denim nearly a year ago now, and is currently well into her second recycling project.

In this performance, I challenged myself to reject the economic system that pushes over-consumption, and the bill of goods that has been sold, especially to women, about what makes a person good, attractive and interesting.  Clothes are a big part of this image, and the expectation in time, effort, and financial investment is immense.

I haven't been able to discover whether the choice of brown had anything to do with St. Francis of Assisi, though.

So if you're wondering where Lionel Shriver and Elizabeth Jolley get (and got) the time to write novels, best go have a look in the wardrobe, ladies.

Of Oz, where they do the moderation quick-step

There's been plenty of soul-searching on Australian weblogs this week regarding what's said online and how it's managed - that's right, the ole defamation and moderation two-step has been in full swing.
Firstly, a very fine post and discussion on writing and blogging appeared on Sarsaparilla early in the week - Georgina Hibberd had found a post on BuzzBalls'n'Hype about writers being expected to blog as a marketing exercise and posed some useful questions to some of the usual suspects at said space, who acquitted themselves magnificently. Writers as Bloggers is full of great small posts (so to speak) on what writers do about the online/offline thing, and showed how Australian blogging can really hit its straps, to the surprise of this reader who has been somewhat critical of her regional area of the blogosphere for some time. The Sars crowd gave a great demonstration of what blogging is all about - some were journos, some poets and novelists, others critics and writers of fine polemic, and one has done just about everything.

Signs that the literature blog is being read by those 'in the know' have been on the increase in recent weeks, and during this post just one link to a writer's work was sufficient to bring him into the conversation to discuss the all-consuming concern of the online flaming of public figures.

Australia's Eureka Street follows the leaders online

The Victorian Writers' Centre newsletter, Write On, reports that the final print version of Eureka Street will appear in May, to be replaced by an online version. Andrew Hamilton SJ, a regular writer for ES, is quoted in a recent editorial as saying that:

The uses of the Web seem to commend writing that is brief, plain and succinctly argued in response to issues of contemporary interest. To write plainly, clearly and succinctly is an art, one we hope has been represented in the printed form of Eureka Street. But Eureka Street has set itself more ambitious goals, and for these particularly it has been valued.

It has tried to represent the humane tradition. Central to the humane tradition is a high evaluation of human dignity. it makes human flourishing the criterion for judging political policies. If we place a high value on human dignity, we shall naturally attend closely to the way in which any policies treat the most marginalised and weakest. The humane tradition, too, requires that we give a persuasive account of human predicaments by attending to their complexity and depth...

...The mission of Eureka Street does not license us to turn our back on electronic publishing. It encourages us to try to find a space in it for reflective communication and leisurely assimilation. The meeting of this larger cultural challenge will not stand or fall with the success of Eureka Street. But we hope to make our modest contribution to it.

they say that freedom is a constant struggle

The Guardian has published the translation of Orhan Pamuk's speech of acceptance of the Freidenpreis, the peace prize offered by the German book industry (via Moorish Girl). Pamuk makes an eloquent argument for the novel as a bridge for building understanding of the 'other':

Today we do not read the greatest political novel of all time, Dostoevsky's The Devils, as the author originally intended - as a polemic attacking Russian westernisers and nihilists; we read it instead as a novel that reflects the Russia of its day, that reveals to us the great secret locked inside the Slavic soul. This is a secret that only a novel can explore. Obviously, we cannot hope to come to grips with themes this deep merely by reading newspapers and magazines, or by watching television. To understand what is unique about the histories of other nations and other peoples, to share in unique lives that trouble and shake us, terrifying us with their depths, and shocking us with their simplicity - these are truths we can glean only from the careful, patient reading of great novels...

He also makes an interesting claim for the novel as Europe's artistic contribution to freedom and political stability:

The most important thing that Turkey and the Turkish people have to offer Europe and Germany is, without a doubt, peace; it is the security and strength that will come from a Muslim country's desire to join Europe, and this peaceful desire's ratification. The great novelists I read as a child and a young man did not define Europe by its Christian faith but by its individuals. It was because they described Europe through heroes who were struggling to free themselves, express their creativity and make their dreams come true, that their novels spoke to my heart. Europe has gained the respect of the non-western world for the ideals it has done so much to nurture: liberty, equality and fraternity. If Europe's soul is enlightenment, equality and democracy, if it is to be a union predicated on peace, then Turkey has a place in it.

Podcasting at the picket line

The Canadian broadcasting workers' lock-out and the innovative podcasting site set up by the sacked employees has attracted the attention of the Guardian. Link via Writing for the Web.

(Note that Crawford Kilian, the author of this blog, has nine other blogs to his credit, all extant. Gets me off the hook for Blog Day 05 in one hit.)

through a londoner's eyes

I didn't think I would blog about this as I felt numb myself after the big weekend inspiration of Live8, pride in Saint Bob and his blessedly un-Irish persistence, followed so quickly by catastrophe. From Jaccqui Lofthouse's blog, this post on the Tube bombings.

Only last week, my husband came back from a day in town, telling me about having taken lunch in Tavistock Square. He remarked what a peaceful spot it was. Now that idyll is shattered. Oddly, I saw an ex-boyfriend speaking in Tavistock Square as an eye-witness yesterday. I hadn't seen him in twenty years. So far that's as close as I come to knowing those who witnessed it.

McEwan is right to speak of numbness. It's not emotional numbness I think, it's simply the body's way of expressing trauma...

I remember that feeling from a family collision with the Bali tragedy, and even from here I've done a mental check of whose kids are in London working. Thanks to Jacqui for her account.

he didn't want to write this but I'm glad he did

It happens everywhere ( Australia is not squeaky clean about this sort of nonsense either), but thanks to blogs we can hear how people feel about it now.

...This humiliation is one of the factors that make some so vulnerable to what a terrorist might preach to them. May be poverty and unemployment might not go away, but I don’t think it is that hard to teach government officials and employees that fellow citizens deserve to be treated humanely no matter how poor they are or how unclean and untidy their clothes might look.

Thanks to David Tiley of Barista for the link.