reeling and writhing

birthdays and panels (and novels) and webisodes, oh my

Constance informs us that the word weblog will have its tenth birthday on the 24th (or thereabouts). Goodness. More on that here from one of the big guys.

Someone is taking a real holiday from blogging. A big decision from a formidable presence in US litblogging, who fortunately will continue to run his podcast interviews with writers over at the Bat Segundo Show (and, one assumes, to write for US papers on matters literary.) Goodbye Ed, and thanks for all the kind advice and interest in my own stab at MSM down here - both the blog and the correspondence were appreciated.

Wow. Who'd a thunk? There will be a panel on litblogging at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York in February.
After a year in which US bloggers have often been in the news, a panel will examine some of the following issues:

From web sites that trade in publishing industry gossip, to blogs that teach you how to get published, literary bloggers have created a whole new world online that is quickly proving as indispensable as its traditional print-based counterparts. And now that they’re here to stay, what can we learn from literary bloggers? How are they not only participating in the publishing discussion, but changing it? And what effect are these bloggers having on the industry (not to mention its content)?

And Mr Gomez, after all, says Print Is Dead. I must remember to pass this link on to some US bloggers. The session with writer Alison Norrington, on blogging fiction, looks fabulous.
Ben Vershbow, from the Institute for the Future of the Book, is also presenting.

Prior to the announcement here, I received news from Mark Sarvas that Text Publishing is delivering Harry, Revised to Australia in June next year. Harry is certainly bursting forth from some impressive stables....first Bloomsbury, then Canongate and our own (simply terrific) Text. Congratulations are due as the world opens up and welcomes the first novel from one of my favourite US litbloggers.

And finally, Hammer Films will ride again in cross-media format, with a series of four-minute 'webisodes' on MySpace for its new film, Beyond The Rave.

Banyule chicken calls election

Oh my word. As the man says, please don't sue him.
Link via Christy Dena, who also provides a link to the list of the films included by its creator, Alonzo Mosely. I AM peeved I didn't pick the Blues Brothers the first time around.

There's a great review here from ReadWriteWeb of a movie recommendations site, giving you the lowdown on how to check the recommendations ghost in the machine.
And also from RWW, it seems that social networking has been part of the BBC's enterprise solutions for at least eight years.

John Freeman has a good post at Critical Mass this week introducing Sign and Sight, Europe's answer to the Complete Review, and has also been talking to people from Eurozine, a collaborative site for more than 60 cultural journals, while he's been at the Frankfurt Book Fair (all his posts from Frankfurt are worth a look).

Ho hum. Tomorrow I write (or at least start) a post without a single link in it. Treely ruly. I don't have a Caladrius bird in my yard, unfortunately, but I'll think of something.

from the google reader

How Henry James would have hated hypertext, says Matt Christie. But 'he might have liked Hegel'. (now where did that bit go I wonder?)

Stephen Mitchelmore links to an interview over at the Harper Collins poetry weblog, Cruelest Month, with Gabriel Josipovici about his new novel and his lack of affection for historical novels: 'I don't believe in them or think they are a viable road for the modern writer to go down.'

I told everyone at the Library Uncon that Stephen Mitchelmore was good - I don't know if this is, but it certainly has curiosity value and I thank him for the link.

And Simon Sellars has noticed that Baudrillard died - but did anyone else in Oz blogging?

This probably is hard to swallow, but apparently AWP was top of the pops on Technorati t'other day. Link via Laurel Snyder, poet (and occasional prose-writer) of Jewishy-Irishy.

Lastly:
Tsk, not even in a handbag.

what's in, what's not

Congratulations are due to Will Elliott whose first published novel, The Pilo Family Circus, has won the Golden Aurealis award at the annual Australian awards for genre and young adult fiction, held this year in Brisbane. The Circus also tied for the Aurealis award for best horror title with Prismatic, written by three writers who pass collectively by the name of Edwina Grey.

The ABC and Telstra have joined the stampede to Second Life. Constance of LINT and Ruminations will be able to tell us if this is good news or not. New media services in both organisations will not be simply advertising, but will be building online facilities in this increasingly popular virtual community.

Germaine Greer talks up Ten Canoes for The Guardian, and does a great job of it in my opinion.

Susan Wyndham is blogging up a storm at the SMH, with 88 comments on this post on best sellers. This blog is a good source of Australian lit news, and Wyndham seems to have a better grip on developing a relationship with her readers than some other Australian newspaper bloggers (Tim Dunlop excepted, of course.) She has made a real effort to engage by starting an online book group, and has a good grasp of how to pitch to a book group readership. You will find plenty of interesting snippets and more than a bit of analysis here.

So, online collaboration on work documents getting you down and you'd rather write a book? NaNoWriMo looks a bit too much like hard work? Try the Penguin online writing project, A Million Penguins (which is a bit crowded to my way of thinking, but that's just me. Link from Australian Writers Online).

Finally, this was so delicious I just had to save it - from the Time archive, link via Flop-Eared Mule. Things to do in 1959 when you've finished your Rhodes scholarship but not your novel.

blogging the box

Elsewhere's Telly Meme - has been everywhere. I refuse to start a TV category as this will be a lonely post. But it's a good meme, worth a run, and thanks to Ariel for getting me started. (Now if I'd picked up Gravity's Rainbow, I'd be back in bed asleep by now...)

I gave TV up for Lent once as a child and it took years to get back on track. In the meantime my family watched heaps of classic '70s films which I studiously ignored - I am still catching up.
We have an awful old TV at present, dark as sin, and none of the widescreen films look any good on it. (When Etta last got undressed for the Sundance Kid we couldn't see her at all.) We still get to the cinema about once a month rather than lash out and buy a new one as I have this ridiculous notion that the lounge room is too small for a bigger teev. But anyway.

Earliest remembered teev:
A 'sixties children's cartoon theme song, We Are The Company. (And Uncle Norman and Joffa Boy. I was jealous to read once that  Shaun Carney of The Age actually won a bike on the Tarax show, having collected all five lemonade bottle tops spelling the name of the softdrink company. His main concern was having to give back the bottle tops. Aren't kids funny.)

An episode of Disneyland featuring the Osmonds touring Tomorrowland and singing Woody Guthrie's 'This Land is My Land' on one of the Disney trains.  Getting up unable to sleep and being invited to watch little bits of The Andy Williams show.

TV series I would want on a desert island
Tossup between Last Man Standing, Secret Life of Us and This Life,  all BRRRILLLIAAANT. I am on the verge of buying the boxed DVD set of LMS as a misguided attempt at archiving a slice of Oz TV as we once knew it, but I'm a bit mean. Also I've bought a lot of books this year and....Awwwwwh.
Can I add here that on a desert island I might also want a goat, and a pair of breeks... never mind.

TV that made me laugh
Arrested Development. Of course. Youngest son bought the first two series for his family this Christmas  A master stroke of gift giving that he will strive to match for many years to come.

TV that made me cry
Oh, dear. Stuff about people with disabled kids who are worse off than me, the mental health system, the Moira Kelly documentary about the little fellow with the blocked stomach who was starving before his surgery. I can see him running back to his parents now... husband and I both cried.
As Beckett said (more or less), 'why do they think my plays are depressing? Can't they see it all around them? La détresse....' If we can't see it now, we can't possibly be looking.

TV crap that I enjoy
I've grown to love Thank God You're Here now that they have realised the comedians are the only real contenders ( and Matthew Newton). Even Spicks and Specks has its moments.

TV you'll never forget
All the Tracy Ullman shows I've managed to tape. The Young Ones. Black Books. Sideshow Bob singing Pinafore.

Favourite TEEV adaptation
BEEB Middlemarch, The Forsyte Saga (holy shit, Ioann as a poor Architect), Hornblower (Ioann as a modest midshipman who has Adventures) also the Gate Theatre Godot (which is always an adaptation of a kind.) When is Ioann going to stop advertising for Burberry and make something else...???

One TV program you are currently watching
Family screenings of Arrested Development, late at night with a captive audience.

One TV show/series you have been meaning to watch
Love My Way, series two. Reruns of Last Man Standing at 2pm in the afternoon all through December (what a rotten time to put it on. Who can remember to put on a video recorder in the middle of the day?)

tell me a story

Busy times down here.

Firstly, I've had a brief incursion into freelancing, covering the Digital Storytelling Conference here at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) last weekend for a film-makers' website. Fits in well in this space, so there is a list of links in the sidebar of the most prominent leaders in the movement, while a few more will reside in the body of this post.

Digital storytelling has a practice base of less than 150 known organisations in the world at present, however as it works to spread technical expertise within communities rather than aggregating it within a group of professionals, it will continue to grow.

In some respects it is low-tech multimedia, in other respects desktop scrapbooking with a voice-over. Groups represented at the conference were not all digital storytellers as it is practised in the US, at the BBC and here at ACMI - some were documentary film makers, some museum curators, one was an  interactive storytelling software developer, others were indigenous film makers and community website authors, or academics involved in youth projects.

But all their work is worth a look if you are interested in the potential of computers to democratise the media. From that magical place Canada, a shot of what it might look like on the box.

And my other life as a family manager and frustrated student? Writing in fits and starts fits in beautifully with all that - down to the index cards hidden away in the handbag where son with autism can't find them and repack them in a better place, along to the opportunities for negotiation with others over computer time. I think my youngest son gets a lot more homework done when I'm on the computer ostensibly 'earning', but mainly learning.

The downsides? the money, my stodgy style (not really like my blog at all, to my recruiter's well-disguised surprise), my innate desire to research rather than report, and the deadlines - flexible in this case, but very like school I must say. I'm very grateful to the networker who got me this gig as he's opened doors in doing so. Will I pass through them? I wonder.

In the meantime, I've got a paper to write and a supervisor to meet with - so Structured Blogging, look out.

lacking direction

This is a tricky time for a meme really - I've got some matters of focus to sort out, apart from being shocked to the marrow by the New Orleans debacle. The meme, then, is a precursor to a short interregnum on this blog - to wit:

Georgina from Stack asks who would play me in a film of my life - being greedy, I've got two (no, three) takers, Ariane Ascaride, the lead in Guedigian's tough little romance, Marius et Jeannette, and most recently seen in Brodeuses - and failing that, Catherine McClements or the fabulous Judy Davis (though she is WAY too thin.)

The casting agency would be on the lookout for someone with plenty of experience observing subservient, oversensitive, somewhat sullen women who take a lot of crap from people and then blow up periodically without warning. They would be highly skilled in reproducing this explosion in a realistic fashion - Ascaride is a shoo-in for her mouthing off at the supermarket in M & J. Needless to say, if I had half of the above women's tenacity in real life, I wouldn't need to blow up at all. Fuck the casting, Georg, why can't we just write the screenplay :) ?

Not going to pass this meme on as I'm taking a few weeks off to sort out some of the ordure, in order to avoid further difficulties ( and hopefully divert explosions into creative activity - like reading the collected works of Lorine Niedecker, taking inspiration from Thomas the Tank Engine and writing a Really Useful Post, or burning fat at the gym - HEY HO, LET'S GO - dang it. I would rather be sedated after all. I think.)

In the meantime please visit some of the links scattered about herein, and please replicate the meme yourself if you so wish. I might (just might!) spend some time discovering how Typepad will let me play with my template and maybe pull some of these lists into more user-friendly displays a la Maitresse de Chekhov - Bud has posted some tempting tips on his Typepad Tips Blog, just to show that bloggers never really take holidays at all....

P.S. or, I will take a holiday whilst marvelling at the bravery of those who play with Typepad Advanced Templates.

­See you after the 18th or so.

Juan les Pins is for Faramir of Gondor

Over at This Stubborn World, Jacqui Lofthouse has posted an annotated list of books about writing as she packs for her annual stint as creative writing tutor with Artemisia Holidays in Barga, Tuscany.

In other news, I'm beginning to think Gore Vidal has a point here regarding questions about filming Fitzgerald's novels (link from Maud Newton):

"The problem of trying to adapt a great work of fiction - 'Gatsby' is not that, but it's a lovely little novel - is you can't get that on screen, and filmmakers have never understood that," he said. "It's a tone of voice, and the tone of voice is that of the author. And, if I may say so, films have no authors, no matter what the prints say. It's a collaborative effort."

I certainly don't agree that all great works of fiction (or lovely little novels) are unfilmable, however, having just watched a 70s Australian classic adaptation of Helen Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip. This was also a novel with plenty of author's 'tone', yet eminently suitable for celluloid. But Helen G. always writes superb dialogue too.

Some films of novels simply get better with time, especially those written by writers thoroughly imbued with a cinematic sensibility: I'm thinking of Forster's Howard's End, which had to wait for Emma Thompson to be born, grow up and play Margaret Schlegel before it became completely, utterly filmable.

Tender Is The Night will be something of a dog with these freakin' actors for Dick Diver, author's tone notwithstanding.(Some of the ladies are acceptable though). David Wenham, ex-Australian Psycho, has the hair and the range, please consider:

Silently she admired him. His complexion was reddish and weather-burned, so was his short hair - a light growth of it rolled down his arms and hands. His eyes were of a bright, hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed... His voice...wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness  in him, of self-control and of self-discipline (p.19).

In Australia he has already played a character called Diver Dan, but don't hold that against him please.

In other film news, Billy Crudup and Colin Farrell are tipped to play Paradise and Moriarty in Francis Ford Coppola's film of On The Road.

linking time

A brief para in the Forbes Best Of The Web directory, reviewing the LitBlogCo-Op. You go, girls and boys...

Marvellous, international, independent DVD publishers and their collections of releases reviewed by the Masters of Cinema for your convenience. Yet another example of how hard it can be sometimes to find and save important lists of...good STUFF.

Given the way I hear ignorant teens, cynical twenty-somethings and even those in their jaded and overworked thirties talk about techies, I'm not surprised that Bill Gates is surprised about this. (Should we be surprised, also, that Microsoft finds it hard to keep people when Bill could be single-handedly responsible for building obsolescence and uncertainty into the IT industry? Don't get me started.) Link from Trevor Cook.

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?

for the personal archive

Okay, I know a Google search will bring 'em up but I'm OLD. And my bookshelves and filing cabinet are a mess, and I need to throw out the paper copy. ( And my blog categories need an overhaul already - I'm enrolled for a database subject this semester, can't you tell? Do blogs need thesauri? Are all litbloggers nascent librarians? Why do I care? Why didn't I get it right the first time?)

Orman Day, That Secret Code - for my daughter to read. A group interview with Larry Brown, Dan Chaon, John McNally and Susan Straight on 'working class literature'.

Karen Maroda, Sylvia and Ruth - for everyone. I don't mind Salon ads - well, maybe I should start that paper file next week after all.

I read Larry Brown's The Rabbit Factory a while back and found it quite hair-raising - haunting is not a word I'd associate with this writer, the material is too immediate for that. Susan Straight has written a book with the evocative title, I Been In Sorrow's Kitchen And Licked Out All The Pots (yes, of course and deserves a capital there).

On an entirely different note, I rented a DVD last night with very little review support which is highly unusual for me, and found myself ( and helpful partner) reviewing an atrociously dubbed Russian film with subtitles three lines ahead of the fast-paced dialogue. (How did we know? We followed the 'Nyets'.) Released here under the title, The Stroll, and going back to the video shop this morning along with my friendly comments to my video collection owner. He is a terrific film buff and natural collection manager, this man - completely delightful, exists on the junk food in the strip, works with his wife without a cranky word ever passing between them, and always happy to know if something cannot be found easily or has not worked properly. His collection of Australian films includes a DVD of the cult '70s biker film, Stone, often re-screened here on the independent multicultural channel, SBS. I'm sure he's eagerly awaiting the release on DVD of John Duigan's early classic, The Year My Voice Broke - I won't even have to ask him for it probably, it will just appear there one day.

He's also easily pleased by a chat with anyone remotely interested in what they have seen elsewhere. In short, he loves his medium and is probably wasted in a video shop - I hope he is happy there. (And did I mention he often trims my fines? )

And our viewing night? Ended happily with Altman's vivid and humane film featuring the Joffrey Ballet, The Company. Very soothing at the end of an enervating week dealing with disability services.

The brain still hurts this morning, not just from the usual teen transport duties; it's just been a very long week, watching my oldest son come in dirty or without his diary and wondering what the hell he has been up to (won't tell and can't tell is a powerful combination!) - then finding our case manager is 500% behind us and wants to visit the day centre not once, but TWICE, to see what is going down. I'm almost too tired to be jubilant, but it's a quiet yet powerful victory over some things that were eating me away slowly. Time to keep up the gym work and cut down the brandy and caffeine so I can 'keep on keeping on'.

Naturally I won't be looking for pots in sorrow's kitchen to lick out just yet, in fact one of the girls is coming to see the Sydney Dance Company with me next week. Call it keeping a (not inexpensive) sense of balance.

Freud, the novel and the New York Times

Just a small protest about a couple of posts, one on the future of the novel at Moby Lives and a riff on psychological realism I came across  at The Reading Experience. Also a quiet wail about the silly things some people have said about films and novels.

Stop 1: Dan Green’s post on psychological realism. Dan got a bit stuck as he tried to peg a discussion on what proved to be a fairly insubstantial piece of populist fluff from the New York Times, by Lee Siegel.

I found the discussion at The Reading Experience fuzzy and disappointing, as Green sought to define psychological realism in the novel as beginning somewhere close to Flaubert, and reaching its apogee with Woolf and Joyce:

I think Siegel is wrong in claiming that 19th century writers "plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance." Before James (or Flaubert, or Chekhov), the reigning narrative model was the picaresque, which surely emphasizes event over reflection, and which generally produces characters that are flat indeed--although not necessarily without color or vibrancy. One could say that writers such as George Eliot or Hawthorne or Melville plumbed the depths of the human soul, but they did not do so using the techniques of pyschological realism as we have come to know them. It was as an addition to the strategies used by 19th century writers that stream of consciousness and what might be called psychological exposition--in which the writer describes what's going on inside a character's mind in the same way he/she might describe landscape or event--came to be identified as "modern" in the first place.

Firstly, let’s hope Stendhal gets a look-in there, Dan?

I'm not comfortable with this neat little line being drawn at all, it reeks of the old undergrad assumption that writers woke up one day in April,1660 in England and said, "Today is the Restoration. The Renaissance is so last century."

This post and its comments came dangerously close to treating film somewhat dismissively as not even comparable with the novel in approaching a serious treatment of character. Come again? What films have y’all been watching?  Not much Ingmar Bergman or Eric Rohmer, I’ll be bound.

Admittedly the Siegel article was far worse, putting film in the dummies basket fair and square, even though it was mainly an opinionated rant, masked as a book review, about the damage Freud  has supposedly done to society, which took swipes at the novel and film along the way.

Finally, I'm also a little dissatisfied with Dan's closing argument where he tries to fight for a novel as a creation of good faith in itself, I know I should know why this argument is simplistic in technical terms, but I really only feel it:

Privileging "psychological realism" over all the other effects a work of fiction might convey, all the other methods of creating an aesthetically convincing work of literary art, ultimately only diminishes fiction as literary art. It perpetuates the idea that fiction is a "window"--whether on external reality or the human psyche--rather than an aesthetic creation made of words...

There are plenty of great novels that reveal human motive and the operations of the human mind. But their authors didn't necessarily set out to make such revelations. They set out to write good novels.

I don't think such hair-splitting is worth the trouble. Dan is simply choosing brownie points for the novel here, without giving it anywhere to go or any credit for where it has been along the way. As well as making some sweeping statements about authorial intentions simply because he can, which is not really a good enough reason, and certainly not a sin in the blogosphere, but maybe one of its weak points.

the lusty month of may-abstracted

Tra la, it's here, that shocking time of year....

Forgive me, my second school musical was Camelot and if your best friend plays The Lusty Month of May at her wedding reception it kinda stays with you. For years and years.

I've been writing abstracts for the ABC's radio archive, RADA, for over three weeks now. I'm having trouble acquiring a taste for Victorian broadcasting, and now gravitate easily to the Radio Australia clips, covering politics, mainly, in the Pacific region.

So, in that vein, and following my Arthurian studies background, the following appealed enormously when I googled the Arthurian cartoon we saw in the 70s here on TV and instead was rewarded with a treasure from this interesting site:

Perceval le gallois(1978).France; dir. Eric Rohmer; Gaumont-Films du Losange.

Alternate title: Perceval.

Cast: Marie-Christine Barrault, Arielle Dombrasie, André Dussollier, Marc Eyraud, and Fabrice Luchini.

After a series of adventures which bring him knighthood at King Arthur's court, the young Perceval has a vision of the Holy Grail but fails to understand what he has seen. He then sets off to find the Grail again in a quest that takes him on yet another series of adventures. Finally, assuming the central role in a Passion play, Perceval is granted a second vision of the Grail. Unique among films about Perceval and the Quest for the Grail, Rohmer's source is Chrétien de Troyes unfinished twelfth century romance. The dialogue retains the verse form of the original romance in a modern French translation. Rohmer uses stylized painted sets reminiscent of manuscript illustrations that give the film a genuinely medieval look to provide a commentary on the necessity for the quest for the spiritual, in a medieval or a modern world.

Often a story that is easy to get horribly wrong, even as a precis. My favourite Arthur film to date is Boorman's Excalibur, which was made a little after the Rohmer I think. The bibliography is cool, film reviews included which is a nice touch.