reeling and writhing

news to me 27.05.10

Alice has been walking and taking photographs at her mother's command. The results are bewitching.

Writing at Desktop, Australian blogger Gerard Edelson calls Banksy's film, Exit Through The Gift Shop,

'that rarest of things in the internet age: a cinematic Trojan horse.'

His full review will be posted on his own blog, Celluloid Tongue, in good time, in good time.

One of my favourite short story writers is putting one up a month as a podcast, and selling the print version from her website as a zine (and Jen makes pretty ones.) We are lucky punters. Get over there and listen, and send off for a bundle when she has a few more up. I will be.

Polari's first issue features an interview with Edmund White, poetry by Pam Brown, the short fiction of Dallas Angguish and the writing of Staceyann Chin. This new international journal is is currently holding an open call for submissions from LGBT and queer writers for its second issue, with a publication date of October 1st 2010.

And finally this link from John Williams at The Second Pass, to an interview with US historian Jill Lepore, carries a very sweet tale of an inspiring letter with it. What an interesting idea for a teacher to have, taking letters every year from 15 year old pupils and posting them back five years later. I wonder if he ever got any of them mixed up...(yes, that would be me if I was that teacher.)

Lethem to leave the Chronic City

A change of scenery has worked for Lethem in the past. “The way people respond to this news is ‘Oh no, what will this do to your writing about New York?,’ as though I have to be on the streets. I wrote most of ‘Fortress of Solitude’ when I was living in Toronto and most of ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ at Yaddo.” It may even be, he told me, that getting out of town was necessary to his development as a writer (he lived in Berkeley in his twenties): “There was something about working from the margin and not right under the shadow of the publishing industry. You should find a way to slow that down and dwell in your apprenticeship and take pleasure in being playful and unfinished while you can. Once you professionalize this activity, there’s no turning back.”

I really liked this news piece from the BookBench blog at the New Yorker. Hopefully there will be something as intense as Fortress of Solitude coming out of the California dreaming.

there will be one week in September we want to remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A WHOLE WEEK. The critics must be nervous already.

reading this space

At Stephen Mitchelmore's blog, This Space, there are two new posts of interest.

He quotes Beckett's concerns voiced in an interview 26 years ago about the label 'absurd' applied to his writing:

Cautiously, I explain that I believe an artist's work is inconceivable without a strict ethical sense.
A long silence.
"What you say is true. But moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found."

And secondly, draws our attention to the online publication of a translation of an early story by Thomas Bernhard.

Lorrie Moore's bandages - The Observer

Typically, she makes light of being 53. "What does that mean ? When I was 52 I used to say, at long last, I have a full deck. Now I say we're into the joker years. I mean, every deck must have two jokers..." Professor Moore (she teaches creative writing) can laugh about "my first joker year" but – as in her short stories – there's an undertow of melancholy. "Actually, it's not funny, or wild, but we'll see. It's only March." In the next breath, comparing her 40s to her 50s, Moore, who was divorced in 2001, remarks, "at 53, you think I've had my marriage, my fun. I'm moving towards the solitaire years, the nursing home..." Her conversational arpeggios of gravity and mirth are delivered with such a sparkle that you know she's only half serious. But which half?

Not also is its author fun (interviewed a couple of weekends ago by Robert McCrum) but A Gate At The Stairs is also very good. I do hope to read Ms Moore's earlier novels sometime.

I'm not sure if this is quite what I think has happened in the book I've read (for a start there are several wounds, not just one), but her epigrammatic summary of her way into fiction does sound like those painters who need to make a mess in order to find their way into the work:

She herself says that she relishes those moments when the even flow of time gets snapped by a sudden crisis and "something's broken". She says her stories begin "with an injury. Then the story becomes like the bandage round a wound."

It's quite a long interview, but worth persisting with for her remarks on creative writing programs, one of which she has been involved with for over twenty years:

She concedes a certain scepticism about creative writing. "I have a friend," she says, "who says it's a pyramid scheme – but at least it's our pyramid scheme." She also evinces a distinct toughness about the necessary qualities of the professional writer. "My students," she says, "are so competent and sympathetic – and nice, because that's what the course requires. I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers."

William Skidelsky, in the same publication, does point out that David Mitchell is considered to be 'extraordinarily' nice. But as his readers know, that's a different pack of cards entirely.

online selections

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

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

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

just hanging

The most amazing flower and plate. This lady is a china photography queen. And this post is a poem with pictures. Via the Strange Fruit blogroll.

Earlier this month, Sonya Chung wrote enthusiastically about Everyman's Guide for Scientific Living at The Second Pass, calling it 'the best book nobody's heard of'.

What book reviewing on blogs can be, (and here also.) The list of best posts on Sterne makes for happy Internet readings for us all. When is the mobile archive coming out, Tim?

One for the money, two for the show - some Pen Macquarie videos. Come on, you know you want to watch them!

This very fine interview with Tom Cho at Eric Forbes's blog was first published in the Ubud Writers'
Festival edition of Quill magazine. Cho discusses the process by which Look Who's Morphing came together, and how his creative writing studies influenced its development.

The opening line of this is gorgeous, though it sounds more like Confession than AA. There's a story waiting to be written about my family, Wilson's Prom and the golden ticket. Or maybe we'll just keep it to ourselves, 'for a larf'.

Finally, Jonathan Mayhew mentioned Arcade on his blog the other day, saying he writes here. Looks like a fine site: a lot of the conversation seems to start here. (And there's plenty of it, too.)

the pick of the feeds (stars down on the right as well)

There has been a lot of wild speculation afoot regarding the potential release of an Apple product which might (gasp!) combine e-reading with other things. Mitch Ratcliffe of Booksahead is trying to put out some of the flames before there's a fire. Bookseller.com has more information here.

The Guardian has a great interview with Shaun Tan, as well as news of the discovery of some previously unseen letters of Flaubert's in a British stash.

I have been following this guy so I can find out things like this quickly. Richard Nash speaks to Publishers' Weekly about his past at Soft Skull and his newest venture, Cursor.

I have enjoyed reading Kris Hemensley's correspondence with his brother in Dorset this week. And I am very fond of the Australian Ballet's excellent blog, Behind Ballet. Here is their tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, by Martyn Pedler, complete with video.

dovegreyreader asks - A.S. Byatt, no less

Lynne strikes gold again, this time with A.S. Byatt, speaking of The Children's Book. Again, there is a reading list, and recommendations in the modern era include Michelle de Kretser. Enjoy.

what helen garner is reading, via:

There's an interview with Helen Garner in the 'Three Questions' feature on Lynne Hatwell's excellent Dovegreyreader blog - probably most of it has been heard before in Australia, but nonetheless a very attractive interview.
(warning - there are a lot of book cover images on that site, so don't fret if it takes a little while to load.)

And it's certainly not every day that we get a reading list from HG, either. Bravo Lynne. Subscribing to Lynne's blog is a triple whammy of delights - great book reviews, quilting and craft tales and a steady stream of magnificent photos of Devon and the dovegreyreader's home. A very pleasurable space indeed.

in which the master cheers up a bit

"A girl home from America is different from a girl home from England," he says. "She will go as one person and come back as someone else, with a new wardrobe, a suntan and new manners, even a new confidence."

-Colm Toibin, speaking to Robert McCrum (he didn't link to that post, though.)

Tagged to:buy on delicious, then - Brooklyn, and MJH's newie. (And why the hell didn't he just talk to her, then? old enough to know better, I think.)

the concrete islander is no more

R.I.P., and three cheers for the man who, like Elizabeth Jolley after him, was told his writing was fully sick.
Via Martin Edmond at Luca Antara, this 1997 article for Salon on William Burroughs, where J.G. Ballard famously wrote that:

'The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.'

Touchingly, Neil Gaiman (he of #Neil Webfail fame) writes that he felt if he said nothing on his blog, it might keep Ballard alive a little longer.
 And speaks feelingly of how terrifyingly ordinary the man was:

"... I don't know what or who I had been expecting, but Jim Ballard, then, and whenever I met him after that, was terrifying in his ordinariness, like the protagonists of his high-rises and drowned worlds, like the man on the motorway island."

The Guardian is all over it, demonstrating with minimal effort how an online newspaper space can do all the book news work if it really wants to. Stories I enjoyed included this one, where Ballard describes his writing space, which included a painting he looked at nearly every day,(fittingly, a copy of a destroyed original), and a chair he probably sat on as a child.
Here he tells how the pram in the hall saved his writing.

I haven't checked yet, but this interview with music writer Simon Reynolds at Ballardian in 2007 may have assisted Reynolds in compiling his recent article for Salon.
Here's a fine excursion from some time ago by our very own David Tiley into Ballardian landscapes - don't forget to look at the Detroit Blog link.

And finally, let the true believers speak. Here's the opening of Simon Sellars' interview for Ballardian in 2006.

Here’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels; instead he devours ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, it’s Robson rather than Ballard who puts me in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

The whole of the Ballardian site is a treasure trove, enjoy.

Toibin works hard for the money - news flash

 I am assuming that The Guardian did not link to this rare interview M.J. Hyland has secured with Colm Toibin because it only went live yesterday, as part of issue 2 of the Manchester Review from the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing.

Not sure if it's enjoyable as such - more of everyone's plaints on what hard work it all is, but an interview from Toibin is certainly not a common event.

*Update: The Guardian decided to ask a few others whether they were happy Vegemites. John Banville suggests that

The pleasure of writing is in the preparation, not the execution, and certainly not in the thing executed. The novelist daily at his desk eats ashes, and if occasionally he encounters a diamond he is likely to break a tooth on it. Money is necessary to pay the dentist's bills.

Alice Waugh of MobyLives, who provided that last link, is more sanguine:

It’s not just the people who are willing to bare all for the broadsheets who talk this way. When I started writing a novel, a wise lady, for whom I have enormous respect, warned me thus: ‘You’ll be locked in a room, stuck to a chair. Your bottom will become enormous and you won’t be able to communicate when you emerge from seclusion.” She was to a large extent right, although Pilates has helped with some of it. But is all this really necessary? However great the angst, novelists are allowed to escape into their own heads and make up invisible friends without being sectioned. That’s got to count for something, surely.

Review: House of Exile, by Evelyn Juers

Review copy provided.

If you have time to look through the transcript of this interview (or to listen) you may feel that Ramona Koval gives Sydney academic and writer Evelyn Juers something of a gruelling time over her biography of Heinrich Mann and his second wife, Nelly Kroeger-Mann, but that's not quite the case.

Some of the issues faced by Juers in writing House Of Exile, a collective biography of writers and intellectuals exiled from Germany in the thirties, are covered in more detail there than I will attempt here.

I've read a couple of biographies like this - the most memorable that comes to mind is A. Frances Johnson's 2007 novelised study of the life and art of Eugene von Guerard, Eugene's Falls.

The construction of Juers' book is admirable. As she explains in her interview, the pre-war period is covered with an eye on more poetic facts than the years after Hitler comes to power, and provides a welcome breathing space before same.

I was very impressed by the care she took to weave so many people's stories together in the later sections without losing focus; the events of the war are a powerful focus, I suppose, but it would not have been difficult to wander off following somebody and lose a reader here or there.

There is no risk of that in this formidable enterprise which is nonetheless humane and warm; Juers speaks of 'cold facts warmed up' in the interview, and her unerring ability to point up small details gives urgency and life to what is for the most part an overwhelmingly bleak period in European history. It's certainly not just about Nelly and Virginia's cakes and coffee.

There is a lightness and warmth to Evelyn Juers' invented backstory for Nelly Kroeger-Mann that is most appealing, counterpointed as it is with the cinematic backdrop of Berlin and prefaced by the rise to prominence of those éminences grises, the brothers Mann.
Helen Garner is right; she has an unerring eye for the detail that will bring a scene alive, and an ear for prose rhythms that make this kind of literary biofaction irresistible.

I was irritated at first by the introduction of the Woolfs and their entourage travelling in Europe in the thirties until I realised that part of the purpose (but not all, as you will find) might have been to point up Heinrich's appropriation of Nelly's only literary production.

Here is Leonard, carrying Virginia over his shoulder out of a cafe and into a train after she has been given travelsickness medication, telling her The Waves is a masterpiece. (Given that Victoria Glendinning's excellent biography has now been in circulation for nearly three years, it is good to see this revisited, as well as other things Woolfian which impinge naturally on this narrative.)

Here is Heinrich in 1932, burning his partner's manuscript and rewriting it as his own, telling her it will get nowhere with her name on it:

He explained that it was an important story and that it must be told, but as the Life and Times of Nelly Kroeger, a complete unknown, it would never be published in the current climate. It was a serious life, he added, and that would be its title, Ein Ernstes Leben. And since it was not right for him simply to put his own name on her manuscript, he was rewriting it. The book was finished in July and I like to think that she told him she thought her version was the better of the two, and he agreed.

(Ha! thinks the reader. We can wish.)

And  here, too, in 1940 is Ms Kroeger helping to carry the man who stole her life-story over the Pyrenees to freedom , with the Gestapo hot on their heels. (Mann was sixty-nine, and not fit enough to travel fast on foot.)

It's one thing to write of this as an intensive literary study, as some have suggested, but it is much more. There is so much rich detail that breathes on the page, and is not fossilised by dry language. Juers' writing sings, her quiet asides about research never detracting from the drive forward, but enriching the conversational tone of this remarkable piece of literary life-work. It's a work of great love as well as of scholarship, I think.

And every so often you come across a quotation from one of many famous writers which makes you wonder, is this what sparked her off on this quest? such as Musil's thought that he might 'construct a person from nothing but quotations'. (Fortunately not all of the bitchy asides from Brecht and Musil about Thomas Mann's tendencies to preciousness make the whole picture.)

It is also charming to have questions posed in mid-story about the nature of this kind of writing (something Johnson also did with considerable style as she attempted to rehabilitate von Guerard, regarded by some art historians as a hack), nowhere more strikingly than when Heinrich Mann ponders how to end his own version of Nelly's novel:

We don't know how Nelly ended her own story, but its new author, struggling to compose the final pages, might have looked up from his writing and told her that she deserved a happy ending, a new beginning, and in a fairytale flourish, he punished the bad and rewarded the good. The heroine was arched between biographical truth and fiction like an acrobat whose supple spine describes a backflip, semi-circular...

Not unlike the supple Ms Juers herself. The bibliography contains a long list of sources, many of them in German. 

interview with Tsiolkas at LiteraryMinded gives the lay of the land

'Richard Ford reminds me to look around at my world anew, to take nothing for granted. He is the best antidote for this false culture of celebrity and excessive materialism that I know.'
Christos Tsiolkas spoke to Angela Meyer at LiteraryMinded last week. It's a terrific interview so do set aside half an hour and read it.

The interest in Ford is quite significant, when one thinks about it - Ford is also quite happy to let his own racism be queried, to leave nothing uncovered in the quest to understand modern life. It is not a connection I would have made on my own, so a fascinating one to unearth in such a discussion, and thanks are due to Angela for getting this down. Great stuff.

do my dreaming and my scheming

This has to be one of the nicest posts in this series that I have read so far, along with Philip Hensher's, who may have sympathised with Kipling on the uses and abuses of a designated writing space.

"We've been in this house over 40 years and I'm 79 years old, so this room is full of my past. ". Alvarez issues a warning about helpful cleaners, and admits to playing poker online if his work is not going well.

Those of you who have been keeping up with the series will of course have seen this, and this (which you will no doubt remember next time you see a crowded desk.)

dropping books into wells and fishponds this time

From the 28th issue of Cordite comes this interview of George Dunford's (he of Hackpacker) with Paul Auster.  I particularly like Auster's remarks on the dialectic of composition - "I want to get back in that red car" he apparently said after finishing one book with his protagonist on foot.
I think I now know what I might want to read next - In The Country Of Last Things, one of Auster's early novels. I may even find (horrors) that I've read it already, which will be a humbling experience.
I have just finished The Buddha Of Suburbia, (Hanif Kureishi's famous first novel which I did not see when televised by the Beeb all those years ago), so what after the Auster? Will I start a  challenge for 'first novels you'd already read and forgotten about?'
Actually there are more than enough reading challenges out there already in bookblog land, of varying levels of interest. (The link shows the results of a cursory Google Alert I ran recently.)

dirty great big festival wrap up

The Festival will wind up tomorrow night and I had two days there this week, which was quite enough as there is a lot going on chez nous just now. I found something electrifying on Thursday which I probably would not have bothered with immediately. though I was aware of its release, and that's poet Robert Gray's most recent volume of autobiography, The Land I Came Through Last, from Giramondo, which he spoke about at the Festival Club around lunchtime. I am powering through it now and will review it later in September.

The David Malouf session was a little less predictable than these things can be, though the usual stuff about how do you write, how do things develop, was gently pushed around by himself and Ivor Indyk, without many surprises presenting themselves; one point which I'm sure Malouf has made on other occasions like this was that his second book, An Imaginary Life, could really have been written at the end of his career, and all the others written between that and Johnno. He spoke at some length about family history, a classical education and the impact of Ovid, and bilingualism in children.

There was a funny question from the floor about the 'physicality' of Malouf's writing practice, in the sense of 'how do you move around the house? do you go for walks?' to which Malouf replied with a nice anecdote about Patrick White ringing up to ask if he was interrupting the ironing, complete with vocal impressions.

He also made the rather remarkable suggestion that grappling with 'the matter of Australia' had been a task authors took on over about the last forty years, but that it was now pretty much over - that young Australian writers are not interested in it. I wonder what someone like Julienne van Loon, who set her latest book in the Pilbara region, would make of that suggestion. (Or Tara June Winch, or Andrew O'Connor, or Carrie Tiffany, just for starters...)

I think I was here this time pretty much to see how Fed Square rates as a MWF venue, to watch old people struggle with BMW Edge steps, in much the same way they would do at the Beckett or Tower Theatres at the Malthouse (where there must have been lifts, I guess.) Fed Square has tremendous potential apart from the access issues in several areas, and the bloggers who were there this weekend will have seen more of that (links to follow) than I did on the relatively quiet Thursday and Friday.

It would be good to have something slightly smaller available for smaller sessions, as well as the Festival Club in the ACMI function space  - one of the younger Americans I visited professed herself a bit intimidated by the size of ACMI 2: Mark Sarvas, of course, took it in his stride, and it was lovely to finally meet him and be able to thank him briefly for the inspiration of The Elegant Variation, on which a lot of newsy book blogs are based.

I enjoyed the Thursday session on small(!) mags with Julianne Schulz of Griffith Review, Sally Warhaft of the Monthly, and Philip Gourevitch of the Paris Review. Having these three, along with Briton Michael Burleigh, chewing the fat on the coverage and editorial practice of their publications was pleasurable, if only for the heartwarming thrill of hearing these smart, smart women give enthusiastic and articulate summaries of their considerable achievements. The blokes were also fine - the women, though, were particularly fine, went for GOLD, you might say.

The blogging session the following night was also very good - Antony Lowenstein and Margaret Simons, along with blogger extraordinaire Professor John Quiggin, did not let the chairperson, John Lenarcic (from RMIT Business no less), get away with any nonsense about blogs versus mainstream media, or pyjamas and cats.

Evidence of the digital/techno divide was steadfastly dismissed by Margaret Simons (Lowenstein did try to address it in part) and I felt for the poor lady who begged for some elucidation of how one found worthwhile blogs to read ("I have children and I work, what am I going to do when the paper is gone? I don't have time to blog") - feed reading is something that I think libraries could offer classes in, and is maybe something you're more likely to get information about from the ABC than a newspaper (though they do offer explanations of what RSS is on their websites, I think).

The working family woman made the salutary point that radio is surviving. That is interesting in itself, of course, and sometimes users do manage to win some fights with technology.

The title of this presentation maybe should have been, "Growing and Changing Media", with the focus squarely on changes, rather than the potential destruction of traditional media: change was certainly discussed intelligently by all panel members, and they were generally able to maintain that focus in the face of small, ineffectual diversions by the convenor.

I met Angela Meyer of LiteraryMinded there, which was terrific - what a top blogger about books and writing this dynamic young person is, and what contacts in new publishing she has! do subscribe to her feed at once if you haven't already.* Angela recommended Lowenstein's book to me, so I snapped that up along with the latest Meanjin, which is damn pretty - bravo Sophie, the design overhaul was long overdue and will have to go some ways towards increasing sales in a design crazy town like this one.

I also took in the Going Down Swinging commission, Static: White Noise, which again was beautifully framed by Beamer Edge.
Festival highlights for me then - saying hi to Mark, and picking up Robert Gray's book, which I've hardly put down. But a truly sublime treat was sitting in Teh Edge and hearing Orlando Figes and Alison Croggon discuss and read Anna Akhmatova's poetry: like Oliver, I want some more.

*Now to be found at Crikey.com

september I remember

World's longest INSTALLED novel. (Link via Ben Dooley at The Millions.)

I saw Lee Miller's photos at the Monash Gallery of Art recently. Among several that were astounding, the shot of Miller in Hitler's bath, with the dust of Dachau rubbed firmly into the bathmat, was the one I returned to more than twice. Ali Smith discusses Lee Miller's photography and writing in The Guardian this week.

Speaking of light and shade - Grand Text Auto comes recommended by Christy Dena of Cross Media Entertainment, and I am really enjoying this addition to my RSS reader, especially when catching up on things like this.

The State Library of Victoria gets a mention in here, just after a shot of the Sorbonne's library.
Way to go. And yes, the crowd at Curious Expeditions do credit Candida Höfer's magnificent tome for some of these pictures (which is where I've seen them before.) As well as offering a link to a Flickr account. (Link from the ALIA New graduates mailing list.)

I'd like to see Nabs try this.

In the last of the Melbourne Writers' Festival news, David Prater covers his session with John Tranter, and the Speakeasy at AWM Online is going to be a regular reporting spot for writers' festivals down the coast -they did Byron a few weeks back, and now they're doing Brisbane. So do watch that space.

writers I like to read (and read about)

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

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

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

live author is on ur screen, eating up ur bandwidth

The blog of the Internet marketing director for Holtzbrincks', Jeff Gomez, carries the ominous title 'Print Is Dead'. In this post he gets pretty excited about the future of book flogging using videos of only the most attractive authors. According to Jeff, if you're not a good looking writer in the future, it won't matter how good your book is, you'll be as high and dry as silent movie stars during the rise of talkies.

Christy Dena has noted some of the first examples of this over at Cross Media Entertainment, and puts a more positive spin on the development than Mr. Gomez, suggesting that video podcasts can communicate more information in a shorter amount of time than audio podcasts (as you'll see if you go take a look, Simon and Schuster's output at BookVideoTV is video podcasting).

Christy is an advisor to the Australian Literature on creative opportunities for writers in new media (among other things), as well as a tertiary lecturer in games and alternative worlds and a consultant in universe development. Her perspective on all developments in publishing, wherever it occurs, is always worth a look, and I really enjoy her blog and another website on text arts forms she contributes to, WriterResponseTheory.

While I agree with her that video podcast is not such a bad idea if your only option is to listen to the promotion of a book, I think that the speedy provision of detailed information is where print reviews have a huge advantage over all these whistles and bells. Not only does the writer get to hide - useful if you're not as photogenic as Allison Dubois, or you don't like getting caught in the wind like Marianne Wiggins, here. (God, she handles this well, I'd have been throwing a whopping tantie to get a better day for my shoot if that was me).

But print reviews and interviews are really easy to read FAST. And I can't see a great deal of benefit anyway in promotional material where the writer sits with you to tell you what a great book this is. No way am I going to read it just because the ad is on the telly, or a computer screen or mobile. The Book TV videos are not giving us much information, and whatever they do offer is prettified up to make us feel there's a product involved somewhere, and the author loves it so much they're happy to stand out in the wind on a beach and tell you all about it with their mouths full of hair.

I really doubt that this will work for readers who have always made considered buying decisions based on print reports. But perhaps we have always been in the minority.

Over at Dan Green's Reading Experience a few weeks ago, Colleen of Chasing Ray discussed the nature and purpose of the reviews she writes for the American Library Association's book review publication, Booklist. There's a place for short, sweet and devoid of literary criticism, even in reviewing. (I'm not sure if I need shots of seagulls and piers as well, though.)

The recent campaign of US bookreviewers to keep book reviews in newspapers has brought the whole function of reviewing under closer scrutiny in the US across several book blogs, and deserves a post on its own. For now I'll say there are reviews, and reviews - and there are also floggings, now available weekly on a phone near you.

more and more (and then some)

This article (link from Miriam Burstein, the Little Professor) points to a range of difficulties emerging with the Google Books project, including poor cataloguing.

Found while researching my recent piece for Cordite, this great review by Theresa Lauf of Jane Smiley and her 13 ways of looking at you-know-what (which I don't really like). From TEXT Review.

Will Self is a fan of Nick Cave's lyrics, using this to briefly unpack an argument he had with a rock writer on the comparative strengths of Dylan and Smokey Robinson:

As I recall, the argument eventually came down to a single couplet from Dylan's song "Visions of Johanna": "On the back of the fish truck that loads / While my conscience explodes". Barney contended that this, in and of itself, meant absolutely nothing at all. Therefore, it could only be viewed either as a self-indulgent verbal riff, or as filler, marking time until the beat cranked up again.

Being forced to analyse the meaning of this trope was, initially, unwelcome. I had no desire either to descend into the nerdish, psycho-biographical slough of the Dylanologists or to ascend to the arid heights of those academics, who have hung on to their tenure by maintaining the view that some songwriters may be considered quite as much "poets" as their unaccompanied counterparts. So far as I'm concerned this approach has always prompted the question: if lyricists are poets, then what are poets? Presumably one-man bands without a band?...

Nowadays, if we picture the poetic muse at all, it's as a superannuated folkie, sitting in the corner of the literary lounge bar, holding his ear and yodelling some old bollocks or other. Whatever need we have for the esemplastic unities of sound, meaning and rhythm that were traditionally supplied by spoken verse, we now find it supplied in sung lyrics.

Bombastic nonsense, really, but it's nicely expressed bombastic nonsense. (I'm obviously easily impressed.)

Not a new lit site, but one I aim to examine more closely  - Western Australian Writing, an Online Anthology.

There's a good review of Ondaatje's newie here at Boldtype, with links to interviews on Salon and CBC.

Also Sara Paretsky speaks to the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, about their campaign to keep reviews in newspapers and the gender imbalance in crime reviewing.

Hay-On-Wye has been running over the past two weeks and is blogged at the Guardian's Comment Is Free blog, here. Around the blogs there have been some concerns aired that it's becoming a bit of a bun-fight - too many political sessions, not enough about books, and tiny toilets to boot. (When I remember where I read that, I'll come back and post it.)

when he's bad he's pretty good

This interview with John Banville has been noted by Mark Sarvas for its discussion of the origins of the protagonist in his novel Shroud, who Banville based on Paul de Man, and his remarks on famous people being slightly fraudulent in some way.
What I've noted in it with some glee is his snarky remarks about Graham Greene, who I'm not exactly crazy about either (let's face it, neither was Shirley Hazzard and she actually knew the guy):

... He was on a panel of a prize given in Ireland [in the 1980s]. And he wanted to give it to somebody else and he behaved very dishonorably. But you know [laughs] he was that kind of man. And I had amusement parodying him, pillorying him, in The Untouchable [Querell, the character based on Greene, is quite fond of child prostitutes]. But I think he would have been amused by my revenge on him.

I don't think Graham Greene is a very good writer. People felt in the postwar period that they were getting this high moral and intellectual questioning when they're reading Graham Greene but they're really actually just sentimental fluff. Evelyn Waugh said a wonderful thing to Graham Greene once. He said, 'You know, it's a good thing that God exists because otherwise you'd be like Laurel without Hardy.'

In my Quirke book, there isn't any moralizing at all. I mean everyone is bad. The only person who is maybe halfway decent is Sarah, and she�s obviously doomed. And Quirke as we discover at the end has been carrying his own dirty little secret for a very long time indeed.

I also note with some delight his departing words to the interviewer, Nathan Ihara:

I'm still agreeing to review books: I got one yesterday from the London Review of Books, one is coming from The New York Times, and I have one from the Irish Times. I'm the girl who can't say no. I can't resist. Who can resist new books?

and his disarming honesty about The Sea, which he does not think is his best book, and which he thought his publishers would turn down, all of which makes this one of the better writerly interviews I've read in recent times.

in my solitude

I'm about due to re-read the section of Intimacy and Solitude to which Stephanie Dowrick is referring in this interview from her website, with Orchard Somerville-Collie:

'I am lucky enough to be writing about what eventually matters most to people – their personal and social relationships, their questions about meaning. This is an incredible field to work in. You can never run out of new things to know, reflect on and puzzle through. My subject matter never fails me. But – it is also extremely daunting to work with these topics. I take it seriously. I doubt myself over and over again. I spend months and months sometimes on a single chapter. The first section [on the Self] of Intimacy & Solitude took me a couple of years! Perhaps I wrote it fast, but preparing to write it took most of that time. There are many times when I wish I could be more pragmatic and just get on with it. But I can’t. I am an absolute perfectionist. I can let something go only when I believe this is the best I can do.

I know, you're thinking, what a snob Genevieve is, just because it took a couple of years she's going to give it another look. Guilty as charged. But Dowrick is one of the few writers my husband and I have both read and enjoyed. He likes The Universal Heart, I'm the Solitude buff. I also have a copy of May Sarton's book, Journal of A Solitude - I certainly don't have a solitary life at all, but it makes me feel a bit better about occasionally pining for some quiet time. It's even made me better at saying 'no' more graciously - my family would say I probably never really had a problem with saying it, but I do hope that I've got better at doing it nicely.

read, write, listen up

Over at the Bat Segundo site, they have passed the hundred-podcast mark, and here's Jorge's interview with Martin Amis  - check it out.

Richard Ford has been thrown a sucker-punch just prior to the semis at the Tournament of Books, courtesy of Maud Newton. I thought Lay Of The Land and Against The Day would be facing up for sure, and was cursing the possibility, but she has saved us the trouble that might have been occasioned by such a lousy draw. Part of her problem seems to be resenting the leisurely, mannered but (to my mind) masterly and assured pace of Ford's last run with Mr. Bascombe:

'...while One Good Turn is not as rich, true, or perceptive as the novels I gravitate toward, it held my interest. The book arrived while I was sick in bed with the flu, and I read it that day.

The Lay of the Land, on the other hand, took 10 days to slog through. Ten days is not a problem, per se — I spent at least that long with Moby-Dick and Anna Karenina and Remembrance of Things Past—but two weeks after finishing Ford’s book, I still have no idea what the point of it was.'

Ouch.

These articles seem to belong together - one's called 'Think You Know How To Read, Do You?' ( a short ad is required watching to access this on Salon). 
And the second, a fun piece of Auden's reprinted in the Times to mark the centenary of his birth, is equally encouraging.

'It is a sobering experience for any poet to read the last page of the Books section of the Sunday Times where correspondents seek to identify poems which have meant much to them. He is forced to realise that it is not his work, not even the work of Dante or Shakespeare, that most people treasure as magic talismans in time of trouble, but grotesquely bad verses written by maiden ladies in local newspapers; that millions in their bereavements, heartbreaks, agonies, depressions, have been comforted and perhaps saved from despair by appalling trash while poetry stood helplessly and incompetently by.'

(Links via Laila Lalami and Matthew Tiffany.)