reeling and writhing

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.)

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.

Richard Ford is back on the menu

Just when you think it's safe to take a break from books and blogging, and do other stuff ( like clean out the pantry and find out exactly how many packets of dried fruit have expired, and where the lentils got to), some great news like THIS comes out
And this interview with Ford from The Guardian is pretty cool too.   I have ordered a copy in hardback from Readings already - so there goes the book budget again.

I'll have to wait to get hold of Auster's Brooklyn Follies, Mitchell's Black Swan Green and Carey's Theft. I went secondhand bookshopping the other week and picked up one of Alex Miller's novels, a book of Imagist poetry and some other bits and pieces for $30. I also found a copy of a 1999 novel by Alistair McLeod I had completely forgotten about, No Great Mischief.

lingering over links

If you've already hit the absinthe, you might care to dip into the drinking issue of Boldtype
while you're at it. Authors reviewed on the topic of imbibing include Jonathan Ames, Graham Greene, Charles Bukowski, Tom Standage and Caroline Knapp.

British author Jacqui Lofthouse has a terrific coaching blog, here. She has put a 30 day writing program online and it's as good as a published book on the subject. Jacqui combines the teaching of writing with creativity coaching, is  a graduate of the creative writing school at the University of East Anglia,  and is the author of several novels.

Kate Kellaway has interviewed Jeanette Winterson about her new book for children, Tanglewreck. Link via Bookslut.

On the designer side of things, the rather beautiful Haruki Murakami website at Random House was nominated for a Webby recently. (See celebrity/fan section ).
The BBC's digital storytelling project in Cumbria, Digital Lives, won the Community section.  And Beck's homepage got a nomination too!!

Thanks are due to a library mailing list for the Webby  links, and a warm welcome to librariesinteractinfo in the sidebar there, under Library Stuff. This is a terrific new group blog for Australian librarians, well set up and run by some smooth and friendly operators who know the ropes.

ways of seeing

From an interview with Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, on the Commonwealth Writers Prize website.  (Sadly the interviewer's name is not given.)

Though you have been compared with many writers of the twentieth century, very curiously however, you have mentioned your affinity to Jane Austen as you explain that you share with her the desire to represent the quotidian and mundane. Why do you choose an early nineteenth century woman writer as a possible likeness and link?

Jane Austen wrote about boring people with desperately limited lives. Her heroines were bound by iron rules about what they could do, where they could go and what they could say. Their futures depended on the single question of who they would marry. Was it going to be the baronet? Or were they going to fall for a cad in tight red trousers and be discarded in a boarding house in Bath? Yet she writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating.

Moreover, she writes about them in the kind of book these woman would themselves read - the romantic novel. This (I realised rather belatedly) was what I was trying to do in Curious Incident - to take a life that seemed horribly constrained, to write about it in the kind of book that the hero would read - a murder mystery - and hopefully show that if you viewed this life with sufficient imagination it would seem infinite.

I actually followed a car once that had a bumper sticker,  'Three red cars in a row make it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cars in a row make it a Super Good Day', and pulled up behind the driver when she parked (she was driving a red car too.) It's not something I do, following people I don't know, and I had to explain myself by saying, ' I have a son with autism too - where did you get your sticker?' Apparently Random House issued them at the time of publication of the book. A super good idea, and I wish I'd chased one up.

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. '

give me death or give me prizes

Maud Newton has been sharing snippets of an interview Anthony Burgess held with Graham Greene when Greene was 75, from a collection of Burgess' journalism and essays, But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?

After expressing approval of Patrick White's Voss, Greene was asked by Burgess when he was going to win the Nobel Prize, to which he quipped,

Yes, I was asked that question in Stockholm. How would you like the Nobel Prize? I said I look forward to getting a bigger prize than that.

(Burgess) Which one?

Death. Let’s go and eat lunch....

athol fugard off the record

Chris Boyd, a Melbourne critic, had a profile of South African writer Athol Fugard published in the Financial Review of February 4-5. He has published excerpts from the transcript of his interview with Fugard at his blog, The Morning After, where you will find Fugard shedding a remarkably clear light on Pascal, Camus and the value of writing in dangerous times:

One of the problems I had... I was a writer. And it has taken me the longest time to arrive... Because it was a dilemma. My friends... There were friends of mine who were in jail because they had made bombs and had planted them. There were friends of mine who had to run for their lives into foreign countries. There were friends of mine who committed suicide outside of South Africa because they just couldn’t live with themselves anymore and by virtue of all that had happened... There were friends of mine who were driven into exile. And there was I writing. And it has taken me a very long time. I’ve arrived at it, now. I arrived at it with a very important play of mine -- in terms of my own personal progress -- with a play of mine called My Children, My Africa. With that play, I examined this issue in a sense. And I realise that the written word, the spoken word, are effective forms of action... every bit as significant -- every bit as potent in terms of consequences -- as any bomb that could be placed anywhere.

stalking digital content in my chamber

Over at The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum has been busy - first interviewing Ian McEwan, and now Camille Paglia.

I hyperlinked myself out of a print publication yesterday to find another interview through the library databases, in the Kenyon Review of 1998, with Richard Ford. Riveting stuff. The sweet thing was how I lifted my bottom (not diminishing fast enough despite finally conquering my fear of the stepper at the gym), from the kitchen chair over to the computer chair to chase a book reviewer's name, Kevin Rabalais, into cyberspace and into the relative solidity of RMIT's electronic library resources.

Thanks to my privileged information access as a part time student (not for much longer), I was able to enjoy this interview immediately instead of ordering Rabalais and Jennifer Levasseur's rather good looking collection of interviews, Novel Voices, from Readings. (Did I neglect to mention it hasn't been purchased by any academic libraries in Victoria? Shame, libraries, shame.)

I was moved to all this by the media rage in the blogging machine which was going on at Dan's blog during the past two weeks. Followers of the brouhaha between Dan and James Wood may be interested to know that Rabalais contributed a review of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men to The Age this weekend - and it's still up today. *Wow. (Please give me a yell if it goes down... I'm waiting for it to happen.)

Rabalais is evidently not a regular Oz reviewer - I was sufficiently impressed by the content of the Saturday Review this weekend to consider registering at The Age after I finish uni, though I don't like the way they manage their online content at all. Digital management issues aside, lit editor Jason Steger is doing a fine job, probably tightening up because of the approaching Melbourne Writers Fest; yesterday's Saturday Review bears traces of his excitement at the breadth of nominations covered in the recently announced Age Book of the Year awards. And it's infectious, especially when one considers the nominations in the poetry section which include Jill Jones' recent collection Broken/Open. (Two blogs of Jill's are in the Poetry typelist to your right, one a blog on translations of poetry, Latitudes).

Personally I'm delighted with the judges chosen to assign the nominations this time round - Jeff Sparrow, Kris Hemensley and Kerryn Goldsworthy are usefully well rounded choices in their categories (nonfiction, poetry, fiction). There are problems everywhere with these matters, I know - but here in Melbourne there seems to be a deliberate intention towards raising the eyes of Melbourne's readers from the Brown man's books towards the riches that lie within the home spaces. This seems to have been achieved without the usual middle class stuffiness, which is compelling, though there is some huffing and puffing about emotional connection with texts which smells like US news spirit. But on the whole, the excitement communicated by the judges is infectious.

Now when will we see a section in the awards for 'Electronic Publications', complete with selectors from Express Media and some online journals?? Tell me I'm greedy, that I'm dreaming...and that the mainstream papers' lit editors are reading blogs.

*Gone behind the Iron Curtain at 2.55pm Sunday.

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.

plus ça change...

It's been noted around the traps, starting in the Guardian and spreading through the mainstream press, that the French are concerned about corruption and  collusion between larger publishers in the awarding of the main literary prizes in France. Big names like the Prix Goncourt  are in the poo - (though according to the Grumpy Old Bookman, Balzac was saying much the same thing 150 years ago).
Over at The Reading Experience, some contentious discussion has arisen in a similar vein following an interview with Alan Cordle  of Foetry.com in the LA Times , about corruption in American poetry
awards and publishing,  and what he's let it do to his marriage and other people's positions in the American poetry scene.

See the comments at Dan's post for a heartfelt high-five for small journals from David Milofsky, ex-journal editor, and some incisive remarks from Jonathan Mayhew. It gets particularly ouchy when Mayhew suggests that

Poetry would continue to be published without contests--a good deal less of it, which would not be a bad thing necessarily.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it all, and in the spirit of wintry Melburnian cynicism will leave the last word with the prolific Balzac, who gave us 'Good Advice' in (Les?) Illusions Perdues through his character Etienne Lousteau,

'If you reckon to live on what your poetry brings in, you have time to die half a dozen deaths before you make your name.'

'Don't imagine that the political world is much cleaner than the literary world: in both of them bribery is the rule; every man bribes or is bribed. When a publisher is bringing out a more or less important work, he pays me not to attack it.'

'The experience of the first person who told me what I am now telling you was wasted on me, just as mine will no doubt be useless to you. It's always the same story, every year the same enthusiastic inrush of beardless ambition from the provinces to Paris.... They all fall into the pit of misery, the mire of journalism, the morass of the book-trade.'

Quelle horreur.

(Thanks to the Grumpy One for the Balzacien quotations. And yes, since you ask, it is raining a little here. Rather pleasantly in fact, though true to form, there are floods in New South Wales.)

transits and fires revisited

My previous qualms about Shirley Hazzard and young women have been focussed more precisely by some information that is new to me ( well, I thought it was, the first time I read this). Here she is speaking to Kerry O'Brien of her recent address to the girls at her old school Queenwood, in Australia:

I did say one thing that I very much believe - I said that I didn't have very happy years when I was growing up and I was very lucky in this movement of my life, travelling, but also there were things very sad for me in that and I said that - yes, I was very young and I always had the feeling someone should rescue me. Well, nobody rescued me, although they might have done, but nothing happened propitiously to rescue me, and I realised at a certain stage it is better if you rescue yourself.

Funny how much assistance biographical detail can give to clarifying puzzling points in a writer's work sometimes. This is from an interview with Kerry O'Brien at the ABC (had to get it from Annie and Maud though, I can't get near the telly at 7.30 pm).

I'm  not sure if it makes it easier for me to deal with her writing of female characters, but it certainly makes her emotional reticence and dependence on surface detail when dealing with them a bit easier to understand. This seems to be a gentler take on the bitterness of emotional desertion we see much more starkly, for example, in the work of Amy Witting. Maybe it suffers from being disguised in this delicate and stylised fashion - I am used to tougher stuff and almost missed the point here, which leaves me wondering if said point may be too unbearable for the writer to communicate.

Read all about it

These people are still running their Tournament Of Books : the final round sees The Plot Against America shaping up against Cloud Atlas, with a stellar list of litbloggers commenting on the stoush. Also there's an interview with Robert McCrum, literary editor at The Guardian and the author of a new bio on P.G. Wodehouse. The interviewer, Robert Birnbaum, works out of Boston and has also interviewed Louis de Bernieres, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Lethem and Peter Carey, among many others. The interviews archive is worth a look, as is the whole site.