reeling and writhing

the way we published then...

As noted at Spike, Ampersand Duck has written a splendid post about Richard Jermyn's Common Press launch in Pambula some weeks ago. Run, read it here  and a couple of other places. Thanks to &Duck for permission to publish photographs of the first printing from Richard's press, built with Australian timbers.

Duck's post includes a fascinating, accessible account of the history and working parts of the Common Press: read it all, it is wonderful.

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.)

so click through now

Now online, at a blog near you: George Dunford's terrific article on litblogs, for the Big Issue of two weeks ago (that would be number 335, with the shot of the King on the front.)

Very pleased to see that one accessible - in a short space, George has captured not just the atmosphere of Michael Williams' drinkies a few weeks back, but also some useful conclusions, and given a few of us some nice nods along the way. (Angela was required to be in two places at once on that occasion. Not even Ange can do that yet...) Thanks, Mr HP.

to review the reviewer

The title of James' recent post at City of Tongues (also listed here at The Group) is taken in vain by Ramona Koval's programmers to introduce a session at Radio National's Book Show on literary criticism, with Delia Falconer and Geordie Williamson.
This session acted also as publicity for the ASAL conference on Common Readers and Critics, held last week in Canberra. (we should be able to read some of those thought provoking presentations in JASAL early next year.)

This BookShow session is notable chiefly for Williamson's remarks on protecting Australian writing from comparisons with work from overseas, and, rather incredibly, his handpass to Falconer in the final five minutes of play, on Koval's nimbly explosive suggestion that it shouldn't be necessary to publish negative reviews if there are lots of good books around. (Not quite why I prefer not to publish negative reviews here, but a surprising suggestion nonetheless.)

And all GW says is, "well, I think that's one for you, Delia." !!!

The answer to that question might be, 'yes, it's something lone bloggers can get away with, I think, Ramona, but editors and writers working together can afford to cover a broader canvas.' It's not even a really useful excuse for a blogger. Where would any media program (RN Book Show included) be if it was friendly all the time because everything it cast its eye over was 'pretty noice, thanks'?

Falconer rises to the occasion like a right sport - do check out her wonderful article on James Wood here if you haven't already (among many other things). It is a shame that Koval chooses to cut her off at the end as she does, and I thank a friend who's an attentive listener for alerting me to Williamson's clumsy pass.

read some Granta for free

That venerable UK literary organ, Granta, did a site rebuild recently and has announced via the monthly email newsletter that the online content on Granta.com has been refreshed.

New on Granta.com in May 2009:

'Rhyme and Reason' by Adam Gopnik: In conversation with the award-winning poet and essayist Katha Pollitt.

'Letter from Gaza' by Hisham Matar: The tragic life of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani.

'Dragon Island' by Laura Fellowes: The most recent in our New Voices series.

'The Last Modernist' by Chris Petit: A consideration of the life and work of J.G. Ballard.

'A Vacation from Myself' by John Beckman: ‘What I gained, and lost, from antidepressants.’

'The Public Poet' by Lavinia Greenlaw: An appreciation of Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s first female poet laureate.

'Getting Lost' by Heidi Julavits: One wintry weekend in the Berkshires.

It will be noted by the observant that online content is available via RSS in seven categories. I  may have seen this when I first visited this sexy looking new site about a month ago: for some reason it looked overwhelming and I plumped for the email newsletter.

So I guess if I really don't want to know about events I can't possibly attend, I could just subscribe to the half dozen other feeds on the online content page.

Or the email newsletter, which gave me the list above in a neat little bloggable text package. Hey, it's my choice.
Do note that it is also possible to subscribe to New Voices, which is definitely an exciting choice. Enjoy.

(belated) happy birthday to the Complete Review

Ten candles for the Complete Review.
Ten years old. My word.  Michael Orthofer muses on a decade, and resolves to sign his name to more reviews in future.

The Complete Review (founded in 1999) and its attendant blog, The Literary Saloon (around 2002), continue to set a very high benchmark for all literature blogs with an international readership. It's hard to believe one person is behind most of it - he does have a team of multilingual readers and reviewers, I know, but claims responsibility for the architecture and (gasp) the enduring URLS therein.
Then there's the eclectic news service - where else would I find a report like this straight from an Indian source on railway book stalls? (regrettably Outlook India has killed their own link within that story.)

Bravo, Michael and team, long may you run.

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. 

in the pre-Christmas rush, an old pony called Southerly

So I updated my Australian Litjournals page, as you do when Christmas is approaching and you've decided to duck down the coast to miss the rush.
And I was surprised and delighted to find that Southerly mag now has an online archive called, rather appropriately, the Long Paddock, bringing to mind that splendid collaborative piece of Lee Kernaghan's and Slim Dusty's:

Leave him out there in the long yard, do not rush him,
Leave him out there with his mate, the baldy bay;
With his mates that he can graze and he can laze with,
Leave him there and we will turn him out today.

(It is a Slim Dusty tune, apparently. Recorded here.)

We have had four of the six birthdays in our little family here, all within sixteen days. As well as Christmas.
Which is why lists like these make me long for a St Hubert's 2006 Merlot and a good lie down. Or this, which I haven't finished watching yet. Perhaps I need to be out in the long yard too.

I have been simultaneously horrified and thankful over the holiday period that I am not required to be as alert and alarmed as Bernice of Viminalis, though, whose fire-blogging posts have been riveting reading. It is still not quite clear if there will be a definitive change up there at Bundanoon soon.

Do check in: regrettably she has not tagged all posts FIRE (this link has most of them in a line, though). But I guess she has more important things on her mind (this from eleven days ago):

More raking, and a friend returned my call, a friend who is a RFS member in the Blue Mountains. She kindly answered my inane questions for about 45 minutes, til we both reached the likely conclusions the fire was not likely to pose a significant threat to my location, but but but if it did, I would have very little warning it was running up the gully behind me, and would be best therefore to ride the fire front out by staying in the house, rather than trying a last minute escape by car.

So tomorrow promises a bit more raking, a last bit of mowing and a lot more waiting. I'll use the time to write a submission to the state planning authority, demanding that the standards for gutters needs to be revised. Particularly in fire-prone areas. Do not, dear reader, assume that gutter guards work. They do not and in fact cause a whole lot of problems much more difficult to fix than arming yourself with a banister brush, ladder, bucket and hat-enclosed head to clean the damn things regularly. And the view from the roof is fantastic.

more of Lessing

Well, the Golden Notebook project is up and running.

I thought at first I had sixteen pages to read and catch up on, but upon examining the comments list at the bottom of the page it became obvious that some of the six seven selected authors are reading faster than others.

I hope they can wait a bit for the rest of us.

she said she would buy the flowers (and the e-books) herself

The latest AustLit newsletter informs us that the Teaching Australian Literature website is up and running.

There are some really fabulous moments in these posts labelled "Woolf" on Fordham professor Anne Fernald's blog, Fernham, as she prepares a new edition of Mrs Dalloway. I like this, this and especially this.

The Three Percent blog, dedicated to international literature, from the University of Rochester, has an offering on the Kindle e-reader:

The 240,000 Kindle sales figure has been written about quite a bit over the past few weeks, with everyone speculating on whether this number is strong enough to make the Kindle the next iPod.

According to Silicon Alley Insider,- Citi’s Mark Mahaney has doubled his estimate of Kindle sales to 378,000 for this year. And if his projection that Amazon will sell 150,000 units in the fourth quarter comes true, that really could be the proverbial “tipping point” for ebooks and the Kindle.

Amongst further discussion of ebook prices and market issues, the surprising suggestion is offered that erotica titles amongst women over 30 are helping to fuel sales.

some books should be dropped into the TV well

I've heard some grumpy mutterings about the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, supported by this review and remarks* from Slate writer Troy Patterson:

...do not, when attempting any course of reading aimed at appreciating Waugh's wit, give undue attention to Brideshead Revisited, a misfit of a book, much loved, and often loved in the wrong way, as the vomitous stupidity of Miramax's new film adaptation attests.

There's a comic novel in there, but it is not, as the common expression goes, struggling to get out. It's lodged there quite contentedly; the book's acid portraits of dull dons and rich oafs are enmeshed with its affectingly tender peeks at lost youth and also with its eagerly overwrought splendor and its sincerely bogus religiosity.

This was the seventh novel Waugh published—the eighth he attempted—a grasp at grandeur written in a mere four months, during a leave from the British army in early 1944. "Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence," Martin Amis once remarked. "Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise."

I'm no longer surprised I didn't finish it, though I do remember the attempt, not something that always stays in my mind - books I don't finish sometimes end up leaving my mind altogether, reflecting Gerald Murnane's memorable phrase (from his essay of the same name) 'some books are to be dropped into wells'.

Come to think of it, I believe I missed early episodes of the famous 'eighties mini-series as well (yes, even with Jeremy at the height of his fame). I think I'd rather read The Forsyte Saga properly than revisit Waugh's hasty pudding, though I could certainly return to the miniseries.

*The link to that Slate review comes via The Complete Review, where you will also find this account of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED, from which the CR writer has extracted the following gem:

How perfect, for example, is it to learn, after reading Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, that one of the definitions of 'Bayard' is:

A person armed with the self-confidence of ignorance.

things I have and haven't read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

say a prayer for the dying

Peter Rose's ABR review of Helen Garner's first novel for fifteen years, The Spare Room, is online and (as a less refined person might say) SMMMMOKING.

This is probably the toughest review Garner's story about caring for a dying friend has had so far, opening as it does with the tart observation that this novella could easily have been written as nonfiction.

Hel’s pride is easily stung. As long as she has practical tasks – beds to strip and change, ‘straightforward tasks of love and order’ – she is composed, but soon she is worn out, anxious, resentful. There is no acknowledgment of her literary obligations or of her solitary nature. Hel seems most alive when she is on her own. The best writing in the book depicts sentience in solitude. A violent thrill runs down her arms and ‘seethes’ in her fingertips. Night noises lull her: ‘Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing: to groom itself.’

Hel is almost professionally observant. Like Isabel Archer, she is ‘constantly staring and wondering’. Nothing escapes her: the neurosurgeon’s fat, penile Mont Blanc pen; the sort of men who can crack their spine and ‘make it crackle all the way down’...

When Nicola’s niece and her boyfriend pay a visit, the young woman is appalled by Nicola’s presumptuousness and her lengthy stay. Hel wants to sob with gratitude: ‘They were young, they were sane, and they were in my corner.’ While Nicola sleeps, the three of them laugh at her demands and swap stories about the inconvenience of it all. Not all readers – not all carers – will relish this Hobbesian pugilism.'

These are tough words for an uncompromising book which I am yet to read (doing that tidy thing that some of us do of getting my review reading out of the way first and saving TSR for 'afters'). Intriguingly, Rose seems to be looking for some respite himself from Garner's somewhat relentless evocation of anger as the enervating emotion it can so easily become, noting that this does not dissipate or evolve towards the novel's end.

Which makes for a powerful review from one of our best critical readers, and increases the pull of the unread book even more at my end.

(And yes, I'm also leaving it on the kids' shopping list for you-know-what day. Why do the bookshops parade all those pastel coloured books around for the day of buying big for female progenitors? Sussann's has BLACK japonaise-patterned flannel pyjamas this year. Get with the program, folks, get The Lost Dog out there for starters.)

Finally I must congratulate ABR for having such a sterling piece of criticism online for us linking folk. Luminous and numerous gold stars for you.

julia funds a new Ozlit chair in the west

What a busy old Government it is, not unlike those at the top of the team. Not content with apologising to those we have wronged, positioning itself to stand up to China and founding Prime Minister's literary prizes, is it. No, there's more...

The Education, Employment and Workplace Relations media centre announced yesterday that funding for a new chair in Australian literature, which was open to applications by universities around the country, will be awarded by the Rudd Government to the University of Western Australia:

Though a number of universities submitted impressive proposals, the six member selection panel unanimously found the University of Western Australia to be the strongest candidate.

UWA’s proposed strategies to promote Australian literature both nationally and internationally as well as the support of the Western Australian Government were identified as strengths in the application.

As the University’s application noted, UWA has pioneered and remained constantly committed to the teaching and research of Australian literacy studies and is today at the forefront in this field.

The University of Western Australia is to be congratulated on its achievement.

The University of Western Australia has been recognised for its long-standing commitment to the promotion of literature and culture in the community.

The decision follows a competitive process which was open to all Australian universities.

Link via Australian Writers Online.

world class reviewing in the Weekend Australian - read all about it

Time to subscribe to Luke Slattery's blog. This is one of the best reviews of James Wood's How Fiction Works you will ever read. I have missed your literary journalism, Mr. Slattery; I used to ask myself, where did that lovely Francophile Slattery person go? And assumed, rather foolishly, that perhaps he had managed to slip away from us all. To la belle France.

And now feel rather silly that I don't read other bits of The Australian, or I would have known, wouldn't I? Hopefully he won't let all that great extra-curricular critical reading go to waste before he hits fifty, and will give us more like this review soon. We could do with a few more philosopher-journalists who write this well down here. Or anywhere else, for that matter. The opening lines will give you a sense of the crackling brio with which he tackles this much-praised book, and you won't stop:

James Wood's brilliant career -- though still in his early 40s, the English-born literary critic is a professor of critical practice at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker -- registers the rising cachet of high cultural capital in a pop cultural age.

It's anyone's guess whether, by the end of his career, Wood will have become a stronger critic than his illustrious mid 20th-century predecessors such as William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Edmund Wilson. But he is already an establishment figure enjoying the sheen of minor celebrity, bestriding the prestige end of the academy and literary journalism.

Yet his new analysis of fiction's interior workings, though bright and occasionally brilliant, is not entirely convincing. Animated by a restless speculative energy and a bravura style, it aims to march literary criticism into an engagement with moral philosophy.

I do hope this courageous and beautifully written review is widely read.