reeling and writhing

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.

oh, an impossible person

I first came across this last November, and I have found it impossible to throw away. The title of this post, I hope, says it all. How unlucky could you be, having Henry James review your first novel? Even if he does recommend you have some chance of future success if you stick to writing what you know?

At the daily Arts Journal blog, About Last Night, that stalwart of US literary blogging, Carrie Frye (usually to be found at Tingle Alley when she is not writing for Terry T.), subjected James' review of Louisa May Alcott's first novel to a rereading:

Mr. Adam Warwick...is one of our oldest and most inveterate foes. He is the inevitable cavaliere servente of the precocious little girl; the laconical, satirical, dogmatical lover, of abut thirty-five, with the "brown mane", the "quiet smile", the "masterful soul", and the "commanding eye." Do not all novel-readers remember a figure, a hundred figures analogous to this? Can they not, one of his properties being given,--the "quiet smile" for instance,--reconstruct the whole monstrous shape? When the "quiet smile" is suggested, we know what is coming; we foresee the cynical bachelor or widower, the amateur of human nature, "Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard", who has traveled all over the world, lives on a mysterious patrimony, and spends his time in breaking the hearts and the wills of demure little school-girls, who answer him with "Yes sir", and "No, sir."

Miss Alcott has probably mused upon Warwick so long and so lovingly that she has lost all sense of his proportions. There is a most discouraging good-will in the manner in which lady novelists elaborate their impossible heroes. There are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society. We speak thus devoutly, not because Warwick is a vicious person,--on the contrary, he exhibits the sternest integrity; but because, apparently as a natural result of being thoroughly conscientious, he is essentially disagreeable. Women appear to delight in the conception of men who shall be insupportable to men.

James did have some nice things to say apparently. But as Carrie notes, they probably rang faint in Alcott's ears. Link via Maud.

from 800 items in the Google reader...

From AWM Online, there's notification of a Digital Futures in Publishing forum to be held on December 12th (that would be Wednesday!) at 1pm AEST, featuring writer Sherman Young and publisher Dr. David Reiter:

Sherman Young is a Media Studies lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney and author of The Book is Dead, ‘a provocation designed to further the conversation about the future of books’. Check out Sherman’s excellent blog and companion to the book at:  http://shermanfyoung.wordpress.com/
Interactive Publications publish books, e-books and multimedia under four imprints and is now in its 10th year. Specialising in quality Australian literary work, it is a leading publisher of digital titles as well as conventional books. Director Dr David Reiter is also well known for his published works of poetry and fiction. See more at the IP website www.ipoz.biz

You will need to obtain a quarterly subscription (at least) to participate in this forum, at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online.

If you write spec fic, don't delay to consider this new national program, set up by Hachette Livre Australia and the Queensland Writers' Centre. Applications close January 23.

Stephen Mitchelmore has read Gabriel Josipovici's review of Peter Gay's book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, and is in agreement with his view that the book is 'appalling'. Elsewhere, in fact written a whole year ago, he has a remarkable essay on Richard Ford's Bascombe trilogy that I am quite taken with, especially this kind of thing:

The implications of Bascombe’s abandonment of creative writing have themselves been ignored by the experts. Recently, James Wood said “the major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism”, yet from the reception of the trilogy one would imagine the struggle is over already. Writing is a report from the real world directed through the craft of fiction. Richard Ford has written such a book. That’s it. Frank Bascombe, however, isn’t so sure, and Wood’s question is thereby placed not over realism, nor even over fiction, but writing iself.

The essay, for ReadySteadyBook, tackles the seamless reflexivity of these books in an impressive fashion. Also Mitchelmore is uncomfortable with the intrusion of shootings and faux action set-pieces in at least two of the books - in one case I agree with him, at the end of The Lay of The Land I was mightily annoyed. At first. Why, I ask, didn't I find this piece earlier? Shoot.

Reader, I killed him off

Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine? (Afraid to title this "A l'esprit de l'escalier', it's not fair to Googlers of idiomatic French.)
This is a post of afterthoughts, which came to me in an unguarded moment alone with books and good food at a spot outside Melbourne this week.

Last week at the Capitol Theatre, Germaine Greer put Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting Of Wisdom together fairly arbitrarily, perhaps with an eye to getting the punters in to discuss at least one book they have all read.
It's possible that not everyone in the space had read Mansfield Park all that recently, apart from the academics, as an absorbed silence hung over the assembly while GG dissected it for the most part of her lecture, leaving only ten minutes or so for Henry Handel Richardson's popular bagatelle, perhaps more a companion piece to her first novel and true bildungsroman, Maurice Guest.

In the spirit of the staircase I am sitting on a verandah in the bush today, turning over in my head, and admittedly practising out loud in the still house as well, what a question on Maurice might have produced in the assembly last week. Here's a fin-de-siècle female writer who adopts a male pseudonym to write a rich, overblown, rotting rose of a book about a young music student who blows his brains out for love, claiming at the time that she 'wrote many of my own [agonies of youth] out in the book, and came up a quieter and saner person.'
It could have been fun to go into HHR's need to get a boy to shoot himself for love (spoiler aside, Jane devotees might have enjoyed being alerted to the darker side that Richardson's own bildungsroman explored), leaving aside the concomitant issues of Louise Dufrayer's characterisation as a festering lily, for which there might not have been any time at all once Richardson's subversion of the genre into a suicidal downward spiral had been covered. Now I'd have liked to see that. Given Greer's brave opening about incest fantasies, it would have been fun to consider the gap between not marrying the heir to Mansfield Park, and killing off male protagonists under a pen name, wouldn't it?

Just two quotes from Michael Ackland's recent bio of HHR, on the reception of both novels, and then I'm done here: firstly, of The Getting Of Wisdom, H.G. Wells wrote to Richardson,

expressing his 'enormous admiration' for her novel ('your little rag of a girl is a most admirable little beast...I don't think this particular thing could have been done better')

and of Maurice Guest, the Times reviewer wrote:

' a fine achievement, thought it is too long and too full of morbid self-analysis and too relentlessly cruel in its denouement to be widely popular,'

while John Masefield remarked he could scarcely find its equal in the preceding decade

'for strength of purpose...[and]truthfulness, of execution and power, not of observation (since many animals observe more sharply than man) but of survey, as from an intellectual watch-tower'.

These are very much the afterthoughts of an idle mind, and I'm getting carried away. The theme of the Austen conference for which this lecture was the opener, after all, was "Jane Austen and Comedy".

And accolades are due to my bloggy colleague, Laura, of Sorrow at Sills Bend fame for a terrific evening, for which I understand she fielded last minute calls from television producers who thought they might like to film it (Ahem.) The story reads like a Frontline script and you can read it here.

continental shift

There's an excellent piece (aren't they always?) by Louis Menand in the New Yorker, on Jack Kerouac and the influence of On The Road. This excerpt is taken from near the end of the article, which talks at length about the history and influence of Kerouac's seminal novel, his place in the Beat movement, his sensitivity and shyness and the 'risky, exposed' nature of his work:

'Years ago, I taught in a Ph.D. program at the City University. One semester, Allen Ginsberg, who was affiliated with one of the CUNY colleges, offered a graduate seminar. He was nearly seventy, small, neatly dressed in jacket and tie and gray flannel pants, totally adorable. He once sweetly sidled up to me and said, “I heard that you are teaching Gertrude Stein.” Then, in a lower voice, “I have some tapes of Gertrude Stein reading”—as one might say, “I have some photos of Greta Garbo in the nude.” I said to the graduate students that I thought it must be amazing to take a seminar with Ginsberg, to be around someone who had been around so much. “Nah,” they said. “He just keeps saying that Kerouac is the most important American writer.” Possibly, they didn’t think that knowing a great deal about Kerouac was going to give them much of a professional edge.

Possibly, they were right. “Lolita” is in the canon; “On the Road” is somewhat sub-canonical—also a tour de force, like Nabokov’s book, but considered more a literary phenomenon than a work of literature. On the other hand, it has had an equivalent influence. Nabokov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent. He made America a subject for literary fiction; he de-Europeanized the novel for American writers. Kerouac’s influence is all over Thomas Pynchon’s books: the protagonist in Pynchon’s first novel, “V.,” clearly alludes to Sal Paradise—his name is Benny Profane. Don DeLillo’s first novel, “Americana,” is Kerouac in spirit if not in style.'

salt from the earth

There is a wonderful post over at Chris Boyd's blog celebrating the life and deploring the untimely loss of Tanja Liedtke.

Salt Magazine is now relaunched online as a free journal! Wow. The first issue is truly beautiful - poems from a galaxy of stars.

From Anne, Woolf scholar, at Fernham, a spin-off that looks quite good, all things considered. (Being wise, of course, she has.)

Beware of jealousy, the greeneyed monster - when you look at this cleversocks. He has an online game that's been played by over a million people. Talk of convergence. Now Nation States is being cited in cross-media journals.

the great unconscious of the intertubes

The discussion list -empyre- at the Australian Network for Art and Technology is running several forums on Second Life this month, entitled The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
There will be at least one inworld event, as well as posts and discussions onlist.
-empyre- is an influential media arts practice discussion space. (Link via Arts Hub.)

Recently, Jane Ciabattari offered a refresher on book coverage and arts news reporting, including the rise of newspaper litblogs, at Critical Mass. She supplied a link in her post to this article on hyperlocal coverage in American Journalism Review, by Jennifer Dorroh. Maybe the 'mandarins' at the Melbourne Writers' Festival could have a look at these before they sit down to chew the fat at the Malthouse in early September. I have the feeling that by the time they get onto the stage, the line between hardcopy arts criticism and online arts journalism, dressed up by newspapers as a species of blogging, will have almost disappeared. I hope they enjoy trying to redraw it.

Over at Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor has been running a One Stop World Tour with a focus on Australian YA authors, including Penni Russon, author of Undine. It's engagingly titled, "Best Reads with Vegemite", and up to a dozen books have been featured on the blogs of participants.

literary authority bytes over at ABR

For this month we get a full look at Ivor Indyk's essay, Literary Authority , which I quoted from in an earlier post,  as it's up at Australian Book Review for a few weeks. 

The whole thing is good to read - as I said earlier, bleeding chunks don't do it justice. I found it a great frame for my recent piece on books and blogging for the December issue of  the Australian Literary Review, and I'm sure there are articles like it in the international critical armory of the '90s. If you are an overseas reader who has a dip into this and finds it echoes something you've read elsewhere, do speak back and let me know.  I just found it gave my article an angle, y'know? and we all need one of those sometimes.

In the event that it disappears back into a library or database somewhere, the citation is:

Indyk, Ivor. 'Literary Authority'. Australian Book Review, no. 196, November 1997.

In other news - I've finished the Grad Dip, officially a librarian and I should be ex-cited... but right now I'm a bit stuffed. In fact the whole family is in the process of finishing things - we also have notched up, collectively, a law degree and a VCE, and a TV series for Channel 31 (in development, but let's have a brag anyway. I feed these people.) And eldest son is having his somewhat enigmatic, gestaltic and gently subversive behaviour evaluated under the care of a wonderful professional, which is a great solace to me and frees my mind to do the things I do a little more effectively (well, I think I do, anyhow.) And a slightly freer mind - well, we can all do with one of those.

Other news - listen to this lovely reading I had the great good luck to find a couple of weeks ago when I could not sleep. It was wonderful, sitting here listening to Richard Ford reading to students at a university in Texas somewhere. First he reads this fabulous story by John Cheever, then reads one of his one. Talk about a cool bedtime story, I couldn't believe my ears. I'll tell you something about The Lay of the Land, which I am 200  pages into, another day.

P.S. And I am going to do something about all these link lists - believe me. It's time to tidy up, we did the shed Saturday afternoon and this blog is next.

talking about word of mouth

Death of the author or birth of the reader? You choose.

Blogging with a disclaimer here - (never thought I would see that day!) as I have been published in The Australian's new lit supplement recently. But otherwise....
Barely do I hear via Mark Sarvas of TEV that the Times Literary Supplement is inviting readers to comment on reviews published therein (indeed!) when I find that the Australian Literary Review is doing the same for some selected articles.  As they are published from the same global behemoth/stable, this is no surprise really - more of a well kept secret, which I had to google to find out.

Nearly ten years ago, Ivor Indyk (who recently gave a very decent impersonation of Imre Salusinzsky at the Melbourne Writers' Festival) wrote an incisive National Library essay, 'Literary Authority,'  which you canNOT  find here at Australian Book Review - you have to find a library with a paper copy, or go to the State Library. Tedious and annoying, as it is all about The Market, The Reader, The Writer and Their Lovers, and deserves a wider audience in these times.

I'm going to use it in an upcoming article on book blogs because it discusses, among other things, his perception of the growing exclusion of the reader from the 'commonwealth of letters' late last century (not so very long ago).

Professor Indyk publishes remarkable fiction, non-fiction and poetry by Australians at Giramondo Publishing, and clearly understood the forces that were shaping publishing when he started up his publishing career  in the mid-90s alongside the one he already had, teaching Australian literature. Here's a snippet - talk of hiding our brightest lights under a bushel (of paper and miniscule copying payments, in this case)....

'We are at the end of that period which was in the first flush of its power in the early eighteenth century, when the dissemination of the printed word, the growth of a concentrated reading public, and a burgeoning middle class all conspired to turn the writer into a particularly compelling social figure. Well, perhaps not so far from the beginning as we may like to think. The dissemination of Australian books in Australia has been occurring on a scale we haven't seen before; and the delights of the bourgeois 'lifestyle' exert an ever-increasing allure. Perhaps, in Australia, because of our unique historical circumstances, it is possible to be at the end of a period, and at its beginning, at the same time.'

to criticise the critic

I've just read a very spirited piece on the role of the critic, and the state of Australian theatre in the early '90s on Alison Croggon's excellent blog, Theatre Notes, in an extended post from her archives which she prefaces with a disclaimer - things now are not quite so bad as they used to be when she embraced theatre criticism as a public literary mode:

I used the style of tabloid journalism in order to write seriously about art, for two reasons. One was to destabilise the privileged art-speak that dismissed an audience as stupid. I wanted to demonstrate to the people who read my reviews that the audience, also, has a vital place in the theatre, that it isn’t there merely to worship at the hallowed shrine of culture, which is often more accurately the hollow shrine of money and cultural status.

so much to tell you

If that's not a misleading title in Google terms, I don't know what is  - it's also the title of a very popular children's book from the '80s by top Australian author John Marsden. Sorry about that if you've come by looking for a review. Check out Libraries Australia to find out where to get an audio recording by the author, here. If you're a university student, talk to your librarian about the Austlit database sometime, and if you're from a public library, ask your librarian to show you book reviewing sources in the databases they subscribe toOne day I may even review those sources of information. But today is not that day. (See also this link at Leisa Reichelt's blog, for further discussion on this and other matters.)

In other words, there is news about, and here it is, printed in bits and bytes...

tell it how it is

I've been revisiting the website of  Walleah Press,  home of Tasmanian literature journal Famous Reporter, and found that this organ now includes 'e-texts' on a regular basis. I first came across Famous Reporter in the Victorian Writers' Centre library, naturally in what is still quaintly known as hard copy. The weblog posts they have collected so far are mainly by Australians, though the first few were from further afield.

The very first blogposts they collected to publish were from Ron Silliman's and Sheila O'Malley's blogs respectively - both high points in anyone's link list, this in July 2003 (scroll down)...

to respect the reviewer

From the beginning of "Two Ways Of Poetry" - a mid-20th century review by W.H. Auden of books by Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill. This review was republished in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun from the Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs. More I would tell about this interesting collection of reviews, which I have borrowed twice already from the library, but alas! it had to be returned. However I managed to type this quote up one afternoon while a video was playing for the entertainment of my oldest son:

To write about a poet for others who have not yet read him is not criticism but reviewing, and reviewing is not really a respectable occupation. When a critic examines the work of a well-known poet, he may, if he is lucky, succeed in revealing something about it which readers had failed to see for themselves: if on the other hand what he says is commonplace or false or half-true, readers have only themselves to blame if they allow themselves to be led astray, since they know the text he is talking about. But a reviewer is responsible for any harm he does, and he can do quite a lot.

A "good" review urges the public to buy a book, a "bad" one tells them that it is not worth reading. It does not matter very much if a reviewer praises a bad book - time will correct him - but if he condemns a good one the effect may be serious, for the public can discover his mistake only by reading it and that is precisely what his review has prevented them from doing.

So much is contained in those four words - 'time will correct him'  - and the possibility is raised that there are good and bad reviewers as well as good and bad books. A more complex scenario than the supporters of 'serious' literature on the blogs would have us consider? and a reminder of times when reviewing and promotion were perhaps more distinct from each other than they are now? We're left wondering if Auden would ever have considered reviewing really respectable in this gently sardonic piece.

He goes on to suggest that it's even worse to lump together four poets in the one article and invent a focus which does them a disservice, and worse still, give them a LABEL - given that this review is written in the mid-50s, he presciently uses the phrases, the X school, the Y generation, the Z young men. then he gets down to business. The rest of the review is devoted to considering Larkin and Hill as individuals, finishing by saying, "one must not judge either kind of poetic world by standards which only apply to the other...Mr.Larkin and Mr. Hill look for and see two very different worlds, but both, I believe, have looked and seen for themselves."

As you would. I recommend this collection, it is a reminder that there are book groups - and then there are book groups. What fortunate subscribers they were.

they say that freedom is a constant struggle

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

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

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

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

I have INFORMATION

Righto, this is Real News. If you wait long enough and log on quick enough it comes to you. Link via Foreword, a blog on book design (see, I did have quite good intentions really.)

In other news:

Mark Sarvas has posted the first instalment of his long boozy lunch with John Banville (I blinked and I missed that - how? I've just added it into this post post-haste.)

Tim Porter is mad as hell and he's not going to take any more - well not just yet. He still has a few things to say about blogging to a couple of people:

that it is fun, that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing printed in newspapers, and that one-in-five people who call themselves newspaper readers primarily use the paper's online edition rather than read articles in print.

Also he notes that the number of blogs - now at 14.2 million (55 percent active) doubles every 23 weeks, with major spikes occurring in the midst of big news events like the London bombing.

Jacqui Lofthouse makes her mark on a beach in East Anglia. Anne has finished her book on Virginia Woolf, and there is much rejoicing. (I lasted two weeks without blogging, but have enjoyed hanging out at other people's spaces, as well as rereading Tender Is The Night.)

gwenda was shaken, and I meandered by

..all caused by this snarkiness. The post and comments are worth a visit, also because they led me to this terrific essay by Christian Bauman, part of Kevin Smokler's collection BookMark Now. This I printed out and read on the train in full, enjoying the tales of writing in Somalia, and pondering his remarks on criticism as cannibalism. Hmmm.

I am a sucker for essays, don't read quite as many as I would like to really - so this blistering review by Jeff Sparrow in Overland also caught my eye some time back. In this case I doubt the criticism is poorly placed, however, as its author is the former manager of a radical bookshop. Sparrow comes well-qualified to attack the editor of Best Australian Essays 2004, Robert Dessaix, on charges of largely excluding hard-hitting political commentary from the collection:

While Dessaix might prefer what he calls “intimate disclosures” to the “faceless assertions of public virtue”, he could have given his own hobbyhorse a fair ride without barring all other gallopers from the race. As it stands, the traditionalist, middle-brow aesthetic of his introduction (the personal over the public, the ruminative over the argumentative, the reflective over the angry, etc.) excludes most of Australia’s journals of dissent. Best Australian Essays includes pieces from Quadrant, Meanjin and Griffith Review, and selections from the Bulletin, the Age, Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review. But there’s no Overland, no Arena, and nothing from the smaller publications that sprang up in the last year or so (White-Ant, Spinach7, Seeing Red, etc.). Such journals are by their nature strident, and stridency is verboten.

Sparrow also bemoans the exclusion of the blogosphere from the collection towards the end of his review:

According to a recent survey, some eight million Americans now maintain their own blogs, while blog readership stands at 27 per cent of internet users. These are staggering statistics, and one suspects comparable numbers would emerge from an Australian study. Why then does Best Australian Essays show no interest whatsoever in local explorers of Blogastan?
Again, it seems a matter of the editor acting as gatekeeper rather than curator. You can see why online essayists might offend Dessaix’s MOR sensibilities: bloggers tend to be crass, aggressive and—often—political. Nonetheless, the rise of a new medium that has more people reading and writing essays than at any time in memory would seem a development worthy of at least a cursory mention.

Can't help admitting - I'd like to see that, and not just in Famous Reporter. ( I have a copy here of this biennial Tasmanian litjournal with not one, but two essays from bloggers within. Wow.)

* I've tried to amend the silly grammar of the first version of this post.

Freud, the novel and the New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a Valve - what would Trilling do?

‘Your voice is your own, if you take responsibility for it. This unimpaired prospect of suiting myself holds back concerns that the sheer volume of blogstuff has gotten appetite suppressing… Then there is the worry that compulsively reading 30+ blogs a day has all the hallmarks of mild narcotic addition. And, yes, the fact that the blogosphere has been colonized by all literary and intellectual vices known to man, and a few invented specially for the occasion.’

From a lovely new offering, The Valve, Miriam Burstein of The Little Professor and Dan Green of The Reading Experience are part of this venture and the first substantial post on offer is written with Trilling’s essay, “The Function of the Little Magazine” very much in mind.

I couldn’t help chuckling the first time I read this – I really thought they meant invented voices here, not vices. And plead guilty on all counts. Even if I’m not being paid to speak or play up, Fran.