reeling and writhing

manuscripts on the way at LiteraryMinded

Recently I have added Angela Meyer's blog, LiteraryMinded, to my roll down there on the right, but have not yet subscribed to her feed. That's due to change right now - Lisa Dempster from Locus has alerted me to Angela's series of posts there, The Best Unpublished Books (the freshest at the top), on books which she knows are in progress but which for all kinds of reasons have yet to find the right publisher.

This kind of news feature is something blogs are eminently suited to, and it's great to see someone as well informed as Angela delivering her tips on who's out there, and what they're working on.

Lisa posted recently on articles about book reviewing and a whole bundle of other interesting publishing news, with an emphasis on independent presses and fresh publishing ideas.

While a Google Reader of 120 odd feeds is the nicest customised news reading you could possibly have, especially if you have mates' news and thoughts scattered throughout,  I struggle sometimes to remember what I've read, and got a big shock at a family function a few weeks ago when I added ten years and a new identity onto a young relative, simply because she had changed her hair (very becoming, but the alteration was significant, and the rellies numerous and fast-growing): so some of the filtering service I offer here from time to time with these links posts will inevitably become recommendation and referral only.

There are quite a few people out there doing this web-monitoring thing much better than I am currently, 'specially with my computer doing the Dying Swan like it is at present.

So I'm offering my strong recommendation for Angela's LiteraryMinded and for Locus, where Lisa Dempster and Emily Clarke of Vignette and Aduki presses write regularly on Oz publishing and writing, and read far more widely than I can on my lonesome here.

Check these blogs out: if you are a writer with published work you would like reviewed, think about whether Angela is someone you might send it to (see the bottom right hand corner of the homepage for details); and check out the eclectic and growing blogroll at Locus while you are 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.

Scheherazade in Sydney

This project came to its culmination in a symposium at the Performance Space in Sydney recently, and was the subject of a review on Arts Hub by Talya Rubin:

'The impetus for the work came out of the sudden death of Barbara Campbell’s husband. The opening screen of her website reads: “In a faraway land a gentle man dies. His bride is bereft. She travels across continents looking for a reason to keep living. Every night at sunset she is greeted by a stranger who gives her a story to heal her heart and continue with her journey. She does so for 1001 nights.” As a way of coping with grief, Campbell undertook a period of enforced public mourning and used as her tools the daily paper, focusing on stories about the conflict in the Middle East.'

Rubin's review is available to Arts Hub subscribers here. Campbell is a member of the  Electronic Literature Organisation, and the text archive of the stories, which are otherwise only available at the time of performance online, is here. At GrandTextAuto she was taken to task for her rather severe approach to presentation, but nonetheless the frame concept and performance aspect of the project, as well as its duration over nearly three years, is remarkable.

on your ABC, and UTS

I wonder if this kind of thing approaches what the ABC has in mind for its new Compendium project, which I read about here in the Austlit newsletter of June-July '07. (That's right, I'm backdated.)

Rosa B is a bilingual online arts and design journal published in multimedia format - so there are filmed interviews along with articles and essays. It is very beautiful to look at, and a good place to practise your French if you are so inclined. (Over at if:book there is a profile of something else like this, called Issue - and yes, I read about Rosa B there first.) Issue has built more interactivity with the audience into its site by enabling comments, though I think the layout is a bit busy. There is not as much interactivity in the Rosa B site, which is perhaps where it diverges from a new Australian project in the works.

The Australian Literature Compendium, for which the ABC and UTS have received a $150,000 grant, will include an e-journal, podcasts and documentary features on one site, along with teaching resources.

Banyule chicken calls election

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

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

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

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

things you will not find on Wikipedia (or elsewhere for that matter)

Recent additions to the Literary Encyclopedia include this entry on F.S. Flint, the Imagist poet, by Michael Copp from Cambridge University.
I thought I knew quite a bit about Aldington, Pound, Hilda Doolittle and Ford Madox Ford, but know absolutely zip about Flint, who was the second eldest of twelve children, left school at 13 and did not discover his exceptional language skills until he learned French and Latin at night school at the age of 19:

'Flint was a complex and contradictory character. The writer Richard Church, a colleague in the Ministry of Labour, underlined one side of Flint’s character when he described him as someone who was a “furnace of nervous passion”, an “unrestrainable companion”, and an “inflammatory creature”. Church witnessed at first hand the effects of Flint’s childhood of extreme poverty, and said he could see “that Flint’s wounds were still bleeding. This extravagant self-pity was the result. So were the recoil, the loud and aggressive histrionics. . . . Flint never found serenity. . . . He never lost his resentment at the miseries of his childhood”. John Gould Fletcher, a fellow-Imagist poet, saw Flint’s character as much more passive and submissive: “His dominating characteristic was a pathetic sincerity. . . . Regarding himself as a badly educated man, ashamed of his own cockney antecedents, he could easily be talked down by Ezra [Pound], or by anyone who appeared to be better educated, and who was capable of making flat, dogmatic assertions”.'

I like the layout of the Encyclopedia, and it only costs $15 a year to subscribe, as it is  aimed at students. It's populated by entries from scholars from all over the world, the editors for entries on Australian writing being Chris Wallace Crabbe, Amanda Nettlebeck, Peter Pierce and Paul Sharrad.

While some Australian writers are not yet represented, upcoming articles and profiles include Deleuze, Terry Eagleton and Lewis Carroll, among 809 entries in progress. (Miles Franklin's entry is being written by The Editors, possibly reflecting the regular dribble of search queries across the 'Net for her work and her prize.)

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.

the queen of Oz crime hits the forums

Gabrielle Lord will be available for Q&A on crime writing in all its forms, the evolution of the genre, the essential value of research and her new book, Shattered. (Note my link there to a funky new Australian crime fiction website, y'all.)
 

Where? Admission is by subscription (starting at $19.95 per annum) at the Live Forums at the Australian Writers' Marketplace Online.

When? Tomorrow evening, 7 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) - for other Oz times, click here. These forums are popular and well worth the investment. If you're an Australian writer reading this who has ever bought AWM in the paper format, at least check out this highly searchable website, which has been warmly welcomed by subscribers.

Upcoming April guests for the AWM Live Forums include Liz Bysrki (Gang of Four, Bellydancing for Beginners) on writing for and about women, and biographer and novelist Susan Johnson.

we live to hack and hack to live

Is this a first? Mark Sarvas has been allowed to publish the whole first chapter of this book , Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris, on his blog, courtesy of Little, Brown publisher Reagan Arthur.

In other book press news, the Lifehacker book( published out of Gina Trapani's wellknown and loved blog) got to the punters before the author got her own copy.

Icky acky --- not sure about this. Writers in a CAGE? Where's a nice Martello tower (or the bunkers just out of Sydney featured in biker film Stone all those years ago) when you need one, huh? (Google hits there, David.) Link from Bronwyn at WRB.

And Carrie Frye is back from a few months off, reading Stephen King and musing over men in hard suits. A welcome renaissance.

My husband has spotted a snotty old copy of Gravity's Rainbow on the coffee table, not conicidentally after the new Pynchon was reviewed in the weekend papers. Not too shabby when you think about it - I'm reading old Pynchon and he's reading the book reviews. Could be worse. And to make life easier for me, there's a lovely illustrated web guide to GR, here. Even if I don't get past the opening banana fest, future trips to the fruit shop will take on an added dimension. (I've only bought kidneys once, and not for frying either.)

Following Kerryn's example, I sampled my bookpile on the bedside table for the odd one out -  Eagleton's After Theory, a Quarterly Essay and HEAT 7 jostle a recent excellent addition to the kitchen bookstack, Penelope Stack's Natural, Nourishing Recipes. I could make it easier by asking you to guess which ones I haven't read yet...

My last bit of news (till I get some better ideas, hopefully soon) is that the family is in uproar over my purchase of a planner, and tickled at me reading my own copy of Australian Best Essays in David Jones this morning and promptly tipping coffee over it. (But not on Nicholas Gruen's contribution, which I'm saving for later. Congratulations Mr. G.)

That's it for a few weeks, depending on how much GR I get through and how many plans I carry out. See you later in January.

Where blogging leaves creative nonfiction in the starting blocks

Here.

speaking is easy - online at AWM

The Online Writing Festival on Monday at the brand spanking new Australian Writer's Marketplace Online was host to several very welcome presenters and a good time seemed to be had by all. Online literary agent Miss Snark was complimentary towards her inquisitive audience, noting there were 'very few nitwits'. How 'kind of you, KIInd of you' to let me come, one might have said.

Viking and Firebird children's editor Sharyn November was taken with Penni Russon's suggestion that gamers were reading their own complex highly rendered 'choose your own adventure' books when playing online, and noted that as the writers and publishers of the future would probably come from this generation, it was worth recognising that some genre writers were gamers as teens, and that 'some still are'.  She also mentioned a rise in interest in Australian YA authors in the US, and that there was a  gap in the 8-12 market there.

John Marsden was mobbed by questioners after technical hitches were overcome - to my question about online writing festivals compared to the face to face variety, one of which he hosts himself at his property, Tye Estate, he answered whimsically that 'writing is so solitary, that these forums can make a big difference to writers' emotional health. And writers all have emotional health issues, don't we?'

australian writers- online and marketing NOW

It's official - the Australian Writer's Marketplace Online site is up and running, as well as the blog, Speakeasy.

Parts of this great new space are subscription based, however the blog is open to all comers to read.
This version of the print Australian Writers' Marketplace,  the bible of Australian writers looking for all tools of their trade,  is produced by the Queensland Writers' Centre.
There are forums on the site which will be put to good use tomorrow, as the inaugural AWM Online Writing Festival (9am-8pm, AEST), featuring guests from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, goes to air.

The program for tomorrow can be found here - Darren Nash and Kate Forsyth's editorials will be available on the blog, but other sessions are limited to subscribers, with a special minimum subscription available of $19.95.

According to the press release for this venture, ABS statistics show that 556,500 Australians engage in writing as a creative or leisure activity; 185,500 Australians have paid involvement in writing; and more than 5,000 manuscripts cross the desk of an editor or publisher in a year. And I promise myself a visit to the Australian Bureau of Statistics online tomorrow, to winkle out that report for closer inspection - sounds like an awful lot of creativity's going down there per capita. I also hope to get some lurking done around the Online Writing festival forums, for reports back here later in the week. We'll talk again.

it's all good news

Simon Sellars, as a travel writer, can see the utility of Houllebecq's Platform, over at the revamped Sleepy Brain.  Seems they forgot to let me know that the new site was up, but it's great to see you back, guys. Sibling site Ballardian, of course, has been pushing on steadily during the hiatus for the mothership.

Someone who was speedy in her alarums, however, is Jo Case of Australian Book Review, who has emailed to let me know they have changed their blog address and format - comments are ON.  Even nicer, she's noted my remarks in the previous post and Ivor Indyk's essay will be featured online in November as part of a Web Archive section on the ABR website - I'll revisit my post accordingly at that time, because there's more goodness in that particular egg.

In the meantime, on the ABR website this month in their new ABR Critics section (link on the main page), there's a profile of esteemed academic, critic, former ABR editor and Oz litblogger Kerryn Goldsworthy, one of our most seasoned campaigners in the cause of Australian writing - and easily one of the most generous in her online incarnation. Here are just some of her remarks on reviewing (there are others in the comments to an earlier post on this site, which show you the accomplished teacher behind all this easily worn erudition):

Thoughtful and simultaneous engagement with content and context is one of my main criteria for a good review: the other is a structured argument.

I like a review that works in two ways at once, bouncing back and forth between the text and its various contexts, and at the same time working its way forward in a shapely fashion towards some general conclusion about the book.

I don't much like rough play or over-the-top cattiness and spattiness: if one must put the boot in, one should attempt to do so with quiet elegance.

Read her elegant and shapely review of Andrew McGahan's new novel in the October issue of ABR, and see practice made perfect, people.

ABR ready for blogging business

Astride of the grave an' all that jazz...Here it is at last, Australian Book Review has a blog (albeit with only an email comments facility).

The inaugural post (sorry, there is no permalink provided - it's simply titled 'Blogspot') has been delivered by deputy ed. Jo Case, and includes her notes on five new Australian titles, as well as a solid commendation of the choice of books for the first episode of the ABC's new book show, First Tuesday Book Club:

The success of the inclusion [of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho] is confirmed on the ABC message board, where to date there are sixty-two posts on American Psycho and just eight on The Ballad of Desmond Kale.

Case announces a change of books for the ABC show for next month - Helen Garner's The First Stone has now been dropped  in favour of Melbourne Writers' Festival visitor Dava Sobel's Longitude.

And someone at ABR is certainly reading other Australian literature blogs, as Case acknowledges in her final paragraph:

Speaking of book clubs, literary 'bloggers' community' Sarsaparilla (whose rollcall includes ABR senior contributor Kerryn Goldsworthy) have started their own informal book club in reaction to the Australian/Patrick White imbroglio. Interested members will actually be reading a Patrick White novel. After much democratic discussion, the chosen novel was The Vivisector. Why did no one else think of this refreshingly sane response?

If you'd like to join the Patrick White Readers' Group (not known as Vivisectors just yet), the site is here.

*UPDATE August 13 - the ABR blog is also home to some current reviews and poetry, which have been added over the course of the week and add greatly to the interest of this part of the site. (Well, I think so, anyhow.)

doll parts

In brief, this is an essential book, both as a work of art and a treatise on the malleability of the body—a concept that has only become more relevant since Bellmer’s passing. This edition is limited to a thousand copies . . . rush over to the Atlas website and get yours before it’s too late.

So speaks Jeremy M. Davies over at the Review of Contemporary Fiction, on the arrival of a rare surrealist book by Hans Bellmer, Die Puppe (The Doll), first issued anonymously in 1934 and finally translated into English for the first time by Malcolm Green. 

All reviews are available online - here's Steven G. Kellman on Murakami's Kafka On The Shore.

Also available from The Center for Book Culture.Org, this free online publication, Context, is disseminated 'to to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature...Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.'

If you haven't visited Center for Book Culture.Org before, it's also the home of the Dalkey Archive Press, named after a novel of Flann O'Brien's. Their mission is to reissue the finest works of literature of the past 100 years, and to keep them in print permanently - they also make them available at a heavily discounted cost to academic libraries. 

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.

finding, winning and losing

Colm Toibin has won the IMPAC prize for The Master. Huzzah. First Irish writer to do so.  Several useful links at Mark's blog, here.

How to write for the Internet - we can all learn something. From Jacket magazine.

From Cordite #23 (the Children of Malley issue):  Robert Kennedy writes on the imminent sale of Harold Stewart's personal library on e-Bay,  in The Journey (Death) of a Library . This is a very sad thing to see happen,  but it is not always easy for larger libraries to absorb personal collections, particularly if they are left under conditions that don't suit potential owners. Kennedy rather begs the question here - we are talking about 2,500 books:

So why aren’t our libraries and institutions set up to take a collection of books from one of Australia’s most prominent poets and writers? Why aren’t they displaying the libraries of our writers so we can gain an insight into their studies and learn from what they learned from? The libraries that helped them to become world-famous writers.

Some libraries have acquired the collected books of our writers. The State Library of NSW has Patrick White’s library. What are we studying and learning from that collection?

And I think he can rest assured that meticulous study will be being made by the gatekeepers, of exactly what is happening with Patrick White's shelf space. As it is done throughout every library.

I think I've seen this before, but from the Cordite blog, this link provides information on a free Australian literature site, Australian Literature Resources, compiled by John Tranter and volunteers.

A New York blogger at the PEN world festival

The festival made real:  this very interesting chat between Colm Toibin and Chris Abani was followed with some difficulty due to the peculiarly small and noisy venue (the KGB bar), by my newest discovery, Michelle of New York Brain Terrain. Michelle has done a great job of personalising and making immediate the rather formidable online presence of the latest Pen World Voices Festival, including a lovely interview with young Nigerian/UK writer Helen Oyeyemi.

I found the first of these posts in one of my increasingly rare visits to Metaxucafe.

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)...

Australia's Eureka Street follows the leaders online

The Victorian Writers' Centre newsletter, Write On, reports that the final print version of Eureka Street will appear in May, to be replaced by an online version. Andrew Hamilton SJ, a regular writer for ES, is quoted in a recent editorial as saying that:

The uses of the Web seem to commend writing that is brief, plain and succinctly argued in response to issues of contemporary interest. To write plainly, clearly and succinctly is an art, one we hope has been represented in the printed form of Eureka Street. But Eureka Street has set itself more ambitious goals, and for these particularly it has been valued.

It has tried to represent the humane tradition. Central to the humane tradition is a high evaluation of human dignity. it makes human flourishing the criterion for judging political policies. If we place a high value on human dignity, we shall naturally attend closely to the way in which any policies treat the most marginalised and weakest. The humane tradition, too, requires that we give a persuasive account of human predicaments by attending to their complexity and depth...

...The mission of Eureka Street does not license us to turn our back on electronic publishing. It encourages us to try to find a space in it for reflective communication and leisurely assimilation. The meeting of this larger cultural challenge will not stand or fall with the success of Eureka Street. But we hope to make our modest contribution to it.

MetaxuCafé is on our screens

'Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball...'

You have to hand it to Bud Parr, he has thought of every CSS thing imaginable in the design of this terrific new site - and then some. I particularly appreciate the extension of the Headlines feature he had on Chekhov's Mistress, and I'm not just praising it up because I've noticed an increase in traffic here already. This is a wonderful, user-friendly, beautifully designed arrival on the scene.(There will be time, there will be time for me to tidy up the US litblogs links area now. )

Congratulations and thanks, to Bud and his sidekick David Thayer of One More Bite of the Apple, for this truly remarkable contribution to  literary content management - even a forum space is included. It should feature on all good library websites everywhere.

At last check there are over 80 members in the network, ranging across the US, Canada and the UK and including a few Australians. Go quickly, add it to your aggregator and your blog.

wired style and other constraints

I'm sitting in the lovely little room where the Victorian Writers' Centre collection is housed, reading Wired Style:Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. (Edited by Constance Hale and published by Hardwired:San Francisco, 1996.) Coffee and bix for nix, specialised writing and fiction collection thoughtfully displayed, large distressed table to spread out on, not a computer in sight, and what do I choose to read about? Online style.

I'm going over to RMIT later to hunt down a copy I can borrow - this is from the VWC's reference collection, and cannot be borrowed - not an entirely novel experience as I'm heading up to the State Library of Victoria later as well, to copy some chunks out of an account of the Yorick Club that is held there.
My son's interrupted this comparatively wireless interlude with a call about his upcoming encounter with a dental surgeon. This young man is a wicked guitarist who gave a fine account of 'Fade to Black' and 'Sweet Home Alabama' with the mates at the school concert two nights ago - now, bitchety bitch, we must have a tooth removed and put braces on his bite. Cruelty, thy name is orthomaximillius...

So, here I am in a pretty, grimy Art Deco building , facing a wall of Australian literary journals whose publishers are slowly nudging their way online,  and revisiting the Internet in 1996.

The chapter titles are the usual snappy bites, leaving me unprepared for the occasionally sober, sometimes passionate analysis they contain within incisive definitions and anecdotes. The reference style is breezy, but the intention is serious nonetheless:

What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in empty acronyms? How can we write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry? Wired Style is anarchic, fluid and rule-averse, so beware: the digital dictions in this book may someday ache for updates and clarifications.(Consider this Version 1.0.Fortunately, Version 2.0 is already being created for the World Wide Web at www.hardwired.com/.)

The compilation strategy used to create the guide back in 1996 was collaborative. Readers are included and named in the credits. Chicago, AP and Strunk &White are mentioned briefly. Dean Swift's influence is invoked on page nine:

'As a lover of the plain simple straight ahead commonsensical [sic] and above all human style of the master Jonathan Swift,' says John Seabrook...'I am so pleased to see citizens of the Net quietly keeping the fires of great prose alive."

I ended up skating through the first two chapters and leaving the definitions in the past, as I couldn't borrow this treasure from RMIT after all. So I'll probably sample the first edition again sometime, in between visiting version X in its freshest incarnation.

There's an excitement in earlier writing about the online environment that's well worth savouring, though. As i'm midway through transcribing Seabrook by hand at the distressed dining table, I'm suddenly visited by a sense that technology has been my master for too long. I'm writing this and thinking, "ewwwh, if they had a machine I could photocopy this and be on my way...why don't I get a laptop, when am I going to start that Wordpress blog..."

Perhaps it's a leftover from being a music student all those years ago - your work is structured around the availability of tools, you come home from school and throw your younger sibs off the piano and hunker down...Then there's written exams, all of which promotes an insidious garbage in, garbage out frame of mind. I suffer from the ridiculous conceit that if it hasn't been researched or isn't the occasion of a special excursion of some sort, then any piece I produce is somehow frivolous or illegitimate.

Thanks to this tendency to over-research, it's likely I'll disappear into someone else's writing once more without producing the pieces I want to write on blogging for a print source. I could easily spend the time between now and Christmas building a little blog to put it all in. Like a pretty box. Bloody hell.

The writer's centre has a ghost librarian who has been busily devising a series of card indexes - it appears the centre is reluctant to invest in an online catalogue of any sort. But there is a freedom in that minimalism that I may be just ready to embrace. Get the tools - then forget them. Is that how to write an online essay? Maybe.

Constraints on this piece (after Derik Badman, another librarian I know of):

A Mitsubishi pencil (Uni-ball Eye Micro) and red notebook, some scratchings out, arrows and asterisks, minimal paraphrasing whilst typing, not having read the whole book I'm using as a peg for my thoughts, a mobile phone with a wonderful young person on the other end, and (last but not least) tiny, cruddy toilets down the corridor.

Tech-free surroundings come at a price.

Update: another constraint - Hardwired disappeared pretty quickly, after some lukewarm reviews. Even Google has it listed as a Style Guide - but the bird has flown.

eternal vigilance

From the Berkman Center at Harvard, a Reporters without Borders publication has been released, The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents,  which includes two articles by Julien Pain, one entitled 'Internet Censor World Championship':

Beijing has spent tens of millions of dollars on the most sophisticated Internet filtering and surveillance equipment. The system is based on a constantly-updated blacklist of websites. Access to subversive ones a very broad notion that includes pornography, political criticism and sites that are pro-Tibet or favour Taiwanese independence is then blocked at the level of the country’s Internet 'backbones' (major connection nodes). But censorship doesn’t stop there and the regime can automatically bar access to sites in which dubious keywords, or combinations such as 'tiananmen' + 'massacre', are spotted.

The regime can also censor online discussion forums almost instantly. State-of-the-art software and a cyber-police thought to number tens of thousands have enabled it to gut online forums (very active in recent years) of virtually all political dissent. A call for free elections, for example, has a maximum online life of about half an hour. The ministry of industry and information has also zeroed in on blogs and done a deal with Chinabased blog platforms to censor users. So a post about the Dalai Lama will appear online full of automatically-inserted blank spaces in place of illegal words.

But how did China get hold of such advanced and effective censorship equipment
when only a decade ago the country had no major Internet firms? With the help of big US companies, led by Cisco. These firms, to get a slice of the enormous Chinese market of already more than 100 million people online, have closed their eyes to how their technology is being used. Some have probably worked directly with the regime to set up filters and surveillance.
Beijing has even got the world’s major search-engines to go on bended knee. Yahoo! agreed a few years ago to remove all material offensive to the regime from its Chinese version. For a long time, Google refused but now seems to be moving in the same direction.
The country’s police and courts also treat very harshly website editors who don’t obey the rules laid down by the governing Communist Party. 75 cyber-dissidents are currently in prison for trying to post independent news online, some of them serving sentences of more than 10 years.
So before you set up a blog in China, it’s best to find out what the rules are. Bloggers living in the country holding the world online censorship title have to be cautious and crafty.

Other articles cover blogging in Nepal, Iran, Bahrain and Hong Kong, technical evasion of online censorship, email privacy and the usual bag of blogging tricks including a chapter on ethics from citizen journalist Dan Gillmor. Almost a hundred pages long, well worth a download. Link from Frank Paynter of Sandhill Trek.

Juan les Pins is for Faramir of Gondor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

near perigord

I'm not big on translation projects, Jill Jones would know a lot more about this than me - but this one is rather nice. I was lazily tolerating the drone of one of those history programs a couple of months ago. You know the kind  - you get up to find your history book because it's way quicker and you don't have to watch the crappy 're-enactments'. Except in this case, I jumped online as I knew I had no book about the twelfth century Normans, ra ra ra.

So whilst chasing Bertran de Born, (about whom I knew a little already, but you will need Pound's collected poems to get the whole of this tale), I found some exorbitant claims made for this poet , Raimbaut Arenga, on this site - he's called the Mozart of the troubadours. The first poem about the wren is rather fine.

Bertran de Born, the warmonger made famous by Dante and owner of that romantic sounding castle, Hautefort, that for some silly reason always reminds me of Altamont, makes an appearance, but has not been translated by the owners of this project yet. They have completed Arnaut Daniel however, and sundry others (the Union Jacks will guide you).

And here's where I'm going to camp if I ever get to Perigord ( I've had this saved in my favourites since cocky was an egg - well, since I got broadband anyway.) The idea is to travel around the sites in Pound's poem and see what is left of them...Which should be fun.