reeling and writhing

Peter Porter poetry prize ceremony on 27 March:book your place

The Peter Porter poetry prize will be awarded on 27 March in Southbank, Melbourne at a ceremony at Australian Book Review's offices at Boyd.

The work of five poets has been selected and can be read in the latest issue of ABR, so you'd better pick one up, or subscribe, if you want to find out what Nathan Curnow, A. Frances Johnson, Dan Disney, John Kinsella and John A. Scott have entered.  Go on and put yourself out of suspense...and in the meantime enjoy making an educated guess at who may win out of that distinguished field.

Invitations to the ceremony are open to all, but bookings are required:

The ceremony will be held in Studio 2 at Boyd, Southbank, Melbourne at 6 p.m. on 27 March. This is a free event but reservations are essential:rsvp@australianbookreview. com.au or (03) 9699 8822

Zoe Dattner finds shiny tools for change in New York

I enjoyed reading Zoe Dattner's conference report a couple of weeks ago in Bookseller and Publisher magazine (now known as Books and Publishing, thanks!) Zoe was present at the eighth Tools of Change conference, convened recently in New York by O'Reilly Media.

While commenting on the depth and breadth of the US book market, she noted some things that she felt were pertinent to the Australian market, in particular the scope for greater support to book events from booksellers, and a better understanding in Australia of the potential of POD (print on demand).

At some length she reported on a session with GoodReads, discussing a survey of 1000 users they conducted recently (I would have loved to know if they have presented at TOC before).

For discovery, Twitter and Facebook score very low. Friends’ recommendations (word of mouth) is the highest. (It is not known, unfortunately, if the word of mouth people refer to comes from social media or person-to-person. My guess is that Twitter and Facebook are actually far more influential, but people consider this the same as word of mouth.) Following this, the best discovery comes from Goodreads itself, and then from media (presumably reviews and media discussion). Discovery via bookstore and the library ‘hold list’ is also very good. (A separate session that gave some fantastic data about libraries made the brilliant point that a library is really a showroom, and one that publishers and booksellers should advocate for.) On the question of why someone buys the book after hearing about it, the top answers were: friends telling you to buy it, general hype, and book clubs. Over 50% of readers said Goodreads reviews helped to convince readers to buy the book.

One of the most valuable points I took away from the Goodreads session was the statistic that 69% of people want to discuss the book with friends after they’ve read it, making me think how much better the industry could get at providing special deals on multiple copies (specifically ebooks) and that there should be better, and stronger, calls to action at the end of the book. Considering the technology available to us—particularly with ePub 3—the possibilities for a ‘What should I read next?’ page at the end of a book are vast.

A last interesting thought from this session was that 49% say they’d be interested in reading a book in serial form instead of waiting six months for the release, but only with an established author, or someone they like, not at all with an unknown author.

Read more here. 

Zoe has kindly supplied the link to the keynote library session she mentions, 'The Library as Ebook Discovery Zone: More Lessons from *Library Journal's* Public Library Patron Research' delivered by Meredith Schwartz. A video link is supplied.

 

 

a pile of stuff #31

It's up! as many already know, the inaugural Stella Prize longlist is out. Read all about the nominated books and their authors in more detail at the Stella Prize website.

A "digital version of passing notes in class" called Snapchat has been profiled in the New York Times. It allows messages and photos to be sent which self-destruct not long after they are opened. Via Bob Stein on if:book. 

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lili Loofbourow has mounted a case for Tolkien's Gollum having been lifted from Thelma, a novel by best-selling British female writer, Marie Corelli:

Given how extensive the parallels are between Sigurd and Gollum, it’s hard to understand how they could have gone unnoticed until now. Much as I’d like to claim credit for being an exquisitely sensitive reader, it’s almost impossible to encounter Sigurd without seeing Gollum. And yet no one, to my knowledge, has made the connection before. How is this possible, given that Corelli, Haggard, and Tolkien were all bestsellers?

Jessie Borelle reviews 99%, a five-minute podcast that punches above its weight, at the KYD blog.

Alison Flood got 99 comments on the splitting of infinitives at the Guardian blog recently. I haven't scanned them all to see if anyone else remembers Billy Liar's dictum on the matter though.

Finally, there is a very fine launch going on at Bennett's Lane, one of my favourite places, on Thursday 28th. Ilura Press is launching issue 11 of Etchings, evocatively titled Three Chords and The Truth and you are all invited for music, nibbles and readings. Go, then catch Cloud Atlas later in the evening.

in The Blue Corner, a striking image of time management from Paul Mitchell

From that well-named blog at Going Down Swinging comes a very good post by poet Paul Mitchell, on how to manage that burning problem  shared by so many Australian writers. I speak of the problem of  failing to build your house in the desert, or in other words, writing for a quid instead of staking all on your masterpiece... oh, you know, working more than one job at a time.

I like the image in the second paragraph here.

Ah, that’s why he hasn’t written a bestseller. Can’t concentrate.

Well, I’d like to. But unlike that icon of writing, Cormac McCarthy, I’m not prepared to build my own stone house in the desert, eat little more than potatoes for several years, and have a series of ‘housekeepers’ type up my manuscripts. I’ve got a youngish family. School bills. All kinds of other bills that are far more creative in pricing than any of my writing.

So I’m a switcheroo.

A friend suggested recently that I am also a ‘spaghetti thinker’. I can pull out a strand of spag (writing) from my saucy brain, work it round in my fingers, gobble it, and then pull out another strand. All without disturbing the whole bowl of pasta. Maybe that’s true. Or I’m just good at time management. Or I am good at switching on and off in short periods. But the question of how switcheroo writers do what we do is probably not as important as how we do it without going insane.

There's also Megan Anderson's terrific looking interview with female Beat poet Hettie Jones, which I am yet to read.

 

Mother Courage reviewed at Inside Story

 

Eleanor Hogan, the author of Alice Springs,  has reviewed Mother Courage, Warwick Thornton’s installation at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI),  for Inside Story.

Some of Thornton’s work has been criticised for its focus on contemporary social dysfunction. Samson and Delilah, for example, portrayed two teenagers’ experiences of rejection and isolation in a remote community and in Alice Springs through a series of events that are perhaps unlikely within the timeframe in which they occur. This compression of incidents from Aboriginal everyday life also features in Green Bush, and Thornton has explained in interviews that all the material in his films is drawn from his own experience. While his films are ostensibly realistic, their dense and highly emblematic use of everyday objects and incidents prefaces an understandable transition from film-making to art installation. Thornton debuted his first installation, Stranded, at the Adelaide film festival in 2011, and elsewhere he has commented on the appeal of the relative immediacy of an art installation project compared to the often expensive and lengthy process of film-making.

A slice of Alice Springs | Inside Story

Art Auction for Gay Hawkes at fortyfivedownstairs on Tuesday 26th February

Moira Finucane will compere a fundraiser event at fortyfivedownstairs on Tuesday evening to assist artist Gay Hawkes, who lost her home, studio and all her work in the recent fires in Tasmania.

The sounds of Rachel Guy and gypsy group Vardos will accompany the event. Over 40 artists have donated works including Jacqui Stockdale, Barbie Kjar, Simon Cuthbert, Sally Curry, Naomi Howard, Eve Howard and Archibald winner Sam Leach...

For donations or for those who are unable to attend and who wish to place a bid please contact us on 03 9662 9966 or  info@fortyfivedownstairs.com

More information here.

James Ley on the virtues of criticism

A question for James Ley, editor of the new Sydney Review of Books, at the Wheeler Centre's blog recently:

Who are some of the critics you admire, and why?

There are lots of them. At a pinch, I would probably nominate William Hazlitt as my favourite critic for the sheer vitality of his prose. But I’d hesitate to choose. The twentieth century produced an extraordinary number of great critics and they all tend to have different virtues. A brilliant close reader like Christopher Ricks can be inspiring, but a bluff journalistic critic like Edmund Wilson can be great on his day too. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has always struck me as a major critical achievement. There are critics I admire because they have taught us to think about culture in new ways, critics like Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes, but in general I tend to be drawn to critics who can combine depth of knowledge with an accessible style, people like Frank Kermode or Susan Sontag, or some of the old New York intellectuals – Elizabeth Hardwick or Lionel Trilling, for example. A lot of the literary theory that was a big deal when I was at university resulted in some very interesting thinking but it didn’t produce much in the way of good writing.

One of the fascinating things about criticism, I think, is that an individual critic’s obsessions, weaknesses and blind spots can be important too, because in their way they can also help to clarify certain arguments and distinctions. I often disagree with James Wood’s criticism, for example, but I invariably enjoy reading him. His anti-‘hysterical realism’ campaign was wrong-headed in all sorts of ways, but it identified a faultline in contemporary fiction and got people talking. Daniel Mendelsohn, Adam Kirsch and Laura Miller are good contemporary critics, and I think Andrew O’Hagan’s cultural criticism is always excellent. There are music critics I like, as well, particularly Alex Ross, Jon Savage and Jim DeRogatis, though of course when it comes to rock criticism you can’t go past the doyen Lester Bangs: fearless, passionate, brilliant, slightly crazed and completely hilarious.

James Ley is the editor of Australia's newest literary publication, the Sydney Review of Books, our (online-only) answer to the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. This is an excerpt of a longer interview.

- The Wheeler Centre: Books, Writing, Ideas

(crossposted at the usual place...)

Prepare The Cabin For Landing: Alan Wearne is ready for take-off tonight at Collected Works

Apologies for not broadcasting this sooner, 

but Alan Wearne's new book of poems,

will be launched tonight at Collected Works bookshop by Owen Richardson.

6pm-8.30pm.

1st Floor, Nicholas Building,

37 Swanston St, Melbourne.

Giramondo & Collected Works Bookshop invite you to the launch of Alan Wearne's new collection of poems, PREPARE THE CABIN FOR LANDING. The launcher will be esteemed Melbourne book reviewer Owen Richardson. 

We quote from Giramondo's blurb :

"Wearne is Australia’s poet-moralist, a master of its idioms, the recorder of its pretensions, and the scourge of its big-noters, con-artists and crooks. In ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’ he pays tribute to Samuel Johnson and Juvenal, ‘who knew that combination of bemusement, annoyance, anger and despair to which your country can drive you, though always aware of its entertainment value and dramatic potential’.

The collection includes an affectionate portrait of three Melbourne high school teachers in the early 1960s, and a saga which records the destinies of their pupils, satires on the world of finance and drug-dealing, literary academics and the libertinism of baby-boomers, and seven new poems based on Australian pop songs.

Alan Wearne’s verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers received major literary awards; his recent collection, The Australian Popular Songbook, won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. He is the publisher of Grand Parade Poets, and teaches poetry at the University of Wollongong."

For further information do not hesitate to contact Kris Hemensley at Collected Works on 9654 8873.

Stay informed of further events and new stock at this brilliant, unique poetry bookshop by following it on Facebook. 

Kris Hemensley, the bookshop's founder, also writes about poetry,his work and life here.

go outside the library

I need to tell a little story about the pictures in this blog's header, particularly the one on the right. 
When I first selected it from a collection of pins on Pinterest marked "Libraries", I did not realise that each pinned picture in the collection corresponded to a whole article on the library in the picture.

Talking to someone the other day about this, I went back to my note in the sidebar to check where both shots came from and clicked right through to a brilliant article at Dezeen, an architecture and design blog now in its seventh year.

The article carries  several more shots of the Liyuan library, designed by Li Xiadong. It was like opening a door.

Here is the outside of the library, on the outskirts of Beijing:

 This next shot shows the rest of the library travelling back from the window shown in my header:

 

It is rather stunning. The whole library is covered on the outside with firewood, so that it blends in with the nearby village.

Read more at Dezeen: there's also a newer article on this library. Then, enjoy clicking through all their pins on Pinterest devoted to libraries to read other articles, or follow their library tag for some very attractive bookish spaces.

what I will be reading on Australian writing in 2013: the Sydney Review of Books and The Writer's Room Interviews

Last weekend was a great one for reading about Australian writing, with the launch of two new e-publications.

The University of Western Sydney is supporting the brand spanking new Sydney Review of Books, which launched with several articles on Friday. There will be fresh reading every week for the next two months of this pilot project headed up by critic and editor James Ley, so get along there.

First postings include critical essays and reviews by Kate Middleton, Evelyn Juers, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Peter Pierce, Mo Yan and Nicholas Jose, as well as a call to arms for a watch on criticism by Ben Etherington.

Charlotte Wood, author and essayist, has begun a series of interviews available by subscription, The Writer's Room Interviews. You can sign up for them here, at an annual cost of $27.50 for six issues. The first interview was with Tasmanian writer and Patrick White prizewinner Amanda Lohrey, and I found it completely absorbing, probably because I love her work.

There were two things from the interview, among many, that struck me.

Firstly, I liked what Lohrey had to say about how taste affects the reading of fiction:

CW: A painter friend of mine says people think they don’t know what good art is, but that in every show he’s ever had, the best pictures sell first. You don’t understand it,but you know it.

AL: You do know it. It’s instinctive. But at the same time I think that’s more true of the visual arts than of literature. For it’s also true with fiction that there is no single standard of excellence. A book is a meeting of subjectivities and the subjectivity of one writer will speak to one reader but not to another. There are some writers who don’t speak to me at all but I can see why they speak to other readers, can see that they are in the same zone in terms of their preoccupations, and their conditioning, what’s important to them. It’s just not important to me and I’m not interested. So I don’t mean to say — I’m not trying to posit an idea of excellence that everybody responds to. I think literature is very much a one-to one conversation, which is why I cannot argue with someone who says The Alchemist is their favourite book when they’ve obviously got a lot out of it.

Secondly, Lohrey made some useful remarks about what she called 'inventive' realism:

I’ve always been interested in exploratory and inventive modes of realism, not for their own sake but because each new project demands its own aesthetic. I could get very technical on the subject but this is probably not the time or place. I would say, however, that one of the important functions of university writing courses is to encourage students to interrogate taken-for-granted modes of representation. If you decide to write in a conventional way, at least know why you’ve made that decision. Traditionally, film-makers have been much more concerned with issues of representation and more innovative. And to be fair, the camera gives them more scope, but that doesn’t mean that we as writers shouldn’t think about it. You don’t have to be obviously ‘experimental’, you don’t have to write like Gertrude Stein or James Joyce — small unorthodox manoeuvres can have potent effects.

Small and unorthodox. I like the sound of that.

I've been so busy reading these two publications that I did not have time to blog about them at the time. Which speaks for itself. Go, enjoy, be enlightened or enraged, as you will.

subjected to sleep deprivation: artists in residence at ANAT

To mark its 25th anniversary, the Australian Network for Art and Technology is presenting an intriguing residency, The Subjects, at a sleep research institute:

Acclaimed author, Sean Williams, will be joined by artists Thom Buchanan and Fee Plumley and writer Jennifer Mills for a week-long residency at the Appleton Institute, Central Queensland University’s Adelaide-based sleep research centre.

Isolated from contact with the outside world, The Subjects will experience severely disrupted sleep patterns, loss of subjective control and constant surveillance. Each day – or is it night? – they will produce creative accounts of their experience. These will be posted to the project blog, enabling those of us on the outside to respond directly with comments and questions.

As the residency progresses we expect The Subjects’ to become increasingly stressed by their privations. Will they go mad – quietly or otherwise? Will they lose their creative mojo? Will they find new ways of expressing themselves, personally and creatively? You be the judge.

The Subjects and The Scientist (that's Professor Drew Dawson) will also be participating in a special panel discussion for Adelaide Writers’ Week.

All four participants have started posting, and I'm looking forward to reading about their time at Appleton.

a pile of stuff #30

Oh dear, busy 2013. Busy, busy. Children boating and flying past fires and floods, as they do. (Yes, mine. It astounds me.)

But I did find these fine things recently:

According to Maud, this lady is the Flannery O'Connor of the internet age. 

Everyone needs to know how to do this. Yes, you! From Pat Grant.

Patti Smith sings William Blake. From Jacket2.

Via things magazine: what happens when you photograph a car on fire, asks J.M. Colberg?

The act of photographing, the gesture, has become part of our interaction with the world. You photograph just like you look. You know that you can never look at all of those photographs again (in all likelihood you never will - who has the time?), but it’s not about the photographs - it’s about the photographing. The act of photography might have turned into the equivalent of whistling a song, something you do, something that might or might not have beauty, a communicative act just as much as an affirmative act: I was there, and me being there means I had to photograph it.

And from Jessamyn West, a link to a NYT discussion, "Do We Still Need Libraries?"

(Crossposted at Mulberry Road.)

 

a night of poetry for Barry Jones at fortyfivedownstairs

On February 12, fortyfivedownstairs is holding a poetry reading in honour of former MP Barry Jones' 80th birthday:

Barry Jones is one of the more remarkable politicians to have sat in the House of Representatives in Canberra, a much loved and respected figure on both sides of politics.

As a tribute for his 80^th birthday late last year, the Chair of fortyfivedownstairs, Julian Burnside, has curated a night of some of Barry’s favourite poetry and music.

Readers include Race Matthews, Gareth Evans, Peter Craven, Marieke Hardy, Dr. Joan Grant, Max Gillies and John Stanton.

The Flinders Quartet will also perform on this memorable evening.

Get your tickets here.

 

 

Finally, in 2013, my review of The Rest Is Weight

Well, what a time that took! Hope you were not holding your breath waiting for my review of Jennifer Mills' rich and rewarding story collection, released in June last year.

Many things got in the way, including another delayed review...

But, here it is, at The Ember.

This excellent book, The Rest Is Weight, provoked an interesting observation from Peter Pierce at the Sydney Morning Herald:

Maybe the short story, not the novel, is the mainstream of Australian fiction. There are echoes of Lawson and Baynton here, as well as Carey. Mills is aware of the tradition to which she is indebted and in which she works adroitly and imaginatively. If the stories can feel like self-imposed tests of what Mills can do, they are also daring, unsettling and assured.

 

The only sad thing about this substantial and beautiful collection is that now we have to wait till Jennifer writes some more. So. Please Consider.

(Crossblogged at Mulberry Road.)

Glass Town chronicles

 

Young Men's Magazine on display

More here, but don't expect to find out anything as useful as where this early Glass Town booklet of Charlotte Bronte's is being displayed. The report is a very general article indeed....

Crossposted here.

too many lists = a pile of stuff #29

Top 10 non-fic and fiction picks of 2012 - from Longreads. Enjoy.

Probably everyone on Twitter knew this but me - you will soon be able to download all your tweets. (At present it is invite only). Via ReadWrite (they dropped the "Web" a while ago.)

Find yourself some books that deserved a wider audience, according to people in British publishing, in this article from The Guardian on publishing in 2012.

The boat installation, A Room For London, wraps up with this podcast from Colm Toibin, which includes a reading of his story about the old age of Joseph Conrad's character Marlow.

Finally, some Tumblr treasure from Maud Newton - a list of favourite New Yorker articles from the archive.

Holidays, movies, tie-ins

I was at the Rivoli in Camberwell last night waiting for my daughter, and spying on folks as Helen Garner has trained us all to do.

I saw three young fellows meeting up, and overheard them picking their film. One said, "I can't bear to sit through that musical again." The other said, "The Hobbit, then?" and when the reply was affirmative, said, "for the second time!" 

(I went to Les Miz, came home and googled this fellow. Goodness, he was fabulous!)

But in the meantime, since Christmas and a massive relocation of our books around a larger family of shelves, a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien that I forgot I had made its casual reappearance on my occasional table. So I have just completed Humphrey Carpenter's concise and gentle 1976 appraisal of Tolkien's life and his rise to fame. (There are of course many other things I could have read, if I'd had the inclination.)

There were many chuckles: there are some hilarious moments in this book. Just as a taste, here's Tolkien on the letter he received from a real Sam Gamgee while he was still attending to fan mail himself:
"For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed "S. Gollum". That would have been more difficult to deal with." 

The Carpenter bio is the only one I've ever read, and only now. For some reason Tolkien's life never interested me before. But in these pages I learned about another astonishing person, one whom Carpenter calls 'extraordinary' for good reason. The philologist Joseph Wright apparently went to work as a mill hand in Yorkshire aged six - taught himself to read at fifteen, and rose through his own night-school and a walking study tour of Germany to a doctorate, and from there  to becoming a professor at Oxford, where he trained Tolkien, one of the most brilliant, if dilatory, philologists at the university. 'Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor....'

I think reading this readable, dare I say personable biography, which was reissued in 2000, is a great antidote to escaping the monster truck that The Hobbit films seem to have turned into. Though it is sobering to research collectible copies of Tolkien's works. And Les Miserables was fine, though I did struggle with the vertiginous camera work. (Would it have really hurt to have a few more shots of FX-ed Paris, the barricades and the people, instead of chasing the leads around like Lars von Trier?)

I have a niece who is apparently spending her holidays reading Les Miserables. I'll be content to reread some snippets in the introduction to my undergrad collection of Hugo's poetry, which I never read properly when I was her age anyhow. Like Boaz, I was asleep then.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Christmas pile #28

I know, I know. It's only the third of December.

Traditionally (a tradition of 24 years standing this year), we have four birthdays in January. So I am preparing about ten days earlier than everyone else. (Who else saw that hilarious Kikki K insert in The Age on Saturday? that calendar had NO TIME FOR SHOPPING in it. Just 'list' seguing effortlessly into 'wrapping'.)

Some of these are quite old. So forgive me if you have seen them already.

If you are feeling the pull to slow down over this busy time of year, the ABC has been running a program introducing meditation over the past six weeks. I heard about it through the Melbourne Meditation Centre, but it may well have been bruited elsewhere. Here's the toolkit. (You can easily trawl down the page to week 1 and begin at the beginning.)

I was interested to see this app, Flipboard, mentioned on the Killings blog by publishing researcher Caroline Hamilton, as I follow one of its developers on Twitter. And it looks to be a very pretty way of aggregating all your stuff on your iPad, too. 

Caroline also mentions a 2010 article by Craig Mod that I really thought I'd read already. As it's not in my bookmarks, then I guess I will have to read it now, but it sure looks familiar...Books In The Age Of The iPad.

 It's probably a bit late for Australians to order these and have them by Christmas, but this gorgeous Swiss toymaker's website is fun to look at, and I dare you not to order something one day. Via Things magazine. (Being the non-starting quilter I am, I have this on the wishlist.)

Something else I still haven't read - Terry Eagleton's review of a new bio of Derrida, from The Guardian.

Robert Crum, a couple of weeks back, had things to say about book marketing, coming up as a result with a list of lit-labels of his own which included the rather clumsy 'lit-lit':

The development of the literary marketplace in the past 30-something years has been echoed by a new, and acute, sensitivity to the place of genre within the trade. In a market-savvy creative economy, you could say that genre has become everything. I have been able to identify 15 contemporary shades of "literature".

I'll leave it to you to decide if his colours of writing are to your taste. Happy Christmas - if Typepad is listening, I want a better clipping tool, please. Like the one I have already on this blog, where, regrettably, you will be more likely to find me in the lazy, hazy days of summer. Thanks for reading the very intermittent postings here this year.

Happy Christmas: we finish 2012 with an introduction to some important legislation #NDIS

From ndis.gov.au, 29 November:

Today the Prime Minister introduced legislation for the National Disability Insurance Scheme into the Commonwealth Parliament. You can watch her speech online here, just as people with disability, their families and carers and NDIS campaigners from around the country did this morning, from the public gallery of the House of Representatives.

The legislation sets out the framework for a national scheme – a framework that will initially operate in five launch sites from mid-next year.

The legislation has been referred to a Senate Committee for their consideration. During their inquiry, the Senate Committee will hear evidence from people with disability, their families and carers about the Bill, which means everyone will have another opportunity to consider the details, and to input into the drafting and design of this important legislation.

Following conversation with people with disability, their families and carers, with service providers and advocates through the Senate Committee, and ongoing work with the states and territories, the Parliament will vote on the Bill next year.

You can also read the Bill and provide feedback through our online forum Your Say.

I have been hearing from various professionals all year about younger families who are at breaking point, and it breaks my heart - I was raising my children at a time when there still wasn't enough support, but there was less, shall we say blockage? in the system. We need this so badly, and we need it now.

If you haven't yet joined the campaign to support this important reform, you can still sign up at everyaustraliancounts.com.au, and share the details of the campaign with your friends. The money for this insurance scheme is still not guaranteed, and we need Australians to stay tuned and make sure we build this right. Congratulations to the Gillard government for getting it this far - now we all need to pull together to get the job done well. 

in which library items' circulation rises, thanks to a book bloggers challenge

Not only that, the bloggers wrote over 1000 reviews of books by Australian women writers. Yes, we're talking about the Australian Women Writers' challenge, people.

Elizabeth Lhuede has been running this reviewing challenge since early this year Recently, at the Huffington Post, she summarised the reasons for staging a blog-led intervention to raise the profile of Australian women writers in their own country:

Last year when I went hunting for books by Australian women at my local library in the World Heritage area of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, I couldn't find any. The librarians weren't much help. They said, "Look for the kangaroo on the spine."

I asked friends. Like me, they'd heard of Geraldine Brooks (who lives in the US), Kate Grenville (who won the Orange Prize), and multi-award-winning author Helen Garner. Familiar, too, were names like Shirley Hazzard, Janette Turner Hospital and Kathy Lette (all non-Australian residents). But what about women living and writing in Australia - women of my own (younger) generation? Their books weren't being reviewed in Australian literary magazines.

She goes on to discuss the foundation this year of the Stella Prize for Australian women's writing, which will be awarded for the first time in 2013.

Around the time that her entry at the Huffington Post blog was posted, she also discovered that the librarians at Nowra library had noticed a rise in the circulation of books by Australian women since they had promoted the Australian Women Writers' Challenge at their library. 

That is the kind of story I just love to hear. Bloggers and librarians making a difference for a group of writers who deserve more attention. Very, very cool stuff, and every one of you must take a bow.

And on top of that, there's a massive database of reviews at the Australian Women Writers' Challenge website, and a new challenge planned for 2013.  So all interested bloggers and librarians should go and have a look around, and consider joining up.

And here's two posts from the site I've saved for later: 

Overland fiction editor and writer Jennifer Mills, on classics 

WTF is women's fiction? by author Paddy Reilly

criticism is tempted by a need for order

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Morten Høi Jensen has reviewed James Wood's new book, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays:

Criticism, like fiction itself, is a paradoxical endeavor. It is always tempted by a need for order. In the book-soaked gloom of his study, the enterprising critic will scan his teeming bookscape, with its shuddering shelves and teetering towers, and go about his systematizing. These systems — and they can be aesthetic, political, sexual — will approach Literature like new management: merging, sacking, restructuring. And for all its achievements, the literary system will ultimately distinguish itself by the writers it leaves at its door (consider, for instance, the poverty of the Leavisite canon). The trick, therefore, is to contain one’s compulsion for wholeness, for systems. “Readers may want to push reconciliation onto a text,” Wood writes, “but this may be just our fantasy of wholeness, not the text’s, which may want to persist in being contradictory.” By sharing that elusiveness, and by engaging in its metaphorical movement, Wood delights in the unsystematic, playful nature of fiction — in the fun stuff.

 

in a quiet moment, some more fine things from David Mitchell

Among some engrossing things about adaptation, Japan, new writers and childhood reading in this NYT interview with David Mitchell, this:

And if you were forced to name your one favorite author?

I’d have to say, “I’m sorry, but books just don’t work like that, and neither does music, Amen” and take the consequences.

 

Sydney Review of Books to launch online this month, while Murnane chafes at the bit

 I found some very welcome news in the weekend Age on Saturday in Jason Steger's Bookmarks column. A university-supported online reviews publication is on its way:

The idea, according to editor and critic James Ley, is to create a critical journal that ''takes up some of the slack from the shrinkage of coverage of books''. The SRB is being produced under the aegis of the University of Western Sydney's Writing and Society group, run by Ivor Indyk (the man behind Giramondo Publishing), novelist Gail Jones and professor Anthony Uhlmann. Ley says it will be a ''literary journal with an Australian emphasis but not exclusively - hopefully it will be a bit more catholic in its tastes''.

Ley is an appropriate editor of the new journal. His recent PhD thesis was called The Secular Wood, which is about literary criticism in the public sphere. He says he has plenty of articles for when the site launches this month. Among them is what will be a regular feature called ''Critic Watch'', in which all the commentary on a particular book is scrutinised.

Read more.

Not only this, but an exquisite review from Gerald Murnane was also published in the books pages. There was much rejoicing chez nous, particularly over the opening line: "I must confess I wasn't eager to read this book." A very fine tease in store if you haven't read this one.

Few people take me seriously when I say that I've got more out of horse racing than from Shakespeare or Beethoven. Even fewer believe me when I argue for the existence of an afterlife on the grounds that we must be able one day to properly compare the champions of different eras.

Surely, on some vast, green racecourse in the Elysian Fields, on one of those incomparable autumn afternoons that settle over Melbourne in early March, we will watch one day the Newmarket of Newmarkets; we will rise to our feet as the field approaches the grandstands; and while Black Caviar is about to break clear, Bernborough, far back in the ruck, is about to make his move.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/off-my-high-horse-20121102-28orf.html#ixzz2BKovlXjp

 

Bumper list of poets in Tranter's Best Australian Poems 2012

I'm amazed that it's that time of year already, however it's good to know that Best Australian Poems 2012, edited by John Tranter, draws work from a long list of poets, noted here by Andrew Burke.

And Cordite editor Kent McCarter has remarked upon poems therein published in the last three issues of Cordite.

You can hear Josephine Rowe read "Atlantic City" here, and read Tiggy Johnson's "Photograph" as well.

as the man says, the elephant has left the room

At Jacket2, John Tranter has posted an excerpt from his recent article in the JASAL journal on the Internet and the history of Jacket magazine. Here's the abstract.

Australian poet John Tranter trained in all aspects of publishing, from hand-lettering to editing, from litho platemaking to screen printing, and developed an early familiarity with computers. The development of the Internet in the 1990s found him armed with a formidable array of skills. He published the first issue of the free international Internet-only magazine «Jacket» single-handed in 1997. «Jacket» quickly grew to become the most widely read and highly respected literary magazine ever published from Australia. In late 2010 John Tranter gave it to the University of Pennsylvania, where it continues to flourish. This memoir traces John Tranter’s publication of literary materials on the Internet including the technical and literary problems faced by «Jacket», and outlines the many other projects he embarked on that resulted in the Internet publication of over fifty thousand mostly Australian poems, articles, reviews, interviews and photographs. 

You can read more, and download the full article, here.