reeling and writhing

other reading, other writing

At the Varuna blog, Cate Kennedy talks about the need for feedback during the writing process from other writers and editors, and her appreciation for readers' remarks on her work.

It’s one thing for a critic to praise your deftness with imagery or whatever, but when someone feels moved to write that they’re planning on staying alive to read what you might come up with next…well,  that’ll get you back to the desk – elated and close to mysterious tears, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

There's a review of Judith Beveridge's latest collection, Storm and Honey, by Libby Hart up at Cordite.

Here's another beautiful bit of writing from Ampersand Duck, this time on some of her own work. What a fine photo-essay this is, on the story and making of pillow books. Get her into Black Inc tout de suite.

Looking for something silly? John Williams' personal collection of personals from the LRB is a hoot.

And here is something rather gorgeous I will get in my letterbox at some point, as a subscriber. John Williams comments that "It looks stunning. Not sure how it’s supposed to make the newspaper business feel any better, though. Not exactly a feasible model . . ."

Finally here's a great post by Alec Patric about the latest issue of Page Seventeen, and the life of small mags in general.

the way we published then...

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

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

...and the way we publish now

Jennifer Mills' cracker essay in The Reader, the first anthology from the Emerging Writers' Festival, is published in full on her blog. The trials of the festival circuit are discussed with complete frankness, something rare and precious these days.

People who are good at writing books (and I hope to one day count myself among them) are not necessarily also good at selling them. Or, indeed, talking about them. And yet, if you don't have a media-friendly persona, the publishing world doesn't seem to want to know you. They are looking for an angle to distinguish you in the crush of new books and new writers, but you know yourself to be a complex individual who is made up of more than just angles. You have curves and straight lines and scribbly bits. On the upside, journalists will sometimes recast you as the mythical, romantic figure you have always suspected yourself to be. But the process of being marketed is deeply compromising and can actually feel like some kind of identity fraud.

(Also noted by the Overland blog.)

new trouble in Paradise, says Stothard

One of the first reports has come in from the roundtable on book-reviewing at Princeton, and it's from Peter Stothard, of the TLS.

Participants included Stothard, Michael Dirda, Sam Tanenhaus, Jessa Crispin, and Steve Wasserman, who wrote this extensive summary in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007 (which has now become a subscription-only publication. Good luck to 'em.)

It's a potent piece of blogging, book-ended by Stothard evocatively reading Fitzgerald's first novel in the hotel where some of its parties were set. Two useful paragraphs suggest a direction for the future, not a surprising one to hear from Stothard's quarters:

Sam Tanenhaus's vigorous defence of the serious and popular in his coverage - with all the hackles it raises from those who distrust popularity at all - took me back vividly to my days of editing The Times in London. The 'serious and popular' is seriously hard. The TLS, by a contrast that could only be explained here at the acute risk of smugness, can succeed - and does - by offering a mix of exclusively the serious and sometimes difficult to loyal subscibers who prize us precisely and only for doing just that.

 Loyal readers paying serious money for literary criticism in a paper which has never been as dependent on advertising as the general press is a winning formula in these days. The World Wide Web, which causes such trouble to newspaper economies, is for us a powerful tool to attract new subscribers in places around the world which we could never reach by mail.

Enjoy.

from my email...

For it is true, some of us live in an Internet world. And isn't "Internet Tendency" just the best name ever for a service delivering an i-Phone app from indie publishers? How 'hubbly jubbly'.

Mc Sweeney's email newsletter promises great things for its new iPhone app, The Small Chair:

No longer will T-Pain be your only salvation on trains, during lunch, and through all the other empty gaps in a day. Allow McSweeney's to fill your moments of solitude, moments of togetherness, moments of intolerable boredom.'

Und so weiter. There's a review making extravagant claims about sales of The Small Chair, here at Boldtype.

Random House Australia to allow publishing at random

Australian Bookseller and Publisher Online announced this afternoon that Random House Australia (RHA) has launched a print on demand (POD) program that will allow it to produce single copies of out-of-print titles:

The program, which has been 18 months in the planning, is in partnership with Sydney-based SOS Print+Media and will cover out-of-print in-copyright Random House titles that sell nine or less copies per year. (Books which sell in small quantities of 10 or more fall into the publisher's short-run program.)

Random House sales director Gavin Schwarcz told WBN the program would ensure the publisher's books stayed in print, but that it was as much about meeting customer expectations as making a profit.

‘It's a reduced margin for us,' he admitted. ‘The author will make the same [royalties on these books], but it's all about service. I think with the world the way it is, the consumer nowadays just thinks if they want something they don't understand why they can't get it.'

Schwarcz said the POD initiative would mean booksellers could satisfy customer requests and added that such a program could even help to promote some out-of-print titles.

only connect

This is another reason I did the tinkering and am trying to read fewer feeds - so I can return to the odd spot of browsing and happen upon people like Lisa, a friend of George Dunford's  who is studying journalism in Paris.

Her views on the difference between zines and blogs are news to me, and fascinating  - she says in an earlier post, "Among the ex-pats here, zines are a rarity, with blogs the main way of keeping touch with people back home. And yet, most blogs do not have the same kind of sincerity or passion that's found in a zine. There's a real love for the zine making process which gets lost when sharing your thoughts becomes as easy as clicking the "Publish" button. "

One of my Facebook friends uploaded photos of his favourite zine front covers. Oddly, I was thankful that none of my zines were among the list. Every now and then there are discussions about digitising zines – but to do so would to lose its meaning. I love reading back on my old zines because it reminds me of who I was at a particular time in my life, and how much I’ve changed (or haven’t changed) since that zine was made. There is an honesty in these early zines, an intimacy between myself and the 50 other people who managed to get a copy. Many things shared in the zines are things that I would not tell an online audience, where strangers from all over the world could find and read it without its original context. Rather than trying to get as many web hits as possible or having an eternal presence on the World Wide Web, I want my personal zines to remain ephemeral. Perhaps the same could be said about squats.

Posted at her blog, Colours of Bohemia, and also published in the Sticky newsletter early this year.

Via the Sticky Institute, someone else discusses these issues at Barnard, Columbia, no less - Jenna
Freedman. Lovely.

the book has a collaborative future, says Stein

While Bob Stein's address on the future of the book at the Capitol on Thursday night was riveting stuff, its delivery was not without some issues - it never ceases to amaze me how MWF administrators manage to program digital publishing events in venues with no Internet access. While two years ago anyone appearing with Net-dependent stuff should have come armed to the teeth with backup plans (including the ability to use a screen set up in a tent!) it's a tad surprising in 2009 that we still need to spell this kind of thing out to festival organisers.

Is it really that hard to let a presenter on digital issues know that there are digital issues with the venue well in advance? Not only that, but as with Germaine Greer's address in this venue a year ago (not part of MWF), it was apparently not possible to have stage lights dimmed, making it hard for Stein to see his own laptop screen while presenting. I doubt the magnificence of the venue made up to him for that, if indeed he could see the damn place at all (Greer could not, and complained she could not see us several times).

Rant over. In a rather large nutshell, early work with text and video at the Voyager Company showed Stein that 'a book is a medium where the user is in control of their experience', in other words, 'user-driven media'. In the early '80s, a book was also what he described as a 'random access device' - and in that sense, without the availability to the general public of recording and rewinding tools, television was not.

In his work on the Criterion series of films recorded on laser disc for Voyager, Stein watched films and 'read' movies the way he read books, turning back and forward, stopping, repeating bits he needed to see again, developing multimedia features now common on DVD, such as director commentary.

He left Voyager in the mid-90s but was coaxed back into publishing sometime in the 'noughties, eventuating in the development of the annotating tools and projects for which he is best known. 

so click through now

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

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

books, spelling, e-readers, ghosts galore

Just In. A simply smashing post on early writing from Penni Russon.

My other top selection for the week is this stupendous post about Venice and Tintoretto, from Fiona's exceptional Strange Fruit blog on painting, photography and writing.

It is time to thank poet and writer George Dunford, of Hackpacker, for his great article on litblogs in last week's Big Issue, which I fortunately got into town to buy late in the week while attending to some panel discussion and the launch of Nathan Curnow's  Ghost Poetry Project, which was a very moving occasion (photos from Sean M. Whelan there). More of that anon. (Update: the article is now available to read on George's blog.)

Feel bad that others can't see what you are reading when you carry your Kindle/iPhone/iLiad/whatsit around? (Not really an Australian problem yet, is it?) Etsy may have the solution. Via Three Percent.

In Readings in Hawthorn this morning, saw a very attractive display of Faber Firsts - enjoy those retro covers for the modern era if you haven't seen them already. (Let's face it, I saw mine in the shop, so I'm last to the party.) They are rather fine, and for some reason I think I like them better than what I've seen so far of the poetry. A little overdone? I just don't know.

just waiting for me to find it - bookshow of the century

...and it has no silly visuals, no annoying fake bookshelves, just pure refreshing chat. ONCE A WEEK at this stage, anyway, tune in not just to Lake Wobegon, but to Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner's radical new take on conversation around books, the Twenty-First Century BookShow.

First seen on the Overland blog, where Jeff casts a sober eye on how we will continue to talk about books, and where.

I know where I'm going to be every week. In this instalment, listen to Zoe talk about YA novels and hiding in the library, and Louise discuss the problems of short story dissemination and the first Cutwater anthology. In one take, like Ella, including a sneeze. FAB.

See you next week sometime, as there's lots going on and I'm off to watch Episode 3 over lunch.

the pick of the feeds (stars down on the right as well)

There has been a lot of wild speculation afoot regarding the potential release of an Apple product which might (gasp!) combine e-reading with other things. Mitch Ratcliffe of Booksahead is trying to put out some of the flames before there's a fire. Bookseller.com has more information here.

The Guardian has a great interview with Shaun Tan, as well as news of the discovery of some previously unseen letters of Flaubert's in a British stash.

I have been following this guy so I can find out things like this quickly. Richard Nash speaks to Publishers' Weekly about his past at Soft Skull and his newest venture, Cursor.

I have enjoyed reading Kris Hemensley's correspondence with his brother in Dorset this week. And I am very fond of the Australian Ballet's excellent blog, Behind Ballet. Here is their tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, by Martyn Pedler, complete with video.

candide gets an e-reader

I saw this video from French publishing company Editis and downloaded it last night from its original source thanks to a tip off on Twitter from Maud. However, the original video is full bandwidth quality and takes forever to load (I checked 250 feed items and was still waiting), so the obliging folk at if:book have found us a lower -res version on YouTube, which still looks quite good in high-quality mode.

It does give a tantalising glimpse of how the ideal e-reading solution might work in the best of all possible worlds. I could well be in line when they beam these up.

there will be links

A new online mag - via Stephen Romei, the ALR editor at the Ragged Claws blog, there's news of a shiny new publication with a contributors' page living in Facebook Land called The Group.
It will be curated by Larry Buttrose, Mark Mordue, James Bradley, John Birmingham and Billy Marshall-Stoneking, and its main interface is here.

And if I were in Britain, this would be fun.

Speaking of the UK (and also Ireland) the Australian Poetry Centre's international circuit places have been awarded to Robert Gray and Alison Croggon (reported here by the Currajah weblog at Walleah Press.)

I've been coming across Ivy Alvarez' work here and there - and found this Hong Kong journal, Cha, via the Canongate writers' network, Meet at the Gate, with two of her poems in the current issue.

Would you just look at this lovely thing (and the great snaps).
And these 'nice publications'.

Hardly a bustle in the hedgerow - more of an alphabet.

And finally blogpost title of THE WEEK.

something ingenious and lovely...

...to enjoy.
And remixing will be provided (see the Made tab for details).

Bless good ship Cordite and all who sail in her. This will be my main online reading for the next week or so.