reeling and writhing

reading this week at Collected Works Bookshop: Susan M. Schultz

Kris Hemensley welcomes all to a reading by Susan M. Schultz, the editor of Tinfish poetry journal, at  Collected Works Bookshop on Wednesday evening this week. (Issue 17 of the journal is available free here from Tinfish Press , and 'centerfold' artworks from the last eight issues may also be viewed online.)

As is usual with the events at the most specialised literary bookshop in this city of books, a gang of other poets will accompany this distinguished visitor, including Michael Farrell. Here are the necessary details. Susan Schultz has a blog on her editing, academic writing and poetry, here.

Patrick White award to Beverley Farmer

Ralph at Currajah was very quick off the mark last weekend! picking up the news of Beverley Farmer being awarded the Patrick White prize, and spreading the love, along with her misgivings (see Susan Wyndham's report, here).

(If you cannot read that bio on Austlit because you are not a subscriber, you should be able to join using a public library card, or a State Library one. Or you can read this older bio by Laurie Clancy, with some good notes on her books, which does not include her latest publication, The Bone House.)

One of my favourite books is Farmer's collection of diary extracts and short stories, collected mainly around their writing, A Body Of Water. There is a story about a Buddhist retreat in that volume, complete with a diary account of the retreat, that provides a magnificent study in how to render fiction out of memory.

Farmer is a prose poet in many ways - from her notes from October in that book comes this account of reading at Mietta's, a fine restaurant with literary leanings, at some time in the eighties:

Heat and sun for the first day of daylight saving. I read a story in the "Readings with Readings" program in the Lounge at Mietta's, among the fringed lamps, clustered gold bubbles of light overhead, black statues bearing flowers - heat and smoke drifting. The dappled grey marble of the round tables, bright with the light of wineglasses.

At seven o'clock tall buildings still reached up into the sun.

In the livid night sky - never black in Carlton - a crescent moon lay on its back holding a smaller moon clasped, a dim full one. (On top of a stupa they have an orb in a cusp.)

Further up that page, she writes of a house she had rented by the coast, somewhere near Lorne:

Skirting the full frog pond with a chilly scud across it, over the road and dunes you go down onto the surf beach. The tea-trees up there in the dune-folds are whiskery knuckles, leafless and lichen-splattered, scraping the sand. Though the sea is so near, there's not a whisper of it, as if this really were another time.

I liked living back there, deep in the tea-tree. Glaneuse Road: after the French barque Glaneuse, wrecked off the surf beach in 1886 with her bottles of contraband cognac. (And Glaneuse, gleaner: what I was and am.) For those six months I was suspended out of time in a glass lantern, not swinging - still, somewhere between two seasons. An old life, a new.

From A Body Of Water, UQP: 1990, p.188 (the one with the Matisse painting on the cover, yesss. Iss mine, preciousss.) A volume of Farmer's longer, meditative essays on art and life, The Bone House, is available from Giramondo. I don't know how many of her other books are in print - her Collected Stories have been on school reading lists from time to time. She spoke with Clive Hamilton and Alfred Yuson on Radio National's Book Show on the art of the essay in 2006 and a podcast is still available, here. I have also found an essay in Island from 2005, 'The Dog Of The Work', in my travels...Enjoy.

reading notes: Brooklyn, The World Beneath

I swear that there are things in Colm Toibin's books that just cut me open, they do (and the interview in that link deals with a few of them, as well as being quite wacky in places). I remember finding The Heather Blazing, the first book of his I read way back last century, a bit clinical: Brooklyn, while returning again to Ireland, seems more assured than his earlier work, even than the precisely calibrated Blackwater Lightship.

There is an almost miraculous engineering of narrative tension in this beautiful book. Toibin conveys the helpless ratiocination of demure Eilis Lacey in a third person narration that is barely coloured with her emerging sympathy for others, so that she just manages to stand out as a character from a cast of much stronger people and two vibrant, colourful backgrounds in Enniscorthy and Brooklyn.

The total effect is just riveting, and perhaps those who were expecting a noisier book may not be in complete sympathy themselves with Toibin's utter success in placing us in an inarticulate Irish migrant girl's shoes. There are several moments where the sheer pity of it all is just overwhelming: Rose prefers not to marry, as she notes what it has done to her friends, while later Eilis waits for her mother to tell her that she will miss her, and waits in vain.

Lives of quiet desperation indeed - the bitterness of the young women in Mrs Kehoe's boarding house could supply a pickle factory. I have some thoughts on how Anne Enright's comparatively tougher style may have influenced Toibin's work here, but for now I really just want to read it all again ASAP. And then his earlier books as well.

Another book that has given me a powerful buzz recently is Cate Kennedy's first novel, The World Beneath, which I found magnificent. The only fault I can find with this book is the use of the noun proletariat as an adjective on the first page, by Sandy, who it transpires is a bit clumsy with words anyway. Apart from that, it is a flawless, absorbing, zeitgeist brokering threehander. (And 'zeitgeist broker', as far as I know, is Kennedy's phrase.)

There's a fine, if brief, review in the ALR by Kerryn Goldsworthy and some notes here on her blog, and I concur completely with the parallel she draws with The Slap: I certainly noticed a similarly acute observational bent in this novel. Jo Case in her ABR review  is concerned that structure sometimes detracts from the overall achievement in this book, but otherwise notes Kennedy's skill in bringing characters to life:

Kennedy crawls expertly inside the skin of her three central characters, assembling word pictures from telling details that enable us to know them better than they know themselves, and avoiding the novelist's trap of sacrificing nuance to secure the reader's sympathy.

(That link may endure for a few more weeks as the ABR website seems to be in flux. It may even stay there for a couple of months if we are lucky.)

I am ready for another novel by Ms Kennedy anytime,and a film of this one, as Kerryn suggests, would be very welcome indeed.

one book to bring them all

From Constance, at Ruminations:

One book you’re currently reading: The Broken Shore by Peter Temple (and a nice change it is, too!)

One book that changed your life: Anne Kotzmann's Listen to Me, Listen to You

One book you’d want on a desert island: Dictionary of Literary Biography, although it would be a bit of a fucking tease after a while as none of the source materials would be available, would they?

One book you’ve read more than once: Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

One book you’ve never been able to finish: Never say never...

One book that made you laugh: The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi

One book that made you cry: Little House on Rocky Ridge, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, for children, by Roger Lea MacBride. Something sick and twisted inside me admires those frontier landgrabbers, Charles and Mary Ingalls. Because they were cheerful - grand daughter Rose speaks here of spending time with Grandma and Aunt Mary in their later life and their indefatigable ability to stay positive - 'doesn't the rain sound good on that nice warm roof over our heads'. That Pollyanna thing, only tougher, more Fordian around the edges. 

Somewhere in that book a family friend or relative recounts that the older Ingalls were never really the same after Mary was disabled. They had counted on her to be the 'clever' girl, the schoolteacher, and their self-esteem, that insouciant restlessness that Laura celebrates in every book where her father features, apparently took quite a beating. It is quite hard to reread the books in that context, especially The Long Winter. She was a flinty chronicler, that one.

One book you keep rereading: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One book you’ve been meaning to read: The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

One book you believe everyone should read: not known to me. I was given a hard time for failing to embrace other people's recommendations when I was young, and I'm still in recovery.

secondhand news, but expensive enough

Happy New 2009, everyone.

I don't know if this link to AbeBooks 'Most Expensive Books' list will stay put - I receive these via email, not sure where else they are filed on the Abe site once they're old news though. I will keep an eye on that. To add to that, here's a list of books with unusual bindings that are currently passing through the enormous online secondhand booksellers' hands. (There's a rubber book with a zip down the bottom...)

Down at Queenscliff last week, I saw a pretty dark orange, green and cream Spode platter that was also expensive. And prior to that, we dealt with a kitchen island bench in the rellies' holiday house that was pretty busted (and is going to be considerably more expensive).

We emptied all the crockery out after the small, late-sixties legs on the bench had withstood the cracking of the particle board base of the cabinets away from the framing base, and the subsidence of the whole seven foot long bench and cabinets straight into the floor. Three glasses were broken and that was all - fortunately no one had their toes under the cabinets at the time. The plumbing still works, though one sink will not drain properly at an angle of 15 degrees. Funny, that.

This happened at my in-laws' beach house. Moreover, on Christmas Day an entire trestle table gave way at my sister-in-law's house, covered in food in sensible plastic dishes. Nothing was lost.

A week has passed and I have no news of a third thing about to fall, though the family is large enough to be its own population sample...the balcony on the beach house has just been replaced, so at least it won't be that.

When not wrangling kitchens (including cleaning out my own prior to the holiday to make it less welcoming for bugs that like to come over when I'm not there to squash 'em), I am currently trying to read Foster's History of Ireland 1600 - 1972 - I am up to the Famine and some more familiar names, and just about ready to retire and leave the rest for later.

I have finished and found Antigone Kefala's Sydney Journals deeply refreshing, and now want to read this. I was sent two Mini Shots by Lisa Dempster, having mentioned a couple of her authors here, and thought they were terrific, and particularly liked the miniaturised format.

A Vignette Press Mini Shot looks like a story crossed with a zine, designed to high publication standards and produced with its own graphics, and neat enough to feature in cafes or slip into a bag or glovebox, to have handy in a dull moment. I don't know enough about zine culture to make judgments here, but has this been done with short fiction in other states? looks very Melburnian to me, and of course, great fiction too.

I am also lining up to read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, on loan from eldest daughter, and really enjoying browsing this, my own Christmas present to me, purchased on the advice of the lovely Daniel at Artisan Books.

If you are ridiculously well off, then here's a link to some of the originals in a gallery. Those, I cannot afford.

The book is a beautifully produced and quite adequate substitute, for the price, and has an absorbing introductory essay about the garden at Eichstatt, the production of the florilegium and its early publishing history. And it's available from the brilliant Artisan Books in Gertrude Street, next door to Vixen (full of more things I can't afford) and just up the hill a little from Arcadia, whose incredible brekkie burgers I can afford.

Be nice to your kitchen cupboards, y'all. Unless you like cardboard boxes, that is.

Today is also incredibly special, windy and hot as it is, as I have (gasp) no more teenagers in my family. How did that happen? I blinked and there it was. Happy birthday, Pat - and many more.

walking and shimmering is more like it, jen

Three cheers for Jennifer Mills, who has been travelling but nonetheless has managed to pick up lots of good stuff. (There is more about her writing here.)

Everything I have read by Mills here and there makes me prick up my ears. There are some great posts on her blog about South America:

antigua was a bit stupid but the coffee was good and i went to a human rights film festival and climbed a volcano with actual molten lava that i got close enough to poke with a stick (literally. the stick went on fire and i felt like harry potter)

 - guatemalingerer

Shades of Mr Chatwin here ( everywhere, really)...

Ricardo was, like many truckies, an angel of the highway, but it was also a strange coincidence. in mexico i sometimes introduce myself as Juana to avoid the fifteen minute repetition of my unpronounceable name, and his sister Juana had just crossed the border into the USA illegally, with three young children in tow. we had an interesting conversation about the frontier, travel karma, and faith. there were many photos of the family in his mother's house, dusted like the two glass coke bottles that sat on her old lady trophy shelf among the ceramic dogs...i gave myself the day off thinking about politics and went to look at butterflies, which are pretty, alive, and constitute a suitably inane thing to do with the eyes after meditating on mortality. they are the same orange as the marigolds. i hope i never forget the sound of thousands upon thousands of butterfly wings in the silence of the forest.

-alert now orange

When people like this are blogging it makes one glad to be alive and plugged in to broadband. Jen is an online poet (who sells her own zines too ). She remarked recently that she doesn't blog often, but man, when she does, I sit up and scan that screen with greatly increased attention. I'll be looking out for her debut novel, The Diamond Anchor, in 2009.

rocking in the free world

I didn't get there - but Alison, as always, brings it on home. What a session. After her scintillating readings and discussion at MWF of Akhmatova, though, she was a natural choice for conversing with Patti Smith.
(Now I can't quite believe I've introduced myself to someone who has interviewed Patti Smith, can I.) Be sure to cross to Alison's link to read Chris Boyd's interview too.

Moving right along, from First Monday, the information management online journal, comes this article about Google and the Open Content Alliance digitisation initiatives.
Author Kalev Leetaru is interested in why no comparisons of both have been made to date, and claims that:

While the academic community has lauded OCA’s “open” model and condemned the proprietary Google, all is not always as it seems. Upon delving deeper into the underpinnings of both projects, we find Google achieves greater transparency in many regards, while OCA’s operational reality is more proprietary than often thought.

(Link via Creative Economy Online.)

Comics on a DVD? OH NOES. On the other hand, perhaps I would be able to obtain that Disney comic with Donald as Jason trying to win the Golden Fleece, that I remember from my earliest years. Yes, that was my earliest exposure to the tale of the dragon's teeth, I'm afraid. (From the Journal of Electronic Publishing).

what's on my table, mabel

From the Bedside Books Club quarterly meet this evening, here's my list of table reads, which was available there in hard copy. Here, of course, it comes with links to reviews and other descriptive noises, where available.

And my totally personal categories for this rather idiosyncratic list are - recent good reads, anticipated good 'uns, and desired rereading.

It was important to me at the time of writing the talk a couple of weeks ago to include rereading. It remains important, not just as the component of a talk, but also as a practice. It won't happen overnight, but by gum, it's going to happen.

Recently delighted by:

Adamson, Robert. The Goldfinches of Baghdad (poetry)

Carey, Peter. Theft: A Love Story

Cheever, John. The World of Apples

Cunningham, Sophie. Bird

Elliott, Will. The Pilo Family Circus (most of the reviews for this contain spoilers, though I'm delighted to see it was published in the UK in 2007, after release in Australia in 2006. Just read it.)

Falconer, Delia. The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers

Ford, Richard. The Lay Of The Land (third of Ford's Bascombe trilogy - all three come recommended)

Gray, Robert. Afterimages (poetry)

­__________. The Land I Came Through Last (memoir)

HEAT magazine

Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line Of Beauty

Hyland, M.J. How The Light Gets In

__________. Carry Me Down

Island - 'a magazine of excellence and variety'.

Jach, Antoni. Napoleon’s Double

Johnson, A. Frances. Eugene’s Falls

Knox, Sara. The Orphan Gunner

Kureishi, Hanif. Something To Talk About

___________. The Buddha Of Suburbia

___________. Midnight All Day (stories)

Malouf, David. The Great World: "that  rarity, a novel of genuinely epic scope" - and I agree with Publishers' Weekly there.

Miller, Alex. Conditions of Faith

Mitchell, David, Number9 Dream

(Cloud Atlas is also magnificent).

Moore, Lisa. Alligator

O’Connor, Andrew. Tuvalu

Stow, Randolph. Visitants

Van Loon, Julienne, Road Story

Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria

Looking forward to:

Ballard, J.G. Complete Short Stories

Conrad, Joseph. Youth

Some more Pynchon

Jackson, Shirley.The Lottery

­_____________.We Have Always Lived In The Castle

Jach, Antoni. The Layers Of The City

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain (recommencing and FINISHING)

O’Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia

Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road (will it be coming to a theatre soon near you, though? I wonder.)

Want to reread:

Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. Spinster

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre

Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire

De Kretser, Michelle. The Lost Dog
(Conflicted about this one and need to understand if its mannered style was a problem, and if so, why.)

Maguire, Emily. The Gospel According To Luke
(rereading is in order, to reconsider the judgments I made about it in a review in 2006.)

The first half of The Magic Mountain

Toibin, Colm. The Master

(This links to Toibin's website, one of the most accessible and interesting author spaces  I've found anywhere online.)

Winton, Tim. The Riders

Wordsworth’s early edition of The Prelude of 1799, in only two books rather than twelve -raw, brief and arresting, and still available from Norton along with the 1805 and 1850 versions.

What I am also looking forward to  if I can handle the suspense:

Bei Dao – poetry and fiction. (Prominent Chinese poet who visited Australia in 2007).

Enright, Anne. What Are You Like
(reviewed by James Wood in 2000.)

R.F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A brief history of change, 1970-2000

Harmon, Joshua. Quinnehtukqut
A debut novel by a teacher of writing from  Vassar.

McCann, A.L. The White Body of Evening
Recommended somewhere by Ian Syson.

Murnane, Gerald. The Plains

Grace Paley and Ann Patchett – anything! I need to catch up with them.

Portis, Charles. True Grit
A 1968 classic ‘comic Western’ which was reissued with an afterword by Donna Tartt recently

Silvey, Craig. Rhubarb (shortlisted for the Vogel around 2003)

‘Silvey shows amazing maturity and confidence for such a young writer. This offbeat love story about a blind girl and reclusive cello maker has a strong affection for its eccentric cast of characters and a ripe Australian sense of humour.’ That’s what the Vogel judges said. James Ley saw it differently at the time.

Zagajewski, Adam. Another Beauty
Colm Toibin describes Zagajewski as 'the best prose essayist alive'.(Critical Mass blog)

Read ‘em all already? Then have a sticky here sometime, and
don’t forget to check out Donald Barthelme’s suggestions while you are there…

(Apologies to those reading in feedreaders, I have updated this today.)

no paring of fingernails for you

For your enjoyment and digestion, here's a bleeding chunk of Hanif Kureishi's essay on writing, "Dreaming and Scheming"  from his collection of the same name (Faber, 2002), which recently tickled my fancy. I've displayed it in larger font because this template needs to be fiddled with - and I haven't had a moment for that recently.

The Modernist writers I admired when growing up - Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Beckett, Burroughs, Genet - didn't expect to trade in the marketplace. They didn't work on TV series or do adaptations on the side; they didn't consider writing for Hollywood. They were artists and individualists, to say the least; they had integrity. Commerce was corruption. The second-rate writers made a living at it; the artists didn't care. Graham Greene seemed an exception: he wrote good movies and novels that sold. Otherwise the world of the nineteenth-century novel - writer and large public in contact; writer to the side of, but part of the ruling class - didn't exist for serious writers. Story-telling in its crudest sense, as entertainment, as escape, had been taken over by the cinema, and then by television.

Yet Burroughs, Beckett and Genet did begin to sell in the 1960s and 1970s, as did Sartre, Camus and Grass; when I was at university writers like Borges and Marquez were in most serious students' pockets. Publishers like Picador made hip books fashionable and sold them to the same people who would buy The Doors and Dylan. The expected 'break' between artist and mass audience never occurred. Jut as in the  cinema there are usually a couple of 'arthouse' hits a year, so it is with literary novelists, some of whom 'cross over'.

The sort of writer you can be is partly determined by the market and whether you want to sell books or not. If you want to make a living by writing, the kind of work you will produce might be different to that which you'd do if you had another job. Your relation to your audience will be different. By the end of the 1980s the nature of the profession and the opportunities available within it had changed considerably. Book publishing, with the rise of massive media conglomerates, became more dynamic. There was more media, more places to promote books and more 'profiles' of writers.
THe intensification of publishing coincided with the rise of better bookshops - mostly Waterstones, then, a bit later, Books etc. and Borders...these shops started to organize readings, where writers and their public could, at least, see one another.

Each seemed curious about the other.

The small independent bookshop - much idealized and often useful - could, at times, drive you mad. These shops were usually small and the selections narrow. In places like Waterstones - if the past sometimes seems to have been expunged and you can only get the latest books - you can instantly get a good idea of what is in print....

The writer who disappears behind his work or seems to dissolve into it, is almost impossible in the modern marketplace...The artist has attempted to capture some kind of complexity while the media caricatures and empties people out. The writer is stripped bare; no mystery can remain, unless he turns himself into a grotesque enigma like Pynchon or Salinger and will, therefore, be pursued and caricatured even more.

(In other spots in that collection Kureishi writes about collaboration and its influence on his work, something I think is less often discussed than it could be in the mainstream press - how many well known novelists are there out there at present who regularly write for theatre and film, after all?)
Kureishi, Hanif. Dreaming and scheming: reflections on writing and politics. London: Faber, 2002, pp.267-268.