reeling and writhing

comus in furs

Alison Croggon is blogging from London at present. Check out her review of Sisters, an adaptation of Chekhov's The Three Sisters playing at Notting Hill Gate, and sundry Royal Court productions, as well as this review of a masque by John Milton and counter-masque by John Kinsella, staged at Christ's College, Cambridge.

The double bill of Comus and Kinsella's 21st century reply was staged in the very hall where Milton was proclaimed Lord of Misrule as a 19 year old student:

Milton reclaimed the masque from its courtly excesses, recasting it as morality tale that defends chastity against the chaos of sensual riot. The plot is simple: a young woman (the Lady) becomes lost in a forest, the home of a wicked magician who, with his half-animal revelers, lives a life of sexual and sensual excess. But with the help of her two brothers, her innate virtue and the intervention of an earth goddess, Sabrina the Nymph, she fights of his seductions.

However, it’s more complex than it first appears. True to the ambiguity noted by Blake when he said Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”, Milton permits the Bacchanalian Comus to run away to fight another day, still clutching his magic wand.

Kinsella’s version, which was commissioned by the Marlowe Society, sticks closely to Milton’s structure and even, intriguingly, his language, and brings the sexual perversity that is subtextual in Milton rampantly to the surface. Certainly, in its radical message it’s very much in the tradition of Milton. The contemporary version of Comus is an out-of-control genetic scientist who swallows handfuls of Viagra and amphetamines, and after her adventures in the forest, the Lady becomes an eco-warrior. But again, all is not quite what it seems: the ultimate triumph of Virtue is merely another form of corruption, in which the wilds of England are preserved at the expense of the wildernesses of the developing world.

This handsome and generous review of a student production wears its author's considerable understanding of the genre and its contribution to 20th century theatre lightly. As with all Alison's criticism, this is a delight to read and a surprise to find online, free and for nothing.

things I have and haven't read

Well, as for TBRs with web-links (distinct from the head- or notebook- links), this is where I keep 'em. When I can be bothered listing links and recommendations, that is.

Keeping a list is, I think, often as much about where it resides as anything else. (The 'foine woines' list lives in a textfile on the desktop. And I like it like that.)

As well as making this link available here on the blog, I promise myself I will try not to write posts about books I am yet to read. I will probably fail though.

And what HAVE I read, apart from books I need to read for the July ALR? I have been poking around in sundry journals - GoingDownSwinging 26 looks and sounds positively glamorous, HEAT is up to its usual scintillating standards, the poetry in Emma Lew's collection Anything The Landlord Touches (UK reprint, also available at Giramondo though) is being slowly sampled, and I've been rereading bits of that old essentialist W.B. Yeats, from whom I need a fix every now and then. I'm dipping into Kundera's celebrated Curtain, which is a tonic and a half, or should that be seven? ten minutes in already and I've found something I can use. So clear, so easy to read. If only all literary criticism was this lucid. (Do note that at the end of that Washington Post review of Kundera's essay, Michael Dirda gives us his gmail address. Indeed.)

Delia Falconer had a terrific review of James Wood's YOU KNOW WHAT in the May ALR (it is almost time already for another.) I will also add at this point that Kerryn Goldsworthy's brief note about the tensions of meshing fact and fiction comes attached to her review of three books in the same issue of ALR, and opens up some issues in recent Australian fiction for reflection (not available online, unfortunately.)

I read almost in its entirety an enthralling article on creative industries and Marxism in Arena Journal by Paul Magee, which I was supposed to be indexing for the Australian Education Union, where I have been a temporary library techie recently. I'm unlikely to be doing that in my current temping position, where I'm cataloguing titles like Outlines of Employment Law. But I do have a room with a view, possibly the only office in my life I've ever spent more than five or six minutes in with a free view attached. I try to look out the window and stretch my eyes away from the screen as much as I possibly can. I can see the Bolte Bridge, Telstra Dome, the licorice allsorts AFTRS building, even a bit of the bay. It's amazing, and the secretary in the next cubicle comes in to get her coat from the rack and lingers, saying, 'Wow, this is such a nice office.' If I close my eyes I can imagine jazz ballet rumbles on the roofs nearby. Perhaps I shouldn't close my eyes too often.

I have read, at two sittings, the US edition of my blogger friend Mark Sarvas' Harry, Revised  (prior to receiving Garner and Kureishi's new books for Mother's Day; so now they have to wait). HR will be released in Australia by Text around June (there is a Readings review here.)

I found some things to my liking there, including little echoes of one of my very favourite books, Billy Liar, whose unreliable, unforgettable narrator ("Shaddy-shaddy-SHADDERS!") I fancy Mark could have emulated rather successfully. There are certainly glimmers of the mordant Billy in there at times.

Part of me admires Mark (of Elegant Variation fame) almost pulling off a Billy Liar persona in a middle-aged man. Part of me wonders why such risks should be taken (though there is a case to be made for a film somewhere in all that). That's the part that would have liked to read a rerun of Billy Liar, I think, rather than a modern tale of LA life and love loosely entangled with The Count Of Monte Cristo. Billy, of course, had his own rich inner life and did not need (ahem!) to seek literary inspiration. But I did dally over a huge copy of the Dumas in an op-shop. One book inevitably, ineluctably leads to another.

When all's said, it is, after all, much more exciting that Tim has revived Sterne, where he writes quite often about things nobody will ever read. So get over there.

say a prayer for the dying

Peter Rose's ABR review of Helen Garner's first novel for fifteen years, The Spare Room, is online and (as a less refined person might say) SMMMMOKING.

This is probably the toughest review Garner's story about caring for a dying friend has had so far, opening as it does with the tart observation that this novella could easily have been written as nonfiction.

Hel’s pride is easily stung. As long as she has practical tasks – beds to strip and change, ‘straightforward tasks of love and order’ – she is composed, but soon she is worn out, anxious, resentful. There is no acknowledgment of her literary obligations or of her solitary nature. Hel seems most alive when she is on her own. The best writing in the book depicts sentience in solitude. A violent thrill runs down her arms and ‘seethes’ in her fingertips. Night noises lull her: ‘Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing: to groom itself.’

Hel is almost professionally observant. Like Isabel Archer, she is ‘constantly staring and wondering’. Nothing escapes her: the neurosurgeon’s fat, penile Mont Blanc pen; the sort of men who can crack their spine and ‘make it crackle all the way down’...

When Nicola’s niece and her boyfriend pay a visit, the young woman is appalled by Nicola’s presumptuousness and her lengthy stay. Hel wants to sob with gratitude: ‘They were young, they were sane, and they were in my corner.’ While Nicola sleeps, the three of them laugh at her demands and swap stories about the inconvenience of it all. Not all readers – not all carers – will relish this Hobbesian pugilism.'

These are tough words for an uncompromising book which I am yet to read (doing that tidy thing that some of us do of getting my review reading out of the way first and saving TSR for 'afters'). Intriguingly, Rose seems to be looking for some respite himself from Garner's somewhat relentless evocation of anger as the enervating emotion it can so easily become, noting that this does not dissipate or evolve towards the novel's end.

Which makes for a powerful review from one of our best critical readers, and increases the pull of the unread book even more at my end.

(And yes, I'm also leaving it on the kids' shopping list for you-know-what day. Why do the bookshops parade all those pastel coloured books around for the day of buying big for female progenitors? Sussann's has BLACK japonaise-patterned flannel pyjamas this year. Get with the program, folks, get The Lost Dog out there for starters.)

Finally I must congratulate ABR for having such a sterling piece of criticism online for us linking folk. Luminous and numerous gold stars for you.

world class reviewing in the Weekend Australian - read all about it

Time to subscribe to Luke Slattery's blog. This is one of the best reviews of James Wood's How Fiction Works you will ever read. I have missed your literary journalism, Mr. Slattery; I used to ask myself, where did that lovely Francophile Slattery person go? And assumed, rather foolishly, that perhaps he had managed to slip away from us all. To la belle France.

And now feel rather silly that I don't read other bits of The Australian, or I would have known, wouldn't I? Hopefully he won't let all that great extra-curricular critical reading go to waste before he hits fifty, and will give us more like this review soon. We could do with a few more philosopher-journalists who write this well down here. Or anywhere else, for that matter. The opening lines will give you a sense of the crackling brio with which he tackles this much-praised book, and you won't stop:

James Wood's brilliant career -- though still in his early 40s, the English-born literary critic is a professor of critical practice at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker -- registers the rising cachet of high cultural capital in a pop cultural age.

It's anyone's guess whether, by the end of his career, Wood will have become a stronger critic than his illustrious mid 20th-century predecessors such as William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Edmund Wilson. But he is already an establishment figure enjoying the sheen of minor celebrity, bestriding the prestige end of the academy and literary journalism.

Yet his new analysis of fiction's interior workings, though bright and occasionally brilliant, is not entirely convincing. Animated by a restless speculative energy and a bravura style, it aims to march literary criticism into an engagement with moral philosophy.

I do hope this courageous and beautifully written review is widely read.

added to the reading list

This is from a sobering review of seminal Irish historian R.F. Foster's new book by Colm Toibin, in Bookforum:

It is possible that the money has created full employment, and this has, indeed, made a difference: Irish people can do their suffering at home. But on some level that even a historian as subtle and ingenious as Foster cannot measure, Ireland may have remained the same. We cannot ask historians to open windows in our souls.

And a brief if stimulating discussion of prizes for Australian writing about women can be found this week at Pavlov's Cat, along with a reprint of Kerryn Goldsworthy's Sydney Morning Herald review of Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, which is up for the inaugural Barbara Jefferis prize  (still no news on this today, though it was announced yesterday - must have just missed the papers, and the ABC news, by a whisker). Kerryn has the news on the winner too, Rhyll McMaster for Feather Man, though it's not on the ASA website yet.

Both of Kerryn's posts indicate that I must get The Lost Dog read pronto, (well, after Toni Jordan's Addition, which I've just started, anyhow) and that leaving it to one side for most of the year has been an error I will correct as soon as possible:

This book is so engaging and thought-provoking, and its subject matter so substantial, that the reader notices only in passing how funny it is. At one point Tom goes to ask the neighbour Corrigan to keep an eye out for the dog, whereupon the narrator produces a sentence worthy of Patrick White: ‘When the Australian desire to provide assistance meshed with the Australian dread of appearing unmanly, it produced the bluff menace that was Mick Corrigan’s default setting.’

Michelle de Kretser is one of those rare writers whose work balances substance with style. Her writing is very witty, but it also goes deep, informed at every point by a benign and far-reaching intelligence. She is still winning prizes for her 2003 novel The Hamilton Case and she is certain to win a few more for The Lost Dog. Publishers Allen and Unwin have shown their faith in her by publishing this novel as a beautifully-designed hardback.
(Kerryn Goldsworthy)

*To update further, I have some not-so-humble remarks from an earlier date on Feather Man (which I have read) here.

ern is alive, well and painting up a storm

If you're going through or around or near Bendigo on or before March 18, make sure you catch this.

I had a bit of R+R up there the other weekend, and enjoyed it very much, as well as a trip to the Bendigo art gallery itself just across the street, and a good hike around the city (AND A RIDE ON A COUNTRY TRAIN for the first time in about thirty-four years. Why have I left it so long? Added to list of excellent 3/4-hour writing spots - the cafe at Southern Cross Station, overlooking the country platforms. 'I had not thought death had undone so many', AND IT'S CLEAN AND SHINY and there's bloody good coffee.)

I lifted a quotation from an installation of winebottles at the exhibition I was in town for, to give you a taste of the Heide-mentary flavour artists Kahan, Johnson and Burder infused it with. See this as a bottle label, of course:

Grunge Hermitage

Grunge Hermitage is generally regarded as Australia's
most influential red. Full bodied and spicy, it is the
ideal accompaniment to any art of a modernist
flavour. This great wine is made from selected
hermitage grapes grown on the rolling hills of
Bulleen in Victoria. Matured in small and exquisitely
crafted Murrumbeena ceramic ramekins prior to
bottling, Grunge Hermitage will appreciate with
additional historical perspective. During bottle
maturation it may show a slight crustiness -
therefore it is recommended that it be debunked
prior to serving and imbibed with due irreverence.

Worth seeing for the cheeky kitchen and modernist en plein air photos alone. And I didn't even mention the 'Chorus Line of Images of Evil Plus SpaceHopper', did I? Or the 'Stoush in the Kitchen Garden', or the Ned Kelly wallpaper? Even Max Harris' hair is not immune from the  mockumentary treatment. This is the show's second outing so far: to top it all off, it was created at Bundanon when all three were on a residency there. There were even a few penguins in view...

in which an australian book is reviewed - Feather Man

When Christina Hill reviewed Australian poet Rhyll McMaster's first novel, Feather Man, for Australian Book Review last year, she placed it in 'the disturbing genre of Amy Witting's I for Isobel and Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra By The River.

In so doing I think she has perhaps not made enough of  how a disjointed, sometimes dissonant style communicates the protagonist Lyce's precarious grasp on reality in this book, and of how deeply shocking the behaviour of the abusive neighbors is (first Lionel, the abuser, and then his son Redmond, whom Lyce later marries). While Witting's Isobel is capable of devastating observations, Witting has never opened with something that could compare with the first chapter of Feather Man, in which twelve year old Lyce is deliberately, quietly and methodically raped in a dirty chicken shed by her neighbour Lionel.

Lyce, whose nickname is Sookie, is observant and articulate, but is constantly under threat of collapse from within. (For most of the book we do not know what her real name is, although it is quoted teasingly in an epigram at the beginning.)

Understandably, after this event the narrative fragments into a series of vignettes, clashing with each other in time and perspective, often sliding between tenses, as she distances herself from her own pain by acutely observing her family and the very few friends she manages to collect. We can only guess that Sookie is hardening over like a tortoise, building a carapace against the world, for most of the book focuses on what she notices about others.

I felt at times the style in this book was quite rough, almost clunky. It took me half the novel to realise this was deliberate and significant, and for that first half I felt quite impatient with the author. There are some disjunctions that, if they are not deliberate, are just plain careless - on page 58 the child Sookie quotes Goethe, even though she is speaking in the present tense, where in the next paragraph she is reading a children's book, Saggy Baggy The Elephant. But perhaps this is in character for this unstable, rather than unreliable narrator. Everything she tells us does hang together and make sense - but it is a bit jumbled at times, sometimes giving the sense she is talking aloud to herself.

The ending also reflects this play on instability, rather than a straightforwardly unhappy ending. This is a bold and assured debut effort which maybe could have been even more powerful with stronger editing, introduced by an epigram from classical literature about Lyce, the nymph who bound Daphnis to be faithful to her upon threat of blinding. Though in Feather Man, it is debatable whether Lyce manages to blind anyone but herself.

oh, an impossible person

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

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

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

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

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

a year of first lines - 2007

Now I think this is a neat meme: it's done the rounds of library land, and  I first spotted it here (thanks Constance!) - but like this person, I'm going through the year from the beginning. Bear with us both for being ornery, everyone else is going backwards, blog-style.  Please adopt it if you like it - and do let me know, so I can have a look.

Each month links to the post from which the first line only is quoted (well, all right, one of mine has two lines). It acts as an overview of your year in (journal/blog) writing.

January Elsewhere's Telly Meme - has been everywhere. I refuse to start a TV category as this will be a lonely post. But it's a good meme, worth a run, and thanks to Ariel for getting me started. (Now if I'd picked up Gravity's Rainbow, I'd be back in bed asleep by now...)

February Congratulations are due to Will Elliott whose first published novel, The Pilo Family Circus, has won the Golden Aurealis award at the annual Australian awards for genre and young adult fiction, held this year in Brisbane.

March 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. 

April If you live in Melbourne, Victoria, then you are invited to a 'massive bash' this Thursday. Sleepers Publishing are holding a salon to launch Conceived on a Tram: A
Book of Cartoons, Illustrations and Graphic Stories Done in Melbourne.

May News of Don Burrows' recent admission to the Jazz Hall Of Fame has jogged my memory about a fabulous evening I had last year...I'm ashamed to have filed it away and forgotten about it, but it was a magnificent occasion and I was delighted to find I hadn't deleted the post I did write later that year.

June This article (link from Miriam Burstein, the Little Professor) points to a range of difficulties emerging with the Google Books project, including poor cataloguing.

July  Not quite sure how this will blog up - we are Internet free this week, and this news has come to hand from Victoria McClelland-Fletcher from the Australia Council, so I'm posting it in only slightly edited form in at the City Library.

August
Found 'in an unguarded moment...'investigating NoveList, a database for selecting books based on readers' preferences which is syndicated to Victorian public libraries and has some intriguing subject headings, I found that under "Elvis Presley impersonators" there are 21 books listed!!

September I was sitting in the Latrobe Reading Room yesterday and got the vibe that prizes were in the offing when photographers snapped Alexis Wright and two other writers sitting on the desks in the row in front of me.

October Aduki Press is about to become the very first publisher in Australia to give a book away online, in addition to selling it in hard copy.

November I got my act together and finally went to my first, and the last, Sleepers' Salon for 2007 on Thursday last, at the Trades Hall bar.

December Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine?

Happy New Year, everyone. A new year, a new government. Hopefully a new decision on water recycling for Melbourne...

Carpentaria is 'simply the best' and coming to the UK soon

While I'm really not crazy about the whole BEST BEST BEST thing, I would like to share some news I picked up at a recent book launch, from no less a person than Miles Franklin winner Alexis Wright herself. It's official - Constable and Robinson will publish Carpentaria in the UK next year. Here's my earlier review of my Book of the Year.

Others of note, cheerfully disregarding dates of publication, were (including non-fiction):

Adamson, Robert. The Goldfinches of Baghdad

Cheever, John. The World of Apples

Farmer, Beverley. Body Of Water  (writer's journal and stories, my review notes here)

Goldsworthy, Kerryn. North of the Moonlight Sonata

Jach, Antoni. Napoleon's Double

Lofthouse, Jacqui. Bluethroat Morning

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow (HA! Finished.)

Stow, Randolph. Visitants

(here's the non-fiction, now:)

Farmer, Beverley. The Bone House

Garner, Helen. The Feel of Steel.

Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Life.

Koch, C.J. Crossing The Gap: A Novelist's Essays.

Knowlson, James and Elizabeth (Eds.) Beckett Remembering:Remembering Beckett

Moretti, Franco (ed.) The Novel (vol 2.)

Nehamas, Alexander, Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty In A World of Art.

Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.) Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling

I did read a bunch of other stuff, some quite new, and all listed here, if it interests you. Also if it interests you, I have just subscribed to Publisher's Lunch, where I followed my nose to this news regarding Helen Garner's latest (due 2008). Apologies if you already knew, but it is news to me.

If you're more interested in what the English think about the French, however, then over at Figaro, Bruno Corty is keeping an eye on the TLS's review of best books for 2007 and noting that French writers are on the Brit critics' lists.
And if you're still greedy for lists, (you absolute glutton, you), there's an exhaustive list of best US books (and others) of 2007, over at the Millions book blog.

the great unconscious of the intertubes

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

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

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

words are bullets...

...speaking of which, I have published recently at Cordite on the continuing online development of Australia's literary journals, alongside the upcoming issue, no. 26, "Innocence". Get over there and take in all manner of good things, with poetry selected by guest editor M.T.C. Cronin.

David Prater, the general editor of Cordite, will have his first collection of poems, We Will Disappear, launched at the upcoming Melbourne Writers' Festival. He also has had the improbable pleasure of bumping into the reclusive Thomas Pynchon on the New York subway not so long ago, when Against The Day was still in pieces (and apparently Mr. Pynchon was carrying them around.) His account (and review of Against The Day) is here.

why Carpentaria is a winner

It's probably not the first time an author has provided an explication in essay form of his or her latest work, but the announcement last week of the 2007 Miles Franklin award reminded me that I had yet to fully read Alexis Wright's essay in HEAT 13 on her winning novel, Carpentaria.

I read Carpentaria for myself and reviewed it in 200 words for the Big Issue here in Melbourne four months ago now, after extracting a promise from the books editor that I could review it here as well later on. I'm sorry I've let so much time slip without organising my thoughts on this exciting work at greater length - 200 words is indeed haiku when it attempts to speak of a novel that reaches effortlessly across cultures, mines contemporary cultural research and resonates as extensively through collective memory as this one.

It was helpful to go from my first reading of Pynchon's seventies opus, Gravity's Rainbow, into this gorgeous Rainbow Serpent of a tale. There are stylistic issues common to both which are easier to handle if you're already in the groove of reading across many voices and viewpoints, although Carpentaria is more approachable than that other, not much heftier Rainbow. In her essay for HEAT, Wright speaks of her attempts to create an authentic storytelling style using local voices and rhythms from the Gulf area of Northern Australia resulting in heavily visual storytelling and writing. She evokes a powerful, probably perfect image to describe the results of her efforts:

...the written form is also visual in that it looks something like a spinning, multi-stranded helix of stories...The helix of divided strands is forever moving, entwining all stories together, just like a lyrebird is capable of singing several tunes at once.

live author is on ur screen, eating up ur bandwidth

The blog of the Internet marketing director for Holtzbrincks', Jeff Gomez, carries the ominous title 'Print Is Dead'. In this post he gets pretty excited about the future of book flogging using videos of only the most attractive authors. According to Jeff, if you're not a good looking writer in the future, it won't matter how good your book is, you'll be as high and dry as silent movie stars during the rise of talkies.

Christy Dena has noted some of the first examples of this over at Cross Media Entertainment, and puts a more positive spin on the development than Mr. Gomez, suggesting that video podcasts can communicate more information in a shorter amount of time than audio podcasts (as you'll see if you go take a look, Simon and Schuster's output at BookVideoTV is video podcasting).

Christy is an advisor to the Australian Literature on creative opportunities for writers in new media (among other things), as well as a tertiary lecturer in games and alternative worlds and a consultant in universe development. Her perspective on all developments in publishing, wherever it occurs, is always worth a look, and I really enjoy her blog and another website on text arts forms she contributes to, WriterResponseTheory.

While I agree with her that video podcast is not such a bad idea if your only option is to listen to the promotion of a book, I think that the speedy provision of detailed information is where print reviews have a huge advantage over all these whistles and bells. Not only does the writer get to hide - useful if you're not as photogenic as Allison Dubois, or you don't like getting caught in the wind like Marianne Wiggins, here. (God, she handles this well, I'd have been throwing a whopping tantie to get a better day for my shoot if that was me).

But print reviews and interviews are really easy to read FAST. And I can't see a great deal of benefit anyway in promotional material where the writer sits with you to tell you what a great book this is. No way am I going to read it just because the ad is on the telly, or a computer screen or mobile. The Book TV videos are not giving us much information, and whatever they do offer is prettified up to make us feel there's a product involved somewhere, and the author loves it so much they're happy to stand out in the wind on a beach and tell you all about it with their mouths full of hair.

I really doubt that this will work for readers who have always made considered buying decisions based on print reports. But perhaps we have always been in the minority.

Over at Dan Green's Reading Experience a few weeks ago, Colleen of Chasing Ray discussed the nature and purpose of the reviews she writes for the American Library Association's book review publication, Booklist. There's a place for short, sweet and devoid of literary criticism, even in reviewing. (I'm not sure if I need shots of seagulls and piers as well, though.)

The recent campaign of US bookreviewers to keep book reviews in newspapers has brought the whole function of reviewing under closer scrutiny in the US across several book blogs, and deserves a post on its own. For now I'll say there are reviews, and reviews - and there are also floggings, now available weekly on a phone near you.

meet the mother who cannot (really) spell obsession

As Judith Lucy might say, I have been a regular Google Reader slut the last few weeks. I weaned myself off checking email, but now I check feeds at least twice a day. Now I'm trying to find a new obsession - reading books is looking pretty good.

It may not be to everyone's taste, but I found this article by Peter Carey (picked up by Maud) excellent. (I think I must be one of those people who subconsciously believes the stories and novels of the world are a constant quantity, and that if too many people are writing they will somehow dry up.)

As Bud Parr notes, the Complete Review just added a complete new feature - Review Overviews, here. Congratulations to Michael Orthofer for making this wonderful online resource even better.

Hmm, my son is doing Sudoku and the nine letter word quiz daily in his gap year - he might enjoy this test. ( He is damn good at the nine letter word quiz. One of those people the word leaps out to from the page.)Link via Ed Champion.

I have a new blog to add to my US list, Chasing Ray. Colleen Mondor writes for the ALA's Booklist (pub of book reviews for librarians) and Bookslut.
Colleen has me feeling guilty about not writing enough reviews - see why, here.

Continuing with reviewing issues, which continue to be hot in the US following the protests  over the sacking of a books editor in Atlanta a month ago,  there's news of a reviewers' database  opened recently at Publisher's Marketplace. (Link via Critical Mass, the US book critics' weblog.)

And Dan Green thinks that books will survive without book reviews in newspapers, but not without literary criticism.

Carrie Frye of Tingle Alley recommends Dwight Garner's new book blog at the New York Times Book Review, Paper Cuts, and applauds Mark Sarvas' new initiative "Second Look" where there will be more attention given to books he might have missed first time around. She sees this as an extension of online writing about books against the tide of gossip and towards more independent discussion, free of the inevitable buzz surrounding publication.

There's a really neat roundup here of online collaborative writing applications, from Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb.

Finally, this is quite old news now - but BoingBoing reporter Xeni Jardin thinks she has uncovered the origins of the LOLcats way back in the early 20th century. What, no intertubes? She has received supporting documentation from Ape Lad, whose grandpa apparently drew them for a newspaper (before cheeseburgers were invented, according to one commenter.) If anyone out there has confirmation that this is a furphy, please advise this ignorant blogger.

off in the blue yonder

Susan Wyndham has done a solid round up of the news on Richard Flanagan's latest book, The Unknown Terrorist, and its overseas reviews, and gives the backstory on his indifferent reception in Australia.
I noted that Peter Conrad, a fellow Tasmanian, is keen on the new book and has also had a nice time panning Cultural Amnesia in the May Monthly (as I did reading his cheerful excoriation.)

I'd like to assure Conrad that if James is telling us he mispronounced 'empyrean' for 40 years, that's a dead giveaway that it was being pronounced in his head rather than in conversation (and thank him for wading through the whopping tome to find that little gem.)  My daughter thinks perhaps all James' friends only used this tricksy word sparingly - and that maybe more than a few of them had it wrong, which is a tempting thought.
The Monthly have some back issue articles online, so maybe this one will be put up in a couple of months and then you can all read it.

On foolishness, and hasty reading

Whew!  a while since I've written about what I'm actually reading, so here are some notes on Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies, which I purchased twice last year (returned one copy after I discovered the other hiding behind a double stack of books), and have just finished.

I wasn't quite sure about this book - perhaps I read it too fast, perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention to nuances of mood therein.

I have read The New York Trilogy and loved it, and have read some of Auster's stories. I've also seen the film of Smoke, and wondered if Auster had a narrator like Harvey Keitel in mind here.

Also in another rather ungainly sense it seemed to ape the concerns of Peter Carey in his tale of art theft, though I suppose this conceit is common enough in New York.  Perhaps that's what I didn't quite get here: the filmic sense of this book, its cinematic qualities, didn't quite allow Auster as a narrator to disappear enough.

I think he manages this better in the sparsely furnished universe evoked in the New York Trilogy, with its concentration on a small cast with very little to do but emphasise tiny details in pursuit of mysteries, where some characters even carry the author's name from time to time. But in this setting he hovered behind Nathan, his narrator, to pull strings and make the characters jump around, leaving me vaguely uncomfortable. I wasn't sure if I was being told a story or invited into someone's rambling thoughts, the movement of the book shifted uncomfortably between one and the other.

It's definitely a more populous and porous narrative, though, ready to translate to screen. I found it a bit noisy in some respects, I put it down and picked it up again and couldn't easily remember where I was in it. First signs of ageing? or just reading too many things at once (hopefully the latter.)
But on first impressions, I found it crowded, and the sting in the tail came a bit too late to redeem the folksiness of what went before. Unlike Miss Fairfax, though, I am always happy to modify first impressions.

I could stand some rain on my windowpane...

Laila Lalami offers a summary of some figures on literature in translation from the NYTBR (and a good perspective), here.

Running alongside the upcoming Sydney Writers' Festival, the programme for the two-day symposium, 'Remembering Patrick White,' is ready to roll, here. ( I would go to SWF to gape at Richard Ford, but I'm better off putting my money into a rainwater tank. As you do in Melbourne. To keep it dry.)

In the US, there's news of the loss of more book review inches in mainstream publications, and John Freeman is urging critics and reviewers to complain from the NBCC's blog, Critical Mass. Link via Mark Sarvas, who has a fuller report here. Though we are not losing whole book sections, I'm scanning our Age and Australian lit supplements at weekends with similar concerns regarding reviews of Australian fiction - they do seem a bit light on the ground at present, and I hope it's my imagination.

And this sounds bad enough to be worthy of attention.

ready for reviewing at SLV this weekend

Mike Shuttleworth, of the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria, informs me that he has put together a workshop on review writing, to be held at the library this weekend.

It has been designed with reviewers of young adult fiction in mind, but has equal application to anyone either interested in, or already engaged in writing reviews for publication.
WHERE and WHEN?

Saturday, March 17th
Conference Centre Lounge
State Library of Victoria
Entrance 3, La Trobe Street
1.00–4.00pm
Cost: $30.00, Subscribers to BookTalk: $25.00

For booking enquiries phone 8664 7262 or email youthlit@slv.vic.gov.au

In other Victorian book news, it's great to hear that the Australian Book Club at Readings bookshop is going so well that they will be running two full meetings a month. For March, members will be meeting to discuss Rodney Hall's Love Without Hope, with new books by Deborah Robertson and Gail Jones to follow.
Email Aviva  for further enquires at avivatuffield@yahoo.com.au.

Finally, I heard some humungous figures at the Library Unconference last week for SLV's incredibly popular program, Text Appeal- as Paula Kelly now knows, my previous remarks were firmly tongue in cheek. They had over 800 participants in the last sessions, have been invited to provide considerable media commentary on the program, and people keep ringing up to put themselves on a waiting list for the next one. Books are much bigger than we all think, even in tooled up Australia, where Internet use is the highest it is anywhere in the world.
Now, if Apple had an iPod Speed Dating event, knowing what I know about music and lists, I think it would be - well, mayhem, actually. Much wiser to stick to one book per session per person, isn't it. (Which is a nice spot from which to nod to Sophie Cunningham's piece on blending book collections, over at Sarsaparilla.)

I had the very great pleasure of co-presenting at the Library Uncon with Paula and her web project manager Lili Wilkinson (she of the excellent YA blog and website, InsideADog), on books and blogging. I've had a bit of a rave about it all over at Library Sputnik (and got a bit carried away, I think - but judge for yourself. That's the kind of day it was). Thanks again to Christine Mackenzie of Yarra Plenty Libraries and her wonderful team, for running a very inspiring event, may there be many more opportunities for Victorian libraries to pick each others' brains using this highly creative format.

summer rain, summer links

Cordite 25 is now online - 25 Generations of Zeroes, edited by Alicia Sometimes. This poem by Joel Deane, 'Hansard', reads like a sombre rerun of Glass House montages. I also liked Carol Jenkins' 'Dispossession'. Cordite has notched up 10 years this year, as has HEAT magazine, and congratulations are due to both.

Jill Jones has done some welcome research on the smell of rain. And having had our first substantial drop for several weeks, and only the second downpour in many months, I had to remember to note it down to mention here, after I went outside and sniffed that sadly elusive vapour and said to myself; what an AMAZING smell rain (whoops I mean petrichor) has.

More on poets under the fold...

australians all let us review

Peter Rose, A Case of Knives. (Allen & Unwin, 2005.)

A jeu d'esprit, Kerryn? In my opinion, it's more than a game.

Something dark and chilly takes hold of this glittering, sometimes noisy book towards the end, and for that I was rather grateful as at times it deliberately read like a gossipy, top of the market Mills and Boon (well, okay, more like Pope really. Not that there's anything wrong with that...Whoops, he quotes Stendhal and the brothers Goncourt as well. But in a totally gossipy, Julian Barnesy kind of way.)

I do admire the games being played with the reader in this book, though the time-shifts became a bit tiresome - a couple more characters' perspectives might have been easier on the reader than two protagonists struggling with their memories. The flashbacks settle and coalesce in a reasonably satisfying dénouement despite this, which resonates fairly successfully past tale-tellers Julia Collis and her protégé, Matt Light, out into the past and future of all concerned.
This is a coruscating, wickedly funny, gleefully tacky book, showing a poet's eye through epigrammatic prose, keen wit and a sharp eye for physical and emotional detail which rarely fails to miss the mark.

google schmoogle Miles Franklin longlist

Feeling jaded - you should see all the hits I got from mistakenly putting 'shortlist' in the title of my last post on the Miles Franklin award. C'est ridicule.

As I'm writing this the night before the real shortlist is announced, after a week of hardly any sleep and having just withdrawn my son from a camp next week as he is quite foolish, I have to say, why all this fuss about prizes? All those books look terrific. Why can't they all have a prize?
Sighted this evening in Angus and Robertson, Forest Hill Shopping Centre, Melbourne: a neat green tag alerting us to the presence of the sole longlist novel in supply that evening, Peter Rose's A Case of Knives.As my daughter and her friends would say, Go Forry.

A sad remark was made by Alex Miller, author of Prochownik's Dream, earlier this week in the Courier Mail:

"Winning the Miles Franklin is the only thing that gets you out of the book pages and into the news pages. You get fabulous publicity, but the response by the bookshops is crap. When the Booker comes out, the shortlisted books are in shop windows for weeks. That doesn't happen with the Miles Franklin."

cultural journalism round-up is rocking

I found this link to a round-up of quality arts journalism some time ago - in his introduction on the main page, Jason Gross devoted most of his introduction to several similar lists to decrying the role of blogs, remarking that they are endangering the discovery and retrieval of quality journalism.

I've yet to explore any of these lists in great detail, but they're enticing and the Music list got a grudging mention from Alex Ross, who languishes in my sidebar under a general category. But it's crowded over there...Never mind, there are many links to music blogs at his engrossing space, The Rest Is Noise.

* Sorry this has been rewritten - apologies, erasing bits simply wasn't enough!A botched and un-botched post.

to respect the reviewer

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

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

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

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

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

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

a list with a twist

Thanks are due to Jeff Bryant and his collaborator TJ at The Syntax of Things. Their list of Underrated Writers for 2005 is now up - we'll be reading all next year:

As you'll see, the results are interesting.  We were able to compile a list of 55 writers from 15 different litbloggers who hailed from four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Australia).  Of these 55 writers, we had only two who received more than one vote.  In addition, the writers ranged from obscure Brazilian poets to a surrealist painter to young adult science fiction writers. Some names are familiar; others we're sure you won't recognize.

The presentation of the recommendations is really nifty - quotes from our supporting remarks, links of interest, and three sidebar lists of writers, bloggers, and bloggers' recommendations. Who said all art is useless? Definitely a pre- PHP statement. Please read and enjoy, and go on to read said writers' works.

all ern's children

Here at Cordite, the children of ghostly Ern rage against the machine. All good clean hoaxing fun. Amusing to hear Jim McAuley and Harold Stewart, creators of the original Malley, described by Cordite editor David Prater as "twin Geppettos". Hehe.

In other Ozlit online excursions, I zoomed through the journals on the sidebar here recently to reassess their online presence since Anna Hedigan did an extensive review of their websites in Cordite two years ago. Here's what she was looking for:

A dynamic site might generate interest to increase subscriptions, or at least encourage people to search the journal out in a bookstore; more traffic means more people know about you and appreciate your content. Surely Amazon has proven that of all things, people feel comfortable buying books online, so why are Australia's journals so slow to pick up on opportunity? A brief look at sites like Granta, admittedly much better funded than many Australian journals, and smell-of-a-wet-rag operations like Diagram and the Land-Grant College Review show some journals are far, far more savvy when it comes to enticing online readers to cough up for hard copy.

And this is what we are still stuck with to date:

Southerly – absolutely ZILCH online. I don't think they should be in the sidebar at all - look but don't touch, children.
Quadrant – poems from August and five articles – progressively less in eds closer to December.

Overland – bloody dreadful. I have already linked to two issues this year, in that time no other content from them has been put online. In the previous edition , Bias and Bullies, absolutely NOTHING is online. Issues 180, 181 – minimalist contributions.

I’m going to the library to read Meanjin – well, okay, I might even buy it. Kerryn has an article , 'Going Global:Charting transformations in the concept of ‘Australian Literature' ' which I ‘d like to read. However I won’t be reading any other content of theirs online – because NONE of it is up there except the titles and the authors’ names. Groovy. Has anyone asked them to put it online, I wonder?

Eureka Street – no RSS, however some articles from the current issue are available online, complete with an invitation to comment via email. Back issues have to be ordered in print format only.

Australian Book Review (ABR) is keen to be seen to be making an effort  - as Anna noted, this site is almost there. About six articles an issue are available online. No RSS options.

Hecate – All online. Get your Australian Women's book reviews here, folks.

Heat – How fricking disappointing. This is one of my favourite journals. This is just locking up content plain and simple. Really. Even a few excerpts for teasers, annoying as it is with the competition, would be better than this.

Thylazine is bloody outstanding. All online, no government funding and they raise money for NT projects at the same time. See, it can be done, people.

And as I mentioned before, Going Down Swinging and Cordite are the places leading the way. Anna had a broader vision, and warned all sites reviewed accordingly. One newer publication, the Griffith Review, had her cautious approval and has now steamed ahead in building an audience in Australia, due in part, no doubt, to providing plenty of content online to whet people's interest.

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.

the bridge is crossed at last

This is not indicative of her most interesting work, but a big welcome to the blogosphere is due to Kerryn Goldsworthy, Australian academic and writer, blogging at A Fugitive Phenomenon. What she doesn't know about Australian literature isn't worth blogging about. I hope this is the beginning of something big in Australian blogging as our lit specialists get their online feet wet. Then I can retire to my new blog at The Weblog Repository and observe them getting down and dirty with new media.

Please check out the whole blog while I attempt to answer her somewhat challenging antipodean meme with as few gaps as possible.

1) Which Australian poem are you most confident you could recite from memory?

Dame Mary Gilmore's 'Nationality'(only 8 lines long) - and dribs and drabs of C.J.Dennis' 'The Play'.

2) Which of the Seven Little Australians are you?

Pip, I reckon. (Sometimes Baby, when things go seriously wrong).

3) Which is your favourite Patrick White novel?

No favourites yet, as I'm not through with Mr. White. Started and abandoned about three to date - finished The Tree of Man. Ask my daughter, she reads all the White in this house. Short White is fine  though - he writes a mean story.

4) Which is the best Patrick White novel?

Haven't read enough to give this a burl. Any takers out there in litblog land?

5) Which Australian fictional/dramatic/poetic character do you fancy most?

Ern Malley - today he would have received a writer's grant and medical attention. My ideal working class, fantasy man.

6) And which do you identify with most?

It's a toss-up today between Eilishe (Criena Rohan's Down by the Dockside) and Athena in The Children's Bach (Helen Garner).

7) If you had to read five Australian poems to a heterogeneous unknown audience, which five would you choose?

'At Sandalwood', and 'Country Children'- Randolph Stow

'Twins' - Gwen Harwood

'Suburban Song' - Elizabeth Riddell

'The House of God' - A.D Hope

8) Which five Australian books would you take to a desert island?

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony - Henry Handel Richardson

The White Thorn Tree - Frank Dalby Davison

A.D. Hope, Selected Poems

Bruce Chatwin, Songlines (it's ABOUT Australia among other things)

Barry Hill, Broken Song:Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession

9) If you were a guest at Don’s Party, would you be

(a) naked in the pool
(b) upstairs having sex
(c) outside having sex
(d) sulking with a headache
(e) huddled round the TV
(f) crying
(g) more than one of the above (please specify)
(h) other (please specify)

I'm sorry, Kerryn, but I would have been in bed after handing out DLP tickets all day - in other words, I was too young, stupid and impressionable for Don's Party!  (thanks to the Google Fairy for this link!)But if they had it now, I'd definitely be in the TV huddle.

10) Tim Winton or Christos Tsiolkas?

Both.

11) Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson?

Henry.

12) Henry Lawson or Barbara Baynton?
Barbara, definitely. Though Brian Matthew's Louisa does gives us a Bayntonesque picture of what Henry drew on for the Drover's Wife.

13) Was Helen Demidenko guilty, and if so of what?

I heard she was a plagiarist. Whether or not she wrote an anti-Semitic book is open to negotiation. She also impersonated a Ukrainian immigrant. In other words, she crossed a few lines and 'rattled some cages'.

14) What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen at a writers’ festival?

When I went to hear Germaine Greer speak several years ago at the Melbourne Town Hall, I went around the wrong side of the hall (up Little Collins Street) and accidentally queue-jumped a queue that went way up Collins Street on the other side. I didn't find out until I was seated that I had inadvertently pushed in to a very crowded and popular event. But nobody else saw me. I hope.

self-made reviewing

The latest issue of Boldtype , the online book review magazine, has been guest-edited by Mark Sarvas and Maud Newton. Editor Toby Warner explains the title of the issue, 'Self-Made':

We hate to say we told you so, but the future of book reviews is online. Besides our own efforts, the past few years have seen the rise of literary bloggers — passionate readers who cover the high and lows of book culture on their own websites. This new generation of digital literati have called out the flab in the major Sunday supplements, turned their favorite titles into successes, and even banded together to form a taller soapbox — a more viral model that's starting to challenge the power of the old-school press. So for our October issue, we asked Maud Newton and Mark Sarvas, two of the most prominent (and trafficked) lit-bloggers, to take the helm of our "self-made" theme and select some titles for all of you. See which books made the cut below. We've also created a blog for Maud, Mark, and myself to riff on the idea of starting from scratch. Check back in the next few days for the ongoing conversation.

Blog posts to date discuss Maud's dislike of collaboration and a shared concern from the pair that others will be annoyed that they have given space to a review of fellow blogger Laila Lailami's new book. Also discussed is the importance to bloggers of the negative review, and how they got over their scruples regarding this staple of litblogging in order to select some fairly positive reviews from a large bunch for Boldtype. Bouquets to you both.

keeps raining all the time

A new day, a new online literature publication ( meaning I haven't looked at this before - of course it's not really new). Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading has a piece in Rain Taxi on litblogs which pretty much sums up what it's all about for most of us, though I must be one of the very few that blog on the weekend, I think. Link from Matthew Cheney at The Mumpsimus.

blog v.study:Round 1 to the blog

Some links and stuff I have been accumulating while waiting for the semester to start:

From TEV, an article on writers and blogging, as well as a neat review of Julian Barnes' new book from the Times Literary Supplement;

A splendid grouch from the Sydney Morning Herald on the new Sydney Public Library - thanks to the ALIA list for the link, and apologies for the registration wall of fire.

Maud, Mark and a few others are finishing novels - however, what if you are considering getting started? A bunch of hooptedoodle, according to Mack, is pretty necessary...(Apologies if you are a Steinbeck fan and already knew this, and thanks to Amanda for educating me.)

And Mr Waggish has a telling post on blogs and genres, including this fine throwaway on the 'gestalt' of litblogs - apparently we're "more Balzac than Joyce".

Great BritLinks

From Scarecrow, a Top Ten of Britlit blogs. (Try saying that six times quickly).

And from Four Eyed Bitch, some good news for smaller bookshops (see her June 13 entry, no permalinks to be found):

Chat-up line of the week: "There's a de Sade to me that you might not like...."

The Daily Express  has a feature today about find-a-date nights in bookshops. I put the newspaper to a higher purpose by recycling it, but the gist of it was that a) it's better than a club and b) the book is the source of the conversation c) it's for people who like not to judge a book by its cover. Not in the aphoristic sense, anyway. Because what you read is always an indication of your swampy, soulful depths, of course. Will this catch on? Perhaps this is a way for the independent bookshop to stake its territory?

gwenda was shaken, and I meandered by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

john kinsella is not peripheral, says henry

A new collection of John Kinsella's poems, edited by Harold Bloom for Norton, is reviewed in the latest Jacket by Brian Henry. A US reviewer who spent two years in Australia on a Fulbright scholarship in the late '90s, Henry is disappointed in the collection, arguing that Bloom wishes to see Kinsella as a 'solitary Orphic poet' and is trying to fit Kinsella's work into his own canon instead of introducing him to the US as a formidable poet in his own right.

In an apparent attempt to present Kinsella as a lyric poet in the tradition of John Clare, Hart Crane, W.B.Yeats, Robert Frost and John Ashbery - all of whom Bloom mentions in relation to Kinsella in his introduction to the book - Bloom omits almost all of Kinsella's linguistically innovative and collaborative poems as well as his most politically oriented poems. Bloom's editing of Peripheral Light distorts, dislocates and diminishes Kinsella's achievements....

It is clear that Bloom is slotting Kinsella into his canon as the first and only Australian poet to deserve inclusion - an odd gesture considering his enthusiasm for Kevin Hart's poetry and Kinsella's own championing of Australian poetry, particularly that of Hewett, Tranter and Dransfield.

Them's fighting words, Mr. Henry. Elsewhere Bloom is accused of 'editorial violence', and of diminishing the 'formal range of Kinsella's poetry'. Henry ends by pronouncing Peripheral Light to be 'a bittersweet achievement', after reflecting that it presents a lop-sided collection of later work to the American public as Kinsella's first collection published there.

But here's the rub, to my mind: Henry claims that Kinsella's poetry has been collected only once before, in an English publication, The Undertow: New and Selected Poems (1996): however, Poems 1980-1994 is available in the US (order online through Powells).

Not only that, Norton also has another Kinsella collection,The New Arcadia:Poems, coming out in June/July. So perhaps Kinsella, himself a founding editor of a poetry press of international standing, has had more influence in the selection process for publication in these collections than Henry was able to assess while reviewing Peripheral Light:

The most apparent solution would have been to allow the poet himself to decide which version(s) of himself - which "John Kinsella" - to present to readers in his first book published in the United States.

Do we know that he didn't? I'll wonder on.

lost in bold translation

From Boldtype's latest edition, news of a new, 'luminous' translation of Georg Buchner's Lenz, from Archipelago Books, by Richard Sieburth. The translation is collected in one volume along with the original German, the diary of Pastor Oberlin with whom Lenz lived when he was mentally ill, and an essay by Goethe.

Also notable is the link within the Boldtype review to an encyclopedia I haven't seen before, the Literary Encyclopedia. The accreditation of online reference works can be a tricky business - this one is produced by a network of academics, including two old stalwarts of the Australian literary establishment. So probably worth linking to now and then - after all,

We pride ourselves on offering a digital system which is as good as anything you can find on the net, and light-years better than most, and we aspire to the highest scholarly and humane values.

I found the entry on Lenz's life and work informative and substantial enough for a work of this scope, ( and it is free after all). His major work on German realist drama is evaluated briefly as well as his relationship with Goethe. I'm looking forward to dipping in and out of this cyber-collection as time permits.

Finally, if you're new to Boldtype, it's deliverable by email! Monthly.

The Guardian’s quick picks

If you can’t wait for me to dig up the Guardian list, where Mark Sarvas was damned with faint praise ( bastards!), here it is.
On revisiting this list I realise I haven’t looked at a lot of these other than Bookslut and TEV – the rest may well be English. Je ne sais pas. The time may well have come for a blog that reviews litblogs. Why leave it to the newspapers?

Sweet surrender

Peter Craven gives high praise to Sonya Hartnett's new book in today's Review ( Weekend Australian) - not easy to see from here however, so here's a slice:

I don't think any of the feasible interpretative systems - Laingian or Jungian, Christian or gnostic - can contain this luminous nightmare that Hartnett has thrown in our faces like a revelation. The only thing that remotely reminds me of Surrender is the verse novel by the great Canadian poet Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red, a long poem of contemporary life and one of the greatest poems of the past 50 years, in which the young hero is also the monster Geryon, red and winged. Hartnett is a writer of vast ambitions and singular gifts. Her imagination is as savage as Dostoevsky's or Emily Bronte's and as gothic as a death's head. She has as keening a sense of the tears in things and the doom that falls like rains as any latter-day tragedian from the American south. It's fortunate that she also has the humour and the poetry to make the art she creates wonderful and bright... [Surrender] is full of beauty and terror and unearthly poetry and it traces with something like love the beauty of youthful faces that must fade and die. Sonya Hartnett is 36 and has been a published writer of fiction since schooldays at our alma mater, Siena College in Camberwell ( a pretty bland space for such a talent to mature in - our other famous past student is Magda Szubanski, Mrs. Hoggett from the Babe films.). Other novels include Sleeping Dogs, Of A Boy, Wilful Blue and Forest. I can thoroughly recommend Sleeping Dogs and Wilful Blue, and am yet to read the others. She does have a spare, dark touch as Craven notes that is easy on the ear but not gentle on the imagination.