reeling and writhing

the meme (it's all about moi)

El tagged me last week, when I was in the thick of a few things (don't try saying that five times quickly). I've finally cleared these items for release.  So here we go:

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Helping with a Safety House committee, playing piano for a school choir occasionally.

Writing a romance, in a totally non-theorised litsnob kind of way, just to see how hard it could really be - and hey, it's harder than you think to write one you'd actually like to read. As I told my sister at the time, it was like completing a toile (calico or cheap fabric mock-up) for a haute couture garment and deciding, nope, this design is not really cutting the mustard, is it.

In 1998 I attended a twenty-year school reunion and realised I did not want to go around for the rest of my life telling everyone my son has autism and my life is screwed, and resolved to go back to university and try to get whatever a real job might be, so that I had something else to talk to people about. (I just realised that now, tarting up this draft. That was ten years ago. Whew.)

For that year and several following I was also trying to make sure none of us disappeared under the collective weight of autism and epilepsy, being the linchpin and main communicator with disability service providers, doctors, and three schools while my husband consolidated his career. Ten years on, we have fingers crossed - give or take more than a few glaring inadequacies in TEH SYSTEM, we seem to have broken on through to some kind of 'other side' - so far, so good, nobody's dead yet. In fact, we're 'feeling rather better' on a few fronts. Unrealistically, almost foolishly so, for the next ten years may be even busier. But at least I'm no longer terrified of the prospect of the next five minutes. (As Therese Rein has said, sometimes you just need to get through the next five minutes...)

All that said, I am looking forward to our thirty-year school reunion later this year. It's going to be a blast, and I may even turn up unfashionably half-grey, or nude. Or both. Nude reunions on Facebook - now I'd like to see that.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

1. King Island Roaring Forties blue, crackers and good red wine (all ingredients are part of the snack). David, whatever you bought us at the Standard the other week was very impressive, I hope you find out what it was because I am in need of some more.

2. Lindt dark chocolate with orange in it (both kinds).

3. Left-over burgundian beef casserole, OR curry, OR veg and gravy beef stew with tomato and paprika, cold, in chunks from the fridge. (Also cold pizza. YUM.)

4. Crumpets. Usually cooked and hot, though.

5. Doughnuts shared with young nephews and nieces.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

6. All of the above, but I try to eat less of them.

7. Those rosemary grissini you can get in Safeway.

8. Coffee from Atomica in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. Or Culinaria at Brentford Square, Forest Hill, which is getting better all the time.

9. Baby carrots, celery sticks with raisins, rice crackers (getting a bit sick of them though).

10. Viognier, sauvignon blanc and semillon blends, brandy and lemonade.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Get a collective of billionaires on the job. Given that along with the money I have the networking skills of a media mogul, right? the world in the palm of my hand, so what am I waiting for? what are they waiting for?

2. Fix climate change with said billionaires, and make everyone promise NEVER NEVER to mess up the ecology again.

3. Buy several farms and set up cluster housing co-ops with other families with disabled children to care for.  Harass all state governments to provide permanent support and staffing, as well as ongoing third party insurance to provide for supported accommodation in the future.

4. Bribe the Brumby government to change its mind about the desalination plant and recycle Melbourne's water instead. And install a fleet of cloud seeding aircraft at Ballarat and Bendigo, and put some serious scientific research and/or funding into this.

5. Buy that gorgeous creamy yellow and black schooner that's always moored at the St. Kilda marina and learn how to sail her. And blog about it.

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Shop assistant in Clark Rubber

2. Parent/ disability advocate (ongoing and permanent position)

3. Wedding singer - just the church,  no opportunity to abuse the crowd there though.
Unfortunately.

4. Personal care worker

5. Cataloguer

Three of my habits:

1. Drying the skin under my rings (quite a new one actually - there are good strong ridges on both ring fingers that require attention several times a day).

2. Not putting the packaging from shopping away immediately - leaving it lying around so I can feel I have achieved something by handing over cash and carrying something home again. I think.

3. Stopping in the middle and wishing, quite abruptly sometimes, that I was somewhere else.

Five places I have lived:

1. Kingsbury, Victoria

2.  Heathmont, Victoria

3. Mitcham, Victoria

4-5. Ocean Grove and Wye River (Vic.) for so many holidays that they almost qualify as two additional places.

Tagged: anyone who would like to do it  :-)

housekeeping

Not about the dying housekeeper's guide, this one (though I do want to read that later on this year).
Merely a note that I am breaking the link to the library blog on the right there for the time being. It's tired and it needs a sleep.

The name, however, is too nice to surrender immediately.

And I can thoroughly recommend the blogging platform it's hosted by.

I am perilously close to ending on a preposition there. Enough.

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.

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...

Reader, I killed him off

Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine? (Afraid to title this "A l'esprit de l'escalier', it's not fair to Googlers of idiomatic French.)
This is a post of afterthoughts, which came to me in an unguarded moment alone with books and good food at a spot outside Melbourne this week.

Last week at the Capitol Theatre, Germaine Greer put Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting Of Wisdom together fairly arbitrarily, perhaps with an eye to getting the punters in to discuss at least one book they have all read.
It's possible that not everyone in the space had read Mansfield Park all that recently, apart from the academics, as an absorbed silence hung over the assembly while GG dissected it for the most part of her lecture, leaving only ten minutes or so for Henry Handel Richardson's popular bagatelle, perhaps more a companion piece to her first novel and true bildungsroman, Maurice Guest.

In the spirit of the staircase I am sitting on a verandah in the bush today, turning over in my head, and admittedly practising out loud in the still house as well, what a question on Maurice might have produced in the assembly last week. Here's a fin-de-siècle female writer who adopts a male pseudonym to write a rich, overblown, rotting rose of a book about a young music student who blows his brains out for love, claiming at the time that she 'wrote many of my own [agonies of youth] out in the book, and came up a quieter and saner person.'
It could have been fun to go into HHR's need to get a boy to shoot himself for love (spoiler aside, Jane devotees might have enjoyed being alerted to the darker side that Richardson's own bildungsroman explored), leaving aside the concomitant issues of Louise Dufrayer's characterisation as a festering lily, for which there might not have been any time at all once Richardson's subversion of the genre into a suicidal downward spiral had been covered. Now I'd have liked to see that. Given Greer's brave opening about incest fantasies, it would have been fun to consider the gap between not marrying the heir to Mansfield Park, and killing off male protagonists under a pen name, wouldn't it?

Just two quotes from Michael Ackland's recent bio of HHR, on the reception of both novels, and then I'm done here: firstly, of The Getting Of Wisdom, H.G. Wells wrote to Richardson,

expressing his 'enormous admiration' for her novel ('your little rag of a girl is a most admirable little beast...I don't think this particular thing could have been done better')

and of Maurice Guest, the Times reviewer wrote:

' a fine achievement, thought it is too long and too full of morbid self-analysis and too relentlessly cruel in its denouement to be widely popular,'

while John Masefield remarked he could scarcely find its equal in the preceding decade

'for strength of purpose...[and]truthfulness, of execution and power, not of observation (since many animals observe more sharply than man) but of survey, as from an intellectual watch-tower'.

These are very much the afterthoughts of an idle mind, and I'm getting carried away. The theme of the Austen conference for which this lecture was the opener, after all, was "Jane Austen and Comedy".

And accolades are due to my bloggy colleague, Laura, of Sorrow at Sills Bend fame for a terrific evening, for which I understand she fielded last minute calls from television producers who thought they might like to film it (Ahem.) The story reads like a Frontline script and you can read it here.

four books I'll never receive

I'm looking forward to donating to Michael Palin's Reverse Book Club after reading this short story published in the Guardian as part of a celebrity auction being held shortly in Britain to raise money for Book Aid.

As far as I know there is nothing like it down here. What I like about this effort is that direct donations are converted into appropriate, often purposely published materials for recipients, and donations of surplus books are only taken if they meet stringent requirements...

tell me a story

Busy times down here.

Firstly, I've had a brief incursion into freelancing, covering the Digital Storytelling Conference here at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) last weekend for a film-makers' website. Fits in well in this space, so there is a list of links in the sidebar of the most prominent leaders in the movement, while a few more will reside in the body of this post.

Digital storytelling has a practice base of less than 150 known organisations in the world at present, however as it works to spread technical expertise within communities rather than aggregating it within a group of professionals, it will continue to grow.

In some respects it is low-tech multimedia, in other respects desktop scrapbooking with a voice-over. Groups represented at the conference were not all digital storytellers as it is practised in the US, at the BBC and here at ACMI - some were documentary film makers, some museum curators, one was an  interactive storytelling software developer, others were indigenous film makers and community website authors, or academics involved in youth projects.

But all their work is worth a look if you are interested in the potential of computers to democratise the media. From that magical place Canada, a shot of what it might look like on the box.

And my other life as a family manager and frustrated student? Writing in fits and starts fits in beautifully with all that - down to the index cards hidden away in the handbag where son with autism can't find them and repack them in a better place, along to the opportunities for negotiation with others over computer time. I think my youngest son gets a lot more homework done when I'm on the computer ostensibly 'earning', but mainly learning.

The downsides? the money, my stodgy style (not really like my blog at all, to my recruiter's well-disguised surprise), my innate desire to research rather than report, and the deadlines - flexible in this case, but very like school I must say. I'm very grateful to the networker who got me this gig as he's opened doors in doing so. Will I pass through them? I wonder.

In the meantime, I've got a paper to write and a supervisor to meet with - so Structured Blogging, look out.

this phone has moshed

An exciting saga chez nous today. My daughter's friend from primary school dropped in with her mobile. Said mobile was last seen in her pocket prior to the White Stripes' gig at Melbourne's annual music day, the Big Day Out, held yesterday in sweltering conditions at Princes Park in Carlton.

Get this, the phone fell out of her pocket at an evening gig, was picked up, the mate was called at random and just happened to be at the festival as well! making it way convenient for him to collect the phone for us. So there you go, honesty amongst 25-30,000 people. The number has been disconnected and reconnected today, the phone is a bit the worse for wear but still functions. And I thought I was so cool this morning telling Hutchinsons that the phone was last seen in a mosh pit.... Over here we call it 'doing a Lazarus'.

And just to be completely frivolous - here's The Battle for Broadband according to Chris Buzelli. Link from Bibliodyssey.

critical glue

Matt Cheney noted a few weeks back that Doug Seibold, founder of Agate, an independent US publishing house, has been frank about his feelings on writing about writing in a piece for the Book Standard entitled Bullcrit:

There have always been places where bullcrit especially flourished—college campuses, dinner parties, openings, the book-review pages of journals large and small. As with so many other entities, though, bullcrit has been transformed by the evolution of the Internet, and the proliferation of literary weblogs has opened up vast new cyberpastures full of truly jaw-dropping quantities of bullcrit.

I’ve always thought of bullcrit as a necessary evil, yet another expression of basic human frailty. But the closer I’ve looked at the way the book industry works, the more I’ve realized the fundamental role that uninformed judgment of a bullcrit-like nature plays in how books are brought to consumers. I’m not sure what I make of it all yet, but knowing that bullcrit is basically the glue that holds together publishing as we know it has forced me to reevaluate its importance.

One does not, of course, have to swallow said bullcrit though. No one is asking you to open your mouth, Douglas. Perhaps his tune would change if bloggers reviewed the offerings from his stable? Certainly one's jaw drops for a different reason when this kind of gold glimmers forth in the cyberpasture. (Thanks again Matt.) I'm going to print this Lethem interview out when the children have been prised away one by one from the new computer which we hope to collect on Thursday. I like to read these at a table with a cuppa, in the old-fashioned way. Dash it all, I've run away to uni today to write and mess about, while others swot for exams at home - I'll print it now. So go read it yourselves, I just know it's good already because all Robert  Birnbaum's interviews are terrific.

Over a week and no working computer apart from an heirloom 1994 Acorn ( only wired for power)stashed away in the teen son's bedroom - if I could get him out of bed, I could type and save text files for later consumption. I've been to the local library three times this week to check email. I think there is something really wrong with me - I tried to garden on the weekend and got a very stiff backside from bending over.

wired style and other constraints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech-free surroundings come at a price.

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