3000 BOOKS

Sticky apples.

2009-07-10T20:48:00.000+10:00

We use a lot of sticky notes at my work but they aren't as cute as these!!!!!!!! (via) Forgive the outburst, it's just that time of the week.

SSEDT

2009-07-09T10:03:00.001+10:00

Only, like, my new favourite website: That's Punny.

Look at that snub nose: Nick Cave reading from his new book The Death of Bunny Munro. (via)

Werner Herzog has a new book, Conquest of the Useless.

The Times has a new columnist: The Pedant, Oliver Kamm. But can he tell us why the column is filed in the women's section?

Rhys Tranter has mapped out the chess game moves from Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy.

A woman who did book design work for the late David Foster Wallace, and later became a friend, has written a tribute.

Submit a mobile phone poem for the Melbourne Writers Festival, you guys.

Now you can do me a favour.

2009-07-08T09:16:00.004+10:00

This post may positively enthrall those of you who reside in Melbourne, and will probably bore the rest of you to death. (Friends of mine who now live in Senegal, you are in the first category, and will in fact forever be obliged to enjoy everything I write.)

So, Maddie and I have had our proposal for a show on SYN FM approved. It will, naturally, be about books and writing and literary magazines and writers and readers. Yay us, etc. If there's anything/one/book that you, as a Melbourne-based literary person, would like to hear about, let me know. Raf reminds me that it's possible for interstate/international friends to listen at SYN's website. It's on Saturday from 1 until 2 (pm you guys, though I secretly suspected they might try to give us a graveyard shift). Starts 18th July. Good hangover cure.

Person who visited this blog by searching for "centre for books writing and ideas" job marketing, I am sure you will like this one. I'm going to a friendly meeting with Michael Williams, head of programming at the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, and some other bookish bloggers next Thursday. If you have any thoughts, fervent dreams and hopes, etc. about the Centre, feel free to leave a comment and I will endeavour to deliver your views to the Admiral. For example, why don't they have a website yet? (One, at least, that I can find in the first two Google search pages.)

Housekeeping / Marilynne Robinson

2009-07-06T09:44:00.004+10:00

I am probably shooting myself in the foot, as John Self has also just written a review of Housekeeping, but sometimes we just need to soldier on despite all circumstances. Anyhow, I want to start with the cover. The edition I have - see above - is unprepossessing. (My shoes, however, are nice.) All the fervent lust with which I typically pursue secondhand Penguins usually goes to some dark place far away when I behold an 80s King Penguin. Images on these covers are generally so insipid as to be insulting to my inner rabid minimalist. Sure, they were the first of Penguin's series to have pictorial illustrations on their covers, but honestly, I wish they hadn't bothered. (The pictures on the inside of the 1940s KPs, though, are stunning.) Just remember, however, this is me talking, a person to whom a world in which every book looked like this:

would be bliss. I'm just waiting for the phone call from Penguin's permissions people. As Phill Jupitus would say: 'Bring on the points, bitch.'

But to the book's subtle proceedings, which are far more wonderful than this unspeakable and indulgent introduction would indicate. I feel like a blackguard for allowing all this silliness to precede discussion of a novel whose gossamer delicacy forms one of the pillars of Marilynne Robinson's reputation as a writer of the highest distinction. Housekeeping was her first novel, and was followed 24 years later by Gilead. This year, her novel Home won the Orange Prize. I'm not going to read Home for another couple of years -- I'm saving it.

Crushing as it always is to resort to a book-discussion cliché, I read this book as slowly and driftingly as physicality and my hunger for its poetry would allow. Robinson's prose is at once icicle-sharp and somnolent, glacial. In Housekeeping, it tells the story of Ruth, a girl from Fingerbone, a tiny outpost on the edge of nowhere selected as a hometown by her grandfather for its multitude of mountains. Ruth has a sister, Lucille, but no mother:

She asked them very pleasantly to help her push her car out of the mud, and they went so far as to put their blankets and coats under the wheels to facilitate her rescue. When they got the Ford back to the road she thanked them, gave them her purse, rolled down the rear windows, started the car, turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go, and roared swerving and sliding across the meadow until she sailed off the edge of the cliff.

The girls change hands through various maternal substitutes: first, their grandmother, then their maiden great-aunts, and end up in the care of their aunt Sylvie, an itinerant whose ways are unwelcome in small-town society. Gentle, stealthy, self-effacing Sylvie is loving but vague; she roams the woods in the mornings, throwing chunks of ice at the dogs who follow her home.

So inattentive, Sylvie is no barrier to the games Ruth and Lucille like to play, if what they like to do can indeed be called games. Many times deracinated sur place, the girls begin to associate visibility with powerlessness, and retreat into the woods for nights on end. Their attempts to escape from view are enacted by the two 'almost as a single consciousness', but their disappearances are felt as a different mantle on each girl's back. Ruth -- contemplative, curious -- countenances their elopements with interest and equanimity, while Lucille suffers her self-imposed banishment greatly. The velvet-and-blood tension of the girls' zygotic existence, it seems, will break upon what quality of acceptance each can foster towards the possibility of otherness.

Housekeeping recalls the qualities of a wishbone, with its invitation to break irretrievably that which was born resolute, whole, but divided as from an inviolable vertex. Housekeeping is resounding literature born from the dual sense of the verb 'to cleave'. Robinson, with tender accretion and signal focus, examines the effects of the sonorous edicts of society and the stillness in the crevices between conventional words and things. Though her characters are few, and she pursues them through backwaters, nothing in Robinson's world is mundane: she shows us that significant things don't need to be violent to be absolute.

Bonus for you: Marilynne Robinson on writing.

Just ignore the typo...

2009-07-03T14:18:00.000+10:00

...and look at the cute penguin. Have a good weekend!

SSEDT

2009-07-02T10:43:00.009+10:00

Recognise this little gorilla (via)? Anthony Browne is the new children's laureate.

Is it possible to raise a child outside of the gender binary? One couple is giving it a go.

Gossip Girl not learned enough for you? Try 'llectuals: skip a grade, change your life.

A book purporting to illuminate the complexity of sex as between Western and Eastern worlds only serves to perpetuate colonial norms. What a surprise; and not in the news, annoying guys with fetishes for Asian girls will try and pick me up this weekend by saying 'Konnichi wa'. I will, as usual, pretend I am from Iceland.

Word up on Iran.

Rebecca's running another round of the Harper-Martel challenge, in which participants pledge to read two of the books novelist Yann Martel sends to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

It's quite a finicky point of law, but the US Ricci v. Destefano decision regarding racial discrimination in firefighting has raised the issue of what happens when legal principles are decontextualised.

Bad writing alert: Bulmer-Lytton Contest furnishes us, the reading public, with this. (via)

Lord Mayor's Creative Writing Award, all you living Victorian writing people. Categories include short story, poetry, three hour book (print) and three hour book (e-book). A three hour book is about 22,000 words in length. The e-book works may contain hyperlinks.

Shortlist for the Frank O'Connor has been released. Makes me want to get onto that Wells Tower collection even quicker.

I practically died when I saw pictures of these Melville House classic novellas at Matt's blog. I'm still drooling. Go on, click on it. Go on. Seriously. Okay, now count your money.

The perks of working for a publisher

2009-06-30T09:51:00.002+10:00

You get to go to Sydney to check out an APA seminar on the future of e-content, and then visit Ligare, your publisher's sometime printer. It's pretty special seeing books being spat magically out of machines that are so complex as to seem intuitive. The older machines were more visually striking, including one which had different stations for the standard black, magenta, cyan and yellow inks, but the newer machines were purringly efficient, feeding undulating paper through the stages of becoming a book. Most excellently, Ligare has a sustainability program, and a huge recycling facility which cost about $500 million. Vegans beware, particularly vegan lawyers - animal glue is still used for certain bound books, because apparently it sticks like no other.

Sydney is beautiful. I hardly ever give it a fair chance, being too busy licking my Sartorialist-inflicted wounds. But its pastel/bold houses, overgrown foliage and expanses of water are kind of too wonderful to hold a grudge for long. Flying in over that winking sapphire ocean and spying the enclosed beaches' calmer waters made me long for a holiday. The Queen Victoria Building is a six-layered diamond cake of splintered colours, and a shop across the road furnished me with my one and only encounter with these Surface to Air shoes. Luckily, my boss spotted a stapler covered with pink and white rhinestones at a cafe we went to, and - bliss - there was a matching bejewelled calculator. Tacky bingo WIN.

Nothing, however, beats flying back into Melbourne at night over that cheerfully neat grid of electric lights, wound through by the dark snake of the Yarra, the city's boundaries resembling lax power lines. My ears hardly ever hurt during those descents.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves / Lynne Truss

2009-06-29T11:57:00.005+10:00

Converse to my experience when reading Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything (people would look at the sepia-toned cover and think I was a learned nerd; notwithstanding the accuracy of the nerd part, it was galling, etc), reading Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves was conducive to some fairly different interactions with other members of society. Nothing to do with the gung-ho 'punctuation warrior' approach Truss espouses in the book, but it did bring on an unexpected encounter with a stranger on a tram. The fellow, older than I (and I suspect, quite inebriated), pointed at the cover and commented that his nickname at university had been 'Wombat', because he 'eats, roots and leaves'. Pretty good. Amused by this anecdote, I humoured his desire for conversation. I was in the middle of telling him that he should encourage his son to learn languages from as young an age as possible when he fell asleep. Literally, actually, does-this-actually-happen fell asleep. Oh well. A friendship bites the dust.

I am sure that Truss would like this anecdote. She has a great sense of humour, though that sense of humour is often displayed in conjunction with an alarmingly violent distaste for incorrect use of punctuation marks. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (the title refers to a panda-walks-into-a-bar joke) reminds me how important voice is in non-fiction. Truss is a scampish vigilante who would be lots of fun at a dinner party, and the book comes with punctuation stickers which she exhorts her fellow guerillas to use in the quest for perfect public punctuation. Though not a 'grammarian', she's sought help from old sovereigns of the English language, such as Amis, Burchfield, Fowler and Bryson.

Our friend Truss rightly points out that exacting standards in punctuation can be important beyond their usual vocation in alerting our companions to how educated we are. Take a look at the difference between the following expressions of a Bible passage (Isaiah, xl, 3):

"Comfort ye my people" (please go out and comfort my people)
and
"Comfort ye, my people" (just cheer up, you lot; it might never happen)

Doctrinal differences, indeed. I don't think I had many doctrinal differences with Truss; she keeps it pretty simple. There are five chapters dealing with punctuation marks themselves: the comma, the apostrophe and the sub-editor's nightmare, the hyphen, each get a chapter of its own; while the colon and semicolon share a chapter (in which Truss ashamedly entrusts us with an anecdote about her 14-year-old self trying to intellectually best an American penpal by using the word 'desultory', as well as throwing a colon in for good measure). A fourth chapter brings these guys: ! ? ' together with the dash and italics.

It's really entertaining, and classic 'I'm learning, but I'm having too much fun to realise I'm learning!' stuff. Truss's examples of how punctuation can finely mould the meaning of strings of words are often hilarious, and they're also balanced with the recognition that once you've got all the rules down pat, you can kind of fling them away in a judicious manner if the flinging-away serves to make your writing more tasty.

Worth noting is the fact that this is a British book, and for reasons I've previously discussed (also strenously and disapprovingly pointed out by Louis Menand in his review for The New Yorker here) Eats, Shoots and Leaves is relevant only to the practice of British writers. It's okay for Australians too, as we're fairly British-leaning and non-standardised in our punctuation usage. Some of Menand's, uh, crispy comments:

The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor. Still, the book has been a No. 1 best-seller in both England and the United States.

Oh dear - maybe he knew the American penpal. It's true that there are trip-ups in the book, and it's true that the book isn't really a style manual: it's more of a researched monologic extravaganza. But I'm okay with that, for some reason. It's really fun. But the one thing I did not like was the final chapter, which bemoans the impending 'intellectual impoverishment' we invite if we allow 'proper' punctuation to go the way of the dodo because of swifter, less considered communications on the internet. This kind of talk has dated horribly since 2003, and there's a cringeworthy section in which Truss ridicules emoticons. This part is overlong, lecturey and therefore a bit boring - it could be revised or cut out for future editions. Also, I happen not to agree with most of her assertions, and the niche-filling weight of now widespread e-conventions makes her rant look a bit silly.

Time to wind this bad boy up. In a nutshell: basic, super fun, not without its faults, but I'd date it.

Literary guilt

2009-06-25T12:54:00.002+10:00

Oh, thank god. There's someone else who hasn't read Virginia Woolf yet. This year, I promise. And then Tolstoy and Foster Wallace and Iris Murdoch and Flaubert and Barthelme and Updike and Musil and O'Connor and Munro. You too, Salinger. Literary guilt: just how different is it to Catholic guilt? I have, however, bought a Woolf book this week, a Vintage two-hander: A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

Damned Rushdie and Murakami. I wasted my youth on you.

...said the vicar to his wife.

2009-06-24T09:40:00.000+10:00

SSEDT

2009-06-23T13:05:00.004+10:00

New book Lacan at the Scene is like CSI: Psychoanalysis. via.

Review of a new book about Jean Rhys, a writer whom everyone should read, by Maud Newton.

Although the book appeared to wide acclaim, Rhys held a grudge against editor Diana Athill for, she believed, publishing it prematurely. “‘It was not finished,’ she said coldly. She then pointed out the existence in the book of two unnecessary words. One was ‘then,’ the other ‘quite.’”

Tim Winton wins the Miles Franklin award. Will I ever read it? The only Tim Winton book I ever read was Cloudstreet, and I don't remember it very fondly or very well. Might be time to give one of his other books a crack.

Matt has created a cool little list of 'paired' literature - kind of like wines and food.

Wells Tower will take a short story class at Melbourne Writers Festival this year. Get acquainted with his verbally elegant self.

Literary furries rejoice.

The Meaning of Everything / Simon Winchester

2009-06-22T09:48:00.006+10:00

When someone asks you what you are reading, and you so cheerfully tell them it is a history of the Oxford English Dictionary, it is unlikely that their response will be very animated. Unless, of course, it is a person who has already read The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester, because such a person will know that it is a seriously good book. Hold your head high against those who would pigeonhole you ('Nerd. Nerrrrrd. NERD NERD NERD NERD NERD' etc.) because Winchester is a cheeky writer with a dashing feel for historical narrative; and, in fact, a few of the chaps involved in the compilation of the OED were a bit cheeky too. I was pretty ready to enjoy this book, in any case, as the Shorter OED is my dictionary of choice. Its authority derives from stylish, succinct, impeccably researched, absolute coverage of the English language: essential reference material for any avowed philologist.

I love reading about British men from days of yore. There's something about them - swanning around in boating caps, tapping their pens on the edges of inkhorns, and positively swimming in money and learning and propriety - that I find hilarious. Don't pretend that a historical period when the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths was alive and kicking wouldn't have been pretty dandy. If someone were to ask me which historical era I would like to visit, 1800s England would definitely under consideration, because making sure I was using the correct spoon to eat watermelon, tatting lace and learning Latin all sound like my idea of a good time. Wait, now I'm not sure if I'm still being facetious. But take it from me; the cover of this book, featuring an image of a smiling real-life Dumbledore (it's one-time OED editor Frederick Furnivall - great name, right?) doesn't promise anything it can't deliver: books, old white men, snarky letters, filing arrangements, murderers, and people so learned as to make good old Ben Naparstek seem like a bit of an underachiever. Example: It was said that Henry Bradley, senior editor of the OED from 1896, learned Russian in a matter of 14 days, 'with no help but the alphabet and a knowledge of the principles of Indo-Germanic philology.'

When the OED was but a dream in the learned ether, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language was the British gold standard of word-reference books, while in America, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language reigned supreme. (It was actually very popular in Britain, too.) Winchester's exposition is fantastic: a brief, fascinating history of the English language is followed by a discussion of the philosophical niceties relating to the enterprise of creating a dictionary - should such a book be conservative, forbidding usages other than those fixed therein; or should a dictionary's steering team acknowledge the unparalleled fluidity of the English language, which grows and feeds greedily upon various sources, unlike the tightly controlled lexical glaciers of Italy and France?

Winchester has an eye for illuminating trivia that make history come alive. He points out that the first English-only dictionary (dictionaries produced before 1604 were predominantly compiled for translation purposes) was collated to feature short meanings of plain words 'for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons'. Yeah - my unskilfull lady-self feels so benefited that I think I will vomit. Yet he also fleshes out the trials of the OED's construction, including the exponentially growing resources pumped into it by Oxford University and other benefactors: the original estimate for the dictionary's completion was 10 years and £9000; but it took 54 years and cost £300,000. Wisely, Winchester leads us through the dictionary's tale by concentrating on some of the key figures in its production - the first three editors: sickly Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), Furnivall (who had a penchant for very young ladies, and started an all-female sculling team) and stern draper's son and school-leaver James Murray, who saw the dictionary almost through to completion.

There is nothing dry or boring about The Meaning of Everything. Story-wise, it's wonderful: the OED was on the brink of being discontinued several times, and though the battles framing its completion were all eventually won, it's scary for language tragics to contemplate what might not have been. In addition to putting the facts and figures of the OED on record, this history of what is now considered the most comprehensive, definitive record of the English language raises questions about how the language was and is formed, created and democratised. Language, equally integral to daily life as it is to matters of great abstraction and complexity, is often taken for granted, and The Meaning of Everything engagingly tells of the immense effort and foresight poured into what is one of the greatest literary enterprises known to the anglophone world.

The Blue Room / George Simenon

2009-06-18T13:35:00.006+10:00

My first introduction to Georges Simenon was a Paris Review interview; I usually avoid these long, intimate and revealing pieces, as they're guaranteed to make me chase the works of the profiled author, and my bookshelf requests respite, sometimes. But who wouldn't be intrigued by a man who wrote 60-80 pages a day? This copy of The Blue Room was a lucky find at one of the City Library's biannual book sales, where most everything is one dollar. Scoop-ups a-plenty. It's in rather nasty condition, clearly having been the victim of a spill, but c'est la vie. I don't generally read crime fiction, but I do like the occasional television crime show. So I'm not averse to the genre per se; I'm just usually much more focused on literary fiction. I like crime shows because they're 'hard fluff' - you get your easy-to-pigeonhole characters, your souped-up logic and of course your predictable cathartic denouement, which is what a girl sometimes needs after a long day of shoe shopping.

The Blue Room didn't quite adhere to these expectations. A little more interesting than your local cop show, it's set in Saint-Justin-du-Loup, one of the many hamlets and villages of rural France where residents often have known no other home in all their lives. It opens with a conversation between two lovers:

'Have I hurt you?'
'No.'
'Are you angry with me?'
'No.'

These memories are rendered as replay in Tony Falcone's mind, endless undertow troubling him while he is being questioned by psychiatrists and court officials. We only find out slowly what the crime is, and though it's a slow-burning question, the crime itself is not the prime target of Simenon's gaze. The reader is given front-row seats to the spectacle of the suspect's torment - after a nicety sought by the judge during questioning: 'This endless wrangling over words!' In response to a line of questioning that would be thrown out even in the laissez-faire world of the American crime television franchises, we have 'Tony, staring blindly into the Judge's face...trying desperately to understand, to explain.'

In France, the criminal justice system is inquisitorial (rather than adversarial, as in Australia or the UK), and the judge's wide-ranging, erosive questioning is compounded by the condemnation of the townspeople, whose propinquity explains their quickness to judge. Simenon maintains the pressure of these comparisons, describing the judge as a man not unlike Tony, a man who even likes Tony for who he is. It's a quiet book which easily evokes the burden of trial by small town, as mild as it is utterly bewildering.

The Blue Room defied my baseless expectations of crime novels, though, granted, I don't read many of those. It wasn't a dense read, and did quench my thirst for lighter fare. But rather than just focus on gore or extreme personalities, though the latter certainly feature in the book, Simenon invites us to interrogate our opinions on culpability and traces the relationship between thoughtlessness and expectation: can we be guilty for the passions of others?

SSEDT

2009-06-16T12:03:00.003+10:00

Israel's oldest newspaper, Ha'aretz, has literary types write the news. The business update: 'Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual.'

Very interesting dialogue about the cover of Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro here, and comments from Text publisher Michael Heyward.

I cannot understand who watches that show!!! Charlie Sheen is indeed a moron.

I am enjoying some musical collaborations these days: this and this.

Very important: Andrew Sullivan (via) updating on the fallout from the Iran election.

Look Who's Morphing / Tom Cho

2009-06-15T10:10:00.009+10:00

I have garlanded Tom Cho with that most sought-after of literary prizes: the suburban flower arrangement. Do you know what kind of books get this kind of treatment? Ones that I like.

My predisposition to love this book was cemented in two separate instances. First, I read 'The Bodyguard' in Black Inc.'s Best Australian Stories 2007 while I was away over the summer. It was, hands-down, my favourite story in the collection, a breathtakingly aware literary roleplay which begins: 'Someone is stalking Whitney Houston and I have been hired to be her bodyguard.' No more explanation than that; an assumption you're familiar with 90s Hollywood tripe; impassive I-strewn narration: I was fully hooked, bro. Second, hoping Cho would do a reading, I went to the launch of Look Who's Morphing at Hares and Hyenas about a month ago. Lucky me! He read 'Aiyo!!! An evil group of ninjas is entering and destroying a call centre!!!', a story which certainly puts the kibosh on the 'no more than 40 exclamation marks per page' rule (don't try it at home, kids). Gold-star funny piece with, rightly, no hesitation or anxious explication about bringing little-valorised South-East Asian shibboleths to Australian literature.

I hesitate to call the works 'short stories' (Cho calls them 'fictions'), because, as with 'Aiyo!!!...' the pieces lend themselves very well to performance, and given Cho's background in spoken word, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them passed through that medium in their development. From 'A Counting Rhyme': 'One, two, buckle my shoe. Two, one, steamed pork bun.' Don't want to annoy myself or you by trying to discuss the 'traditional' short story, but most of the pieces are short, and feature a first-person point of view. The pieces are also connected through their performativity of the personal, and the inevitability of play in that performance. Reinforcing this is the cover, with Cho's eyes, framed by cliff-high quiff and leather jacket, gazing out over a neon-pink bleed on his cheek.

Having sobbed many guilty Asian-Australian tears over The Joy Luck Club when I was ten (okay, and Mulan when I was fifteen), I admit to having developed a hardness of heart towards 'ethnic' as a literary flavour: writing in that genre (as with other genres, of course) is often not distinct or sophisticated or complex or interesting, and I'm not as guilelessly interpellated by it as publishers would probably like. But Cho interrupts these cardboard cutout performative accounts of racial identity. His narrators' identities are perpetually changing and fluid, and questioned by themselves and others. With irreverence, too -- 'Learning English' begins like a typical migrant story but, madlib-like, veers off that road pretty quickly:

When I first arrived in Australia, I did not know a word of English. I began English lessons through a migrant settlement program soon after I arrived, but I found it all very difficult.

...

Australia is very different from my homeland. I was born and raised in a town called Rod Stewart. Back in those days, Rod Stewart was a very busy town. The major industries were David Hasselhoff and coal. I think it is hard for a non-migrant to understand just how difficult it is to learn a new language while adapting to life in a new country.

Cho doesn't limit his inquiry to racial identity, extending it also to gender, sexual and even social identity. In 'Pinocchio', the protagonist attempts to justify his long absence to his girlfriend, Tara (Cho's actual partner's name) by claiming that he has only just managed to transform back from being one of Jim Henson's muppets. Sure, it sounds silly, but it's not too bad a metaphor for the lies we tell each other. This piece is a well-judged reminder that the concerns of morphing aren't only for those who look or act most differently from the norm, but that everyone is everyday prodding at the fabric of themselves.

There's also a healthy amount of irreverence towards the seriousness with which people address these selves and choices. In 'The Sound of Music', erstwhile nun Maria asks Mother Superior: 'Can who you like to "do" also be bound up in issues of who you are or want to be?', after which the two women begin sharing their fantasies about the Fonz. You might have noticed that I think this book is hilarious, and in fact spurred me to multiple 'let me read this to you' moments. Cho selects a matter-of-fact tone in most of the stories, and it works really well. In particular, there's a fantastic running joke about Chinese food that made me snicker each time it appeared.

If there is such a thing as classically postmodern, Look Who's Morphing fits that description. It's relentlessly intertextual, openly questioning and questing, and takes storytelling to absurdist yet never inhumane extremes. But it's also inclusive and playful. Cho's written identities defy the linear narratives of self imposed by technology, product lust, received knowledge and ancestry to emerge as shifting sands: the endless metaphors and similes for the self eventually resolving, not blurring, into the person.

A hypocritical by-the-way: there are lots of reviews about this book already, but try not to read too many of them, because lots of them quote highlights of the book, and the book's not very long. Read them afterwards.

Verdict: the Fonz says yes.

Peter Singer on Bioethics

2009-06-12T11:16:00.006+10:00

I went to see Peter Singer's public lecture on bioethics last week. Singer, who I saw speak at Writers at the Convent last year, is a hook-line-sinker speaker. He's accessible but able to put complex ideas to a layperson audience in compelling forms. He didn't use any jargon, either, which is a plus. I've never studied any ethics or philosophy, so I was pleased that it was fairly broad-based and introductory.

Singer addressed the issue of what ethics is, and where it comes from. To illustrate, he used a story about a brother and sister deciding to have sex just one time, using contraception and without any adverse effects being sustained for their relationship. Singer asked how many of us thought the act was wrong, and a majority considered it not okay. Though the evolutionary reasons for humans developing a 'yuck' reaction to situations were isolated and dealt with in the story - no chance of reproduction, no adverse effects on their relationship - most people reacted to the story emotionally, and felt the scenario was not okay. This hypothesis was supported in studies: those who thought the scenario was acceptable took longer to come to that conclusion. That is, they used rationality to overcome their emotional objections. (Apparently Melbourne is less anti-incest, or more rational, than other places he's used this example.)

It was all good stuff. Singer argued that ethics should come from using rationality to address practical issues related to a situation after emotional evolutionary responses to that situation are negated. The talk is supposed to be available as audio and video here, but doesn't seem to have popped up yet.

I was amused at the juxtaposition of Singer's talk with the events which ensued. The representative of Centre for Human Bioethics did a little bit of donation-begging, and I'm sure that Singer has stated (and I paraphrase wildly, anyone correct me if I'm wrong) that he doesn't see giving to the arts as charity or philanthropy. Then, the 'light refreshments' promised were a cavalcade of chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches, and so much wine that it's possible someone might have had three glasses. Extravagance.

I start my new job next week! Woooo.

SSEDT

2009-06-11T10:45:00.001+10:00

In the 'I am disappointed in your words' segment this week, Commes des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo:

Kawakubo launched her label in 1969, and despite her fiercely independent point of view has built a multi-million-dollar empire (Comme turned $108 million in 2008). Though Comme des Garçons translates to "Like the Boys," the philosophy behind it has nothing to do with feminism.
“I really felt that I was on my own,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I never felt my work had anything to do with being a woman. I am not a feminist. I was never interested in any movement as such. I just decided to make a company built around creation, and with creation as my sword, I could fight the battles I wanted to fight.”

I get that lots of people don't like to be branded feminists, but I am always a little bit angered by public personalities who disown feminism like it's something to be ashamed of, or, even worse, disown it because they say it's not relevant to them. Sure, there are lots of things that aren't relevant to you, like AIDS research and photon science (I made that up). If someone said 'My work has nothing to do with poverty, and I am not interested in the concerns of poor people', it would be scandalous, and rightly so. But you can say you are not a feminist, because there's no such thing as unequal pay for equal work, or domestic violence. So uncool.

An incredible poem by James Schuyler. Begins like a prosey, casual but intimate letter, and ends focused, inscrutable.

Kanye West hates books like George Bush hates black people.

Happy 60th birthday, 1984. 1984 wasn't one of my English texts at school, which probably explains why I still hold it in high esteem, unlike Animal Farm. It's nowhere near my favourite book, but I suspect it was the first important book I read from the 1900s, and to this day I still remember flinging it across the room in anger when I finished it.

Applications for grants from the ASA close 30 June 2009. they have $175,000. Writers! Ask for money.

Book tattoos

2009-06-09T12:14:00.001+10:00

Think of the tears this tattee will shed when they realise they have left out Neil Strauss's The Game.

The Elements of Style / William Strunk Jr and EB White

2009-06-08T10:13:00.008+10:00

Uh-oh. I've been outed as 'a dog person'.

I bought The Elements of Style at the RMIT bookshop a little while back, sucked in by the morose basset hound on the front. I don't live under a rock, so I'd heard of the book, and was curious about its take on the do's and don'ts of the English language. My go-to style guy is Henry Dubya Fowler, but I thought my horizons could do with a little expanding.

While I was amongst it, as they say, I came across this article, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, by Geoffrey Pullum, co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (via The Mumpsimus). From the title, you will be able to guess that Pullum doesn't think 'pon this little book with approval. In fact, he says that the authors are 'grammatical incompetents', Strunk having 'very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less'. Ouch. I had noticed a few things that perturbed me, particularly over-rigid and outdated rules such as the exhortation not to start a sentence with 'however' when the meaning is 'nevertheless'. Er, doesn't everyone do that? Pullum agrees. He declares the advice in The Elements of Style anything from 'sensible' to 'toxic'.

Some wisdom can be had from this book, especially for those like me whose education did not explicitly deal with the rudiments of grammar and style. (Is it just me, or is the Australian educational system a bit hands-off with those aspects of writing?) The authors counsel the writer to 'omit needless words', an oft-heard dictum which blessedly rings in my own ears from time to time, perhaps not often enough. The Elements of Style is also entertaining, an artifact recalling a grumpy professor who had probably corrected one too many crappy essays. For example, Rule 21 urges the unknowing to ensure that summaries are written in the same tense throughout. The authors plaintively disparage useless generalisations:

Facility: Why must jails, hospitals, and schools suddenly become "facilities"?

Yet, as with any book spawned by human beings with proclivities and their opposities, readers should be wary of taking the rules as gospel. Some of the rules are specific to a geographical usage area, such as S&W's US-flavoured preference for the serial comma (the comma appearing before the 'and' separating the final item in a list, as in: 'She ate apples, cakes, and radishes.') and veteran language mavens will find some of the rules gratingly basic. Other times, the authors distill their irritation into rules that are unforgivably misformed. Take the explanatory section expanding on rule 22: 'Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.' Fine, except that halfway through this section appears the somewhat silly assertion: 'The other prominent position in the sentence is the beginning.'

I'm in two minds about this book. On the one hand, The Elements of Style is a fascinating cult book, and certainly you can learn something from its pages. Actually, it's not so cult: have you ever wondered why your Microsoft Word document has so many goddamn green zigzag lines through it? You're probably using too much passive language, one of the S&W bugbears. But as a reference, I don't recommend it, particularly for an Australian/British English writer. Its reasonable advice can be easily found elsewhere, and its deleterious propositions have actually muddled in my head with other, more legitimate fodder. It's not particularly comprehensive, either, and non-US writers are better off picking a guide that is more appropriate to their writing region.

As I mentioned earlier, my bet for stylistic curmudgeon is Fowler, even as somewhat tempered by Burchfield. Pam Peters' The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage is an up-to-date, non-prescriptivist behemoth for antipodean enthusiasts. For US writers, The Mumpsimus recommends Huddleston & Pullum's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, Harper's English Grammar by John Opdycke, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage and Patterns of English by Paul Roberts. If anyone out there champions any other Australian/British English usage guides, I'd love to hear what they are.

Subjectively selected and decontextualised tidbits (SSEDT)

2009-06-05T12:51:00.000+10:00

Papercuts has posted a trailer for Bad Writing, a documentary featuring George Saunders and David Sedaris (commenting on bad writing, obvs, not doing it). Like the idea of this, but Saunders' comment on bad writing is an example of why I hate 'she' as the alternate universal pronoun -- it looks like the gender of the person has been changed specifically to illustrate a negative point:

As far as I’m concerned, bad writing is always about falseness. It’s about the writer’s real view of the world and her attempt to articulate it being out of sync in some way...

It could just be a context-bereft idiosyncracy, but them's the breaks. Don't do it, kids. Personally, I like 'they'. Don't tell me it's grammatically incorrect -- it's the most elegant solution we've got.

Already much blogged, but for us very timely, is this New Yorker article about The Program Era: Postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing, which debates whether creative writing should be taught. Subjectively selected and decontextualised tidbits:

Iowa merely admits people who are really good at writing; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma. “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged."

*

As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.

*

What counted as craft for James, though, was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie (who teaches at the University of Virginia) must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer (who teaches at N.Y.U.). There is no “craft of fiction” as such.

*

One of Rick Moody’s teachers at Columbia asked the class to indicate, by a show of hands, how many found Moody’s work boring. Donald Barthelme, at Houston, assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashbery’s “Three Poems.” Lish taught private writing classes that lasted from six to ten hours, a little like est training. He had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence.

Have a good long weekend! It's the Queen's birthday. Sweet, sweet Commonwealth.

Events

2009-06-04T10:54:00.006+10:00

Took a quick look at the Melbourne Writers Festival Blog, and I'm suffering from premature excitement. The first three confirmed authors are Russell Grigg, who completed his PhD in the Department of Psychoanalysis founded by Lacan at the University of Paris VIII, Thomas Buergenthal, an international law and human rights expert who has written a book about his childhood in Nazi camps, and the prolific Kerry Greenwood, who lives with a registered wizard. And I hear Evil Steve is back taking charge of the box office.

It's like the MWF team had a look inside my brain to configure this trio. Psychoanalytic theory? Tick. Human rights law? Tick. Wizards...!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! etc.

Also, the blog alerts readers to a Cinema Nova special screening of Disgrace, featuring a discussion panel of Elliot Perlman, Sue Maslin, Catherine Deveny, Tom Ryan and Peter Rose. That might be interesting. It's been a while since I read the book, but, as well as other things, it will be interesting to see if I can get over the spectre of John Malkovich screaming 'Osborne Cox! Osborne Cox!' in Burn After Reading.

Statistically Improbable Phrases

2009-06-03T10:53:00.006+10:00

So, Amazon is good for something. Its Search Inside! program can identify Statistically Improbable Phrases, or 'SIPs', which are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books. Alan, of the purest of treats, has suggested that you can read these lists in lieu of the books themselves. (Of course he's joking. Is he joking? He has a point. Does he have a point? etc.)

Here's one of the 69 lists he has curated for your attention:

matrimonial gift, quaker librarian, charming soubrette, editor cried, retrospective arrangement, pike hoses, pensive bosom, seaside girls, absentminded beggar

...and now you've read Ulysses.

I really like these lists. They appeal to the part of me that likes Googlewhacking (though not the term 'Googlewhacking', peh peh). Unusual word combinations are like fingerprints, they're the signature of minds whose synapses are arranged differently to yours. The lists are presented soi-meme, so see if you can guess their synecdochic counterparts. At worst, you'll be 69 books the wiser by the end. (I yoinked this from TEV.)

Also, final City Library Street Press workshop tonight at 6pm. SYN FM are in charge and they're going to teach us how to make podcasts. It's free, good for you, etc, so please come along.

Can I count books that I read for work?

2009-06-01T10:04:00.002+10:00

I've read two books lately that haven't been leisure reading. Last week I handled the proofs for a non-fiction book, which I won't talk about yet because it won't be published for a little while. It wasn't anything blockbuster-sexy like Alice Pung's Homeland Recipes or anything like that, but I consider it a socially important book, so I'm happy to have been involved with it. The other book was a book I reviewed for lip magazine, so I won't write about it here either.

Should books I read for work count towards my yearly total? Don't know. I guess so, since I have technically read them. There's nothing in the rules which says that I have to pick my books voluntarily...hey! I make the rules. Anyhow, since I use this blog as an aide-memoire, here they are:

1. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (embargoed!)
2. A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean / Gary Buslik

I'm starting to feel strange about the idea of having a reading target. It was useful to have one last year because I had lost my habit of seizing most moments to read. But now that I'm a rehabilitated reader it seems redundant. Do you have targets?

Emerging Writers' Festival Part III

2009-05-31T22:00:00.012+10:00

Let's get straight into it, folks.

Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed emerging writers were ear-to-ear in the Yarra Room for Crashing and Bashing and Smashing Through, a panel about how to get that desired start in getting published, despite some pretty ominous fog in the morning. Kathryn Heyman kept her advice short and sweet: Write a good book. Know what your character wants. Read Aristotle's Poetics. Make contact with an agent. Humble Chris Morphew talked about his strange sideways tilt at writing success, having started ghostwriting for Hardie Grant Egmont's 'Zac Power' series. Note to nerds: it's ok to like dinosaurs and spaceships if you can write. Sarah Ayoub counselled the audience to call themselves writers, and Bel Schenk, artistic director of Express Media, suggested that under-25s take full advantage of the funding/support opportunities available and make time to write. It was a down-to-earth session with accessible advice given by all panellists.

Out of the Mouths of Babes was an interesting breadth panel featuring speechwriter Rhod Ellis Jones, comedy writer Adam Rozenbachs and ghostwriters Melita Granger and Matt Davies, all discussing what it's like to put their words in other people's mouths. Aspiring ghostwriters beware. Melita edited (read: rewrote) a YA novel whose author was later extensively garlanded, though Matt took care to note that ghostwriting is 'just a writing job', for which fame and glory is not always sought or needed. Well, if you were writing the equivalent of 'Property by Paris Hilton: Being Rich is Hot!' you might be reticent too.

After the break, I thought it might be good to vary my literary food intake, so I popped in to see Sammy J discuss his 1999 show, which he's about to take to Edinburgh. Amusing demographic information: audience 90% female, with definite mid-20s and early-50s age group clusters. Sammy recommended Robert McKee's Story for assistance with narrative. We all hoped there would be a song, and there were two: one from 1999, entitled (and I paraphrase) 'I believe that there's a chance you don't detest me' and a new one. Lovely.

Maddie and I popped across to Page Parlour, the renamed zine/panellists' market. I bought her a copy of Stop, Drop and Roll for her birthday, and she bought quite a few other tidbits. I was on a strict no-acquisitions diet. Call me if you want a picture of my stacks of crap as evidence of a reason why.

Finally (for me) The Best Ways Forward. Steven Amsterdam, of Things We Didn't See Coming fame, had a very interesting path to being published. Being the son of a literary agent, having sent out rejection slips at the age of 16(!), and having worked for Random House ('one of the biggest English-language publishers in the universe') weren't enough of a kickstart for Steven. Hey now. He found that workshopping with a cadre of 3 very different writers was the most beneficial thing for his writing. He also recommended the Zoetrope Virtual Studio for workshopping shorter pieces. Also, controversially, Steven recommended RMIT writing courses for their focus on producing work over Melbourne University courses (too much literary theory).

Rijn Collins credited her participation in the feminist punk zine world for jump-starting her writing confidence and success, and considered writing a key aspect of her re-emergence into society after suffering from agoraphobia. Rijn recommended Red Bubble, an online writing community, and local writers' centres for support and resources.

Stu Hatton, who teaches writing at Deakin University, spoke movingly about being mentored by the late Dorothy Porter. Their friendship arose from one of the ASA-run mentorships and spanned craft, life and street-smarts advice. Pooja Mittal, one of the festival's Ambassadors (roving, approachable experts, a lovely idea) was one of those irrepressible writers who would leave school to write a poem, forcing her bemused mum to send her right back to school when she would show up at the front door. She encouraged young writers to detach ego from art, and to welcome criticism, because anyone can be a mentor if you let them.

I had to skip off to book club after that. I had an amazing time at EWF. It was my first foray into Melbourne Town Hall as well as my first time at the festival, so I was pretty chuffed about sighting the infamous Miss Moomba portraits (think this hai r). There was a palpable sense of excited, collaborative learning in the building over the weekend, and I think the team are to be congratulated on an inspiring week-and-a-bit. I wish I'd had more time to actually talk to more people, but such is life. I wonder if there's a way of harnessing this energy in a sustained way over the whole year?

If you haven't been to EWF before, and you are an aspiring writer looking for inspiration or advice, I'd say try it next year for a pretty spot-on bunch of events. Good times and claps.

Emerging Writers' Festival Round-up

2009-05-30T22:49:00.010+10:00

The Emerging Writers' Festival has been such a fun, nice experience. I know -- 'fun'? 'Nice'? Have I learned nothing? But it has been both fun and nice. There's nothing I like more than hanging out in a building with hundreds of other people who like things that I like. I just need to organise a Feminist Ice-Cream Lovers Convention and my life will be sorted.

Wednesday night, after I finished running the City Library Creative Writing workshop, I went down to the Empress with Maddie for The Serious Business of Being Funny with Josh Earl, Sammy J and Claire Hooper. I think having festival sessions in a pub is a great idea; I consider being able to eat crispy wedges with aioli, sweet chilli and sour cream (yes, three condiments) during any activity a plus. Maddie knows Josh, and he greeted us by asking, 'So you're here to see my first ever show, are you?' Turns out all the comedians were bravely revisiting their first ever comedy shows. It was as awkward as expected, with Claire Hooper mentioning that she wore pigtails and a homemade Australian flag t-shirt at every show in her first year of performing. Josh's set involved some cringetastic break-up material and very questionable song lyrics wherein someone is punched with a part of the anatomy that is usually reserved for other functions. Sammy J's set was remarkably hilarious for a first outing, and included a musical tribute to Flagstaff station. Afterwards there was a little bit of chat about techniques and because I'm not a comedy writer I drifted in and out a bit, but people seemed to be having a good time.

Joke of the night went to Sammy J with this pearler: 'I baked humble pie, but I must have got the recipe wrong because it was awesome.' Yes, I'm a nerd.

Thursday night was the only one of Angela Meyer's 15 Minutes of Fame mini-launches I managed to get to. Tiggy Johnson spoke about her short story collection, Svetlana or Otherwise, and Hoa Pham spruiked the Asian-Australian journal Peril, whose next issue is themed 'Why Are People So Unkind?' Jenny Blackford was launching her historical novel about slaves and pythia, the Greek priestesses at Delphi, and Helen Ross read from her fun book of children's poetry.

Phew. And then there was today.

After picking up our treasure-laden showbags (Overland and The Big Issue and The Griffith Review and Wet Ink, oh my -- I took photos but no bluetooth on this laptop, alas), Maddie and I caught the very end of the Seven Enviable Lines session, where Kathryn Heyman was encouraging a packed room to get it wrong, play and be ludicrous in writing.

Just Write Dammit featured Tiggy Johnson, Victoria Carless, Andrew Hutchinson and PD Martin. I don't identify as a writer (see Peril's interview with Nam Le on this), though I seek to engage with the written word in many ways. But it is easier to relate to the dilemmas and processes of people just embarking on their writing careers than it is to relate to, say, Helen Garner. Andrew Hutchinson: very funnily, head in hands, 'What if my publisher finds out that I can't write?' The tools in the authors' arsenals were quite varied: Hutchinson, Chekhov-like, likes to write between midnight and 4am, while PD Martin likes the hellish writing boot camp of the '10k day'. Note: when I Googled Victoria Carless, I turned up a cairns.com.au news story about her entitled 'Carless whispers'. Gold.

The packed Furious Horses session proved the cult appeal of Christopher Currie's masochistic but evidently very useful story-a-day blog. I say 'evidently useful' because he reports that the exercise gave him army-like discipline with writing, and his novel manuscript has now been picked up by Text Publishing. I've never seen such a question-to-audience-member ratio. The audience were enthralled. I particularly liked his tip of using Wikipedia random articles as inspiration.

Truth and Honesty in Writing was a really well curated panel. Dale Campisi was an interactive, lively chair for Lisa Dempster, Krissy Kneen, David Mence and Scott-Patrick Campbell. Loved Campbell's Henrik Vibskov pants. David Mence stole the show with his down-the-rabbit-hole experience of honouring truth to History (with a capital H), the play as a medium, and himself while researching and writing the story of Victoria's first large-scale massacre of Aborigines.

Then, The Revolution Will be Downloaded, where Angela Meyer took this picture of the audience to reveal the power of Twitter. (I was outside the camera's embrace, thankfully.) I was feeling a bit faint, since my cold-bloodedness made me feel over-warm in a room where most people still had their coats on. Yes, I'm a lizard. So I felt a bit woozy during this panel. But great to see three engaged, enthusiastic, female culture-vultures on this panel, including Angela, Hoa and freelance writereditorbloggerpublicspeaker Rachel Hills, who encouraged emerging writers to have a consolidated online presence to make it easy for potential employers and like-minded people to find them. Not forgetting James Stuart, whose interactive poem-world The Homeless Gods defies definition, which is both liberating and frustrating, I imagine.

The Pitch came last, with editors from near and far (well, mostly near) basically begging fledgling wordsmiths to please please read the submission guidelines. Oh, except for Trespass Magazine, which doesn't have any submission guidelines at all. But also to please please submit. Some baby journals were represented, like Stop, Drop and Roll, some of the old guard, like Meanjin and Overland, and some unexpected publications, like Tango, baby of City Library Street Press-beloved Bernard Caleo.

Check out the time of this post, people. That is dedicated literary event blogging. If you made it to the end, or anywhere even near the middle of this post, I congratulate you. Now I am going to drink chrysanthemum tea, peruse Etsy for handmade perfume, and listen to Veckatimest yet another time. Then bed, because back to Melbourne Town Hall tomorrow morning for round two, and Fitzroy for book club afterwards.