The Wheeler Centre: Dailies

Masha Gessen: Russian revolutionary

2012-05-24T10:30:53+10:00

Masha Gessen is a strong presence: passionate, deeply knowledgeable and slightly impatient, in that way of people everywhere who are committed – body and soul – to a cause. She is impatient to return to her native Russia, where she lives and works; where a revolution of sorts is brewing.

‘I’m going to get right back into it when I fly home tomorrow,’ she told the Wheeler Centre audience on Tuesday night.

Masha Gessen: ‘As a writer, you just try to see what’s in front of you with fresh eyes … pretend you’ve just fallen off the moon.’

The new revolution

Last December, tens of thousands of Russians gathered in mass protests against Putin’s government. They were angry at the conspicuously rigged elections his party had just won, calling for an end to the country’s endemic corruption.

‘The protest movement happened very suddenly,’ said Gessen. ‘It surprised all of us who took part in it – we looked at each other in the streets, like, Oh, you’re here too.’

Journalist Gessen is the author of The Man Without a Face, a damning biography of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the man she labels a dictator and describes as an ‘accidental’ leader. An epilogue diarising her involvement in last year’s protests was rushed into the book at the last minute before publication.

‘I feel so fortunate I was able to get that in,’ she said. ‘It would have been a very different book without it.’

Rise of the grey faceless man

Back in 1999, the previous Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin, once hugely popular, had become erratic. He was ill, alcoholic, and had become an embarrassment. And he was presiding over a country in crisis, experiencing ‘economic and social inequality on a scale [its citizens] had never known’.

Yeltsin had alienated all those he had been close to over the years, except a very close group nicknamed ‘the Family’, who took it upon themselves to find a successor whose number one job would be not to prosecute Yeltsin once they took office.

One of the ‘unremarkable … grey faceless men’ they auditioned was Putin, the head of the secret police.

Early on, Putin was set forth – and welcomed – as ‘the embodiment of everybody’s best hope’. Because he had spent his life working with the secret police, nothing about him was on the public record. He was a blank slate.

The west welcomed Putin as someone they could do business with, a democratic reformer. This view persisted in the western media long after it was obvious that he was the opposite of democratic: he’d sent the quasi independent media into exile, reversed judicial reforms and dismantled the Russian electoral system.

Western press ‘held captive by conventional wisdom’

‘The western press are held captive by conventional wisdom,’ Gessen said. ‘It often takes a long time to catch up.’

After 9/11, foreign coverage completely shifted to Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘Moscow became a waystation for reporters on their way to Kabul,’ said Gessen.

She said that the idea for The Man Without a Face came to her when she wrote a broad-ranging portrait of Putin for Vanity Fair in 2008. ‘I had gotten sick of writing about him – for a long time, I felt I had to dumb it down when I was writing about him in English. But I found myself really enjoying it.’ By the time she finished the 10,000 word piece, she had pitched the book to a publisher.

Her writing philosophy? ‘As a writer, you just try to see what’s in front of you with fresh eyes.’ She gives the advice, ‘pretend you’ve just fallen off the moon when you’re writing’.

Marina Salye: Woman in hiding

One of Gessen’s favourite stories in her book is that of Marina Salye, ‘an incredible woman’ and ‘the most popular politician in St Petersberg in the early 80s and 90s’; a member of its city council.

She ran an investigation of the period when Putin was deputy mayor of the great city, largely running its economy and found evidence that he had embezzled between ten million and 100 million dollars, ‘an unbelievable amount of money in Russia at that time’.

Her investigation, which concluded in 1993, recommended that the mayor should prosecute and dismiss Putin. Instead, the mayor dismissed the city council.

A week before the election that saw Putin installed as president, Salye published an article warning that Putin ‘would be the president of a corrupt oligarchy’. A few months later, she was threatened and fled to a semi-abandoned village in the woods near the Russian-Latvian border, where she stayed in hiding.

Gessen spent two years ‘putting out feelers’ to Salye. As soon as she agreed to talk to her, Gessen ‘jumped in the car and drove 12 hours through the night’.

Last days

Gessen is confident that we are seeing the last days of Putin’s reign; she says his numbers have ‘never been so low’. It took him weeks to form a new government after last year’s election, as politicians declined to join his cabinet. ‘No one wants to be part of this government.’

The Man Without a Face is not available in Russian, though an English language edition is on limited sale in two Moscow locations: a total of ‘about 100 copies’.

’The risk is out there’

Gessen says that she has a Russian publisher who likes the book, but has told her she can’t take the risk of publishing it. ‘Lots of foreign publishers want to publish it in Russian and smuggle it into Russia, but I’m not interested in that,’ she said. She wants to wait until a local publisher feels able to publish it.

‘From what I can tell, Putin doesn’t know about the book. For him to know about it, someone has to tell him about it. It’s an amazing symptom of the situation in Russia that no one will tell him about it.’

At question time, an audience member told Gessen he was concerned for her safety when she returns to Russia. She both acknowledged and dismissed the concern.

‘I have friends who’ve been attacked and killed, the risk is out there,’ she said. ‘But I’m somewhat protected by my connections with the west and my US passport, which I hold alongside my Russian one.’

‘I’m a lot safer than many of my colleagues.’

Masha Gessen and Chinese novelist Sheng Keyi appeared together in an event at the Wheeler Centre, chaired by Jenny Niven, on Tuesday 22 May.

'Make Good Art': Writerly Advice from...

2012-05-23T08:48:02+10:00

Are you an artist (aspiring, working, ‘working’ or otherwise) in need of a little inspiration? Well, you might like to go back to school, to hear Neil Gaiman’s recent address to students at the Philadelphia School of Arts.

The whole address is well worth watching, but we’d like to share some selected highlights from his speech. (The headings are ours.)

1. The benefits of having no idea what you’re doing

When you start a career in the arts you have no idea what you’re doing. This is great.

People who know what they’re doing know the rules and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not and you should not.

The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible. And you can. If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.

2. Learn by doing it

If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.

I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions and simply go out and find out how the world works.

And besides, to do those things I needed to learn how to write, and how to write well. I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, and on deadline.

I learned to write by writing.

3. Accept you might fail, and do it anyway

You need to learn to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive.

A freelance life in the arts is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money or love.

And you have to accept that you may put out hundreds of things for every bottle that winds up coming back.

If you make mistakes, you’re out there doing something.

4. Make good art: no matter what

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong. In life, in love, in business and in friendship, in health … and in all the other ways life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art.

Husband runs off with a politician? make good art … IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.

Make it on the bad days; make it on the good days too.

5. Uncertainty is a good sign

The moment where you feel that just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment where you may be starting to get it right.

The things I’ve done that have worked the best were the ones I was least certain about.

What would be the fun in making something you knew would work?

6. Secret freelancer business

People get hired because, somehow, they get hired.

People keep working in a freelance world because the work is good, because they’re easy to get along with and because they deliver it on time.

And you don’t even need to do all three. Two out of three is fine.

7. Do what you love

Nothing I did where the only reason I did it was for the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.

The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them become a reality have never let me down and I’ve never regretted the time I’ve spent on any of them.

Best Australian Book Design, 2012

2012-05-22T09:20:02+10:00

We don’t exactly judge a book by its cover here at the Wheeler Centre … but we do appreciate a good-looking book cover, nonetheless.

The Australian Publishers' Association celebrates the best in Australian cover design once a year, with the APA Design Awards. This year’s winners were announced last week; here’s some of them.

Best Designed Book of the Year

Love Lace: Powerhouse Museum International Lace Award, Powerhouse Publishing, designed by Toko.

Best Designed Cover of the Year

The Art of Pasta, Lucio Galletto & David Dale, Penguin, designed by Daniel New, artist Luke Sciberras.

Young Designer of the Year

Hannah Robinson for And Red Galoshes, pictured, Glenda Millard & Jonathan Bentley, Hardie Grant; The Elegant Art of Falling Apart, Jessica Jones, Hachette; Wide Open Road, Tony Davis, ABC Books; and Chasing Odysseus, S.D. Gentill, Pantera Press.

Best Designed Children’s Cover of the Year

August, Bernard Beckett, Text, designed by W.H. Chong and Susan Miller.

Best Designed Fiction Book

Love in the Years of Lunacy, Mandy Sayer, A&U, designed by Emily O'Neill.

Best Designed Non-Fiction Book

Hiroshima Nagasaki, Paul Ham, HarperCollins, designed by Matt Stanton and HarperCollins Design Studio.

Best Designed Literary Fiction Book

Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears, A&U, designed by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko, and Yolande Gray.

Best Designed General Illustrated Book

The Flight Attendant’s Shoe, Prudence Black, NewSouth, designed by Di Quick.

Best Designed Children’s Fiction Book

Alaska, Sue Saliba, Penguin, designed by Allison Colpoys.

Best Designed Children’s Picture Book

Ben & Duck, Sara Acton, Scholastic, designed by Nicole Stofberg.

Best Designed Children’s Series

Star League 1: Lights, Camera, Action Hero!, H.J. Harper, Random House, designed by Nahum Ziersch and Astred Hicks, Design Cherry.

The full list of winners is available at Bookseller and Publisher online.

In the first of a new event series on the art of book design, multi-award-winning cover designer W.H. Chong will present an illustrated talk on how he turned much-loved Australian classics into art for Text Publishing’s Australian Classics series.

Beautiful Books: How To Design an Australian Classic with W.H. Chong will be held at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 31 May at 6.15pm. Free, but please book.

Jeanette Winterson and the Gospel of ...

2012-05-21T14:08:55+10:00

In person, Jeanette Winterson has a somehow otherworldly appearance. Small and lithe, her short hair curling over her ears and at the nape of her neck, she resembles an elf or a pixie.

Light-footed, she strides the stage at the Comedy Theatre as she greets her audience, brandishing her book as if talismanic object. She reads – or, more accurately, performs – the first chapter in full, but barely glances at it and rarely seems to turn the page. It’s as if she knows the story by heart – and she should; she lived it.

Jeanette Winterson: ‘I was never going to be a nobody.’

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal tells the true story partly covered in her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: living with her eccentric adopted parents, devout Pentecostals, growing up with books and language as her refuge from an arid emotional life. It picks up where Oranges left off, too, with her mother discovering her in bed with her female lover and kicking her out of home, aged just 17 – and goes on to take snippets from her literary career, and to follow her discovery of her birth mother (or ‘bio mum’, as she calls her). Threaded throughout are meditations on the nourishment of books and art, the way they offer solace, discovery and growth.

Not a memoir; a ‘cover version’

But Jeanette doesn’t like to call it a memoir; she prefers ‘cover version’, as she told Salon. In Why Be Happy, she writes, ‘Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.’

She tells her Comedy Theatre audience that the book is ‘an experiment with experience’.

Reflecting on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she channels the first chapter of the book in her hands, her memoir-of-sorts:

1985 wasn’t the day of the memoir – and in any case, I wasn’t writing one. I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ – the compass of what they know – while men write wide and bold – the big canvas, the experiment with form. Henry James misunderstood Jane Austen’s comment that she wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody?

Germaine Greer: ‘The lying autobiography’

Not everyone has embraced this experiment, nor her acknowledgment of the shifting border between fact and fiction.

In a recent First Tuesday Book Club, Germaine Greer called both Oranges and Why Be Happy self-serving and ultimately unfair to the characters portrayed in them, particularly Mrs Winterson, Jeanette’s adopted mother, a larger-than-life ‘monster’. Greer said the books belong to ‘a strangely female genre … the lying autobiography’. She declared that she wasn’t ‘buying’ Jeanette’s story of feeling unloved from birth, because ‘adoptive parents DO love children’.

An audience member asks Jeanette, during question time, for a response to Germaine’s comments – which she handles with dignified aplomb. She says she won’t ‘hear a word said’ against Germaine Greer, ‘mother of feminism’, but adds, almost as an aside, ‘I think it’s rather touching that she’s standing up for Mrs Winterson, who died in 1990.’

Mrs Winterson ‘was clever and she was trapped’

‘I think it’s a very affectionate portrait of her,’ she reflects. ‘I began to have a lot more sympathy for her, a lot more understanding.’ She concludes that her mother, Mrs Winterson, had none of the chances she did, coming of age when she did, before the 1960s changed the options available to women. ‘She was clever and she was trapped.’

Indeed, Jeanette is openly admiring as she recalls that her mother read her Jane Eyre as a child, but changed the ending, so that Jane didn’t end up marrying the dashing Rochester, with his mad wife in the attic, but her cold clergyman cousin St John instead. Jeanette didn’t discover what her mother had done until she found a copy of Jane Eyre in the library and read it herself. She’s now impressed by Mrs Winterson’s ability to make up her own alternative story as she turned the pages, fluidly inventing in the prose style of Charlotte Bronte.

Jeanette credits Mrs Winterson and her upbringing with making her who she is; surprisingly, though she has confessed both a longing to be loved and an innate inability to do so, she says she wouldn’t change her circumstances if she could.

‘You can rewrite yourself’

‘I was never going to be a nobody,’ she tells the Comedy Theatre audience, with a bright confidence. ‘That wouldn’t have suited me.’ She believes if her circumstances were different, she’d have a suburban house, kids, a Range Rover, and a high-flying corporate job. ‘I’d have had the energy but not the poetry.’

Her isolation, she says, meant that ‘I thought of myself as the hero of my own life.’

‘If you think of yourself as a fiction instead of a fact, you learn an important truth: you can change the story. You can rewrite yourself.’

Jeanette Winterson, it seems, is as passionate about her chosen religion as her mother was about God. Hers is art, literature, words.

Gesturing at the audience below her, at the blue velvet curtains at the sides of the stage, Jeanette Winterson laughs and says, ‘It’s the gospel tent, isn’t it? I’m hoping I’ll have saved some souls tonight.’

Jeanette Winterson appeared in a double bill with Chad Harbach at the Comedy Theatre as part of the Wheeler Centre’s Ten series of events, presented in partnership with the Sydney Writers Festival.

Friday High Five: Seriously silly aut...

2012-05-18T11:21:17+10:00

When serious authors wear silly outfits

Looking for an end-of-week giggle? Flavorwire has published a selection of photos of writers looking silly. There’s Susan Sontag sitting at her typewriter in a bear suit, snapped by her partner Annie Liebovitz; Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe (resplendent in his signature cream suit) inexplicably perched atop a lifeguard’s tower; Maya Angelou hugging a Muppet on a visit to Sesame Street, and more.

Susan Sontag, somehow looking dignified in a bear suit. Photo by Annie Liebovitz.

Authors working overtime in digital age

We’re all working harder in the digital age, it seems, and authors are no exception. The New York Times reports on all the extra work expected of authors these days. Not only is there Twitter, Facebook and the expectation of being available for online Q&As and the like … but impatient readers, used to downloading books at the press of a button, are leading publishers to drive their authors harder. Genre writers who used to produce new books at the rate of approximately one per year are now ‘pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year’.

Once was a columnist: Mark Dapin

Mark Dapin’s long-running Good Weekend column recently ended – and he’s taken the opportunity to reflect, for Meanjin, on the strange job of being a columnist, while the memories are still warm. It’s a characteristically funny piece, with seem terrific insights into the privilege of diarising in public, getting used to being recognised on the street, creating a persona and battling with bristly readers and online trolls.

In my second Good Weekend column of 2012, I mused that there’d been a lot of ‘lifestyle’ columnists around a decade before, waxing whimsically and repetitively to a diminishing audience, yet I was one of the last men standing. One issue later, the new Good Weekend editor, Ben Naparstek, axed the column.

Mark Dapin: ‘A column should live for two years, not ten, and I’d become increasingly weary of living with such a high public profile.’

I was a childhood psychopath

Last year was the year of the psychopath, with Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test fascinating readers around the world – both with its criteria for psychopathy, and its questioning of how useful (and accurate) it is to categorise people.

Can the psychopath test be applied to children as young as five? What are the consequences of labelling children – and what are the consequences if we don’t?

This week, the New York Times explores the question of classifying children as psychopaths, asking what such a classification can do to a child’s (and their parent’s) life, and what the costs are of avoiding such classifications simply because they scare us. The writer profiles one family with a nine-year-old boy who fits the classification. The mother’s analysis of the situation is particularly chilling:

She mentioned an episode of Criminal Minds that terrified her, in which a couple’s younger son was murdered by his older brother. ‘In the show, the older brother didn’t show any remorse. He just said, “He deserved it, because he broke my plane.” When I saw that, I said, “Oh my God, I so don’t need that episode to be my life story down the line.”’ She laughed awkwardly, then shook her head. ‘I’ve always said that Michael will grow up to be either a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer.’

Under the covers of the New Yorker

Last fortnight, we mentioned Blown Covers, the book of rejected cover art from the New Yorker, edited by Francoise Mouly, the magazine’s long-time art editor (since 1993). All those curious about the process of cover design will be fascinated by the interview with Francoise on Salon this week (originally published on design blog Imprint). Mouly, who tells her artists to ‘think of me as your priest’, says:

Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. ‘Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist … but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.’

A 1997 cover by Harry Bliss, who sketched then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s paranoid psyche in the wake of the assault of a Haitian immigrant, by white NYPD officers.

Working with Words: Ruby J. Murray

2012-05-17T10:33:49+10:00

Running Dogs author Ruby J. Murray (Photo: Brad Dunn)

Ruby J. Murray’s first novel, Running Dogs, was published (to a warm critical reception) this month. Ruby has written for several Australian magazines, newspapers and literary journals; she will be a guest at next week’s Debut Mondays.

What was the first piece of writing you had published?

When I was 11, I won my district’s round of the Nestlé Write Around Australia competition, which published all the districts in a little book. My short story was a one-and-a-half page epic struggle between good and evil based in space, entitled ‘Blood Angels’. The girl who won the regional round wrote a story about an immediate family member dying. I was outraged. I felt it was extremely tacky of her to use this unfair advantage. Then I decided that I probably objected to Nestlé for political reasons, anyway.

What’s the best part of your job?

Writing. And, very occasionally, getting paid for it!

What’s the worst part of your job?

Writing. And very occasionally getting paid for it.

What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?

There are some passionate, incredibly hard-working people in the Australian literary community who are really pushing for an arts landscape that is diverse, progressive, and ambitious. Meeting them along the way makes it all feel worthwhile.

Ruby’s debut novel, Running Dogs

What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?

My mother, who is a young adult author, gave me the best advice, which was: you can’t edit a blank page.

Strangely, I think one of the worst, or at least most misunderstood, pieces of advice people give is: ‘write what you know.’ I think it should probably be: ‘know what you write.’

If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

I was going to continue working in international development before I stopped to write Running Dogs. I was thinking of going on to Haiti, so I’d probably be there. I am also an accomplished Myer Santa Elf. If you could do that all year round, then …

There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?

I have mixed feelings on this. Ultimately, you are the only person who can really teach yourself to write. That said, it can be difficult to give yourself time and permission. And communities of writers, whether formal or informal, can do that, as well as provide those other essential things: readers. Feedback. People to share your rejection letters with.

What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?

Read. Read. Read. There are no magic underpants. And: you can’t edit a blank page.

Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?

Both. Mainly in bookstores, because I like the feeling of a community of minds I get inside them.

Do you read your reviews? If so, how do you approach them? If not, why?

Yes. I try to keep a level head. I try to keep my lunch down. I tell myself that next time I won’t read them.

If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?

Loki. We wouldn’t talk so much as drink bottles of whiskey and set fire to our own hair.

What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?

This is always a difficult question. There is no one book. They all have their own impacts. While I was writing Running Dogs, I was thinking a lot about the work of Lawrence Durrell, Angela Carter and Armistead Maupin, who are strange bedfellows but … there you go.

Ruby Murray will be a guest at this month’s Debut Mondays, with Lisa Jacobson, Madeleine Griffeth and The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award Winner 2012, Paul D. Carter.

You can catch them at The Moat from 6.15pm, next Monday 21 May. The event is free.

Modernist Romantic: Jeffrey Eugenides...

2012-05-16T11:17:53+10:00

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides’ third novel, opens with a look at the bookshelves of his heroine, English literature major Madeleine. It’s stacked with nineteenth-century romantic novels: Edith Wharton, Henry James, Austen, the Brontes.

What would we see if we looked at Jeffrey Eugenides’ bookcase, back when he was a college student?

‘My bookcase was full of obscure Eastern European novels that I could barely read, but if I carried them around, people would think that I was very smart and destined to be a novelist,’ he told Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams at the Comedy Theatre last night.

Jeffrey Eugenides: ‘I wanted to be James Joyce and I thought the easiest way would be to dress like him. I had round glasses, wore old men’s suits and at one point, I even carried a cane.’

Being James Joyce

Eugenides’ hero was James Joyce; when he started loving literature, it was the modernist novels he adored. He read the nineteenth-century classics later. ‘I did it backwards,’ he said.

It was Joyce who made him decide to be a writer, aged 16, after reading Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. ‘I read it unironically. I thought an artist was a heroic thing to be.’

Writing replaced his earlier aspirational career of choice – being an actor. Watching Eugenides on stage, relaxed, seemingly enjoying himself, trading wisecracks with Michael Williams, it’s not so hard to imagine him as a professional performer. He told the audience that his parents, who had been horrified by his decision to be an actor, thought writing a ‘somehow better’ choice.

So, what kind of college student was Eugenides? ‘There were people like Madeleine in my English seminars who were there because they loved to read. I was there because I wanted to be a writer and I had some kind of mercenary idea that I needed to learn how.’

He described a moment where he looked around and had the realisation that his classmates were all socially hopeless; they were the brown cardigan wearers, while across the quad were the cool students. ‘I realised I must be hopeless too, because these were my people.’

But Eugenides must have cut an arresting figure on the college lawns; his Joyce worship wasn’t confined to the page. ‘I wanted to be James Joyce and I thought the easiest way would be to dress like him. I had round glasses, wore old men’s suits and at one point, I even carried a cane.’

Like Madeleine, he took a semiotics class. ‘In the college I went to in the 70s and 80s, French deconstruction theory was coming into fashion.’ He said that as a student, you’d end up caught between the traditional and postmodernist approaches to studying literature, as the professors at the university were divided between the two schools of thought.

‘I wasn’t happy to hear that the novel was dead when I went to college wanting to become a writer.’ But he was attracted to semiotics intellectually and ‘wanted to know what it was all about’.

‘I don’t like books without a sense of humour’

Michael mentioned the centrality of humour to Eugenides’ three very different novels: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex and The Marriage Plot.

‘I don’t usually like people without a sense of humour, so I don’t like books without a sense of humour,’ said Eugenides. ‘Though occasionally I find a big, solemn book I like.’

‘If I try to write something with no humour, I almost can’t find my way forward.’

Reinventing the wheel

Some critics have been disappointed by the traditional narrative structure of The Marriage Plot, after the daringly original first-person plural narrator of The Virgin Suicides and the sprawling inventiveness of Middlesex. Why did Eugenides choose a more traditional formal approach with his third novel? The answer was intriguing.

‘With The Virgin Suicides, I limited the amount that the narrator could know. I couldn’t go inside the heads of those girls. I don’t think at that point I could have done that, so it made it easier to write the book.’

He sees The Marriage Plot as more advanced than his previous two books: by narrowing the scope to three central characters, he was able to go deeper. ‘While it’s more traditional on the face of it, to me it seemed like an advance in depth and intricacy of character.’

‘Each book teaches you another thing that you might try in the next book.’

Eugenides says that he has five unfinished novels; that the reason his books take so long (so far, he produces roughly one every ten years) is that he’s ‘constantly starting things that don’t work’.

‘I don’t have a voice, or a manner or typical book that I write, so I’m always reinventing the wheel.’

‘This is something a lot of writers have in common: You often feel while you’re writing that you don’t really know how to do it.’

‘Never put a bandana on a character’

In audience question time, someone inevitably asked about the influence of David Foster Wallace on The Marriage Plot. It’s been often said that his character of Leonard is based on Wallace because he wears a bandana, chews tobacco and is a manic depressive. (Wallace was actually a depressive, not a manic depressive; despite some reports, Eugenides was not a close friend of Wallace.)

Eugenides handled the question with a blend of humour and élan, despite visibly wilting as it was spoken.

‘Never put a bandana on a character, is my advice.’ He’s said elsewhere that he was actually thinking of Axl Rose when he made that wardrobe choice.

‘It wasn’t based on him, it was based on a couple of other people and I guess I disguised it very well because everyone thinks it’s David Foster Wallace.’

‘Is it true that Madeleine’s based on Jonathan Franzen?’ quipped Michael.

‘Yes,’ laughed Eugenides. ‘When I met him he had all these nineteenth-century books – and a terrific figure.’

Mitchell or Leonard?

Michael finished by telling Eugenides about a Twitter thread from earlier that afternoon: Mitchell or Leonard? (Yes, we confess, it originated in the Wheeler Centre office.)

Eugenides seemed to come down firmly on the side of Team Mitchell; perhaps unsurprising, as he admits he’s a character who bears a lot of surface resemblance to himself.

‘Mitchell has gotten a lot of proposals of marriage,’ he said. ‘Readers write saying, If Madeleine doesn’t want him, I’ll have him.’

‘Since he’s sort of based on me, though, I think, Where were you when I needed you?’

Not in the Mood: Clementine Ford on B...

2012-05-15T09:49:19+10:00

Clementine Ford attended Bettina Arndt’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on Why Sex Matters So Much to Men at the Wheeler Centre last Thursday. She tells us why she vehemently disagrees with Arndt’s views on men, sex and whether women should say yes to their partners even when they’re not in the mood.

‘Life as a hot-blooded heterosexual man isn’t much fun these days!’

So began sex therapist Bettina Arndt, when she brought her particular brand of gender politics to the lunchtime soapbox at the Wheeler Centre last week. If you’re not familiar with Arndt’s work, the Cliff Notes are simple: heterosexual men in married or de-facto partnerships aren’t getting enough sex, because women are too mean and selfish to dole it out to them on a regular basis. Women have this idea that they have the right to say no to sex whenever they want. But ladies, when you won the right not to be maritally raped, it didn’t mean you could withhold sex for the next 20 years. Frankly, men are trapped in a sea of endless negotiation. They’re up against it and they don’t know what to do.

I assure you, I’m not exaggerating. All of these ideas and more form the general basis of Arndt’s politics. In fact, apart from the bit about women being mean and selfish, Arndt said all of those things last week – even the brazenly offensive part about women thinking they have the ‘right’ to say no to sex.

It’s not necessarily surprising that these views exist. When you live in a society that finds it acceptable to seek advice from the Catholic priesthood on the choices women make regarding marriage, you can pretty much guarantee that anything else is par for the course. In her extremely superficial representation of sexual interplay, Arndt is less guilty of reinforcing the status quo than she is of legitimising it.

And it’s not as if she has no experience. Regardless of how vehemently I might disagree with Arndt, I must at least acknowledge that she has a minimum of 30 years’ research under her belt and presumably a mass of subjects who’ve been all too willing to share the details of their sex lives with her. Put simply, I do not disbelieve her when she says her male subjects are dissatisfied with the level of physical intimacy in their marriages, and that they wish they could get more slap ‘n’ tickle.

But the problem is in how limited that pool of subjects might be, and how willing they are to address their own complicity in the matter. Arndt reports that single women do not exhibit the same eradication of sex drive as the married or partnered women in her studies, yet she fails to draw the obvious conclusion. If, removed from a domestic partnership, women remain sexually vital and vibrant (or are, as she shudderingly refers to them, ‘juicy tomatoes’) then surely the problem isn’t the women? Surely, it’s the bounds and interplay of that domestic partnership?

In fact, Arndt doesn’t really seem to acknowledge the reality of most domestic partnerships at all. Rather than ponder what a job plus motherhood plus unpaid domestic labour might do to a woman’s libido – particularly when statistics continue to show that they carry the burden of that labour – Arndt instead wonders why women wouldn’t choose the ‘easier’ option of satisfying their husbands in the sack. Women spend an awful lot of time and energy doing things to make their husbands happy, says Arndt. Things like spending hours shopping for him, trying to find nice underwear, or scrubbing the kitchen floor to make it perfect! Surely ten minutes of letting him do it to them would be easier?!

It’s usually not difficult to find flaws in Arndt’s logic, but this has to be one of the most glaring ones. Not only does it absent women’s sexual desire from the equation, but it’s erected (heh!) on the idea that women primarily make men happy not by being an independent, equal partner, but by performing domestic chores for them. Indeed, it establishes sex itself as a domestic duty that wives are expected to perform in order to placate their menfolk. Now, men are all adrift, grovelling on their knees for a scrap of attention. Frankly, it’s unseemly.

Of course, I can think of nothing less likely to get women going to bed knickerless than the idea that they probably should. But when I asked Arndt if she thought obligation was the enemy of desire, she replied that it wasn’t – because desire could be switched on. ‘If you put the canoe in the water, people will happily start paddling,’ as she wrote in one of her articles. Ladies, lie back and let him frolic in the ebbs and flows of your Lake Titicaca!

While it’s true that desire can be stimulated after initial contact – many people could claim to have begun sex not really feeling like it, and had quite a pleasant time after all – is that really what we should be arguing is the payoff for women fulfilling their duty? And is that really the level of intimacy men are after?

When further questioned as to why she seems to only demand change of women, Arndt argued that she was often pigeonholed by journalists. Apparently, whole reams of discussion about the complexities of men and women, not to mention male obligation, were failing to make it into the final copy of all those people determined to paint her as a woman-hating harridan.

But the last I checked, those journalists weren’t writing Ardnt’s articles. They weren’t delivering her soapbox at the Wheeler Centre. And they certainly weren’t standing before a fair-sized crowd arguing that if men are only having an affair here or there in a 29-year marriage, they’re mostly succeeding at monogamy yet getting no credit for it.

Perhaps the reason Arndt’s men seem to have so much trouble getting their wives ‘in the mood’ is because, in Arndt’s world, those wives have already spent all afternoon on their knees in another position – namely, scrubbing that kitchen floor. Solve that problem, and I think you’ll find that women are a bit more open to some casual frottage.

Until then, I’d rather not take sex advice from a woman whose alternative for me not actually having sex with my husband is to just lube up and give him a quick wristy.

Clementine Ford is a writer and broadcaster who has appeared in the Age’s Daily Life, ABC’s The Drum, as a guest on ABC TV’s Q&A and as a host on Triple R’s Breakfasters. She blogs at www.clementineford.com.au.

You can view Bettina Arndt’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on Why Sex Matters to Men on our website.

Cancer, Sex, Art and Mortality: Joshu...

2012-05-14T07:42:24+10:00

Some memoirs are less about the subject than about meeting the writer on the page. New York composer Joshua Cody’s [sic], ostensibly about being a young cancer patient, is one of those memoirs.

Cody writes that his book was intended ‘as a riposte to the literature of disease … pure dreck, pale pastel book after book on the shelves’. There’s nothing pastel about [sic], which is as much about art, mortality, creativity and the way we make our own lives as it is about illness. It’s also about a thirty-something man living in New York City: studying music, making films for fun, haunting his neighbourhood bar, recreationally using cocaine and having affairs with beautiful, slightly mad women. The result could easily be a tired cliché or a hot mess, but instead, it’s a vivid, intricately crafted meditation on a life interrupted by serious illness.

Cody says that studying music has given him a particular sensitivity to form. Indeed, the form of this memoir is both unusual and seductive. Though it follows the rough trajectory of its genre by beginning with diagnosis and ending with recovery, [sic] is refreshingly different from its shelfmates. While illness provides the frame of the memoir – a timeline and central reference point – its subject is wider and more ambitious.

Illness memoirs often attempt to answer the questions ‘what is it like?’, ‘how does it feel?’ and ‘what does it all mean?’. Cody answers these first two questions with a crisp starkness reminiscent of Helen Garner’s unflinching descriptions in The Spare Room. He describes sitting in a hospital room with fellow patients, all of them absorbing chemotherapy medication through drips in their arms:

there was something grotesque about it all as if everyone were sitting around … defecating while making affable conversation.

At one stage during his treatment, he comes close to dying. He describes the sensations and steps of his brush with death in such a way that he takes the reader to the brink of the experience, somehow avoiding both ghoulishness and sentiment. Cody’s word-pictures are keenly precise, carefully articulate about experiences that are difficult to articulate and impossible to imagine. He likens the experience of feeling his life ebb away to an intense discomfort:

There was above all the body, and the need to escape from it; and that need eclipsed all else. Biologists call this escape ‘death’.

That third question, ‘what does it all mean?’, is perhaps the most interesting of them all. Cody details the ‘three-act’ structure of most illness memoirs, of which he’s read many:

(1) diagnosis and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there’s more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe.

He writes, almost angrily, that there is no intrinsic worth or meaning to his experience: ‘illness was not an opportunity for existential awakenings, it was the very opposite of beauty or grace’.

Yet it was, clearly, an impetus for sustained reflection. Cody asks ‘How do we position suffering in human life?’ He answers that while illness can be pinned to a specific time and place, humans are ‘all over the place and whenever time’. This idea, that illness doesn’t happen in isolation, but in the midst of all the other elements of a life, is central to the book and reflected in the form it takes.

The narrative often leaps about wildly, branching off from the central story to follow multiple peripheral associations, before returning to pick up on the progress of events. For example, midway through sitting in a doctor’s office, receiving a crucial update on the effectiveness of Cody’s treatment, we drift with him to muse on the writings of David Foster Wallace and Susan Sontag, the process of editing films and a lost-forever revisionist western silent film made by his ancestor – before returning to the scene, trying and utterly failing to focus on the doctor’s verdict, before taking off again. It takes nearly 13 pages before the reader is allowed to digest the doctor’s information: that the chemotherapy hasn’t worked and Cody will need brutal radiation therapy, which will take a year and involve hospitalisation and a bone marrow transplant.

This seemingly chaotic riffing brilliantly mirrors the mood of the narrative and the headspace of the narrator. It is impressionistic in a way that music (which Cody calls ‘the least representational of the arts’) often is. It’s not just content but form that veers and varies like this; some sections, where Cody is focused on his experience, are starkly evocative, resembling the ‘line of polished blocks’ he originally intended the book to be, with short, precisely carved sentences. Others times, his sentences are breathlessly, deliberately long – one even goes for roughly a page – reflecting an unmoored mind. The technique, which could go so wrong, works brilliantly, proving what a virtuoso writer Cody is. (Despite the fact he insists he’s ‘not really a writer [but] just writing this one thing and that’s it’.)

[sic] poses another question, one Cody believes occupied his father, a talented writer who never published: ‘what’s the proper position of art within a life?’ For Cody’s father, literature was central to his life in a personal rather than a public fashion; he passed his passion on to his son. Art and artists were part of the dialogue they shared, the common language they spoke: to the extent that after his father’s death, an annotated manuscript of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a gift from Cody to his father, is posthumously returned to him with a final letter. Their final dialogue happens through a book.

Similarly, Cody’s book – his conversation with the reader – is suffused with references to films and filmmakers, musicians, albums, poets. He compares his openness about his sexual encounters to Orson Welles’ repulsion at the idea of a ‘kiss and tell’; contrasts Mozart’s Don Giovanni with The Rolling Stones’ New York album Some Girls, and describes one girlfriend, in part, by saying:

her personal wardrobe and her apartment somehow reminded me of the fake white Christmas tree Ray Liotta brings home for the family after the 1978 Lufthansa heist portrayed in Goodfellas.

For Cody – and for many of us – the stories we consume become part of our own stories. Art is central to a life not only for those who create it, but for those of us who consume it, borrowing parts we find meaningful or significant and weaving them into a new whole.

The way we construct our lives, consciously assemble them out of a myriad of possible parts – both as we live them and as we tell them – is at the heart of Cody’s project. ‘I don’t know how many words I’ve said that I’ve forgotten and I don’t know how many of these were recorded,’ he writes, making concrete the fact that stories are chosen, truths are made. Those fragments we notice and record; they are the ones that become our narrative.

Review by Jo Case, senior writer/editor at the Wheeler Centre

Joshua Cody will be in conversation with Chris Flynn on Tuesday 15 May 2012. They are in a double bill with Jeffrey Eugenides (in conversation with Michael Williams). Tickets are $35 for the double bill. Book now.

Friday High Five: Art Stars, Cool Dop...

2012-05-11T20:01:23+10:00

Eyes on the Prix

Winners of this year’s Prix Ars Electronica were announced this week. Celebrating artists and projects at the forefront of media experimentation and digital innovation, the awards are considered amongst the most prestigious and coveted in the field. Six Australians were acknowledged in the honours list.

In the Interactive Art category, It’s a jungle in here by Melbournians Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine (with programmer Matthew Gingold) was given an Award of Distinction. The piece – ‘a confronting tour of the fragile rules that organise our public lives’ – reflects the regular collaborators' preoccupations with creepy, unsettling scenes and playful representation.

Controlled by facial recognition, voice and pressure sensors, attackers morph into grizzly bears or crows; their victims can retreat into a turtle shell, or be subjected to the unwanted advances of snakes.

In the Hybrid Art category, Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor received Honorary Mentions for their piece The Body is a Big Place. Prue Lang scored the same for her system Un Reseau Translucide, which harvests dancers' kinetic energy.

Beside Oneself

Life as an artist can be a slog, and many practising artists choose to refocus their energy on the daily grind: a more regular job, perhaps, or a family, wondering what may have been.

Writing for GQ, Eric Puchner was wondering the same thing when he met his doppelgänger, a singer-songwriter named Kyle Field. ‘As a writer, I’d always been fascinated by the trope of the doppelgänger and its long literary life, from Dostoyevsky to Nabokov to Spider-Man,’ he offers. ‘I’d started wondering if there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one – a person who encapsulates everything you’ve ever dreamed of becoming.’

‘There was an indie-rock singer who lived in a house full of young Swedish women and an erotic photographer who looked like Jesus.’

Making Ideas Happen

The 99% Conference recently wrapped up in New York – its name not Occupy-related, but rather gleaned from Edison’s adage that ‘genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration’. With a broad focus and a diverse roster of speakers, the event generated a slew of suggestions for snaring the muse. They’ve posted a list of ‘key takeaways’ on their website, quoting figures such as Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal, Radiolab co-host/creator Jad Abumrad and Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile.

‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.’ Alexis Madrigal quotes Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook employee.

A Picture of Procrastination

One of the 99% Conference’s guests was Australian designer/illustrator Rilla Alexander of art and design collective Rinzen. Alexander was showcasing Her Idea, an adult-friendly picture book about the tension between ideas, focus and realisation.

Rilla Alexander’s richly illustrated Her Idea.

Sendak Send-Off

Best Made Co.’s ‘playfully dangerous’ tribute to Where the Wild Things Are.

On the subject of picture books, we couldn’t let this week go without a nod to the genre’s hero Maurice Sendak, who passed away on Tuesday aged 83.

Tributes to the iconic author and illustrator have been made far and wide, but perhaps the most unusual comes via Best Made Co. – a customised, coloured and spotted axe dubbed Max’s Axe.

Looking further back, a 2006 New Yorker profile entitled ‘Not Nice’ reveals Sendak’s early loneliness, raw wit and close ties to the mystique of childhood.

Questions of life and death did not elude Sendak. In interviews such as the one below, he spoke about living and dying, asking: ‘Why bother to get born?’

‘I have adult thoughts in my head, experiences – but I’m never going to talk about them,’ he says. ‘I’m never going to write about them. Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don’t know, I don’t know. I guess that’s where my heart is.’

Sjón and the Literature of Iceland

2012-05-10T11:00:51+10:00

Hannah Kent, deputy editor of Kill Your Darlings, has spent time living and writing in Iceland, the setting for her forthcoming debut novel, over the past eight years.

The Australian visit of one of Iceland’s leading literary lights, Sjón, is just days away. Hannah provides a perfect introduction to Icelandic literature – and Sjón in particular – in this passionate appreciation.

Hannah Kent

There is an Icelandic riddle that asks: ‘What in the house keeps silent and yet speaks to all?’ The answer? A book. It is a maxim that is revealing of Iceland’s profound respect for and love of the written word. A small island, its coast of black sand washed on all sides by the cold waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, Iceland’s nationhood has, in many ways, been built on a reverence for language; its heritage is unquestionably literary.

Books, reading and storytelling have not only long been part of Icelandic cultural traditions, but arguably comprise its cultural landscape. The Icelandic sagas (Íslendingasögur), medieval prose histories relating the lives of the Norse and Celtic inhabitants of Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries, form the nation’s cultural backbone. Landmarks of world literature, with many of the manuscripts preserved to this day, the sagas are ‘the great foundation myths’ of Iceland; singularly responsible for threading the country’s mythologies and historical traditions through the generations.

For hundreds of years Icelandic households gathered in the evenings during the dark grip of winter for kvöldvaka, where a member of the family would read aloud to amuse the others as they turned their hands to chores: knitting, fulling wool, mending tools. Recitation and contemplation of the sagas, many of which were known by heart, and readings of devotional books, newspapers and – in later years – published books of folktales, not only helped pass the snow-locked hours before sleep, but cultivated the education of Iceland’s people.

Unlike its European and Scandinavian neighbours, Iceland’s population achieved almost total literacy before 1800 – a remarkable feat for a country that, even after 1800, possessed only one school. As Uno Von Troil, a traveller to Iceland in 1772, remarked in his journal:

‘You will seldom find a peasant who besides being well-instructed in the principles of religion, is not also acquainted with the history of his country, which proceeds from the frequent reading of the traditional histories (sagas) wherein consists their principal amusement’.

This sentiment was supported by Sir George Steuart MacKenzie, who travelled to Iceland in 1810 – ‘the literary character of the people is doubtless the most extraordinary and peculiar’. He was struck by the fact that literature could thrive amongst a community ‘so oppressed by all the severities of soil and climate, and secluded amidst the desolation and destructive operations of nature’.

In modern times there has been little sign that Icelanders’ love affair with the book and with storytelling is diminishing. Reykjavík, the country’s capital, was appointed as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2011, in recognition of its ‘outstanding literary history with its invaluable heritage of ancient medieval literature’, and ‘the central role literature plays within the modern urban landscape, the contemporary society and the daily life of its citizens’. Despite the fact that these citizens amount to only 317,000, the country continues to publish the most books per capita in the world – the equivalent of five books each year for every 1,000 citizens – and has produced a vast number of internationally known writers, including 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Halldór Laxness. Other, more contemporary Icelanders to achieve international acclaim include Arnaldur Indriðason (2005 winner of the Golden Dagger Award) and Yrsa Sigurðardottir, both crime writers, and Nordic Council Literature Prize winners, Thor Vilhjálmsson, Einar Már Guðmundsson and Sjón.

Sjón cuts a distinctive figure in Iceland’s cultural landscape

Sjón (born in 1962 as Sigurjón Sigurðsson) is perhaps most emblematic of the vibrancy and originality that can be found in the contemporary Icelandic literary scene. At only 16 years of age he published his first poems, and a few years later he formed the surrealist poetry group, Medusa, with other artists. Now the author of seven novels and many collections of poetry, Sjón has applied his creativity in other areas: establishing the record label Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), and collaborating with Lars Von Trier and Björk on the lyrics for Dancer in the Dark. His literary abilities and interests are manifold and reflected in the style of his work; from the precise, controlled lyricism of his novel The Blue Fox (Skugga Baldur, 2005) – where a priest hunts an enigmatic blue fox through a wintered landscape and a naturalist finds a young girl shackled to a ship wreck – to the stream-of-conscious surrealism of his most recent publication, From the Mouth of the Whale.

From the Mouth of the Whale (Rökkurbýsnir, published in Icelandic in 2008, and translated into English by Victoria Cribb in 2011), is, like Sjón, representative of the way in which Icelandic literature today coalesces the country’s rich history with modern sensibilities. It is the story of Jónas the Learned, a self-taught naturalist and healer who has been sentenced for sorcery and necromancy, outlawed to Gullbjörn’s Island in 1635. Shortlisted for the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, From the Mouth of the Whale is a portrait of seventeenth-century post-Reformation Iceland: a bleak island shrouded in poverty, mysticism and superstition, just as the bright light of science is dawning upon the world. It is a novel where tradition is amalgamated with discovery.

From the Mouth of the Whale – or Rökkurbýsnir, if you’re Icelandic

The Iceland represented by Sjón, as Jónas narrates his story to a lone sandpiper, similarly teeters between the magical and the known: ravens’ heads are roasted and their brains picked apart in search of bezoars; a solar eclipse drives peasants to despair and madness; the ghost of a parson’s son runs riot until it is exorcised with poetry; whalers are massacred; and corpses are invaded by the Devil, who ‘rides the deceased like a cruel jockey driving his horse’. Sjón’s prose is at once intensely surrealist and peculiarly charming, and – like so many Icelandic authors – he plays with the myths, history and folktales of his country. Just as Jónas breathlessly exclaims, ‘Every book is imbued with a human spirit,’ so are Sjón’s novels imbued with a spirited appreciation and exploration of language and Icelandic literary culture.

In a 2011 interview with David Shariatmadari from the Guardian, Sjón acknowledged Icelanders’ need for storytelling: ‘In a small country, you really feed your identity with stories. Nobody else is … looking at you, so the only people you can assume are interested in who you are, and where you come from, and where you’re going is yourself and your people. So you’re very much reliant on the story of your origin…’ It’s a philosophy and a recognition that, as Reykjavík’s City of Literature site suggests, ‘the art of the word is the strongest thread in Iceland’s cultural history’. It is what holds Iceland together as a nation, what connects it to its past. As Jónas exclaims in From the Mouth of the Whale:

‘And so it is with all the far-fetched tales […] of this world with their uncouth exclamations about endless nights, burning snow, whales the size of mountains, trumpet blasts of the dead from volcanoes and icebergs, witches who can sell sailors a favourable wind or send their sons to the moon; in some strange way they come close to the stories that we ordinary, humble folk tell ourselves in an attempt to comprehend our existence here and make it more bearable.’

Hannah Kent is deputy editor of Kill Your Darlings, and teaches at Flinders University. She recently received the 2011 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for her manuscript, Burial Rites, which tells the story of the last woman to be executed in Iceland.

Sjón will be in conversation with Alan Brough next Monday 14 May, in a double bill with Roddy Doyle and Blanche Clark at the Comedy Theatre, 6.30pm–9.30pm. Tickets $35. Book now.

Thank You for Phoning: Mobile Phones ...

2012-05-09T12:29:22+10:00

Too close for comfort? Apple’s iPhone 3G.

If you’re reading this article on a smartphone, check that you’re holding it at least 15mm away from your body. That’s the small-print manufacturer’s warning that comes with your iPhone 3G.

It’s not too hard to do, though it’s a jolt to realise how often we unthinkingly read with our phones resting on our knees, or talk, in a noisy crowd, with them pressed against our ear.

The World Health Organisation advises that holding your phone 30 to 40cm away from your body will give you a ‘much lower’ exposure to the radiofrequency fields that are ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’.

Try texting with a ruler held between you and your mobile; that’s effectively the closest the WHO thinks you should be to your phone, if you want to reduce your exposure to ‘possible’ carcinogens. Feels weird, doesn’t it?

The jury is out on whether mobile phone use is linked to brain cancer; however, many experts are worried. It’s too early, they say, to conclusively judge: mobile phone use only became common in the 1990s. In March this year, the cautious-by-nature World Health Organisation upgraded its position to the warning that mobile phone exposure is ‘possibly carcinogenic’.

Charlie Teo: One third of brain tumours around the ear

Brain surgeon Charlie Teo notes a disturbing rise in brain tumours around the ear.

Earlier this week, leading brain surgeon Charlie Teo wrote a piece for The Punch expressing his concerns. ‘I see 10 to 20 patients each week and at least one third of those patients’ tumours are in the area of the brain around the ear. As a neurosurgeon I cannot ignore this fact.’

Teo says two of the largest centres in the world have documented a disturbing rise in the incidence of brain tumours; UK figures suggest a 50% increase in frontal and temporal lobe tumours between 1999 and 2009.

He is calling for more – and better – research. Of the studies that show no link between mobiles and cancer, up to 75 per cent have been funded by telcos. (Of those that show a link, predictably, none have been funded by telcos.)

30 minutes daily use = 40% increased risk of tumours

Interphone, the world’s largest study – conducted in 13 countries over 12 years – suggests no overall link between mobile phones and brain cancer, but concludes ‘the possible effects of long-term heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation’ (our emphasis).

The study also concluded that those in the top ten per cent of phone usage are up to 40 per cent more likely to develop glioma, a common type of brain cancer.

Just 30 minutes of mobile phone conversation daily is enough to put participants in that top ten per cent category. Think about it: how many people do you know (or sit next to on the train journey home) who easily do that? In 2010, the New York Times wrote that ‘today’s typical user indistinguishable from the heavy user of 10 years ago’.

Teens and children at increased risk

The Interphone study’s authors have said that mobile phone use is ‘more prevalent’ now than it was during the study period. They also admit ‘it is not unusual for young people to use mobile phones for an hour or more a day’.

‘Young people are both higher users of mobiles and more susceptible to radiation. The New York Times said:

‘Radiation that penetrates only two inches into the brain of an adult will reach much deeper into the brains of children because their skulls are thinner and their brains contain more absorptive fluid. No field studies have been completed to date on cellphone radiation and children.’

Both British health authorities and the Royal College of Physicians have suggested ‘it would be prudent’ for teenagers not to use cell phones.

Calls for research that’s ‘not flawed’

Epidemiologist Devra Davis has argued that many studies are not thorough enough.

Another oft-cited study used to back up the case that there is no link between mobile phones and cancer is a 2006 Danish study that followed more than 420,000 mobile phone users for more than 21 years and found no evidence.

That study has been described as deeply flawed. As American epidemiologist Devra Davis told Lateline last year, the average user in that study has used a mobile for eight years. It seems that ten years or more is the amount of time that triggers a measurable increased risk. More importantly, perhaps, that study excluded business users of mobile phones – probably the heaviest users. (It began with 700,000 mobile users and excluded 200,000 for being business users; that’s a significant percentage.)

‘We need to design a study that is not flawed from the start,’ says Charlie Teo.

Comparisons to tobacco and asbestos industries

Devra Davis is the author of Disconnect, which was nominated for the US National Book Award. She brings a particularly disturbing perspective to the topic:

I worked at the US National Academy of Sciences for 10 years and in that capacity as director of one of their large boards I oversaw the evaluation of the evidence on passive smoke and tobacco and asbestos and in those instances we looked at the data and we said well we’re not sure, we think there could be a problem and while we waited and continued to evaluate the issue unfortunately millions of people were exposed … In this situation with cell phones I don’t think we want to wait.

Using your phone safely

It’s not all doom and gloom though; there are things you can do to decrease your risk, including (but not limited to) using a headset rather than talking directly into your phone. (Charlie Teo has said he always uses a headset or a speaker phone.) And don’t sleep with your phone under your pillow or on your bedside table, next to your head.

Devra Davis has a terrific list of ten mobile safety tips on her website. Here’s a summary:

Use a head set, use a speaker phone, don’t keep the phone on your body. Be smart and sensible with how you use a phone and don’t give a phone to a child to use without a head set or a speaker phone. Children should be encouraged to text and not talk on a phone and all of us should think twice before keeping a phone close to the head or close to the body.

We’ll leave you with a snippet of dark satire, from the ending of Jason Reitman’s 2005 spin-doctor film, Thank You For Smoking:

Interested in science?

Two world-leading women in science, Dava Sobel and Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, will be at the Comedy Theatre at 6.30pm next Thursday 17 May. Tickets are $35 for the double bill. Book now.

As a special offer, if you comment on this post, you could win a double pass to our see our two science stars. To be in the running, just include your email address when you log in.

Working with Words: Tony Birch

2012-05-08T09:45:08+10:00

Tony Birch

Tony Birch is currently shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award for his first novel, Blood. Yet he’s best known for his short stories, which have been published in two collections, Shadowboxing and Father’s Day, and several anthologies. Tony teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne.

We spoke to him for our Working with Words series, about teaching creative writing, finding your mentor on the page and dreaming of being Atticus Finch’s son.

What was the first piece of writing you had published?

I began publishing poetry, and published several poems with the 925 poetry magazine, out by collective effort press. My first short story, ‘Joy’, was published by antithesis at Melbourne University in 1991.

What’s the best part of your job?

Coming across a student who has a real passion for both reading and writing, who knows it is a long haul, and is driven by the quality of the work, and not their ego.

What’s the worst part of your job?

The fact that universities are driven more by metric outcomes than intellectual and creative development.

What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?

Probably this year’s shortlisting for the Miles Franklin award for my novel, Blood. But personally, it was walking by Readings bookshop on Lygon Street and seeing my first book, Shadowboxing, in the front window.

What’s the best (or worst) feedback you’ve received about your writing?

The best is unforgettable and wonderful. A past student of mine, Julian Drape, told me that Shadowboxing was being passed around in his circle of friends like a favourite Gillian Welch album. The worst – which also makes me smile – is that my writing is depressing and bleak.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?

That I was hiding my identity behind my fiction – clearly insinuating that my fictional characters had no life, or identity of their own.

If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

I make a living by teaching writing, not writing itself. I could never make a living writing, and don’t really want to. I’d worry too much about money, and my five children would have to save their scraps of toast rather than feed them to our loving Staffie, Ella. I don’t know what I would be doing, but given the choice I’d be riding the Tour de France.

There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?

Well, the ‘debate’, if you can call it that, is so shallow and misinformed that it’s not really a debate. For instance, those who shit-can writing classes sometimes claim that it is the reason we are not reading fiction, Australian fiction in particular. That’s bullshit. My students have to read fiction every week, and analyse and come to understand what it is trying to do.

I have never taught a university class where students do not read some Australian writing, particular new and younger writers, who I always promote. The debate sounds more like a screech from a monkey cage. (Not that monkeys should be kept in cages – or chickens, birds, and even ferrets).

A good writing class establishes an atmosphere where students firstly learn to value reading quality writing, and gain knowledge from it. And then realising that a writing career is based on discipline, regular labour and a passion for curiosity, creativity and the shift from an idea to work on the page.

I don’t teach writing to get students published. Most will never publish. I teach to create a foundation for those who will continue to write long after they leave university, and to illustrate to each of my students that both reading and writing enhance both the intellectual and creative ability in all of us.

Those who continue to claim that creative writing cannot be taught seem to believe that it is a ‘natural’ talent, and that good writers are inherently ‘gifted’. Some are gifted and some may be naturally talented. So what? It’s only part of the story, and a small part of it. And so what if a writing student is not good enough to be published? Many of my students leave my class having a greater respect for what writers do. And they become better readers – for life.

What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?

Always be reading. Find your mentors on the page. Write regularly. Accept rejection as an occupational reality. And if you don’t make it, ask yourself: is there another way to pursue your creative interest?

Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?

I will always buy a book in a shop, if I can. I only buy online if the book is not available in the country, and then if there is a delay in getting it from a local seller. I love the physical space of the bookshop, and can spend hours in them.

If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and what would you talk about?

It would be Atticus Finch. And I would ask him if he would mind if Harper Lee rewrote To Kill A Mockingbird, and I could be his son, and he would put a secure hand on my shoulder on that front porch of his, and he would say to me, ‘listen to me son. Hanging out at that river instead of getting your schooling, and smoking those cigarettes, and chasing after those private school girls, and cussing and fighting, that’s no way for a boy to grow up.’

He would then gently ruffle my hair with they same hand that took down that crazy dog with a single shot from his rifle and say, ‘you’re my oldest boy. You have to set an example for your brother, Jem, and your sister, Scout, and it needs to be a good example.’ We would then sit on that old porch in the quiet and heat and take in the scent of the night

What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?

The answer is directly above (and obvious).

Tony Birch’s essay, ‘Not Writing a Novel: Recent Australian Short Fiction’, is the latest in our Long View series.

Trolls, Donkeys and Bigots: Is Freedo...

2012-05-07T08:50:27+10:00

As an opinionated lady who shares those opinions for a living, writer and broadcaster Clementine Ford is no stranger to debates about freedom of speech. She explains why freedom of speech is often misread to mean a licence to spread bigotry – and why true freedom of speech can never be over-rated.

Clementine Ford

Regular readers of online opinion columns will no doubt be familiar with the staggeringly putrid depths to which humans cloaked in the veil of anonymity can sink. The brutal coliseum of comments that accompany such pieces can, over time, cause the average person’s brain to achieve such dangerously high pressure levels that one requires the metaphorical equivalent of a hemicranieactomy (ie. a stiff drink or ten) to simply make it through the night.

Although generally composed of illegible honks and rabid drooling, there are a handful of certainties that one can expect to find in this collection of head-scratching nonsense puzzles. After you’ve sifted through the pop science and invocations of Godwin’s Law, you’ll stumble upon several barking donkeys braying about the apparent death of freedom of speech.

Let’s assume the following example. Bettina Arndt writes something ridiculous about women and their failure to reward ‘beta’ males with sex and marriage. Another writer responds, suggesting that Arndt’s views are archaic, unconscionable and completely dismissive of women. This piece receives a level of support (namely because the only person who would disagree with it is a fool). A fool then turns up and proceeds to disagree with it, invariably managing to work in this zinger somewhere along the way:

Whatever happened to FREEDOM OF SPEECH?!?! So now the PC POLICE won’t let anyone say anything? THIS IS WHY AUSTRALIA IS LOSING.

While it never becomes evident what competition Australia is being forced to lose due to its obsession with codified politeness, this typical comment demonstrates something pretty key about a vocal majority’s understanding of freedom of speech. Namely, that they don’t seem to know what it actually means.

The problem with defending freedom of speech in a hyperconnected, sound-bite driven world is that people rarely need any encouragement to say whatever pops into their head at any given moment. Usually, it’s all harmless fluff – you could argue that the greatest offence against a society that champions freedom of speech is that of mind-numbing stupidity.

But occasionally, people are driven to nastiness. The cloak of anonymity easily donned by online commenters means ‘freedom of speech’ is now held up as a shield against the natural consequences of spreading racist, homophobic, sexist and just plain offensive sentiments. When Andrew Bolt was forced to pay damages to a collection of plaintiffs after being found guilty of violating the Racial Discrimination Act in a column questioning the authenticity of light-skinned Aboriginals, he embarked on a tedious quest in defense of freedom of speech.

But in much the same way that political correctness is willfully misunderstood to mean ‘giant big pantywaisted whoopsies spoiling everybody’s fun’, so too has ‘freedom of speech’ been co-opted to defend people’s ‘right’ to spread the kind of viciously ignorant sentiments that do little to add to debate and much to diminish us a society.

The person squawking about freedom of speech in regards to, say, being allowed to vilify refugees or asylum seekers doesn’t actually believe in freedom of speech at all. If they did, they’d understand that the flipside of ideological freedom is that others are free to openly disagree with their views.

Instead, what they’re actually arguing for is ideological domination and the right to spread their bigotry, unchallenged.

This is the central problem in a society where the greatest punishment for speaking as freely as you please is a monetary one. Ideologically, the fight to ensure free speech in societies that mete out punishment with the sword, not the poison pen, is something we should all be striving for and supporting. But once that’s been achieved – once we are indeed free to say exactly what we feel without fear of violent or penal reprisals – what we are left with is a privilege whose precariousness is rarely honoured. What does it mean to fight for the freedom to express ourselves without fear if we abuse that privilege by oppressing others with bigotry and cruelty?

I believe that the right to speak freely is inalienable, and that the suppression of that right leads to dictatorial systems of governance, the oppression of the people. Adhering to a system in which The People’s thoughts are policed can only result in a society complicit in its own intellectual shackling.

But I also believe that an evolved society is one that cares for its citizens; that legislates socially, not politically, to protect its people from oppression. I believe in a society that strives for intellectual evolution, and understands the great responsibility that comes with the privilege of that existence. There is no honour in using an ideological privilege to deny the freedom of equality to others.

The privilege to speak freely is not, nor can it ever be, ‘overrated’. It is essential to a society for which intellectual growth and civilised behaviour are constant goals. Unfortunately, it appears that not all of us value those goals.

For many, the idea of free speech is simply an invitation to foist undeveloped, nonsensical forms of bigotry upon the world. In that sense, I’d say freedom of speech is highly overrated, because it relies on the overestimation of people’s ability to contribute anything productive to a cultural debate.

I mean, let’s be honest – when you have Australia’s most-read commentator appearing on the cover of Australia’s most-read newspaper under the enormous headline ‘I WAS SILENCED’ while he subtly encourages his countless followers to harass anyone who speaks out against him, it seems freedom of speech is not the blind spot we’re battling.

It’s irony.

Clementine Ford is a writer and broadcaster who has appeared in the Age’s Daily Life, ABC’s The Drum, as a guest on ABC TV’s Q&A and as a host on Triple R’s Breakfasters. She blogs at www.clementineford.com.au.

The Intelligence Squared debate Freedom of Speech is Over-rated will take place at Melbourne’s Town Hall tomorrow night from 6.30pm. Book now.

Panelists will be Marcia Langton, Michael Gawenda, Catherine Deveny, Julian Burnside, Gretel Killeen and Arnold Zable.

Friday High Five: David Simon blogs, ...

2012-05-04T11:59:36+10:00

Blown Covers

A terrific new coffee table book by the art director of the New Yorker, Françoise Mouly, collects her favourite covers that were either rejected (often for being too controversial) or have an intriguing story behind them. Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See comes with commentary by Mouly – and the images range from the shocking to the hilarious, to the absurd. Here’s a taste:

At the height of the Lewinsky affair, Art Spiegelman proposed this sketch titled ‘Clinton’s Last Request.’ ‘When a word like “blow job”, which you never dreamt of finding in the paper is on the front page every day,’ he explains, ‘I had to find a way for my image to be as explicit without being downright salacious.’

Sometimes it looks like an artist is poking fun at the more sedate New Yorker covers. This was proposed by M. Scott Miller, years before Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. He claims that the inspiration for this jeté is an experience familiar to anyone who follows classical ballet.

David Simon is blogging

Fans of Wire and Treme, rejoice! David Simon, creator of what is generally agreed to be the Best Television Series Ever, is now blogging. Simon was a writer of journalism (and books) before he turned his hand to television, which means that his writing is well worth reading. What’s more, he’s opinionated and loves to share his opinions. The posts so far vary from an impassioned article on journalism, prize culture and the Pulitzer to bite-sized observations from the streets of Baltimore, or his own lounge room. Bookmark this one.

David Simon, with the cast of The Wire: ‘Those who know me understand that while it is refreshing to meet people with no opinions, I am not that fellow. I like to argue … I delight in pursuing a good, ranging argument.’

How to teach teens text-driving is insane? Make them do it

A Belgian not-for-profit, Responsible Young Drivers, has hit on a brilliant strategy for teaching teens that texting-and-driving is insanely dangerous. They tricked student drivers into believing that in order to pass their driving tests, they also had to demonstrate proficiency in texting while driving. The responses? ‘I’ll stop driving if this is introduced as law’, ‘People will die’ and ‘This is dangerous’.

It’s a bit like that urban myth, where a parent catches their kid smoking and forces them to chain-smoke an entire packet of cigarettes (and they never smoke again). From the looks on these kids' faces, the message has sunk in. This video is genuine car-crash viewing – almost literally.

How books will survive Amazon

Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, has written optimistically for the former about why he believes ‘actual’ books will survive the digital age (as will bookshops and libraries), and will coexist with digital books:

Few technological victories are ever complete, and in the case of books this will be especially true. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves. So will libraries, whose vast and arcane holdings will soon be available to everyone everywhere.

Beijing artist turns schoolbooks into art

All book lovers are fond of the idea that books are art. Chinese artist Lui Wei has taken the idea literally, creating intricate cityscape sculptures from stacks of schoolbooks, held together by steel rods and wood clamps. His sculptures include a range of iconic buildings from the Pentagon to Saint Peter’s Basilica, and depict cities in a state of metamorphosis, a concept familiar in his native Beijing.

Working with Words: Arnold Zable

2012-05-03T11:10:25+10:00

Arnold Zable is one of Australia’s most loved writers and storytellers. His books, from the classic Cafe Scheherezade to his latest, Violin Lessons, are beloved by readers and admired by critics. Arnold is also an impassioned human rights advocate, known for his work on behalf of asylum seekers. He is currently president of the Melbourne Centre of International PEN.

He spoke to us for our Working with Words series about not losing your nerve, storytelling as empowerment and rafting with Huckleberry Finn.

What was the first piece of writing you had published?

Arnold Zable

I can’t remember exactly, probably pieces in Melbourne University’s weekly Farrago back in the late 1960s. I became a regular contributor and my pieces ranged from book reviews to political commentary to non-fiction stories. It was a very political time on campus, and the topics we debated, and which I wrote on, included the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Australian politics and the Vietnam War, in which young Australian were being drafted.

I travelled in PNG and wrote a series of articles for Farrago which included pieces on the Bougainville mining dispute, the West-Irian Freedom movement and a village based co-operative movement in New Britain which challenged and provided an alternative to the colonial plantation system.

I developed a love of travel and writing, and to seeing things at the grass roots level though my own eyes. One of those early journeys took me to Vietnam in the summer of 1969/70, the height of the war, and what I observed and wrote then formed the basis of my story ‘The Dust of Life’ which was published in my most recent book, Violin Lessons, over 40 years later.

What’s the best part of your job?

It forces me to be alert, to keep observing, and to notice the details of everyday life.

What’s the worst part of your job?

The inevitable brick walls, those moments when I come up against a seeming dead end. This is not so much writers’ block, but a time when I have to detour and find solutions to a problem. It is the moment when you realise, yet again, when it comes to a sustained piece of writing, there are no short cuts.

What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?

It is always the moment when I know I have finally finished a particular story or novel. The editing is yet to come, but the essential work of getting it down and working it out is over. This usually arrives unexpectedly – one moment a novel I am writing has no end in sight and then, somehow it is over. What a relief.

What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?

The best advice: do not lose your nerve.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work? In several reviews, the reviewer has taken something I have written and dwelled upon it as a metaphor of great significance. For instance, one review of my first book Jewels and Ashes made a big play of my description of my father’s potato latkes, which he made according to a recipe he had received from his mother. This reviewer saw the latkes as the central metaphor of the book, illustrating the way in which stories are transmitted from generation to generation, and so on. But from my point of view, I was simply writing about my father’s potato latkes.

If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

My fantasy answer is working as a gardener. There was a time when I travelled and worked in a series of related manual jobs: farm labourer, fruit picker, forest worker, landscaper’s assistant, and so on, and I loved it. As for the reality … well let’s stick to the fantasy.

There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?

Yes, I think it can be taught. Why not? Writing is a craft. There are techniques that take years of experience to gain, and these can certainly be imparted to others. Writing can also be a need, a means of trying to make sense of this chaos we call life. Many people who attend writing workshops are driven by such a need to express themselves. Expression actually means ‘getting it out’.

I have seen this need at work in many workshops – most recently in workshops I have run with Black Saturday bushfire survivors. In one of these workshops, a participant came up to me and said she was finding it more powerful than counselling. When I asked her why, she said that when she is counselled she feels like a victim, but when she writes she feels in charge and empowered.

There is so much snobbery involved when people say writing cannot be taught, and that writing workshops or creative writing courses are suspect. Sometimes the aim may be to simply write a family story, for the children and grand children – and a few techniques can inspire it to be just that bit more readable, creative and compelling.

What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?

Keep observing, keep reading, and keep writing. Especially writing. Like many other jobs, you learn on the job, not by thinking about it.

Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?

In physical bookshops.

If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? What would you talk about?

Jim, in Huckleberry Finn – it would be great to spend time with him rafting down river and camping out. The stories and conversation would emerge in their own good time, out of the silences, out of the good company, and from the rhythm of being on the river.

What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?

It keeps changing. Certain books help me find ways of solving problems in specific projects. For instance, Gabriel Garcia’s One Hundred Years of Solitude taught me how to move in time and space, and to be daring when I was writing my first book. The most recently read book that has had a deep impact on me was Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman. Completed in the 1960s, this is a novel of epic scope and deep compassion. It depicts the events that afflicted the Soviet Russia as it faced the twin yoke of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel’s greatness lies in its humanity, unswerving honesty, and in its empathetic characters. A novel that taught me a lot about the sensuousness of writing was The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schultz, written in the 1930s. And there are many more …

Arnold Zable will be appearing in our Intelligence Squared Debate, Freedom of Speech is Over-Rated, at the Melbourne Town Hall on Tuesday 8 May, 6.30pm–9.30pm. Book now.

Arnold will be arguing against the proposition, with Julian Burnside and Gretel Killeen. Marcia Langton, Michael Gawenda and Catherine Deveny will argue for the proposition.

Page to Screen: Franzen, Hemingway an...

2012-05-02T12:58:49+10:00

The talk of Twitter today is the surprising announcement that HBO rejected the pilot for the planned series of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Not only does The Corrrections have that rare combination of popular appeal and critical acclaim, but the pilot was adapted and directed by Noah Baumbach, with a cast that included Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Opportunity missed?

To cheer you up with some good news, here are some upcoming literary screen projects on their way:

Charlie Kaufman will adapt The Knife of Letting Go, the first book in Patrick Ness’s YA trilogy Chaos Walking. A meeting of two great writers with strong cult followings; sure to be something worth seeing.

Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman are set to co-star as macho literary lion Ernest Hemingway and his feisty second wife Martha Gellhorn, a legendary war correspondent, in Hemingway and Gellhorn. Interesting casting.

The first pictures from Ang Lee’s forthcoming film of The Life of Pi were recently released. The film co-stars Gerard Depardieu, Adolfo Celi, Irrfan Khan, Adil Hussain and Tobey Maguire as the film’s narrator. The release date is December 2012.

Keira Knightley and Jude Law will star in Anna Karenina, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Director Joe Wright worked with Knightley in previous literary adaptations Atonement and Pride and Prejudice. Release is slated for November 2012.

Peter Jackson’s long-awaited The Hobbit will finally be released on Boxing Day 2012.

Scarlett Johansson will make her directorial debut with an adaptation of Truman Capote’s posthumously published novella, Summer Crossing. Her role will be strictly behind the camera, not in front of it.

And Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, filmed in Australia, will hit cinemas in January 2013.

Housewife Superspy: Stella Rimington

2012-05-01T12:23:23+10:00

Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5, has been called Britain’s most famous spy. She’s also rumoured to be the inspiration for Judi Dench’s character M, in the James Bond franchise. But Rimington is not a fan of Bond; she says it’s ridiculously unrealistic and that anyone who tries to join any intelligence service inspired by 007 ‘should be rejected at the first hurdle’.

John Le Carre’s George Smiley is more her style. ‘The intelligence service of John Le Carre’s Cold War books really is quite reminiscent of the MI5 I joined,’ she told Kerry O’Brien on her last visit to Australia, in 2009. ‘There were people around quite a bit like Smiley … And the closed nature of the community he creates is also something that I can relate to.’

Tapped on the shoulder

Rimington was ‘tapped on the shoulder’ to join the MI5 (as a clerk) while living in India, with her husband. The invitation came at a cocktail party, which sounds impossibly glamorous. She accepted because she was bored, passing her time doing ‘amateur dramatics and running jumble sales’. When she moved back to Britain, she approached an MI5 recruiter and asked for a job, which she got.

It was a ‘two-tiered system’, she recalls, with very separate careers for men and for women. ‘The men did the sharp-end intelligence work and the women’s job was to sit at the desk and deal with the papers.’

Spying in the pub

Things changed in the early 1970s, when the women mounted a ‘quiet revolution’ and asked why they couldn’t do the same work as the men. ‘Our bosses of the day had to scratch their heads for an answer, because there wasn’t one,’ she told a Dymocks Literary Lunch in 2009. ‘If you think about it, some of the skills you need to deal with human beings who are often in difficult and dangerous sitations requires just those skills we think of today as ‘female’ skills: warmth, empathy, the ability to encourage and bring people along, an understanding of people, and a certain degree of ruthlessness, which I think is also a female quality.’

Rimington was the first woman allowed to go on the training course that taught the skills needed for on-the-street work, with ‘human sources’. The course was geared for men, she says: the trainees were assigned pubs, where they had to create a cover story for themselves, then engage patrons in conversation and find out about them. Her pub, she recalls, was a ‘sleazy dump’ full of ‘men in dirty macs leaning on the bar’. She duly chatted up one of the men, who was ‘very surprised by the approach from a seemingly respectable lady, who he then thought was something other than a respectable lady’. That was the beginning of her career as an ‘agent runner’; it got better from there, she says. For one thing, she could pick her own venues to meet agents.

Liz Carlyle and the modern MI5

The MI5 heroine of Rimington’s four espionage novels, Liz Carlyle, is partly drawn from Rimington’s own experiences, but is operating in a very different world. ‘Liz is a modern MI5 officer,’ she says. ‘She didn’t have to wait to be tapped on the shoulder; she could look on a website (which now exists), see what jobs are available and apply online. And she did.’ Like her creator, Liz’s adventures in espionage are juggled with a private life that always seems to come off second best.

While Liz finds it hard to hold onto her lovers, Rimington divorced in 1986 and brought up her two daughters as a single mother. It was the kind of life where she got phone calls about umbrella stabbings while cooking dinner and was faced with decisions like whether to rush to hospital, where her young daughter had been taken seriously ill, or meet a defecting Eastern European agent at a London safe house (in the latter situation, she did both – ‘the safe house was quite near the hospital’).

‘All working mothers – and nowadays many fathers too – find themselves struggling to juggle things and I suppose I did have a few dilemmas like everyone else,’ she told the Australian.

Life in danger

Rimington began writing novels after the publication of her 2001 autobiography, Open Secret, a publication her former employer tried to stop. The MI5 still vet all her novels, to ensure she’s not revealing state secrets.

It’s ironic, given that it was MI5 who outed her in 1992, when she was the first director-general to be publicly named (resulting in the tabloid nickname ‘housewife superspy’), with little warning given. It was the only time Rimington ever felt her life was in danger, she says; the IRA were still active in London at the time, and the media quickly found out where she lived. She had to move house, along with her younger daughter, who was still living with her.

Liz Carlyle’s latest adventure is Rip Tide, involving Somali pirates and Islamic terrorists. What next for Liz, and Rimington? The 77-year-old author says she’s not sure how much longer she wants to keep it up, though there will definitely be at least one more novel.

Her many fans will be hoping that idleness appeals as little now as it did when, many years ago in India, she was tapped on the shoulder at a party …

Stella Rimington will be appearing in a double bill with Hisham Matar on Wednesday 16 May at 6.30pm, at the Comedy Theatre. Tickets are $35 for the two back-to-back events. Book now.

Good Things End

2012-04-30T17:26:59+10:00

Spain’s Librería General de Arte Martínez Pérez, open since 1890, is one of those bookshops that looks like it’s always been and always will be. So when Ailsa Piper received word of its closure, it felt like more than simply the demise of a business.

One morning not long ago, I opened my Inbox to find an email from a favourite bookstore – the Librería General de Arte Martínez Pérez in Barcelona. There’s nothing unusual in that. I’ve received updates from them for months. They remind me of the one visit I made there, a chance discovery of a place I’ve been hoping to see again.

Yesterday’s email was unusual: a missive with no details of upcoming events, no photographs, dates or times. It contained words like dificultades and tristeza. Yesterday’s email said that after 121 years, the Martínez family’s bookshop and recital space would close.

I cried. I don’t know why it hit me so hard. I only spent a couple of hours there.

I walked in off a hot Barcelona street, enticed by a leather edition of Cervantes in the window. I had no intention or budget to buy; it was just that the shop had a ‘feel’. The wood around the doorway was polished. The metal knocker gleamed. Inside, the shop smelled of leather, musty paper and good coffee. It was silent. Cool.

Bookshelves climbed to the ceiling, and volumes of prints and old letters were stacked on tables in the centre of the room. All were in Spanish or Catalan, and beyond my conversational Español. But oh, the tug of the place.

Stay, it whispered. Run your fingers over those spines. Consider the previous reader, and the reader before them. Lift the Cervantes and let your eyes run over the copperplate print. Pretend that your simple Spanish is good enough to savour the words. One day maybe it will be…

A man appeared, wearing a grey cashmere cardigan, and extended a hand to me. ‘Bienvenida a nuestra tienda,’ he said. Welcome to our shop.

He wasn’t phased by the dirt on my hiking boots or the tear in my khaki pants. Even my bursting backpack didn’t trouble him as he took it from my shoulders, telling me the store had opened in 1890, and had been in his family ever since.

He told me that in recent times he had had to branch out to survive, but that had given him a new pleasure. His other love was music, and he had found a way to support musicians. Would I like to see the Sala – the room where he had been hosting small concerts?

We walked past his paper-piled desk, down a few stairs, and through a narrow doorway.

I gasped. He smiled.

We stood at the entrance to a space that was almost as long as a netball court. To my left was a centuries-old wooden statue of a saint. I forget which one: there are so many in Spain. Two black pillars lined up behind the anonymous santo before the space opened out, its polished concrete floor gleaming under skylights that refracted light from the hot sky I’d escaped. My eyes travelled to a heavy wooden door in the distance, opening onto ferns in terracotta pots against an ochre wall.

‘Venga,’ my host whispered. Come.

Our steps click-clacked toward a refectory table. We passed a grand piano, a floral sofa, a wooden bench-seat, and three oil paintings, all lit from wall-mounted lights.

You need rest, Senor Martínez said. And perhaps a coffee? I can play for you some music too.

At the other end of the beeswax-scented table was a painting of St John the Baptist, his lush red robe clearly of more interest to the painter than the light streaming from heaven. To my right were the door and a shuttered window opening to the courtyard. A bird trilled. I sat. Yes, rest would be nice.

Coffee came in a modern white espresso cup, with a single almond biscuit and a choice of CDs – recordings he’d made of his concerts. Choral chants, flamenco, the jazz of Cole Porter, blues, Bach and tango…

I made my choice, and as the first notes from a quartet insinuated themselves into the space, Señor Martiñez handed me the volume control, and a note on which was written the password for his wifi. If you want to write to your family at home, he said, as he walked away.

I stayed for an hour. Then another. I wrote. I listened. I read a little Cervantes, wondering who first turned those yellowed pages. I studied the patina of window and picture frames, and I inhaled the scent of polish and care.

When I left, Señor Martiñez would only accept a euro for the coffee. I added my name to his mailing list before thanking him and walking out into the day.

Back in Melbourne, I was always excited to open one of his emails. In our clear southern light I’d be transported to that mellow place, imagining myself sitting in company with thirty others as the sun set, sipping our included glass of cava as a cellist or blues guitarist warmed up for a fifteen euro concert. In my mind I wore smart clothes and spoke perfect Spanish!

His emails always radiated possibility; all except yesterday’s.

All the hard work and efforts to maintain financial equilibrium have been insufficient to ensure continuity, he wrote. It is a considered decision, taken with profound sadness.

Even that note, full of bad news, was restrained and dignified.

Of course, there are worse stories in the world. Bigger losses. Harder. But I mourn the passing of that place. With it goes something civilised and civilising: history, grace and a beauty that cannot be bought with re-issued bonds, or re-built by the next wave of developers. Some things are losses to all of us, and no bankers or politicians can ever give them back. Tradition is one such thing. Kindness to strangers, no matter how humble they may be, is another.

My Spanish is not gracious enough to reply in the style of Cervantes, or even of Senor Martínez, but I do know how to write that I’m sorry.

Lo siento.

In Spanish, it also translates as ‘I feel it’.

Ailsa Piper is an award-winning playwright and actor. She recently appeared at the Wheeler Centre’s Debut Mondays, where she read from her newly-published first book, Sinning Across Spain.

Friday High Five: Video Edition

2012-04-27T09:26:47+10:00

In another Friday High Five themed edition, we share five bookish videos from around the web that made us giggle, including looks at the art of pencil sharpening and the smell of old books, a quirky promotional book video featuring Hangover star Zach Galifianakis, various Go the F**k to Sleep performances and our own Unexpected Passions.

Slow writing: The Artisanal Art of Pencil Sharpening

Think you’ve read everything? Think again. The latest hot how-to book is How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Art of Pencil Sharpening, by David Rees, a former political cartoonist turned artisanal pencil sharpener.

‘With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat. It’s this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic,’ says Rees. ‘Nobody else is doing what I do. I guarantee an authentic interaction with your pencil.’ He also guarantees to get your pencil ‘really freaking sharp’. Rees charges his mail-order customers $15 per pencil, which he sends back in a sealed tube, with with a signed and dated certificate ‘authenticating that it is now a dangerous object’.

In the above video, Rees gives a pencil-sharpening demonstration and talks through the ethos of his business, which has been called the writing world’s equivalent of the slow food movement.

‘I boiled my novel and I ate it’

This Picador book trailer made the rounds of the internet a while ago. Actor Zach Galifianakis interviews John Wray about his novel, Lowboy. So far, so normal, right? (Albeit with a sprinkling of celebrity stardust.) Galifianakis and Wray swap roles – the actor plays the writer. (It’s made even funnier by the fact that Wray interviewed Galifianakis for a New York Times profile in 1999, so this really is role reversal.)

Highlights include the visual gag of a manual typewriter with two enormous keys, a confession to playing Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 as writing inspiration (‘it’s good for morale’) and the story of having written a previous novel in alphabet pasta. (The novel no longer exists; he ate it.)

This isn’t Wray’s first claim to internet-video fame though; before his Galifianakis outing, his performance at an ultra-hip book reading was enjoyed by literary types. In this video, Wray unveils a giant back tattoo of New York Times reviewer Michiko Kukatani, with her face and the legend ‘KAKUTANI 4 EVAH’. (And no, it’s not real: it’s drawn with what the Americans call ‘Magic Marker’, and we would call a texta.)

The smell of old books

It’s a cliche (and sometimes a truism) that fetishists of what publisher Zoe Dattner now calls the ‘p-book’ like to rhapsodise about the smell of books. This video, made by online second-hand bookseller Abebooks, goes one step further, explaining the science of the smell, which is summed up as: a ‘combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness’.

Bedtime with Noni, Samuel L. Jackson and … Grandma

Go the F**k to Sleep is well known as the book that not only took the internet by storm, but was created by the internet: it started on Facebook as a joke circulated by novelist and tired parent Adam Mansbach, who was urged to create and publish it as a real picture book.

It’s been performed by former Play School host Noni Hazlehurst and godfather of cool Samuel L. Jackson (in his most memorable recitation since Pulp Fiction’s ‘I will lay my vengeance upon you …’). Samuel L.’s version has also been set to music.

But just as good is this one with an unsuspecting grandmother reading the book to a baby at bedtime. Watch her reaction when she realises that this is no ordinary picture book! She’s a good sport.

Unexpected Passions

Sam Pang’s Unexpected Passions series is a favourite here at the Wheeler Centre. Past guests have included Noni Hazlehurst and musician David Bridie. Tonight is another (free) instalment in our series, with comedian Lawrence Mooney (on his love of Vanity Fair) and Tom Elliott on World War II fighter planes. It’ll be at the Wheeler Centre, 7pm – 8pm.

You can whet your appetite with this video of the first Unexpected Passions, with guests Kate Langbroek (on op-shops) and Adam Zwar (on cats).