The Wheeler Centre: Dailies

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).

Working with Words: Maria Tumarkin

2012-04-26T11:02:00+10:00

In this week’s Working with Words, we talk to writer, cultural historian and Long View essayist Maria Tumarkin about writing, the value of self-doubt and teaching creative non-fiction.

Maria Tumarkin: ‘Don’t fight doubt … Writers who do not doubt themselves are charlatans (with a few notable exceptions).’

What was the first piece of writing you had published?

An article on sleep called ‘Stranger in the Night’ published in Meanjin in 1999 by the wonderful Stephanie Holt, who also published my second piece of writing – this one was about a baby born in the eye of Cyclone Tracy – the following year.

What’s the best part of your job?

Undoubtedly, the best part is doing my own thing. I’ve always craved independence, which is why I hated being a child. I just love it that these days I am beholden to one.

What’s the worst part of your job?

Constantly worrying about money. When will it be possible for writers to survive in Australia? This is a rhetorical question, I know, but really, when?

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

Deciding (not that long ago) that writing is what I do, that this is who I am.

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

Best advice: the difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write.

Worst advice: Do market research.

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

That I am reluctant to divulge personal information in my writing. If only.

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

Making documentaries, although I am not particularly good at teamwork.

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

I teach creative non-fiction at Writers Victoria once a month and it feels like an honest job. You recognise people, who have something important to say and you encourage them to say it. You treat people’s words and ideas with respect. You discuss books that will outlive all of us. You make sure you don’t pontificate or lecture. It really is okay.

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

Don’t fight doubt. Accept it as part of the process. Writers who do not doubt themselves are charlatans (with a few notable exceptions).

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

70% from bookshops, 30% online.

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

Hmmm…. I don’t know. I haven’t been reading much fiction lately, have been too excited by narrative non-fiction.

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

In the spirit of evasion, let me tell you of a book that made a huge impression on me this year – it is Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet. By the time he wrote this book, Judt, who was suffering from a motor neuron disease, was completely immobilised. He would compose parts of the book in his head and then dictate them. It’s incredible. Similarly, Christopher Hitchens’s essays in his final year have made an indelible impression. Two great men, who wrote till the very last moment. You have to bow to that.

Maria Tumarkin’s essay, ‘A Sentimental Yoke’, on ‘unsentimental’ writing and why we praise it, is the latest in our Long View series, featuring long-form literary criticism by some of Australia’s best writers.

Guns, Race and the Law

2012-04-24T12:52:14+10:00

Gun violence is at the top of the news bulletins this week, both in Australia and the US.

On Saturday, police opened fire on a stolen car joyriding through Kings Cross; the driver, a 14-year-old male, was hit in the chest and arm, while an 18-year-old passenger was hit in the neck. All the passengers were indigenous.

The car had hit a 29-year-old woman and struck a pedestrian.

The girlfriend of a passenger charged over the incident told the Sydney Morning Herald that she fears ‘an uprising’. She cited the 2004 riots over the death of Aboriginal teenager T.J. Hickey, who was impaled on a fence after being chased by police. ‘If they wanted to stop the car they could at least have shot the tyres, not shoot at little kids,’ she said.

The grandmother of another passenger said the shooting of children by police was ‘brutal’.

NSW assistant police commissioner Mark Murdoch called for calm, saying police had ‘just a split second to make the decisions’ – and that ‘we don’t shoot at tyres’.

Rodney King: in ‘a forgiving state of mind’

Next week will mark the twentieth anniversary of one of the worst urban riots in US history, sparked by the acquittal of the four police officers who were captured on film savagely beating Rodney King, after he was pulled over for drunk driving.

The LA Times has awkwardly dubbed him ‘an elder statesman of victimhood,’ following King’s appearance at the magazine’s Festival of Books on the weekend, to talk about his memoir, The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption.

King says he forgives his attackers. ‘That’s how I was raised, to be in a forgiving state of mind … I’m only human, so who am I not to forgive someone?’

The audience were asked to reflect on how the city and country had changed, for the better or worse, in the two decades since the riots.

Opinions were mixed, with some reflecting that the LAPD had changed ‘dramatically for the better’ and others that in inner-city neighbourhoods today, ‘it’s even worse’.

Trayvon Martin: a victim who didn’t survive

Rodney King has commented on another case of racial profiling that has gripped America. Unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was leaving a convenience store when he was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer who had decided that he looked ‘really suspicious’ and had been following him.

‘At that time, I thought I was going to die. Very, very gratefully, I survived,’ said King of his own ordeal. ‘Unfortunately, Trayvon Martin did not.’

‘I am grieving, like the rest of us, for this young man and his family. And now that charges have been filed against George Zimmerman, I am waiting, like the rest of us, to get to the facts and carefully, thoroughly, get to the truth.’

Police initially decided not to press charges against Zimmerman; he is now being charged with second-degree murder, following angry demonstrations by black communities across the US.

Last Friday, Zimmerman apologised directly to the victims’ parents in court. They dismissed the apology as insincere and ‘self-serving’. The family are also angry that Zimmerman made bail, which was set at $150,000; he had to post 10% of that amount to make bail.

‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,’ President Obama told a press conference.

America: one nation, under the gun

A terrific article in the New Yorker by Jill Lepore looks at America’s gun laws, in the context of the Trayvon Martin case and the spate of high school shootings since Columbine in 1999.

It includes a chilling report on the recent massacre at Chardon High School in Cleveland, where ‘everyone knew what to do’ as events unfolded, following a pre-rehearsed drill.

‘Ever since the shootings at Columbine High School … American schools have been preparing for gunmen. Chardon started holding drills in 2007.’

Local police, too, had trained to prepare for such an event.

There are nearly 300 million privately owned firearms in the US: the equivalent of one gun for every American. The US has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world.

Lepore’s article charts the growth of the gun lobby, the ever more liberal laws as a result, and gun violence in the US. One of those laws is Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, passed in 2005, which exonerates citizens who use deadly force against an assailant, even if they could have retreated safely, not just inside the home, but anywhere an individual ‘has a right to be’.

David Keene, national president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), told Lepore: ‘If you had asked, in 1968, will we have the right to do with guns in 2012 what we can do now, no one, on either side, would have believed you.’

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot.

In an average year, roughly a hundred thousand Americans are killed or wounded with guns.

As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live.

Port Arthur and gun control in Australia

Australia’s Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed, was the worst civilian gun massacre in the world (until last year’s Norwegian massacre, in which 69 people were gunned down).

Then prime minister John Howard coordinated a national response that involved banning the weapons used from civilian ownership, buying back more than 640,000 weapons, tightening laws around gun ownership and making it harder to qualify to own a gun.

Last year, researchers at Harvard University reviewed the impact of the reforms and concluded ‘The National Firearms Agreement seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved.’

Australia has had no gun massacres since 1996 and total gun deaths have been reduced, from approximately 600 deaths per year in the early 1990s to fewer than 250.

Books That Make You Cringe

2012-04-23T15:05:21+10:00

My Monday morning amusement was an article at The Awl, asking various writers and editors to share books they read as teenagers or twentysomethings that now make them cringe. Revelations included New Yorker writer Ariel Levy’s obsession with Sweet Valley High, and various abandoned affections for the likes of Ayn Rand, Ann Rice and the Beats.

We’ve asked some Australian writers and editors to reveal their own books that they once loved, but now make them cringe. The results of our ad-hoc survey are fascinating, with lots of schlock horror – and, though it’s not reflected here, many off-the-record confessions of an early love of Sweet Valley High. Please, enter our confessional booth and share your own now-embarrassing former literary loves in our comments below.

Kirsten Tranter

This makes me wonder if I might actually be a bit shameless. I find myself quite fascinated by this idea of repudiating or mocking our own immature tastes, however affectionately. I loved the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Naughtiest Girls, the Girls Crystal girls, and Trixie Belden, girl detective, with equal ardour – and even enjoyed some Sweet Valley High books, and see no reason to disavow any of that. I adored Anais Nin and while I’m not at all ashamed of that, I’d probably be ashamed now if I read back over my ‘dear diary’ attempts to imitate her.

Kirsten Tranter will be in conversation with Jeanette Winterson on Friday 18 May. Kirsten’s latest book is A Common Loss.**

Jenny Niven

I grew up in a very small rural Scottish town. Our house was right next to the library where my next door neighbour was one of the two librarians. By the time I was about 11, I’d read everything in the kids' section about a hundred times and spent the next couple of years skulking around the teen books, simultaneously horrified and transfixed by the tales of Judy Blume’s ‘sanitary belts’ and R.L. Stine’s Point Horror books (which are all ultimately about teenagers making out in the back of cars while being stalked by their murderous friends). There was only the tiniest hint of sex in any of them, but I could only take them out of the library when the ‘other’ librarian was on in case she told my mum. Looking back, they’re all actually deeply conservative books. It’s all so unbelievably tame in comparison– God knows what I would have done if Gossip Girl had been available then.

Jenny Niven is associate director of the Wheeler Centre. She will be in conversation with Chad Harbach on Friday 18 May.

Ronnie Scott

Michael Crichton! Nowadays I’m not a big re-reader, but in my early teens I must have done Sphere, Disclosure, Congo, Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and The Andromeda Strain at least a dozen times. (My phase culminated with Airframe in 1996, so let’s say a half dozen for that.) Although Crichton later revealed himself as a climate change denier, I could never bring myself to mind; his version of the nineties was a deadly, salacious place, and he’ll always be the man who taught me that hippos are the most dangerous animals in the jungle. Vale.

Ronnie Scott is outgoing editor of The Lifted Brow.

Michaela McGuire

I, like the rest of my Year Five class, was completely obsessed with the Fear Street series. Once we’d blitzed through all of Goosebumps, myself and the other girls in my class started reading R. L. Stine’s infinitely more grown-up series about a bunch of attractive cheerleaders who all get horribly murdered. Unfortunately this obsession coincided with a school project wherein we had to write our own short novel, and I produced a mortifyingly obvious tribute to Fear Street of my own. I think I even called it ‘Scary Street’. After handing my teacher’s report on this marvel of literary fiction to my mother, she promptly banned me from reading any horror novels, and I spent the remainder of my primary school years as a social outcast, reading Bryce Courtenay novels by myself each lunch. Which, come to think of it, is a probably more embarrassing confession.

Michaela McGuire runs Women of Letters, with Marieke Hardy. She is the author of Apply Within.

Monica Dux

During the school holidays when I was 12 my older brother started reading the first two books in the Rambo: First Blood series (by David Morrell). I wasn’t allowed to read such unladylike material, so I used to sneak them from his room when he was out, and read them in secret. These were movie tie-in editions, with Sylvester Stallone on the cover, and I developed an intense crush on Sly and identified strongly with his psychic pain, ignoring some of the carnage he left whilst exploring said pain. I remember fantasising that we would one day join forces to liberate an oppressed village deep in South East Asia. Early puberty can do some strange things to the young girl’s mind.

Monica Dux will be in conversation with Kathy Lette at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday 9 May.

Rebecca Starford

The master of adolescent pseudo-horror/thrillers, Christopher Pike brought me into a seductive world in which a bunch of good-looking, preppy American high schoolers have to figure out who among them is a murderer. What a formula for a nerdy 12-year-old! Flicking through the novels today, I shudder at the pedestrian prose, woeful characterisation, cheesy dialogue and cringe-worthy sex scenes – Pike was always good for a bit of clandestine nookie …

Rebecca Starford is managing editor of Kill Your Darlings.

Jessica Au

When I was younger, I was a total sci-fi/fantasy genre geek (and to be honest, I suspect part of me still is). Some of this was great – books like Victor Kelleher’s era-spanning Parkland series, Brian Caswell’s eerily telepathic Cage of Butterflies, Gillian Rubenstein’s heart-stopping Galax Arena and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. However, I have to admit that I also ran with my fair share of Eddings and Jordan and co. I think I read something like 11 of the Wheel of Time books, before giving up – Robert Jordan dying plus all the plots congealing to mush in my head meant it was just too much to handle. I suspect I still have a box of these somewhere in my garage, which I hope never to reveal to the light of day.

Jessica Au is the author of Cargo.

Penni Russon

When I was 16, my boyfriend, let’s call him Anthony (because that is his name), introduced me to his favourite author: Richard Bach. Jonathon Livingstone Seagull is Bach’s most famous book (about a seagull who rises above the pettiness of material existence through the power of flight). But I read more: Illusions, The Bridge Across Forever, One. I read and re-read them in his bedroom (while Anthony built a sailboat in his garage or tinkered with his cars), in fact my memory is that Anthony only owned these books and Douglas Adams’ entire oeuvre, which is probably false. Bridge Across Forever is about soulmates, but it didn’t stop us from breaking up. And I have just discovered through the power of Google, that Bach and his soulmate (all his books were semi-autobiographical) didn’t last the distance either.

Penni Russon is a YA author whose latest novel is Only Ever Always.

Angela Meyer

In Year Three, my teacher read Say Cheese and Die of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series to the class. I was enthralled. I remember that actually being the moment where something clicked: so this is what reading is all about. I read many of the spooky, exciting tales after that. Welcome to Camp Nightmare and A Night in Terror Tower were stand-outs. I had a hardcover four-in-one book that screamed when you opened it. I also had a Goosebumps reading lamp. Soon I moved onto his ‘teen’ horror series Fear Street. Years later I picked up one of the Goosebumps books and was amazed to find the story was tame (and lame) and the writing simplistic!

Angela Meyer blogs at Literary Minded and reviews for various publications, including the Australian.

P.M. Newton

I was a horse-mad kid, so read anything and everything I could lay my hands on. This meant my reading was a little undiscriminating and with the exception of Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby books, an unrelenting diet of English kiddies going fox hunting – I wasn’t a fan of the fox hunt. One series really stuck out. I loved it – they were the ‘Jill’ books by Ruby Ferguson. We followed our heroine Jill as she grew up, but I remember feeling totally cheated by the last book. Jill finished school and was trying to make a career working with horses, but at the end of the book she made a very ‘sensible’ and ‘grown-up’ decision to keep her horses as a hobby and go and become a secretary. Jill sold out. I never forgave her.

P.M. Newton is the author of The Old School. She blogs at The Concrete Midden.

Benjamin Law

My parents kept a copy of The Joy of Sex in their study which, even now, I think has aged pretty well. (Look: they have pubes back then!) When I wasn’t covertly reading that, I was reading my copy of Everything A Teenage Boy Should Know, by Dr John F. Knight. At that age, you want to know everything about sex there is, but looking back, I’m pretty sure Dr Knight was a billion years old and probably not the best authority on sexual development.

Benjamin Law is the author of The Family Law.

Friday High Five: Mean Critics and 50...

2012-04-20T07:47:58+10:00

We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered on the web over the past week.

Fifty shades of spanking and Katie Roiphe

It’s a bit weird to think that one of the hottest topics of conversation in the literary world, from London to New York, is a book that began as a self-published fan fiction e-book, and is now an international erotic bestseller backed by a multi-million dollar deal.

Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek article, ‘Spanking Goes Mainstream’ on what she diagnoses as a ‘current vogue for domination’ (or, ‘the stylised theatre of female powerlessness’), epitomised by Fifty Shades and explored on HBO’s new zeitgeisty series, Girls. Roiphe says it’s a reaction to feminism, by women who find ‘free will a burden’. The internet has exploded in angry response.

For those wondering what all the fuss is about, The Vulture has produced ‘The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Fifty Shades of Grey’, including reasons why it’s just not sexy:

‘There are ways to write sex well. This is not that. This is like Tom Wolfe–bad sex scenes but punctuated by non-sex scenes that are gut-wrenchingly awful. A passage where we find out what Anastasia Steele looks like via girl-frowning-at-her-appearance-in-a-mirror exposition should be punishment for vehicular manslaughter in some states.’

Mean guys: Chris Flynn on critics

Novelist, critic and Big Issue books editor Chris Flynn has been blogging a lot for Meanjin recently. This week, he writes about the influence of the Hatchet Job of the Year Award on the kinds of reviews that are being published; wondering if the rewarding of snark promoted by the award might be encouraging reviewers to be gratuitously mean, making it more about them than the work under consideration. ‘As a casual reviewer myself I’m beginning to wonder if I’m just not mean enough to be cut out for the task,’ he writes.

Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones. ‘If decapitations and regular helpings of bare breasts and buttocks are all you require of your television, step right up,’ wrote one unimpressed reviewer.

He singles out the infamous New York Times take-down of Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper (‘a textbook on how not to write fiction’) and Neil Genzlinger’s evisceration of television’s Game of Thrones – and its viewers (‘Dungeons and Dragons types [with a] fairly low reward threshold’).

Blurb Your Enthusiasm

Adam Mansbach (of Go the F**k to Sleep fame) has a very nice little satire in the New Yorker on the art of asking authors to ‘blurb’ (ie. endorse) your book. Here’s an excerpt from his pricing chart:

This is your first book. (+$100)

This is your first book in a decade. (+$150)

You’re still using the author photo from your ‘promising début’. (+$75)

I know you. (–$50)

I met you once. (–$20)

We made out at a party. (+$25)

We got drunk together at a literary festival once, but I could tell you were thinking the whole time about how now you could ask me for a blurb. (+$75)

Adam Mansbach with the book that made him famous.

Less sexist Lego?

One of the most popular articles we’ve published this year was our look at the pink-and-pastel hued ‘Lego for girls’, officially branded Lego Friends. This week, Salon reports that Lego executives have agreed to sit down to talk with SPARK, a group who hopes to get the company to include more characters in its standard Lego lines, and improve the Lego Friends line, which Time magazine compared to Disney Princess, ‘with its emphasis on physical appearance and limited career choices’.

Of course, Disney Princess – and Lego Friends – are fantastically successful with consumers, if not commentators. Salon is sceptical, thought its reporter says ‘it would be wise for a company founded nearly 50 years ago with the imperative to create toys for “girls and for boys” to remember that goal doesn’t mean “girl toys and boy toys.”’

David Sedaris: ‘I like non-fiction books about people with wretched lives’

The New York Times has launched a new regular series, ‘By the Book’, in which they interview writers about what they’re reading and recommending. They kick off with David Sedaris, who is characteristically entertaining and enlightening.

David Sedaris: ‘Whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like’.

Among his confessions? ‘I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives. The worse off the subjects, the more inclined I am to read about them. When it comes to fictional characters, I’m much less picky. Happy, confused, bitter: if I like the writing I’ll take all comers.’

The book that made him want to write? Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. ‘His short, simple sentences and familiar-seeming characters made writing look, if not exactly easy, then at least possible.’

No Duds: Orange Prize Shortlist 2012

2012-04-19T11:51:18+10:00

The shortlist has been announced for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK-based literary prize for the best book for a woman writer, now in its 17th year.

Contenders are:

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Canada)

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (Ireland)

Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (UK)

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (US)

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (US)

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (US)

Ann Patchett won the prize ten years ago, for Bel Canto, while Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for The Gathering in 2007.

Ann Patchett: She won the Orange Prize ten years ago, for Bel Canto

Enright told the Guardian she is proud to be on the Orange shortlist. ‘It is the friendliest and most forward-looking of all the prizes, constantly bringing new names to our attention and casting older ones in a new light. It gives the bag a shake.’

American Cynthia Ozick is another frontrunner; she turned 84 on the day of the shortlist announcement. Asked whether she minded her age being a topic of discussion, she told the Guardian that while she understands journalists need something to talk about, she does found it mystifying. ‘I think that writers are judged on their work and not on their age, and that seems to me a very simple axiom. I suppose if a writer publishes a novel at the age of 10 it is worth mentioning, but if one is mature it seems rather irrelevant.’

Joanna Trollope, chair of the judges, said, ‘I think this is one of the strongest lists I’ve seen for a literary prize and I’m quite an old hand at them now. It is a list of international standing.’

Of course, she would say that, wouldn’t she? But she’s not alone in thinking so.

‘Pulitzer, please take note’

The decision not to award a fiction prize for the Pulitzer, the US’s most significant national literature prize, was announced just hours before the Orange shortlist.

The Guardian’s Robert McCrum lay the Pulitzer blame with a faulty selection of titles by the fiction jury, who put three titles forward for the Pulitzer board to choose a winner from (Dennis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia).

‘Respectfully, I suggest that Pulitzer swallows a hefty slice of crow pie and takes home for careful study the Orange prize playbook,’ he said.

‘This UK-based, but globally significant award is not yet as ancient or distinguished as the Pulitzer, but the people who run Orange take a great deal of care – this year’s shortlist is a model – to ensure that their nominations include six new fictions of distinction, by writers who are likely to show form over many years.’

‘Look at the list of Orange winners and you will see that, not only are there no duds, there are, among the runners-up, several writers who have already achieved greatness. Pulitzer, please take note.’

Kate Grenville: The Idea of the Orange Prize

Kate Grenville, the Australian author who won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection in 2001, says that the win changed her life.

’I won it for The Idea of Perfection, a book that wasn’t shortlisted for a single important Australian prize. As a result, sales were dismal. A year later, it won what was then Britain’s richest literary prize. Suddenly everyone was reading it and assuring each other that they’d always known what a great book it was. It was the same book it had always been, but now it had the stamp of approval – a big prize.’

‘Because of the Orange Prize, my next book was taken very seriously by publishers. Instead of trailing cap in hand from publisher to publisher, I had the delightful experience of them courting me. When The Secret River appeared, readers of all sexes read it … It’s sold 200,000 copies in Australia alone. It was what publishers call my ‘breakout’ book. In my case, this meant ‘breaking out’ of the stereotype of ‘women’s books’. Paradoxically, a prize for women has freed my books from the ghetto of ‘women’s writing’.

Grenville is a strong supporter (and official ambassador) of The Stella Prize, an Australian equivalent to the Orange Prize, which will annually reward the best book in any genre by an Australian woman writer each year. Organisers hope to have the prize up and running soon.

You can find out more about The Stella Prize here.