We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered on the web over the past week.
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.’
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’).
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.
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.”’
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.’
Rebecca Starford, managing editor of Kill Your Darlings, writes back to Geordie Williamson’s Long View essay on Australian rural writing and wonders: what does this trend of privileging the rural story say about our culture more generally?
Geordie Williamson’s ‘Our Common Ground’ is an erudite and engaging essay on rural Australian life represented in literature. But I was surprised to find myself quoted within it, and the implication that I do not appreciate this literary tradition.
‘I can only claim to have read three of the books on the list – Silvey, Flanagan and McGahan. But I already see the same patterns in selection evidenced in recent Miles Franklin shortlists – masculine novels that disproportionately focus on events from the past (are we so fearful of examining contemporary Australian society?) as well as bush settings.’
My comments on the 2012 National Year of Reading’s recommended reading list can be found, in full, in the Liticism post Geordie quotes. They’re neither radical nor particularly original – the debate about the underrepresentation of women in Australian literary prizes has been raging for the last year or so. In the case of the National Year of Reading list, only one woman writer featured; seven were men.
I took issue with the National Year of Reading’s lofty claim to be the arbiter of ‘what it is to be Australian’. I don’t think anyone can argue that a list including only one woman articulates the genuine Australian experience. Nor can a list that has virtually no ethnic representation (with the exception of indigenous Australians).
I have an interest in such questions about Australian literature: I’m an editor and publisher. I’m also a member of the Stella Prize committee, a group dedicated to establishing a prize celebrating Australian women’s writing, as well as initiating research into national reading habits and trends based around gender.
In my comments to Liticism blogger Bethanie Blanchard, I also made note that many of the National Year of Reading texts are set in the past and/or the bush. ‘What do we miss when we mount arguments about the state of contemporary Australian literature,’ Williamson went on to ask in ‘Our Common Ground’, ‘without recourse to its foundation texts?’
I couldn’t agree more with these sentiments – a literary critic must be immersed in the literature he or she aspires to critique. But what does this trend of privileging the rural story say about our literary culture more generally, a genre that has 200 years of masculine, Anglo and heterosexual parameters?
I’m not lambasting our rich vein of bush writing, mind you, and Williamson’s inspiring analysis of some of our finest literary practitioners should send any discerning reader running to their local bookshop. As it happens, I have read a great number of novels located in the bush. I’m a huge admirer of Thea Astley, David Malouf, Kylie Tennant, Elizabeth Jolley, Xavier Herbert, just to name a few (I will never claim to be a fan of Patrick White). Going further back, I count the wickedly subversive 19th-century novelist and short-story writer Barbara Baynton (the subject of my thesis at university) and Rolf Boldrewood two of my favourite writers of all time.
What my comments urged for was a greater degree of reflection about the implications of these lists and prizes, and how they shape our literary culture. With 89% percent of our population living in urban areas, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world – so it’s not odd to wonder, is it, why so many of these award-winning novels are located in the bush?
Williamson cites the dangers of polarity is this debate, how easily nuance and complexity is lost. I agree with his assertion that the embedded and unexamined assumption that literature from the bush is ‘inevitably conservative, exclusionary and passé’ denies the intricate relationship between the division of rural and urban Australia.
Yet it’s the issues behind this discussion that are most revealing and interest me most. As many of us would agree, much cultural debate in this country is bereft of nuance and complexity – it doesn’t matter if it’s about a price on carbon or football codes. Conversations about the sensitive subject of our national literary tradition are unlikely to be any different.
Increasingly, I’m aware of this apparent fear of examining contemporary social and cultural issues in Australian fiction, and how this trepidation is evidenced in the awards system. The best historical fiction, as we all know, casts a sceptical and interpretive light onto events of the past, often illuminating the contemporary human condition. But are we so nostalgic for the past that it turns our gaze from more recent social wrongs?
We’re not so keen on reading about such squeamish contemporary domestic issues – where are the prize-winning works about the Stolen Generations, the Forgotten Australians, the federal intervention in the Northern Territory, asylum seekers, internment camps, mining and destructive climate change? We’re happy to sing the praises of a novel like The Secret River (and well-deserving it is) but something nearer to our own experiences, to our own time and place, causes us to shy away.
There are some novels that buck this trend, of course. Look at the phenomenal success, both critically and commercially, of a novel like The Slap. Here was a novel of our time that spoke to a particular reader of a particular milieu, the crass bourgeoisie stewing in their own ennui. Occasionally, other suburban novels, like Steven Carroll’s superb The Time We Have Taken, have been given the nod by the Miles Franklin judges. But look carefully at the subject matter of these novels – how deep do they analyse contemporary Australian society, how unflinching is their gaze? And even The Time We Have Taken is set in the past …
Williamson claims a personal interest in bush writing: he grew up on a farm near Grenfell, a small town in NSW, the birthplace of Henry Lawson, the granddaddy of the bush tradition. I was born in Melbourne in the mid 1980s, and I grew up in Williamstown, a small suburb in the west of Melbourne (a town where, incidentally, 19th-century novelist and journalist Ada Cambridge lived for two decades). Like Williamson, my own experiences have informed my taste in literature. I enjoy many Australian novels with a rural setting, have studied and in turn appreciated their literary precursors; but I would like to see the narrow definition of the Australian experience broadened – and more of my world represented in our national literature.
Rebecca Starford is the associate publisher at Affirm Press and managing editor of Kill Your Darlings. She was part of our Critical Failure panel on book reviewing in 2010, which you can watch online.
The Wheeler Centre’s senior writer Jo Case stumbled on a goldmine of reviewing advice after she put a question to Twitter. Here, she shares her booty.
Don’t let anyone tell you Twitter can’t be a useful educational tool. I found this out when I decided, on a whim, to launch a last-minute appeal for wisdom into the Twitterverse, on my way to give a reviewing workshop to the next generation of critics (for the University of Melbourne’s student publication, Farrago).
I asked, ‘Anyone have pet hates or absolute loves when it comes to reviewing? Tweet me if so …’
Twenty minutes later, I checked into my Twitter account and found it full of 140-character gems, many of them from writers, editors and reviewers.
Here’s some reviewing advice worth following – or at least, debating. Please feel free to add your own thoughts in our comments!
Michelle Griffin, national editor, the Age, former Age deputy editor overseeing arts and entertainment
A critic should be interested in why something worked/didn’t work, rather than what they liked/didn’t like or approved/disapproved.
Don’t be boring. This is a piece of writing angling to keep readers who don’t have to read it. DON’T WRITE FOR THE AUTHOR.
Sybil Nolan, freelance writer and editor
Pet hate: Reviewers who start their review with the ‘I’ word. Yes, it’s all about them!
Reviewers should not assume the book’s editor has failed to spot and fix errors and style flaws: some authors reject/overrule advice.
Claire Corbett, author, When We Have Wings
Hate hate hate plot summaries. Reviews so short these days plot ends up taking up half the review. LAZY. HATE spoilers.
James Tierney, freelance writer
Find your own voice as a reviewer. There’s an impersonal ‘reviewerese’ that is hard to read, let alone remember.
Charlotte Wood, author, Animal People
Pet hate: Reviews that just tell the plot or events of a book, and don’t come out with an opinion.
Damon Young philosopher and author, Distraction
The bad: Snark without reason and eye for language. Snark without achievement. The good: Reviews that exemplify what they praise.
Helpful to distinguish between book written and book reviewer wants written. Not fair to judge using imaginary ideal.
Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic, the Australian
Neat selective quotation helps clinch points. [It’s important to have] the ability to read well at sentence level without losing a sense of larger context.
Jennifer Mills, author, Gone
Participate in the conversation the book is starting; don’t insult the editor; check your gender/cultural privilege.
Fiona Hardy, bookseller, freelance reviewer
Reviewing isn’t a place to show off your knowledge of long words and obscure references.
Ben Pobjie, television columnist, the Age
Make sure you’re informative about the book, rather than pure opinion; so people with different tastes will get a sense of it.
Tim Sterne
I like it when you can see the reviewer has made a real effort to meet the book on its own terms, while also bringing to bear his/her intelligence and breadth/depth of reading.
It annoys me when reviewers give no consideration of a novel’s stylistic qualities and focus solely on what the novel is about.
Patrick Cullen, author, What Came Between
As a reader of reviews, I’m almost always underwhelmed by the passage quoted as an example of the work. So, how to pick a good line? Basically, most quotes out of context don’t hold up. They’re not necessarily great sentences.
Peter Taggart, freelance film and theatre writer
I think reviews still have to be entertaining. Slamming work for being dull is hypocritical when the review is torturously boring. That’s probably really obvious, but the reviews I read follow the same structure.
Emily Maguire, author, Smoke in the Room, Princesses and Pornstars
Hate it when the reviewer obviously has no knowledge of, or worse, contempt for, the genre of the book being reviewed.
P.M. Newton, crime writer, Old School
Yes. Famililarity with genre doesn’t mean giving it an easy pass. Particularly genre reviews that give plot summaries but don’t engage with ideas, or place the work within the range of the genre.
Kylie Ladd, author, After the Fall
Pet hate: When reviewer gets the genre wrong. My latest novel has some cricket in it but is contemporary fiction. One reviewer reviewed it in the same review as a non-fiction review collection of articles on rugby.
Rochelle Siemonowicz, publications manager, Australian Film Institute and film editor, the Big Issue
Dos and don’ts? Do stay until the end of the credits. Don’t eat in the cinema.
Do write beautifully and spell names correctly. Do place the film in context.
Do expend precious space pointing towards the best films instead of viciously ‘clubbing baby seals’!
Anthony Morris, DVD editor, the Big Issue, freelance film reviewer
Um, try to describe accurately what you’ve seen without giving away plot twists/spoilers? And not talk about yourself AT ALL?
Ben Hibbs
Determining if work achieved what it intended is important, including intended audience. No point reviewing blockbuster like arthouse.
The Wheeler Centre’s Long View series of luxuriously long review essays on Australian writers and writing gives some of Australia’s best critics the room to stretch out – and leap into the kinds of conversations about our literature they’ve always longed to have.
A new Long View essay will be published on our website every second Friday, from now until mid-July. The current essay is ‘Our Common Ground’, Geordie Williamson’s defence of Australian rural writing. Next fortnight, Toni Jordan will look at humour in Australian writing.
Geordie Williamson is one of Australia’s most respected (and most compulsively readable) reviewers. He is chief literary critic of the Australian and won last year’s prestigious Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year.
Geordie’s essay in defence of Australian rural writing, ‘Our Common Ground’, is the second in the Wheeler Centre’s Long View series of critical essays on Australian writers and writing.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
I was seven or eight. It was a short story about American Indians that appeared in our local paper, The Grenfell Record. Looking back I can only wonder at how starved for copy they must have been.
What’s the best part of your job?
The chance to publicly communicate personal passions.
What’s the worst part of your job?
The grinding relentlessness of rolling deadlines.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing and reviewing career so far?
Winning last year’s Pascall Prize for criticism was great, and not just for the prize-money. I passed the inaugural Pascall winner, David Malouf, on my way to collect the award at last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Now there is a writer to try and live up to.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about book reviewing?
Best advice? Always come in on word count – editors loathe overrun.
Worst advice? When I was thinking of starting a family, Irish author Anne Enright told me that children don’t interfere with writing. And yet, behind me as I type, my 11-month old son is enthusiastically un-shelving entire rows of books.
If you weren’t making your living by writing and reviewing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I spent half a decade cataloguing rare books and manuscripts in London, and would happily return to it. Bookselling is not so much a career as a life-long treasure-hunt.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
Certain technical aspects of the craft can be taught – and the discipline and group support it offers are helpful. But the lonely place where true writers go to get words that sing on the page? Courses can’t help with that, and may well be a hindrance.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a book reviewer?
Don’t! Reviewing has the same financial instability and quiet desperation of the creative writer’s craft – just without the novelist’s redeeming cultural cachet.
If you can’t help yourself, however: read as widely as you can, never work for free (your labour has dignity), find your own favourite critics and read all their stuff, and (politely, strategically) don’t take no for an answer when approaching outlets for work.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I get sent a lot of books by publishers. But when I’m buying for myself , I use a combination of Kindle Store for digital titles and abe.com for physical books (I tend to buy the kind that are out of print).
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? (And what would you talk about?)
I would like to join Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantegruel, along with Panurge and Brother Jean, for a meal. The booze would be plentiful and I would be keen to hear their views on contemporary Australian politics.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
That’s impossible to answer. This week I have finished Patrick White’s lost novel, The Hanging Garden. It reminds me that the ongoing discovery of the Australian continent through literature is one of the few undertakings that goes some way to making reparation for our presence here, so often unwelcome and destructive.
You can read Geordie’s essay in defence of Australian rural writing, ‘Our Common Ground’, or watch him in conversation with Alex Miller, both on our website.
Today, we launch our new long-form review series, The Long View. Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams explains the thinking behind the series.
One of the most frustrating things about working at the Wheeler Centre is coming up with names for things. Now, a few months into our third year of programming, we’re doing at least half a dozen events a week, with numerous series and programmes, each of which needs a snappy name to give an idea of what it is and why it exists. It’s harder than naming a child (how much easier it would be if that panel series could be called Henry, or that lecture Persephone) or a rock band (I’m reserving the name Dewey Decimal, just in case). It can be tear-your-hair-out material.
In launching our new fortnightly series of current affairs events we agonised for weeks, trying to come up with a name that captured everything we wanted from it. We know what it is: a series that moves beyond the limitations of contemporary media, resists the glibness of the 24-hour news cycle, the inanity of constant commentary and opinion. A series that presents a more measured, more considered, more deliberative alternative. In The Fifth Estate we finally found that title: one that we feel captures the ambition and the complexity of the project.
But along the way, one of the ideas we kept coming back to was that of the ‘long view’, a concept that underpins so much of what we’re trying to do with the Centre. A long view denotes the luxury of perspective; of a broader context.
In establishing the Wheeler Centre, our team has constantly had to think about both our short term priorities and programming, and also the longer term goals and visions for what we’re trying to achieve. We believe passionately that the role of a Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas should go beyond merely housing our six resident organisations and coming up with a public programme of events. We believe there are other gaps to be filled and conversations to be held, and that there are ideas to be promoted and explored in ways other than through people sitting on a stage talking.
In 2010, we held a week-long series of events exploring the state of arts criticism in this country. Considering the worlds of books and theatre, music, visual arts and cinema, our panels reflected on the ways in which a limited or constrained critical culture held back our artists and our arts. One of the recurring themes was the shortage of outlets for long-form criticism and reviewing, a form of cultural commentary that all our panellists identified as essential for supporting rich artistic expression.
The week was provocative, thought-provoking and ultimately – as all good events seem to do – left us with a palpable sense that there was work to be done. There are amazing reviewers and critics in this country, doing extraordinary work in both conventional media outlets and through new and emerging channels. But the fact remains that the opportunities for publication of this criticism are becoming fewer and farther between. Newspaper sections devoted to arts criticism grow increasingly thin. Dedicated and specialist magazines and journals are finding the publishing environment ever more perilous.
So it’s with delight that we announce that, with the support of Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), we’ve commissioned ten long-form pieces of literary criticism for publication on this website over the next few months.
We think adopting a long view when it comes to considering and discussing the world of books, writing and ideas frees us up to dig deeper, to better understand the context into which new voices are publishing and the nature of the tradition to which they belong. We will feature contributions from critics and novelists, journalists and academics, encouraging readers and critics to take the time to consider our literature with a little more depth.
Plus, it gives us the chance to resurrect a name we otherwise weren’t using. So it’s win/win.
In The Long View’s first essay, Brilliant Careers: A Quintet of Australian Writers, Elisabeth Holdsworth reflects on Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, Shirley Hazzard, Helen Garner and Delia Falconer.
A new biography of Kurt Vonnegut has invoked a ill-tempered man consumed by bitterness and loneliness, a shadow of the avuncular persona well known to his adoring fans. The biography alleges that Vonnegut was convinced his work was undervalued by the American literary establishment despite the massive impact of such novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. The biography raises an age-old question: should we judge a creative work by its creator?
In a recent Wheeler Centre event, literary critic Simon Leys argued that we mustn’t judge a writer by their work, nor a literary work by its creator. “The greatest creators in world literature,” said Leys, “literally do not necessarily know what they are doing. They may intend to do one thing, but what they actually achieve may be quite different.” Citing Cervantes, Gogol and Tolstoy, Leys noted that time and again writers have misunderstood their achievement.
But Leys identifies an even more perplexing conundrum, which he calls the problem of biography, citing several authors to testify to the dimensions of a great paradox. “Biography does not explain one damn thing,” wrote poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. “Every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats, too humiliating to contemplate,” said George Orwell. The ever-controversial VS Naipaul said, “Everything of value about me is in my books only.” French poet Paul Valery wrote, “Every individual is inferior to his most beautiful work.” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “I never knew a man who was consonant with his work, when the work is of genius. When the work is of genius, he is far below it … it is not the mere man who does the thing, it is the man inspired. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent to him from outside.”
Citing two great French writers with Fascist leanings, Leys goes on to ask, “How can one ever explain this contradiction between a work and its author? Greatness of the work, mediocrity of the man; beauty of the work, vulgarity or downright ugliness of the man.” Leys cites Proust’s theory of two selves to explain the conundrum: “A book is the product of a different self from the self manifest is our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there that we may arrive at it.”
“[I]n the early years of the 21st century, liberal America got its news from a satirical television program and its moral compass from a fortnightly journal of book reviews.” So writes Geordie Williamson in an essay this week in The Australian, asking why it is that after 9/11 the Daily Show and the New York Review of Books became such authoritative source of news and opinion for cosmopolitan progressives often described in the US – often derogatively – as ‘liberal’.
Williamson, the newspaper’s chief literary critic who this week accepted this year’s $15,000 Pascall Prize for criticism, suggests the unexpected rise of a book review magazine occurred during a period when other media outlets abdicated their journalistic responsibilities. “It is possible to disagree with the positions held by [Mark] Danner on torture [in a 2004 essay, ‘The Logic of Terror’], or by Jonathan Raban on the surveillance society, or by Joan Didion on domestic politics in the US. But what is undeniable is that the pages of The New York Review of Books (and indeed the books pages of newspapers and magazines across the world) have become, during the past 10 years, a powerfully effective means of interrogating the larger political claims of the day.”
Recent winners of the prize, administered by Music & Opera Singers Trust, include essayist Mark Mordue and theatre writer and blogger Alison Croggon.
Judy Horacek’s take on book critics
Two related pieces appeared in The Observer on the weekend, signalling more debate over the role of the critic. Neal Gabler, author of Walt Disney: The Biography, writes, “It is Twitter, Facebook, myDigg, Yelp and dozens of other sites where, sometimes just by sheer quantity of opinion, the people are overrunning the Winter Palace of cultural elitism.”
In a related piece, a group of artists and critics adds to the swell. Here’s Hari Kunzru, novelist: “Critics praise work that doesn’t upset them. So much looks like art but just tastes of cardboard.”
And over at the Huffington Post, critic Anis Shivani has asked major American critics the question, “"How can book reviewing be relevant to the new generation of readers?”
Regular readers of the Dailies may remember our story last week on the spat between playwright David Williamson and Crikey’s theatre critic Jason Whittaker (currently the subject of our Talking Point). Indeed, attendees of Wheeler Centre events will recall our Critical Failure series on theatre, film, books and music.
Andrew Weldon looks at how everyone’s a film critic. This cartoon is excerpted from Andrew Weldon’s I’m So Sorry Little Man I Thought You Were a Hand Puppet.
Image courtesy of Pat Allan
On Sunday the Wheeler Centre extended its Critical Failure week with an unconference looking at bloggers and online writers.
Unconferencers set the agenda on the day of the event so it kicked off with a discussion of the “amateur” status of bloggers. This was inspired in part by Alison Croggon’s article “The Return of the Amateur Critic” asking why bloggers are often thought of as amateurs. This led into a discussion of money and how bloggers can monetise their places on the web.
Games writer Paul Callaghan led a discussion of how criticism could be applied to video games, including concepts such as establishing what makes a “good” game and how appropriate it is to create a canon of games or get non-gamers to review games because they bring ideas from film or arts criticism. Reference was made to a New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker in which he looks through the eyes of a gamer and non-gamer.
Angela Meyer led the discussion on Twitter and how it can be employed as a critical tool. She’s had some success getting followers to write reviews and then retweeting them.
After a lunch break, Richard Watts raised the idea of sustainability of blogs wondering if some blogs have a natural lifecycle and how do you continue a blog when other work calls. Ben Eltham brought some insights into the cultural economics of blogging particularly how the cheap technology of blogging has democratised publishing. There was a discussion of commenting before Estelle Tang led the last session about blogging as an individual or institution with reference to her recent experiences of blogging for the Melbourne Writers Festival.
Many thanks to Pat Allan from Trampoline for facilitating the event.
WH Chong’s sketch of unconferencer Alison Croggon
If there was one intention for the week of Critical Failure it was that it would create debate – either in the event itself or spilling out onto the web or newspaper pages in the following weeks.
Critical Failure: Books panellist Rebecca Starford
By way of right of reply, the participants have already begun penning some further thoughts. Book critic Peter Craven called the event a “successful merging of critic with fan” and called criticism “the way we set about registering and memorialising those representations of human life that have supreme significance for us”.
Rebecca Starford blogged that she came away “frustrated and disappointed (in myself, it must be said)” from the same books panel. She believes “many readers are turning from the books pages because they aren’t reading about books they are interested in” and are increasingly looking online. In part it’s a response to the Australian’s Bugger the Bloggers article.
Theatre panellist Alison Croggon published a “quick hit” promising a longer response later and pointing to Curtain Call’s review.
Andrew Weldon considers a different kind of critical failure.
Blogger, designer and visual artist, Culture Mulcher has been keeping a scrapbook of his visits to the Wheeler Centre and this week of Critical Failure he’s been particularly busy with sketches capturing both quotes and characters from the sessions.
Here’s a selection:
Adrian Martin debates the point at Critical Failure: Film
Fenella Kernebone offered her view on Critical Failure: Film
Peter Craven talked about what makes a good review at Critical Failure: Books
Hilary McPhee said she was “not as despondent as Gideon”
(Haigh countered that he was “not despondent, I’m quite cheerful!” at Critical Failure: Books
We’re looking forward to what Master Mulcher comes up with for tonight’s session on the visual arts.
Yesterday’s ALR in the Australian, ran an article on the state of Australian criticism by Geordie Williamson calling for a return to old-style reviewing and scholarship.
Williamson has a hit list of what to keep from critical theory (“Greater circumspection in making broad or universalist claims” and “A healthy suspicion of fixed literary canons”) as well aspects to throw out notably “a disregard for literature’s special status, lumping it with every other form of writing, from bus tickets to bumper stickers”. It’s a bold piece of writing in which Williamson lays a blueprint for the future of criticism.
While he acknowledges the importance of the internet as “ridiculously cheap, blisteringly fast and the online community it engenders is one that thrives on argument and constant to-and-fro”, he doesn’t see it as the democratic saviour of criticism. While he sees the potential of the web as a tool, he hasn’t seen this potential met, decrying that “For every brilliant new blogger that has emerged, 100 pallid yes-men (and women) have sprung up.”
It’s a view supported by ALR editor, Stephen Romei, in his last blog post as editor (he moves on to become the Australian’s literary editor). Romei defends the piece because “the internet age means we need old-fashioned literary critics, humanist thinkers such as Geordie, more than ever”.
Judy Horacek has mischievous books turning the tables on critics. Her cartoon collection, If you can’t stand the heat, is due out in October.
Author Gideon Haigh
Everybody wants to go to heaven, as they say, but nobody wants to die. So it is in the world of book reviewing. Everyone is in favour of frank and fearless criticism, up to the point where a work of theirs might come off the worse for it.
It was, arguably, ever thus. But the books pages of Australian newspapers and magazines have become such a wasteland that traditional timidities no longer suffice as a satisfactory explanation. Sections that should contain some of a publication’s sharpest, shrewdest, most incisive and irreverent writing have become hodgepodges of conventional wisdom and middlebrow advertorial.
Newspapers bear some blame for this. Although you’d imagine that anything contributing to an informed and discriminating print culture would be advantageous to them, newspapers publish books pages with a grudging air, regarding them as a financial burden because they attract little advertising support.
Reviewers, by extension, are the lowliest of contributors. Some newspapers and magazines in Australia have ceased paying for reviews at all, believing that the thrill of a free book alone will summon the definitive notice. Others are winnowing costs away by on-selling reviews to sister publications, buying reviews from overseas (usually of books three people in the country might read) or using staff journalists (generally, whether out of incompetence or envy, the dopiest reviewers of all).
Then there is the popular institution of the capsule review, one hundred words or less, executed for beer money, and there to convey the illusion of comprehensiveness by breaking up the page, one superficial but reverberating assertion at a time.
In his classic essay ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, a touchstone for every ‘down-trodden, nerve-wracked creature’ who has toiled in the craft, George Orwell opined that one thousand words was the ‘bare minimum’ for a review of consequence, and that the ‘standard middle-length review of about 600 words’ was ‘bound to be worthless’. Yet in newspapers today, six hundred words constitutes a veritable meander.
It’s no wonder, then, that there’s little incentive for sticking one’s neck out, for actually taking a position, for arguing that a book is bad, or sloppy, or stupid, or two or three iterations short of finished – an affliction staggeringly common among Australian books. Who needs the aggravation?
Far easier to summarise the contents, recapitulate the blurb, describe the author’s reputation, or examine the author’s politics in a thinly veiled op-ed – is he or she ‘one of us’? After all, the author might be reviewing us one day, or perhaps already has. In which case, it may, of course, be payback time.
Yet there’s much less of this last phenomenon – both the time-tested revenge fanging and the newfangled pre-emptive fanging of the sort recently perpetrated in The Monthly – than is commonly imagined. The besetting sin of Australian book reviewing, curious in an age in which newspapers are chock-full of try-hard humourists and blow-hard opinionistas, is its sheer dullness and inexpertise.
A successful review has two qualities. First, it is a lively and engaging piece of writing. It informs and invigorates. It detains and delights. Yet how often in Australia do you read a book review that is a sparky, spunky, memorable bit of prose? And how many reviewers can you name whose work you would cheerfully read regardless of the book being discussed?
Second, a competent book review should be a form of inquiry into what makes good books good – an inquiry with, as unfashionable as it sounds, the courage of its elitism. Without a benchmark of what constitutes excellent writing, scrupulous research and intelligent discussion, a reviewer is locked into a world in which ‘liking’ and ‘not liking’ are the only options – the Beavis and Butthead world, as the American literary critic Curtis White has put it, in which ‘this sucks, that rocks, this is awesome, and everything is just finally a lot stupid’.
As well as setting standards, a competent review gives context, deepens understanding and clarifies debate. This requires some discernment, some rigour, even some dedication. If you’re reviewing a work of fiction, it might be expedient to have read, or if not, to read, the author’s earlier publications; if you’re critiquing a work of non-fiction, it will require an acquaintance with the subject in question, even if it is a general one. Whatever the case, reviewing is a discipline, a form of argument demanding logic and evidence as well as ‘taste’ and ‘opinion’. And it is a discipline in barely acknowledged decline.
What is perhaps just as troubling as the lacklustre infomerciality of so much Australian reviewing – gushing over the latest vogue, avoiding anything that cannot readily be pigeonholed – is that the situation suits so many vested interests in Australia’s small, snobbish, fashion-conscious, self-celebrating literary scene. 
It veils the publishing industry’s lazy, parsimonious, hidebound practices. It reinforces the everyone-has-won-and-all-must-have-prizes racket of festivals, fellowships and grants. It makes our culture a cosy, matey, happy, heavenly place, while reminding us of Mark Twain’s dictum: ‘You go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.’
This essay was originally published in Kill Your Darlings.
The Observer announced its top ten cook books on Sunday creating a stir in culinary circles.
Many of the big names missed out. Our Stephanie Alexander came in at 31 with her cooking bible, The Cook’s Companion, and relative newcomers like Jamie Oliver only got a single mention at 15 for Jamie’s Italy. Even Nigella barely scraped in at 42.
So who did make the top ten? Aussie chef David Thompson got a guernsey at 7 for his Thai Food and at number 1 was The French Menu Cookbook. Both great books but we couldn’t help but notice that Thompson himself is listed as a judge for the list.
The sauce thickens even more when you look at the judges who also have their books in the list: Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop at 9 and Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson at 5. Of course on a team of more than 15 judges there’s bound to be some overlap, but we wonder if Fuschia Dunlop is the best person to comment on her fellow judge David Thompson’s book as “one that opened the door to a new appreciation of Thai cookery among readers of the English language”. It seems a comment that lacks objectivity.
Alison Croggon (Image courtesy Jacqueline Mitelman)
“As an artist, my relationships are experiential rather than theoretical. I certainly share with scientists and philosophers a desire to make sense of my existence. It is just that my approach is poles apart. It is a fragile, highly intuitive process, in which sensory acuity and memory are subtly intertwined.”
~ Jonathan Mills, State of the Arts lecture 2010
I had an English teacher in high school who one day strode into class, looked around belligerently at his students, and demanded to know if any of us read poetry. I did. I had read the dusty anthologies we had at home from end to end, and supplemented them with random buys from school jumble sales. I was a passionate and indiscriminate reader, devouring Alfred Noyes and TS Eliot with equal enthusiasm.
But this teacher so clearly thought that no one – and especially no one in this class of scruffy 13 year olds – could possibly read poetry for pleasure, that I didn’t dare to raise my hand. I sensed that he himself didn’t like poetry much, and that the price of outing myself would have been his unexpressed contempt. Certainly, he was a bad teacher of poetry.
I guess it wasn’t all his fault: the pedagogical approach to poetry was discouraging. I don’t know if schools still do this, but back then a staple of English comprehension lessons was the question: “What is the poet trying to say?”
This question enraged me. I didn’t think the poet was trying to say anything: the poet said it. The poem was what it said: it wasn’t there to be nailed down to an unambiguous message, but instead, like life itself, shimmered in its sensual ambiguity.
The meanings of a poem exist as much in its sounds and rhythms as in its semantic sense: but it was precisely those material aspects of language that were dismissed in the insistence on a particular kind of comprehension. After all, the suspension of certainty that is at the heart of any work of art is not easily translatable into exam questions.
Later, when I read Baudelaire’s insistence that “a poem must be a debacle of the intellect”, I knew exactly what he meant. Poetry is the place where the legislating impulse of language, even to its very grammar, is exploded from within, where our desire for order and control meets the anarchy of existence.
This subversion of the human wish to control reality is where art finds its power. It isn’t always a comfortable power, but it is always liberating, opening the consciousness to new perceptions of the world we live in. As Jonathan Mills claims in his lecture, art is one place where the many possible ways of perceiving and understanding can be articulated.
It resists paraphrase, claiming for itself a primacy of experience that is parallel to, if not the same as, life. And like life, its liberations are too often chained by the insistence it conform to a very limited idea of what “meaning” is.
In her famous 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag called for an erotics of art. “What is important now is to recover our senses,” she said. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”
All anyone needs to understand art is to look, to listen, to feel: all else follows. They are, not uncoincidentally, exactly the same skills we need to love. Yet our education system leads us to believe that this is not enough. I’m sure that this is the primary reason for the hostility so many people, including my English teacher, feel towards art. Having been taught that they ought to look for meaning in the wrong places, art makes them feel stupid, as if they are found wanting.
That’s not the fault of artists nor of those who reject their work. But it does express a terrible failing in our culture, a constriction of our thought, that has far wider implications. And as Mills suggests, if we are to face the challenges of our future world, it’s a failing we need to address.
Alison Croggon is a theatre critic, blogger, poet and novelist. Her blog Theatre Notes is one of Australia’s most respected reviews, criticism and play news.
Mandy Ord looks at our critical animals and finds a lot of marsupials. Her exhibition, Dark Contrasts, opens at Hawthorn Town Hall in September.
Gideon Haigh has released another salvo in his campaign against Australia’s critical culture on Killings (the blog of journal Kill Your Darlings).
In part Haigh’s response to Rosemary Neill’s piece in the Australian Critical Mass. Haigh objects to the snobbery of ignoring online critics, saying “Despite being set explicitly in ‘the age of the bloggers’, Rosemary managed not to mention a single blog by name. Could this, perchance, be another dodging?”
But overall Haigh is asking for a return to a more considered reading culture rather than a thumbs-up simplicity of scores which he likens to “consumer guides, who condense everything to a ratings system rather like a Choice survey of vacuum cleaners”. Haigh prefers reviews that are a conversation around a book and its ideas. “A thoughtful review permits disagreement; a number seems to brook no argument”
The Australian’s Review magazine examined Australia’s arts criticism in an age when it is challenged by bloggers and the struggle to make the web profitable.
Since 2006 more than 60 full-time critics have been sacked in the US including Variety’s shock dismissal of its chief film critic in March. In Australia we’ve seen the Herald Sun cull its arts writers and News Limited’s film critics reduced from four nationally to one Melbourne-based writer.
The finger of blame is pointed at blogs and internet aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes, which hoovers up reviews from across the web and creates an overall rating. Theatre blogger Alison Croggon praised the internet’s ability to allow everyone to be a critic but also saw the sheer mass of content as a problem. She said “What is awful is just being drowned by sludge.”
Age writer Marcus Westbury continues the conversation today with his editorial. He believes that the future of arts criticism lies in better understanding your audience. Westbury concludes “It’s becoming less about being an expert to a mass audience and more about becoming the reconnaissance party for a niche one.”
The Wheeler Centre is presenting Critical Failure, a series of events on the state of arts criticism in Australia.
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