Masha Gessen is a strong presence: passionate, deeply knowledgeable and slightly impatient, in that way of people everywhere who are committed – body and soul – to a cause. She is impatient to return to her native Russia, where she lives and works; where a revolution of sorts is brewing.
‘I’m going to get right back into it when I fly home tomorrow,’ she told the Wheeler Centre audience on Tuesday night.
Masha Gessen: ‘As a writer, you just try to see what’s in front of you with fresh eyes … pretend you’ve just fallen off the moon.’
Last December, tens of thousands of Russians gathered in mass protests against Putin’s government. They were angry at the conspicuously rigged elections his party had just won, calling for an end to the country’s endemic corruption.
‘The protest movement happened very suddenly,’ said Gessen. ‘It surprised all of us who took part in it – we looked at each other in the streets, like, Oh, you’re here too.’
Journalist Gessen is the author of The Man Without a Face, a damning biography of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the man she labels a dictator and describes as an ‘accidental’ leader. An epilogue diarising her involvement in last year’s protests was rushed into the book at the last minute before publication.
‘I feel so fortunate I was able to get that in,’ she said. ‘It would have been a very different book without it.’
Back in 1999, the previous Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin, once hugely popular, had become erratic. He was ill, alcoholic, and had become an embarrassment. And he was presiding over a country in crisis, experiencing ‘economic and social inequality on a scale [its citizens] had never known’.
Yeltsin had alienated all those he had been close to over the years, except a very close group nicknamed ‘the Family’, who took it upon themselves to find a successor whose number one job would be not to prosecute Yeltsin once they took office.
One of the ‘unremarkable … grey faceless men’ they auditioned was Putin, the head of the secret police.
Early on, Putin was set forth – and welcomed – as ‘the embodiment of everybody’s best hope’. Because he had spent his life working with the secret police, nothing about him was on the public record. He was a blank slate.
The west welcomed Putin as someone they could do business with, a democratic reformer. This view persisted in the western media long after it was obvious that he was the opposite of democratic: he’d sent the quasi independent media into exile, reversed judicial reforms and dismantled the Russian electoral system.
‘The western press are held captive by conventional wisdom,’ Gessen said. ‘It often takes a long time to catch up.’
After 9/11, foreign coverage completely shifted to Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘Moscow became a waystation for reporters on their way to Kabul,’ said Gessen.
She said that the idea for The Man Without a Face came to her when she wrote a broad-ranging portrait of Putin for Vanity Fair in 2008. ‘I had gotten sick of writing about him – for a long time, I felt I had to dumb it down when I was writing about him in English. But I found myself really enjoying it.’ By the time she finished the 10,000 word piece, she had pitched the book to a publisher.
Her writing philosophy? ‘As a writer, you just try to see what’s in front of you with fresh eyes.’ She gives the advice, ‘pretend you’ve just fallen off the moon when you’re writing’.
One of Gessen’s favourite stories in her book is that of Marina Salye, ‘an incredible woman’ and ‘the most popular politician in St Petersberg in the early 80s and 90s’; a member of its city council.
She ran an investigation of the period when Putin was deputy mayor of the great city, largely running its economy and found evidence that he had embezzled between ten million and 100 million dollars, ‘an unbelievable amount of money in Russia at that time’.
Her investigation, which concluded in 1993, recommended that the mayor should prosecute and dismiss Putin. Instead, the mayor dismissed the city council.
A week before the election that saw Putin installed as president, Salye published an article warning that Putin ‘would be the president of a corrupt oligarchy’. A few months later, she was threatened and fled to a semi-abandoned village in the woods near the Russian-Latvian border, where she stayed in hiding.
Gessen spent two years ‘putting out feelers’ to Salye. As soon as she agreed to talk to her, Gessen ‘jumped in the car and drove 12 hours through the night’.
Gessen is confident that we are seeing the last days of Putin’s reign; she says his numbers have ‘never been so low’. It took him weeks to form a new government after last year’s election, as politicians declined to join his cabinet. ‘No one wants to be part of this government.’
The Man Without a Face is not available in Russian, though an English language edition is on limited sale in two Moscow locations: a total of ‘about 100 copies’.
Gessen says that she has a Russian publisher who likes the book, but has told her she can’t take the risk of publishing it. ‘Lots of foreign publishers want to publish it in Russian and smuggle it into Russia, but I’m not interested in that,’ she said. She wants to wait until a local publisher feels able to publish it.
‘From what I can tell, Putin doesn’t know about the book. For him to know about it, someone has to tell him about it. It’s an amazing symptom of the situation in Russia that no one will tell him about it.’
At question time, an audience member told Gessen he was concerned for her safety when she returns to Russia. She both acknowledged and dismissed the concern.
‘I have friends who’ve been attacked and killed, the risk is out there,’ she said. ‘But I’m somewhat protected by my connections with the west and my US passport, which I hold alongside my Russian one.’
‘I’m a lot safer than many of my colleagues.’
Masha Gessen and Chinese novelist Sheng Keyi appeared together in an event at the Wheeler Centre, chaired by Jenny Niven, on Tuesday 22 May.
Are you an artist (aspiring, working, ‘working’ or otherwise) in need of a little inspiration? Well, you might like to go back to school, to hear Neil Gaiman’s recent address to students at the Philadelphia School of Arts.
The whole address is well worth watching, but we’d like to share some selected highlights from his speech. (The headings are ours.)
When you start a career in the arts you have no idea what you’re doing. This is great.
People who know what they’re doing know the rules and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not and you should not.
The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible. And you can. If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.
If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.
I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions and simply go out and find out how the world works.
And besides, to do those things I needed to learn how to write, and how to write well. I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, and on deadline.
I learned to write by writing.
You need to learn to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive.
A freelance life in the arts is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money or love.
And you have to accept that you may put out hundreds of things for every bottle that winds up coming back.
If you make mistakes, you’re out there doing something.
Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong. In life, in love, in business and in friendship, in health … and in all the other ways life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art.
Husband runs off with a politician? make good art … IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.
Make it on the bad days; make it on the good days too.
The moment where you feel that just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment where you may be starting to get it right.
The things I’ve done that have worked the best were the ones I was least certain about.
What would be the fun in making something you knew would work?
People get hired because, somehow, they get hired.
People keep working in a freelance world because the work is good, because they’re easy to get along with and because they deliver it on time.
And you don’t even need to do all three. Two out of three is fine.
Nothing I did where the only reason I did it was for the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.
The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them become a reality have never let me down and I’ve never regretted the time I’ve spent on any of them.
We don’t exactly judge a book by its cover here at the Wheeler Centre … but we do appreciate a good-looking book cover, nonetheless.
The Australian Publishers' Association celebrates the best in Australian cover design once a year, with the APA Design Awards. This year’s winners were announced last week; here’s some of them.
Love Lace: Powerhouse Museum International Lace Award, Powerhouse Publishing, designed by Toko.
The Art of Pasta, Lucio Galletto & David Dale, Penguin, designed by Daniel New, artist Luke Sciberras.
Hannah Robinson for And Red Galoshes, pictured, Glenda Millard & Jonathan Bentley, Hardie Grant; The Elegant Art of Falling Apart, Jessica Jones, Hachette; Wide Open Road, Tony Davis, ABC Books; and Chasing Odysseus, S.D. Gentill, Pantera Press.
August, Bernard Beckett, Text, designed by W.H. Chong and Susan Miller.
Love in the Years of Lunacy, Mandy Sayer, A&U, designed by Emily O'Neill.
Hiroshima Nagasaki, Paul Ham, HarperCollins, designed by Matt Stanton and HarperCollins Design Studio.
Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears, A&U, designed by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko, and Yolande Gray.
The Flight Attendant’s Shoe, Prudence Black, NewSouth, designed by Di Quick.
Alaska, Sue Saliba, Penguin, designed by Allison Colpoys.
Ben & Duck, Sara Acton, Scholastic, designed by Nicole Stofberg.
Star League 1: Lights, Camera, Action Hero!, H.J. Harper, Random House, designed by Nahum Ziersch and Astred Hicks, Design Cherry.
The full list of winners is available at Bookseller and Publisher online.
In the first of a new event series on the art of book design, multi-award-winning cover designer W.H. Chong will present an illustrated talk on how he turned much-loved Australian classics into art for Text Publishing’s Australian Classics series.
Beautiful Books: How To Design an Australian Classic with W.H. Chong will be held at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 31 May at 6.15pm. Free, but please book.
In person, Jeanette Winterson has a somehow otherworldly appearance. Small and lithe, her short hair curling over her ears and at the nape of her neck, she resembles an elf or a pixie.
Light-footed, she strides the stage at the Comedy Theatre as she greets her audience, brandishing her book as if talismanic object. She reads – or, more accurately, performs – the first chapter in full, but barely glances at it and rarely seems to turn the page. It’s as if she knows the story by heart – and she should; she lived it.
Jeanette Winterson: ‘I was never going to be a nobody.’
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal tells the true story partly covered in her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: living with her eccentric adopted parents, devout Pentecostals, growing up with books and language as her refuge from an arid emotional life. It picks up where Oranges left off, too, with her mother discovering her in bed with her female lover and kicking her out of home, aged just 17 – and goes on to take snippets from her literary career, and to follow her discovery of her birth mother (or ‘bio mum’, as she calls her). Threaded throughout are meditations on the nourishment of books and art, the way they offer solace, discovery and growth.
But Jeanette doesn’t like to call it a memoir; she prefers ‘cover version’, as she told Salon. In Why Be Happy, she writes, ‘Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.’
She tells her Comedy Theatre audience that the book is ‘an experiment with experience’.
Reflecting on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she channels the first chapter of the book in her hands, her memoir-of-sorts:
1985 wasn’t the day of the memoir – and in any case, I wasn’t writing one. I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ – the compass of what they know – while men write wide and bold – the big canvas, the experiment with form. Henry James misunderstood Jane Austen’s comment that she wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody?
Not everyone has embraced this experiment, nor her acknowledgment of the shifting border between fact and fiction.
In a recent First Tuesday Book Club, Germaine Greer called both Oranges and Why Be Happy self-serving and ultimately unfair to the characters portrayed in them, particularly Mrs Winterson, Jeanette’s adopted mother, a larger-than-life ‘monster’. Greer said the books belong to ‘a strangely female genre … the lying autobiography’. She declared that she wasn’t ‘buying’ Jeanette’s story of feeling unloved from birth, because ‘adoptive parents DO love children’.
An audience member asks Jeanette, during question time, for a response to Germaine’s comments – which she handles with dignified aplomb. She says she won’t ‘hear a word said’ against Germaine Greer, ‘mother of feminism’, but adds, almost as an aside, ‘I think it’s rather touching that she’s standing up for Mrs Winterson, who died in 1990.’
‘I think it’s a very affectionate portrait of her,’ she reflects. ‘I began to have a lot more sympathy for her, a lot more understanding.’ She concludes that her mother, Mrs Winterson, had none of the chances she did, coming of age when she did, before the 1960s changed the options available to women. ‘She was clever and she was trapped.’
Indeed, Jeanette is openly admiring as she recalls that her mother read her Jane Eyre as a child, but changed the ending, so that Jane didn’t end up marrying the dashing Rochester, with his mad wife in the attic, but her cold clergyman cousin St John instead. Jeanette didn’t discover what her mother had done until she found a copy of Jane Eyre in the library and read it herself. She’s now impressed by Mrs Winterson’s ability to make up her own alternative story as she turned the pages, fluidly inventing in the prose style of Charlotte Bronte.
Jeanette credits Mrs Winterson and her upbringing with making her who she is; surprisingly, though she has confessed both a longing to be loved and an innate inability to do so, she says she wouldn’t change her circumstances if she could.
‘I was never going to be a nobody,’ she tells the Comedy Theatre audience, with a bright confidence. ‘That wouldn’t have suited me.’ She believes if her circumstances were different, she’d have a suburban house, kids, a Range Rover, and a high-flying corporate job. ‘I’d have had the energy but not the poetry.’
Her isolation, she says, meant that ‘I thought of myself as the hero of my own life.’
‘If you think of yourself as a fiction instead of a fact, you learn an important truth: you can change the story. You can rewrite yourself.’
Jeanette Winterson, it seems, is as passionate about her chosen religion as her mother was about God. Hers is art, literature, words.
Gesturing at the audience below her, at the blue velvet curtains at the sides of the stage, Jeanette Winterson laughs and says, ‘It’s the gospel tent, isn’t it? I’m hoping I’ll have saved some souls tonight.’
Jeanette Winterson appeared in a double bill with Chad Harbach at the Comedy Theatre as part of the Wheeler Centre’s Ten series of events, presented in partnership with the Sydney Writers Festival.
Looking for an end-of-week giggle? Flavorwire has published a selection of photos of writers looking silly. There’s Susan Sontag sitting at her typewriter in a bear suit, snapped by her partner Annie Liebovitz; Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe (resplendent in his signature cream suit) inexplicably perched atop a lifeguard’s tower; Maya Angelou hugging a Muppet on a visit to Sesame Street, and more.
Susan Sontag, somehow looking dignified in a bear suit. Photo by Annie Liebovitz.
We’re all working harder in the digital age, it seems, and authors are no exception. The New York Times reports on all the extra work expected of authors these days. Not only is there Twitter, Facebook and the expectation of being available for online Q&As and the like … but impatient readers, used to downloading books at the press of a button, are leading publishers to drive their authors harder. Genre writers who used to produce new books at the rate of approximately one per year are now ‘pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year’.
Mark Dapin’s long-running Good Weekend column recently ended – and he’s taken the opportunity to reflect, for Meanjin, on the strange job of being a columnist, while the memories are still warm. It’s a characteristically funny piece, with seem terrific insights into the privilege of diarising in public, getting used to being recognised on the street, creating a persona and battling with bristly readers and online trolls.
In my second Good Weekend column of 2012, I mused that there’d been a lot of ‘lifestyle’ columnists around a decade before, waxing whimsically and repetitively to a diminishing audience, yet I was one of the last men standing. One issue later, the new Good Weekend editor, Ben Naparstek, axed the column.
Mark Dapin: ‘A column should live for two years, not ten, and I’d become increasingly weary of living with such a high public profile.’
Last year was the year of the psychopath, with Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test fascinating readers around the world – both with its criteria for psychopathy, and its questioning of how useful (and accurate) it is to categorise people.
Can the psychopath test be applied to children as young as five? What are the consequences of labelling children – and what are the consequences if we don’t?
This week, the New York Times explores the question of classifying children as psychopaths, asking what such a classification can do to a child’s (and their parent’s) life, and what the costs are of avoiding such classifications simply because they scare us. The writer profiles one family with a nine-year-old boy who fits the classification. The mother’s analysis of the situation is particularly chilling:
She mentioned an episode of Criminal Minds that terrified her, in which a couple’s younger son was murdered by his older brother. ‘In the show, the older brother didn’t show any remorse. He just said, “He deserved it, because he broke my plane.” When I saw that, I said, “Oh my God, I so don’t need that episode to be my life story down the line.”’ She laughed awkwardly, then shook her head. ‘I’ve always said that Michael will grow up to be either a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer.’
Last fortnight, we mentioned Blown Covers, the book of rejected cover art from the New Yorker, edited by Francoise Mouly, the magazine’s long-time art editor (since 1993). All those curious about the process of cover design will be fascinated by the interview with Francoise on Salon this week (originally published on design blog Imprint). Mouly, who tells her artists to ‘think of me as your priest’, says:
Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. ‘Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist … but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.’
A 1997 cover by Harry Bliss, who sketched then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s paranoid psyche in the wake of the assault of a Haitian immigrant, by white NYPD officers.
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
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.
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.’
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’.
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.’
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.’
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.’
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?’
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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’.
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.)
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.’
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.
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.
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.
Wondering what to do with your old books? It can be hard to get much (or any) cash from your local second-hand bookshop these days. If you’re a dab hand with scissors and a glue-gun, you might like to try making them into art.
Surely this only took a few rainy-day afternoons, right?
Spanish artist Alicia Martin’s Biografias project uses 5,000 books in each of her three site-specific sculptures, based in historic buildings in Madrid. The current installation is at Casa de America.
Each of the large-scaled books columns is held securely by an intricate metal and mesh framework inside. The metal skeleton gives the voluminous sculptures shape and holds each and every page in place, although the pieces appear to be flowing downward.
‘By constructing the curving towers with a rather free and disheveled exterior, while maintaining a sturdy core, the books’ loose pages are free to blow and rustle in the wind, allowing the piece to be further animated,‘ writes My Modern Met.
You can watch the installation in action in the video below.
Does it symbolise the death of the print book, or its fetishisation? Or is it simply a really cool piece of art?
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.
Most audience members for Tuesday night’s Intelligence Squared debate, Animals Should Be Off the Menu, murmured to each other that they were clearly in the majority company of vegetarians, vegans and animal activists.
But a pre-debate poll taken as the audience filed in from Swanston Street proved that, while passionate animal rights supporters were indeed in the majority, the audience was more divided than you might think. Well, sort of.
A majority of 65% supported the proposition that Animals Should Be Off the Menu, while 22.5% were against and 12.5% were undecided.
Internationally renowned ethicist Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, began, arguing on the grounds of health, the best use of the food we produce, environmental considerations and animal ethics.
‘We can live a healthy life with animals off the menu,’ he said, citing the long and healthy lives of lifelong vegetarians – and of second or third generation vegetarians – to prove his point.
It was an argument that opposing speaker and chef Adrian Richardson (author of the cookbook Meat) would later support. A vegetarian as a child, with vegetarian parents and grandparents, he said that he has vegetarian relatives who lived ‘well into their nineties’ – as did his omnivore relatives on the other side of the family.
‘Even small portions of red meat are likely to increase your chance of dying, including from cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes,’ Singer said, citing a recent much-discussed study from Harvard University.
‘Animal production is a major factor in climate change,’ said Singer. ‘Livestock production is a bigger contributor to climate change than all transport.’ He said that 20 years worth of methane production is 72 times more damaging than carbon dioxide.
And he delivered sad news for advocates of free-range beef: cattle fed on grass produce 50% more methane than grain-fed cattle. ‘There is no way to have ecologically sustainable cattle,’ he concluded.
Fiona Chambers, the first speaker against the proposition, has been farming organically on her Daylesford property since 1990 and was the first person in Victoria to have certified organic pork.
‘Animals are a vital link in global ecology,’ she said, arguing that breeding rare animals for consumption is a way of preventing them from becoming extinct.
Yet, she argued that ‘animal welfare and sentience are not at the centre of this debate; ecological welfare is’.
The best way to achieve sustainability, she said, is through methods like rotating the use of paddocks.
‘Animals are important just as the earth and the sun are important, but they are not the central issue.’
While Peter Singer was the primary crowd-puller for the evening, it was Philip Wollen, a former vice president of Citibank turned founder of the Kindness Trust, who attracted a partial standing ovation on the night, with his passionate, emotive arguments.
‘Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in slaughterhouses,’ he began, going on to detail what he witnessed when he visited slaughterhouses in his former life; an experience that changed him forever.
‘In our capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig is a bear … is a boy,’ he thundered.
Though he cited a litany of damning statistics (by 2048, all our fisheries will be dead; 10,000 species are wiped out every year because of one – us), he did find some hope in the way the internet enables people to come together to address causes.
‘Ten years ago, Twitter was a bird sound and www was a stuck keyboard.’
He concluded darkly: ‘Animals are not just other species, they are other nations, and we murder them at our peril. If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we wouldn’t be having this debate tonight.’
Animal scientists Bruce McGregor was appropriately nervous about following Wollen’s act. ‘I’m on a hiding to nothing already,’ he joked as he began. ‘But being a St Kilda supporter, I’m used to it.’
He argued that taking animals off the menu would threaten the food security of ‘at least two billion people’ – and that these kinds of debates often tend to overlook the natural losses (or deaths) that occur in every system.
The Age’s Life&Style editor (and former Epicure editor) Veronica Ridge spoke like a true foodie; arguing that taking animals off the menu doesn’t mean saying goodbye to inventive, delicious meals.
‘There has been a revolution in vegetarian and vegan cooking in the last decade,’ she said, before going on to describe some of those meals in salacious detail. Refrains of ‘you’re making me hungry’ briefly filled the active Twitter feed (#iq2oz).
Like Singer, Ridge concluded that ‘there is no such thing as humane slaughter’.
Meat-loving chef Adrian Richardson opened his argument with a resounding bang. ‘If it has a pulse, I’ll cook it,’ he declared.
Rebutting Singer, he declared that, yes, too much meat kills you. ‘Or too much chips, donuts or processed crap.’
‘A few meat-free days and lots of leafy greens will do wonders for the planet and your health.’
In a burst of Mars/Venus humour, he declared that he needed to say, for his wife and ‘for the ladies’, that chocolate is part of a balanced diet.
‘If you want to stop factory farming, don’t eat supermarket meat,’ he said. ‘Go to your local butcher: remember him? I’m sure there are some ladies here who do. As long as death is quick and painless, eating animals is okay. Fiona’s pigs are delicious.’
He said the proposition that Animals Should be Off the Menu is ‘ridiculous’.
‘Don’t you think we can all enjoy a tender, juicy, grass-fed steak occasionally? Eat meat responsibly.’
As the votes were counted to decide who won the debate, the audience got their chance to speak, for one minute each, for or against the proposition.
One of the last speakers was a 12-year-old schoolboy.
He said, ‘I am for taking meat off the menu. I don’t think it is appropriate to throw meat on a grill and smother it with barbecue sauce. How would you feel if that was you? Or your children? Or your siblings? Or your mother?’
One tweep quipped in reponse, ‘We borrow the earth from our children. Sorry negative team, but you just got schooled by a kid.’
No one was especially surprised when the debate was resoundingly won by the ‘for’ side, who argued that Animals Should Be Off the Menu.
The post-debate statistics read 73.6% for the proposition, 19.3% against, and 6.9% undecided. So – a significant number of audience members were evidently swayed by the speakers.
But the movement wasn’t all one-sided. One tweep told the Wheeler Centre they started off on the ‘for’ side and moved to the ‘against’. Why? ‘I didn’t like the FOR team’s emotional manipulation and black and white thinking. Sustainable and humane farming is the way forward.’
Surely, that’s a mark of success for an exchange of ideas: people left with new ideas and changed convictions, on both sides of the argument.
The video for this debate is now online; watch it here.
Anna Krien will be speaking about her Quarterly Essay on our treatment of animals, in Us and Them, at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday 4 April at 6.15pm. The event is free, but bookings are recommended.
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.
The year in Australian politics was one characterised by tumult, indifference and a degree of soul searching – but there were big changes, too. Julia Gillard succeeded in introducing the controversial carbon tax, which some argued in our Intelligence Squared debate would have questionable effect on climate change. Facing off against record growth in emissions, the bills' passing marked a legislative defeat for climate change denial and earned Gillard a place in Atlantic’s top 50 Brave Thinkers of 2011.
Leadership
While the PM fended off suggestions of internal party dissent (and the niggling threat of a Rudd challenge), and grappled with the challenges of a minority government, the broader question of leadership took the spotlight this year. In her Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation, Christine Nixon argued that Gillard is a progressive, consultative leader who has been wrongly judged against an outdated model.
Speakers debating the proposition that ‘Both Major Parties are Failing the Australian People’ lamented a lack of ‘real policy debate’ and questioned the ability of Labor and the Coalition to ‘govern for all, but also to govern for the national interest’. And Susan Mitchell courted the ire of the Opposition and its supporters when she criticised Tony Abbott’s ‘narrow worldview’ and ‘political opportunism’.
In one of our biggest events this year, Paul Keating blamed John Howard for throwing Australia’s moral compass overboard, whilst recounting the reforms of his own government and reiterating key concepts of his vision. On his party’s current woes, he offered: ‘Labor hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story.’
Oration
Keating was speaking to promote After Words: The Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches. Former Keating speechwriter Don Watson appeared in a separate event earlier in the year, amongst other things explaining his relationship with his former boss.
You may recall the Keating-Watson disagreement over whose words were spoken by Keating in the 1992 Redfern speech; it was among many favourite speeches reread at our Unaccustomed As I Am event in July. (Elsewhere, some wondered whether Gillard’s woes in the polls were linked to her scripted speech style).
Polls
Speaking of the polls, we invited a formidable political brains trust to examine the effect of the news cycle and polling on the political process in our Greasy Polls Talking Point event. Their assessment somewhat echoed the earlier observations of Lindsay Tanner, who lamented the behaviour of the media and described parliamentary question time as ‘performance art for the six o'clock news’.
Who we are
Amidst the political back-and-forth, we continued to examine our changing national identity. Our So Who The Bloody Hell Are We? series turned the lens on blokes, the quarter-acre block and the fair go. Judith Brett talked about the relationship between city and country, while Guy Rundle explored the essentialist, adversarial racial politics emerging from a crisis of identity in the West.
Finally, Thomas Keneally finished our year of Lunchbox/Soapbox polemics with a presentation about twentieth century White Australia’s relationship with its Aboriginal and Asian ‘others’.
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.”
A new exhibition at Paris' new-ish Quai Branly museum has become the most talked-about exhibition of the season, according to the Guardian. The exhibition, ‘Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage’, traces the history of publicly displaying indigenous people. The practice began in 1492, when Christopher Columbus returned from his landmark voyage to the Americas with six indigenous Caribs, who were put on show at the Spanish court. By the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, indigenous peoples, including Indigenous Australians, were being displayed in zoo-like enclosures as curios and freaks for public entertainment, often under the pretext of public education. Some, like Congolese pygmy Ota Benga, were displayed in actual zoos (in Benga’s case, Bronx Zoo). The last such display was in Belgium in 1958.
The cover of Roslyn Poignant’s 2004 book, ‘Professional Savages’, published by Yale University Press
The exhibition was curated by Lilian Thuram, a former soccer player (and World Cup hero) of Caribbean origin. Thuram’s World Cup-winning teammate Christian Karembeu is of New Caledonian origin. When his grandparents migrated to France, they believed themselves to be ambassadors. Upon their arrival, they were displayed in cages, first in Paris and later in Germany, under a plaque that read ‘cannibals’.
Indigenous Australians were co-opted to be displayed as curios and freaks in Europe and North America too. In her 2004 book Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, historian Roslyn Poignant wrote about a group of Australian Aborigines shipped to the US for this very purpose. The story was also the subject of a 1997 exhibition at the National Library of Australia.
She was the only daughter of one of the most famous and ruthless tyrants in history. She said she was doted upon, and only once did her father threaten to hit her, but when at 16 she fell in love with a 40 year-old filmmaker he was banished to Siberia.
Her mother committed suicide because of her father’s cruelty. So did a half-brother and, arguably, her elder brother. She authored books and mixed in the Soviet Union’s highest official intellectual circles. She even had a perfume named after her – (Svetlana’s Breath). And, in 1967 and at the age of 41, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva became one of the most famous defectors in the history of the Cold War. Her subsequent life would last another 44 years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself, only to end yesterday.
The defection was organised by the CIA from India, where Svetlana had travelled to bury the ashes of her lover, an Indian man she referred to as a husband despite having been denied permission to marry him. She left two children behind in the Soviet Union, with whom she would remain permanently estranged despite a brief return to the USSR in the mid-1980s. At a press conference in New York soon after her defection, she said of her infamous father in a press conference, “I loved him, I respected him, and when we was gone I have lost maybe a lot of faith, just personal faith and respect. Of course I disapprove many things [about Stalin], but I think that many other people who still are in our Central Committee and Politburo should be responsible for the same things for which he alone was accused. And if I feel somebody [is] responsible for those horrible things – killing people, unjustice [sic] – I feel that responsible for this was and is the party, the regime and the ideology as a whole.”
Following her defection, she briefly married an architect and engineer closely tied to the Taliesin West headquarters of Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When she returned to the USSR, she disavowed her time in the west, but family ructions caused her to return to the US shortly after. She settled in small-town Wisconsin where, over the years, Svetlana became increasingly reclusive. In a documentary she complained of the burden of the expectations of others: “I’m neither this nor that. I’m somewhere in between. And that ‘somewhere in between’ people don’t get.”
This sad news comes the day after a Wall Street Journal look at the children of China’s ruling class.
Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award by the Literary Review. It’s the 19th year the awards have been held to celebrate the worst depictions of sexual activity in literature. Nominated for the award is a passage from Dead Europe, Tsiolkas' third novel, which has been published in the United Kingdom this year (along with Tsiolkas' first book, Loaded) on the back of the success of The Slap.
It’s hardly a slap in the face for the Melbourne writer – Dead Europe has received some admiring reviews, and at any rate there’s always been something, ahem, tongue-in-cheek about the award. Indeed, Tsiolkas is in august company. Haruki Murakami is a nominee, as is Stephen King. Extracts of all the nominees are available on the Guardian website, which on its Woman’s Blog page asks the question, why are men so bad at writing sex?
It’s the 48th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The New York Times has published a short film by noted documentarian Errol Morris called The Umbrella Man, in which he interviews Josiah Thompson, writer of Six Seconds in Dallas. Here’s an excerpt of Thompson’s speculation about what the assassination means for historians:
“In December 1967, John Updike was writing [the] ‘Talk of the Town’ [column] for the the New Yorker and he spent most of that ‘Talk of the Town’ column talking about the Umbrella Man. He said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” Watch the film here.
The Morris documentary is based on what’s known as the Zapruder film – footage of the assassination captured on a hobbyist camera by Abraham Zapruder. While it’s not the only footage of the assassination, it’s considered the most complete and the only one that clearly shows the president’s head wound. The film has thus been extensively surveyed by amateur sleuths and professional investigators ever since, despite the fact that the vision is extremely unstable. Now, the Zapruder film has finally been stabilised – although we must warn you that the content is extremely violent.
We’ve come a long way since then. Last week, a pepper spraying of Occupy protesters by police at the Davis campus of the University of California was captured on a variety of handheld video capture devices – let’s call them phones. The image of a policeman casually releasing pepper spray from a shake-up can is now a meme. Four of these videos have been synchronised and can now be viewed simultaneously. It’s led some to write about the birth of the citizen reporter – but, as Zapruder’s film shows, citizen reporting isn’t exactly new. What’s new is the platform, which is why the emerging debate about internet censorship looms as a critical one. (Read our recent story on the debate between the champions of DIY journalism and the defenders of traditional, institutional reporting.)
Far more disturbing though is footage of the public unrest in Egypt. This Guardian footage is bad enough – this Al-Masry Al-Youm TV footage may give you nightmares. “The age of authoritarianism is over, no one can tell the Egyptians what to do anymore,” says a young Egyptian revolutionary quoted in the Guardian, one of thousands of Egyptians protesting against the ruling military junta that has triggered the resignation en masse of the interim government and threatens to derail elections scheduled to be held in a week. So far, the protests have claimed the lives of 33 protesters. Here’s video of the Wheeler Centre’s recent event on the Arab Spring, where former diplomat Paul Bowker warns that the Arab Spring could take five to ten years and see many twists and turns.
The State Library of Victoria’s reading room
Library-lovers will go weak in the knees for this list of the world’s 35 most amazing libraries, but Victorians have an added pleasure in store. The State Library of Victoria has been listed at number 23 in the list – a feather in the library’s cap, considering the company it’s keeping. It’s enough to make Borges weep.
Last week, we referred you to an article defending public-interest journalism in the Columbia Journalism Review. It was another instalment in a fascinating online debate that concerns not just journalism and the media but art and culture too. If the cost of production of online journalism and culture is close to zero, and if all good content can be picked over by content vultures, and if paywalls don’t work, what hope do ‘content producers’ have of making a living from what they do? It’s the subject of a book review by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, one of our favourite websites. Popova supports a pay-what-you-like model of online publishing.
The Age carries a Guardian report today on how consensus on a global climate change treaty seems to have dissipated among wealthy countries. According to the report, agreement on a treaty is now unlikely before 2016, and implementation of any such treaty unlikely before 2020. Explore the Wheeler Centre’s climate change and carbon tax-related content.
Money has been much on our minds lately – both here at the Dailies and in the collective hive. Just try not to get lost in this amazing infographic on all the money in the world, ever. (Addendum: while on the topic, we also note Satyajit Das' insight-abundant look at the financial mess the US has gotten itself into.)
Finally, fans of Scandinavian crime writing will find this article a must-read. It’s a look at how Norwegian crime writing has been affected by the killing spree of right-wing lone gunman Anders Behring Breivik. While we’re on the topic of Scandinavian crime fiction, here’s the video of the Wheeler Centre appearance earlier this year of Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson’s widow.
If the Wheeler Centre was a bar and café, what would it look like? We like to think it would look just like The Moat, a bar and café located in the basement level underneath the Wheeler Centre premises at 176 Little Lonsdale Street. Currently open from noon ‘til late Monday to Saturday, The Moat is the perfect place to chill out before and after Wheeler Centre events, or to escape the city bustle during the day and into the evening – whether you’re up for a good conversation with friends or just after a quiet nook to read a book.
(Click images to enlarge them.)
The menu is delicious, the wine list is mesmerising, the décor is warmly intimate, there’s free wifi (using the State Library network) – and there’s an astroturfed courtyard for those warm summer days and nights. The Moat will open for breakfast from Monday, 5 December and will be an occasional Wheeler Centre venue next year.
(Click to watch video.)
“This year two thirds of all world growth has come out of the developing economies. And we think we can have a debate about the circumstances of someone’s birth and their complexion and how they look. I mean, it’s sick, sick, sick. It’s truly sick.” Paul Keating’s recent conversation with Robert Manne at the Melbourne Recital Centre revealed a man still passionate about the value of conviction politics. It also allowed a born political storyteller space to tell his stories – and there were several major themes.
In classic Keating gladiatorial form, the former Prime Minister reiterated his belief that, were the federal electoral cycle four years rather than three years, he would have beaten John Howard in 1996. “I just needed more time,” he told Robert Manne. Keating blames a Royal Commission involving Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia that took up most of 1995 – at the time he called the commission a political stunt. “By the time I got on to Howard, I had him a blithering wreck … He didn’t know whether he was coming or going. If I’d had another year I would have done to him what I did every other day, was tread on him. He never got on top of him in the polls … and I would have massacred him in 1996 if I’d had another year, but I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time.”
On the issue of illegal refugees, Keating berated the ALP for not having the courage of its convictions. “One of the primary duties of a Prime Minister is to protect a country from prejudice,” he says. At the time of Tampa, Keating recalls having advised the then Labor leader and opposition leader Kim Beazley that the ALP couldn’t hope to outflank Howard’s conservative reaction: “The Labor Party should have stood its ground.” This leads Manne onto the topic of the Labor Party’s mixed fortunes since Keating. He asks, has Labor lost its way? “Labor hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story,” Keating replies. “This is another transition. This is perhaps the biggest transition in 300 years. This is the transition to the establishment of China’s position of primacy again in the international system. A change in the way the world works, from West to East. And … here we are, a primary exporter to this.” The Labor Party, he adds, should be “constructing a story of transition”. The transition “should also be a cultural one”, he says, and thus Keating comes to the tagline that made the papers the next day: Australia should derive its security in Asia, not from Asia.
This is Keating’s biggest theme, one he returns to repeatedly in the course of the conversation. The rise of China is the great story of our generation. “All great states claim strategic space. And if you don’t give it to them they take it.” Keating warns that refusing to accord China the strategic space it demands may lead to catastrophic results. “Accommodating China a new construct is … the most important thing facing Australia.”
Keating concludes his Wheeler Centre appearance with another classic aphorism that summed up his political fortunes: “You don’t necessarily give the public back what the public wants. You give them what the public needs. If you give them too much of it they get sick of you.”
In the week the Senate finally passed the carbon tax legislation, new research indicates that the amount of carbon emissions being released into the atmosphere grew by a record amount in 2010. The Washington Post reports that the current growth rate of carbon emissions exceeds the worst-case scenario of the last Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change report in 2007. This means that, according to a 2009 Massachussetts Institute of Technology report, the current rate of growth equates to a probability of a 5.2 degree celsius warming by the end of the century, with a 10% chance of a 7 degree warming. About two-fifths of the increase was attributable to China.
Click here to read an excellent summary of what the effects of such a temperature rise would be. In terms of food production alone, a University of Washington study, based on conservative assumptions, estimates that one-third of the planet could be facing desertification and half of the world’s population could be faced with a food crisis by the end of the century.
Interestingly, Bernard Keane in Crikey reports today that the carbon tax will in net terms cost the government more than its earns it for the foreseeable future.
Still not convinced? Here’s the video/podcast of our recent Intelligence Squared debate on the proposition, ‘A carbon tax won’t fix climate change’.
(Click to watch video.)
(Click to watch video.)
Historian Bill Gammage’s recent Lunchbox/Soapbox event was subtitled ‘How Aborigines made Australia’. In the course of his address, Gammage gave the audience a bird’s eye overview of what central Melbourne would have looked like when Batman and co first arrived in 1835, using eyewitness accounts of the time.
North of the Yarra, the land was ‘park-like’, ‘open grassy forest, rising into low hills’. But it was not all the same. Imagine a line from the bottom of Swanston Street to Flagstaff Hill. Southwest, hill and valley were grassy with scattered trees. Northeast was eucalypt woodland, open but with dense forest patches. One patch east of Swanston Street and south of Bourke Street perhaps shielded a dance ground, while at Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens open forest suddenly gave way to ‘dense gum forest’, mostly manna gum. Hilltops varied. Flagstaff Hill was ‘covered with a beautiful grassy surface … [It] had the appearance of a large lawn’. Batman’s Hill (Southern Cross Station) was grassy but topped by sheoaks.
A creek down Elizabeth Street separated two hills, ‘rising and picturesque eminences … on the verge of a beautiful park’, one cresting east at Spring Street, the other west at William Street, each burnt differently. ‘The Eastern Hill was a gum and wattle tree forest, and the Western Hill was so clothed with sheoaks as to give it the appearance of a primeval park’. Both were ‘lightly wooded’, which means regular fire, the west topped with mushrooms, the east with a grass clearing between the Museum and Parliament House. Along the river stood tea-tree patches, as you’d expect of a shallow stream choked with debris and flooding easily, but the patches alternated with grass, which you wouldn’t expect.
All this, Gammage argued, was to promote grass and suppress tea-tree to encourage animals such as kangaroos to feed, and all of it was a landscape managed by just a few families. Gammage’s book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, systematically outlines for the first time how the Australia European settlers found from 1788 on was not a wilderness but in fact a continental-sized garden carefully tended by Aboriginal Australians in a mosaic pattern to maximise its natural abundance.
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