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.
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?’
In another Friday High Five themed edition, we share five bookish videos from around the web that made us giggle, including looks at the art of pencil sharpening and the smell of old books, a quirky promotional book video featuring Hangover star Zach Galifianakis, various Go the F**k to Sleep performances and our own Unexpected Passions.
Think you’ve read everything? Think again. The latest hot how-to book is How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Art of Pencil Sharpening, by David Rees, a former political cartoonist turned artisanal pencil sharpener.
‘With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat. It’s this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic,’ says Rees. ‘Nobody else is doing what I do. I guarantee an authentic interaction with your pencil.’ He also guarantees to get your pencil ‘really freaking sharp’. Rees charges his mail-order customers $15 per pencil, which he sends back in a sealed tube, with with a signed and dated certificate ‘authenticating that it is now a dangerous object’.
In the above video, Rees gives a pencil-sharpening demonstration and talks through the ethos of his business, which has been called the writing world’s equivalent of the slow food movement.
This Picador book trailer made the rounds of the internet a while ago. Actor Zach Galifianakis interviews John Wray about his novel, Lowboy. So far, so normal, right? (Albeit with a sprinkling of celebrity stardust.) Galifianakis and Wray swap roles – the actor plays the writer. (It’s made even funnier by the fact that Wray interviewed Galifianakis for a New York Times profile in 1999, so this really is role reversal.)
Highlights include the visual gag of a manual typewriter with two enormous keys, a confession to playing Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 as writing inspiration (‘it’s good for morale’) and the story of having written a previous novel in alphabet pasta. (The novel no longer exists; he ate it.)
This isn’t Wray’s first claim to internet-video fame though; before his Galifianakis outing, his performance at an ultra-hip book reading was enjoyed by literary types. In this video, Wray unveils a giant back tattoo of New York Times reviewer Michiko Kukatani, with her face and the legend ‘KAKUTANI 4 EVAH’. (And no, it’s not real: it’s drawn with what the Americans call ‘Magic Marker’, and we would call a texta.)
It’s a cliche (and sometimes a truism) that fetishists of what publisher Zoe Dattner now calls the ‘p-book’ like to rhapsodise about the smell of books. This video, made by online second-hand bookseller Abebooks, goes one step further, explaining the science of the smell, which is summed up as: a ‘combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness’.
Go the F**k to Sleep is well known as the book that not only took the internet by storm, but was created by the internet: it started on Facebook as a joke circulated by novelist and tired parent Adam Mansbach, who was urged to create and publish it as a real picture book.
It’s been performed by former Play School host Noni Hazlehurst and godfather of cool Samuel L. Jackson (in his most memorable recitation since Pulp Fiction’s ‘I will lay my vengeance upon you …’). Samuel L.’s version has also been set to music.
But just as good is this one with an unsuspecting grandmother reading the book to a baby at bedtime. Watch her reaction when she realises that this is no ordinary picture book! She’s a good sport.
Sam Pang’s Unexpected Passions series is a favourite here at the Wheeler Centre. Past guests have included Noni Hazlehurst and musician David Bridie. Tonight is another (free) instalment in our series, with comedian Lawrence Mooney (on his love of Vanity Fair) and Tom Elliott on World War II fighter planes. It’ll be at the Wheeler Centre, 7pm – 8pm.
You can whet your appetite with this video of the first Unexpected Passions, with guests Kate Langbroek (on op-shops) and Adam Zwar (on cats).
My Monday morning amusement was an article at The Awl, asking various writers and editors to share books they read as teenagers or twentysomethings that now make them cringe. Revelations included New Yorker writer Ariel Levy’s obsession with Sweet Valley High, and various abandoned affections for the likes of Ayn Rand, Ann Rice and the Beats.
We’ve asked some Australian writers and editors to reveal their own books that they once loved, but now make them cringe. The results of our ad-hoc survey are fascinating, with lots of schlock horror – and, though it’s not reflected here, many off-the-record confessions of an early love of Sweet Valley High. Please, enter our confessional booth and share your own now-embarrassing former literary loves in our comments below.
Kirsten Tranter
This makes me wonder if I might actually be a bit shameless. I find myself quite fascinated by this idea of repudiating or mocking our own immature tastes, however affectionately. I loved the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Naughtiest Girls, the Girls Crystal girls, and Trixie Belden, girl detective, with equal ardour – and even enjoyed some Sweet Valley High books, and see no reason to disavow any of that. I adored Anais Nin and while I’m not at all ashamed of that, I’d probably be ashamed now if I read back over my ‘dear diary’ attempts to imitate her.
Kirsten Tranter will be in conversation with Jeanette Winterson on Friday 18 May. Kirsten’s latest book is A Common Loss.**
Jenny Niven
I grew up in a very small rural Scottish town. Our house was right next to the library where my next door neighbour was one of the two librarians. By the time I was about 11, I’d read everything in the kids' section about a hundred times and spent the next couple of years skulking around the teen books, simultaneously horrified and transfixed by the tales of Judy Blume’s ‘sanitary belts’ and R.L. Stine’s Point Horror books (which are all ultimately about teenagers making out in the back of cars while being stalked by their murderous friends). There was only the tiniest hint of sex in any of them, but I could only take them out of the library when the ‘other’ librarian was on in case she told my mum. Looking back, they’re all actually deeply conservative books. It’s all so unbelievably tame in comparison– God knows what I would have done if Gossip Girl had been available then.
Jenny Niven is associate director of the Wheeler Centre. She will be in conversation with Chad Harbach on Friday 18 May.
Ronnie Scott
Michael Crichton! Nowadays I’m not a big re-reader, but in my early teens I must have done Sphere, Disclosure, Congo, Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and The Andromeda Strain at least a dozen times. (My phase culminated with Airframe in 1996, so let’s say a half dozen for that.) Although Crichton later revealed himself as a climate change denier, I could never bring myself to mind; his version of the nineties was a deadly, salacious place, and he’ll always be the man who taught me that hippos are the most dangerous animals in the jungle. Vale.
Ronnie Scott is outgoing editor of The Lifted Brow.
Michaela McGuire
I, like the rest of my Year Five class, was completely obsessed with the Fear Street series. Once we’d blitzed through all of Goosebumps, myself and the other girls in my class started reading R. L. Stine’s infinitely more grown-up series about a bunch of attractive cheerleaders who all get horribly murdered. Unfortunately this obsession coincided with a school project wherein we had to write our own short novel, and I produced a mortifyingly obvious tribute to Fear Street of my own. I think I even called it ‘Scary Street’. After handing my teacher’s report on this marvel of literary fiction to my mother, she promptly banned me from reading any horror novels, and I spent the remainder of my primary school years as a social outcast, reading Bryce Courtenay novels by myself each lunch. Which, come to think of it, is a probably more embarrassing confession.
Michaela McGuire runs Women of Letters, with Marieke Hardy. She is the author of Apply Within.
Monica Dux
During the school holidays when I was 12 my older brother started reading the first two books in the Rambo: First Blood series (by David Morrell). I wasn’t allowed to read such unladylike material, so I used to sneak them from his room when he was out, and read them in secret. These were movie tie-in editions, with Sylvester Stallone on the cover, and I developed an intense crush on Sly and identified strongly with his psychic pain, ignoring some of the carnage he left whilst exploring said pain. I remember fantasising that we would one day join forces to liberate an oppressed village deep in South East Asia. Early puberty can do some strange things to the young girl’s mind.
Monica Dux will be in conversation with Kathy Lette at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday 9 May.
Rebecca Starford
The master of adolescent pseudo-horror/thrillers, Christopher Pike brought me into a seductive world in which a bunch of good-looking, preppy American high schoolers have to figure out who among them is a murderer. What a formula for a nerdy 12-year-old! Flicking through the novels today, I shudder at the pedestrian prose, woeful characterisation, cheesy dialogue and cringe-worthy sex scenes – Pike was always good for a bit of clandestine nookie …
Rebecca Starford is managing editor of Kill Your Darlings.
Jessica Au
When I was younger, I was a total sci-fi/fantasy genre geek (and to be honest, I suspect part of me still is). Some of this was great – books like Victor Kelleher’s era-spanning Parkland series, Brian Caswell’s eerily telepathic Cage of Butterflies, Gillian Rubenstein’s heart-stopping Galax Arena and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. However, I have to admit that I also ran with my fair share of Eddings and Jordan and co. I think I read something like 11 of the Wheel of Time books, before giving up – Robert Jordan dying plus all the plots congealing to mush in my head meant it was just too much to handle. I suspect I still have a box of these somewhere in my garage, which I hope never to reveal to the light of day.
Jessica Au is the author of Cargo.
Penni Russon
When I was 16, my boyfriend, let’s call him Anthony (because that is his name), introduced me to his favourite author: Richard Bach. Jonathon Livingstone Seagull is Bach’s most famous book (about a seagull who rises above the pettiness of material existence through the power of flight). But I read more: Illusions, The Bridge Across Forever, One. I read and re-read them in his bedroom (while Anthony built a sailboat in his garage or tinkered with his cars), in fact my memory is that Anthony only owned these books and Douglas Adams’ entire oeuvre, which is probably false. Bridge Across Forever is about soulmates, but it didn’t stop us from breaking up. And I have just discovered through the power of Google, that Bach and his soulmate (all his books were semi-autobiographical) didn’t last the distance either.
Penni Russon is a YA author whose latest novel is Only Ever Always.
Angela Meyer
In Year Three, my teacher read Say Cheese and Die of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series to the class. I was enthralled. I remember that actually being the moment where something clicked: so this is what reading is all about. I read many of the spooky, exciting tales after that. Welcome to Camp Nightmare and A Night in Terror Tower were stand-outs. I had a hardcover four-in-one book that screamed when you opened it. I also had a Goosebumps reading lamp. Soon I moved onto his ‘teen’ horror series Fear Street. Years later I picked up one of the Goosebumps books and was amazed to find the story was tame (and lame) and the writing simplistic!
Angela Meyer blogs at Literary Minded and reviews for various publications, including the Australian.
P.M. Newton
I was a horse-mad kid, so read anything and everything I could lay my hands on. This meant my reading was a little undiscriminating and with the exception of Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby books, an unrelenting diet of English kiddies going fox hunting – I wasn’t a fan of the fox hunt. One series really stuck out. I loved it – they were the ‘Jill’ books by Ruby Ferguson. We followed our heroine Jill as she grew up, but I remember feeling totally cheated by the last book. Jill finished school and was trying to make a career working with horses, but at the end of the book she made a very ‘sensible’ and ‘grown-up’ decision to keep her horses as a hobby and go and become a secretary. Jill sold out. I never forgave her.
P.M. Newton is the author of The Old School. She blogs at The Concrete Midden.
Benjamin Law
My parents kept a copy of The Joy of Sex in their study which, even now, I think has aged pretty well. (Look: they have pubes back then!) When I wasn’t covertly reading that, I was reading my copy of Everything A Teenage Boy Should Know, by Dr John F. Knight. At that age, you want to know everything about sex there is, but looking back, I’m pretty sure Dr Knight was a billion years old and probably not the best authority on sexual development.
Benjamin Law is the author of The Family Law.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered on the web over the past week.
It’s a bit weird to think that one of the hottest topics of conversation in the literary world, from London to New York, is a book that began as a self-published fan fiction e-book, and is now an international erotic bestseller backed by a multi-million dollar deal.
Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek article, ‘Spanking Goes Mainstream’ on what she diagnoses as a ‘current vogue for domination’ (or, ‘the stylised theatre of female powerlessness’), epitomised by Fifty Shades and explored on HBO’s new zeitgeisty series, Girls. Roiphe says it’s a reaction to feminism, by women who find ‘free will a burden’. The internet has exploded in angry response.
For those wondering what all the fuss is about, The Vulture has produced ‘The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Fifty Shades of Grey’, including reasons why it’s just not sexy:
‘There are ways to write sex well. This is not that. This is like Tom Wolfe–bad sex scenes but punctuated by non-sex scenes that are gut-wrenchingly awful. A passage where we find out what Anastasia Steele looks like via girl-frowning-at-her-appearance-in-a-mirror exposition should be punishment for vehicular manslaughter in some states.’
Novelist, critic and Big Issue books editor Chris Flynn has been blogging a lot for Meanjin recently. This week, he writes about the influence of the Hatchet Job of the Year Award on the kinds of reviews that are being published; wondering if the rewarding of snark promoted by the award might be encouraging reviewers to be gratuitously mean, making it more about them than the work under consideration. ‘As a casual reviewer myself I’m beginning to wonder if I’m just not mean enough to be cut out for the task,’ he writes.
Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones. ‘If decapitations and regular helpings of bare breasts and buttocks are all you require of your television, step right up,’ wrote one unimpressed reviewer.
He singles out the infamous New York Times take-down of Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper (‘a textbook on how not to write fiction’) and Neil Genzlinger’s evisceration of television’s Game of Thrones – and its viewers (‘Dungeons and Dragons types [with a] fairly low reward threshold’).
Adam Mansbach (of Go the F**k to Sleep fame) has a very nice little satire in the New Yorker on the art of asking authors to ‘blurb’ (ie. endorse) your book. Here’s an excerpt from his pricing chart:
This is your first book. (+$100)
This is your first book in a decade. (+$150)
You’re still using the author photo from your ‘promising début’. (+$75)
I know you. (–$50)
I met you once. (–$20)
We made out at a party. (+$25)
We got drunk together at a literary festival once, but I could tell you were thinking the whole time about how now you could ask me for a blurb. (+$75)
Adam Mansbach with the book that made him famous.
One of the most popular articles we’ve published this year was our look at the pink-and-pastel hued ‘Lego for girls’, officially branded Lego Friends. This week, Salon reports that Lego executives have agreed to sit down to talk with SPARK, a group who hopes to get the company to include more characters in its standard Lego lines, and improve the Lego Friends line, which Time magazine compared to Disney Princess, ‘with its emphasis on physical appearance and limited career choices’.
Of course, Disney Princess – and Lego Friends – are fantastically successful with consumers, if not commentators. Salon is sceptical, thought its reporter says ‘it would be wise for a company founded nearly 50 years ago with the imperative to create toys for “girls and for boys” to remember that goal doesn’t mean “girl toys and boy toys.”’
The New York Times has launched a new regular series, ‘By the Book’, in which they interview writers about what they’re reading and recommending. They kick off with David Sedaris, who is characteristically entertaining and enlightening.
David Sedaris: ‘Whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like’.
Among his confessions? ‘I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives. The worse off the subjects, the more inclined I am to read about them. When it comes to fictional characters, I’m much less picky. Happy, confused, bitter: if I like the writing I’ll take all comers.’
The book that made him want to write? Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. ‘His short, simple sentences and familiar-seeming characters made writing look, if not exactly easy, then at least possible.’
This week’s Friday High Five is shameless click-bait, as we share five of our favourite internet stories, links and images of everyone’s favourite heart-throb, Ryan Gosling. Why? Because it makes us laugh, and our programming is all about comedy over the next few days, to coincide with the Melbourne Comedy Festival. That’s a good enough excuse, yes?
Ryan Gosling is such an indisputed king of hearts that when he was beaten for the title of Sexiest Man Alive by Bradley Cooper last year, the news stories all focused on the fact Ryan somehow didn’t win. (Like Australians who miss out on Oscars, he was ‘snubbed’.)
From Ryan Gosling Works in Publishing
A focus of all that loving is the popular Tumblr site, F*k Yeah Ryan Gosling, featuring various moody/sexy/smiley shots of Gosling, with taglines like ‘Hey girl, I can’t wait to meet your parents and all of your friends’.
From Ryan Gosling Works in Publishing
It’s spawned countless offshoots, including the delightfully bookish Ryan Gosling Works in Publishing, Hey Girl, I like the Library Too and Ryan Gosling, Arts Administrator.
What’s better internet fodder than fantasies of the chiselled star of The Notebook as the ultimate sensitive new age pin-up boy, offering massages, cuddles and to listen to bitching about work colleagues?
Is Ryan Gosling Cuter Than a Puppy? It’s Ryan, teamed with look-alike puppies, asking readers to vote on who is cuter.
Okay, here’s where it starts to get a little crazy. (Or a little crazier.)
Last year, Gosling (who got his first taste of fame as a member of the Mickey Mouse Club) told a television talk-show that ‘Disney has been breeding an army of cats. And they’re not just ordinary cats, they have a special set of skills, they’re like commando cats.’ Apparently, they roam Disneyland at night, killing mice. (Except the mouse.)
This has inspired the equivalent of an internet perfect storm: Ryan Gosling Disneyland Cats. Visit and enjoy Gosling experiencing the Happiest Place on Earth, accompanied by feline friends. Creepy, much?
Last week, a UK journalist in New York tweeted that Ryan Gosling had saved her from being hit by a car, grabbing her and saying ‘Hey, watch out!’ after she accidentally wandered into the road.
The story quickly made news around the world. The journalist, who claimed to be annoyed by the attention, then shut down her Twitter account and wrote a series of articles about how everyone should just stop talking about it.
She said, ‘I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story … even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him.’ Hmmm.
In an MTV interview, Gosling was presented with some ‘Hey Girl’ images and asked to read them aloud, which he did, killing himself with laughter. It seems he’s a fan of his fans.
Limited tickets are newly available for tonight’s Get Fact! (7pm–8pm), a comedy quiz show with Dave O'Neil, and panellists John Safran, Glenn Robbins, Adam Zwar and Felicity Ward. Free, book now.
Jeez Louise, the Comedy Festival’s annual consideration of ladies’ matters, is back with a discussion about agents and the representation of women in comedy, this Saturday afternoon, 3pm–4pm.
Moderated by comedian Clare Bartholomew, with Judith Lucy, Anne Edmonds, Kevin Whyte (Managing Director of Token Group) and MaryAnne Carroll (Executive Producer – Comedy, Network Seven). It’s free; book now.
Toni Jordan is one of Australia’s most loved comic writers, with her sharply funny novels Addition (longlisted for the Miles Franklin) and Fall Girl.
Toni’s essay about humour in Australian fiction, ‘Dry As a Chip’, is the third in the Wheeler Centre’s Long View series of critical essays on Australian writers and writing.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
A short story, ‘The Rise and Fall of Winston’, in the Romance Writers of Australia short story anthology, Little Gems (2006).
What’s the best part of your job?
Having the time and space to think and read.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Accounts, BAS, invoicing, statements, six months between paychecks. I had a normal job for 19 years and the lack of security and mountains of paperwork freaks me out.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
The Miles Franklin longlisting of my first book, Addition, made me think differently about my work and the best way to tell the stories I wanted to tell. When the going got tough for my characters, I had a tendency to wimp out with a cheap gag. The longlisting gave me the confidence to go places that weren’t necessarily comfortable and stare them down.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
This is hard: I feel like I need different advice of every page of every book, because there’s always something new I have to figure out. My favourite quote is Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.’ I love this because it reminds me that it’s all about the reader and not at all about me.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself?
Probably my top two are that I’m not a feminist because in Fall Girl my protagonist gets spanked during sex, and that I’m an ‘unconscionable disgrace’ who encourages people to disregard the advice of mental health professionals, because of the plot of Addition. I also got a postcard from a Jehovah’s Witness lady once, who told me it wasn’t too late to avoid going to hell. Phew.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Before I started writing, I was national sales and marketing manager for a medium-sized company. I’d probably be still there.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
I’m somewhat biased, because I wrote my first book while a student in a creative writing course, and I also teach creative writing one day a week. So the short answer is yes, it can. The long answer is: creative writing is both art and craft. The ‘art’ bit – ideas for characters, plots, premise, voice – can’t be taught. I don’t know where that comes from. The ‘craft’ part – how sentences work, how dialogue works, how structure works, how to convince a reader a character is real – can be taught. But to be published, you need both.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Read more. Much more. If you’d rather listen to your iPod on the train than read, or you’d rather play Angry Birds than read, you’re not in love with words enough. I often ask people who are struggling to have their first book published this: what was their favourite Australian debut of the last 12 months? Nine times out of ten, they haven’t read any. Not one. They’re not really interested. And that’s okay. Writing drains enormous amounts of free time and energy. If you’re just doing it because ‘publish a book’ is on your bucket list, find something you’re really crazy about instead. Life is too short.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Online for the hard-to-find specific books that would see me running all over town, physical bookshops for the advice, surroundings and joy of being surprised by something I didn’t know existed ten minutes ago but now just must have.
If you could have dinner or a date with any fictional character, who would it be and why?
I’m having an Australian classics year, and I’m half way through Tom Collins’s Such is Life. Wow. Brilliant and a bit incomprehensible, both at the same time. I’d love to be camping by a fire under a clear sky and listening to Tom tell me stories.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
My first grown-up book was the Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. I was probably 13 or 14. It must be three inches thick and it was the first time I was actually lost inside a book. Missed meals, day turned to night, the works. Once you experience that, you never stop wanting it again.
You can read Toni’s essay, ‘Dry as a Chip: A Journey Through Humour in Australian Fiction’ on our dedicated web page for The Long View.
The Hunger Games is the film – and the book series – of the moment.
Everyone’s talking about it, from comparing how the screen version measures up to the beloved books (verdict: pretty well), to comparing independent, kick-ass heroine Katniss Aberdeen with Bella Swan, Twilight’s damsel in distress.
And now there’s a parody (discovered via Mamamia) that will tickle the fancy of literary types everywhere: The Hipster Games.
In this clever little mock-trailer, heroine Lochness Evergreen volunteers as tribute after her sister’s name is drawn to compete in the ‘semi-annual Hipster Games’.
‘No!’ she cries. ‘She’s not ready! Her clothes aren’t even vegan!’
Let’s just say it involves battles over vinyl records, a talismanic brooch of the Mockingjays, ‘a rad post-punk band from the late seventies’ – and the line, ‘I just really miss brunch, you know’.
If Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like made you giggle (or cringe in semi-recognition), this parody is for you …
May the Trends Be Ever in Your Favour.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
File this under ‘strange but (maybe) true’. Feminist writer Naomi Wolf has called for a boycott of Katy Perry’s music, reports The Vine. But it’s not the singer’s whipped-cream breast cannons, skimpy clothes worn on Sesame Street or the lesbianism-as-turn-on-for-men of I Kissed A Girl that are bothering her. Wolf believes that Perry has accepted money from the US Marines in exchange for inserting propaganda into her latest video clip.
Katy Perry: Being paid by the US military to produce propaganda, or does she really think joining the army is a savvy response to a break-up?
Sounds like a cuckoo claim at first, but watch the video clip, in which an uncharacteristically covered-up Perry breaks up with her boyfriend, chops off her hair and joins the marines as revenge, before you make up your mind. Take a good look at all the marching and dancing under a fluttering American flag. ‘It is a total piece of propaganda for the Marines,’ Wolf wrote on her Facebook page. ‘I really want to find out if she was paid by them for making it…it is truly shameful. I would suggest a boycott of this singer whom I really liked — if you are as offended at this glorification of violence as I am.’
Who doesn’t love David Sedaris? There’s a new essay available online, about Sedaris’s medical adventures in France.
I was lying in bed and found a lump on my right side, just below my rib cage. It was like a devilled egg tucked beneath my skin. Cancer, I thought. A phone call and twenty minutes later, I was stretched out on the examining table with my shirt raised.
‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ the doctor said. ‘A little fatty tumor. Dogs get them all the time.’
I thought of other things dogs have that I don’t want: Dewclaws, for example. Hookworms. ‘Can I have it removed?’
‘I guess you could, but why would you want to?’
He made me feel vain and frivolous for even thinking about it. ‘You’re right,’ I told him. ‘I’ll just pull my bathing suit up a little higher.’
David Sedaris: ‘I’ve gone from avoiding dentists and periodontists to practically stalking them, not in some quest for a Hollywood smile but because I enjoy their company.’
Ghostwriting is – by its very nature – a mysterious trade. There’s a terrific article on The Rumpus this week by ghostwriter Sari Botton, explaining just how she goes about her work. There are some fascinating insights into the relationship between subject and hired writer, and how disagreements can arise over just who actually wrote the words.
Gwyneth Paltrow denies she had a ghostwriter for her cookbook, despite a New York Times article claiming she did.
Sari Botton writes:
‘Ghostwriter’ is a problematic word. It gives people the idea that we have some kind of other worldly power; that we’re able to hover over clients somewhere in the ether and read their minds, then write their books using only our own words. But it’s nothing like that, at least not for me. That’s where misunderstandings arise.
In her denial [of having a ghostwriter for her celebrity cookbook], Paltrow tweeted, ‘I wrote every word myself.’ The thing is, even if she did write every single word that made it into the book, it doesn’t mean she didn’t have the help of a ghostwriter or co-author whatever you want to call us.
Salman Rushdie was forced to withdraw from the Jaipur Literary Festival earlier this year, after receiving death threats. This week, he spoke about freedom of speech to a Delhi conference. He replaced cricketer and politician Imran Khan as lead speaker, after Khan pulled out in protest at Rushdie’s inclusion, citing the ‘immeasurable hurt’ The Satanic Verses had caused to Muslims. ‘
Salman Rushdie: People here are asleep, I think. Very largely asleep to what’s going on and you need to wake up'.
Rushdie said:
[It’s] a book which I would be willing to place a substantial bet that Imran Khan has not read … Back in the day when he was a playboy in London, the most common nickname for him in the London circles was ‘Im the dim’. The force of intellect which earned him that nickname is now placed at the service of his people, and its enemy, it seems, is my book. If Imran really wants to argue about the literary merits of The Satanic Verses, I am happy to meet him in a debate on that subject anywhere and any time.
We looked at the ingredients of a good review in Dailies this week. What we didn’t say is that a really good writer can break all the rules (or: a lot of them) and produce excellent work nonetheless. If you’re tempted to try this, just make sure you’re feeling confident. Jon Ronson’s* review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts manages to be both entertaining and informative, despite using the dreaded ‘I’ word several times. It’s made the rounds of the internet this week, and with good reason.
Jon Ronson: Uses the ‘I’ word in his reviews, but gets away with it.
Here’s how it begins:
When you’re at a party, do you suddenly feel the desperate urge to escape somewhere quiet such as a toilet cubicle and just sit there? Until I read Quiet, I thought it was just me. I’d see other partygoers grow increasingly effervescent as the night wore on and wonder why I felt so compelled to go home. I put it down to perhaps there not being enough iron in my diet. But it’s not just me. It’s a trait shared by introverts the world over. We feel this way because our brains are sensitive to overstimulation. I am genuinely astonished by this news. In fact, I read much of Susan Cain’s book shaking my head in wonder and thinking: ‘So that’s why I’m like that! It’s because I’m an introvert! Now it’s fine for me to turn down party invitations. I never have to go to another party again!’
*Yes, we are aware we used Jon Ronson in last week’s Friday High Five. Pure coincidence. Promise the next one will be Jon-Ronson-free.
Sam Pang’s Unexpected Passions events series is proving hugely fun so far. Last month, Kate Langbroek shared her passion for op-shops while Adam Zwar talked cats. This Friday, we’ll hear from Noni Hazlehurst and Melbourne muso David Bridie.
To get you in the mood, the Wheeler Centre’s Jo Case shares an unexpected passion of her own … *
Growing up, my mother’s favourite saying was, ‘life is not a fashion parade’. This gem was usually delivered while refusing to buy me must-have items like marble-washed ribbed skinny jeans at the local Westfield. I realised just how wrong she was during an actual fashion parade, in Year Seven, during a themed disco. As I watched most of the girls strut the perimeter of the school hall in triple-tiered ra-ra skirts and matching ruffled tops, teetering in stilettos belonging to their mothers or older sisters, I shuffled behind them in white leather shoes and lacy white socks, wearing a cherry-printed dress with puffed sleeves and a pig-tailed wig made out of wool. The others were dressed as Barbie; I was a Cabbage Patch Kid.
Perhaps it’s the lingering humiliation from those days that perversely draws me to Project Runway, watching from the safety of my couch as ice blonde fashionista Heidi Klum (the show’s creator, executive producer and host) delivers her cool girl edicts in that clipped master-race accent. ‘In fashion, one day you’re in – the next, you’re out.’
As far as reality TV goes, Project Runway is one of the genre’s better incarnations – and one of the few you can admit to liking in civilised circles. (After all, it’s creative.) One nice thing about Runway is that the contestants seem to genuinely bond more than usual for these shows. After all, they have an actual profession, skills and interests in common, rather than being united by the mere fact of looking good in a swimsuit (the Next Top Model franchise) or aiming to look good in a swimsuit again (The Biggest Loser).
Of course, it’s still fun to watch the contestants engage in communal eye-rolling over the contestant who spontaneously lied during judging about accidentally destroying a dress with an iron, when everyone saw him bin it in a tantrum. Or watch the contestants quietly, confidently tell the camera mid-challenge that a fellow contestant’s outfit looks like a mess, or a bin-liner, or a disaster, only to watch their faces fall when that contestant makes the top three. Not to mention Heidi’s withering put-downs: ‘She looks like she’s going to Oktoberfest’; ‘It’s a bad prom dress’; ‘I don’t know what’s worse, the disco pumpkin or the shower curtain’.
We all wear clothes, every day. But giving them serious attention seems frivolous, even silly. Watching Carrie Bradshaw figure out her shoe collection equates to a deposit on a New York apartment; watching Anne Hathaway’s character ignore her sexy boyfriend and proper journalist ambitions to fetch Meryl Streep’s coffee in The Devil Wears Prada, only confirms these feelings. But Project Runway focuses on fashion not as ridiculous status symbol or powerful industry, but as a creative enterprise.
Watching all the hard work, clever thinking and craftsmanship that goes into creating the outfits – sometimes from seemingly impossible materials, like vegetables, or newspaper, or the furnishings of a restaurant – is not just fascinating, but a reminder that thinking seriously about clothes doesn’t have to equate to a frivolous waste of time. Done right, it can even be art.
*This is an especially unexpected passion for Jo, because while she no longer takes her fashion cues from a Cabbage Patch Kid, she is more often to be found in jeans and a t-shirt than anything Heidi Klum (or indeed anyone) would call ‘fashion forward’.
Hear Noni Hazlehurst and David Bridie confess their Unexpected Passions to Sam Pang at the Wheeler Centre this Friday 30 March at 7pm. The event is free, but bookings are recommended.
Fans and sceptics alike will enjoy this chuckle-worthy breakdown of a typical Murakami novel. there’s cats, classical music, bizarre dream sequences and jazz. It’s all there; the only thing to disagree about is the percentages. Personally, we think 25% cats may be overstating it a bit.
Three years ago, architect and blogger John Bertram ran a competition asking designers to come up a better cover for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel that has been often misinterpreted as portraying a teenage sexpot and seducer. ‘We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,’ says Bertram, who challenged the designers to do justice to its dark complexities. The competition has spawned its own book, with 60 new designs. A Salon article shares a few of them.
Four different cover designs for Lolita. From left to right: Barbara deWilde, Kelly Blair, Alkesander Bak, Jamie Kennan
We all know that The Hunger Games is the new Twilight, which was the new Harry Potter. When books strike such a chord with such a broad and populous fan base, they usually says as much about our culture – and the fears, desires, fantasies or questions it’s tapping into – as it does about the book or its author. On the eve of The Hunger Games movie, Salon’s Andrew O'Heihr takes a deeper look.
‘The Hunger Games taps into a vibrant current of pop culture and indeed of Western civilization in general, one that never really runs dry. It’s the idea that our species remains cruel and barbarous at heart, that the strong will always rule the weak by whatever means necessary, and that our collective obsession with sports and games and other forms of manufactured entertainment is a flimsy mask for sadism and voyeurism.’
The Hunger Games movie: the studio ‘eagerly awaits an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from teens, tweens and young adults all over the globe.’
Ten years after Fast Food Nation was published, Eric Schlosser reflects on what’s changed and what hasn’t. It’s sobering. He reports that the annual revenues of America’s fast-food industry have risen by about 20 per cent since 2001. The annual cost of the nation’s obesity epidemic (‘about $168 billion’) is, alarmingly, the same as the amount Americans spent on fast food in 2011. And in 2008, 143 million pounds of meat (one fourth of it purchased for federal school lunch and nutrition programs) had to be recalled.
On the other hand, there is a significant growth in those who are embracing a new food culture, championed by the likes of Alice Waters and recent Wheeler Centre guest Jamie Oliver, involving farmers' markets, organic food and school gardens. ‘The contrast between the thin, fit, and well-to-do and the illness-ridden, poor and obese has no historical precent,’ writes Schlosser, in a piece published by The Daily Beast.
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is now officially middle-aged: the series celebrates its 35th birthday this year. To mark the occasion, Maupin – whose life was so entwined with his stories that he used Michael Tolliver’s coming-out letter to his parents to come out to his own – has written a gorgeous reflective piece for the Guardian. He was often at odds with his editors over his insistence that ‘gay folks’ were part of the human landscape and deserved equal billing in his chronicle of modern life. ‘One of them even kept an elaborate chart in his office to insure that the homo characters in Tales didn’t suddenly outnumber the hetero ones and thereby undermine the natural order of civilisation.’
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City started as a newspaper series. ‘There were times when he was barely two days ahead of his readers.’
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
The whimsical Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year was first awarded in 1978, to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. The shortlist for this year’s prize has just been announced, with contenders including Cooking with Poo, Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World and The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria. The full list, and explanations of just what these books are about, is at the website of The Bookseller, the book trade magazine that awards the prize.
The Thai cookbook Cooking with Poo is up for Oddest Title of the Year: ‘Poo’ is Thai for crab and the chef’s nickname.
Recently, we shared a Ron Charles video, ‘Sh*t Book Reviewers Say’, poking fun at typical reviewers' clichés, like ‘Kafkaesque’.
This week, the Guardian ran a blog by Jonny Geller, an agent and managing editor at Curtis Brown, who confessed ‘I think I might have done something really stupid on Twitter’. Using the hashtag #publishingeuphemisms, he translated the real meanings of the phrases publishers use when they’re rejecting authors. Among them: ‘this is too literary for our list’ (it’s boring); ‘the novel never quite reached the huge potential of its promise’ (your pitch letter was better than the book); and ‘sadly we are publishing a book similar to this next spring’ (it too has a beginning, middle and end).
Want more? Last year, a US website published the euphemisms used by some of the business’s most influential, like Bloomsbury’s Peter Ginna (‘acclaimed’ = ‘poorly selling’).
Jonny Geller: Sharing his secrets on Twitter meant ‘I had robbed myself of my tools.’
Next Thursday (8 March) is International Women’s Day. One of the hot topics of last year was the underrepresentation of women in the literary pages – sparked by statistics gathered by US organisation VIDA. One year on, VIDA has posted an update, looking at the past year in books pages and lit mags. Sadly, we’ve still got a long way to go, baby.
Website Flavourwire did its own math and estimated that ‘the vast majority’ of the publications’ statistics hover ‘at around 25% female, 75% male’. For example, in the London Review of Books, 29 of the book reviewers were female and 155 were male. Of the books reviewed, 58 authors were female while 163 were male. And in the New York Times book review section (one of the lesser offenders), 368 book reviewers were female and 448 were male; while of the authors reviewed, 273 were female and 520 were male.
Novelist Kirsten Tranter wrote for us last International Women’s Day on how the issue has played out in Australia. On 8 March this year, we’ll be publishing an update from her on what’s happened in our literary pages and on our prize circuit in 2011 – and what happens next. Stella Prize committee member Christine Gordon will deliver our Lunchbox/Soapbox at 12.45pm on the same day, on the topic Feminism is Personal. And in the evening, war conflict reporter Eliza Griswold will talk about her book The Tenth Parallel in another free Wheeler Centre event, at 7.15pm. Bookings recommended.
Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin said of the 2011 VIDA count, ‘London Review of Books, you break my goddamn heart’.
Lionel Shriver is always happy to wade into controversy. In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, she’s published an article on why, though ‘on a strictly definitive level, I am a “feminist”’, she’s uncomfortable with the label.
‘On the connotative level … the word gives me the willies … Self-confessed feminists are, it is broadly accepted, humourless, earnest, touchy, on the lookout for slights, sexless, and probably ugly. They are party-pooping pills who don’t know how to have a good time or take a joke. They are a big drag. Little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word.’
Shriver believes that feminists should be focusing on the big issues, like ‘genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour killings, and marital rape’ rather than being ‘tight-arsed and prim’ about things like raunch culture.
Lionel Shriver: A feminist ‘on a strictly definitive level’, but says ‘little wonder that younger women these days run a mile from the word’.
Tim Parks has a terrific piece on the New York Review of Books blog about the professionalisation of writing as a career, from the advent of studying (rather than simply reading) books in the 20th century, through agents, writers’ festivals and finally the 21st-century expectation that authors will promote themselves on Facebook and Twitter.
Parks traces the explosion of creative writing courses (and would-be authors) from the 1980s onwards back to studying books: readers ‘supposed that if you could analyse it, you could very probably do it yourself’.
Tim Parks asks: ‘Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders?’
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
Fans of Game of Thrones, the series based on George R.R. Martin’s novels, shouldn’t miss eyeballing the medieval feast staged to celebrate the DVD release. But they might want to miss out on actually eating it. Complete with bloodied pigs’ heads, ‘eyeballs’ and ‘dragon’s eggs’ drizzled with liquid gold, it’s a feast for the eyes, but not one that will necessarily work up an appetite.
‘Anything about chopping dudes up, I’m into that,’ says chef Grant King, who hopes to make Darth Vader in chocolate next.
Rachel Cusk’s latest memoir, Aftermath, about her separation from her husband of ten years, includes lines like, ‘My husband said he wanted half of everything, including the children. No, I said … They’re my children … They belong to me.’ Cusk caused a scandal – and spawned the ‘mummy memoir’ genre – with her brutally self-analytical memoir of early motherhood, A Life’s Work, in 2001. She sharply divided critics, who either loved or hated her for laying bare the dark side of motherhood. The Guardian says of Aftermath (April): ‘She has again mined her life and told of her experience of being a woman, in a Read the extract and make up your own mind.
Rachel Cusk: ‘If there is a disjuncture between how women live and how they actually feel – which to me there is, in motherhood and marriage – I will feel entitled to attempt to articulate it.’
Stephen Colbert is making bookish news this week, after a gag during a two-part interview with Maurice Sendak (which he began by saying ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’) has turned into a book deal. After pitching an idea for a sequel, While the Wild Things Are: Still Wildin’ (starring Vin Diesel), Colbert joked he was writing a picture-book-in-verse, I Am a Pole (and So Can You!) and read a preview aloud. Sendak, who told Colbert that most children’s books are ‘very bad’, admitted, ‘The sad thing is, I like it.’ So did Grand Central Publishing, who has signed him up, with a publication date of 8 May 2012. ‘It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to write a children’s book,’ said Colbert. ‘I hope the minutes you and your loved ones spend reading it are as fulfilling as the minutes I spent writing it.’
Stephen Colbert: ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’.
Wondering what to read this year? Readings’ Martin Shaw has asked a handful of Australian writers to share the books they’re most looking forward to in 2012 for a series of posts for Kill Your Darlings. Nam Le is looking forward to new books from Chloe Hooper, Hilary Mantel and Richard Ford – and the second novel from Rachel Kushner. And there were multiple mentions of Texts in the City host Ruby Murray’s first novel, Running Dogs (Scribe, May) and Paddy O’Reilly’s Fine Colour of Rust (Harper Collins, March), which will be released simultaneously in Australia and the UK. Israeli comic short-story writer Etgar Keret, who will be appearing at the Wheeler Centre next month, also earned a nod for his new collection Suddenly a Knock at the Door, which got a rave review in last weekend’s Australian.
Etgar Keret: The Australian says, ‘There is method in Keret’s madness, and genius, too.’
In the lead-up to this week’s Oscars, the Independent talked to five novelists about their books’ transitions from page to screen. Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants, said director Alexander Payne ‘met my whole family, and they all ended up being in the movie’. He said, ‘Almost every line of dialogue was right out of the book, every sequence, the music I’d mentioned, the clothes they wore, the places they went to.’ Lionel Shriver thinks Lynne Ramsay’s movie of We Need to Talk About Kevin is ‘rather wonderful’, though ‘the movie does lean towards Kevin being evil from birth, whereas that’s more up for grabs in the novel’. Fay Weldon, however, enjoyed the money for the rights to her book The Life and Loves of a She Devil, but says the movie (starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep) ‘missed the point entirely’. She’d still do it again, though.
‘I still see myself as a struggling writer,’ says Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants
Is nothing sacred? It’s a subject that continues to torture the stylish brows of French literary types following the bombing of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week. Last week’s edition – titled Sharia Hebdo – had reported on the triumph in Tunisian elections of an Islamist party and featured on the front page a cartoon of the prophet promising readers 100 lashes if they didn’t “die laughing”. As a result, the magazine’s Parisian HQ has been firebombed, its website has been hacked and death threats have been aimed at its staff (full story). Readers wondering how the magazine would respond to the events will discover on their newsstands today (Paris time) this cover featuring a magazine cartoonist and an Islamic man locked in passionate embrace under the headline, ‘Love is stronger than hate’.
Oslo Davis looks at the other kind of same-sex relationship. Recently his work was part of the Artist and You project at NGV. This cartoon originally appeared in the Age.
Paul McDonald writing for the Independent believes he’s found the world’s oldest joke and it’s a good indication of just how much humour dates.
According to McDonald the oldest recorded joke came from ancient Sumer (1900-1600 BC) and includes both sexism and flatulence:
Something that’s never been known since time immemorial: a young lady who doesn’t break wind in her husband’s lap.
Much of the humour would have come from the taboo of farting, but the relatively risque situation of a woman on a man’s lap may have increased the laughs. But it’s hard to even see where the humour is so McDonald also uses England’s oldest recorded joke from the 10th century manuscript, the Exeter Codex:
Question: What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.
McDonald acknowledges “recognise its double entendre as typically British, it’s not exactly side-splitting”. It has evolved into something that we recognise as a question-answer joke. But jokes play an important social role. According to McDonald jokes “replaced social grooming as the main bonding device between early humans. Humour can facilitate and reinforce communal ties; we use jokes to make friends, a function so important that we don’t let corniness get in the way.”
Looking for a bookish gift that’s not a book? Soho!, a literary board game could be the answer.
The game revolves around collecting “6 pieces of rashly commissioned copy [that] need to be retrieved from a somewhat motley bunch of recalcitrant writers… And, being writers, all 6 are currently holed up in 6 Soho pubs, cadging free drinks, chatting up people half their age (but with, oddly, twice their looks), and complaining vociferously about their agents”.
The characters themselves are drawn with the same cheeky humour including such writing stalwarts as “travel blogger and author of ”Leicester: City of Crisps“, Toby D’Azure” and “Girl-about-town and sparkly-heeled chick-lit tyro Sophie Blush”. Players are required to corral copy from these various literary geniuses. The game is apparently “suitable for all ages, though under-12s might not get some of the jokes and under-8’s will probably throw tantrums. Also, any taxi-drivers will have a built-in advantage, but there’s not much we can do about that – they have enlarged hippocampi, you know”.
The game is a fundraising drive for Smoke, a London-based literary magazine that’s currently on a “short sabbatical to consider its options and work on other projects” including Soho!. As we look to the future of literary journals in Australia, could board games be the new e-books?
Writer, critic and comedian, Ben Pobjie
Comedians are, as we all know, tortured. The only trait that better defines the comedian than being tortured is the habit of complaining about how bad it is being a comedian, as I am about to demonstrate.
Because, self-pitying whininess notwithstanding, it isn’t easy being funny for a living. The pressure of having to keep having ideas will wear you down quickly to the point where you spend all your waking hours staggering about hollow-eyed, senses dulled, earthly pleasures rendered meaningless, constantly pinching the bridge of your nose and turning to loved ones with a beseeching expression and the pleading, pathetic words: “Is this funny?”
Jokes, gags, sketches, scenarios, characters, one-liners, zingers, catchphrases, set-ups, punchlines, premises, conceits, set-pieces… the comedy writer is forever obsessively searching for them. Every brilliant gag dreamed up means little more than the nasty realisation that now you have to come up with another one, and that the pool of available humour in the collective unconscious is now that little bit shallower.
Every writer lives with the knowledge that their talent is finite; that at some point the ideas will run out. Even if this isn’t true, they live with this knowledge. A comedy writer who is out of ideas SHOULD have the good grace to fade respectfully into oblivion, taking a job at a call centre, giving up his dreams, recognising his inherent mediocrity, etc.
However, many do not. This leads to painful situations at open mic nights, and often even more desperate measures, like Rove McManus impressions and parody songs. A comedian without ideas is a lot like a dog with rabies; they should be shot without hesitation, lest they infect the rest of us.
So in summary: comedy is a horrible business that will ruin your life and cause you to die broken, alone and penniless. Best to leave it to experienced, hardened comedic troopers like myself, who are not only able to weather the savage vagaries of the mirth game, but are also keen to minimise the competition. However, given that reality is rarely an obstacle to people pursuing a comedic career, in the interests of protecting the senses of humour of the wider population, I’m willing to sling a few bits of advice your way. If you are looking to make your mark on the world by creating comedy, listen well. Future viewers/readers/listeners/immediate family members will thank you.
This is an excerpt from the Emerging Writers Festival’s The Reader. Ben Pobjie is a satirist for the likes of New Matilda, The Drum and Crikey. He’ll be unlocking the secrets of new media writing at his Victorian Writers’ Centre Course, Jousting with the Media.
Andrew Weldon has his own take on free-range parenting.
Andrew Weldon sees the romance in advertising. Taken from the book, If You Weren’t A Hedgehog… If I Weren’t A Haemophiliac….
Tony Martin probably has advice on buying gift books for pets
The irrepressible and ingeniously pre-planned Tony Martin has posted his bookish stocking fillers as he beats the Christmas rush over on Scrivener’s Fancy.
Mostly it’s Martin’s satirical swipe at the latest and lamest in publishing including Justin Beiber’s The Autumn of My Years which he describes as “Volume two of the baby-faced pop star’s memoirs covers the two-week period since the first one”. Or there’s the faux Kathy Lette book, Maternal Combustion, which “Contains so many puns, you’ll be suffering from quiplash!”
Looking for a gift for the pop music fan? Martin recommends Dannii: My Story (updated) which is “Much thinner paperback edition that bears little resemblance to the original.” For the hard to buy for, Martin mashes up Russell Brand and Star Wars with My Wookiee Book by Peter Mayhew – “The long-awaited autobiography of the man who played Chewbacca. Mostly incoherent howling.”
No-one escapes as Martin even parodies himself with You Sank My Battleship! by Tony Martin which he characterises as “More supposedly true stories about old things from the seventies that nobody else remembers.
Dr Samuel Johnson has been an active Twitterer for some time but recently he has published a new dictionary based on our modern world.
Of course, it’s a fake but as an extract from the Quietus shows, author phoney-Johnston Tom Morton has captured much of Dr Johnson’s humour especially when defining hip-hop right down to the characteristic spelling. Here’s the basic definition: “Hip-Hop is oft defin’d as rhythmick Oratory set to a Beat; heralded as the inventive Poetry of the Streets & then condemn’d for all the Ills of Mankind.”
There’s a discussion of hip-hop artists (“equal Part a Town-Crier, Poet, Peacock & Highwayman”). But Mortons seems to have most fun translating lyrics into Johnson-ism, such as Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” as “Tis like a Jungle out there, oft-times I wonder how I keep from going UNDER. Push me not, SIR, I am close ‘pon the Edge. I try, most ardently, not to lose my HEAD”. Or take his re-working of Kelis’ “Milkshake”: “My Milk-Cart brings all the Rakes unto the Yard forthwith, and verily, it is better than THINE”.
Punctuation can tell you a lot about a person, but at Slate Nathan Heller has traced the rise and fall of film director Woody Allen all through his use of the humble comma.
“Bafflingly mispunctuated” poster from Woody Allen
Heller argues that Allen’s films were at their best when the titles used more punctuation, citing What’s New Pussycat?, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and the “rigourously punctuated” Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex/ But Were Afraid To Ask. For Heller the wheels fall off with Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You which he tetchily dismisses as “a title that shifts, with no punctuation, from third-person citation to first-person direct quotation” though he also thinks one of the problems was that it “also required Julia Roberts to sing”.
By 2008’s “bafflingly mispunctuated” Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Heller concludes the “golden age of Allen – for the grammar-minded moviegoer, at least – was over”. Heller does conclude that punctuation may have found an unlikely new heir in Justin Beiber. Helller concludes that the Canadian pop star’s new book entitled Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever: My Story is the worst example of “highly irregular, morally suspicious colon deployment”.
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When the author of Stuff White People Like came to the Wheeler Centre, it was a house packed with hipsters. Christian Lander explained his “desperate need to point out how all white people think they’re unique – and they’re not”. With John Safran and the audience asking the questions it was a lively Q&A with the man who “built a career on saying all white people are the same”.
Michaela McGuire
I have spent most of my life avoiding thinking about whether or not I am a feminist. My earliest ideas about my place in the world as a young lady were informed by my high school’s mission statement. “Women in time to come will do much,” we were told. These words were emblazoned around the school on glossy pamphlets, on stained glass windows, underneath hallway art and in the diaries that we carried to Home Economics class. It was here, after flooding the kitchen, baking cupcakes that were consistently too dry and, finally, sewing through my own finger that I was told with great seriousness, “Your husband is going to need to be very tolerant.”
And so, full of teenage spite, I arced up, dedicated a year to topping that class and then having proved a point that makes even less sense in hindsight, promptly forgot about the entire thing. I went to university where feminists were known to me as the women I saw around campus who didn’t shave their armpits, or wear bras, or read anything except for terrifyingly dense texts about this movement I understood nothing about. I avoided these women in the same spirit that I avoided the philosophy students who did not wear shoes or nutrition students who only wore track pants. Having had no greater injustice inflicted upon me than having been told that my place was in the kitchen, but only if that kitchen was supervised at all times, feminism was something I thought did not apply to me.
In subsequent years I have been called a sexist because I co-curate an event that celebrates women. I have also been told by a woman that this same event degrades females because it raises money for neglected animals. I had, I was informed, entirely missed “the importance of genuinely celebrating women’s voices.”
This was the reason, I realised, that feminism, at least as I had encountered it, does not seem relevant to me. It has rules. Qualifiers. Hundred-year-old mottos that I am meant to apply to my own life. Celebrating women’s voices is an admirable pursuit, but not if this celebration assists in the care of abandoned animals. Women in time may well come to do much, but only if these women know how to correctly use a sewing machine. Or, presumably, if they have very tolerant husbands.
Michaela McGuire co-curates and hosts Women of Letters. Her first book, Apply Within: Stories of career sabotage, was published by MUP last year.
Politicians say the dumbest things. Over at Slate they’ve compiled their favourite Palinisms, tweets, Facebook updates and other wit from former Vice Presidential hopeful, Sarah Palin.
And she’s got plenty to say. Even in a tweet of 140 characters she manages to reflect on feminism: “Who hijacked term:‘feminist’?A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree on a singular issue; it’s ironic (& passé).” And who says Americans don’t appreciate irony?
But Palin is also a defender of the creative use of language. Witness this tweet after mispronouncing ‘repudiate in an interview: “'Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!” We’re hoping for a book, if not of Palinisms, but of her insights into great writers – for a title perhaps Wee Wee Upping Literature: Not-so-great Writers Misunderestimated by History.
Over at his regularly hilarious and randomly thoughtful Scrivener’s Fancy, Tony Martin had some thoughts on the Hawke telemovie and the nature of impersonating the greats.
Martin “found it impossible to concentrate on the film’s narrative… as I was spending all my time evaluating whether the actors looked enough like who they were supposed to be.”
Himself a TV actor and director on The Librarians, Martin recounts a recent run-in with actor Patrick Brammall, who played Kim Beazley. “‘But surely you wouldn’t be fat enough?’ I blurted, immediately feeling like an arsehole as his face informed me that I was probably the one-thousandth person to have said this to him.”
He also reckons the only person for the lead in the Julia Gillard telemovie would be Kath and Kim’s Jane Turner and though the costume could do the acting for the leader of the opposition as “Tony Abbott… would he be sporting the lollybags and bathing cap in every single scene, including those depicting fierce debates in the Lower House”.
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