Image of a Lego WB Yeats via Dunechaser/Flickr

Poetry – even poets don’t always like it. Marianne Moore, a major 20th-century American poet, wrote a poem, appropriately called ‘Poetry’, that began, “I, too, dislike it…” But in the same poem she gave us a metaphor for poetry that has become a justification for an entire form: poems, she wrote, are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. And that’s the point. Sometimes, there’s nothing more real than a poem.

It’s National Poetry Week this week, and we conducted a straw poll around the office, asking people to nominate their favourite poems. Here are a few nominations:

• ‘Forgetfulness’, Billy Collins

• ‘Dover Beach’, Matthew Arnold

• ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, WH Auden

• ‘Bullocky’, Judith Wright

• ‘This Be the Verse’, Philip Larkin

• ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, TS Eliot

• ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, WB Yeats

• ‘Dreamer’, Libby Hart (from the collection, This Floating World)

• ‘The Seventh’, Attila Jozsef

• ‘Encyclopedia of Rhythm and Blues’, Anthony Walton (we couldn’t find it online, but it’s a ripper)

• ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, Dylan Thomas

• ‘Totem’, Luke Davies

• ‘Thinking the room empty’, Cate Kennedy (from the collection, The Taste of River Water)

Wheeler Centre resident organisation Australian Poetry is celebrating National Poetry Week with a different theme every weekday this week. Today’s theme was ‘write’, tomorrow’s is ‘buy’, then there’s ‘share’, ‘live’ and ‘celebrate’.

Screenshot from the trailer of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious [1946], via WikiCommons

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who read the last page or two of a book before starting it, and those who insist on knowing as little as possible. To the latter group, one can barely mention a book or a film without them snapping back, “Don’t say anything more! I don’t want to know!” They’ll sanctimoniously stick their fingers in their ears – some of them won’t even read the book blurb on the back cover. And in the process they make those of us who don’t mind knowing the ending feel like second-rate readers. Spoilsports, so to speak. Well, spoilsports of the world, unite! No longer need we skim the last page of a John Grisham in furtive shame, for new research suggests that spoilsports have more fun.

Results of a recent US study suggest that knowing the ending of a story may increase audience pleasure. The Guardian reports that a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science is due to publish results of a survey undertaken by University of San Diego researchers indicating that survey subjects who were given spoiler paragraphs to read before reading 30 short stories across a variety of genres reported higher levels of satisfaction than subjects whose reading wasn’t spoiled. “So it could be that once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier – you’re more comfortable processing the information – and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story,” explained Jonathan Leavitt, a PhD student at the university and one of the study’s co-authors.

Detail of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore from the linocut, ‘Remarkable Collection of Angels’, from the blog Fiji Island Mermaid Press

Saturday was National Bookshop Day, and we asked readers to show a little love to their favourite bookshops. And to tell us: what’s your favourite bookstore? You know, the one that gives you a little thrill of excitement every time you step inside it. We all have our personal favourites – so tell us which bookstore you ♥ the most, and why!

Will they use a condom? Cover art of an historical romance novel by Tom Miller, c1960s, courtesy anoldent/Flickr

It’s perhaps the most common controversy in the world of ideas: how does the content of art and literature change us? Do representations of violence and sex corrupt us? Is porn bad for us? And what about … romance novels?

A couple of weeks ago, writer and relationships columnist Susan Quilliam published an essay on the potentially harmful effect reading romance novels might have on their readers, who are predominantly women. The headline-grabbing essay echoed claims reported in early June by a Christian psychologist that she was treating “more and more women who are clinically addicted to romantic books”, and that these books were the cause of some of their relationship dissatisfactions.

The essay has sparked widespread debate. Strangely, a good deal of the discussion seems to hinge on… condom use. But the discourse about romance fiction more broadly seems to mirror the debate on how pornography affects men: do these representations of sex and romance – as the case may be – diminish their users?

Melbourne academic Lauren Rosewarne has another take. She objects to the presumption that consumers of art and entertainment should be such easy touches. “I don’t doubt for a moment that romance novels provide problematic information about sex,” she writes for The Conversation. “But to pretend that the only message, or even just the strongest message received, comes from steamy paperbacks is simplistic at best and conservatively deceptive at worst.”

In her Lunchbox/Soapbox address, In Defence of Trash Fiction, Toni Jordan spoke about the challenges of writing romance fiction.

In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries ago — as well as its poor relationship with the indigenous population now. How can we redress injustice and convert our awareness of the past into a productive force?

The challenge, Maddison says, is an adaptive one — and it won’t be overcome without a painful and uncomfortable process of introspection. But, she continues, “by taking account of past injustice in this work, we may have the opportunity to experience ourselves as truly moral, rather than as defensive and anxious about the past”.

At stake is also the authenticity of our national identity, or “diminishing the gap between the values people stand for, and the reality they face”. In other words, we must reconcile our closely held idea of the fair go with our racist past.

(Click to watch video.)

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Do you believe that guilt, evasiveness and awkwardness surrounding our past hinders progress on indigenous issues?

Can we rely on public institutions to lead the way on adapting to moral truth? If not, what’s the best way to address our nation’s brutal beginnings?

An image posted on the Facebook page ‘Free Amina Abdalla’

In his 2010 book Reality Hunger, US writer David Shields argued against traditional realist fiction in favour of a new kind of fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. It was a manifesto that appeared to be a theoretical mirror to the collapse of fiction and reality that is occurring in the online world, where invented personae proliferate. But when the writer of a blog called ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ was recently outed as being 37-year-old US peace activist, student and heterosexual male Tom MacMaster, and not Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, reactions across the world were a clear indication that, pace David Shields, we still expect some authenticity in our authors.

While the story has slipped off the front pages, the blog hasn’t been killed off. At least, not yet. Last Thursday, a contrite Tom MacMaster published another post. Writing as himself now, he blogged about a previous incarnation of his heroine. In Amina’s former existence (which ended in 2010), he had fabricated an Amina who was, on this occasion, a married Syrian-American mother of two. This proto-Amina, MacMaster wrote, also suffered injustice at the hands of Syrian authorities: her husband had disappeared for several days during a family trip.

In response, the silence – writes MacMaster – was deafening. “She received exactly one anonymous comment: ‘That kinda sucks’. Nothing more. No one was alarmed. No one started a campaign to free him. No one sent messages of support. The blog had two followers. I deleted it. A failure. No one had noticed. I revised Amina. Now, she was single and in Syria … and openly gay … I worked on her back story for a while before debuting the new version.” Amina mark II, on the other hand, received much more attention. Perhaps it was her youth, or her good looks, or her openly transgressive identity, or perhaps it was because world events caught up with her – whatever the reason, this Amina received decidedly more attention.

As some bloggers achieve celebrity status through their blogs (albeit of a minor order), it’s no surprise that flogs (short for fake blogs) will also mushroom. But whereas literary fiction retains prestige despite dwindling sales, flogs are the blogging world’s dirty little secret. And Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari is a case in point: a figure that for a day or two became the torchbearer of an entire nation’s tortured soul turned out to be a hoax. But in an online world that thrives on concealment, is is still reasonable to expect a clear demarcation between the invented and the real?

Addendum: we were alerted on Facebook to an article in The Age suggesting MacMaster has invented another persona for himself.

Sydney Opera House 1975, image by Gregory Melle, via Flickr

Sydney is appointing a city poet to sing the virtues of the city in verse. For $20,000 over 12 months, the poet will be required to write six publishable poems. The poet will be based at the University of Technology Sydney in the inner-city suburb of Ultimo. Here’s the call for expressions of interest.

Australia’s most famous city has already been the subject of much poetry, including this by Les Murray. Peter Boyle’s ‘On Sydney’s South-West Line’ is a neat summation of that unique blend of dazzle and tack so emblematic of the silver city.

We applaud the scheme and hope it will be extended. We envisage a poet for every city, every town and even every suburb, or at least selected suburbs (we imagine suburbs like Carlton and Brunswick are already well-versed). However, we do fear the appointed poet will have their work cut out finding words that rhyme with Sydney: other than kidney, the alternatives are pretty much all proper nouns. The Oxford Rhyming Dictionary lists them as Rodney, Sidney (the alternate spelling, probably ruling it out), Adeney (a Shropshire village, very hard to include in a poem about Sydney, although maybe Sydney’s city poet will relish the challenge), Evadne (the name of some rather tortured Greek mythological characters, and also of Wonder Woman’s cousin) and our favourite Ariadne. Good luck!

Incidentally, if Melbourne has an unofficial poet laureate, it may well be Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Congratulations to Chris for his AM, announced on the Queen’s birthday honours list last weekend.

Here’s a video of Les Murray reading from his collection, Taller When Prone, at the Wheeler Centre.

Screenshot from the trailer of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious [1946], via WikiCommons

It’s Bloomsday. People all over the world – including Melbourne – are attending public readings of the novel Ulysses, despite the objections of James Joyce’s descendants. Why, even Joyce himself was recorded reading it aloud – and why not? It is a very read-out-loud-able kind of book.

So Bloomsday gets us to thinking about Ulysses, which gets us to thinking about Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which you can read here and listen to here. This gets us to thinking about our favourite last lines in novels.

Here’s how Molly Bloom ends Ulysses: “… I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ending sentence for The Great Gatsby is a thing of beauty: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” And Samuel Beckett’s ending to The Unnameable is a conclusion in both senses of the word – an ending and a summation: “…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

More.

Federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry predicted this morning that online shopping will wipe out bookstores within the next five years. Senator Sherry made the comments at the launch of a campaign called Driving Business Online, an initiative intended to encourage small business owners to develop the online side of their business.

The Australian Booksellers Association’s CEO Joel Becker said he was “gobsmacked” by the minister’s comments, while ABA president Jon Page, of Pages and Pages Booksellers in Sydney, added, “I think there’s still a place for an independent that services their local community”. The ABA has launched an initiative of its own – National Bookshop Day, on August 20 – the focus of which will be “celebrating bookshops, their contributions to the local community and to Australian literature, culture and society.”

A few weeks ago, the Wheeler Centre hosted a fascinating Meanland event on the future of the bookshop. Here’s the video:

(Click to watch ‘Meanland: The Evolution of the Bookshop’.)

Two articles published today present starkly different views of the justification for Australians paying the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan.The debate follows a spike in the number of Australian army personnel deaths in Afghanistan. The toll is now at 27.

In The Age, the Lowy Institute’s Raoul Heinrichs describes the conflict as hopeless. He argues that leaving Afghanistan in 2014, which is the government’s timetable, would make little difference to leaving it now except in one crucial respect. “The only difference for Australia,” Heinrichs writes, “is that many more of our fellow countrymen will be dead, wounded and maimed. More still will bear the mental scars of their prolonged exposure to war.”

By contrast, in The Punch, Ian McPhedran writes that leaving now would be a “tactical and strategic disaster”. “The key to any counter-insurgency operation is squeezing out the enemy so that they become irrelevant and after five years of hard work in Oruzgan that is now happening,” he writes. “If we withdraw before the job is finished then the sacrifice of these 27 brave young Australians, including four this past week, and more than 170 more badly hurt and maimed would have been in vain and that would be a tragedy.”

Raoul Heinrichs will be a speaker at the next Intelligence Squared debate on July 28. He will be arguing for the motion, “There is no justification for risking Australian lives in Afghanistan”.

The New York Times Magazine has published a list of words and phrases its readers most despise. The magazine’s readers were invited to write to the magazine with their pet word peeves following a blog post titled ‘Words We Don’t Say’, featuring a list of 36 words and phrases verboten at the magazine under the editorship of Kurt Andersen. Needless to say, the readers' list is far longer. ‘Popular’ choices in this unpopularity contest included ‘impact’ (used as a verb), ‘going forward’, and ‘at the end of the day’.

Language is an emotive subject. We found other discussions of vocabulary fear and loathing. A couple of years ago the Guardian took a look at poetic peeves (‘pulchritude’, anyone?); the online magazine Socyberty has this list that includes our favourite peeve, ‘irregardless’ (language warning); and this blog post has a bunch of web-related neologisms, some of which (like ‘hyphy’, derived from ‘hyperactive’), are guaranteed to rile.

What are your pet linguistic peeves?

Sheet music of ‘Stars & Stripes Forever’ by John Philip Sousa, from the Library of Congress via WikiCommons

The debate over Philip Roth’s legacy continues following his win of the Man Booker International Prize last week, honouring his overall achievement. One of the prize judges, Virago founder Carmen Callil, quit her position following the announcement, as we reported last week, saying, “he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.” On the weekend, Callil explained in the Guardian that her reservations about Roth were not political but literary. “Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there,” the report quotes Callil as saying. “His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.”

In her overview of the story, Salon’s Laura Miller says that although it’s unfair to presume Callil was motivated by ideology, her reaction was inappropriate: “insulting an author (any author) by name in such a context is uncalled for. There are enough readers who love Roth’s work to make him a reasonable choice for an important award, even if Callil can’t personally endorse that choice.”

An even more interesting reaction is by Anis Shivani in the Huffington Post, who connected the story to an older story about the resistance of the Nobel committee to US writers on the basis that American literature is too introspective. The permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, Horace Engdahl, recently said, “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature…That ignorance is restraining.”

Shivani agrees, adding, “Our publishing model, like that of the lapsed auto industry, is a failed one. It survives only because of our gigantism – mere volume is sufficient to ensure a certain amount of financial success, but it is not producing a worthwhile cultural product. Just as we might have 500 television channels but not one will ever offer the challenging movies of Buñuel or Godard, or a Wagner opera, we might produce 175,000 books a year, but quality is elusive.” Shivani says US readers overestimate the importance of the recent greats – Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon – but that because these writers restrict themselves to an American version of reality their global significance is limited. “What recent American novel – by an American, not an immigrant, writer – accepts or even acknowledges the new global reality, even with America at its center?” asks Shivani, answering, “There is none.”

US author Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Home at the End of the World, The Hours, Specimen Days and, most recently, By Nightfall, is appearing tonight at the Wheeler Centre from 7:30pm. Tickets are free.

Opponents of a decision by Fairfax Media to outsource its subediting from 2012, and thus make redundant its subeditors, will take to the streets at lunchtime today. The publisher of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald plans to save $25 million by shedding up to 100 subeditorial and other production-related positions, and outsourcing the subediting work to Pagemasters. Opposition to the move has been widespread and has coalesced around the website Fair Go, Fairfax. Rallies were held on Thursday in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra and Wollongong. The Melbourne rally took place on the grassy knoll outside the Age building.

Coincidentally, Text Publishing senior editor Mandy Brett spoke at the Wheeler Centre at lunchtime Thursday on why the world will continue to need editors even in a world without books. Mandy published an essay on editors and the art of editing a book in the January issue of Meanjin. In it, she deems editing “an essentially bipolar occupation” because “[e]verything about it can go hard one way or just as hard the other and the difficult thing is not that you have to choose, but that you have to balance.” She says the contribution editors make to books are publishing’s dirty little secret: “Good editing is not just important for an individual book, it is crucial to the health of our industry and the survival of reading as a recreation.” Mandy’s essay referenced this blog by novelist and anthologist James Bradley.

In the Paris Review, Toni Morrison’s editor Robert Gottlieb called editing “simply the application of the common sense of any good reader”. Text Publishing’s Michael Heyward compares the relationship to that between a confessor and a priest. There’s been widespread coverage on the demise of the editor in the literary presses for some years now. Just possibly, the days of an author-editor relationship as formative as the one between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish are behind us. Are we the worse off for it?

In this Guardian report, Alex Clark grumbles, “It is not uncommon, if you are of a certain cast of mind, to fling a book across the room and wonder if there is anyone still alive who cares about hanging participles”. And this blog by Rufus Griscom has a more urgent ring to it, signalling that the editor has morphed into something altogether different: the content producer. Rufus' message to editors? Evolve or perish.

Oslo Davis' take on the author/editor relationship

In her Australia Day speech to the nation this year, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the phrase “demography is not destiny” was a defining Australian characteristic. One of the most common ways to classify demographic information is by postcode – just ask Treasurer Wayne Swan. Much has been made of his penchant for the postcode since the budget. After all, it’s the name of a book he authored in 2005 – here’s a review. The Australian’s Tom Dusevic identified Australia’s most affluent postcodes as the biggest budget losers, including 3944 – Portsea – where the average salary is just under $200,000.

Is it “milking the rich”? Does it qualify as “class warfare”, as Tony Abbott claimed? “From the reaction, you’d think there was blood everywhere,” writes Michelle Grattan. She points out that the ‘class warfare’ amounts to 31,000 families losing family tax benefit A, 9,000 families losing benefit B, and just 700 families losing eligibility for the baby bonus in the first year.

One of the key spending commitments made in this week’s budget was $425 million to reward top performing teachers. Finance journalist Robert Gottliebsen called it a blow to middle-income earners, who are more likely to send their kids to independent schools. “The government is planning to substantially lift the rewards of government school teachers that are deemed to have performed well,” he wrote. “The independent schools system will have to find a way to match that and they will lift fees accordingly.”

There was no commitment to changing funding arrangements for independent schools. That’s something that’s going to have wait until the end of the year, when a Review of Federal School Funding led by David Gonski will hand down the findings of their report. But Gottliebsen reckons he has the early scoop: “The Gonski report, to be released later this year, will almost certainly lower the amount the government spends on independent schools and therefore lift fees by the same amount.”

David Gonski told the Australian Education Union’s Federal Conference earlier this year that “the focus on equity should be ensuring that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possession.” Echoing the PM’s Australia Day remarks, he added, “disadvantage is often determined by Indigenous status, non-English speaking backgrounds (including refugees and migrants), disability, geographical remoteness, and low socioeconomic status… The charge for our panel will be to consider funding arrangements that will be able to address this current disadvantage.” The Review released an Emerging Issues Paper in December. It received a wide variety of responses, published online.

Janet Albrechtsen sees things more starkly. On the same day the PM delivered her Australia Day speech, Albrechtsen claimed the Gonski report was being used to extend class warfare into the classroom. She accused teachers' unions of staging “a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the evils of funding private education and the virtues of funding public education.” Meanwhile, a February Sydney Morning Herald report indicated independent schools have received $2.7 billion more government funding than they were entitled to.

In a debate published in The Age earlier this year, Michelle Green of Independent Schools Victoria wrote, “Government schools received total government funding of $11,061 a student while non-government schools received $6089 a student.” Michelle Green will be speaking against the proposition, “Public funding of private education is unconsionable,” at the next Intelligence Squared debate on May 24.

(Click to watch video.)

Lindsay Tanner appeared at the Wheeler Centre last week, in conversation with George Megalogenis. The publication of Tanner’s book Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy has been extensively reported. Highlights of the media’s coverage have included an interview with Crikey, and several appearances on the ABC (Radio National, 7:30 and Q&A).

In some ways, coverage of the book penned by the former cabinet minister-turned-“private citizen” has served to illustrate Tanner’s point. Despite significant pressure brought to bear on him, Tanner has studiously avoided tipping the bucket on his former colleagues while painting a scathing portrait of the political-media landscape. Some have applauded Tanner’s position, while others have condemned or been puzzled by it. “The book’s account of our troubles is sound enough,” writes University of Canberra journalism academic Jason Wilson, “but there are significant weaknesses, especially in Tanner’s proposals for fixing it.”

Do you agree that democracy has been ‘dumbed down’? Is the media to blame? And what possible solutions are there on hand to improve policy debate in Australia?

On January 24 this year, Toronto policeman Michael Sanguinetti walked into a lecture room at Osgoode Hall Law School to deliver a talk to 10 people on campus safety. He began his talk with a line that has since passed into infamy: “You know, I think we’re beating around the bush here. I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” Sanguinetti must be wishing he’d heeded the advice. His statement, which he has since retracted, prompted a debate that in turn has become a movement.

The first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, and women are SlutWalking through the streets of cities across North America, Europe and now Australia. Boston’s took place last weekend. Melbourne is set to join the worldwide SlutWalk movement on Saturday May 28. Other SlutWalks are planned in the UK for London, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Katt Schott-Mancini, an organiser of the Boston SlutWalk, summed up the motivation behind the SlutWalk in the following way: “What you are wearing doesn’t cause rape – the rapist causes it.”

The number of sexual assaults in Australia trended upwards by approximately 50% between 1995 and 2007, about twice the rate of Australia’s population growth in the same period. There were 19,781 recorded sexual assaults in Australia in 2007, or slightly more than one every half hour of every day.

Anti-pornography activist Dr Gail Dines – who will be appearing in Melbourne as a guest of the Wheeler Centre on the eve of the Melbourne SlutWalk – has questioned the use of the word ‘slut’. “Women need to take to the streets,” she writes, “– but not for the right to be called ‘slut’. Women should be fighting for liberation from culturally imposed myths about their sexuality that encourage gendered violence.”

Feminist writer and activist Ray Filar has responded to Dines by labelling the SlutWalks a reprise of the riot grrl culture of the 1990s. “There is room for more than one feminist march,” writes Filar, “and more than one kind of feminist activism.”

A (male) organiser of the Los Angeles SlutWalk has responded to Dines more stridently. Hugo Schwyzer has blogged, “SlutWalk stands for the principle that no matter how short the skirt, no matter how high the heel, no matter how promiscuous the past, every woman is entitled to freedom from verbal or physical sexual assault.”

Melbourne academic Lauren Rosewarne sees the debate re-exposing the divide between second- and third-wave feminism: “The movement of slutwalking is the fascinating phenomena [sic] of what happens when the political passions of the second-wave fantastically crash into the third-wave’s warm embrace of sexuality performed in all its spectacular, confronting and revealing glory.”

(Click to watch video.)

When Donald Horne described Australia as the ‘lucky country’ in 1964, it was with some degree of irony. What Horne described was a culture – and a political elite – characterised by complacency. Four and a half decades later, what’s changed? Very little, according to some prominent Australians. In 2005, Ross Garnaut spoke of complacency in relation to economic reform. Last year at the Wheeler Centre, Lindsay Tanner spoke of our complacency as the result of two decades of uninterrupted economic boom. Even casino baron James Packer has complained that the way Australia is being marketed overseas is tired and outdated.

In this video of last Thursday’s Lunchbox/Soapbox event, Robert Manne speaks of the complacency of our political culture. Manne argues that the 2000 Sydney Olympics marked the death knell of an innovative, distinct Australian culture. During the Howard reign Australia took refuge in the “triumphalism” of the anglophone West and in the process, Manne says, we lost the edge that had characterised Australian culture for the preceding 25 years. Instead, we’ve taken refuge in a militarised nationalism championed by the “right-wing commentariat”.

A group of Australian women writers and publishers are seeking a sponsor for a proposed literary prize for fiction by Australian women writers. Sophie Cunningham, Kirsten Tranter, Louise Swinn, Monica Dux, Jenny Niven, Aviva Tuffield from Scribe Publishing, Rebecca Starford, Jo Case and Chris Gordon from Readings have formed a steering committee to establish the award – equivalent to the UK’s Orange Prize – which has a working title A Prize of One’s Own.

In an interview in the Guardian, novelist and publisher Sophie Cunningham said the committee was talking to sponsors. “What we want to achieve is a prize that brings more readers to novels by women, and respects and rewards the work of women writers,” she said. “Women continue to be marginalised in our culture. Their words are deemed less interesting, less knowledgeable, less well formed, less worldly, and less worthy.” Not only have the Miles Franklin Award shortlists been exclusively male twice in the last three years, several state premier’s literary award shortlists also excluded women. What’s more, although in overall terms publishing is dominated by women, the highest levels of the industry continue to be mostly male. The committee is hoping the inaugural women’s prize will be held in 2012 or 2013.

The Wheeler Centre’s next Talking Point is ‘Banging on the Ceiling’, Thursday May 12 at 6:15pm.

Image via WikiCommons

Unlike magazines, books have somehow always avoided the encroachment of advertising. They’ve even managed to successfully resist product placement – at least for the most part. The website Publishing Perspectives yesterday visited a subject that will shock bibliophiles everywhere. Under the banner, ‘Is it Time for publishers to Offer Advertising in Books?’, the article considers the implications of cloud reading. Cloud reading, as we’ve covered before, is an alternative to the conventional model of buying and reading ebooks. Instead of downloading a digital file, cloud reading – such as that offered by the Readings online ebook store – gives readers access to a file stored remotely via a web connection.

The success of a Swedish music website called Spotify prompted the Publishing Perspectives article. Spotify gives music lovers remote access to a database of 13 million songs. Its business model offers listeners free access to music if they’re willing to put up with some advertising – much like conventional commercial radio broadcasting. Otherwise, for a fee, they can enjoy commercial-free listening.

In a related article, Javier Celaya, vice president of the Spanish Digital Magazines Association, points out that the returns to writers of such a business model will be meager, if Spotify is any indication. And he frets over the social implications of this kind of business model. He writes: “… we are allowing the creation of a very unequal digital society where readers with higher spending power will be able to enjoy screen reading without advertising interruptions whereas those with a lower budget will enjoy a very different experience.”

Julio Cortázar, who spent much of his writing life in exile in Paris, via WikiCommons

Argentinian lawmakers are considering a proposal that will pay a special pension to established writers in their dotage. The proposal could see writers who have had a minimum of five books published, or devoted at least 20 years to “literary creation”, receive a government pension three times above the regular pension. Whereas the old age pension in Argentina is about $1000 per month, the writer’s pension would be around $3000 per month. Australia’s old age pension for a single person is $1340. The proposal seeks to recognise the social benefits of literature as well as its lean monetary pickings. Many a promising young writer’s career has been cut short not by deprivation in the here and now – which is, after all, easier to bear in youth – but out of fears of destitution in life’s increasingly long autumn.

The politician who initiated the proposal is Carlos Heller of the Solidarity Party (PSOL), a party that supports Argentinian president’s Cristina Kirchner run for another term in October. “Writers add to a community’s general culture,” states his proposal. “They are creative individuals who generate a kind of ‘social richness’ that’s difficult to quantify.” The City of Buenos Aires introduced a similar, but less generous, scheme three years ago. It’s had 100 applications, 72 of which have been approved. Similar arrangements are already in place in Spain and France. Ironically, in 2008 Kirchner’s government nationalised Argentina’s private pension funds – covering about 85% of Argentinians – in a desperate move to stave off a debt crisis.

Latin American literature is to the 20th century what Russian literature was to the 19th: a source of excellence as unlikely as it is fecund. The continent’s governments have veered between honouring their writers and oppressing them. Before the professionalisation of politics, some Latin American countries would reward its best writers with ambassadorial appointments (Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes is a case in point). Peruvian writer Mario Vargos Llosa came within a hair’s breadth of becoming his country’s president. The Argentine Jorge Luis Borges was director of the Argentina’s National Public Library from 1955, although the position was titular rather than administrative. Legend has it that after Borges published an essay critical of Juan Perón’s regime, the dictator offered Borges a new job running the city abattoirs. Needless to say, Borges politely declined the appointment.

Borges is a giant of literature, it goes without saying. But Argentina’s ever-surreal and self-reflexive literary landscape boasts many other stars: Julio Cortázar (pictured, best known for his novel Hopscotch), Adolfo Bioy Casares (a kind of Latin American Kafka), Ernesto Sabato (whose Tunnel is sadly out of print in English) and Beatriz Guido are just for starters. At the forefront of contemporary Argentinian literature is César Aira, whose imagination is as wild as his output is prolific. His novel The Literary Conference is currently in the running to win a Translated Book Award. It’s about a literary translator turned mad scientist, who decides to take over the world by cloning Carlos Fuentes.

Indigenous artist Richard Bell has revealed that he decided the winner of this year’s prestigious Sulman Prize on the toss of a coin. Bell awarded the prize to Peter Smeeth for his painting, The artist’s fate. Smeeth was reportedly less than impressed by the revelation, admitting, “It’s a bit deflating”. The Sir John Sulman Prize is awarded annually to ‘the best subject/genre painting and/or murals/mural project executed during the two years preceding the [closing] date’. It’s administered by the Art Gallery of NSW, which awards some of Australia’s most prestigious prizes for visual arts, including the Archibald (for portraiture) and the Wynne (for landscape). These two latter are awarded (occasionally to great controversy) by a committee of 11 trustees under the guidance of gallery director Edmund Capon. The Sulman, on the other hand, is determined by a single judge, appointed by Capon.

Richard Bell, who revels in the role of agent provocateur, reportedly compiled his shortlist on the basis that he likes animals, but added that he also felt obliged to break his animal-based method in order to include some of his friends. Defending his method of choosing the winner of the $20,000 prize, he added, “Like every prize, it’s a lottery.” The Sun-Herald reported that, even though winning such a prize can make or break a career, Edmund Capon agrees with the sentiment: ‘'It’s very much a matter of individual taste and instinct and the kind of aesthetic, wit and humour of the individual artist. And I like that.’'

The revelations prompted Crikey’s WH Chong to cite other instances of lotto metaphors for major art prizes: “Kiran Desai, winner of the Man Booker in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss, says: ‘Awards are such a lottery.’ A.S. Byatt, whose novel Possession won the Man Booker in 1990, knows whereof she speaks: ‘I’ve won it and judged it and it’s a lottery.’”

The politics of awards have been much in the news. Locally, the Miles Franklin shortlist raised more than a few eyebrows last week, prompting a personal response from the Wheeler Centre’s Michael Williams: “Suddenly the arbitrary nature of literary awards seems cruel rather than useful.” In the UK, the administrators of the MAN Booker Prize have decided to award a special, posthumour Booker to Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted five times but never won. In a special online poll, about 1000 readers judged her historical novel Master Georgie to be the best of her five Booker-nominated titles (it lost in 1998 to Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam). The special Booker has been derided as a condescending publicity stunt by Robert McCrum. The Guardian’s Sam Jordison denies there was never any conspiracy against Bainbridge, concluding, “Each year [the Booker] is a lottery.”

Last week, we reported that Jennifer Egan had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. We also reported on the kerfuffle prompted by the announcement of the shortlist for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award – a very short shortlist, consisting of three rural, historical stories, all written by men.

Jennifer Egan has prompted more debate about women and letters following comments she made in a Wall Street Journal interview shortly after receiving news of her Pulitzer win. Asked whether women writers tend to understate the importance of their own writing, Egan replied, “Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them … I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.”

In her response, Egan referred to Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Though initially well-received, the novel was subsequently accused of plagiarising widely from chick-lit authors like Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella and Megan McCafferty, authors whose work Egan described as “very derivative and banal”.

Egan’s comments drew opprobrium from various bloggers (“Oh, wow am I pissed. I’m so pissed off I don’t even want to use cutesy exclamation marks to illustrate how pissed off I am”) who argue that chick-lit shouldn’t be dismissed as a second-class form of literature. Writes one defender of the genre: “Is there derivative, poorly written chick lit? Sure. But there’s also derivative, poorly written literary fiction. Slamming an entire genre of novels written by women is unsavory, inaccurate, and akin to the kind of girl-on-girl crime that women should be trying to stop, not perpetuate.”

The stoush takes up an exchange in the Guardian last year which began when DJ Connell called the label “chick-lit” offensive: “When you call a woman a chick you diminish her as a human being and dismiss her as something less than intelligent”. Michele Gorman replied with a defense of the genre: “saying that chick-lit can’t be well-written is a little like saying that pretty girls can’t be smart. It’s ludicrous. And it’s wrong.”

Here’s an overview of the debate from the Millions. In a related article, Egan describes her writing process in candid detail.

Portrait of Miles Franklin via WikiCommons

A warm congratulations to Chris Womersley, Kim Scott and Roger McDonald for yesterday’s announcement that they have been shortlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award. Three wonderful writers who deserve recognition and celebration of their work. Congratulations too, to the other six authors who were earlier included on the award’s longlist for this year.

Literary awards always attract debate and disquiet. Discerning readers will profess their outrage that Proust never won a Nobel, or that they couldn’t understand how Vernon God Little won a Booker. That’s the point. A good literary award is one that gets readers arguing and thinking, engaging with the books on offer and being introduced to authors they may not have read. Controversy, you might reasonably think, is the friend of the literary award. But not always. Hot on the heels of this year’s shortlist announcement, Australia’s highest profile literary award appears doomed to be mired in a fresh brouhaha.

The terms of Franklin’s bequest state that the prize shall go to the work of the highest literary merit that “reflects Australian life in any of its phases”. Many of the arguments surrounding the award in the past have concerned the parameters of these terms, including instances of judges admitting to counting pages set on Australian soil to determine ‘Australianness’. Famously, Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days and Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously were both deemed ‘insufficiently Australian’ for consideration, despite Australian protagonists and sensibilities.

In 1973, only half a dozen books were entered for the award and not one was of sufficient quality for the judges to deem it Miles Franklin-worthy. For the first time since its inception, there was no award given. The same thing happened ten years later in 1983. Kate Ahearne, in Australian Book Review, argued that the decision “cast more serious doubts on the value of the award itself than on the quality of the novels being produced by Australian writers”. The Miles Franklin Award is a phenomenal cultural asset but in just over half a century of shifting fortunes, stoushes and scandals, perhaps the biggest controversy to dog the award is its failure to gain the recognition and relevance it deserves.

And this year, the judges have elected to nominate a shortlist of only three titles, half the conventional list. In and of itself, this should be unremarkable. Surely it is the judges’ prerogative to declare as many books worthy of consideration as they see fit. But it seems to me the problem here springs from an internal inconsistency. If nine titles were stand-out enough to be included as a longlist of viable candidates, how is it that six of them then fail to make the cut through to the next stage? Suddenly the arbitrary nature of literary awards seems cruel rather than useful.

The truncated shortlist is only part of what has attracted outcry in response to this year’s selection. All three shortlisted authors are men (just as they were two years ago). In the 53 years that the Award has been given, only 9 different women have received the prize (with both Thea Astley and Jessica Anderson clocking up multiple wins). There are definitely questions to be asked about gender and the Miles Franklin Award, and many will rightly be asking them (such as here and here). But a look at previous winners suggests that the prize’s overwhelming masculine tendencies are a symptom of something broader.

The definition of ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ that has consistently been favoured by successive judging panels is one with a bias towards the historical, towards the rural, towards the Anglo. If our notion of a ‘sufficiently Australian’ novel adheres to these constraints – to a sunburnt country and its battlers – then it’s little wonder judges tend to favour male stories. The readers of Miles Franklin Award-winning titles predominantly live in Australia’s cities (in the present day, no less!). Statistics would suggest they’re overwhelmingly women too. Shame they have so rarely seen winners telling stories that feel like their own.

So where does that leave us? If awards are inevitably tainted by subjectivity and should be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism, why pay any attention to them? Why should we on the one hand congratulate the shortlisted, and on the other bemoan the choices we disagree with? The shortlist is the point. In the shortlist, an award has its opportunity to highlight the breadth of talent and imagination on offer from our extraordinary writers. Those books, and their writers, are out there.

Michael Williams is head of programming at the Wheeler Centre. Many years ago, he did his honours thesis on the Miles Franklin Award. His opinions are his own. The Miles Franklin Award winner will be announced at the State Library of Victoria on June 22.

(Click to watch video.)

After the extraordinary outcomes of the 2010 Federal Election, Australian voters, pundits and politicians alike are asking the same questions: what happened? Where does this apparent disillusionment come from? What’s wrong with our political system and what kind of constitutional change is needed to fix it?

In this discussion hosted by the ABC’s Fran Kelly, held at RMIT’s Storey Hall in Melbourne, former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser joined fellow pollies Lindsay Tanner and Malcolm Turnbull and veteran journalist Margaret Simons to interrogate political leadership and the party machines, candidate preselection and governmental debate, as well as the need for a nuanced, principled approach to moral issues. If Australian democracy is broken, what significant changes must be made?

All panellists criticised the interaction between the media and politicians, with Tanner likening contemporary politicians' behaviour on-camera to theatre, and Simons (channelling the advice of media academic Jay Rosen) proposing that the media take its lead from the public rather than the politicians. Former PM Malcolm Fraser championed a reform of the party preselection process, recalling an era when more — not fewer — candidates were encouraged to throw their hats into the ring. Tanner suggested members of the Parliamentary Executive should be made accountable to members of specialist committees, while Turnbull argued that Question Time should be devoted to particular ministers, allowing a more forensic approach to questioning.

The panel also fielded questions from the audience about topics such as Wikileaks and transparency, and the restrictions politicians face in enacting their strongly-held moral beliefs within their parties.

Is Australian democracy broken? And if so, how do we fix it?

(Click to watch video.)

Earlier this week we reported on a new campaign by Clubs Australia opposing proposed reforms to pokies venues. As part of the campaign, an ad depicted two Aussie blokes having a quiet beer and a quick flutter, agog at the idea of having a daily spend limit on the pokies habit. “It’s un-Australian,” gasps one in horror. Stoic, sports-loving, beer-drinking, emotion-hiding, hard-working, authority-bucking, laconic – this is the stereotype of Australian masculinity.

But does reality conform to the fantasy? All week we’ve been taking a good, hard look in the mirror of Australia’s national identity. In The Sentimental Bloke – the first in our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series of videos to be published over the next few days – Michael Cathcart, Craig Sherborne, Anne Summers and Craig Reucassel debate the finer points of the what it means to be a bloke in today’s Australia. Where are our templates of masculinity formed, and how true to life are they? How has the face of Australian fatherhood changed since decades past, and why? Do our nation’s traditionally ‘male’ pastimes and occupations still ring true? And will you be drinking beer or wine?

Today, Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, launched a resource centre for Muslim women. The Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights will be run by the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council of Victoria. It will be staffed by Muslim women, providing advice on issues specific to the needs of women belonging to Australian’s Muslim community.

Yesterday, a survey commissioned by the Victorian Council of Social Service reported that an overwhelming majority of respondents agreed that workers in the community sector are underpaid. On a similar theme, an Essential Report survey released earlier this week indicated an overwhelming majority of respondents supported the notion that the corporate sector shoulder more of the burden for returning the federal budget to surplus. Only one in five respondents supported cutting welfare to the same end.

All week, the Wheeler Centre has run a series on Australia’s national identity in conjunction with ABC Radio National under the banner ‘Who the Bloody Hell Are We?’. Last night we heard Stuart McIntyre, Monica Dux, Melissa Lucashenko, David Manne and chair Damien Carrick discuss the concept of the ‘Fair Go’ in contemporary Australia.

The series ‘Who the Bloody Hell Are We?’ culminates this evening with the event, Our World Class Culture. The event will be chaired by Natasha Mitchell and features Jim Davidson, Mary Vallentine and Don Watson.

We’ll publish a video/podcast of the first event in this series, The Sentimental Bloke, tomorrow. Keep an eye out for more videos and podcasts of these events over the next few days, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Image of Keel’s Simple Diary covers via WikiCommons

Though often derided, the diary is a distinguished literary form as well as a source of consolation. A new website seeks to publish extracts of diaries and letters penned by current and former adolescents to alleviate the loneliness felt by many teens.

The Open Book Project is designed to remind teenagers that the intense emotions many of them experience are commonly felt across the board. “By sharing a page of your teenage diary,” says the website, “today’s teenagers will know that, no matter where life takes you, there are similar things we all experience when growing up.” The project is auspiced by Reach, which specialises in adolescent mental health.

As part of the website’s launch, extracts have been published of the Victorian Premier’s diary, written when Ted Baillieu was an 8 year-old. Each one of the 8 year-old’s days begins very matter of factly with getting up. Jim Stynes, a founding partner of the project, submitted a 1980 diary extract that records a “blazing row” following a break-up with a girlfriend, then a James Bond film – we assume it was Moonraker.

The diary has proven fertile ground for literature, especially for British literature – indeed it’s arguably a literary genre of its own. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is written in diary form. Many readers of a certain age will be reminded of a diary that helped them through their adolescence – Adrian Mole’s teenage years were memorably recorded for posterity by Sue Townsend. Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is written in diary form; Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones was a famously keen diarist, as was Barbara Covett, the narrator of Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal.

In US literature, Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie is written in diary form and Chuck Palahniuk’s 2003 novel Diary is just that. Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s magisterial Savage Detectives begins and ends searingly in diary form.

Samuel Pepys often wins arguments about who is the greatest real diarist. Anne Frank needs no introduction as a diarist of precocious talent, but Brian Eno possibly does – he’s a surprisingly lively writer. Readers of The London Review of Books have followed Alan Bennett’s diary for years. At the other end of the spectrum, Julia Cameron has spawned an entire industry with The Artist’s Way.

Readers wanting a sample of diary writing across the ages could do worse than read The Assassin’s Cloak. This anthology of diary entries, organised by calendar day, proves that, far from being a poor cousin, diary writing stands shoulder to shoulder with other forms of literature. The title is from a quote by William Soutar, who became one of literature’s greatest diarists even though he was bed-ridden – evidence that a great diarist doesn’t necessarily need to lead an eventful life. Soutar wrote, “A diary is an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen.”

Can you add to our list? Who are your favourite diarists? What’s your favourite diary-novel? Do you keep a diary? How often do you write in it? What kind of diary do you prefer?

Leave a comment below and join the conversation.

There has been much speculation about social media’s potential in bringing about social change. The discussion has been brought to the fore by the upheavals sweeping the Arab world. As previously reported in the Dailies, social media has played a central role in organising protests in Egypt – to the extent that the parents of one little girl born during the revolution named their daughter Facebook. In 2010, Malcolm Gladwell was doubtful about social media’s potential as an agent for change, but other commentators disagree.

But in today’s The Conversation, UNSW Professor in Modern Film and Literature Julian Murphet writes that social media wasn’t the catalyst for change. If anything, he argues, social media is simply the endpoint of a process that begins with literature: “What appears simple and “in the moment” — the inexplicable imperative to act — has in fact been elaborately prepared for by generations of writers.”

We’ve previously looked at the role poetry has played in the events that toppled Hosni Mubarak’s regime, and Murphet develops the theme. To illustrate his point, he reminds us of the Iraqi journalist who hurled a shoe at George W. Bush as an act of political protest – Murphet calls him “the famous shoe-thrower of Baghdad”. Quoting a 20 year-old poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Murphet writes, “The spontaneous hurling of footwear, and the polished cadences of Darwish’s sombre yet defiant elegy, are two aspects, two velocities, two moments, of the same fundamental movement.”

Murphet argues that the light of political liberation is one that is passed down from one generation to the next: “This is a labour of infinite patience, often life-long obscurity, of thankless and punishing self-scrutiny and criticism … But it waits its time. And when that time comes, suddenly those shadowy, indefensible, whispering words are shouted in the streets to topple tyrants and install the basic conditions of human decency.”

The pokies hotels and clubs industry is set to launch a $20 million campaign to oppose proposed poker machines reform. Clubs Australia’s campaign, to be launched today, aims to scuttle reforms proposed by independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie by calling them “un-Australian”. The campaign website features a conversation between two mates having a quiet beer and “quick flutter” after a hard day at work. The ad concludes with one of the mates delcaring that a licence to gamble is un-Australian. There are versions of the website in Vietnamese, Korean and Mandarin too.

Andrew Wilkie’s support of the government is contingent on the passing of the reforms, which among other measures will introduce a daily spend limit at pokies clubs. Independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor are unlikely to support the reform, while Bob Katter is in favour. The government, which needs Wilkie’s support to hold on to power, has until May 2012 to strike a deal with states and territories on pokies reform.

This week the Wheeler Centre is running a series of four events four nights under the title, Who the Bloody Hell Are We? The series kicks off tonight with the event, The Sentimental Bloke.

Image of crucifix via WikiCommons

Update, Friday April 8: All week we’ve been talking about the division of religion and state, particularly in relation to education. We ran the original story (below) on Tuesday with a follow-up on Thursday. Today, two more reports of note have added grist to the mill. In the first, The Age reports that the Victorian government has increased funding to Access Ministries, the primary provider of special religious instruction in public schools – the Access Ministries website also publishes this defense of the teaching of Christianity in state education. Secondly, Bob Carr has blogged today on the case for withdrawing funding for school chaplains.

Original story, published Tuesday April 5 The relationship between church and state is a debate that has caused less angst throughout Australia’s history than in many other places, but the issue is still alive and kicking. In the lead up to Easter, it seems that religion is preoccupying the zeitgeist once again. This week’s headlines were dominated by a ban on Easter egg hunts in childcare centres. In Fairfax’s National Times on Monday, education editor Jewel Topsfield argued that religion has no place being taught in state school classrooms. Meanwhile, the Victorian government moved to ban Easter Mass 11, a heavy metal event headlined by Sydney band Jesus Christ scheduled for the Northcote Social Club on Good Friday. The title of Catherine Deveny’s Comedy Festival show God is Bullshit speaks for itself.

British philospoher AC Grayling’s new book, The Good Book: A Secular Bible, sets out the philosophical rationale for an atheism that argues its own case – sometimes called militant atheism by critics. It’s the latest in a line – perhaps an emerging tradition – of British anti-theist writing, which notably includes Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Grayling rejects the pejorative ‘militant atheism’ as paradoxical: “How can you be a militant atheist?” he asks. “It’s like sleeping furiously.”

The Wheeler Centre and the St James Ethics Centre are hosting the next Intelligence Squared debate on Tuesday 24th May at the Melbourne Town Hall. The motion of this debate will be, ‘That public funding of private education is unconscionable.’