Are you an artist (aspiring, working, ‘working’ or otherwise) in need of a little inspiration? Well, you might like to go back to school, to hear Neil Gaiman’s recent address to students at the Philadelphia School of Arts.
The whole address is well worth watching, but we’d like to share some selected highlights from his speech. (The headings are ours.)
When you start a career in the arts you have no idea what you’re doing. This is great.
People who know what they’re doing know the rules and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not and you should not.
The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible. And you can. If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.
If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.
I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions and simply go out and find out how the world works.
And besides, to do those things I needed to learn how to write, and how to write well. I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, and on deadline.
I learned to write by writing.
You need to learn to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive.
A freelance life in the arts is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money or love.
And you have to accept that you may put out hundreds of things for every bottle that winds up coming back.
If you make mistakes, you’re out there doing something.
Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong. In life, in love, in business and in friendship, in health … and in all the other ways life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art.
Husband runs off with a politician? make good art … IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.
Make it on the bad days; make it on the good days too.
The moment where you feel that just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment where you may be starting to get it right.
The things I’ve done that have worked the best were the ones I was least certain about.
What would be the fun in making something you knew would work?
People get hired because, somehow, they get hired.
People keep working in a freelance world because the work is good, because they’re easy to get along with and because they deliver it on time.
And you don’t even need to do all three. Two out of three is fine.
Nothing I did where the only reason I did it was for the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.
The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them become a reality have never let me down and I’ve never regretted the time I’ve spent on any of them.
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.
Hannah Kent, deputy editor of Kill Your Darlings, has spent time living and writing in Iceland, the setting for her forthcoming debut novel, over the past eight years.
The Australian visit of one of Iceland’s leading literary lights, Sjón, is just days away. Hannah provides a perfect introduction to Icelandic literature – and Sjón in particular – in this passionate appreciation.
Hannah Kent
There is an Icelandic riddle that asks: ‘What in the house keeps silent and yet speaks to all?’ The answer? A book. It is a maxim that is revealing of Iceland’s profound respect for and love of the written word. A small island, its coast of black sand washed on all sides by the cold waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, Iceland’s nationhood has, in many ways, been built on a reverence for language; its heritage is unquestionably literary.
Books, reading and storytelling have not only long been part of Icelandic cultural traditions, but arguably comprise its cultural landscape. The Icelandic sagas (Íslendingasögur), medieval prose histories relating the lives of the Norse and Celtic inhabitants of Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries, form the nation’s cultural backbone. Landmarks of world literature, with many of the manuscripts preserved to this day, the sagas are ‘the great foundation myths’ of Iceland; singularly responsible for threading the country’s mythologies and historical traditions through the generations.
For hundreds of years Icelandic households gathered in the evenings during the dark grip of winter for kvöldvaka, where a member of the family would read aloud to amuse the others as they turned their hands to chores: knitting, fulling wool, mending tools. Recitation and contemplation of the sagas, many of which were known by heart, and readings of devotional books, newspapers and – in later years – published books of folktales, not only helped pass the snow-locked hours before sleep, but cultivated the education of Iceland’s people.
Unlike its European and Scandinavian neighbours, Iceland’s population achieved almost total literacy before 1800 – a remarkable feat for a country that, even after 1800, possessed only one school. As Uno Von Troil, a traveller to Iceland in 1772, remarked in his journal:
‘You will seldom find a peasant who besides being well-instructed in the principles of religion, is not also acquainted with the history of his country, which proceeds from the frequent reading of the traditional histories (sagas) wherein consists their principal amusement’.
This sentiment was supported by Sir George Steuart MacKenzie, who travelled to Iceland in 1810 – ‘the literary character of the people is doubtless the most extraordinary and peculiar’. He was struck by the fact that literature could thrive amongst a community ‘so oppressed by all the severities of soil and climate, and secluded amidst the desolation and destructive operations of nature’.
In modern times there has been little sign that Icelanders’ love affair with the book and with storytelling is diminishing. Reykjavík, the country’s capital, was appointed as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2011, in recognition of its ‘outstanding literary history with its invaluable heritage of ancient medieval literature’, and ‘the central role literature plays within the modern urban landscape, the contemporary society and the daily life of its citizens’. Despite the fact that these citizens amount to only 317,000, the country continues to publish the most books per capita in the world – the equivalent of five books each year for every 1,000 citizens – and has produced a vast number of internationally known writers, including 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Halldór Laxness. Other, more contemporary Icelanders to achieve international acclaim include Arnaldur Indriðason (2005 winner of the Golden Dagger Award) and Yrsa Sigurðardottir, both crime writers, and Nordic Council Literature Prize winners, Thor Vilhjálmsson, Einar Már Guðmundsson and Sjón.
Sjón cuts a distinctive figure in Iceland’s cultural landscape
Sjón (born in 1962 as Sigurjón Sigurðsson) is perhaps most emblematic of the vibrancy and originality that can be found in the contemporary Icelandic literary scene. At only 16 years of age he published his first poems, and a few years later he formed the surrealist poetry group, Medusa, with other artists. Now the author of seven novels and many collections of poetry, Sjón has applied his creativity in other areas: establishing the record label Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), and collaborating with Lars Von Trier and Björk on the lyrics for Dancer in the Dark. His literary abilities and interests are manifold and reflected in the style of his work; from the precise, controlled lyricism of his novel The Blue Fox (Skugga Baldur, 2005) – where a priest hunts an enigmatic blue fox through a wintered landscape and a naturalist finds a young girl shackled to a ship wreck – to the stream-of-conscious surrealism of his most recent publication, From the Mouth of the Whale.
From the Mouth of the Whale (Rökkurbýsnir, published in Icelandic in 2008, and translated into English by Victoria Cribb in 2011), is, like Sjón, representative of the way in which Icelandic literature today coalesces the country’s rich history with modern sensibilities. It is the story of Jónas the Learned, a self-taught naturalist and healer who has been sentenced for sorcery and necromancy, outlawed to Gullbjörn’s Island in 1635. Shortlisted for the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, From the Mouth of the Whale is a portrait of seventeenth-century post-Reformation Iceland: a bleak island shrouded in poverty, mysticism and superstition, just as the bright light of science is dawning upon the world. It is a novel where tradition is amalgamated with discovery.
From the Mouth of the Whale – or Rökkurbýsnir, if you’re Icelandic
The Iceland represented by Sjón, as Jónas narrates his story to a lone sandpiper, similarly teeters between the magical and the known: ravens’ heads are roasted and their brains picked apart in search of bezoars; a solar eclipse drives peasants to despair and madness; the ghost of a parson’s son runs riot until it is exorcised with poetry; whalers are massacred; and corpses are invaded by the Devil, who ‘rides the deceased like a cruel jockey driving his horse’. Sjón’s prose is at once intensely surrealist and peculiarly charming, and – like so many Icelandic authors – he plays with the myths, history and folktales of his country. Just as Jónas breathlessly exclaims, ‘Every book is imbued with a human spirit,’ so are Sjón’s novels imbued with a spirited appreciation and exploration of language and Icelandic literary culture.
In a 2011 interview with David Shariatmadari from the Guardian, Sjón acknowledged Icelanders’ need for storytelling: ‘In a small country, you really feed your identity with stories. Nobody else is … looking at you, so the only people you can assume are interested in who you are, and where you come from, and where you’re going is yourself and your people. So you’re very much reliant on the story of your origin…’ It’s a philosophy and a recognition that, as Reykjavík’s City of Literature site suggests, ‘the art of the word is the strongest thread in Iceland’s cultural history’. It is what holds Iceland together as a nation, what connects it to its past. As Jónas exclaims in From the Mouth of the Whale:
‘And so it is with all the far-fetched tales […] of this world with their uncouth exclamations about endless nights, burning snow, whales the size of mountains, trumpet blasts of the dead from volcanoes and icebergs, witches who can sell sailors a favourable wind or send their sons to the moon; in some strange way they come close to the stories that we ordinary, humble folk tell ourselves in an attempt to comprehend our existence here and make it more bearable.’
Hannah Kent is deputy editor of Kill Your Darlings, and teaches at Flinders University. She recently received the 2011 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for her manuscript, Burial Rites, which tells the story of the last woman to be executed in Iceland.
Sjón will be in conversation with Alan Brough next Monday 14 May, in a double bill with Roddy Doyle and Blanche Clark at the Comedy Theatre, 6.30pm–9.30pm. Tickets $35. Book now.
In this week’s Working with Words, we talk to writer, cultural historian and Long View essayist Maria Tumarkin about writing, the value of self-doubt and teaching creative non-fiction.
Maria Tumarkin: ‘Don’t fight doubt … Writers who do not doubt themselves are charlatans (with a few notable exceptions).’
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
An article on sleep called ‘Stranger in the Night’ published in Meanjin in 1999 by the wonderful Stephanie Holt, who also published my second piece of writing – this one was about a baby born in the eye of Cyclone Tracy – the following year.
What’s the best part of your job?
Undoubtedly, the best part is doing my own thing. I’ve always craved independence, which is why I hated being a child. I just love it that these days I am beholden to one.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Constantly worrying about money. When will it be possible for writers to survive in Australia? This is a rhetorical question, I know, but really, when?
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
Deciding (not that long ago) that writing is what I do, that this is who I am.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
Best advice: the difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write.
Worst advice: Do market research.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
That I am reluctant to divulge personal information in my writing. If only.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Making documentaries, although I am not particularly good at teamwork.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
I teach creative non-fiction at Writers Victoria once a month and it feels like an honest job. You recognise people, who have something important to say and you encourage them to say it. You treat people’s words and ideas with respect. You discuss books that will outlive all of us. You make sure you don’t pontificate or lecture. It really is okay.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Don’t fight doubt. Accept it as part of the process. Writers who do not doubt themselves are charlatans (with a few notable exceptions).
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
70% from bookshops, 30% online.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? What would you talk about?
Hmmm…. I don’t know. I haven’t been reading much fiction lately, have been too excited by narrative non-fiction.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
In the spirit of evasion, let me tell you of a book that made a huge impression on me this year – it is Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet. By the time he wrote this book, Judt, who was suffering from a motor neuron disease, was completely immobilised. He would compose parts of the book in his head and then dictate them. It’s incredible. Similarly, Christopher Hitchens’s essays in his final year have made an indelible impression. Two great men, who wrote till the very last moment. You have to bow to that.
Maria Tumarkin’s essay, ‘A Sentimental Yoke’, on ‘unsentimental’ writing and why we praise it, is the latest in our Long View series, featuring long-form literary criticism by some of Australia’s best writers.
Anna Krien is one of Australia’s most exciting young writers. Her first book, Into the Woods, was shortlisted for numerous literary prizes; she is now working on her second. Anna will talk about her new Quarterly Essay, Us and Them, at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday night.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
I think the first piece was a teen angst poem which I entered in a ‘world poetry competition’ when I was 14, which turned out to be a total scam where everyone who entered the comp was either a winner or ‘highly recommended’ – meaning you had to pay 80 bucks to receive your published work (pay another three grand, and you get to go to USA to read your poem aloud!) So… that doesn’t count.
My first proper paid publication was for Voiceworks, a magazine for under-25s, who accepted a poem (it was called ‘Chasing Buttercups with Wings of Corrugated Tin’, or something like that) when I was 19. That was a pretty poignant moment, as I went on to be part of the magazine’s editorial committee, where I met some of my closest writerly friends.
What’s the best part of your job?
My job? Do I have a job?
What’s the worst part of your job?
There was this one time, years ago, when a magazine stalled paying me for two features – that sucked. But I got my own back. I offered to write another feature, then on deadline, withheld it and asked for my money. They eventually paid but I refused to file anyway. I gave it to the Big Issue instead. Ha!
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
Murder Your Darlings. Best and worst advice by far.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Sometimes I daydream about being a gardener, or a vet’s assistant. Something hands on and practical.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
That’s a tough one. I did a professional writing degree at Deakin University and loved it. I had brilliant lecturers and tutors, met great people and learnt a lot. At the same time, I think I would’ve been a writer regardless – and maybe that’s the key, a writing course can be incredibly helpful and perhaps even crucial to developing one’s craft if you’re already on your way to becoming a writer.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Both.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? (And what would you talk about?)
Maybe Mersault from The Outsider – then we can just laze around, have sex, eat some nice cheese, go for a swim, catch a film maybe. Keep it simple. Talking is overrated.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Catch 22, by Joseph Heller. I saw the world anew after I read Catch 22. The ridiculousness of bureaucracy can be applied everywhere – not just in the army as Heller portrayed.
Plus there’s the beautiful absurdity of the main character Yossarian’s conundrum.
He can’t complete the required number of army air combat missions because the army keeps upping the limit on required missions, and the army doctor will not ground him for insanity, unless he asks. The problem being that if Yossarian asks to be grounded, it’s obvious that he must be perfectly sane.
Enough said.
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.
Geordie Williamson is one of Australia’s most respected (and most compulsively readable) reviewers. He is chief literary critic of the Australian and won last year’s prestigious Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year.
Geordie’s essay in defence of Australian rural writing, ‘Our Common Ground’, is the second in the Wheeler Centre’s Long View series of critical essays on Australian writers and writing.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
I was seven or eight. It was a short story about American Indians that appeared in our local paper, The Grenfell Record. Looking back I can only wonder at how starved for copy they must have been.
What’s the best part of your job?
The chance to publicly communicate personal passions.
What’s the worst part of your job?
The grinding relentlessness of rolling deadlines.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing and reviewing career so far?
Winning last year’s Pascall Prize for criticism was great, and not just for the prize-money. I passed the inaugural Pascall winner, David Malouf, on my way to collect the award at last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Now there is a writer to try and live up to.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about book reviewing?
Best advice? Always come in on word count – editors loathe overrun.
Worst advice? When I was thinking of starting a family, Irish author Anne Enright told me that children don’t interfere with writing. And yet, behind me as I type, my 11-month old son is enthusiastically un-shelving entire rows of books.
If you weren’t making your living by writing and reviewing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I spent half a decade cataloguing rare books and manuscripts in London, and would happily return to it. Bookselling is not so much a career as a life-long treasure-hunt.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
Certain technical aspects of the craft can be taught – and the discipline and group support it offers are helpful. But the lonely place where true writers go to get words that sing on the page? Courses can’t help with that, and may well be a hindrance.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a book reviewer?
Don’t! Reviewing has the same financial instability and quiet desperation of the creative writer’s craft – just without the novelist’s redeeming cultural cachet.
If you can’t help yourself, however: read as widely as you can, never work for free (your labour has dignity), find your own favourite critics and read all their stuff, and (politely, strategically) don’t take no for an answer when approaching outlets for work.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I get sent a lot of books by publishers. But when I’m buying for myself , I use a combination of Kindle Store for digital titles and abe.com for physical books (I tend to buy the kind that are out of print).
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? (And what would you talk about?)
I would like to join Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantegruel, along with Panurge and Brother Jean, for a meal. The booze would be plentiful and I would be keen to hear their views on contemporary Australian politics.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
That’s impossible to answer. This week I have finished Patrick White’s lost novel, The Hanging Garden. It reminds me that the ongoing discovery of the Australian continent through literature is one of the few undertakings that goes some way to making reparation for our presence here, so often unwelcome and destructive.
You can read Geordie’s essay in defence of Australian rural writing, ‘Our Common Ground’, or watch him in conversation with Alex Miller, both on our website.
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?’
Janette Turner Hospital has lived in parallel worlds for most of her life. Born in Melbourne, she moved to Queensland, where she was raised, at an early age. Hers was a cloistered fundamentalist Christian family. At home, ‘where just about everything was forbidden’, there was no television or radio, but instead, nightly Bible readings.
At school, she found it hard to adjust to the outside world. ‘There was a full range of vocabulary I knew nothing about, so I felt like an alien. From my earliest days at school I had to become a very acute observer to figure out how to behave and fit in. So I guess that set the pattern for my life.’
That early outsider’s status, coupled with the ability to move between very different worlds and learn the language and social codes of each, seems like the perfect writer’s toolkit.
‘The rule for living in two worlds is to keep things separate, because everything you need to know to function in one world is counterproductive to survival in the other, and vice versa,’ muses one of her characters, Mishka, from her latest novel, Orpheus Lost (2007).
Outsiders who move between worlds recur often in Turner Hospital’s eight novels and three short-story collections. Her characters are always watching, taking mental notes.
In Orpheus Lost, Turner Hospital marries the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with the horrors of rendition and Abu Ghraib; Mishka is drawn into the world of Islamic fundamentalists. In a neat reversal of the myth, it is up to his lover, Leela, to somehow rescue him from his underground prison. In Due Preparations from the Plague (2003), another literary thriller with political and terrorist themes, the main character, Lowell, is set on a posthumous quest into his CIA agent father’s dark past, accessing his father’s shadow life.
Turner Hospital has lived all over the world with her husband, academic Clifford Hospital, including India, Canada, France and the United States. All these settings have found their way into her novels – though it is Queensland (where ‘psychically, I feel at home’) that most often works its way through.
The Last Magician (1992) is, to my mind, her masterpiece. Along with Oyster (1996), about a religious cult in outback Queensland, it is her most Australian novel. A mystery wrapped in a riddle, folded into an enigma: that’s The Last Magician.
At its core is a dark secret shared by four childhood friends: two misfits (Charlie, the son of Chinese emigrants, and wild girl Cat) and two golden-haired children of the elite (closet rebel Catherine and conformist Robbie). They are bound by secret trauma – and joy. We see events mostly through the eyes of brilliant Lucy, a former university student now working a double life as a barmaid (downstairs) and a prostitute (upstairs) at Charlie’s Sydney pub.
There are secrets, unexpected connections and missing people everywhere; Lucy is our guide between the parallel worlds of the upper and under classes and Charlie’s bar is where they mix. Charlie, an artist and photographer, offers clues through his work. Turner Hospital’s fascinating descriptions of his films and photographs evoke those of fellow literary-mystery writer Siri Hustvedt, in her wonderful novel of artists in New York, What I Loved.
‘Charlie believed the world was thick with messages, you could hardly move for secret codes in Charlie’s world,’ reflects Lucy, who is drawn into Charlie’s obsessions. Turner Hospital’s fiction is rife with codes for the reader to unfurl; they leave room, too, for multiple interpretations, just as life does.
Those codes include literary and artistic references: Dante’s Inferno is central to The Last Magician, as the Orpheus myth is to Orpheus Lost; Due Preparations for the Plague is Turner Hospital’s Decameron; one of the stories in her latest book, Forecast: Turbulence (2011) takes its title (and central idea), ‘The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman’, from King Lear. She says this is partly due to her Christian upbringing (‘where everything had allegorical meaning’) and partly to her MA in Medieval Studies (medievalists ‘saw allegory everywhere’ too). ‘It just seems to happen willy-nilly with me, because I got used to seeing the world that way.’
One of the joys of reading Turner Hospital is the intellectual adventure: the way she draws on art and literature and politics, bringing them together in conversation with each other – and dramatising them with intricately imagined characters.
‘In the Sunshine State, we resist shadow. We don’t believe in darkness,’ writes Turner Hospital in ‘Moon River’, the memoir-essay that closes Forecast Turbulence. Her tongue, of course, is planted firmly in her cheek. She gives a more pointed, poetic version of her Queensland in The Last Magician: ‘The rainforest smells of seduction and fermentation and death. It smells of Queensland.’
In recent years, Turner Hospital has taken to America’s South as a setting for her fiction, including several stories in Forecast: Turbulence. It appears in Due Preparations for the Plague and is the childhood home of Orpheus Lost’s Leela – whose father is devastated when she ‘crosses over’ to the enemy territory of the north.
‘I joke in South Carolina that I grew up in the state, except it was in Australia,’ Turner Hospital says. South Carolina reminds her of Queensland in many ways, including the climate, the politics (reminiscent of the Bjelke-Peterson era) and the racial divide. The prevalence of fundamentalist Christianity (‘a phenomenon’) in America’s South also reminded her of Queensland, and the fundamentalist community of her youth.
In Forecast: Turbulence, the two worlds come together in one story. In ‘Republic of Outer Barcoo’, a teenage girl guards the office of her father’s declared outback republic (based on the potent combination of guns and religion) and encounters a handsome Hugh Jackman type who offers the possibility of escape. It’s an intriguing literal juxtaposition of the American South with rural Queensland: the girl and her father have fled Georgia, then Texas in Waco-style shoot-outs – and ended up here, where they’ve attracted local members. ‘I’m all for secession,’ says the Hugh Jackman type. ‘I’ve signed up for the militia.’
The collection is rich with Turner Hospital’s hallmarks: obsession, absences, dreams so vivid they blur the boundaries with real life, people who are not what they seem. Perhaps it’s that last one that is most potent. Sometimes, the unknown is benign, even healing, as when sons find secret reserves of affection in their fathers (which happens more than once in Hospital’s fiction). But there is also the potential for horror. The charming, attentive drama teacher is a paedophile. The bland next-door neighbour at the Hamptons summer house is a serial killer. A persistent ex-employer invades a man’s fantasy life in the most torturous way possible.
‘There are many things people don’t know that they know,’ says Lucy in The Last Magician. This idea pops up in Forecast: Turbulence, too. ‘I didn’t realise I knew,’ says Katie, the daughter of the paedophile, ‘Not until afterwards. Then I realised I did know.’
In her storytelling, Turner Hospital confronts us with some of that knowledge we would prefer – as individuals and as a society – to block out.
Yet she is hopeful, too, as she has reiterated to interviewers over the years.
‘Every short story, every novel ends with the belief that there is a path out of there, you just have to find it,’ she told the Australian’s Stephen Romei recently. ‘It’s just what I insist on believing in, otherwise life is too dark.’
By Jo Case, senior writer/editor at the Wheeler Centre.
Janette Turner Hospital will be in conversation with Jo Case in a free event at the Wheeler Centre this Thursday 1 March at 6.15pm. Bookings are recommended.
Working with Words is a new Wheeler Centre web series, where we’ll talk to writers and publishing folk about their work – and other bookish things. This time, we talk to Booker Prize-winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst.
Alan Hollinghurst shot to a new stratosphere of literary fame when he won the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty, his elegantly satirical social comedy about Thatcher’s Britain, in 2004. But he’d long had a devoted following among readers who’d been devouring his novels about gay life in the UK since his ‘sex-drenched’ debut The Swimming Pool Library. His latest book, The Stranger’s Child, traces the growing fame of an early-20th century poet across the generations, and in so doing dramatises the development of gay culture in Britain.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
A poem in the Listener magazine in 1974. I had just won the Newdigate Poetry Prize at Oxford, and this felt like the beginning of a career as a poet; but it wasn’t to be, and I haven’t written a poem now for 25 years.
What’s the best part of your job?
Being self-reliant, free to invent, and master of my own time.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Having nothing to fall back on, getting stuck, rushing to meet deadlines.
What’s the best (or worst) advice about writing you’ve received?
The best advice: read, read, read.
Do you read your own reviews? If so, how do you approach them? If not, why?
I read all of them, unless particularly warned off by a kind friend: there’s no point in upsetting oneself by reading abuse. But I’m interested in how my books are received, and as I bring one out so rarely the interest (to me) is greater. As I get older I’m less vulnerable, and capable of reviewing my reviewers fairly objectively. I’ve been a reviewer myself for over 30 years, so I know what’s going on.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Other than temporary teaching jobs, the only permanent job I’ve had was as an editor on the Times Literary Supplement, which I did for 14 years before leaving to follow a freelance career. If I’d not been able to leave, I expect I would still be working in that field.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
Creativity can’t be induced out of nothing, but where it exists it can of course be nurtured. Writing is a craft whose techniques can be instilled and enhanced in a receptive student. We could all do with writing better.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I enjoy the virtuous feeling of supporting my (excellent) local independent bookshop, and paying full price; but after a few drinks in the evening I forget my principles and order books at huge discounts online. I also buy second-hand books heavily through abebooks.com, whose existence is one of the great transforming blessings of the internet era.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Probably a school anthology called Fifteen Poets: Chaucer to Arnold, which I read exhaustively in my adolescence, and which created tastes, particularly for Romantic and Victorian poetry, that have stayed with me ever since and I suspect have become subconscious models of form, rhythm and euphony to me in my own writing. I still have swathes of Tennyson by heart.
Alan Hollinghurst will be in conversation with Michael Williams at the Athenaeum Theatre at 7.30pm on Friday 2 March. Tickets are $20 or $10 concession. You can book your tickets online.
Chris Flynn writes about the weirdness of becoming an author. Especially when you’ve been making your living as a reviewer – and now it’s your turn to be reviewed.
It’s fairly odd being a debut novelist at the best of times. You have a book coming out! You must be so excited! So, what’s the next one about? Is that a Lamborghini? It’s even stranger when you’ve spent the past few years panning everyone else’s work in the review pages of newspapers and magazines, as I have.
In the Australian literary diaspora (that makes it sound a lot bigger than it is) many writers earn a modest crust penning reviews and much has been written and publicly discussed about the weaknesses in our critical culture.
Chris Flynn: ‘The debut novelist should not be afraid of criticism.’
Are we honest with each other, or is there a lot of hand-holding that goes on, a lot of back-patting and mutual arse-kissing? I guess I’m about to test the theory. Will everyone get stuck into my book and tear it apart, or be extra nice about it just in case I end up reviewing theirs at some point? (Ooh, the tension!)
What happens if they eviscerate it in a review and then bump into me at an event? Will I headbutt them like Norman Mailer did to Gore Vidal? (‘Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.’ What a comeback, albeit from the floor.) No, I won’t. Headbutts hurt both parties. Will I introduce their kneecaps to a drill like Billy does in the book? Hmmm … Look, obviously I have to say no because that’s illegal and everything, but hmmm …
In all seriousness, the debut novelist should not be afraid of criticism. In fact, they should welcome it more than most. No one should be given a ‘free pass’ just because it’s their first book (something I’ve heard reviewers say so many times, it’s depressing).
Writers – and just about everyone else these days – live their lives in public, surrounded by the chaos and noise and opinions that make up our culture. Either you jump in or you stay at home with the internet unplugged, not talking to anyone except the postman. And if you’ve written a novel and it’s your debut, then you’ve jumped in: so start swimming.
You can tell me you hate my novel (‘a filthy sex-and-drug-fuelled romp, an absolute disgrace!’), you can tell me that you love it (‘a filthy sex-and-drug-fuelled romp, thrillingly disgraceful!’) or you can just say ‘meh’ – though if you do, you probably deserve the drill.
Chris Flynn’s first novel, A Tiger in Eden, is released Tuesday 27 February. He is the books editor of the Big Issue and has reviewed for the Australian, the Age and Australian Book Review.
Our weekly Debut Mondays series, featuring authors talking about their new books, kicks off tonight at The Moat at 6.15pm. Authors featured will be Michael Sala, Denise Leith and Eric Knight.
Chris Flynn will be a guest at next week’s Debut Monday (also 6pm at The Moat). He’ll be joined by Robert Power and Maggie Groff.
In a nice departure from the traditional Australia Day focus on flags and sporting heroes, The Sunday Age has marked the lead-up to the occasion with an editorial decrying our ‘tendency to anti-intellectualism’.
It lamented the fact that Australia’s ‘great writers, artists, soldiers, politicians and scientists … take second place to footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players’.
‘As we approach Australia Day and make our plans for the beach or the backyard, it’s worth reflecting on what we are losing through this neglect of our classics. They are our stories written in our voices, and give us specific clues as to how we became the country we are today.’
In an opinion piece published alongside the editorial, Michael Heyward, publisher of Text Publishing, argued that while Australia has come a long way in recent decades when it comes to valuing and celebrating our homegrown authors, we ‘seem not to care’ about the great authors and books of our past, neglecting to keep them in print and to consistently teach them in our universities.
‘Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history,’ wrote Heyward.
He said it will take ‘all kinds of effort’ to change both publishing and academic cultures. Increased adaption of Australian novels to film and television was one proposed solution, while he also suggested that the rise of the eBook ‘may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect’.
Text will release a new series, Text Australian Classics, in 2012, featuring titles such as David Ireland’s (currently out of print) The Glass Canoe, winner of the 1976 Miles Franklin Award, as well as earlier works by current favourites such as Kate Grenville and Peter Temple.
It’s not the first time Text has dabbled in resurrecting neglected works of Australian writing. In 2009, Madeleine St John’s debut novel The Women in Black (1993) – never before published in Australia, though set in Sydney – was published in a handsome new edition, packaged with accolades from much-loved Australians like Barry Humphries, Helen Garner and Clive James. The novel, a sharp-witted, affectionate portrait of a group of women working in the ladies department of a store much like David Jones, was embraced by both critics and readers; it was followed by new editions of St John’s subsequent novels.
Christina Stead’s work has enjoyed renewed interest thanks to some high profile endorsers. Watch our session The Late Great: Christina Stead here.
The endorsement of a popular writer was also integral to the recent renewal of interest in Christina Stead, after The Man Who Loved Children (1940) was given a rave review by Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times. Melbourne University Press published a new edition, with a stylish cover and introduction by Franzen, shortly afterwards. This was followed by new editions of Letty Fox: Her Luck (with a foreword by Carmen Callil) and For Love Alone (with a foreword by Drusilla Modjeska).
Stylish new editions and canny endorsements or introductions designed to lure new readers seem to be an integral (and, it seems, effective) part of the publisher’s bag of tricks when relaunching forgotten or neglected classics – literally making the old new again.
Another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), enjoyed a resurgence thanks to these tricks (an introduction by Peter Temple and afterword by David Stratton) when the 1971 film was restored and re-released in 2009. The film attracted a wave of media coverage and allowed an accompanying film tie-in edition (again, from Text Publishing, who had also published a 1993 edition).
Barbara Creed, head of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne, told The Age that she agreed with Heyward about the need for more Australian novels on the screen. She said, ‘Whenever a novel is adapted to screen … there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.’
Creed also said that a dedicated Australian literature course was back on the university’s syllabus this year. Last year, a group of students had started their own Australian literature studies, in the absence of such a subject. (‘An unusual situation,‘ Creed said.)
This enthusiasm from students so actively keen to steep themselves in Australian writing is, at least, a good sign.
The Wheeler Centre will run a free series of ten events entitled ‘Australian Literature 101' from next month. Details will be released, along with our February-April programme in full, next Friday 3 February.
The roll call of global literary luminaries gracing the Wheeler Centre this year was nothing less than astonishing. Let’s revisit some of the highlights of our international guests.
In March, Annie Proulx spoke about designing a “bibliothèque” in her new home, built on a property where she’s discovered obsidian fragments from Yellowstone and 2700-year-old charcoal beneath a mere inch of topsoil. Andrew O'Hagan discussed the role of the novelist against the dangerous lure of newspaper controversy and a culture that threatens to “understand less and condemn more”.
Yannick Haenel told one of the most arresting stories we’ve ever heard at the Gala Night of Storytelling (here’s the translation), and in a separate event described the challenges of writing his partly fictionalised account of a little-known chapter of World War 2 history and of the importance of bearing witness. Murong Xuecun discussed his sometimes controversial characters and explored the challenges that face an ‘independent’ writer in modern China.
In April, Jeffrey Archer talked about his first love – politics – and his respect for Margaret Thatcher, whom he described as one of three women who have profoundly affected and influenced him. Meg Rosoff confessed that she’s interested in characters rather than plots, and shared the advice she’s been given about writing novels. David Mitchell told us about his fear of being boring (not a chance). Michael Cunningham complimented Australians on our balance between “a kind of gravitas and a good joke … that’s hard to find in a lot of places”. Thank you.
Michael Connelly told us about the important editorial input of his mother, a fan of crime fiction who first introduced her son to the genre, and how she felt about his modern style of mystery writing which allows for more unanswered questions. Sir Terry Pratchett spoke on his thoughts on death and religion. TJ Clark was eloquent on the topics of art, poetry, death, truth and love. Anita Shreve described the Oprah phenomenon with Jane Sullivan.
Jonathan Safran Foer told us he had “no conception” of himself as a writer: “To me, it sounded like saying, ‘I’m a lover’. It didn’t seem like something one should say.” Finally, one of our favourite guests, Jon Ronson, told us he suspects he suffers from about a dozen mental disorders and concluded that anxiety disorders are indicative of moral goodness. Whether he succeeded in his aim “to try and make wet doubt seem attractive” is for you to decide.
The Literature Board of the Australia Council has announced the first three of eight recipients of their Book2 grants. The grants are worth $50,000 over three years and are intended to lessen the pressure on writers writing their second book. The recipients are Nam Le, Anna Krien and Favel Parrett.
In a media release making the announcement, Susan Hayes, Director of Literature at the Australia Council, says, “[F]or many writers, the second book will be the most difficult of their career … This is particularly the case for literary writers, whose first book will have attracted considerable critical acclaim but a relatively low contribution to their income.” Book2 is part of the Australia Council’s Creative Australia Artists' Grants program.
A new biography of Kurt Vonnegut has invoked a ill-tempered man consumed by bitterness and loneliness, a shadow of the avuncular persona well known to his adoring fans. The biography alleges that Vonnegut was convinced his work was undervalued by the American literary establishment despite the massive impact of such novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. The biography raises an age-old question: should we judge a creative work by its creator?
In a recent Wheeler Centre event, literary critic Simon Leys argued that we mustn’t judge a writer by their work, nor a literary work by its creator. “The greatest creators in world literature,” said Leys, “literally do not necessarily know what they are doing. They may intend to do one thing, but what they actually achieve may be quite different.” Citing Cervantes, Gogol and Tolstoy, Leys noted that time and again writers have misunderstood their achievement.
But Leys identifies an even more perplexing conundrum, which he calls the problem of biography, citing several authors to testify to the dimensions of a great paradox. “Biography does not explain one damn thing,” wrote poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. “Every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats, too humiliating to contemplate,” said George Orwell. The ever-controversial VS Naipaul said, “Everything of value about me is in my books only.” French poet Paul Valery wrote, “Every individual is inferior to his most beautiful work.” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “I never knew a man who was consonant with his work, when the work is of genius. When the work is of genius, he is far below it … it is not the mere man who does the thing, it is the man inspired. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent to him from outside.”
Citing two great French writers with Fascist leanings, Leys goes on to ask, “How can one ever explain this contradiction between a work and its author? Greatness of the work, mediocrity of the man; beauty of the work, vulgarity or downright ugliness of the man.” Leys cites Proust’s theory of two selves to explain the conundrum: “A book is the product of a different self from the self manifest is our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there that we may arrive at it.”
Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award by the Literary Review. It’s the 19th year the awards have been held to celebrate the worst depictions of sexual activity in literature. Nominated for the award is a passage from Dead Europe, Tsiolkas' third novel, which has been published in the United Kingdom this year (along with Tsiolkas' first book, Loaded) on the back of the success of The Slap.
It’s hardly a slap in the face for the Melbourne writer – Dead Europe has received some admiring reviews, and at any rate there’s always been something, ahem, tongue-in-cheek about the award. Indeed, Tsiolkas is in august company. Haruki Murakami is a nominee, as is Stephen King. Extracts of all the nominees are available on the Guardian website, which on its Woman’s Blog page asks the question, why are men so bad at writing sex?
A Jane Austen scholar believes it highly likely that Jane Austen died of arsenic poisoning. Although she won’t rule out the possibility that Austen was murdered, Lindsay Ashford believes Austen is most likely to have been prescribed medecine in which arsenic was an ingredient. The Guardian reports that tests on a lock of Austen’s hair currently owned by private collectors has found an unusually high level of arsenic.
Jane Austen was only 41 when she died, and the cause of her death has been the cause of some speculation among Austen scholars. Arsenic – the byproduct of purification techniques for copper, lead and gold — was a plentiful by-product of Britain’s booming mining industries. In Austen’s day, it was “handed out in the form of Fowler’s Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis,” according to the Guardian piece. Here’s more on the medical uses of arsenic in Victorian England.
A new UK publishing venture is bringing crowdfunding to the book world. Unbound lets authors pitch their novels-in-progress to readers, who then decide whether or not they want to contribute to the financial costs of having the book written and published.
The website already features book projects by Monty Python regular Terry Jones and respected mid-career author Tibor Fischer, but it also plans to make room for first-time authors too, like debutant Jennifer Pickup, whose novel Unbelievable was fully funded by readers. Readers can opt to contribute to a project at several levels, each one of which offers a reward. More than an act of charity or patronage, these rewards give readers value for money. For example, a contribution of £10 to Vitali Vitaliev’s Bad Food Tales: An Anti-Tourist Guide to Italy is rewarded with ebook edition, access to the author’s shed (essentially updates on the writing of the book) and the reader’s name in the back of the book. Readers can contribute at higher levels too, each one of which has its own rewards. The highest contribution level for this title (they vary from title to title) £500, the reward for which is “Everything up to and including launch party level & spend a day with me, learning about my work as an author, journalist, editor and presenter, include a tour of Pegasus Cottage, where I do my writing, and a special Italian lunch cooked by me.”
Unbound is the brainchild of publishers John Mitchinson, Justin Pollard and Dan Kieran, deputy editor of the magazine, The Idler, and is one of several new publishing business models emerging in the digital realm – check them all out in this Wired feature. Read more about Unbound here..
It’s a movement that started way back in 1999, when 21 people in the San Francisco area pledged to write a novel in a month. Last year, its 12th, 200,000 aspiring novels the world over made the same pledge, writing some 2.8 billion words, or nigh on 100 million words a day.
It’s National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, and the idea is simple: participants have all 30 days in November to write 50,000 words of a novel. They can plan, they can plot, but they can’t start early and they can’t use any pre-written material in the body of their novel. Other than that, there are few restrictions: any genre is allowed, in any format, any language, using any theme. Writers don’t even need to finish the novel – the 50,000 words can be a partial novel. A manuscript of 50,000 words equates to a short novel of about 175 pages in length amounts to the same length as The Great Gatsby – not a long novel, but a novel nevertheless. Conventionally, the 40,000 word mark distinguishes a novel from a novella.
Though NaNoWriMo isn’t a competition, it does have winners – anyone who completes the task is a winner and, after the word count is verified, their name is added to NaNoWriMo’s winner’s page. The philosophy is simple – quantity trumps quality, the idea being that quality comes later, with careful revision and redrafting. Here’s a list of writers who’ve had their NaNoWriMo novels published.
“If you allow this toxic combination of religion and politics to become too closely entwined, then you’re in trouble.” In her recent Lunchbox/Soapbox, Dr Susan Mitchell spoke on the topic of her newly-released polemic on opposition leader Tony Abbott, Tony Abbott: A Man’s Man (watch the video). She explored at some length the influence of the Catholic Church on the man many are inking in as a shoe-in for prime minister following the next election. Tony Abbott, Mitchell argued, “has allowed religion and politics to become entwined.” Indeed, if Abbott were to become prime minister, he would be the first practising Catholic prime minister of Australia from the conservative side of politics (there have been, by our count, three on the Labor side: James Scullin, Joseph Lyons and Ben Chifley).
Mitchell, adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University, a radio and television broadcaster, and a former opinion and humour writer for The Australian, presented Tony Abbott as a man who sees things in black and white. She attributed this to his Catholic faith, listing key Catholic mentors in Abbott’s youth. Father Emmett Costello, a Jesuit priest in Sydney’s Riverview College, trained Abbott in Churchillian rhetoric and encouraged him to enter politics. At university, Abbott was a protégé of B.A. Santamaria, an influential anti-Communist journalist and Catholic activist who believed the Church should instruct Australians how to vote and, Mitchell contends, taught Abbott that “politics is a way to give glory to God in the human sphere”. Another Jesuit priest at Oxford University encouraged Abbott to take up boxing. At the age of 26, Abbott chose to enter St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly. He later discontinued his religious studies and became a journalist, writing for The Catholic Weekly for a time.
While Tony Abbott has never shied away from acknowledging the importance of the Catholic Church to him as a person and as a politician, he is nevertheless capable of having a foot in both camps (Church and state) when the situation requires it. How does he justify this? In a speech he gave in 2004 to the Adelaide University Democratic Club decrying the annual number of women having abortions, he had this to say on how Christian politicians should juggle their responsibilities to Church and state.
“Despite the debt that political institutions owe to the West’s Christian heritage, there is the constant claim that Christians in politics are confused about the separation of church and state. There’s also a tendency among Christians in the community to think that Christians in politics have to sell out their principles in order to survive. Christian politicians are often warding off simultaneous accusations that they are zealots or fakes. Indeed, the public caricature of a Christian politician is hypocrite or wuss, in denial about the ruthlessness and expediency necessary to wield power, or too sanctimonious to be effective … Christians are not required to right every wrong. Christian politicians are not required to promote policies for which there is no demand in the community.”
The next Intelligence Squared debate on 15 November at the Melbourne Town Hall will debate the proposition, ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world’.
(Click to watch video.)
“[A]lthough the Man Booker can change a writer’s life, a prize is only a prize,” Booker Prize judge Gaby Wood has written in the Telegraph. “It’s not an investigation, it’s not a work of criticism, and it’s not the result of common-or-garden enjoyment, either. There are all sorts of other lives books can have.”
The judge’s words seem to be a direct response to unprecedented criticism levelled at the Man Booker Prize this year. The prize, worth a little over A$75,000, is arguably the highest-profile English-language literary award. For what it’s worth, Julian Barnes took the honours this year, after having been thrice shortlisted, for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. According to Michael Wood in the London Review of Books, the novel, the chief theme of which is “Englishness”, is “the story of an obtuseness that generally cannot see the damage it does, and yet in a brief moment of illumination grasps the malevolence lurking in what it took to be its quiet life.”
The Booker’s profile is matched, as Guy Rundle points out on Crikey, by its idiosyncrasies. “Everything about the Booker is bizarre,” Rundle writes, “from its name – which fuses current sponsor the Man Group, with half of the original sponsor, Booker-McConnell – to the ever-changing judges, to the degree of anguished debate it draws about the state of the culture”. Much of the Booker anguish this year has been about an alleged dumbing-down of the award, following statements by the chief judgment, former British spy chief (and spy novelist) Stella Riminton, in which she stressed that the judges had prioritised “readable” novels in the shortlisting process: “"We want people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them.”
Jeanette Winterson weighed in impressively on the debate in The Guardian. Under the headline, ‘Ignore the Booker brouhaha: readability is no test for literature’, she writes that the row “is a misunderstanding about literature and its purpose. We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.”
According to Rundle, the dumbing-down began about a decade ago (and signals the death of “reflexive humanism”). But the Booker’s been odd ever since it was first awarded in 1969. The official website says the prize is awarded to “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.” Given the Commonwealth is an accident of history nowadays as peculiar as it is irrelevant (Mozambique, anyone?), it should be of no surprise that these two character traits are reflected in the Booker – and yet the table-thumping oddly persists. The Booker is a booster for British publishing (Barnes' publisher is printing an additional 25,000 extra copies of The Sense of an Ending as a result of his win) and, given the inwardness of US literary prizes, the English language – arguably the globe’s most fecund literary language – has hitherto lacked a truly all-encompassing literary prize.
No more, following news that a new prize, dubbed the Prize for Literature, will be set up to reward to reward “quality and ambition”. The prizemoney is still being raised, but an impressive phalanx of writers (including John Banville, Pat Barker, Nicole Krauss and David Mitchell) are reported to be backing the prize.
“We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” Hundreds of writers have lent their names to the website Occupy Writers to support the Occupy Wall Street movement and others like it spawning in cities across the globe (including Melbourne).
The list is a literary who’s who and includes names like Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Tariq Ali, Ann Beattie, Noam Chomsky, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sasha Frere-Jones, Nell Freudenberger, Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, China Mieville, Rick Moody, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Donna Tartt, Alice Walker, Ann Patchett and Naomi Wolf. Australian writers on the list include Alison Croggon and Paddy O'Reilly.
Some are going a step further, penning work for publication n the Occupy Writers website. Daniel Handler, better known by his sobriquet Lemony Snicket, the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, has published a list entitled, ‘Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance’. It’s a plea for social justice made in typical Lemony Snicket style. We especially liked points 4 (“4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices”), 10 (“It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view”) and 13 (“99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree”).
In July, the Wheeler Centre ran a promotion inviting you to subscribe to our enewsletter. As a sweetener, we offered one randomly-selected new subscriber a trip to the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which has just ended. We called it the Ultimate Book Lover’s prize. The lucky winner was Deb Sestak, who has been kind enough to send us this taster of the festival. Thanks to all of you who subscribed, and thanks to the festival and to the competition sponsors, Garuda and the Honeymoon Guesthouse/Casa Luna Bali.
Bali is a wonderful place for a festival – we have become regulars at a local spa treating ourselves to a daily massage. Today we got up early and went for a stroll around the rice paddies before breakfast. After a quick dip in the pool we caught the shuttle bus to the festival office, collected our passes and headed up to Neka for our first festival event. We were seated in a massive pergola, seating more than 200 on top of a steep ravine overlooking lush green foliage onto rice paddies on the next ridge, with a warm breeze wafting through. Paradise.
There are so many standout writers at the festival. At a panel discussion, Kunal Basu talked about his latest book, The Yellow Emperor’s Cure. Alex Miller picked up the syphilis theme and morphed it into a story about white ants. Greg Day kept the white ants theme going talking about his formative experiences.
We were inspired by Rob Lilwall and his adventures chronicled in Cycling Home from Siberia and intrigued by Andrew Fowler’s tales of Julian Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World.
Our favourite, though, was Tariq Ali. He has the face of a walrus, weary but wise, and shares his vast knowledge, resting his chin in his hand, with humour, compassion and immense humility. He brought cheers from the audience with his final remarks about Australia being “the permanent aircraft carrier for the US”.
We ended the day watching an evening performance of Ketchuk dance followed by a drink at the Lotus Café and ‘Words in Motion’ set against the vast backdrop of the gate and walls of the Saraswati Temple. Bliss. We are already looking forward to next year.
Its title is now a stock-standard phrase of the English language. It’s sold some 30 million copies since it was first published some 75 years ago. It single-handedly invented a new kind of book, one that now sells in the millions annually. It even inspired not one but two satirical memoirs (the first published in 1937, and the second in 2001, now an eponymous film). It’s Dale Carnegie’s self-help Bible, How to Win Friends and Influence People (satirised in the aforementioned memoirs as How to Lose Friends and Alienate People).
Dale Carnegie was the quintessential American success story of the early 20th century. As a farmer’s son, he’d dreamed of being an instructor in the Chautauqua adult education movement. After failing as an actor, the soap salesman-cum-autodidact (then known as Carnagay) found his calling as a public speaking instructor, publishing books on public speaking for business. His business thrived, he changed his name (Carnegie was the name of a well-known steel baron) and became successful by teaching the aspiring American middle classes how to be successful. At the time How to Win Friends was published, in the thick of the Great Depression, Carnegie was earning the equivalent of $10,000 a week.
Despite the faintly creepy title, Dale Carnegie’s manual took a benign view of human relationships that eventually came to be emblematic of the sunny side of mid-century American capitalism. The book espoused a win-win model of interaction grounded in a Christian, ‘do-unto-others’ moral framework, stressing that, on the whole, acting with politeness, empathy, honesty and integrity – as well as basic social niceties like listening to people and remembering their names – would encourage others to behave similarly in return.
Now, the original self-help bestseller has been reworked for the 21st century – but the results may not be either winning or particularly influential. Dale Carnegie Training, the descendant of the company founded by Carnegie 99 years ago, has re-released the book for the socially-networked era. How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age offers tips on email etiquette and how to avoid the common Twitter mistakes that can damage careers irrevocably. Bloggers are encouraged to interact with their audience and due attention ought be paid to Facebook friend updates.
So how has the book been received? Dwight Garner in the New York Times laments the loss of the original’s homespun qualities: “This new adaptation seems to have been composed using refrigerator magnets stamped with corporate lingo.” Take, for example, this advice: “Today’s biggest enemy of lasting influence is the sector of both personal and corporate musing that concerns itself with the art of creating impressions without consulting the science of need ascertainment.” This sentence, Garner opines, is “so inept that it may actually be an ancient curse and to read it more than three times aloud is to summon the cannibal undead”.
(Click to watch video.)
One of the most fascinating of the many fascinating topics Jonathan Safran Foer discussed with Michael Williams during his recent Wheeler Centre conversation was on his mixed feelings about identifying as a writer. Even after the success of Everything is Illuminated, Safran says he had “no conception of [himself] as a writer”. “To me, it sounded like saying, ‘I’m a lover’. It didn’t seem like something one should say,” he argues, but admits “at a certain point it was just simply true.”
All the same, he contends that “writing is the vehicle and not the destination”. “The ends for me are a kind of emotional experience or a kind of access to thoughts and feelings that I can’t get anywhere else,” he explains.
Safran Foer’s entry into writing was unplanned. Without wanting to be a writer, he took a writing class at university, where Joyce Carol Oates took him under her wing, encouraging and mentoring him. He remembers a comment she made before a class one day as being the moment he realised there was such a thing as “my writing”. The support he experienced under Oates, he says, is the reason he now teaches students of his own. “The difference between writers and non writers is not [that] writers are better at writing,” he later adds. “It’s that writers write.”
He confesses to being a writer whose awareness of historical and critical context is not as keen as some of his peers, who are critics as well as writers. “I don’t think in that language of literary movements,” he explains. When pressed on the question of peers, he reveals his “natural” repulsion to the idea of being a part of a literary community or cohort. “Being a writer, to me, is being individual,” he clarifies, “so thinking about it in the opposite way makes me feel uncomfortable.”
The annual game of shadows and mirrors that accompanies the October announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature is in full swing. The Millions, a US online literary magazine, has published ‘An Open Letter to the Swedish Academy’, practically begging that Philip Roth be granted the prize, currently worth in excess of A$1,000,000. The letter’s writer is Michael Bourne, a Brooklyn writer of fiction and literary journalism, who writes, “Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?”
While the stature of Roth’s achievement is undeniable, his position as a writer of great prose isn’t beyond argument. Earlier this year, when Roth was granted the biennial Man Booker International prize at the Sydney Writers' Festival, Carmen Callil, one of the judges, quit over the decision, saying,“I don’t rate him as a writer at all, I made it clear that I wouldn’t have put him on the long list, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn’t admire – all the others were fine.”
Detail of the Nobel Prize gold medal, featuring the profile of the Prize’s benefactor, Swedish tycoon Alfred Nobel
While the million-dollar purse and ‘lifetime achievement’ quality makes the Nobel Prize for Literature the world’s highest-profile literary award, like every other prize the Nobel has its fair share of eccentricities. Not least among them is the stipulation by the endowment’s original benefactor, dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, that the prize be granted to a writer who has produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Precisely what an “ideal direction” might be is hard to define – Leo Tolstoy allegedly didn’t win a Nobel because his work wasn’t perceived as being “ideal” enough.
In a recent Guardian online podcast, Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, defined literary worth and cultural importance as the two most significant qualities in deciding on the Nobel winner. In the same interview, Englund acknowledges that European literature is disproportionately represented among Nobel winners, adding that this is a natural consequence of the fact that the Swedish academicians are most exposed to European literature. Englund rejects the charge that Nobels are occasionally awarded on the basis of positive discrimination and adds that the Academy tries to be more inclusive by commissioning special, secret translations of major works by significant authors writing in non-European languages. Many canonical authors, including Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov and Borges, are not on the list of winners, which instead features names that have fallen into complete oblivion, like the inaugural 1901 winner, Sully Prudhomme, who was praised at the time for his “poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”.
There is no shortlist for the Nobel, but this in itself isn’t enough to dissuade publishers from re-releasing certain novels in the lead-up to the announcement and speculators from putting their hard-earned on the rumoured favourites. This year, the 81 year-old Syrian poet Adonis, the pen name of Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, is the odds-on favourite, not just because of his own achievements but also because of the events known as the Arabic Spring. “A combination of artistic excellence and social justice have often played well with the Nobel committee,” writes the LA Times blog, Jacket Copy.
Postscript: the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
Image of Michel Houellebecq in Poland via Mariusz Kubik/Wikipedia
French novelist Michel Houellebecq (reportedly pronounced WELL-beck) has gone missing, according to Bloomberg news agency. Houellebecq, the author of Atomised, Platform, The Possibility of an Island and a biography of HP Lovecraft, was on the eve of a book tour of the Netherlands and Belgium, promoting the release of the Dutch translation of his latest novel, The Map and the Territory.
The disappearance is the cause of some concern in publishing circles connected to the author because of the controversial and, at times, polarising nature of the author’s work. Houellebecq the man, who according to the Bloomberg report has struggled at times with mental illness, lives a quiet life in southern Spain. But Houellebecq the writer is variously described as an incisive visionary and a misogynistic nihilist.
Houellebecq’s novels have also at times seemed to have a prophetic quality, such as in the novel Platform, which ends (spoiler alert) with an attack on a tourist resort in Thailand by Muslim fundamentalists. The novel was published shortly before 9/11 and the Bali bombings a year later. Halfway into The Map and the Territory, the lead character, whose name is Houellebecq, is brutally murdered.
(Click to watch video.)
Former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon delivered last Thursday’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the subject of leadership. Comparing what she argued are old and new models of leadership, Nixon stressed that qualities such as independence, lateral thinking and openness to the needs of others are key to leadership in a progressive society. She also acknowledged the reluctance of some to leave behind the comfort and security of militaristic, top-down command, a reluctance she attributed to a reluctance by the old guard to relinquish power.
Nixon pointed to Prime Minister Julia Gillard as an example of a new style of leader being judged on an outdated model. Dismissing the media’s undermining “voice of ridicule”, she argued that Gillard is dealing with “an incredibly complex system where she is in a minority government, having to make sure that a whole range of other people are a part of it”. This ridicule, she says, is borne from fear. Rather than being weak for capitulating to the ideas of others, though, Nixon praises leaders like Gillard and Obama for their strengths in consensus governance.
Image credit: Ingvar Kenne
Mark Mordue on why modern-day fatherhood is all about eating breakfast standing up.
It’s Father’s Day morning, the year 2011. No Glad Wrap in the house. Do you have any idea how that screws with dad’s main day of the year? Three kids, lunches to make and pack, no Glad Wrap! My day is in tatters, man. Ruination. It’s going be a big climb back after this kind of start, let me tell you.
The kids are up early. I notice on special sleep-in days like this they always wake up early. They’re excited. There are two different father’s day events at the two eldest kids schools. I’m a guest DJ at one. Which effectively means loading up my ipod with 70s rock, 80s post-punk pop and a few hip hop tunes and old country numbers, then I’m on my way to found my own groove nation.
Of course you try to be a crowd pleaser, but personal taste creeps in. At the last minute I get cold feet about the prospect of playing Nick Cave’s ‘No Pussy Blues’ at the school Fathers’ Day breakfast. What was amusing and irreverent last night when I put my ‘mixed tape’ (I’m so old) together now seems crude and likely to offend. Dear me – what to do?
I’ll swap it for Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s ‘Come Up and See Me, Make Me Smile’. I always remember one of my friends’ fathers accusing me of being a homosexual for liking that song when I was 12. I think it was because Harley wore mascara and a fur coat with no shirt on in the video clip, which seemed kinda cool to me at the time – not that I ever adopted the look for myself.
Anyway, back at Masterchef Central I use some disposable plastic containers – left over from takeaway Indian meals and rinsed clean – to pack the sandwiches in. Dads are genius improvisers like that. My partner is meanwhile trying to make sure the kids get dressed – and put their shoes on as well! Then we are finally out of our own private madhouse and on our way to a larger, school-organised one.
My DJ efforts prove to be somewhat frustrated as the hall stereo keeps getting turned off due to surges brought on by all the tea urns. So I stand beside the electrical mains switching the power on again every time it goes off. It strikes me this is not the safest way to celebrate Father’s Day, but damn it, I put David Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ and Johnny Cash singing ‘Solitary Man’ on this mix, and whether the crowd wants it or not I am giving it to them. ‘Golden Years’ comes out a little like this: Golden ..ears, G..ears… Wah.” Long pause. “Wah.”
My partner has been co-opted to do the barbecue and has disappeared into a cloud of smoking bacon fat. I am amazed she can smile at all but she seems to be enjoying herself.
Image via terriseesthings/Flickr
Somehow my youngest son has attached himself to my leg, and is weeping and crying because he wants a bottle of strawberry milk from the canteen, which is still officially closed. Which means he cannot have that strawberry milk. The tears and screaming suggest he has been through a savage beating or received news of a death in the family.
I have to drag him across the stage where I am DJing in front of audience of about 100 other highly distracted dads and their families. Most of them are busy dealing with their own kids or trying to have a conversation over my annoying music, but I still feel my crying-son-attached-to-my-leg-and-being dragged-along look lacks the right aura of parental harmony and love that I am seeking to project. He finally lets me go and I make a break for it as he lays resentfully in a tantrum-ish heap.
I decide to get a bacon and egg roll off my partner and a coffee as well. What the heck. It’s 8am and I’m just a modern guy, as Iggy Pop used to sing. Every now and then as I walk around with breakfast in my hand – and isn’t modern fatherhood the art of having breakfast standing up? – I catch another father’s eye, and get some weird amused smile or a hard-working, stunned nod of the head.
Up on the stage the kids all start reading poems for their dads that are very hard to hear, then the whole event declines into a rambling multiple-choice quiz that no one ever wins. My partner takes off with our two youngest children to the next port of call, the Father’s Day celebration at my daughter’s school down the road. My son goes to his class. I’m left with his football and my ipod throbbing to Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in an almost empty hall.
Outside the sky is grey as my hair, threatening rain that does not seem to come. I’m able to stop for a more solitary and calming coffee at a local café where what sounds like Johann Sebastian Bach is being piped through the stereo. It’s now 10am. And there is plenty of Father’s Day yet left to burn. I promise myself not to yell at the kids tonight when they bicker and harass me. All the time I sense the main game is tolerance, patience, listening, and more patience. It’s the lesson I keep having to re-learn every day.
I know the kids have surprises for me, cards they’ve made, presents they have picked up at the stalls being held at their respective schools. A key ring, a bottle opener, a bath flannel with a football team logo, maybe I will even score some red wine as well if I am lucky. I realize I can get some Glad Wrap at the shops on the way home, and feel a new mood of fatherly zen begin to descend over me. The static of the morning is still subsiding, and yet what I find I want – and need – all over again is my family around me once more. Though maybe not attached to my leg. Just to be safe, I’m thinking I’ll buy some strawberry milk as well anyway.
Mark Mordue is the 2010 Pascall Prize Australian Critic of the Year. He is currently working on a biography of Nick Cave.
“Prison is a place where one can meet the most extraordinary people,” according to Russian tycoon and billionaire jailbird Mikhail Khodorkovsky. According to an Agence France Presse report published in The Australian, Khodorkovsky’s observation was made in the first of a series of chronicles of prison life he’s begun writing for Novoye Vremya, or New Times, magazine.
His column, called ‘Prison Folk’, will be about the inmates of a prison in the far-northern Russian republic of Karelia where Khodorkovsky, formerly one of the richest men in the world, has been incarcerated since the middle of the year. The first instalment is about a prisoner called Kolya, “who disembowelled himself and threw his intestines at guards for being set up for a crime he did not commit: grabbing a purse from an elderly woman.”
Khodorkovsky, whose life story seems lifted from a Russian fable, is in the middle of serving an eight year term for tax evasion. His oil company Yukos was the subject of litigation, and subsequent takeover, by the Russian government in 2003 in an action designed to signal the end of Russian gangster capitalism.
Russian history has been marked by viciously punitive prison regimes. Because writers have often been the target of official opprobrium, Russian literature has chronicled these regimes in detail. Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are the best-known chroniclers of the Russian prison system during the Soviet era.
The scale of the Russian penal system has led to the rise of a kind of ‘prison anthropology’, looking into the complex social systems that have evolved over time. Danzig Baldayev, a prison guard at St Petersburg’s notorious Kresty Prison for 33 years, documented this culture in the three-volume Encyclopedia of Russian Criminal Tattoos (here’s a preview via the book-design blog Brain Pickings).
Browse by content type
Explore by area of interest
