reeling and writhing

highlights of 2008

So, yep, it is that time of year again. And I will keep it simple.

I'm off to the beach, then having Christmas, as we do, then trying to catch up on Web and book reading - among which I will include this find on The Elegant Variation, some interviews Californian writer Jim Ruland did with Benjamin Black (that's John Banville to the rest of us) recently.

I read a lot of Australian books this year. There seem to be a lot more Oz titles to read next year, and Angela Meyer has a good roundup of potential candidates in the latest Bookseller and Publisher if you can't wait for the holiday newspapers. I do hope I get some European titles under the belt, though - a new book from Colm Toibin is certainly not going to pass me by.

The standout, then, is a poetry/non fiction combo.

Racing this time:

Robert Gray's The Land I Walked Through Last (and all his poetry, just all of it) by a nose from David Malouf's 1990 novel, The Great World.

Coming clustered tightly after that

Hanif Kureishi's richly entertaining Something To Talk About and his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, back to front (should one say, tail to tail? quite hard to organise deliberately)

Edward St Aubyn's acidic and brilliantly skewed Mothers' Milk

Gerald Murnane's reissued classic,Tamarisk Row and his essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap

Anne Enright's The Gathering 

Robert Adamson's The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems (arranged by the poet, thematically, which makes for a good change).

 

and making a dash down the strait for the finishing line

Julienne van Loon's Road Story

Sara Knox's The Orphan Gunner

Jessica Anderson's classic, Tirra Lirra By The River

Alex Miller's Journey to the Stone Country

Helen Garner's The Spare Room

and Matt Condon's Trout Opera, of course

Toni Jordan's fine comic-mathematical romance, Addition

Susan Johnson's Gold Coast Barton saga, Life In Seven Mistakes

Fiona Capp's fine historical Daylesford romance, Musk and Byrne

Sophie Cunningham's tri-continental Bird.

Really, this race analogy is tacky. As if Mr Gray Australian writers need to race anybody anywhere, at any time.

I've decided not to publish the year's reads - some of it feels like it's so long ago, I'm beginning to wonder if it's not a corrupted file. May all future reads end up corrupted by memories and crosscurrents from the past, so that I end up rereading more often.

I do want to let you all know, though, that today, having rescued the latest GoingDownSwinging from the carport where an uncharacteristically cranky postie hurled it (fortunately not on the side I park on and a mere four minutes before my son came back in from buying new tyres), I have particularly enjoyed the following:

Stories: 'Pearl of Mercy', by Libby Angel
            'Flame Game', by S.J. Finn
            'Turnin',' by Eric Stoveken (which is drily fantastic)
Poems: 'Anything Precious', Sean M. Whelan
           'Brace', Andy Jackson
           'Black Rook in Stormy Weather', Lorin Ford.
And if you are fortunate enough to have your son improvising on guitar to his backing tracks in the next room, 'Net Weight of Intention' by Jillian Patterson reads rather well too.

See you all sometime in the middle of January, and as my favourite mother-in-law would say, go safely.

walking and shimmering is more like it, jen

Three cheers for Jennifer Mills, who has been travelling but nonetheless has managed to pick up lots of good stuff. (There is more about her writing here.)

Everything I have read by Mills here and there makes me prick up my ears. There are some great posts on her blog about South America:

antigua was a bit stupid but the coffee was good and i went to a human rights film festival and climbed a volcano with actual molten lava that i got close enough to poke with a stick (literally. the stick went on fire and i felt like harry potter)

 - guatemalingerer

Shades of Mr Chatwin here ( everywhere, really)...

Ricardo was, like many truckies, an angel of the highway, but it was also a strange coincidence. in mexico i sometimes introduce myself as Juana to avoid the fifteen minute repetition of my unpronounceable name, and his sister Juana had just crossed the border into the USA illegally, with three young children in tow. we had an interesting conversation about the frontier, travel karma, and faith. there were many photos of the family in his mother's house, dusted like the two glass coke bottles that sat on her old lady trophy shelf among the ceramic dogs...i gave myself the day off thinking about politics and went to look at butterflies, which are pretty, alive, and constitute a suitably inane thing to do with the eyes after meditating on mortality. they are the same orange as the marigolds. i hope i never forget the sound of thousands upon thousands of butterfly wings in the silence of the forest.

-alert now orange

When people like this are blogging it makes one glad to be alive and plugged in to broadband. Jen is an online poet (who sells her own zines too ). She remarked recently that she doesn't blog often, but man, when she does, I sit up and scan that screen with greatly increased attention. I'll be looking out for her debut novel, The Diamond Anchor, in 2009.

seasonal bruitings

Fancy a round of handheld Villette sometime soon? Nintendo might be able to help. The first thing we do, let's blast all the Reeds, though. (As you can tell, I didn't really read that feed item properly, did I?)

Alison Croggon was there, watching Warne watch Warne, so read all about it.

Tim Howard, of Sterne, has a review of Murray Bail's The Pages in online journal The Quarterly Conversation.

Of Twain, and buttermilk, and important modern neologisms that aren't as new as we thought they were, Jack Pendarvis sings. Via Maud, comme d'habitude.
Maud's been exceptionally helpful, too, evaluating the iPhone as an e-reader.

Steven Conte has put up some nice book covers and written feelingly of other things at the Summer Read blog, while Sophie C got out a new camera and does Melbourne with her usual visual panache.

Since I started on this the other week, there have also been posts from Toni Jordan that are dry, warm and humorous, as one might expect from the author of her witty first novel Addition, and as I leave for the beach and some reading and festivities of my own, the blogging will continue over there, so get on down.

Other spots to watch include of course Ange's fabulous Literary Minded blog at Crikey, Lisa Dempster's book blog at Unwakeable, where she is reviewing her selection from most of the Summer Reads ( see below!), and Mobylives, which seems to get better every week. (Yes, that whale is sure out there.)

And you might like to have a look at Perry's profiles of litbloggers over at Matilda - skip the first one, 'cause you know all about this space, and you may find some new sites of interest. I certainly did. Thanks, Perry.

dorothy porter dies at 54

What terribly sad news. I have El Dorado looking at me from the bookshelf as I write, and know what my summer read down at the Prom will be now. A brilliant star fallen.

tomorrow never knows, but probably has a damn good idea

I want to share a long, somewhat rambling but quite interesting post reporting on The Future Of Entertainment 3, an MIT conference held recently: it has literary novels and fan culture as its main topic and is by Joanne at Tomorrow Museum ( a blog pointed to by MobyLives):

I find the more time I spend online, the more I crave the quiet escape of a novel. But to work as a technology respite, a novel first must be exceptionally well-written...The novel won’t ever die. The more I think about it, the more I agree that fan culture/spreadable media is essential to literature, and will succeed in spite of constraints on time and size. The first step is a great book.

Joanne also provided this post on iPhones and novels a while back.I did think it funny that Joanne is asking this question as it is my understanding that novels on phones are huge in Japan. However her post really discusses the absence of social media technology in recent fiction, and she has a point: do we 'novelise' phones and email yet? (Christos Tsiolkas, to his credit, does acknowledge technology has a place in people's lives in The Slap at several points.) She gives it a shot:

'The intensity of the 24-hour news cycle, the impatience of waiting for email replies, these frantic, perpetually-shifting day-to-day Internet journeys … can these be novelized? Let me try…

    None of my friends were at the party so I pulled out my iPhone as I waited. I checked out Mary on Facebook and realized she has a new boyfriend. His profile was set to private so I looked him up on google and found an old Myspace profile he hasn’t updated in 2 years, but it says his favorite band is Wolf Parade and someone left a comment that he left his white Wafarers at her place. What a wanker. I twittered something passive aggressive about how I hate hipsters...'

Her post reminded me that Stephen Fry, who would have found some very good reasons why there should be an Internet if it had not already existed, I am sure, had a very successful Oscar Wilde twitter day recently, which you can read about here.

Review: Life In Seven Mistakes by Susan Johnson

Susan Johnson has attacked some pertinent subject matter here (apparently the book deals with seven problems attacked by, or attacking, the Barton family over the years, though this was not immediately apparent to me).

The descriptions of making art in this book are beautiful, yet like their creator, they are not allowed to dominate. What does dominate is the parents' story and the parents' life - the weight of this sweet, often funny novel is pitched against Elizabeth's late boomer generation quite deliberately, and one recognises over time that the novelist has made a choice to examine her controlling, self-involved parents as forensically as possible without excavating their hearts, wisely leaving us to fill in those gaps ourselves.

While I did not find the resolution as unlikely as one reviewer has, I did become impatient at times because I realised that I'm one of the strident ones, like sister-in-law Katie, one of the ones that wants a clear, transparent story in which everything is explained and uncovered. (The psychotherapist Adam Phillips has spoken of this desire, in his characteristically half-derisive fashion, as the need to 'translate a person'.)

However the beauty of this book is that it attempts to delicately describe what it is that Elizabeth, her siblings and her parents turn away from uncovering, over and over again through the course of their lives; a psychology lecture is not on the agenda. I read Life In Seven Mistakes with great, school-marmish relief at times that I could spot immediately what it was that Elizabeth should not put up with from her ageing, suffocating parents: no baby names, no rubbishing about her mistakes, no extended holidays with people who talk to her like she is garbage (for Christ's sake, just go visit them and stay in a hotel!!). This woman doesn't set boundaries, and should. Some would find this annoying, and have said as much.

But as Johnson indicates clearly throughout, she hasn't set them with anyone else either. Life has simply happened while she was busy not making any plans in particular, and this seems to be what her parents resent the most, while blissfully ignoring the fact that they were given different life work to do in their time.

While some of this is a bit rushed, there are some very touching moments towards the end as the bullying, self-sufficient patriarch of the family becomes ill and vulnerable, and relationships are sustained in spite of deep hurt and constant misunderstanding as a health crisis is faced.

I enjoyed, as always, reading about Cooma and the Snowy too. I also noted the care with which young family members in the book were depicted, especially the lovely, gangly-legged teenage girls. And not everything was tied up neatly - there were plenty of prickles left over for later, which was quite satisfying. Definitely a 'machine that works' here.

FOCL (Friends of Colac Library) rock

'This is not what we call democracy
Change your council, change your world,
just you wait and see'

There's a happy ending - do watch the end. Four of these cyber warriors...oh, watch it and listen to the story. Thanks for this, Georg.

where is this river going...

Oh NOES.

Amazon gets bigger, and the CEO of the little guy explains why, here.
I have only just found this out, reading elsewhere and am a bit unnerved. Not sure if it's a good thing or not. I rather liked AbeBooks just as it was, thanks. It had a nice musty feel about it, and everyone I ordered from through them was terrific.
If you are a smaller bookseller out there who knows any more about this and whether it's a good thing or not, drop us a line.

The Amazon press release is quoted here:

"As a leader in rare and hard-to-find books, AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide," said Russell Grandinetti, vice president of books for Amazon.com. "AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further grow their business. We're excited to present all of our customers with the widest selection of books available any place on Earth."

"This deal brings together book sellers and book lovers from around the world, and offers both types of customers a great experience," said Hannes Blum, chief executive officer of AbeBooks. "We are very excited to be joining the Amazon family."

The good news is that AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand alone operation, and will maintain all its websites. This user sighs in relief.

review: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap is less of a tightly skewed exercise in punishing libertarians than James Ley in his ABR review would have us believe, and more of a satanic version of Neighbours, borrowing where required from its far sexier and more richly cinematic relative Love My Way, and swapping most of the Anglos for their real northern (and increasingly eastern, western and southern) suburbs neighbours.

I adored this book, though I'm not crazy about some of the Vaseline-lensed sex sprinkled throughout, which is borrowed quite happily from pulp romance, along with some rapid-fire dialogue that would sound awful even on television. That old porn writer Hanif Kureishi is less mechanical in this department, and with feeling (though I have not read Loaded, so don't know what else Tsiolkas does better either.)
I could not put The Slap down, walked around the house with it and had it finished pretty quickly given that the house was full of people, people talking to me, eating with me and generally doing stuff. It grew on me in much the same way Love My Way does if you are having the DVD-fest, though it is rather different in tone.

I thought Tsiolkas displayed masterly control of the multiple threads of narrative, probably doing a better job than anyone in the country. I was disappointed in his editors - Moorabbin with ONE B, and some neologisms that should not have got through (Mulitfarious, anyone? perhaps from the Latin root muliere, maybe something to do with women...?)

The interesting thing about this book was its effortless blend of well-observed local detail  ("I shot a man in Vermont, just to watch him die"), with the hyper-realism common to soap opera, but rarely well managed in novel form. Like the folks who wrote the end of Mullet, Tsiolkas knows this story has to be bigger than real life, soap without the bubbles: dirt, blood and a few broken teeth left in the bath when it's emptied. Yes, some silly things happen: but they do not have to be believable to make the book move and live and have its being, and his control of all threads is mesmerising - he never lets go. I don't think I've really explained what I mean there, but let it be.

I was moved to tears at least twice, firstly by the chapter on Connie's father, and on another chapter on the ageing Greek grandfather, Manoli, visiting his dying friend on a whim after a funeral.

We do need someone in this country writing anger, too, and again I beg to differ with Ley; instead of being weighted against the raffish failed bohemians Rosie and Gary, the anger is spread around this book like an infection (my evidence for this needs to be withheld though, for fear of spoiling the book for others.)
A lot of our novels are damn pretty, unfortunately. Funny, though, that this also happens elsewhere, so that someone like Richard Ford leaches anger slowly through his work and then gets really mad off the page. The stress of writing pretty can't be very good for one's emotional health, if Ford is anything to go by.

And the last chapter simply sings, resurrecting what I understand of Loaded (really must read that now), for a last run around the block, shall we say, before Christos has to really grow up. As Ley noted also, he writes magnificently about teenagers - there's a great little shoplift of cigarettes in the middle which simply shouted "Coles" to me. A very exciting book, much more to my tastes than Dead Europe, which was incredibly well written and conceived, but terrifying. Simply terrifying.

Whatever will he do next?

you gotta love this hairy city of books

HAH. Only ONE WRONG. On teh first try. I'm arrogant (that's a clue to the one I got wrong.)

Miriam Burstein found some dead cakes here, which reminded her (and others) of Miss Havisham's wedding feast.

Another week, a new blog to read - what fun. Linh Dinh describes her travels around the States in a recent tour, here on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog.

Antipodean SF#126 is now available, link via HorrorScope. TEN fabulous original science-fiction, fantasy, or horror mini-stories of about 500 words each that will entertain, yet won't take hours to read.

To coincide with his tour, Text Publishing will release two Leonard Cohen novels here.(And I say Hallelujah because Google Reader helped me pull a feed off their new website.)

Mark Thwaite alerts us on ReadySteadyBook to a notification site for new DRM-free e-books.

And according to Bud Parr, there's some Pynchon-lite on the horizon.

She's a famous librarian who writes like a dream, she was here very recently (I could not really justify the outrageous price of the seminar without a current job), and she loved the joint. Of Melbourne, K.G. Schneider, the Free Range Librarian, says:

'Melbourne is a lovely city about as old as San Francisco, with similar Gold Rush origins. It’s the first city I’ve been in for a long time that felt truly sui generis.

Some old cities feel like a set piece, some have had their souls rebuilt into chilly commercial canyons, but Melbourne has kept a lot of character (not without proactive help from its citizens). From the Vic Market to the funky little cafes in alleys, Melbourne resists being bottled. Sydney is beautiful and tidier, but Melbourne has broader shoulders and a way of tossing its hair that says, “I’ve been through a lot.”'
(And yes, I've cut the links to her photos there, but you can see them from her site.)