reeling and writhing

her poetry is in motion

No, I will not start competing with Kerryn for forecasting - in this case it's pure serendipity.

I posted on Kay Ryan last week - and this week she is the new Poet Laureate of the US of A. (The Book Bench is a good news source - do add it to your feeder. The two articles quoted in this post are very good.)

There's a bundle of good poems for the reading (not copying out, though) by Ms Ryan over at the Poetry Foundation, but I rather like this sonnet, and think it fits the occasion.

we haz all ur information on drivethrough

At Brascoe Publishing's blog, following a link from Arts Hub, I found this rather brave little article by Leticia which was withdrawn from the Society of Editors (SA)'s newsletter recently.
(Brascoe folk, like me, also love the Locus blog.)

Someone whose blog work I have followed for a long time is Carrie Frye (CAAF), of Tingle Alley, who has been responsible for morning and afternoon coffee postings on the remarkable Terry Teachout's blog, About Last Night, which can be found at the fabulous US arts news site, Arts Journal.

(Another beauty is Arts and Letters Daily, which I learned while composing this post is brought to you by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Until quite recently I thought Terry lived there, but no. As my son would say, ROYDL - roll on your driveway laughing.)

Anyhow, enough about me and my foibles. CAAF has lighted my way to Zadie Smith's Believer essay on John Keats, for which I am most grateful.

And finally, here is a nice piece of news, gathered a little while ago by Perry, on the fate of Tom Keneally's book collection.

on the side of the user

This is one of the occasional pleas from Jessamyn West, one of the original revolting librarians, to OCLC to get real about the digital divide and public libraries, among other things.

I was lucky enough to meet Jessamyn when she was in Melbourne last year, at Mr Tulk with an enterprising bunch of new librarians. I continue to find her blog engrossing - I've yet to read Revolting Librarians Redux, but in both incarnations it made quite a stir.

What I love about her work is that she is constantly evaluating what may or may not work in the bright shiny world of library tech from the perspective of the people who have to use it, be they librarians or clients. Her approach is practical rather than deliberately iconoclastic, and most refreshing.

essaying the past and future

Arnold Zable will launch the latest publication from Giramondo next Thursday, July 17.

Dmetri Kakmi's memoir, Mother Land, is leaving the blocks at 6 (for 6.30) p.m., at Readings, 309 Lygon Street, Carlton.

Mother Land is the story of a boy's love for his homeland, and of a childhood marked by the hostility between two cultures.

Kakmi's memoir offers a vivid portrayal of Greek-Turkish life on the Aegean island of Bozcaada, in all its beauty, poverty, and ignorance. At the age of eight, Dimitri is forced to confront the political realities that spell the end for the Greeks of Anatolia. Nature and his parents' volatile marriage are his only teachers as he tries to make sense of his changing world.

As the boy struggles to reconcile the different cultures within himself, he is involved in acts of violence that erode his innocence and sense of humanity. Finally, the family flees the island. Years later, the adult Dimitri returns in the hope of making peace with his past.

Dmetri Kakmi was born in Turkey to Greek parents. His essays have been published around the globe. He compiled and edited the acclaimed children's anthology When We Were Young, and was the co-recipient of The Peter Blazey Fellowship in 2007. He lives in Melbourne, where he works as senior editor for Penguin Books.

 

There's an interview by Zable with the author in the latest Readings newsletter, here.

manuscripts on the way at LiteraryMinded

Recently I have added Angela Meyer's blog, LiteraryMinded, to my roll down there on the right, but have not yet subscribed to her feed. That's due to change right now - Lisa Dempster from Locus has alerted me to Angela's series of posts there, The Best Unpublished Books (the freshest at the top), on books which she knows are in progress but which for all kinds of reasons have yet to find the right publisher.

This kind of news feature is something blogs are eminently suited to, and it's great to see someone as well informed as Angela delivering her tips on who's out there, and what they're working on.

Lisa posted recently on articles about book reviewing and a whole bundle of other interesting publishing news, with an emphasis on independent presses and fresh publishing ideas.

While a Google Reader of 120 odd feeds is the nicest customised news reading you could possibly have, especially if you have mates' news and thoughts scattered throughout,  I struggle sometimes to remember what I've read, and got a big shock at a family function a few weeks ago when I added ten years and a new identity onto a young relative, simply because she had changed her hair (very becoming, but the alteration was significant, and the rellies numerous and fast-growing): so some of the filtering service I offer here from time to time with these links posts will inevitably become recommendation and referral only.

There are quite a few people out there doing this web-monitoring thing much better than I am currently, 'specially with my computer doing the Dying Swan like it is at present.

So I'm offering my strong recommendation for Angela's LiteraryMinded and for Locus, where Lisa Dempster and Emily Clarke of Vignette and Aduki presses write regularly on Oz publishing and writing, and read far more widely than I can on my lonesome here.

Check these blogs out: if you are a writer with published work you would like reviewed, think about whether Angela is someone you might send it to (see the bottom right hand corner of the homepage for details); and check out the eclectic and growing blogroll at Locus while you are there.

comus in furs

Alison Croggon is blogging from London at present. Check out her review of Sisters, an adaptation of Chekhov's The Three Sisters playing at Notting Hill Gate, and sundry Royal Court productions, as well as this review of a masque by John Milton and counter-masque by John Kinsella, staged at Christ's College, Cambridge.

The double bill of Comus and Kinsella's 21st century reply was staged in the very hall where Milton was proclaimed Lord of Misrule as a 19 year old student:

Milton reclaimed the masque from its courtly excesses, recasting it as morality tale that defends chastity against the chaos of sensual riot. The plot is simple: a young woman (the Lady) becomes lost in a forest, the home of a wicked magician who, with his half-animal revelers, lives a life of sexual and sensual excess. But with the help of her two brothers, her innate virtue and the intervention of an earth goddess, Sabrina the Nymph, she fights of his seductions.

However, it’s more complex than it first appears. True to the ambiguity noted by Blake when he said Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”, Milton permits the Bacchanalian Comus to run away to fight another day, still clutching his magic wand.

Kinsella’s version, which was commissioned by the Marlowe Society, sticks closely to Milton’s structure and even, intriguingly, his language, and brings the sexual perversity that is subtextual in Milton rampantly to the surface. Certainly, in its radical message it’s very much in the tradition of Milton. The contemporary version of Comus is an out-of-control genetic scientist who swallows handfuls of Viagra and amphetamines, and after her adventures in the forest, the Lady becomes an eco-warrior. But again, all is not quite what it seems: the ultimate triumph of Virtue is merely another form of corruption, in which the wilds of England are preserved at the expense of the wildernesses of the developing world.

This handsome and generous review of a student production wears its author's considerable understanding of the genre and its contribution to 20th century theatre lightly. As with all Alison's criticism, this is a delight to read and a surprise to find online, free and for nothing.

a thousand tiny poems

Andrew Burke, WA poet, puts in an appearance in Part Two of Radio National's Poetica program on haiku and senryu this afternoon.

Part One can be listened to here - Part Two no doubt will also turn up at that recent programs podcast link sometime in the next 24 hours. In the meantime, State times and programs are here - looks like there will be a repeat next Thursday.

Thanks to Andrew for passing on the news, and my apologies for letting the end of the week run away so quickly without posting on it.

I know I won't be leaving here... with a tail

This news post has been shuffled about a bit, but, to begin again, I must share this link with my eldest daughter, who had an old copy of Coles' Funny Picture book when she was small.

As noted on the Speakeasy blog and elsewhere, the Franz Ferdinand Book Group is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
This post and comments are an interesting sample of what's going down on their English tour...

The newest Meanjin is cram full of people from Sarsaparilla, who have done themselves proud! and RMIT's new Harvest mag is in the shops too.

Go find 'em - Laura Carroll's fine piece on Jane Austen's right to be single AND romantic, and Ampersand Duck's account of designing The Lost Dog are there for the reading. You have been told.

In other news, we will now be able to find out when our local member speaks in Parliament, via OpenAustralia.org. Link via Libraries Interact, authored by cyberlibrarian Kathryn Greenhill.

And finally, a blogger I know nothing of has, via Terry Teachout of About Last Night, reminded me of US poet Kay Ryan, and this very funny, though lengthy anecdote she shared quite a while back about the American poetry fest/bunfight, AWP.

Here's Ryan in the middle of an AWP panel on creativity, wrestling with the presenters' promiscuous use of the words 'mentor' and 'workshop':

Because it seems to me so deep and intimate, I have always had a very cautious feeling about this word mentor, as something far beyond the teacher of a class a student signed up for. It would be specific to two people who found some particular affinity, a relationship that would develop gradually. It would rarely occur. 

When I was a young writer, for some years I only knew one poet, Rosalie Moore, thirty-plus years my senior. We got to be friends and she was encouraging to me, but we barely understood each other at all. We stayed friends until she died in her nineties.

Occasionally over the years someone would refer to Rosalie as my mentor and I always felt an electric shock, like red cartoon arrows flying off my body, like bristles. Rosalie wasn’t my mentor. She would agree with that. I just don’t think the word should be used casually. It should be deep. Some people have mentors, some never do. I didn’t.

Workshop. In the old days before creative writing programs, a workshop was a place, often a basement, where you sawed or hammered, drilled or planed something.

You could not simply workshop something. Now you can. You can take something you wrote by yourself to a group and get it workshopped.

Sometimes it probably is a lot like getting it hammered. Other writers read your work, give their reactions, and make suggestions for change. A writer might bring a piece back for more workshopping later, even.

I have to assume that the writer respects these other writers’ opinions, and that just scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter if their opinions really are respectable; I just think the writer has given up way too much inside. Let’s not share. Really.

Go off in your own direction way too far, get lost, test the metal of your work in your own acids. These are experiments you can perform down in that old kind of workshop, where Dad used to hide out from too many other people’s claims on him.

Said blogger pointed me to this lovely piece in the Yale Review on Marianne Moore. (And yes, I have tarted up this post - I started rereading the Ryan piece and simply had to sample it.) So thanks, Patrick and Terry.

meme-a-rama

They are coming out my ears. This one, from Mark, is the 'open the book nearest to you at page 123 and write down the fifth sentence' meme.

"Verstehe nicht, she said."

Now if I was a really tough individual, I'd say, 'guess what it's from, HAHA, HAHA!'

But no. It's from Tim Parks' Cleaver, which I am ashamed to say I picked up for a song from the Melbourne University professional bookshop's sinbin on Monday, along with a copy of Gail Jones' Sixty Lights, A.L. Kennedy's Day and a book by David Malouf which I was going to use for this meme before dinner, but which my son has decided belongs elsewhere.

I can't remember the name of it, and now I can't even see it. I loved The Great World so much when I read it earlier this year that the Malouf came easily into my hand - and has gone walkies, but the point of this activity being that the book must be close to you has to be maintained. So, Cleaver, from the new bargain books pile, it is. (He tried to swipe Cleaver while I was typing this, too, but I said "OI." )

Tim Parks is someone I became interested in after reading a profile that described him as a writer who has managed to build a reputation without appearing at festivals or being interviewed for (ahem) profiles.

He eschews giving bits of himself away, arguing that they distract from the books, which include 'narrative' and other essays, a study of Italian translations of the English modernists, many English translations from Italian and three other books of non-fiction.

There is some information on his website about five of his eleven novels (where are the others? one wonders), including this from the Irish Times about Cleaver:

' Never has the need to empty one's mind been as convincingly, or as brilliantly, illustrated as in Tim Parks's full-blooded Cleaver. In a career spanning more than 20 years, and 13 novels, this most deliberate and underrated of English writers has consistently entered the more unattractive corners of human consciousness, with increasingly sophisticated and mature results.

Never overly concerned with style, he is instead a no-nonsense writer who invariably has something to say and tends to say it with robust candour, few apologies and a mastery of controlled indignation.'

There's also news that he is preparing a new translation of Machiavelli's Prince for Penguin, due for publication in 2009. What an intriguing fellow. I am excited, it's almost as good as Brian Moore coming back to life. I can hope so, anyway. The mise-en-scene of Cleaver has more than a sniff of the peerless Moore about it.

I have only read 35 pages of Cleaver, as I am still finishing Hanif Kureishi's Something To Tell You. So I have not read the rest of page 123.

But if the next 87 88 pages are as terse and compelling as the first 35, I will get there very speedily indeed.

(The Malouf is Child's Play. I've just found it in a completely different spot - maybe it was me?) Do consider yourself tagged, if this is your fancy.

oh what a feeling for a man with no qualities

Jon Faith excerpted quite a bit of this on his blog, and it looks like we can read it all for free anyhow. I know Joe Queenan wasn't de rigueur amongst the US bloggers a while back, but I can't remember why. So here it is.
Pretty funny.

The Speakeasy blog at Australian Writers' Marketplace Online pointed me at this lovely article about collecting books in the Wall Street Journal by author and writing teacher Luc Sante.

They've quoted one paragraph - I'm going to quote another, because this article appeals to me for its notes on weeding and the underlying reasons for collecting in the first place:

For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas.

I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it's ever truly complete. When I'm truly passionate about a subject, anything can be grist for the mill. Poetry can be as materially informative as journalism, and railroad timetables can be as evocative and lilting as poems. I derive nourishment from the copyright pages, from the publishers' ads in the back, from even the most misguided attempts at cover design.