reeling and writhing

Prime Minister's literary awards are in

Finally. The news is out on this year's PM's literary awards.

Minister for the Arts Peter Garrett has just announced the winners of the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

The winner of the 2009 Fiction award is Nam Le for his book of short stories The Boat. The judging panel was impressed by the daring scope and excellence of its execution, the generous breadth of its emotional and social traverse and the excitement generated by every story.

In 2009, two books and three authors share the Non-Fiction award. The winners are Evelyn Juers for House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds for Drawing the Global Colour Line.

Both books explore important racial, moral and political issues of Australia's past. The Non-Fiction judging panel said "With great intellectual authority and international research Evelyn Juers, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell their stories magnificently."

The link for this Bookforum review of The Boat comes from Nam Le's reviews page on his website - scroll right on down...

The most recent Latrobe University Bulletin  carried these remarks on Reynolds' and Lake's prizewinning book, here, and the Cambridge University Press catalogue entry includes (somewhat chunky bits of) reviews. 

And my March '09 review of House of Exile, with links to other sources, is here.

the way we published then...

As noted at Spike, Ampersand Duck has written a splendid post about Richard Jermyn's Common Press launch in Pambula some weeks ago. Run, read it here  and a couple of other places. Thanks to &Duck for permission to publish photographs of the first printing from Richard's press, built with Australian timbers.

Duck's post includes a fascinating, accessible account of the history and working parts of the Common Press: read it all, it is wonderful.

...and the way we publish now

Jennifer Mills' cracker essay in The Reader, the first anthology from the Emerging Writers' Festival, is published in full on her blog. The trials of the festival circuit are discussed with complete frankness, something rare and precious these days.

People who are good at writing books (and I hope to one day count myself among them) are not necessarily also good at selling them. Or, indeed, talking about them. And yet, if you don't have a media-friendly persona, the publishing world doesn't seem to want to know you. They are looking for an angle to distinguish you in the crush of new books and new writers, but you know yourself to be a complex individual who is made up of more than just angles. You have curves and straight lines and scribbly bits. On the upside, journalists will sometimes recast you as the mythical, romantic figure you have always suspected yourself to be. But the process of being marketed is deeply compromising and can actually feel like some kind of identity fraud.

(Also noted by the Overland blog.)

a library of news made by many hands

Peta Hopkins reports at the LINT blog that the digitisation 'crowdsourcing' project the NLA has been conducting in recent times, in order to edit enormous quantities of scanned text from Australia's newspapers, has received its most recent review, which can be read here. 

There are pictures on the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program website which give a visual account of the scanning process by which NLA staff have been adding more and more early newspapers to the database, which now holds 4.3 million fulltext, searchable articles. There are, regrettably, no pictures of library users editing scanned text in the comfort of their own homes, but that's not to say that the program is not receiving support from the punters - as Rose Holley says,

Users have demonstrated a willingness to work towards the ‘common good’, to volunteer their time, energy, skill, knowledge and ideas and to be involved long term in a program of national historic significance. The collaborative activity from this new community is enhancing the quality of the data and therefore the accuracy of full‐text searching in a way that the National Library of Australia could never have achieved using its own resources alone.

The Project details page where this report is published also carries a document of comments from those who volunteered to correct text.

Not only can Australians assist the library by going online, registering and helping to correct scanned text of old, often poorly printed newspapers - if you are aware of old papers that are missing from the library's collection, you can assist the work of the Australian Newspaper Plan by checking them against the list of titles, here. (Lists and shots of found titles, here.) The online documenting of both projects make for interesting reading.

poetry in the corner, in the spotlight or underground

I was quite moved by this post by George Szirtes on his recent involvement in the Best Poems from the London Underground anthology launch:

In bookshops there is usually the poetry corner about which Kingsley Amis once wrote a funny poem, 'A Bookshop Idyll', before turning his attention to fiction. There is, for all kinds of reasons, something coyly cornerish about Poets' Corner. Sensitives retire there in varying states of tremulousness: the robustly healthy avoid it as if it were a source of potential weakening or embarrassment. The common-sense disciples of straight-speaking and simple man-ness avoid it because it is for clever intellectual types who'll only make them feel inferior and dumb. Fancy talk for the fancy minded.

People, on the whole, only go there if it is what they already want: the corner offers a specialism, like turnip growing or vintage trains...
What is marvellous about Poems on the Underground is that it takes poetry out of the corner (I know, I live in the corner, am of it, and love it because how can you not love being with what you love?) and floats it into the very air. It is there among crowds, among advertisements, among newspapers, public notices, maps, graffiti, above the issues of London Lite and the Evening Standard. It is not in a corner. People glance up and there it is. Just a few lines of it. And those lines are doing something that nothing around them does. They hold the air. They engage an unprepared part of them (of me, of us, of you) just as the poem itself must enter the world a little unprepared, always a little surprised at itself. They engage the place we know exists within us, that rises out of all we are to meet them.

I have reluctantly excised a paragraph of this which I enjoyed very much, because it would be stealing to quote it all - but please read it all, he has something lovely to say about poetry printed on napkins in the very next para. Not only that but he has a book of poetry on the shortlist for the T.S. Eliot prize - thanks to Andrew Burke for the news of that announcement.

just hanging

The most amazing flower and plate. This lady is a china photography queen. And this post is a poem with pictures. Via the Strange Fruit blogroll.

Earlier this month, Sonya Chung wrote enthusiastically about Everyman's Guide for Scientific Living at The Second Pass, calling it 'the best book nobody's heard of'.

What book reviewing on blogs can be, (and here also.) The list of best posts on Sterne makes for happy Internet readings for us all. When is the mobile archive coming out, Tim?

One for the money, two for the show - some Pen Macquarie videos. Come on, you know you want to watch them!

This very fine interview with Tom Cho at Eric Forbes's blog was first published in the Ubud Writers'
Festival edition of Quill magazine. Cho discusses the process by which Look Who's Morphing came together, and how his creative writing studies influenced its development.

The opening line of this is gorgeous, though it sounds more like Confession than AA. There's a story waiting to be written about my family, Wilson's Prom and the golden ticket. Or maybe we'll just keep it to ourselves, 'for a larf'.

Finally, Jonathan Mayhew mentioned Arcade on his blog the other day, saying he writes here. Looks like a fine site: a lot of the conversation seems to start here. (And there's plenty of it, too.)

weekend news 3: come see the magic theatre

This beautiful exhibition (click on the image for details) is running at Craft Victoria from October 23rd to November 28th.

Taking its cue from Hesse’s surrealistic landscape (in Der Steppenwolf), A Key to Help Make Your Own World Visible presents a series of hidden interior topographies; worlds existing somewhere between the pain and beauty of things past.

Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison have worked collaboratively for the past ten years, chiefly using paper as their medium. From carefully constructed limited edition artists’ books to works on paper, they record, deconstruct and rebuild miniature worlds.

Do please check it out. Louise Jennison's fine blog is elsewhere (so to speak) and you can see more of their work there.

weekend news 2: neighbour wins Bristol short story prize

It is not every week that I go out for bread and bump into a neighbour who has won the Bristol Short Story prize. Saves me a bit of feed-reading!! and makes our little shopping square a larger place to be, all of a sudden.

'Beyond The Blackout Curtain', by Elizabeth Jane, took first prize of 500 pounds, publication and a Waterstones' gift card, and sits first in the 2009 prize anthology, which can be purchased at several UK outlets. The prize is awarded with the aim of finding stories to publish in a 'vibrant, original short story anthology' to be stocked in as many bookshops as possible, including high street chains, and to promote the profile of the Bristol Review of Books.

It was awarded way back in July (yes, my neighbour is modest and did not email me about this. I hope she keeps in better touch next time she does something astonishing) and entries for next year's prize will be accepted between December 2009 and March 2010.

Belated and heartfelt congratulations, Liz. BRAVA!!!

weekend news 1, with a remark on Gerald Murnane

HEH. What I said I would not do any more.

But I cannot resist notifying you of these podcasts of treasure  from Radio National - has the programming there been sensational this week or what?

CAN HAZ Gerald Murnane, the writer of Tamarisk Row, The Plains and his latest book Barley Patch, on fiction for an hour (PURE GOLD) and Sonu Shamdasani, the editor of Jung's Red Book for twenty minutes? THOSE BASES BELONG TO US thanks to the national broadcaster and Team Koval. Thanks to Peter Mares for both interviews  - regrettably the Shamdasani interview has doubtful sound quality, so it will be easier to deal with when the transcript is up in a week or so.

Thanks to Giramondo I have already read Barley Patch, and what can I say? so much more to digest and think about regarding this thing we call fiction. I bought two volumes of his stories (out of print) from AbeBooks for myself for an extra birthday present. Velvet waters, indeed.  And he mentions in the radio show that he has completed a novella, A History of Books, so I hope we will see that sometime soon as well.

Barley Patch is provocative, teasing, bracing, all sorts of good things. Suffice it to say that upon finishing it, I started in on Vikram Seth's An Equal Music with the sense that I was seeing everything through the cleanest of clear windows. The Seth felt baroquely messy, and I was hearing all kinds of annoying things, including pastiche, even after I realigned my ears and eyes. So I know what to go back to in the future if my reading aids need tuning up. It's unlikely I'll have more to say on this, I have too much to learn.

new trouble in Paradise, says Stothard

One of the first reports has come in from the roundtable on book-reviewing at Princeton, and it's from Peter Stothard, of the TLS.

Participants included Stothard, Michael Dirda, Sam Tanenhaus, Jessa Crispin, and Steve Wasserman, who wrote this extensive summary in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007 (which has now become a subscription-only publication. Good luck to 'em.)

It's a potent piece of blogging, book-ended by Stothard evocatively reading Fitzgerald's first novel in the hotel where some of its parties were set. Two useful paragraphs suggest a direction for the future, not a surprising one to hear from Stothard's quarters:

Sam Tanenhaus's vigorous defence of the serious and popular in his coverage - with all the hackles it raises from those who distrust popularity at all - took me back vividly to my days of editing The Times in London. The 'serious and popular' is seriously hard. The TLS, by a contrast that could only be explained here at the acute risk of smugness, can succeed - and does - by offering a mix of exclusively the serious and sometimes difficult to loyal subscibers who prize us precisely and only for doing just that.

 Loyal readers paying serious money for literary criticism in a paper which has never been as dependent on advertising as the general press is a winning formula in these days. The World Wide Web, which causes such trouble to newspaper economies, is for us a powerful tool to attract new subscribers in places around the world which we could never reach by mail.

Enjoy.

just call your life in

I promised James Bradley I would post this when he twittered in disbelief earlier this week that there are Twitter novels.  I'm quoting from the first chapter of Alexandra Johnson's Leaving A Trace: On Keeping A Journal, the first chapter of which can be found here.

This is the excerpt I've printed out and stuck in a commonplace book - James, N.B. the bolded section, which for some reason made me think of your raised eyebrows. I also like Mansfield's quoted remark at the end.

Ten million blank journals are sold annually in stationery stores alone. Two million in specialty stores. Thanks to secret passwords and specialized software, an estimated four million scribblers keep some form of journal on a computer. If the information age has spawned a hunger for connection (and privacy), so, too, a need for the quickest way to access interior life. Web sites pop up daily. Our accelerated global age has left little time to slow down and reflect. In Japan, for example, those too busy to keep journals phone in their entries. At the end of the month, a company sends a bound transcript.

Familiar with the statistics, I also know how hard it is for many to keep journals. Yet when I ask people, as I often do, who they wish had kept a diary, a torrent of names is unleashed — my mother, my husband, my sister, the uncle whom I'm named after, the father I never knew. Why then the resistance to keeping them ourselves? Virginia Woolf put her finger on it best perhaps, when she asked her own diary: "Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?"; Whom does one write for? Oneself, of course. "True to oneself — which self" asked Woolf's friend and archrival, Katherine Mansfield. (In her journal, she confessed that a single day's "thousands of selves" made her feel like a hotel clerk busy handing keys to the psyche's "willful guests.")

see where a single step will take you

Some notes on Lisa Dempster's book Neon Pilgrim (Aduki Press, 2009)

Although talking to her online and at a couple of launches, and hearing her speak at EWF, makes me feel that I know Lisa Dempster a little, it is only in reading her first, tough little book, this travelogue called Neon Pilgrim, that I feel several layers of her lie uncovered to all comers, in much the same way she slept out in the open in rudimentary shelters during most of her 1200 kilometre trek around Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan.

I feel a bit shy offering this reading, too, as Aduki kindly offered me a copy and I completely forgot how rarely I read contemporary travel writing - it is hardly fair to compare a work like Neon Pilgrim to In Patagonia, and I hope I'm not doing that unconsciously here.

Taking her cue from a seminal English-language account of the 88 Temple Pilgrimage, Japanese Pilgrimage by Oliver Statler, which she picked up in a small community library in the midst of a bout of depression and social withdrawal, Dempster returned to the island she had spent her sixteenth year in as an exchange student to take up a pilgrim's staff, don a white vest and walk herself back to health. This spiritual and physical exercise not only caused her to lose ten kilos in fifty-odd days but clearly changed her life as well. There is naturally a strong emphasis on physical struggle in this book, and that is part of its rugged charm.

from my email...

For it is true, some of us live in an Internet world. And isn't "Internet Tendency" just the best name ever for a service delivering an i-Phone app from indie publishers? How 'hubbly jubbly'.

Mc Sweeney's email newsletter promises great things for its new iPhone app, The Small Chair:

No longer will T-Pain be your only salvation on trains, during lunch, and through all the other empty gaps in a day. Allow McSweeney's to fill your moments of solitude, moments of togetherness, moments of intolerable boredom.'

Und so weiter. There's a review making extravagant claims about sales of The Small Chair, here at Boldtype.

some vital information just for you

A true tale of conversational vengeance, here at a blog at the Times that I normally would steer wide of, because of its unfortunate name. I wonder if the scholar involved here will indeed watch more television now. The comments swerve pretty quickly into confessions about the changing nature of TV consumption in the age of DVDs and excessive advertising, as well as why LA entertainment professionals avoid watching TV:

Here in LA there's a strange paradox between making entertainment and consuming it. If you are actively watching TV, internet, movies, it's because you aren't successful. If you're working less than 18 hours a day, you're considered a slacker, though work time includes "improving yourself" with Pilates or Pynchon. Entertainment people (especially working actors) are the most culturally ignorant folks on the planet. It's one reason why the Industry favors young writers - because the older ones have no time/inclination to follow youth culture so hire others who are. Until they get too busy, that is, and fall behind.

and speculation about reclusive US authors:

You said Pynchon was the second most-reclusive american author. I'm assuming the first is John Swartzwelder.

Another very important thing you must know before you die is that there is a very strong possibility that Jeff Bridges could be involved with the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit.Via Celluloid Tongue, one of Angela Meyer's recommendations.

reading notes: Brooklyn, The World Beneath

I swear that there are things in Colm Toibin's books that just cut me open, they do (and the interview in that link deals with a few of them, as well as being quite wacky in places). I remember finding The Heather Blazing, the first book of his I read way back last century, a bit clinical: Brooklyn, while returning again to Ireland, seems more assured than his earlier work, even than the precisely calibrated Blackwater Lightship.

There is an almost miraculous engineering of narrative tension in this beautiful book. Toibin conveys the helpless ratiocination of demure Eilis Lacey in a third person narration that is barely coloured with her emerging sympathy for others, so that she just manages to stand out as a character from a cast of much stronger people and two vibrant, colourful backgrounds in Enniscorthy and Brooklyn.

The total effect is just riveting, and perhaps those who were expecting a noisier book may not be in complete sympathy themselves with Toibin's utter success in placing us in an inarticulate Irish migrant girl's shoes. There are several moments where the sheer pity of it all is just overwhelming: Rose prefers not to marry, as she notes what it has done to her friends, while later Eilis waits for her mother to tell her that she will miss her, and waits in vain.

Lives of quiet desperation indeed - the bitterness of the young women in Mrs Kehoe's boarding house could supply a pickle factory. I have some thoughts on how Anne Enright's comparatively tougher style may have influenced Toibin's work here, but for now I really just want to read it all again ASAP. And then his earlier books as well.

Another book that has given me a powerful buzz recently is Cate Kennedy's first novel, The World Beneath, which I found magnificent. The only fault I can find with this book is the use of the noun proletariat as an adjective on the first page, by Sandy, who it transpires is a bit clumsy with words anyway. Apart from that, it is a flawless, absorbing, zeitgeist brokering threehander. (And 'zeitgeist broker', as far as I know, is Kennedy's phrase.)

There's a fine, if brief, review in the ALR by Kerryn Goldsworthy and some notes here on her blog, and I concur completely with the parallel she draws with The Slap: I certainly noticed a similarly acute observational bent in this novel. Jo Case in her ABR review  is concerned that structure sometimes detracts from the overall achievement in this book, but otherwise notes Kennedy's skill in bringing characters to life:

Kennedy crawls expertly inside the skin of her three central characters, assembling word pictures from telling details that enable us to know them better than they know themselves, and avoiding the novelist's trap of sacrificing nuance to secure the reader's sympathy.

(That link may endure for a few more weeks as the ABR website seems to be in flux. It may even stay there for a couple of months if we are lucky.)

I am ready for another novel by Ms Kennedy anytime,and a film of this one, as Kerryn suggests, would be very welcome indeed.