Monthly Archives: February 2012

Daytripper, the comic

Posted on 26 February 2012 | 1 comment

Fàbio Moon & Gabriel Bà, Daytripper (Vertigo, 2011)

20120224-180529.jpgThis is the last of the comics I was given at Christmas. It’s another beautifully compressed gem I’ve read in counterpoint to Frank Moorhouse’s slow Cold Light. Its hero is a newspaper obituary writer, and – skip the rest of this paragraph if you hate spoilers – each of the 10 original comics collated here tells a different story of his death, each occurring at a different age, and each ending with a paragraph or two from his obit.

Bà and Moon are described in the blurbs as twin brothers from Brazil, and though I couldn’t find an acknowledgement that the book was first published in Portuguese, it is set in Brazil, and it has a Latin-American magic realist feel to it – not fantasy as such but a way of seeing the actual world as magical. The art is beautiful without pretending to be other than comic-book art. The cumulative effect of the narrative(s) is a profound meditation on the fragility of life – or not so much the fragility as the conditionality: we all knowingly or unknowingly have frequent brushes with death, so the life we have now is something of a miracle.

The book isn’t perfect. In the final section, these two young men try for a vision of acceptance of death by an old man, and (in my not-yet-as-old-as-the-protagonist opinion) manage only a romantic empty gesture. So according to Randall Jarrell’s definition of a novel as ‘a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it’, this is a graphic novel. It’s an excellent one.

Fàbio Moon & Gabriel Bà have a blog in English.

1 Comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

Dory Previn

Posted on 21 February 2012 | 1 comment

Dory Previn died on Valentine’s Day.

It seems appropriate when writing about her to move into too-much-information mode, so let me say that I first heard her music after a sexual embarrassment. My companion got out of bed, turned on the light, put an LP on the stereo and played  ‘Don’t Put Him Down’ from Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign.

I can’t say that it relieved my chagrin, but it did make me a fan.

There’s an obituary in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, truncated from the Guardian, and a much more comprehensive and better informed one in the New York Times. Both the Herald and the Times mention Joby Baker, her husband since 1986, but neither tell us anything she did since she married him. The full Guardian obituary does mention Planet Blue (a musical protest against the invasion of Iraq, which you can download from the link) and her two volumes of autobiography. Astonishingly, one of the bits that the Herald omitted was her collaboration with Andre Previn in 1996, surely something that gives shape to a story that otherwise is a parable about the dangers of psychiatric drugs.

She did a long interview with Bernadette Cahill in 2005, in which she comes across as a bit scattered, but very much alive. It’s in two parts here and here.

1 Comment

Posted in From the web

Tagged

Bill Willingham’s Bad Doings and Big Ideas

Posted on 20 February 2012 | Leave a comment

Bill Willingham (writer and artist), and Mark Buckingham, Zander Cannon, Duncan Fegredo, Peter Gross, Paul Guinan, Nico Henrichon, Adam Hughes, Phil Jimenez, Michael Wm Kaluta, Jason Little, Marc Laming, Shawn McManus, Linda Medley, Albert Monteys, Kevin Nowlan, David Peterson, Paul Pope, Eric Powell, Ron Randall, John Stokes, Jill Thompson, Daniel Torres, Bernie Wrightson (artists), John Costanza and Todd Klein (letterers), Bad Doings and Big Ideas: A Bill Willingham Deluxe Edition (Vertigo 2011)

As I continue on my intermittent re-entry into the world of comics, which I abandoned at roughly 12 and came back to in my late 50s, it’s the non-fiction that I respond to most, and after that – oddly, since I don’t care for it in non-graphic narratives or movies – it’s fantasy-horror. Or maybe it’s not so odd, as it was Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman that re-piqued my interest.

This hefty hardback full of horror was a Christmas gift, and one that gave me a lot of pleasure. Bill Willingham, I gather from his entertaining interstitials here, is a writer and artist best known for a series of comics called Fables. This is not that. It’s a collection of Other Stuff, including a number of adventures of minor characters from the Sandman universe. I don’t know what the uninitiated would make of these, with their injokes and unexplained walk-ons, but the stories stand up by themselves, especially the 60 or so pages of Thessaly the witch (the second half of which I read in its own book, also a gift, a while back).

The opening story, Proposition Player, is the longest (130+ pages) and most interesting. Willingham tells us it was the first thing he wrote for Vertigo, having been an artist with them for some time. It must have been quite a debut: the hero starts out working for a casino and ends up through a series of poor choices and successful gambles as the most powerful God (capital intended) in the cosmos. The gambles are much grander than Pascal’s bet, and I wonder if the story’s cheerful blasphemy does more damage to the cultural authority of established religion than the humourless argumentation of, say, Richard Dawkins.

I’m currently leading a double life as a reader. In one life, I’m reading a number of huge books, and in the other a whole lot of smaller ones as counterpoint. When I was reading Reamde, which is great fun but far too big to lump around in a shoulder bag, I read poetry books and literary journals, physically but not intellectually light. Now I’m a third of the way through Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light, not as physically weighty as Readme, but quite a slog – the slogginess doesn’t make me want to give up on the book, but it does make me cry out for something lively to relieve the pain. Bad Doings and Big Ideas was perfect for the part. And I have a couple more Christmas present comics that are also looking good.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Kate vs Inga – it’s still going on

Posted on 19 February 2012 | Leave a comment

Kate Grenville was interviewed on the most recent Guardian Books Podcast, a good choice of guest as the subject was historical fiction, and her last three books – The Secret River, The Lieutenant and Sarah Thornhill –  have been tales of the early years of the colony of New South Wales.

It must be irritating to Ms Grenville that every time a journalist talks to her about her colonial novels, they raise the matter of the ‘attacks’ on The Secret River by ‘historians’. And that’s what happens in this podcast. Asked about the response to The Secret River, KG says in part:

We all kind of knew that things had happened, but people of my generation were brought up with this illusion that, you know, the reason there were no Aboriginal people left in many parts of Australia was that they all got measles, and had no resistance to it. We all kind of knew that this was wrong and The Secret River gave people a way of starting to think about it, I think. And because it’s fiction, it wasn’t too confronting. With fiction you can always reassure yourself that after all this is just made up. …
A couple of historians, with The Secret River, were cranky that I was writing something that they felt was their territory. You know, this is hard stuff to think about. Here we are as white Australians living incredibly privileged lives and we’re doing it on the back of 2oo years of oppression and misery and murder, basically. To actually look that fact in the face is extremely confronting, very difficult. So I think when those historians really diverted the debate away from what I’d been writing the books about, which is the massacre and what  the beneficiaries of it do with that knowledge, I think they felt that this was a chance to divert the debate into something more comfortable – which is the debate of is it history, is it fiction, how far should novelists go in writing historical fiction.

OK, the only reason for a novelist to appear on the Guardian podcast is to promote her own work, and the dismissal of any number of other novelists who have tackled the subject (Thea Astley comes immediately to mind, and surely there are others) can be forgiven as loose talk. It’s absolutely true that the subject of ‘massacre and what  the beneficiaries of it do with that knowledge’ is difficult and confronting and, I would add, of high priority (though it’s an open question whether the book actually goes to the question of the beneficiaries). It may even be that the criticisms of The Secret River had the effect of diverting attention from that question. But really ….

The only historian I’ve read on this subject is Inga Clendinnen, who made some astringent and, yes, cranky remarks about The Secret River in her Quarterly Essay, Who Owns the Past? But her gist, as I remember it, was that on many points the novel distorts the history – for instance, by moving a key incident from the first years of the colony to a couple of decades later – and in general it lacks any sense of actual engagement with the times she was writing about. Clendinnen herself could hardly be described as ‘heavy duty’ in the sense of inaccessible. And it would be hard to read her writing about the early colony as comfortable.

Evidently Kate Grenville is still smarting from the criticism, but this is fighting dirty. Inga Clendinnen is not Keith Windschuttle, yet anyone learning about her criticisms from this podcast would assume she was near allied.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , ,

Jim McCann and Janet Lee’s Return of the Dapper Men

Posted on 13 February 2012 | Leave a comment

Jim McCann and Janet Lee, Return of the Dapper Men (Archaia Entertainment 2010)

This is a kind of steampunk fairy tale graphic novel, self-consciously beautiful to the extent that it includes an appendix explaining its decoupage technique. I found it visually boring if not outright repulsive, and was left cold by the story, which involves a city, or perhaps a whole world, where time has stopped but starts again when hundreds of identical ‘dapper men’ float down from the sky, a mute mechanical angel that somehow brings harmony, an elliptical message about destiny, and strangely empty allusions (the city is Anorev, Verona in reverse, but why?).

It was a generous and thoughtful Christmas present, but I guess I’m just not part of the target audience.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

Ampersand 4

Posted on 11 February 2012 | 3 comments

Alice Gage (editor), Ampersand Magazine 4: From the Heart of the Forest to the Edge of the Road (Art & Australia 2011)

20120211-182652.jpgI’d seen earlier issues of Ampersand in coffee shops around Newtown and assumed it was a kind of zine with advertising – you know, quirky, poorly crafted stories about queerness, spiky incoherent poems and blurry photos, interspersed with slick promos for hip merchandise. A quick, lazy flip through one copy while waiting for a hot chocolate wasn’t enough to make me rethink,

Then the Art Student gave me this issue for Christmas, and I discovered I WAS WRONG. True, there are a couple of rap-influenced poems, and an over the top postmodernish necrophiliac horror story. But from the opening fold-out photograph, ‘Black Friday’ by John O’Neil, with John Forbes’s ‘Going North’ luxuriating in white space on the back, to the charming appendix noting things that happened when the magazine was in production, this is a delight.

I don’t have to describe the physical magazine because there’s a video of an elegant pair of hands flicking through it here. (Go on, have a look. It only takes about 90 seconds.)

Tommy Murphy (Holding the Man and Gwen in Purgatory playwright) writes about his father’s dementia. Bob Brown (the senator, not an obscure namesake) writes about Oura Oura, his shack retreat in rural Tasmania. Three pages of comics by Leigh Rigozzi tell sweet quotidian anecdotes about life in Newtown (I don’t know if that’s exactly a correct use of quotidian, but it’s a Harvey Pekar term, and seems to fit). Fabian Muir visits people living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (and makes me wish he and Merilyn Fairskye had been in touch: his article and Plant Life, her recent exhibition of photographs from Chernobyl speak volumes of each other).

There are a couple of wonderful young fogey articles, one inveighing against proposed changes to Fisher Library at Sydney University, to make it more efficient by getting rid of half the books, an auto da fé on an unprecedented scale being conducted in secret, the other lamenting the passing of toll booth operators. An iconoclastic piece on iconoclasm argues that the restoration of works of art that have been vandalised sometimes does more damage than the vandalism. There are pages and pages of high quality colour reproductions of art by Tracy Moffatt and a clutch of Western Desert artists, among others.

I wish I’d read this magazine three months ago, because then I would have made sure to go to the Carriageworks for My Darling Patricia’s Posts in a Paddock, a theatre piece built around murder by Jimmy Governor of ancestors of one of the company: the piece about it here is a brilliant example of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration, infinitely more interesting than February’s I Am Eora at the same venue.

And as a final note: accustomed as I am to thinking of Melbourne as the place where solid new literary ventures come into being, I was pleased to see that this is a Sydney publication. I Googled the editor, Alice Gage, and discovered that though she is indeed a Sydneysider, she produced the first issue of Ampersand while in Melbourne. Her reflections on the difference in the milieux are worth reading,

I’m posting this the day before the launch of Ampersand 5: Eleventh Hour (the link is to that issue’s YouTube teaser).

3 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , ,

Southerly 70/3

Posted on 11 February 2012 | 1 comment

David Brooks & Elizabeth McMahon (editors), Santosh K. Sareen & G. J. V. Prasad (guest editors), India India: Southerly 70/3

Southerly is a venerable institution – the Journal of the English Association, Sydney, it has been going for 70 years (which isn’t long compared to children’s literary journals such the School Magazine or its New Zealand equivalent, but impressive among little magazines for grownups). This issue has a central focus on Indian–Australian literary relations, but I bought it for Jennifer Maiden’s poem, ‘The Year of the Ox’, which doesn’t relate to that focus.

‘The Year of the Ox’ is to an end-of-year family letter what many of Jennifer Maiden’s poems are to diary entries, that is to say, same same but different. It brings us up to date on characters who have been inhabiting her poetry for some time: herself and her daughter, current political leaders (Obama, Clinton, Gillard), iconic figures of the recent and not so recent past (Diana Spencer, Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria, Eleanor Roosevelt) and her fictions George Jeffreys and Clare Collins. It’s a long and complex poem, but from one point of view, it brings us up to date on the doings of this mental family during 2009, the Chinese Year of the Ox, and into 2010, Year of the Tiger, all the while ringing the changes on the images and connotations of ox and tiger. I love the way the poem swings with apparent nonchalance from observations on her own close relationship, the political scene and the nature of poetry, to – what to call them? – Platonic dialogues between icons, to vividly realised domestic scenes from a virtual novel, and all the while there’s a sense of poet-as-ox pulling a plough through the furrows of a mind alert to the world.

There are other excellent poems: by Ali Alizadeh (whose ‘Election Announced’ chillingly mentions someone as ‘the theocrat / a retributivist in speedos’), Judith Beveridge (whose two poems are actually India-related, thanks to her interest in Buddhist lore), Richard Deutsch, Craig Powell and a list of other Australians, and by a handful of Indian poets. I couldn’t get into any of the short stories, with the exception of Sarah Klenbort’s ‘The Chinese Circus Comes to Cessnock’, in which three fruit-picking backpackers encounter the complexities of Australia’s policies about Asian immigration.

Southerly comes from academe, and there a number of academic pieces, in particular surveys of the India-Australia literary connection and studies of particular texts. I intended to read the journal from start to finish, but decided to skip the scholarly bits when I read on page 20 that one novelist’s work ‘might be taken as a case study of Deleuzean deterritorialised nomadology […] Derridean self-critique in which text and meta-text mutually […]’. Too much like hard work! I skipped pieces by Indian critics on Mollie Skinner, Hazel Edwards, and a number of Aboriginal subjects with words like subjectivity, constructing and historiography in their titles. But I was wooed back by Mark Macleod’s ‘Reading my first time in India: the ACLALS Conference 1977’. Once you get past the daunting title, this is a fabulous piece of travel writing structured around two literary conferences. It sheds light all over the place, and abounds with striking images and telling anecdotes.

The other stand-out piece was by Patrick Bryson, a white Australian married to an Indian woman and living in rural India. His ‘The Men Who Stare at Bogans’ explores the Indian press’s coverage of the anti-Indian racism in Australia, and moves on to a brilliant essay on the treatment of ‘tribals’ in India.

As I was writing this, the next issue of the Asia Literary Review arrived in the mail. It’s an English language journal reflecting writing in and about Asia. This Southerly does a nice job of reminding us of one of our strong Asian relationships.

1 Comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

4W twenty-two

Posted on 1 February 2012 | Leave a comment

David Gilbey (editor), 4w twenty-two New Writing (2011)

fourW is an anthology produced regularly by the Booranga Writers’ Centre, home of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers. The 22nd issue, the first I’ve read, is extraordinarily eclectic: in small part a showcase for local Wagga Wagga writers, it extends to work from Japan (a Noh play, some fine short poems) and elsewhere far beyond these shores, established writers rubbing shoulders with those still wet from the cocoon, the academic with the demotic, and a world of diversity in between: short stories with the ghosts of O Henry, Raymond Carver, Henry Lawson and maybe Tropfest hovering over their shoulders, a touch of magic realism, some ‘ladies who lunch’ pieces (is that a genre?), cryptic and narrative and lyric and satirical poetry. It was perfect to carry in my bag while I was immersed at home in the completely unportable Reamde.

My crabby editorial soul snarked into life once or twice, most strikingly at this: ‘Her mother … insisted she keep her hair long and plaited to trick the suitors into seeing her as young, virile and obedient.’ Um, note to author: I may be missing something, but I think you meant nubile.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged , , ,