Category Archives: Books

Cate Kennedy’s taste of river water

Posted on 25 May 2011 | 1 comment

Cate Kennedy, The Taste of River Water (Scribe 2011)

When Cate Kennedy read, marvellously, from this book at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, she described her poems as meditations through narrative, and that’s a nice description. Her poems generally have a narrative thread, whether it’s the story of the woman who wins second prize in a photography competition in ‘8 x 10 colour enlargements $16.50‘ or the moving hand of a baby at the breast in ‘Dawn service’.

Mostly this is no-frills poetry: very little by way of formal rhyme schemes, and even less prosodic adventure – no clever enjambement, uncanny syntax, esoteric allusion. Almost universally, the cadences and imagery are those of conversation, sometimes intensely intimate but always intelligent, generous and emotionally engaged. There’s an attention to fleeting moments, to things easily overlooked: a tight smile, a gesture accidentally caught on camera, a detail from a larger narrative, a parent’s childhood memory, a tiny act of wanton cruelty. These become the subject for meditation, their meanings explored. Many of the poems can be read as reflections on art and communication, though the immediate subjects range from the laying of a brick path to being caught in a rip, and include a locust plague coming to the city, a little girl dancing in a square of sunlight, or the auction of the contents of a deconsecrated church.

What I wasn’t prepared for was that the sixteen poems in the second section of this book constitute what Frank Moorhouse used to call a discontinuous narrative: each poem stands alone, but there are lines, even words (a throat-tightening ‘again’ in ‘Thank you’, for instance) that gain tremendous force from their place in the sequence. Although it’s in many ways a very different beast, I was reminded of Sarah Gibson’s wonderful short lyric film The Hundredth Room.

Cate Kennedy read some of the poems and chatted with Ramona Koval on the Book Show on 19 May. It’s worth a listen, but be warned that the conversation reveals quite a lot about Section 2. Not that there’s a twist to the tale or anything of the sort – but there’s something to be said for letting a narrative reveal itself to you rather than approaching it with foreknowledge.

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SWF2011: Sunday

Posted on 23 May 2011 | 5 comments

I didn’t get to the Festival on Sunday morning, so missed out on A C Grayling’s session, The Good Book, which the Art Student said was superb. I plan to listen to the podcast. We bought a copy of the book, which describes itself as a secular bible, and the Art Student is threatening to organise a bible reading circle among our atheist friends.

I was back on deck in the afternoon for

2:30: Poems on Pillows
Australian Poetry Ltd, the new ‘peak industry body for poetry’ (I didn’t make that up!) ran a competition in the lead-up to the Festival. People were asked to submit 10-line poems on the theme of Sweet Dreams. Seven poems were selected, printed on postcards and placed on the pillow of every bed in the hotel where Festival guests were staying. At this session the seven winning poems were read to us, six of them by the poets.

My guess is that the audience was mostly friends and relatives of the winners, and losers who had come to see what they’d been beaten by. It turned out I belonged in both categories. My submission, which I’m too embarrassed to reproduce here, played around with  Daisy Bates’s phrase ‘smooth the pillow of the dying race’ and amounted to a little squib about genocide. I’d failed to notice the Sweet Dreams theme and wasn’t surprised when I didn’t make the cut.

I would have been delighted to find any one of winning poems on my pillow, and it wasn’t surprising to hear that at least one distinguished writer was seen addressing his postcard poem to his mother.

Five of the winners are connected in some way with writing for children or young adults: Tricia Dearborn, Bill Condon, Libby Hathorn, Laura Jan Shore and Richard Tipping. I don’t know about the others, Scott Chambers and Josh McMahon. When I pointed this preponderance out during the brief question time, one of the panellists recognised me and replied by drawing attention to me as a benefactor of children’s poets in my past life as editor of the School Magazine, which was good squirmy fun.

4.00: David Hicks and Donna Mulhearn
This was my last Festival event, David Hicks’s first public appearance since the publication of his memoir, in fact since his detention in Guantanamo Bay. He was in conversation with pacifist Donna Mulhearn, who had gone to Iraq as a human shield. She did a very nice job of shepherding him through what must have been a gruelling event, even though the audience was demonstratively sympathetic. She kicked off, for example, by saying she was going to ask him the question that was on the forefront of everybody’s mind: was it true that he had been invited by Channel 7 to appear in Dancing with the Stars? Yes, he said, it was true, and his wife had wanted him to wear the costume to this event, but it’s purple with sequins.

For the most part, things felt very raw. Talk about terror and pity – and shame and rage! Mine, I mean. Hicks said at the start that during those years of being kept incommunicado, thankfully unaware that he had been abandoned by the Australian government, he had learned to detach from his experience, and that was how he was managing this experience. He spoke pretty much in a monotone, but did manage to say he was ‘annoyed’ by the way the press had bought into the lies and distortions told about him. He has never been convicted by a legitimate court of breaking the US or Australian law, and has received no compensation, explanation or apology from either government, not even an acknowledgement of the extraordinarily harsh treatment. The press received his memoir with almost total silence. And Donna Mulhearn told us of something Miranda Devine said in her review that went beyond her normal level of vicious contrarianism to pure evil. The current Labor government, having decried the treatment of Hicks when in opposition, has made no moves in his support in government.

‘This shouldn’t be about me,’ Hicks said. He got passionate describing the sufferings of the people of Kosovo as they were told to him when he went there to join the KLA, and reminding us that people are still being killed in Kashmir. Julia Gillard’s statements about Julian Assange sound very like John Howard’s about Hicks: both seem perfectly content to abandon an Australian citizen to a dangerously extra-legal fate in the US.

One tiny grace note: throughout, Donna Mulhearn pronounced the Gitmo prison’s location as Guantamano Bay. Of course this was inadvertent, but I imagine angels rejoicing at this tiny act of disrespect.

I plan to buy David Hicks’s memoir. It feels like a duty to give the horse’s mouth a go, given all agenda-driven stuff I’ve read about him elsewhere.
——
I haven’t mentioned the absence of PEN Chairs this year. At past Festivals theere has been an empty chair on the stage at some events, representing writers who are imprisoned or harmed by governments. At each session where there was a chair, details about one such writer would be read out. It’s a shame that the tradition was abandoned this year, when Liao Yiwu, invited to appear here, was prevented from attending by the Chinese government. And I haven’t mentioned the busker who sat hunched over a clickety-clackety typewriter offering to type a word portrait for five dollars. I haven’t said much about the weather (glorious), the crowds (big), the volunteers (orange-shirted and everywhere), the app (fabulous), the serendipitous encounters (constant), but I imagine you know the sort of thing.

Now it’s all over bar the reading.

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SWF: Saturday

Posted on 22 May 2011 | Leave a comment

11.30: The Book of Rachael

‘What’s a nice secular Jewish girl like you doing writing a book about Jesus?’

That’s how Irina Dunn kicked off this session in the Bangarra Mezzanine room, swimming in morning light and vibrating to an occasional passing jet ski. Leslie Cannold, the nice secular Jewish girl in question, was there to discuss The Book of Rachael, one of a number of books at the festival to address religious issues from the viewpoint of respectful non-believer.

I’d been keen to attend this session. I love Dory Previn’s song, ‘Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister?’ and a novel about just such a sister has a huge appeal. It turns out that Leslie Cannold has written a number of non-fiction books, to do with abortion and other feminist issues. She was watching a series about the life of Jesus on television, and had a moment when the narrator said that, though Jesus almost certainly had sisters, nothing is known about them. She decided to write an essay bringing those sisters back to history. She headed off, full of resolve, to an institution called something like the Melbourne Theological Library, only to discover that when someone is forgotten it means they are forgotten, that we know nothing about them and never will. She decided to write a novel. Fortunately no one warned her how difficult that would be.

As she was completely ignorant of religion, her research involved reading the entire Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible, but not too much interpretation of it, though the limited amount she read included daunting texts such as Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her. She drew a parallel with the process in which hints and silences in the official histories must be interpreted to unearth the the histories of subject peoples – ‘women have essentially been a subject people’. The project of telling the story of Jesus’ sister ran into many difficulties, among them being the way Jesus’ story kept drifting into the foreground, as it did a couple of times during the discussion.

Irina Dunn did a lovely job of letting Ms Cannold shine, and supplied a couple of sweet theatrical moments when she tried to discuss elements of the plot, and had to be almost physically restrained. ‘But I never mind if people tell me a book’s plot,’ she said, genuinely astonished that people should object to spoilers. ‘It’s the writing that matters.’

One lovely thing I wrote down:

I love and respect all these characters. I assume they are believers and respect that about them, but I needed to tell their stories in a way that made sense to me, and I don’t believe in miracles.

The book was sold out when I tried to buy itbut I did embarrass myself by approaching Leslie Canold at teh signing table and singing a few bars of Dory Previn to her.

1 pm: The Director’s Notebooks
Former National Gallery of Australia director Betty Churcher chatted with Terence Maloon about her new book about the drawings she did of beloved paintings when she thought ahe was going blind. This was a marvellous session, not least for the unabashed affection these two people showed for each other. To kick things off, Maloon read a passage from early in the book, where Betty describes herself aged eleven being enchanted by a painting (in a serendipitous echo of the spirited intelligence of Leslie Cannold’s Rachael). It was a lovely passage, and when he finished reading, Maloon simply sat and beamed at the writer of it. After a long moment, she said, ‘That was the start of it,’ and the conversation was under way.

4:00: The Big Reading
This is a regular event where a big theatre full of people is read to by an all-star international crew of novelists, with SBS’s Annette Shun Wah as ring mistress.

Kei Miller read from his first novel, The Same Earth. Introducing him, Annette made a teasing reference to the Caribbean accent as impenetrable. In fact he was brilliantly articulated, as much a pleasure for the music of his voice as for the slightly fabulist text.

David Mitchell and Michael Cunningham read from works in progress, the latter explaining that reading published works feels to him like showing a cucumber that won a prize at a county fair several years ago. It didn’t seem to occur to him that this might seem to be disparaging his companions on stage. Still, both WIPs were intriguing.

Téa Obreht, originally from the former Yugoslavia and now living in the US, read from The Tiger’s Wife, a piece that blended vampire elements with tales of the recent Yugoslav wars.

Kader Abdolah, sporting an impressive Mark Twain moustache, was an established novelist in Iran, but now lives in The Netherlands and writes in Dutch. He was the stand out of the session, reading us a short story that was a lightly fictionalised account of his refugee journey – this was both affecting and funny. Then he read the first paragraph from his new book, The House of the Mosque, and held the book up, saying that he had been missing Iran for many years, but had finally been able to go there again, ‘in this book’.

We had an excellent and surprisingly cheap Lebanese meal watching the sunset over Walsh Bay, then walked up George Street to the Town Hall for:

8:00: We (Still) Need to Talk About America
This was the fizzer of the festival for us. Four interesting people on the panel, with an idea that sounded promising: the US sometimes seems scarily incomprehensible from the outside, and this was a chance to hear what it’s like inside. Michael Connelly is a crime novelist who engages with live issues. Téa Obreht is a young novelist who arrived in the US as an immigrant when she was (I think) 12 years old. Daniel Altman is an economist with an interesting résumé. Gail Dines is a sociologist who takes on the influence of porn. It went nowhere. From the front stalls it looked as if Anne Summers mishandled the moderator role, moving doggedly through her list of things that are weird in the US – the cheering of the killing of Bin Laden, the failure to introduce gun laws, disenchantment with Barack Obama, and so on – asking questions that couldn’t help but make the panelists defensive, and jumping in too often to display her knowledge of things USian, in effect clamping on the brakes whenever any momentum seemed to be developing among the panelists. Dines and Altman, sociologist and economist, gamely worked up some edgy sparring, and they both had interesting things to say, but for me the dominant mood was encapsulated in this exchange:

Summers (to Connelly): I saw you smile. You had a thought there.
Connelly: No, I was just waiting for this to pass.

My guess is that the whole thing would have gone better if a moderator had opened with a brief statement to the effect that many things about the US are incomprehensible to outsiders, maybe giving a couple of examples, then having each of the panelists take 5 minutes to respond what it looked like from their vantage point. And trust them to take it somewhere interesting.

Still, we had plenty to talk about in the long wait for a bus.

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SWF: Busy Friday

Posted on 21 May 2011 | Leave a comment

I had tickets for a 10 o’clock session yesterday morning. One of the participants was prevented from being there by the Chinese government, and I was kept away by an act of vandalism (see previous post). There’s a photo of Liao Yiwu on a chair in the Gleebooks shop, but I got my whole body to Walsh Bay in time to spend a little money and queue successfully for

11.30 am: The Fascinator
Delia Falconer, Ashley Hay and Gail Jones have all recently written books set in Sydney. With Jill Eddington in the chair, the three of them – one a lifelong Sydneysider, one here since she was about 20, one a very recent arrival – chatted interestingly. Jill Eddington recommended reading all three in succession because the effect was like three movements in a piece of music. She imagined a movie that might be made of the three of them wandering the Harbour foreshores, going in and out of the Mitchell Library, walking in each other’s footsteps, almost meeting. The conversation that followed was a nice contradiction to the myth that writers are essentially in vicious competition with each other: Ashley Hay, for example, said that when her book was finally with the printer, reading Delia’s, which covered so much of the same territory but from a very different perspective, was like a special reward.

I tore myself away early, just as they were playing with possible readings if the session’s title: were we meant to think of the Harbour as a hat or an evil enchanter from a Margo Lanagan short story, or – the preferred option – both? I left reluctantly so as not to risk missing out on the Francis Webb session at 1 pm. This turned out to be a wise move, and brought a sweet bonus: I was hailed by a friend I hadn’t seen for 40 years, and while I kept one eye on the Webb queue we snatched a quarter of an hour to get reacquainted. When the growing queue vanished into the dark, we promised to follow up on Facebook, and I skedaddled to:

1 pm: The Lost Poetry of Francis Webb
This was in a much bigger venue than other poetry events, and we were told that it could have filled a space twice the size. It was one of a series of events around Australia to celebrate the recent publication of the UWA Collected Poems. The book’s editor, Toby Davidson, has organised and chaired the events, in which local poets read poems by Webb and speak briefly of their connections to him.

Toby D is a young man whose enthusiasm for his subject wouldn’t have shamed a revivalist preacher. He wants us all to read Webb, in solitude and aloud to our friends. He recommends the practice of carrying a book of his poems everywhere with us (which Bob Adamson told us later he actually does). He kicked things off by reading ‘Ball’s Head Again’. He didn’t read badly by any means, but he did demonstrate the difficulty of Webb’s verse and gave us a yardstick by which to judge the other readers.

By any measure they were all brilliant.

Judith Beveridge spoke of the texture of Webb’s language, its compression and richness, and read ‘Images in Winter’ and ‘For My Grandfather’.

Brook Emery quoted a speaker from an earlier session who referred to ‘songs that please the ear and songs that please the heart’ and said he would add ‘songs that please the mind’ – Webb’s poems, he said, are always reaching for meaning. He read ‘Night Swimming’, the first poem by Webb I ever read, when I was 24 or so, and ‘Nessun Dorma’.

Johanna Featherstone, easily the youngest of the poets, struck a blow against the view that Webb is a poet’s poet, read only by scholars and fellow poets. She takes poetry into correctional centres, where prisoners, possibly influenced by knowledge of his time in institutions, believe him. She read ‘The Runner’ and ‘Harry’.

Craig Powell, a psychiatrist in his day job, told a little story of his acquaintance with Webb when in a psych hospital in Melbourne. He read ‘Five Days Old’, prefacing it with the story of its creation: a psychiatrist in England took Webb on an outing, and asked him to hold his little baby for a moment. Powell almost spoiled the moment by asking with a snigger, ‘Who would hand their baby over to a certified chronic schizophrenic?’ But he gave us the poem with sound and heart and head. He also read ‘Hospital Night’.

Robert Adamson talked about the stigma of ‘mental illness’, quoting an eminent poet-critic-media-personality’s description of Webb as ‘the maddy’. When they met, Webb asked Adamson, ‘Are you a Communist?’ ‘Why?’ ‘The long hair.’ He read ‘Bushfire’, ‘Black Cockatoos’ and ‘End of the Picnic’. As a final comment he said that whereas a lot of discussion of Webb’s poetry focuses on his ‘mental illness’, the poetry itself is full of hope and lucidity.

The young Bulgarian woman sitting next to me said she’d loved the poetry, though there were many words she didn’t understand. Me too.

As I was on my way to the next session, I accosted Bob Adamson and said how much I’d loved his reading. He reached into his briefcase and gave me a book! So, dear reader, when someone does something that delights you, make a point of thanking them.

2.30 pm: The Merchants of Doubt
Naomi Oreskes’s eponymous book (can you say that?) is an exploration of the doubt-mongering techniques developed by the Marshall Institute in the US to defend vested interests against the implications of scientific research. They began with the connection between tobacco smoking and cancer, and progressed to a range of environmental issues, reaching some kind of peak with climate change They don’t have to lie (though they do anyway), but they do systematically create disinformation. She was in conversation with Robyn Williams, and they are clearly kindred spirits, science journalists passionately concerned about the current attacks on science.

I won’t try to summarise. Robyn recommended a BBC doco, Science Under Attack. In a neat echo of Adamson’s anecdote, he told of meeting one of the doubt-mongerers at a conference, and being asked of his journalist colleagues, ‘Are they all Communists?’

My main take-home point was that scientists (and, I would add, others) have a deeply held belief that the facts will speak for themselves. But this is manifestly not so on matters with big emotional charges on them.

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The Book Group, the Finkler Question and the SWF by night

Posted on 20 May 2011 | 1 comment

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury 2010)

This won the Booker Prize last year. Howard Jacobson lectured on Dickens to at least one member of my book group at Sydney University in the 1960s. He’s a guest at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival and we’d decided to combine our group meeting with a visit to the festival. Even if three members of the Book Group weren’t gentiles married to Jews, this book, which is broadly speaking about gentile–Jew relationships, would have been a logical choice.

Before the group meeting:
When I’d read to about page 80 I wrote a draft blog entry explaining why I didn’t finish the book. Mainly, I found the central narrative thread, in which a gentile man obsesses over the implications of having been mugged and called a Jew, to be both flimsy and ponderous. That wouldn’t have mattered if it was funny – and after all, much has been made of the Booker going to a comic novel – but I didn’t laugh once. Too often a character is given just enough two-dimensionality to allow the writer to take a satiric pot shot at her/him. There are jokes. Our gentile hero (he’s a serial romantic, Treslove by name, get it?) is in love with a woman who confesses that she’s ‘a bit of an arsonist’, and in the morning he wakes to ‘twin realisations’:

The first was that she had left him. The second was that his sheets were on fire.

Boom-tish! or Clunk! You be the judge.

In that draft I said, with only slight exaggeration, that a two page account of a Google search was the most interesting thing in the book up to that point. I did read on, hoping only for a cute line to quote as the point where the book and I parted company.

It was not to be. The Google search – “Anti-Semitic Incidents” – foreshadows a transition to something much more interesting. The unfunny humour keeps coming, and all but one or two of the characters stay paper thin, but from about the halfway point the book begins ringing the changes in a tantalisingly complex way on themes of Jewish identity and culture, Judaism, anti-Semitism, internalised anti-Semitism, Zionism and anti-Zionism. Viewpoints multiply, transmogrify, collide, dissolve. Just as you think the book is coming to a settled view, a telling incident or a forceful argument challenges that view. It’s not just the familiar ‘two-Jews-three-opinions’ thing, though it includes that. It becomes a dramatisation of intractable complexity.

Raissa Maritain, Russian Jew turned French Catholic philosopher, wrote what could have served as an epigraph to the second half of The Finkler Question: ‘To every argument can be opposed an argument, and thus appears the futility of all argument.’ Or perhaps it wouldn’t serve, as she was talking about faith as superior to reason. Up to a point, the arguments are tested here, not against faith but against the characters’ experiences – of love, loss, betrayal, disappointment, kindness, stupidity, brutality – but the characters are so thin it’s hard to believe the testing is real.

Yet other people, including the Booker judges, have loved the book. I came away feeling that I’d somehow missed the point, much as Treslove does throughout the book.

After the group meeting:
We met at a pizzeria in the wharf precinct. Three of the seven of us came straight from Howard Jacobson at the Sydney Recital Hall. Those three and I had read the book, a third had reached page 225 and was enjoying it. All the others had a much better time with than I did. One said that like me he’d noticed page 79 as the point where things became interesting, but unlike me he’d found what came after that funny in the I’ve-got-to-read-this-to-my-wife way. Others related strongly to Treslove. When I said there was almost nothing to the character they agreed, but saw that as a brilliant depiction of a certain kind of personality: ‘There’s a little Treslove in all of us.’ Someone related strongly to the theme of men of a certain age (he said ‘our age’) looking out for each other when their wives have died. Sex scenes that I found weirdly unfunny and not much else were to other people touchingly intimate. The scenes towards the end that I read as competently introducing some much needed pathos (please note the emotional distance in that way of saying it) made St least one grown man cry.

I found myself conceding that I’d enjoyed more of the book than I’d been willing to admit. But mainly it was interesting to see that the book spoke so personally to the others who had read it. Evidently I was right – I’d somehow missed the point. And the thing is, if I were to reread the book, I expect I’d miss it again. I’m the wrong horse for that course.

Our plan had been to go to the Chaser’s Empty Vessel  show at  nine o’clock, but by the time we got to the venue it was half past, and the person in orange T-shirt told us it was sold out. Some of the others went on to the poetry reading at the Number One Wine Bar. I came home.

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Overland 202

Posted on 18 May 2011 | 1 comment

Jeff Sparrow, editor, Overland 202, Autumn 2011

I have one major complaint about this issue of Overland: it won’t be read by enough people. It gets classified, correctly, as of the left, and so there’s an assumption that only people who identify as left-wing should read it. It gets marginalised, when item after item in it deserves the widest readership and engagement. Rather than saying too much, here are a couple of excerpts.

From Guy Rundle’s ‘Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take‘, a look at the theory and practice (‘praxis’) of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks:

In Assange’s model, the failure of the anti-globalisation movement to challenge the governmental conspiracies that emerged post-September 11 resulted from the very dispersal that they celebrated […] WikiLeaks, in that respect, represents a dialectical development: recognition that a counter-conspiracy,  to  be effective, must decisively reject openness  in favour of an ultra-conspiracy. […]
WikiLeaks’ massive category-shifting leaking is not intended to dissolve governance but to uncouple governance and conspiracy, to make it impossible for governments to fall back on conspiracy as a mode of action.

From Rjurik Davidson ‘s ‘Imagining New Worlds‘ on ‘New Wave’ science fiction of the 1960s and after:

The New Wave [demonstrates] that approaching culture politically (in the broad sense of the term) does not necessarily result in the production of dour and didactic texts. On the contrary, political interventions underpin many of the greatest formal
 revolutions, the most experimental and original work.

From Bob Gosford’s ‘They took our culture – now there is no law‘, one of three pieces on the Northern Territory under the Intervention:

[A] Northern Territory judge who in 2009 considered the effect of the changes to the Emergency Response Act 2007 noted that: ‘the precise mischief that [the section] is intended to remedy is unclear’. He went on to argue that because the legislation precluded consideration of a range of previously acceptable and relevant issues, it ‘distorts [the] well established sentencing principle of proportionality, and may result in … disproportionate sentences’.

From Alexis Wright’s ‘Talking About Tomorrow‘, an open letter to Bob Brown and Rachel Stewart:

I cannot believe that the Intervention can be  justified  when   families  are  leaving their
traditional lands – the lands where they have lived and that they have taken care of for tens of thousands of years – unable to endure the heaviness of government controls over their lives. They are becoming the new gypsies, vilified by residents of Australian towns and cities opposed to having them as neighbours.

She goes on to argue that ‘the only way forward is through treaty-making with individual nations and regions in northern Australia. in particular in the Northern Territory ‘.

From Patricia Gillespie’s ‘[In]Dignity‘, which is largely a graphic account of her elderly mother’s experience with the health system:

From a medical perspective, the treatment for her congestive heart failure – the reason for her admission to hospital – was a success. She was no longer ‘dying’ or ‘drowning’ in fluid. But Marie inherited […] problems such as vitamin deficiencies, suicide ideation, muscular weakness and mobility issues, chronic rash, a bleeding tongue, bedsores and ulcers, which made a mockery of the notion ‘do no harm’.

There are eight wonderful pages of images and pensées from Sean Tan. There’s poetry, including K A Nelson’s ‘Chorus of Crows‘ (winner of the 2010 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and another angle on the NT Intervention) and  Jennifer Compton’s sweet celebration of the quotidian, ‘I Came Home with the Shopping‘.

Almost teh whole lot is up on line. Have a look.

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Gallery

NSWPLA Dinner, a report from the trenchers

Posted on 17 May 2011

Last year a woman premier presented the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards at the Art Gallery. Tonight a non-Labor premier, just as rare a beast in the 10 of these dinners I’ve been to, did it at the Opera Point Marquee, … Continue reading →

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A launch

Posted on 16 May 2011 | Leave a comment

Ursula Dubosarsky’s new book, The Golden Day, was launched yesterday with a suitable sense of occasion. I’d spent the morning as an extra in a rap video clip (about which I may blog some other time), but no one at the launch seemed to notice that my usually shiny forehead was sporting a light dusting of make-up.

We were at Nutcote Cottage, home of May Gibbs, a lovely site for a launch. The golden light of a fine Sydney autumn afternoon, tiny muffins, cupcakes and Lamington slices would have made the mood celebratory even without a subject. As you see from the pic a new Dubosarsky book draws quite a crowd: from the publishing world, family, writers (not just for children), artists and illustrators, colleagues, Marrickville dwellers, the wife of a former Federal Minister, former students of SCEGGS Darlinghurst and even some of the book’s target audience, that is to say, children.

The Nutcote lawn

Julie McCrossin presided. Drawing on her experience as radio interviewer and stand-up comedian, she put Ursula through her paces, quizzing her about her inspiration for the book. It’s set in a genteel girls church school in the inner eastern suburbs of Sydney, a school that evidently bears an uncanny resemblance to SCEGGS Darlinghurst, of which both Julie and Ursula are alumnae. Calling on contributions from other Old Girls, they evoked a startling picture of uniformed schoolgirls making their way from the bus stop to the school gates though filthy streets where junkies and prostitutes hung out. One member of the class of ’78 was coaxed by Julie into saying that she didn’t remember much out of the ordinary, apart from an occasional flasher and the naked woman who appeared in a doorway one morning asking her to get help.

‘There are myriad kinds of writers,’ Ursula said, responding to Julie’s pressing her for the meaning of some of the incidents in the book. ‘I’m the kind of writer who lets herself go to the dream.’ I quote this because it rings so very true of Ursula’s work, but also because just a few moments later Julie referred to the ‘ ‘myriad of influences’ she detected in the book (Picnic at Hanging Rock, classical myth, etc), thereby adding a little fuel to the fire of a conversation I’ve been having recently about usage: Ursula the classicist uses ‘myriad’ as I do; Julie the journalist agrees with my journalist friend. (Are you reading this, L–?)

Julie: Might I suggest that there's an underlying theme of sexual awakening? Ursula: Oh, that's what my book's about!

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Michael Moore on the killing of OBL

Posted on 13 May 2011 | 4 comments

Michael Moore may get a bit too smart-arsey in his movies, but this piece on the killing of Osama Bin Laden is worth reading.

Perhaps there was no way to bring him back alive – I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be in that dark house trying to make that snap decision. But if the execution was ordered in advance, then I say we should be told that now, and we can like it or not like it.

I recommend the whole thing.

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Rhyll McMaster at Sappho’s

Posted on 11 May 2011 | Leave a comment

Next door to Gleebooks, Sappho’s Book Shop stages monthly poetry readings. Last night Rhyll McMaster read from her next book – she’s writing poetry again after years engaged one way or another with the novel Feather Man.

No one was smoking in Sappho’s courtyard, but I like the way this phone photo suggests the classic smoke-filled ambience for poetry reading.

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