NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Night

Posted on 17 May 2016 | 3 comments

I’d love to go to the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards again one of these years, but $60 for a cocktail event is a stretch even for people who drink alcohol, and it’s way out of my range for hors d’oeuvres, sparkling water and speeches. Maybe I’ll get a freebie one of these years as a designated blogger, but for this year, as for the last couple, here’s how the evening went as gleaned from Twitter (Noting by the way that Twitter account @NSW_PLA has been silent for five years, and the facebook page ‘NSW Premier’s Literary Awards‘ for nearly three, I put my faith, mainly, in #PremiersLitAwards).

In the lead-up, there was a flurry of good-luck messages from publishers, seven tweets from one publisher lobbying for votes in the People’s Choice Award, and at least one person wondering if the recent Australia Council cuts to literary magazines would lead to an ‘interesting’ evening.

The first tweeter of the evening, a book editor from Text Publishing, turned up about 10 to 6, and a little later the State Library account posted a moody photo of the crowd gathering upstairs at the Mitchell Library, and we were away.

CikEFsYUoAA2Ki3.jpg

Twitter was fairly tightlipped during the night – nothing about what anyone was wearing, no jokes, and little from acceptance speeches. Maybe that’s what happens when it’s a cocktail event rather than a dinner. However, here’s what I’ve got. Links are to either my blog posts about books or the State Library’s listings of the awards.

Just before 7 the State Librarian officially welcomed everyone. The Welcome to Country included didgeridoo, but no one tweeted the name of the welcomer(s). Ross Grayson Bell, senior judge (I guess that’s what used to be call Chair of the Judging Panel), spoke briefly, saying that the Awards reflected the diversity of Australian writing (and so foreshadowing a major theme of the evening). Wesley Enoch delivered what Twitter said was an inspiring Address: among other things he said that when you are feeling your lowest is when you should make more art, and spoke of ‘storytelling for a nation that is in want of a memory’ (Wesley Enoch is a Murri man).

In a welcome departure from recent practice the Premier Mike Baird himself presented the awards. He spoke of J D Salinger, and said that ‘stories remind us why we’re here, what we’ve forgotten, and help us to inhabit other worlds’, echoing Wesley Enoch’s words. Jennifer Byrne took over as MC and the announcements (what she called a ‘rollcall of excellence’) began.

Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000) went to Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami (Hardie Grant Books). He gave a ‘very funny and memorable’ acceptance speech. No details.

Indigenous Writer’s Prize (a new biennial award worth $30,000). Of the shortlisted books I’d read only Inside My Mother by Ali Cobby Eckermann (Giramondo). The prize was shared between Dark Emu  by Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books) and Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven (University of Queensland Press), which must be wonderful books.

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000).  The Bleeding Tree, Angus Cerini (Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company). I knew I should have subscribed to the Griffin.

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000). Of the shortlist, I’ve seen only Last Cab to Darwin, and though it had many good things about it, it would have surprised me if it won. The winner was the fourth episode of Deadline Gallipoli, ‘The Letter’, written by Cate Shortland (Matchbox Pictures) and screened on Foxtel, so bad luck for us non-subscribers.

The Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000) went to Teacup, written by Rebecca Young & illustrated by Matt Ottley (Scholastic Australia). The Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000) was won by Alice Pung’s Laurinda (Black Inc.).

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000). Again, I’d only read one book, Joanne Burns’s brush (Giramondo). It won!

Of the shortlist for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction ($40,000) I had once again just one book under my belt, Magda Szubanski’s wonderful Reckoning: A Memoir (Text Publishing). Once again, it won. I was doing well. Mike Baird held Magda’s phone for her so her mother and brother could hear her acceptance speech. Someone tweeted at this point that a number of award winners spoke of their family histories and ‘complex journeys to Australia as displaced persons’.

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing (a mere $5000) went to An Astronaut’s Life by Sonja Dechian (Text Publishing). Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)went to Locust Girl, A Lovesong by Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex Press), a post-apocalyptic novel. One tweeter congratulated her for helping us ‘care across borders’. The People’s Choice Prize, which is restricted to the grown-up novels, went to The Life of Houses, Lisa Gorton (Giramondo).

The Special Award (for which, if money is involved, the amount is not easily discoverable) was given to Rosie Scott, described by Susan Wyndham on Twitter as ‘admired author, supporter of young writers, asylum seekers, refugees, many social causes’.

The book of the year (again, monetary value not easily discovered) went to Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. Accepting his award, he said to the people in the room, ‘I want to hear your story, because I would be spellbound.’

Then the State Library account tweeted the hashtag #BestSpeechesEver. So those of us pressing our noses against the glass wall of Twitter know what we missed out on. It was all over bar the reading – oh, and the many pictures of underdressed young women that began appearing with the Awards hashtag during the night.

 

3 Comments

Posted in Books

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

Adam Aitken’s One Hundred Letters Home

Posted on 16 May 2016 | 2 comments

Adam Aitken, One Hundred Letters Home (Vagabond Books 2016)

100letters.jpg

Just a short post on this book: no disparagement intended, it’s just that the Sydney Writers’ Festival is here and if I don’t get this post done now there will be too much time between the reading and the blogging.

One Hundred Letters Home is Adam Aitken’s memoir of his parents and his own youth. It has been a long time in the making – earlier versions of two of its chapters were published in the late lamented Heat in 2004 and 2009. In it, Aitken goes in search of his parents. Not the actual parents,with both of whom he is still in contact in the course of the book, but the young people they once were. He explores letters and photographs from more than 50 years ago to gain some understanding of how these two people met, married, and separated. His father was a white Australian advertising man posted to Bangkok, who after enjoying the nightlife for some time fell in love with a university graduate from southern Thailand, and after some vicissitudes married her.

Their son knows more about these events than most of us do about our parents because the young advertising man wrote detailed letters home to his mother, including notes on his alcoholic excesses, the taxi dancers and other women he was drawn to, and then – all others falling by the wayside – his great love. Aitken makes wonderful use of this resource. There are also photos, which he squeezes for their narrative potential, and on his mother’s side some wonderful sketches of Thai culture.

The story continues: the couple leave Thailand to live in England, then come to live in Australia – first in Perth and then in Sydney. The source material tends to be sparser, especially for the English period, until the writer’s own memory comes into play. Along with his father’s time in Thailand, the most gripping part of the book is Aitken’s account of his own visit there in his early 20s, in search of his Thai identity – where he finds that questions of identity are a lot more subtle than that.

Launching this book at Gleebooks recently, Beth Yahp commented that whereas mostly these days we want to rush through things we read, this book forces us to slow down, dwell on moments, go back and reread or have another look. She’s right. My impression is that it was written as a group of more or less stand-alone essays, and the joining of those essays isn’t seamless. The occasional rough edges, however, mean that the reader is made aware of the work involved in making the book. It’s not an entertainment in the manner of Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs (not that there’s anything wrong with that!): you can feel the wrestling involved in getting these stories told.

I found myself itching to interrogate the received versions and silences about my own heritage. Thanks, Adam

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

Lumberjanes

Posted on 15 May 2016 | 4 comments

Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters, Brooke Allen and others Lumberjanes: To the Max edition Volume 1 (BOOM! Box 2015)

1608868095This was a generous birthday gift from a son. It’s a hefty and handsome hardback which collects eight original monthly comics, presented as the tenth edition (February 1984) of the field manual for the Lumberjanes advanced program, the Lumberjanes being a fictional version of the Girl Scouts (which I think is the US version of the Guides). The graphic adventures of five girls disrupt the manual’s practical instructions and moral exhortations. They don’t undermine its ethos, but go off on bizarre, anarchic adventures to earn their badges and save the day.

I’m definitely not part of the target audience for this one, being neither USian, nor female nor tween. I do like the central idea, as foreshadowed on the false title page where the ‘Girls’ in the phrase ‘Camp for Girls’ has been blacked out and replaced with a hand-printed ‘HARDCORE LADY-TYPES’. But the graphic style (mostly by Brooke Allen, with garish colours by Maarta Laiho) is too anarchic for my taste and the stories (mostly written by Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis) of spells, anagram clues, underground animated statues, zombie boys, dinosaurs and so on left me pretty unengaged, even when I could decipher what exactly was happening. I did enjoy the way any number of feminist icons (‘Holy bell hooks!’, for example, or ‘Oh my Bessie Coleman!’) are invoked in moments of high emotion.

Horses for courses. There aren’t too many 12 year old girls who would enjoy the books I do. So I’m not knocking this.

4 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , ,

Gail Jones’s Guide to Berlin

Posted on 13 May 2016 | 8 comments

Gail Jones, A Guide to Berlin (Random House 2015)

berlin.jpgAfter ten or so pages of A Guide to Berlin I was weighing my options. Did I really want to read another 240 pages about a small group of Nabokov enthusiasts in Berlin who meet to tell each other stories from their lives? Especially when those pages promised to include overcooked writing like this:

Shivering, cold, suffering pathetically in a minor key of frozen hands and feet, she aimed her phone through the watery light at the disappointing building across the street, and a man appeared, standing silently beside her.

The main thing that kept me reading was the desire to have one more shortlisted book under my belt before the NSW Premier’s Awards are announced in a week or so. Plus: some fabulous literature has been built around the conceit of a group of travellers telling each other stories to pass the time; I would love to revisit Berlin; the first page foreshadows a death and therefore, perhaps, interesting developments; and I hoped that the self-conscious literariness of the narrating voice might turn out to be a function of character rather than the author’s natural (I use the word loosely) style.

I did read on. The group of six people tell their stories, and are much more moved by them than I was. Berlin is present mainly in the naming of streets, landmarks and train lines. The main character, Cass, visits the Pergamon and the aquarium, and the tale-tellers do tell each other their favourite spots. Death happens at about the three-quarter mark, but it feels like a plot device, or at best a pretext for more introspection. And the self-conscious literariness keeps up all the way, with some beautifully quotable paragraphs but an over-riding sense that the writing is more interested in itself than anything else.

I’ve never read any Nabokov. Given that the characters frequently quote him to each other, maybe a reader familiar with his work would in effect be reading a different, infinitely more enjoyable book than I read. I hope many people love this book. I’m not one of them.
—–
That much was written when I had about 50 pages to go. I was hoping I’d have to ditch my draft and start all over again, this time singing the novel’s brilliance. After all, a lot can happen in 50 pages. Alas, the concluding pages are pretty much taken up by the narrator’s fairly callow reflections on the limitations of story, and the characters’ callous, self-preoccupied responses to some terrible deaths. Maybe the novel is subtly and elegantly holding both these things up for scrutiny, but if so the subtlety passed right by me. I was left with a feeling of deep disgust. Sorry!

AWW2016A Guide to Berlin is the fourth book I’ve read as part of the 2016 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

8 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

Goodbye art student …

Posted on 12 May 2016 | 7 comments

… Hello Emerging Artist.

National Art School degrees were conferred today. The Emerging Artist whipped her cap and gown off before I could take a photo, but consented to be snapped before leaving the school.

She says that when the head of the institution handed her the testamur, he said, ‘You look terrific.’ And she does.

7 Comments

Posted in Diary

Tagged

Pam Brown’s Missing Up

Posted on 11 May 2016 | 11 comments

Pam Brown, Missing Up (Vagabond Press 2016)

Francis Webb once said that a poem was a meeting place of silences, or words to that effect. I don’t know if Webb would have taken to Pam Brown’s work (or vice versa), but the poems in Missing Up reminded me of his observation. It’s not that she writes things that ‘oft were thought but ne’er so well expressed’ (to invoke another unlikely poet), but I find in her poetry a kind of mental activity, the kind that generally precedes speech or even coherent thought, that is distractible, non-linear, associative, interspersed with snatches of other people’s words. I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of activity that fills a lot of my silences. Pam Brown wrangles it into words.

Rather than try to say more about the book as a whole, let me have a go at a single poem. Here’s ‘Flat white’, which is far from being typical of the longer, non-linear, obliquely and sometimes grimly personal poems in this book, but which I’ve chosen partly because it’s the shortest in the book, and because I wanted to figure out what its title pun is doing:

Flat white
how to hold a genre
__who likes
______genres
& how to
___handle filth___und drang
or
_(ring the bells here)
______devise
__a few innocent new myths
to resacralize
______the apostasy
of the bourgeoisie
_________________ the who?
they’re the ones
____with unhappy consciousness
who are seeking
_a brains & sex harmony motor
to spruce up
___the non-lived
__________flat white life
in
__natural surroundings

First off, you can’t read this poem as you would a passage of prose, and that’s not just because of the line breaks. Like Pam Brown’s poetry in general, it asks for a different kind of attention: not requiring that it yield its meaning at a glance, but settling in, tolerating ambiguity and ok that some meanings and references may take a while to become clear, may even remain permanently inaccessible. I think I’m right in saying that if you feel like an outsider as you read this poem for the first time, then that’s not a bug but a feature: we’re not being addressed, lectured at or wooed; we’re eavesdropping – eavesdropping by invitation, if that’s a thing.

**** The next few paragraphs show me struggling to explicate the poem. I had fun and learned from the process, but you may find it a bit boring. ****

In the absence of conventional punctuation, some parsing is called for. Here’s how I read it – your mileage may vary.

The poem is in two parts, of 12 and 10 lines respectively. The first part ruminates on a project. ‘How to’ doesn’t introduce a set of instructions, but poses a question or challenge: how is one ‘to hold a genre & … handle filth … or … invent a few innocent new myths’. The reason for wanting to do these things is ‘to resacralize [sic the US spelling] the apostasy of the bourgeoisie’. The second part then offers a definition of the ‘bourgeoisie’, and in doing so indicates why the activities contemplated in the first half are called for.

So far, so straightforward. To complicate things, it’s as if a second voice heckles the first: when Voice A mentions genres, Voice B mutters in the reader’s ear, ‘Who likes genres?’; when Voice A mentions filth, Voice B adds a sarcastic, or perhaps clarifying, ‘und drang’; Voice B is surely mocking when she says, ‘Ring the bells!’; and then her question ‘The who?’ is the poem’s turning point. And I guess you could read the rest of the poem as integrating the two voices – the one who names the project and the one who derides it.

But grasping the structure doesn’t make the poem transparent. ‘How to hold a genre’ for a start: Harvard University’s Poetry Classroom lists 35 genres, from allegory to verse epistle – what does it mean to hold one of them? It’s probably not ‘hold’ as in ‘hold the mayo’ (though on first reading one may stay open to that possibility), but as in ‘grasp’. I provisionally take the phrase to mean to write a poem that follows clear conventions. As Brown’s work rarely fits into any established genre, perhaps here the poem’s speaker is wondering how she would go about doing this thing that she has no actual desire to do (hence Voice B’s interjection), or maybe she’s contemplating establishing a genre of her own, of holding her own poetry to some established form (in which case Voice B is questioning the worth of the project).

Then ‘hold a genre’ is paraphrased as ‘handle filth’: the meaning of ‘filth’ isn’t clear, and the interjected ‘und drang’ is funny, but hard to pin to a meaning. (I know I miss a lot of Brown’s poetic references, but I do know that Sturm und Drang was a highly charged German artistic movement, in which Beethoven was a major figure.) The line expresses emotional recoil from the idea of working in genres – the speaker likens it to handling poo. A quick internet search refined my understanding of Sturm und Drang: it translates literally as storm and yearning, which gives the joke an interesting twist: yes, to attempt that kind of poetry may be like handling filth, but that doesn’t stop the poet from yearning for it to achieve some higher end. (Alternatively, ‘handle filth’ may not be meant to paraphrase ‘hold a genre’ at all, but add to it, so the challenge is to hold to conventions while handling messy (filthy) and emotionally charged realities. Both readings can work, possibly at the same time.)

In the next lines the project becomes more ambitious. Voice B’s sarcastic injunction to ring bells and the deprecating irony of ‘few’ and ‘innocent’ (can myths ever be innocent) modify but don’t erase the ambition of ‘to devise … myths’. And ‘to resacralize / the apostasy / of the bourgeoisie’ sounds like a big deal. I’m inclined to take this phrase seriously, either as an aspiration or as a sorrowful recognition that something is needed, even though impossible. ‘The apostasy of the bourgeoisie’ is probably a reference that I don’t recognise – Google didn’t help me with it. The bourgeoisie have lost their sense of the sacred, perhaps of meaning, or not so much lost it as turned away from it: their sustaining myths are either dead or toxic/desacralised. It’s worth noticing, though, that the speaker isn’t contemplating reviving those myths, but devising new ones, not to reverse the apostasy of the bourgeoisie, but to (re)sacralise it. Whatever that means.

But bourgeoisie is such a nineteenth-century, Marxy term. Fair enough that the voice from the peanut gallery challenges it: ‘the who?’

The remaining nine lines answer the question in a single, only slightly obscure sentence: ‘they’re the ones / with unhappy consciousness / who are seeking / a brains & sex harmony motor / to spruce up / the non-lived / flat white life in natural surroundings.’

There is probably someone on the planet who doesn’t know that a flat white is a kind of coffee (cappuccino senza schiuma is how you order an approximation in Rome), that the cool people drink in some parts of the world. The phrase ‘the non-lived / flat white life’ is what drew me to the poem in the first place. Barry Oakley described marijuana as the new sacrament of rebellious middle class youth in the 1970s. This poem suggests that the flat white is currently the desacralised sacrament of certain alienated or spiritually lost middle class people. (When one of my sons was a teenager, he quipped that when God was giving out senses of humour, a certain adult thought he meant coffee and asked for a flat white. There’s a similar play of ideas here.) These are not the bourgeois who were shocked by Baudelaire; these are, more or less, Pam Brown’s people. (I don’t drink coffee, but the poem is pointing at me.) There’s discord between what they are seeking – ‘a brains & sex harmony motor’ – and what this poem has been contemplating – ‘to resacralize / the apostasy’. They want a mechanical solution; the poem is groping towards something more demanding. Their ‘surroundings’ are ‘natural’ only ironically, like Patrick White’s carefully natural gum trees in Barrenugli. No room for poetry to play a central role there: the poem ventures to consider the possibility, but recognises that the odds are against it.

The poem does all this while managing to feel tossed off (the technical term for which I believe is sprezzatura).

**** End of potentially boring explication *****

The Vagabond Press website has a very nice blurb on this book which describes the poems as ‘offbeat, fragmentary yet often discursive’, and includes this:

For Pam writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. You know – the fridge over there, the bus stop, surf music on a radio, a raisin squashed against a floor tile – always backgrounding a connection to the ‘social’ as the poems make political and personal associative links.

AWW2016Missing Up is the third book I’ve read as part of the 2016 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

11 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

Dimity Figner

Posted on 30 Apr 2016 | 9 comments

Dimity Figner, feminist, artist and generally lovely person died on Thursday in a nursing home in Nowra. She had been sick for some time, and some of her many friends were with her at the end.

There was a retrospective exhibition of Dimity’s art in Nowra earlier this year, and she was active in the Older Women’s Network until recently (at that link is a photo of Dimity and 13 other rambunctious older women celebrating the publication of a history of Nowra OWN). In the 1970s she designed a beautiful Women’s Liberation symbol that has been widely used on badges and publications in Australia. She briefly illustrated for The School Magazine in the early 1980s. Back when I used to run into her regularly I could count on her to say she liked my hair just about a day before my official grooming consultant told me it was time to visit the barber.

One of our most cherished art acquisitions is this wonderful little bust, her creation:


Many people will miss Dimity. I’m one of them.

Added on 6 May: I don’t think many people will be aware of Dimity’s work with The School Magazine. Here’s a scan we managed to get of a 1981 cover by her (difficult if not impossible to get a perfect scan, as the bound volumes don’t flatten out without damage):

9 Comments

Posted in Diary

Tagged ,

Martin Harrison’s Happiness

Posted on 24 Apr 2016 | Leave a comment

Martin Harrison, Happiness (UWA Publishing 2015)

1742586864.jpgI’d pretty much finished writing this blog post when I discovered the special issue of Plumwood Mountain, an ‘Australian journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics’, dedicated to the memory of Martin Harrison who died in 2014 while Happiness was being prepared for the press. I won’t be offended if you click over to that and don’t bother with the rest of my post. But here it is anyhow:

An email is doing the rounds with the subject line ‘Poetry Experiment’. It asks you to do two things: 1) send a poem – any poem – to the first on a list of two people; and 2) alter the email by moving the second person on that list to the top and adding yourself in second place, then Bcc the altered email to 20 friends. If everyone follows instructions, 400 poems will soon arrive in your inbox.

I did as instructed, and received 4 poems: four famous lines from William Blake, a prose quote from Mahatma Gandhi, Emily Dickinson’s ‘He ate and drank the precious words‘, and a Leunig verse. The person at the top of my list sent me copies of the poems she received. There were five from my friends: some lines from Auden, Shakespeare, and Rumi, and whole poems by Judith Wright and (again) Emily Dickinson.

Tentative conclusions: the vast majority of people don’t take to poetry, or at least to a combination of chain letters and poetry; people are generally more willing to share poetry than to ask other people to do so; and we’re more likely to share favourite lines than whole poems.

Which brings me to Happiness. There are any number of excerpts that would do perfectly for the poetry experiment. For example, this lovely evocation of a landscape in ‘Summer Rain Front, North Coast’:

the mountain mirrored in the instant’s stillness
of the calm sea flooding into the bay
the mountain photoing its image on the waters
over the grounds where dolphins track    and then its scarves
hanging high in the air like drifted parachutes
white against blue

But probably none of its poems is chain-letter material in its entirety – they’re too long, and mostly proceed like conversation rather than performance. That is, the pleasure of reading them doesn’t come so much from brilliant turns of phrase or striking metaphors as from the sense that one is being invited to join the poet in his experience of the world, his loving embrace of it, including that part of it he addresses as ‘you’, which at least sometimes is his lover Nizat Bouheni, to whom the book is dedicated, and who died in 2010. There are love poems, poems filled with meticulous, immersive observations of nature, forty-five pages of elegies. There are a couple of awkward but trenchant poems on the politics of climate change, and an ‘experimental’ poem that an author’s note (kindly) informs us is ‘made up of responses to a randomly sorted set of instructions repeated four times’. And there’s one satirical description of some US Americans abroad.

One of my favourite moments in the book, which is in some ways representative, is in ‘Wallabies’. After three pages of  two-line stanzas evoking the sights and sounds of a particular Australian landscape with something approaching ecstatic fervour (the absence of punctuation may make this hard to decipher at first, but patience pays off):

nothing is dead here the spaces between them are
inhabited leaves twigs debris fallen white-anted trunks

slopes rocks grass parrots galahs floating down
in pink streamers again the grey lack of edge

around sprays cream waterfalls of turpentines flowering
in high irrigated air-blue reaches

and much more, there’s this:

that twenty mile shadow across the claypan’s a fence

which as dusk comes is a lightning-quick snake
momentarily distracting the way they appear

as if from nowhere like sentinels weathered stone
camping in that stubble sunset-toned no like mushrooms

wallabies two of them and then three over there then more
pale half-red underfur letting them melt into late light

alert as the slanting hour’s alert to earth cool as wine
then the shriek as they scatter

I love how the poem enacts the way you often become aware of the presence of wallabies in a landscape rather than see them arrive: they’ve been in the poem for three lines before they are named. They may be the subject of the poem, but they are part of a much bigger field. Harrison’s poetry often seeks out and celebrates the tiny or the evanescent – a blue wren nesting under the eaves on a sweltering day, a moment in a changing skyscape, a half-heard sound in the upstate New York woods. These lines from ‘A Music’, which is the second part of ‘Two for You’, an elegy for Nizar Bouhemi, could be describing much of Harrison’s poetry:

________The singleness
of each event in

its own swerve and
sharpness, drawing

attention and attentiveness
making it seem as if anyone

could just see it, grasp it,
wait to understand

what no one understands

Martin Harrison’s death of a heart attack in 2014 makes this book’s attention to the fleeting and its grappling with the realities of death incredibly poignant

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged ,

The Book Group & Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights

Posted on 22 Apr 2016 | 2 comments

Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights (Jonathan Cape 2015)

2yrs.jpgSadly (or not – you be the judge), I missed the book group meeting on Wednesday night. Unusually, though, there was a lot of email discussion of the book in the lead-up to the date. Here are annotated excerpts from the emails, with names changed and identifying detail removed:

3 March 1:35 pm, Alphonse:
NEXT BOOK: Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: ‘From one of the greatest writers of our time: the most spellbinding, entertaining, wildly imaginative novel of his great career, which blends history and myth with tremendous philosophical depth. A masterful, mesmerising modern tale about worlds dangerously colliding, the monsters that are unleashed when reason recedes, and a beautiful testament to the power of love and humanity in chaotic times.’
NEXT DATE: Wednesday 20 April / 7pm
NEXT VENUE: Bill … we voted last night that the next meeting would be at your place. Hope that’s OK with you and that you are able to join us.

That was all until:

15 Apr 2016 2:45 pm, me:
Hi all
I’m assuming our next meeting is confirmed for Wednesday 20th at Bill’s place, as in Alphonse’s last email.
Sadly I won’t be able to make it. I’m about three-quarters through the book, and mostly enjoying it. (I love the description of Obama on p 127.) I’ve read a number of children’s books dealing with similar subject matter and I’m not sure that this is any more engaging than the best of them. If you’re interested you could have a look for the Bartimaeus Sequence by Jonathan Stroud.

Having now finished Rushdie’s book, I would name Sophie Masson’s Snow, Fire, Sword as a more relevant children’s book: Sophie has supernatural beings from Arabic lore wreak havoc in Indonesia, with an implied parallel to real-world Wahhabism – a scenario not a million miles from Rushdie’s book. Here’s the Obama description I mentioned:

… the president of the United States was an unusually intelligent man, eloquent, thoughtful, subtle, measured in word and deed, a good dancer (though not as good as his wife), slow to anger, quick to smile, a religious man who thought of himself as a man of reasoned action, handsome (if a little jug-eared), at ease in his own body like a reborn Sinatra (though reluctant to croon) and colour-blind.

The prospective roll-call began:

15 Apr 4:02 pm, Chrysostom:
Apologies from me too. Am in the bush

15 Apr 5:18 pm, Dionysus:
I’ll be there

And then the opinions started:

15 Apr 10:37 pm, Errol wrote:
I’ll be there, but as a complete bludger I’m afraid. I couldn’t get traction with the book. I tried three times but then I put it down and just couldn’t pick it up again.
Looking forward to other opinions
PS. What’s the address?

17 Apr 8:52 am, Ferdinand:
Same.

17 Apr 10:49 am, Dionysus being a little more forthcoming:
Glad to hear I’m not alone.

That’s three people who couldn’t get past the first few pages. I’m guessing that’s because there’s a lot in those pages about 12th century philosophical debates between Ibn Rushd (known to the West until recently as Averroes, and surely not coincidentally sounding a bit like ‘Rushdie’) and Ghazali (said to be the most influential Islamic scholar since Mohammad), mixed in with a lot of lore about jinn, plus some unconvincing sex. For a book that’s going to feature fairies and magic and levitation and comic book monsters, this beginning is perhaps just a little anxious to establish that the author has a serious underlying theme. Surely Salman could hear his readers muttering, ‘Get on with it!’

Back to the correspondence.

17 Apr 4:52 pm, Graham:
Just back this morning from overseas. So far I am enjoying the book but not finished yet. Has Bill said it’s on for Wed?
I am keen to come but may need to cancel at the last minute.
Keen to hear what people thought of the book

Hmm, enjoying it, but not going to move heaven and earth to talk about it with the comrades. And still no word from Bill.

18 Apr 8:17 am, Harald:
I’m on, got half way so far, with a similar lack of interest. Too much jinnying, to too little purpose.

Was ever a book so unenthusiastically greeted?

For my part, the place where I nearly put the book aside was page 107, well before the halfway mark:

… in Times Square … for a period of time variously described by different witnesses as ‘a few seconds’ and ‘several minutes’, the clothes worn by every man in the square disappeared, leaving them shockingly naked, while the contents of their pockets – cellphones, pens, keys, credit cards, currency, condoms, sexual insecurities, inflatable egos, women’s underwear, guns, knives, the phone numbers of unhappily married women, hip flasks, masks, cologne, photographs of angry daughters, photographs of sullen teenage boys, breath-freshening strips, plastic baggies containing white powder, spliffs, lies, harmonicas, spectacles, bullets, and broken, forgotten hopes – tumbled down to the ground. A few seconds (and maybe minutes) later the clothes reappeared but the nakedness of the men’s revealed possessions, weaknesses and indiscretions unleashed a storm of contradictory emotions, including shame, anger and fear. women ran screaming while the men scrambled for their secrets, which could be put back into their revenant pockets but which, having been revealed, could no longer be concealed.

That’s clever, it’s funny in a number of ways, and nicely written, with a touch of surreal silliness (when did you last see a sexual insecurity lying on the footpath?). But I was overwhelmed with a sense that life is short and Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights is long. Too much jinnying indeed, and if this is part of what the book calls the War of the Worlds, there’s a serious gap between what the book seems to be claiming to be and what it actually is. Oh Salman, Salman, the readers are still muttering. Still, I went in mildly to bat:

18 Apr 8:42 am, me:
I’ll be interested to know if people think his account of the ‘purpose’ towards the end makes up for all the jinnying.

And then things got all organisational.

18 Apr 09:12 am, Alphonse:
So we have:
*   4 apologies
*   3 yes (2 of whom haven’t got far with the book)
*   3 no reply
*   no confirmed venue
Do we reschedule to a new venue next week ?

18 Apr 1:16 pm, Errol (who, remember, hadn’t got past the first couple of pages):
The way I see it, it’s not our fault that Salman Rushdie is a stuffed shirt with funny ideas and a strange way of saying them.
What if we ignore him? How about those of us that are available just go out for a meal on Wednesday night and hang out?

Bill (who hadn’t read the book) finally surfaced from his heavy other commitments to say that his place wasn’t possible this week, and with a little back and forth it was decided to go ahead, in a restaurant, last night. Harald (of the ‘too much jinnying’ comment) said he’d try to finish the book in time, and Jamahl chimed in:

18 Apr 4:40 pm, Jamahl:
I’ve read the book and enjoyed it.
See you at the restaurant.

By now, I was spoiling for a conversation:

19 Apr 11:22 am, me: 
I’m sorry I can’t be there. Apart from the always excellent company, I would have enjoyed advocating for the book. It’s not as if I enjoyed it hugely. I struggled with the start and was tempted to give up at about page 100 (where the jinnery was getting tedious). Also, the sense that Rushdie was doing stuff that many children’s books had been doing for decades made me kind of resentful by proxy
BUT
in the end I was drawn in by the way he expects us to treat Arabic scholars with the same respect as we would western mediaeval ones; and the way he seduces us into seeing the ‘fairy’ world of northern Africa as central, with various more familiar Indian and Greek gods as manifestations of them. There’s a tiny bit where two characters are married at the Auribondo ashram in Pondicherry, by ‘Mother herself’ – an Indian email friend of mine has told me about Mother, who was a huge influence in my friend’s life. I wondered how many other references there were that non-Westerners would pick up on that just float by me. And yet, the book is definitely a novel in the western tradition, even if closer to children’s books and graphic novels than to Bleak House.
That’s my two bits.

Which drew Jamahl out with a perfect counterbalance to my over-seriousness. The book is after all a lot of fun, with goth-girls hurling lightning from their fingers and elderly gardeners floating a couple of millimetres above the ground, and terrible things happening to people’s skin if they tell lies in the presence of a magical baby:

19 Apr 5:06 pm, Jamahl: 
What a fantastic BUT.
Despite the river of references flowing by unnoticed while I read I still enjoyed the book. While I read I would suspend disbelief and wallow in the plasticity of time. There are also moments of ‘couldn’t give a fuck to consequence’ that I wholeheartedly supported.
While as a retiree you may be familiar with these freedoms this book allowed me to drift and swim in them.

No report from the dinner yet.

2 Comments

Posted in Book Club, Book Group, Books

Tagged ,

NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2016 Shortlist

Posted on 21 Apr 2016 | Leave a comment

I love the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. As a country boy at heart, I’ve had the best time when I’ve attended the awards dinner, just gawking at the Writers, including the ones I can claim as friends or – once – a relation. This year’s short list was announced this week. You can see the full list with judges’ comments on a pdf press release from the State Library, and you can click through to notes on the list on the State Library’s website here.

In case you missed it in the press (as I did), here it is, not as a dreaded PDF or requiring you to click back and forth, but with added links to my blog posts on the shamefully few I’ve read (or seen).

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)
Ghost River, Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press)
Locust Girl, A Lovesong, Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex Press)
Clade, James Bradley (Penguin Random House)
The Life of Houses, Lisa Gorton (Giramondo)
A Guide to Berlin, Gail Jones (Penguin Random House)
The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau (Bloomsbury)

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5,000)
 Fever of Animals, Miles Allinson (Scribe Publications)
An Astronaut’s Life, Sonja Dechian (Text Publishing)
Relativity, Antonia Hayes (Penguin Random House)
In the Quiet, Eliza Henry-Jones (HarperCollins Publisher)
When There’s Nowhere Else to Run, Murray Middleton (Allen & Unwin)
Hot Little Hands, Abigail Ulman (Penguin Random House)

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000)
The Nashos’ War: Australia’s National Servicemen and Vietnam, Mark Dapin (Penguin Random House)
One Life: My Mother’s Story, Kate Grenville (Text Publishing)
Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History, Klaus Neumann (Black Inc.)
Reckoning: A Memoir, Magda Szubanski (Text Publishing)
Island Home, Tim Winton (Penguin Random House)
Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright (Giramondo)

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)
Brush, Joanne Burns (Giramondo)
Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future), Lionel G. Fogarty (Vagabond Press)
The Hazards, Sarah Holland-Batt (University of Queensland Press)
Fainting with Freedom, Ouyang Yu (Five Islands Press)
Terra Bravura, Meredith Wattison (Puncher & Wattmann)
Not Fox Nor Axe, Chloe Wilson (Hunter Publishers

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000)
Tea and Sugar Christmas, Jane Jolly & Robert Ingpen (National Library of Australia)
A Single Stone, Meg McKinlay (Walker Books Australia)
Molly and Pim and the Millions of Stars, Martine Murray (Text Publishing)
The Greatest Gatsby: A Visual Book of Grammar, Tohby Riddle (Penguin Random House
Teacup, Rebecca Young & Matt Ottley (Scholastic Australia)
Flight, Nadia Wheatley & Armin Greder (Windy Hollow Books)

Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult’s Literature ($30,000)
Battlesaurus: Rampage at Waterloo, Brian Falkner (Pan Macmillan)
Freedom Ride, Sue Lawson (Black Dog Books)
Laurinda, Alice Pung (Black Inc.)
Welcome to Orphancorp, Marlee Jane Ward (Seizure)
The Peony Lantern, Frances Watts (HarperCollins Publisher)
The Guy, the Girl, the Artist and his Ex, Gabrielle Williams (Allen & Unwin)

2016 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)
Boys Will Be Boys, Melissa Bubnic (Sydney Theatre Company)
Broken, Mary Anne Butler (Currency Press)
The Bleeding Tree, Angus Cerini (Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company)
Battle of Waterloo, Kylie Coolwell (Sydney Theatre Company)
Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday, Roslyn Oades (Malthouse Theatre)

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)
Last Cab to Darwin, Reg Cribb & Jeremy Sims (Last Cab Productions)
Deadline Gallipoli, Episode 1, Jacquelin Perske (Matchbox Pictures)
The Secret River, Part 2, Jan Sardi & Mac Gudgeon (Ruby Entertainment)
Deadline Gallipoli, Episode 4: “The Letter”, Cate Shortland (Matchbox Pictures)
House of Hancock, Katherine Thomson (Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder)

Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000)
Shining: The Story of a Lucky Man, Abdi Aden & Robert Hillman (HarperCollins Publisher)
The Other Side of the World, Stephanie Bishop (Hachette Australia)
The Principal, Episode 1, Kristen Dunphy (Essential Media and Entertainment)
Good Muslim Boy, Osamah Sami (Hardie Grant Books)
We Are Here, Cat, Thao Nguyen (Allen & Unwin)
Vera: My Story, Vera Wasowski & Robert Hillman (Black Inc.)

Indigenous Writer’s Prize (New Award) ($30,000)
Ghost River, Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press)
Inside My Mother, Ali Cobby Eckermann (Giramondo)
Dirty Words, Natalie Harkin (Cordite Publishing Inc.)
Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books)
Heat and Light, Ellen van Neerven (University of Queensland Press)
Not Just Black and White, Lesley Williams and Tammy Williams (University of Queensland Press)

The awards are announced on 16 May, no longer at a dinner but at an exclusive cocktail event, at the start of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I’m hoping to have read a couple more by then. It’s a big list.

Leave a comment

Posted in Books

Tagged