Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway

Posted on 4 Jun 2011 | Leave a comment

Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway ( 2007)

A friend told me about this in an email, describing it as short stories soaked in historical research, and mentioning that one of the stories is a set of fictitious journals kept by Charles Sturt. I trekked to the library the same day.

Most of the book’s eleven short stories evoke historical moments: Chernobyl in April 1986, Hadrian’s Wall in ancient times, a Nazi-sponsored quest for evidence of the yeti, Sturt’s exploration of the south Australian desert, a Russian space launch, the Battle of Marathon, and the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. These historical events aren’t there as background to the stories, they are the stories, reimagined from the point of view of key participants. For instance, the Reign of Terror story, ‘Sans Farine‘, is narrated by Charles-Henri Sanson, the royal executioner before the revolution who was kept on in the job to become the man in charge of the guillotine. The real Sanson has a Wikipedia entry, which confirms that Shepard’s story stays close to the known facts. But Shepard doesn’t give us some kind of pedagogical re-enactment – this story in particular takes us to a poignant human reality. The horrors of capital punishment before and after the revolution are graphically presented, and Shepard avoids what might seem another obvious temptation, to editorialise on the evils of state murder. His concern is with the experience of the man, and with coming to imaginative grips with historical events.

Eons ago, on the way to an MA thesis that never eventuated, I read Sturt’s published journals, as well as those of Leichhardt, Eyre, Mitchell, George Grey and Ernest Giles. My thesis would have argued, of Eyre’s Journals in particular, that these books were literary compositions and should be much more widely read. Novelists and poets including Patrick White and Francis Webb, have drawn on the various Journals, and there is at least one anthology of excerpts. Shepard’s ‘The First South Central Australian Expedition’ captures the feel of the original. It does something else as well, as the fictional diarist Sturt is much more forthcoming about his emotional life than the real one was, at least in published form, but Sturt is much more a presence in the story than a jumping off point.

The book is dedicated to the author’s brother, and it includes plenty of brothers and brotherly relationships. Probably the single thing that stops the historical pieces from feeling didactic or info-dump-ish is the overarching preoccupation with relationships between men. Even the one story with a female narrator is set in the predominantly male milieu of the Russian space program, and the relationship between the two main female characters has the kind of competition traditionally found between men. The nerdy scribe overwhelmed by barbarians in ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ has a lot in common with the skinny twelve-year-old who manages to survive the bullying at summer camp in ‘Courtesy for Beginners’. The team sport in ‘Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak’ (surely a science fictional take on American Football rather than a realistic account!) is as brutalising in its way as the work of the executioner in ‘Sans Farine’. Fathers ache for their sons, sons for their fathers. Sons die. Fathers die. Brothers die. Occasionally there’s a woman, but she’s not let in easily. Like she’d understand, anyway.

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Adam Aitken’s Tonto’s Revenge

Posted on 3 Jun 2011 | 3 comments

Adam Aitken, Tonto’s Revenge (Tinfish Press 2011)

Tinfish Press is a small Hawai’ian publishing house run by Susan M Schultz, the poet who wrote Dementia Blog. It publishes poetry in the Tinfish journal, in books and in chapbooks. Even if Adam Aitken hadn’t been Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i–Mānoa in 2010,  would have been a natural fit for Tinfish. He wrote recently on his blog:

I have spent my whole career as a writer trying to critique and understand a cross-cultural poetics and [my] multicultural cultural capital.

Almost like call and response, the Tinfish website says:

We publish work from the Pacific region, concentrating on language issues, colonialism, Buddhism, place, and poetic form. Above all, we seek to create alliances between writers whose work crosses national and aesthetic borders.

Tonto’s Revenge is the second title in the Tinfish Retro Series, which will comprise 12 chapbooks, $3 USD each or $36 for the set, available from http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com. (You can read Susan Schultz’s blog entry on this book here.)

I enjoyed the book’s twelve poems very much. Most of them are responses to Hawai’i: conversations on TheBus (not a typo), an encounter with a homeless woman, an elegy for the actor who played Danno in Hawai’i Five-O, a meditation on a major shopping precinct. Five monologues by ‘The Sheriff’ are less Hawai’i specific, but they too relate to encounters with the US more broadly. For example, ‘The Sheriff as Recidivist’ which gives the book its title, plays with a particularly US flavour of political correctness, in which certain words have been declared ‘bad’:

I know I can't call him that, my dusky Injun,
but I does.
[...]
Tonto.
Now that Tumbleweed U's banned the term
now that it's banned
it's even sexier.

Here, as elsewhere, the play turns serious in a surprising way, but you’ll have to read the poem to find out how.  There’s a lot of playfulness in the book as a whole – playful puns, play with syntax, play with paradox – and a lot of affection.

Since this is a blog entry and not a review, here begin a couple of paragraphs on a very minor matter:

As is pretty inevitable these days, when we can never assume a common set of references between a poet and any given reader, there are plenty of obscurities. For example, in ‘Ala Moana’, the piece on the shopping precinct, which to my mind is the most interesting poem in the book, the narrator has been meditating on nostalgia:

So I want to write 747 poems
and not worry. Whose home is it?
Whose nostalgia?

Presumably he doesn’t mean he want to write seven hundred and forty-seven poems. Is he looking forward to the time when we will be nostalgic for 747s?  Perhaps he is stating an ambition to write big poems that will carry many people to new places. This morning, re-reading the poem while walking the dog, I stumbled on this line, and moved on – as you do. Just now, checking to see if Adam had uploaded the poem to his blog as he has some of the others, I read this: ‘I feel deeply complicit in a kind of poetic tourism, where I am always unmoored, or detached from a deep sense of belonging to a place. Susan Schultz calls this the “747” poem, a poem of shallow impressions, a sketch.’

Ahh! (And since I wrote that last sentence, I’ve googled ‘747 poems’ and found lots of references: it’s not a deliberate obscurity.)

Added later: Susan Schultz has added a clarification in the comments.

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Beyond White Guilt at Gleebooks

Posted on 2 Jun 2011 | Leave a comment

Last night we cashed in a couple of our Gleeclub vouchers to hear Sarah Maddison in conversation with Jeff McMullen about the former’s new book, Beyond White Guilt. A couple of years ago, Sarah’s Black Politics drew on interviews with 30 Aboriginal leaders to give a kind of map of Aboriginal politics (the link is to my blog entry, which outlines some of salient points on the map). This book could be seen as a sequel, looking at non-Indigenous Australians.

A quick look at Wikipedia’s entry on Jeff McMullen shows him to be an eminently qualified whitefella to converse on this subject. He kicked off the conversation with two lists: on the one hand, invasion, dispossession, genocide, stealing children, and on the other denial, loss of memory and guilt. ‘We struggle in Australia,’ he said at one stage, ‘to have an honest and direct conversation [about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians].’ This conversation was refreshingly free of indirection or quibble. I won’t try to summarise, but can offer a couple of notes.

Asked why she chose to focus on guilt, which is after all often a useless, self-punishing emotion, Sarah Maddison cited Bernhard Schlink’s Guilt About the Past which argues in the German context that every generation that doesn’t make a substantive break with the atrocities of its forebears is standing in solidarity with them. Her book doesn’t advocate that non-Indigenous Australians should wallow in guilt forevermore, but that we should ‘sit with’ our guilt for a time, not run from it either by taking action or by denial. Facing that discomfort is a necessary step to understanding and making thoughtful progress. [I liked this. I know a Native American woman who urges non-Indigenous people to put our minds to answering the question, ‘How have I personally benefited from genocide?’]

She talked about ‘high-identifiers’ – people for whom it is extremely difficult to acknowledge any negative dimensions to their national identity. Such people tend to think that the continuing disadvantage of Aboriginal people must be their fault, specifically must be because there’s something wrong with Aboriginal culture. She talked about the need for adaptive change, the kind of change that requires a change of perspective rather than a technological fix.

The questions were all excellent. Perhaps for the first time in my life I heard a very long question that was neither primarily self-promoting nor bizarrely tangential to the topic in hand. The questioner spoke of the problematic nature of the phrase ‘white guilt’ both because non-Indigenous Australia is very diverse, and ‘white’ covers only part of it, because the ‘we’ who actually experience guilt, as opposed to, say, denial, is very hard to define (is it only liberals?), and because guilt is a pretty dead-end notion anyway. These were interesting issues to raise, and, as Sarah Maddison acknowledged, weren’t going to be resolved in an hour before dinner on a Friday night.

No doubt I’ll blog about this again when I read the book.

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Vivid

Posted on 28 May 2011 | 1 comment

On Friday night we caught the bus to Circular Quay for the start of Vivid. To tell the truth, I’ve had only the vaguest idea of what Vivid is until now. Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed have featured in past years, and I’ve heard that the Opera house has been lit spectacularly. I’ve meant to have a look, but never managed the trip to town. I’m not sure I’ve completely grasped the concept yet, but it’s at least partly a festival of light-related art.

The animated illuminations of the Opera House are wonderful. The Customs House, if anything, is even more wonderful. For gee-whiz technical brilliance and stuff you can’t take your eyes off, they’d both be hard to beat. There’s a reason so many people were lugging proper cameras with tripods around the Quay area. I won’t embarrass myself by uploading any of what I managed to capture on my iPhone. Vivid have a photostream on Flickr, and here’s someone else’s take on Customs House from You Tube:

Apart from the two big items, there are more than 40 ‘light sculptures‘ scattered around the Quay and the Rocks. Number 23, Social Firefly, was the big drawcard for us. Created by Jason McDermott, Liam Ryan & Frank Maguire, the second of whom is one of my two brilliant sons, it’s a medium sized fig tree near the MCA that’s full of gizmos. Here’s a phone shot of one gizmo in captivity:

The tails of these gizmos (at the bottom of the one in the photo) light up firefly green when light shines on them, and they also move in response to light. So a beam of light from, say, the torch tethered to the tree, will make one of the ‘fireflies’ light up, and set it swinging back and forth. When its light hits another, that one is animated in turn, and soon the whole tree is full of dancing green lights. It’s not the only interactive sculpture, and it’s certainly not the easiest to photograph or film (as the Art Student and I demonstrated to our own satisfaction), but it’s fascinating, and gets the paternal pride cells swelling

So there you are, that’s a glimpse of this Vivid thing that fills the weeks between the Writers’ Festival and the Film Festival in Sydney.

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Bill Hunter

Posted on 28 May 2011 | 4 comments

‘It seems everyone in Australia wanted to remember Bill Hunter this week,’ said Julie Rigg on the Movie Show yesterday. Well, for what it’s worth, here’s my 10 second encounter with him.

It was interval at the Nimrod Theatre, now the Stables, roughly 40 years ago. I was in my mid 20s, a nerd before the word – awkward, shy, and wretchedly lonely. (How glad I am not to be still in my mid 20s!) Enter Bill Hunter and two actor friends, all a little rowdy and more than a little tiddly. One of the trio was a reasonably well-known sexy comic actress. Somehow or other she and I found ourselves inclose proximity at the foot of the stairs leading up to the performance space. Seizing the moment for what was no doubt intended as a bit of good natured teasing, she turned her large mascara’d eyes on me and saying something like, ‘Hi there,’ moved very close, brushing against me with her fur coat in a parody of screen flirtation. I was mortified. And cornered. And it must have shown. She moved even closer. At that point Bill Hunter made me a fan for life by intervening. He took her by the arm. ‘Come on, Fifi,’ he said. ‘Leave him alone. You’ve had a few too many.” [He didn’t actually call her Fifi, because that’s not her real name.] And he led her firmly if a little unsteadily out into the night, leaving me with a story to tell and no harm done.

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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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Fireflies

Posted on 23 May 2011 | Leave a comment

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is over, and Vivid is about to light the town up. In this house we’ve been aware of a Vivid project that looks very interesting, and the Sydney Morning Herald site put up a teaser for it on the weekend:

They buzz like fireflies, light up like fireflies, but forget about calling them insects. Social Firefly is the latest installation to be announced as part of the Vivid festival, and is made up of a smattering of interactive robots flying around the fig tree at the Overseas Passenger Terminal.

The creatures are a collaboration between designers Liam Ryan and Jason McDermott from the firm Arup and Frank Maguire.

They have been programmed to respond to light, and to each other.

‘When light is shone on one of these little creatures, it will react and change the way it is moving and shine light around its immediate neighbourhood,’ McDermott said.

Visitors to the installation will be able to shine torches on the ‘fireflies’ to provoke a response, and see the ripple effect of that on the community in the tree.

Vivid starts of Friday, and Fireflies is scheduled to be switched on at 6 o’clock.

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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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