Why, how or what?

Posted on 16 May 2010 | 1 comment

This is the last of these posts for a while, I promise. Mireille Juchau isn’t an easy writer, but she is rewarding. ‘Habitat Group’, her story in the current Heat, compresses a great complexity of relationships into an astonishingly small span. But it  begins:

Josie looks out from the treehouse, across the roofs and conifer spires to the grand home hovering in shreds of fog. Through its high window she sees a framed picture changing form – now a plane of radium green, now a dappled mercury lake. Pain knives her belly.

Why knives rather than the accepted usage, knifes? I can’t think of a reason why someone would make that choice deliberately, unless perhaps to say subliminally about spelling conventions what a recent commenter here said explicitly about syntax: ‘your correct syntax is […] synthetic and immutable and already outmoded.’ I don’t believe this story is intended to make any such statement, even though there’s a tremour a couple of pages later. There is no why, no meaning-making intent.

How did it happen? None of three spellcheckers easily available to me rejects knifes (though WordPress rejects both gages and pavo). It could be a typo, as v is very close to  f on the qwerty keyboard. It could be a moment’s inattention on the writer’s part or a product of an education that didn’t insist on relentlessly testing spelling, backed up by similar moments of inattention or educational deficits in the copy editor and everyone else who read the text on the way to publication. However, it’s almost certainly accidental, and accidents will always happen.

What effect does it have? It’s immediate effect on me is to throw me into proofreader mode, so unless I lay the book aside and come back to it with a fresh mind in a couple of days, I read on, distracted by every instance where I would have made a different judgment on the commas. Fourteen pages later, for example, in John Mateer’s poem, ‘Pieta’, a prostitute smiles ‘discretely’ at her customer, and I’m irritated that my first response is to think it’s a misspelling – when in fact it’s a finely judged and unusual use of the word. This immediate effect is what prompts me to blog about these things. But there are other, more serious effects, of which three come to mind. First, Heat is a serious, often groundbreaking literary journal, and the routine occurrence of these and less obvious errors makes it look amateurish and second rate. Second, these errors are likely to spread confusion among young readers. I realise this is not as big a deal as it would be in a children’s magazine, but it is still a consideration. Third, they contribute to a general falling off of precision in the use of language and in thinking, of which it is a symptom.

Haven’t I got better things to do with my time, you might ask, than blog about other people’s spelling mistakes? Well, yes, I have. I will pass over any remaining errors of the sort in this issue of Heat in silence. The silence will also apply to eccentric, inconsistent and North American use of commas and other punctuation. Sydney is hosting the Biennale, the Writers Festival and – soon – Vivid. I’m sure I’ll find something to write about there.

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Another tiny adventure in reading

Posted on 15 May 2010 | 7 comments

At the risk of making it absolutely clear that I’m a total pain in the neck, here’s another little confused-reader moment. John Bryson’s essay, ‘Panama, a Pantomime‘, in the current issue of Heat, is structured as a conversation a Panamanian bar in 1990. This is our introduction to the bar:

The place is well known to cab drivers as El Parvo Real on Calle 51, set between the hotels and office blocks of Via Espana and the classy condominiums of Campo Alegre. But to those inside the bar it is called the Royal Peacock.

My knowledge of Spanish is minuscule, but it was enough to set me wondering just what point was being made here. Parvo has something to do with smallness; real means royal. Perhaps the taxi drivers nicknamed the place because it was tiny but opulent.  But wait, pavo (in Latin) means peacock. I looked it up, and sure enough the Spanish for peacock is pavo real. So perhaps the taxidrivers here represent the Spanish-speaking majority of Panamanians, the Parvo is a misspelling, and the point of the two different names is that those inside the bar are English speakers. The next sentences remove all doubt:

A barmaid pulls brown ale from the keg. Ayrshire roses stands in a window vase, and someone can tell you the result of the soccer draw between Crystal palace and Manchester United.

The bar is a haven for the British/English, then. But what about that misspelling? Is it a subtlety – those English speakers, including the narrator, know the bar’s Spanish name only from the taxi drivers (possibly the only Spanish speakers they deal with) and disdain to read the name as written over the door. If so, this single misplaced r sends ripples through the whole story: we no longer take the narrator’s voice to be that of the author; the conversation in the pub, an effective device for conveying some of the complexities of the 1989 US invasion of Panama, now resonates with the silence of the absent, disdained majority population, and the essay invites us to be wary of the point of view of the wealthy expat characters, as well as that of the narrator and his excursions into history.

Or is it just a slip of the pen that slipped through the editorial net? Given the gage/gauge slip a few pages earlier, this seems the most likely reading. But it makes me sad.

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Is it just me?

Posted on 14 May 2010 | 5 comments

How do you respond when you read the following? It’s wrenched out of context here, but I’ve tried to include enough so you have a sense of what’s going on.

Susan, Bessie calls out, Susan, the plums are spoiling and splitting and there’s flies all over. […]

The only gauges in the district says Stan. Stan has his eye on the girl; the bench lined with jars, the plums in pails repelling the water. They are barely outlined in the dark kitchen, Stan and the Dimboola girl, Stan and Susan.

Never mind the idiosyncratic punctuation, how about them gauges? I’m genuinely interested. Did you:

a) Take it in your stride, thinking something like, ‘I have no idea what gauges he’s talking about, maybe he’s got railways or shotguns on his mind and we’ll find out about it in a minute’?

b) Read as a child reads, accept that there are some things you won’t understand in any piece of writing, and move on?

c) Worry at it for a bit, realise Stan is talking about the plums and referring obliquely to Susan as the only available female in the district, and think in passing that the author can’t spell.

d) Same as c), but wonder if perhaps the author got it right only to have the copy editor introduce the confusing error?

e) Understand the meaning and read on without breaking stride, perhaps unaware that a gage is a plum and a gauge is something to do with measurement, or possessed of an enviable ability to read with the working assumption that the words as written may occasionally be mere approximations of the words intended?

See, what I don’t know is how atypical my response is. I was somewhere between c and d, and the whole story (‘New Gold Mountain’ by Michelle Moo in Heat Nº 22 – it’s a good story) ground momentarily to a halt.

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Jasper Jones at the Book Group

Posted on 13 May 2010 | 4 comments

Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones (Allen & Unwin 2009)

The fourth paragraph of Jasper Jones begins:

This is the hottest summer I can remember and the thick heat seems to seep in and keep in my sleepout.

‘Keep in’? That’s awkward, I thought, and it chimes oddly with ‘seep in’ and ‘sleepout’. The paragraph continues:

It’s like the earth’s core in here. The only relief comes from the cooler air that creeps in between the slim slats of my single window. It’s near impossible to sleep …

Seep in, keep in, sleepout, creeps in and sleep, all in five lines: this is definitely odd, but – along with the heat, the relief and those slats, which are slim for no reason other than alliteration – it’s clearly deliberate.

Over the next pages, while the story had my attention from the word go – thirteen year old Charlie Bucktin, the narrator, is woken in the night by the town’s bad boy Jasper Jones and led to a secret place in the bush where he’s faced with a terrible spectacle and an equally terrible dilemma – I had a weather eye out to see if anything would come of this stylistic oddity. Nothing did, in the sense that if you didn’t notice it you weren’t missing a vital clue to the book’s meaning. But Charlie is in love with language, and bursts of assonance and alliteration for their own sake amount to something of a stylistic signature. I did a quick scan before returning the book to the library, and noted, from many examples, ‘a bundle of lonely bones tied to a stone’ (page 123), ‘Pored over it, taking little portions’ (page 128), and this, in one of Charlie’s reflective moments:

Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people’s pain, as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us as trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It’s a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It’s the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But sorry, really, is not about you. It’s theirs to take or leave.

Like the frequent references to Charlie’s reading – To Kill a Mockingbird, Batman, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (which he hasn’t read, but Eiza, the love interest, has, and seen the film), Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz – this fascination with words is important in establishing Charlie’s character and the tone of the book. It’s been described as an Australian To Kill a Mocking Bird, but I doubt if Harper Lee’s book was anything like as intertextual as this. The description is OK as a sales pitch but I’m surprised that reviewers have echoed it.

Anyhow, it’s a terrific, fast moving, undemanding read: a coming-of-age romance cum mystery cum homage to Mark Twain cum historical drama (the Vietnam War is on, and the Beaumont children are mentioned towards the end) cum tale of pre-adolescent friendship (with a substantial nod towards the movie Stand By Me). There’s a beautiful description of a cricket match in which Charlie’s best friend, a very short Vietnamese boy (‘Jeffrey Lu on debut’) makes a splash, in a way that reminded me of Ruth Starke’s brilliant book for younger readers, Nips XI.

One thing I don’t understand is what makes the book ‘mainstream’ rather than ‘young adult’. There’s some pretty intense swearing, I guess, but sex is treated with great tact; even when sexual abuse is described explicitly in a letter that’s crucial to the plot, we don’t get to read the letter. The story is told from a thirteen-year-old’s point of view, and there’s no hint that he’s in any way an unreliable narrator: we don’t know any more than he does and we’re not invited to make judgments that differ from his – we learn about the world with him. In fact, Charlie’s angry mother is treated with less adult-sympathy than similar mothers in many a YA title. I’ve heard that the classification was a policy decision on the part of the publishers – that they were invited to submit the book for the Children’s Book Council Awards, but declined. The mainstream classification seems to have paid off in adult readership and award nominations – always assuming that a Miles Franklin shortlisting is more prestigious than one from the Children’s Book Council, and that being on the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist alongside David Malouf’s Ransom and Coetzee’s Summertime is more dignified than being named in the same breath as Justine Larbalestier’s Liar (not a view I share: I’m looking forward to Justine’s book as keenly as I am to David’s, and who in their right mind would want to compete for a prize against Malouf and Coetzee?). I hope this taxonomical decision hasn’t discouraged the young people who are the book’s natural readership. [Since writing that I’ve seen an online  trailer that is clearly aimed at teenagers, so it looks as if the pubisher is having two bob each way, and a good thing too.]

I wrote that much a number of weeks ago. The Book Group met last night.

With one exception, we were lukewarm. No one actively hated the book, but different people saw different things as gaping flaws. One man said he found Charlie’s decision at the very start to help conceal a crime highly implausible, and intolerably hackneyed – from then on he read with very little pleasure. Another was irritated by the banter between Charlie and Geoffrey (though one man said he thought that was the best thing in the book). Others found the narrative voice, and the characters’, wildly inconsistent – perhaps especially in beautifully written passages such as the aria on ‘sorry’ I quoted from above. I think we were unanimous in finding the characters’ emotional responses to crises (a grisly death, the acrimonious departure of a parent, the discovery of a grandparent) lamentably one-dimensional. I’m sorry to say that as we talked the book’s charms diminished. I proposed a reading that transcended these concerns for consistency, verisimilitude and psychological realism. Perhaps we ought to see the book as akin to the startlingly discontinuous novelitas of César Aira that I’ve just been reading about in the current Heat. But that didn’t wash. Its one defender said it reminded him vividly of things he had felt when he was an adolescent, and he wasn’t howled down.

Sorry, Craig.

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Glebe Annandale Balmain elegies

Posted on 12 May 2010 | Leave a comment

David Brooks, Urban Elegies (Island Press 2007)

‘Ars Poetica’, the first poem in this lovely collection, begins

When I woke first I imagined it was starlings
mid-demonstration on the galvanised roof,
a thick forest of chirpings,
claws like the scratching
of a thousand sharp pencils

then, waking again, thought
swallows
perched for a briefing
before launching out over Annandale
like a hundred miniature scimitars

but of course it was the Rainbow Lorries
fresh over from Manly
unable to contain their Springfulness

He had me, as they say, at ‘Annandale’. After that he’d have had to do something terribly wrong for me not to love this book. He didn’t. I did.

Robert Adamson says in his intro that he read the book in one sitting. I almost read it in one dog walk. It’s not difficult poetry, but its appeal goes well beyond the pleasure of recognising places and events from Sydney’s inner west – the apartments built on the site of the old Children’s Hospital, street names, the two local giveaway newspapers, a rat in the compost, headlice in a child’s hair. The pieces that most hit home for me are those that touch on the numinous. ‘Flying Fox on Wire’, for example, begins:

A human poet, trying to remove
a fallen powerline from his roof, accidentally
touching the cable and surviving the
J-U-D-D-E-R-I-N-G shock of it
might think it is as if
he’s grasped a tendril of his Al-
mighty God

and draws a comparison to a flying fox on overhead wires

completing a
circuit it could
never have imagined – what
vast
grids and
networkings of night, what
chittering labyrinths of
tree and
air, what
soundless shrieks of
pain or
joy or
prophecy are
there?

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Out of the Box

Posted on 11 May 2010 | 8 comments

Michael Farrell and Jill Jones (editors), Out of the box: Contemporary Australian gay and lesbian poets (Puncher and Wattmann 2010)

I approached this anthology with suspicion. Does it really make sense, I wondered, to read David Malouf’s or Pam Brown’s poetry in a context that draws attention to the poet’s sexuality? Wouldn’t it skew, and narrow, the reading? My suspicion wasn’t allayed by having recently read editor Michael Farrell’s ultra-skewing assertion in Jacket Magazine 39 that he has ‘always read Judith Wright’s “Woman to Man” as referring to the experience of gender transfer’. But … well, once again the Book Club has dragged me from the path of least resistance.

Of Michael Farrell’s introduction and its use and abuse of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, I can reasonably say I didn’t find it congenial, and his readings of poems strayed too far into hip idiosyncrasy for my taste. Jill Jones, his co-editor, gives a nice potted history of identified gay and lesbian writing in Australia since the late 70s, and provides some useful orientation to the lesbian poems – I mean of course the poems written by identified lesbians, because as the book’s subtitle makes clear it’s the poets, not the poems, that have sexual identitites.

The poems are wonderfully diverse. They belong together not because of shared themes or concerns or formal qualities, but because their creators are contemporary (ie, alive?), Australian and gay or lesbian. A number of the poems are outed by the context – that is, poems I would elsewhere have read as heteroerotic I here read as homoerotic. That’s probably a good thing – my heteronormative mentality is being challenged. Others shrink: Pam Brown’s ’20th Century’ (‘And as we were the tootlers / we tootled along’) here tends to read as referring to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras rather than something more global. I don’t know that that’s so good. At times I caught myself approximating a Beavis and Butthead snigger: ‘Hur hur! He said fist!’ Definitely not cool, though I plead in mitigation that Michael Farrell’s introduction does something of the sort more than once, and a handful of poems seem to be intent on a kind of high-culture gay Beavis-and-Buttheadism.

A good bit of the time while reading these pages, I got to feel very straight – not necessarily in the sexual sense, but in the sense that I prefer my language syntactical, don’t warm to commas at the start of sentences or parentheses that don’t close, and hate it when I can’t tell whether something is a typo or deliberate wordplay (when Javant Biarujia’s ‘MappleTROPE’ gives us Mapplethorpe’s deathbed utterance as, ‘I just hope I live long / enough to see the frame’ – has he inserted that r into the last word as a piece of witty surrealism or is it just bad proofreading? I genuinely don’t know, and it bothers me).

There are wonderful poems by David Malouf (‘A History Lesson’), Dorothy Porter (‘The Ninth Hour’), Pam Brown (‘Peel Me A Zibibo’), Martin Harrison (‘About the Self’), Peter Rose (‘Plague’), Kerry Leves (‘the escape’ – I’ve known Kerry mainly as a children’s writer, and he is definitely not that here) and joanne burns (‘aerial photography’), among others. I was delighted to be introduced to Stephen J Williams (‘Museums of beautiful art’), Andy Quan (‘Oath’, possibly the single poem that touched me most directly) and Tricia Dearborn (‘Life on the Run’) among others.

It probably doesn’t make sense to talk about a book of poetry without quoting any, but every poem I wanted to quote turns out to feel like an all or nothing proposition. I guess if you’re interested you’ll just have to find the book.

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An acquisition

Posted on 10 May 2010 | 1 comment

I dropped in at Little Queen Street today to pick up Steven Vella’s small bowl, which we bought a couple of weeks ago.

Here it is nestling in its bed of polystyrene:

Out of the box:

On the wall, though we have yet to find a place where its shadow is as dramatic as in the gallery:

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Stop the presses: Inner city house has surplus cockroaches

Posted on 7 May 2010 | 4 comments

If you don’t know about Freecycle, you’re missing out on a very good thing. It’s a transnational ‘grassroots movement’ of people giving stuff away (and getting stuff). Instead of putting useful bibs and bobs  you no longer need out on the verge to be collected by canny passers-by, or canvassing friends to see if anyone wants the chair that doesn’t fit in your living room any more, or selling the superseded TV on eBay for a nugatory sum, you advertise them on your local Freecycle list and someone interesting comes and takes them off your hands. It costs nothing, and is remarkably undemanding. When a small business I know was closing down an office, it gave away book cases, a television set, large pieces of furniture, computers, to recipients including a family whose house had burned down and a school that was struggling to  make ends meet. Someone put up a message saying they needed compost: we happily gave them a couple of buckets from our plentiful supply (and the recipient turned out to be someone I last saw when she was two years old, the daughter of a close friend’s partner at the time). The Freecycle website’s catchphrase is, ‘Changing the world, one gift at a time.’

Today must be some kind of landmark case of one person’s junk being another’s treasure. I received an email with the subject line ‘[freecycle_sc] OFFER: Annandale – Live cockroaches.’ He wasn’t kidding:

Anyone who keeps a pet lizard knows that roaches are expensive to buy at petshops, and that many you might catch yourself are likely to be contaminated with insecticide and harm your reptile.
My house has not had insecticides used in it for at least a dozen years, and my roaches are healthy and safe. I’m offering to catch them on a weekly basis and have them available for collection.
best phone to catch me on is xxxx xxxx Thurs Friday or Monday.

See, you don’t know what you’re missing.

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Greg Weight and Western Desert Artists

Posted on 6 May 2010 | 1 comment

At least one of my regular readers would have loved to be at the Gallery East opening this evening [All turn and look at Will]. Greg Weight’s ‘Artists of the Western Desert’ comprises eleven portraits of Western Desert artists – from Kintore, Haast Bluff, Yuendumu and Alice Springs. The opening was a small, even intimate gathering. I recognised a number of stars of the art world, but someone explained that they were there as neighbours and old friends of Greg and Carol Ruff, his partner and the owner of the gallery, rather than as A-listers.

Long Jack Philipus Tjakamara dominates the gallery’s front window.

In lieu of speeches, Carol Ruff and friend played ukulele and sang – among other things, Carol’s own song ‘Finding Love in CLOVElly’ – and were joined on the bongos by the artist photographer, seen here in the right foreground. The Indigenous artist beaming down from the wall is Yukultjii Napangati, a Pintipu woman who came in out of the desert in 1984 when she was about 14 years old.

The exhibition lasts until 23 May.  If you miss it at Clovelly, you may be able to catch it at the Musée Branly in Paris in the next year or so.

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Bill Murray reads Emily Dickinson

Posted on 5 May 2010 | Leave a comment

Remember Paul Robeson singing to workers in the Sydney Opera House under construction? New York’s Poets’ House isn’t quite on that scale, but this coming together of Bill Murray, Emily Dickinson and a group of construction workers is beautiful to behold.

I usually tend not to like actors’ readings of poetry, but this is masterly, especially his apparently casual use of props and the way he modulates degrees of seriousness. Even the little bit of ‘New Yorkers are special’ rhetoric isn’t too vomitous.

Thanks to Harriet the Blog.

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