Blog - Meanjin

Reading List - Jeffrey Goldberg

2012-02-23T13:36:30Z

This week in your Meanjin reading list we draw your attention to American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, current national correspondent for The Atlantic, and former Middle-East and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker.

Goldberg reports extensively on the issues facing Israel today, from the Palestinian conflict, to Iran, to corruption amongst pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington, and he has a rich, conflicted history with that country. From a childhood in Long Island, as the victim of persistent anti-Semetic jibes, he cultivated a burgeoning Zionism, and moved to Israel to joined their defense force, where he served as a prison guard during the First Intifada, the 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising. His sole book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle-East Divide, is an account of his time in the prison camp, and of the tentative friendship he formed with Rafiq Hijazi, a Palestinian prisoner there. But the full metamorphosis into an Israeli that he desired floundered in stresses of the Intifada, and he eventually re-Americanized himself. He now writes with considerable authority and access on the highest levels of US and Israel foreign policy. Part of the satisfaction of reading a Goldberg piece is watching him namedrop the various powerful people he gets to speak to. He’s the kind of reporter who can get a personal invitation from Fidel Castro to come to Cuba, visit an aquarium, and chat about the failures of communism.

He also blogs for The Atlantic.

The Hunted by Jeffrey Goldberg

This is the first Goldberg piece that really made me sit up and pay attention. In the course of a US television report in 1996 on Mark and Delia Owens, two wildlife conservationists in Africa, the shooting and killing of a supposed poacher is shown on air – a murder which remained officially unsolved. His moral curiosity piqued by this remarkable event, Goldberg uncovers a compelling, Heart of Darkness-esque tale of two American activists gone pretty much off the rails and running their own private war in a Zambian national park.

When people speak about the detrimental effects that the internet has had on the economic health of newspapers and other journalistic publications, I think this is the kind of piece they’re worried about losing. It has the kind of dense research that only come with substantial amounts of time and money and resources. Goldberg clearly went on several trips to Africa and around America, and spoke with just about everyone he could find connected with the TV report and the Owens, and the effort pays off in the notable and original revelations found in the article.

Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. Vieira introduces the scene: “We were allowed to accompany patrols in Zambia after we agreed not to identify those involved, should a shooting occur. On this mission, we would witness the ultimate price paid by a suspected poacher.” A game scout in a green uniform walks in what appears to be a recently abandoned campsite. A pouch on the ground contains shotgun shells, and the scout removes a few of them to show the camera. The scout waits for the person camping there, a suspected poacher, to return. A new scene begins, and Vieira continues her voice-over: “Our cameras begin rolling again after a shot is fired at the returning trespasser.”

Onscreen, the scout is shown from behind, running through brush and carrying a rifle. He approaches a man wearing a gray jacket and brown pants, lying prone in a small clearing. The man tries to move, lifting his head a few inches off the ground. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. At this moment, a second figure is seen in the background. His face and upper body are blurred, so that even his race is obscured, but he is dressed in green and appears to be carrying a rifle. The camera turns to the wounded man, and Vieira says, in a voice-over, “The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall for the animals to eat.” She pauses, and says, “Conservation. Morality. Africa.” Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.

The Ally From Hell by Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder

Our previous Meanjin reading lists, on the likes of John Jeremiah Sullivan and David Grann, have brought you a bunch of literary journalism. This is the other kind: a big, meaty, Woodward and Bernstein-esque report on serious matters of politics. Goldberg and his colleague at The Atlantic Marc Ambinder write on the scary, headache-inducing tangle that is the US-Pakistan relationship, and in particular the precarious security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Nuclear-weapons components are sometimes moved by helicopter and sometimes moved over roads. And instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the SPD prefers to move material by subterfuge, in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic. According to both Pakistani and American sources, vans with a modest security profile are sometimes the preferred conveyance. And according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de-mated” component nuclear parts but “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

What this means, in essence, is this: In a country that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse these extremist ideologies, including al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which conducted the devastating terror attacks on Mumbai three years ago that killed nearly 200 civilians), nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads. And Pakistani and American sources say that since the raid on Abbottabad, the Pakistanis have provoked anxiety inside the Pentagon by increasing the pace of these movements. In other words, the Pakistani government is willing to make its nuclear weapons more vulnerable to theft by jihadists simply to hide them from the United States, the country that funds much of its military budget.

Among the Settlers by Jeffrey Goldberg

Goldberg cultivates a measured, complex perspective on the state of Israel, he is equal parts zealous and critical. Worrying though the existential threats posed by Hamas and Iran may be, he is equally concerned by the metastasizing moral and political disaster caused by the Israeli governments schizophrenic approach to Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. In this New Yorker piece from 2004 he reports on the settlers and the untenable, de-facto apartheid situation they are helping to bring about.

Some settler leaders see in the Palestinians the modern-day incarnation of the Amalekites, a mysterious Canaanite tribe that the Bible calls Israel’s eternal enemy. In the Book of Exodus, the Amalekites attacked the Children of Israel on their journey to the land of Israel. For this sin, God damned the Amalekites, commanding the Jews to wage a holy war to exterminate them. This is perhaps the most widely ignored command in the Bible. The rabbis who shaped Judaism could barely bring themselves to endorse the death penalty for murder, much less endorse genocide, and they ruled that the Amalekites no longer existed. But Moshe Feiglin, the Likud activist, told me, “The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior. I can’t prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek.” When I asked Benzi Lieberman, the chairman of the council of settlements-the umbrella group of all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza-if he thought the Amalekites existed today, he said, “The Palestinians are Amalek!” Lieberman went on, “We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.”

I heard similar talk from Effie Eitam, a hard-edged former general who leads the National Religious Party, a coalition partner in Sharon’s government. Eitam, who is Sharon’s housing minister, said, “I don’t call these people animals. These are creatures who came out of the depths of darkness. It is not by chance that the State of Israel got the mission to pave the way for the rest of the world, to militarily get rid of these dark forces.” Eitam told me that he believes there are innocent men among the Palestinians, but that they are collectively guilty. “We will have to kill them all,” he said. “I know it’s not very diplomatic. I don’t mean all the Palestinians, but the ones with evil in their heads. Not only blood on their hands but evil in their heads. They are contaminating the hearts and minds of the next generation of Palestinians.”

Reading List - David Grann

2012-02-16T13:44:01Z

Today in your Meanjin-issued homework we have the narrative journalism of David Grann, reporter for The New Yorker, and author of The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann has a preternatural gift for arranging the raw facts of a news story into a compelling narrative, complete with vividly drawn characters and startling plot twists.There’s an old newspaper dictum against ‘burying the lede’, or relegating the most interesting or pertinent details of a story to the body of a piece, rather than the introduction. But in Grann’s writing the most immediately newsworthy facts are often delivered midway through the piece, transformed by the accumulation of character, detail, and back story into compellingly affecting narrative turns. His articles have the energy and structure of a well paced murder mystery or thriller. .

At the risk of detracting from your enjoyment of the work before you get a chance to dig in, I’d like to pose a question. I often find myself so thoroughly, pleasingly entertained at the close of a Grann article that it’s easy to forget that the base materials for his prose comes from real events; real murders, real countries destabilised, real lives ruined, and are not just clever narrative games from the mind of an ingenious writer. Is there something morally suspect about transforming these serious real-life events into an engine for the satisfaction of the reader, or am I just chiding an author for being too good at his job?

Let Meanjin know what you think in the comments, if you feel so inclined.

A Murder Foretold by David Grann

Grann’s most recent long piece for The New Yorker, about a lawyer in Guatemala, one of the world’s most abjectly violent and corrupt countries, who predicts his own murder and the political firestorm that follows.

“Good afternoon,” Rosenberg said. “My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano and, alas, if you are hearing or seeing this message it means that I’ve been murdered by President Álvaro Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos.” Rosenberg went on, “The reason I’m dead, and you’re therefore watching this message, is only and exclusively because during my final moments I was the lawyer to Mr. Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa, who, in cowardly fashion, were assassinated by President Álvaro Colom, with the consent of his wife, Sandra de Colom, and with the help of … Gustavo Alejos.”

Which Way Did He Run? by David Grann

Grann tells the story of New York firefighter Kevin Shea, one of the first responders to the World Trade Centre site on 9/11, and the only one of his team to survive the collapse of the towers. Shea suffers from post-traumatic amnesia, and Grann accompanies him as he attempts to piece together the events of that morning.

He seemed haunted not just by the gaps in his past but also by a single question that they prevented him from answering: had he survived because he was a hero, as everyone treated him, or because, as he feared, he was somehow a ‘'coward,’‘ someone who had abandoned his men? ’‘I like to think I was the type of person who was trying to push someone out of the way to save them … and not the type who ran in fear,’‘ he said. ’‘But I can’t remember anything, no matter how hard I try. It’s like my memory collapsed with the building, and now I have to piece the whole thing back together again.’‘

Trial By Fire by David Grann

Grann outlines a convincing case that Texas executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham, in 2004. Willingham was convicted of setting the blaze the murdered his two young children, and Grann patiently describes the chain of evidence that convicted him and then commences paring it away, showing how just about everything about the investigation, and the State’s callous response to its mistakes, is highly questionable, right down to the arson investigator’s basic understanding of the behaviour of fire. He cunningly narrates the take as though there is still something at stake, and cultivates a special kind of frustration in the reader, who can’t help believing Willingham still has a chance to be saved.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”

The Chameleon by David Grann

The pretty much mind-blowing story of Frédéric Bourdin, a French serial impersonator of children, who finds himself in San Antonio, Texas, posing as a missing American boy. This piece is probably the ne plus ultra example of Grann’s ability to transpose the narrative techniques of fiction to journalism, and it’s so consistently surprising that to explain more would be to spoil it.

In Paris, the authorities launched an investigation to determine why a thirty-year-old man would pose as a teen-age orphan. They found no evidence of sexual deviance or pedophilia; they did not uncover any financial motive, either. “In my twenty-two years on the job, I’ve never seen a case like it,” Eric Maurel, the prosecutor, told me. “Usually people con for money. His profit seems to have been purely emotional.”

On his right forearm, police discovered a tattoo. It said “caméléon nantais”—“Chameleon from Nantes.”

David Grann on murder, madness and writing for The New Yorker

An interview with Grann, from Neiman Storyboard, in which he articulates the narrative impulse that lies at the heart of his journalism.

“In fiction, I struggled with characters and plot and coming up with what people did and said. In nonfiction, I realized that if could find characters and stories that were real, I simply had to excavate them and tell them in a compelling way.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan

2012-02-09T12:49:04Z

I recently spent about a week trawling through the internet, hunting down and devouring everything I could find by this writer, and then selfishly cornering friends at parties and trying to retell his jokes. Sullivan is a reporter for GQ and Harpers, and the southern editor of The Paris Review. He has been compared to David Foster Wallace, and while it’s an unfair comparison for any writer to bear, he does share the same astounding cultural fluency, and the same ability to meld garrulous riffs on on the more bizarre areas of modern life to richly emotional philosophical musings. He has a book of essays, Pulphead, published last year by Farrar, Strous and Giroux.

Upon This Rock by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sullivan reports from the largest Christian rock festival in the US, and latches on somewhat desperately to a bunch of good ol' boys (some “West Virginia guys on fire for Christ”). He admirably avoids the cynical approach to writing on the underground Christian monoculture and instead delivers a sympathetic reflection on his own teenage flirtation with evangelicalism.

The rain stopped. It was time to go. Two of the guys had to leave in the morning, and I needed to start walking if I meant to make the overlook in time for the candlelighting. They went with me as far as the place where the main path split off toward the stage. They each embraced me. Jake said to call them if I ever had “a situation that needs clearing up.” Darius said God bless me, with meaning eyes. Then he said, “Hey, man, if you write about us, can I just ask one thing?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Put in there that we love God,” he said. “You can say we’re crazy, but say that we love God.”

Violence of the Lambs by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Obsessed by reports of atypically violent animal behavior worldwide, Sullivan writes on the coming war between man and beast. He’s running a kind of game on his readers throughout this piece, but sometimes it’s best not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

If you and I are here in a half century, I hope we’ll be celebrating the end of this war. I hope we’ll be telling with highest zest, again and again till our great-grandchildren are sick of it, the story of the day of the accord, when we knew it was over. Of little Bindi Irwin, a woman now, wind in her face, her beauty still touched by a bit of Mad Max dog-boy ferality, as she was escorted out through the waves between white flags to a meeting with Dolphin Leader, where they brokered a détente in the chirpy language Steve had just finished teaching her when he got spiked. We, for our part, will have promised to live in greater harmony with Gaia.

A Rough Guide to Disney World by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Visiting Disney World Orlando with their young families, Sullivan and his friend, a functioning pot addict, periodically sneak away to get stoned out of their gourds. There’s a nice kind of tension in the piece between the proximity of drug use to children and the fact that it seems like a quality family vacation.

Now we were truly at Disney World. A person didn’t come here every day! What is the scene here? Hello, primary colors; hello, quickly fading microdramas of passing human faces, incessantly deciding whether to make eye contact; hello, repeating stalls and gift shops. We were walking on the balls of our feet. The surface of things had become porous and permitted of the potential for enjoyment. Where were our womenfolk and Lil’ Dog? Let’s find them. Let’s be good fathers. Tomorrow was Father’s Day. Oh, my God, I didn’t even remember that!

“We don’t need to remember that,” Trevor said. “We are that.”

“We are Father’s Day?”

As if to put an exclamation point on his observation, I stopped and bought, for some obscene amount of money, two blue plastic sprayer fans.

Mister Lytle by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sullivan, himself a child of a Kentucky family of some history, spends time with a eminent Southern man of letters, before his death.

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make

Reality Effects by James Woods

A New Yorker review of Pulphead.

So the contemporary essay is often to be seen engaged in acts of apparent anti-novelization: in place of plot, there is drift, or the fracture of numbered paragraphs; in place of a frozen verisimilitude, there may be a sly and knowing movement between reality and fictionality; in place of the impersonal author of standard-issue third-person realism, the authorial self pops in and out of the picture, with a liberty hard to pull off in fiction. That these anti-novelistic tricks are all, in fact, novelistic tricks, often borrowed from the history of the novel, does not muffle the pleasure of watching this literary freedom in action.

What I'm Reading — Ronnie Scott

2012-01-24T10:44:16Z

I am not a person who generally feels well-informed; for a year I called our Prime Minister Julia Jillard. So I’ve been reading a series of remedial primers, the Oxford Very Short Introductions. These offer “stimulating ways in to new topics”, note the precisiony Oxford charm in the division of the totally acceptable “into”. My collection:

I’ve been feeling that I squandered my best learning opportunity some years in to the past. When I finished school I enrolled in a freeform arts degree, but quickly dropped most subjects when I realised I liked the writing ones. In keeping with the spirit of the ‘learning opportunity’, the Oxford series is my version of the Grand Tour, ‘the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means’. My version is less sexy but also costs far less. Installments might be $11 if you buy second-hand, which works out to maybe ten cents a page.

Although some volumes present unorthodox insights in to their topics, most equate to your standard twelve-part Introduction-to-Something course. You get a feel for the field, a general coverage. Without making me anything like what you could call an expert, the books expose me in ways that are not incredibly taxing to backgrounds that are different from my own.

There are 323 titles in the series, and one of them is Dinosaurs. Already, though, the particular spine-feel nauseates me, as does the pages’ academic white. It’s like getting back from a holiday where you’ve eaten out all fortnight: all you really want is homemade soup. I’m entering a period that is about Australian women (partly your fault). Once again this is remedial and I cannot learn too soon, because my first go was Regeneration by Pat Barker. In a panicked conversation I defended the error by saying she is “at least an honorary Australian” (she is not).

My next mistake was the enthusiastic plunge into Brian Castro. Because his name sounds so muscular, and he has been around for ages, I thought he might be portentous and thick, but it turns out he’s a sneaky, fluid, funny/cruel writer. Then I read Thea Astley, and soon I’ll read Christina Stead, and I’ll go on like this until I am entirely sick of women, and become at least an honorary misogynist.

While I still have my credibility, I would like to conclude with a short list of facts and terms that I have underlined or circled in two of the Oxford books. Why not match the list against the photo to guess which? Meanjin will give away a year’s subscription for the first right guess [Editor’s note: No, we won’t].

Words and terms I’ve learned

A rebus (a transformational set of rules; an algorithm)

Epiphenomenon (a causal occurrence or functionally insignificant phenomenon; one that has no function as such)

Les jambes coupees (an expression used to describe one who is sexually exhausted)

Recency

Raw factz

“Associationism” asserts that memory is organised according to categorical similarities between objects, people, ideas, and so on, to every category of content.

Declarative and episodic memories refer to specific memories of personal and historic events, i.e. “I went to Boston last weekend”. Semantic memories involve general facts, i.e. “Boston is the capital of Massachusetts”. Procedural memories are what they sound like: “I know how to drive my car to Boston.”

Contrary to popular belief, there is almost no sex in advertising: “for supermarkets, for household cleansers, for medicines, for financial products? Hardly ever.” That’s because more than 40% of consumer spending is by people over 50.

Brand advertising rarely increases the size of a market or product sector if the market is large, long-established, static, and satisfies a basic need. In these cases, the aim of advertising is just to increase market share at competitors’ expense.

Ronnie Scott’s writing has appeared in The Believer, Heat, and The Big Issue, and he’s the comics and graphic novels critic on ABC Radio. He edits The Lifted Brow, an arts, culture, fiction magazine, and is also the editor of Strange Flowers: Australia-China Encounters in Writing and Art (Wakefield, 2011). Visit him at www.theliftedbrow.com or finefoods.tumblr.com.

Reading: The Best Australian Essays 2011

2012-01-23T14:11:17Z

After we’ve rubbed the sleep from our bloodshot eyes, kicked the empty beer bottles away from our bedside and willed ourselves to leave the comfort of our darkened caves, we begin the New Year’s dance of guilt and resolve. But before we can commit to paper all our soon-to-be-broken promises, we must first turn our hazy minds to year that was — our failed resolutions, our modest successes, the notable events that punctuated our calendar, the people we’ve lost and found along the way.

The Best Australian Essays anthology performs this annual reflection for us as a nation, canvassing the prominent figures, issues and events that captured our imagination in the preceding 12 months. The recently released 2011 edition, collated by Ramona Koval, is no exception. “I hope this collection tells a story of the past year, as told by Australian writers looking inwards or outwards,” says Koval in the introduction, “or by others looking at Australia or Australian people”.

Koval’s definition of what makes an Australian essay is more fluid than some editors past. She includes British writer Anthony Lane’s New Yorker essay, ‘Hack Work: A Tabloid Culture Runs Amok’ — an incisive look at Rupert Murdoch’s empire, the demise of News of the World and what these events signified in our increasingly globalised mediascape — and longtime expat Clive James on ‘How Broadway Conquered the World’ from The Atlantic. However, criticism that the Monthly is overrepresented in these collections is sure to be bandied about again (a difficult problem to curb when the Monthly pays the best rates in the country, thus often attracting the best writers).

Cultural shifts engendered by new technology and the speed at which information is transferred is a recurring theme in 2011. Fiction writer M.J. Hyland’s excellent ‘The Trial of Mary Bale’ explores how a “professional, intelligent, middle-aged, middle-class woman” from Coventry became “the woman who put the cat in the bin”. After the cat’s owners captured her misdeed on CCTV, Bale was quickly identified when the video was posted on Facebook. The footage soon went viral, spawning an array of Mary Bale hate groups on social media sites and a furore in the British tabloid media. But what Hyland discovers when Bale grants her the sole interview is not a malicious zoophobe but rather a woman in mourning for her dying father, who can’t actually remember the incident that made her an infamous household name.

Similarly, these themes are central to Robert Manne’s extended essay, ‘The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: Julian Assange’, one of the more comprehensive portraits of the enigmatic Wikileaks founder (who, coincidentally, is also thought to be a cat hater) — from his peripatetic Australian childhood, to his early involvement in hacking subcultures, to his creation of what would prove to be one of the most significant websites of our time. Manne explores Assange’s intellectual trajectories, his black sense of humour, his obsessive and anarchic tendencies, and his belief in freedom of information above all else. Any attempt to understand Assange invariably involves an attempt to understand Wikileaks itself, an organisation that tested the limits of freedom, democracy and censorship.

The uncontrollability of the internet also features heavily in Anna Krien’s ‘Out of Bounds: Sex and the AFL’, one of the most acute essays I came across this year. Krien examines the incident of the self-proclaimed ‘St Kilda Schoolgirl’ Kim Duthie, a media savvy 17-year-old who momentarily eclipsed the Australian media when she released incriminating photos of St Kilda players via Facebook and later pictures of herself purportedly pregnant. The AFL got her Facebook account shut down within a few hours, but not before the images had been shared between thousands of internet users. Duthie later recorded video blogs, tweeted prolifically and branded all her photos, not to mention inviting press to the protests she staged at St Kilda training sessions. While many praised Duthie for challenging sexism in football culture, it was later revealed that she had stolen the photos and faked the pregnancy. What Krien so perceptively highlights is that Kim Duthie never set out to be a feminist icon. Yet there was something so broken in the AFL that we all wanted her to be. “The spell had been lifted,” writes Krien, “and everyone was naked, muddied and a little bit ashamed”.

Other highlights include Nicolas Rothwell’s ‘Living Hard, Dying Young in the Kimberley’, a horrific portrait of this WA region in which Indigenous youth suicide is at levels officially recognised as a “crisis”, Paul Kelly’s wistful remembrance of Frank Sinatra, ‘In the Wee Small Hours’, and Amanda Lohrey’s ‘High Priest: David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art’, an excellent look at Hobart’s new “secular temple” and the reclusive professional gambler-cum-art collector behind it. But my personal pick is Gillian Mears’ opening essay ‘Fairy Death’, taken from the recently defunct journal HEAT. Mears poignantly details the decline of her body in the midst of multiple sclerosis, her prose aching with the weight of memory, unsatisfied desires and the painful process of self-acceptance.

Early on Mears quotes her favourite line from John Berger: “the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying”. Prefacing a collection that surveys one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory, this macabre thought is also a comforting one.

The Best Australian Essays 2011 is out now via Black Inc.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and the modern audience — Interview with Ray Lawler

2012-01-16T16:10:39Z

Meanjin: Has the language used in Australia changed much since the play was first performed in 1955? If so, have you changed any words or elements of the script?

Lawler: Naturally, slang expressions and everyday terms for common objects have changed over the years. The use of ‘bad’ language, both in general conversation and accepted interchange between the sexes is also more widespread. The permitted use of four-letter words on stage, screen and in the media, has had a definite impact in those areas. But The Doll is a play that belongs to its time, 1953, and I have never felt the urge to modernise it for any of the above reasons.

Changes came with the writing of the other two plays of The Doll Trilogy, which pre-date The Doll in actual time. Kid Stakes takes place in 1937 and Other Times in 1945, which means that I was able to examine the characters over the seventeen-year span of their relationship. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll stood as a pre-determined ending to the story, I knew that events and happenings must follow the line they had in the original production, but the Trilogy gave me a chance to shade dialogue here and there to emphasise character traits and attitudes already indicated in the original draft.

Ray Lawler, June Jago, Roma Johnston, Noel Ferrier, Fenella Maguire and (at piano) Carmel Dunn, in the 1955 production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

Meanjin: Has the rhythm of speech changed since 1955, and if so, how have you altered or adapted the speech to accommodate that?

Lawler: I do think the rhythm of Australian vernacular has changed since 1955, and I am greatly aware of this nowadays when I attend the first reading of a modern production of The Doll. Often the actors were not even born when the play was first produced, and they have occasional difficulty with the extended line of the speeches. But actors are experts at finding the speech rhythm of a play, it is part of their job, and I certainly make no attempt to ease the process for them.

Meanjin: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is considered a naturalistic play, but it has a universality that gives it a contemporary message, how did this happen?

Lawler: Your guess is as good as mine. If one accepts naturalistic as a lifestyle corresponding to present day society, The Doll has lost its relevance. There are no longer itinerant cane-cutting teams, pub life and barmaids have changed greatly since the Aussie male preserve of the public bar was lost, and the social attitude towards unions outside marriage has changed entirely. There seems no reason why audiences nowadays should accept The Doll as anything but a naturalistic play with the set values of its own particular period. If it comes through as anything beyond that, perhaps one should question the label ‘naturalistic’.

Steve Le Marquand and TJ Power in the current Sydney production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Photo by Heidrun Lohr.

Meanjin: Do city and country audiences respond differently to the play?

Lawler: I have no great experience of seeing it played to country audiences. But companies who have done country tours tell me that the response is much that of city audiences. Personally I would think that country audiences might relate to the questions of mateship, marriage and seasonal working life on a more immediate level, assuming that social changes come more slowly to a rural community, and that the values involved would have meant more in a country setting. Anyway…

Meanjin: What is your experience, seeing so many different productions of the play?

Lawler: Always an interest in what the company involved has made of the play. And always gratitude that the people concerned should make the effort. What other response would you expect from a ninety year-old playwright?

Truth, Fiction and Autumn Laing — A Conversation with Alex Miller

2011-12-15T16:33:20Z

Novelist Alex Miller is one of Australia’s most successful, with two Miles Franklin awards under his belt for Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game. His latest book, Autumn Laing, began as a work loosely modelled on the life of artist Sidney Nolan, but quickly morphed into something quite different.

In Autumn, Alex has created — or is it found? — a narrator of questionable reliability, who wrestles the story away from the formidable, fictionalised, Sidney Nolan. She pushes him into the background of the memoir/fiction that she feels compelled to write, consumed as she is with setting down her own truth, resolutely avoiding a memorist’s compulsion to portray herself as sympathetic — and yet she is.

A cranky, fiery woman of 85, Autumn is flatulent, impatient, and furious at the indignities and ravages that old age has wrought upon her. Having spotted the ex-wife of her former lover, artist Pat Donlon, she finds herself looking back on her life with no small measure of guilt, remembering their brief affair which would mark the rest of her life.

In the novel, Autumn, as an impressionistic portrait of Nolan’s lover and muse Sunday Reed, continually casts back into the past. She plunges back into Melbourne of 1938 and her circle of artists, poets and writers trying to tackle the art establishment of the time.

I spoke with Alex upon the release of Autum Laing, touching upon the subjectivities of biography and memoir, guilt and the mask of the confessional, and the influence Sidney Nolan had on his own life.

...

I read that you’d said that she [Autumn Laing] inhabited you.

Yeah, it’s not to be taken literally.

You weren’t possessed?

No. I mean, people say ‘oh, you heard her voice when sitting on a bench in Holland Park?’ Well, yes. But it was a realisation on how the book ought to be written.

And how did that differ from your original conception?

Radically. I thought for years it was going to be a book about Sidney Nolan. And it’s not. It’s a book about something else. Which involves Pat Donlon, who is loosely modelled on Sid Nolan, with whom I’ve had a long association going back to my childhood.

What form did that association take?

I was working as a farm labourer when I was kid, when I was 15, 16. And an Australian, my first Australian, moved in next door, and he gave me a book on the outback, which I’d never heard of. Australia was as remote to me as Serbia.

And he gave me this book and said, ‘if you want to go to somewhere really wild and remote’ — And I thought Exmoor was pretty remote – ‘why don’t you go to Australia?’ And I read the book. I have no memory at all what it was about. Presumably the travels. But it was illustrated with wonderful black and white photos of this country, which was a straight line dividing the top of the page from the bottom of the page, and that was the horizon line. Or there would be one feature and it would be a dead tree. Or it would be a figure of a man, taken from behind in silhouette, standing at the edge of a veranda, looking out at that straight line. And it just possessed me, this idea of going there.

What was it? Was it this idea [of] the vastness of it?

When we’re young, and also I think when we’re old, and I’ve experienced both, we still dream of a kind of freedom; we’re not sure what we mean by it. But it’s probably a liberation from the kind of thing Artaud dreamed of, having a theatre that was liberated from all the constraints of all the usual theatre he’d ever seen, and he wasn’t sure how to see this. How do we see that? What is it?

There was this very powerful sense in me that I needed to go and find out. The images of emptiness weren’t so much emptiness to me, as promise. A kind of lure. Particularly a picture of stockmen on a veranda, looking out toward this undeviating horizon line. And they seemed to me to be in this vast, wonderful, mysterious silence that I’d never before imagined, having come from South London and being brought up as a Londoner. And of course those photos were taken by Sid Nolan – I didn’t know that at the time.

They were images through the eye of the camera by a person I would say was a very great artist. In The Australian [recently] there was an article about a famous Australian artist living in Italy, and the heading was ‘Nolan wasn’t a real artist’. Which is to me a loud announcement of envy. Well, are we talking about Nolan or are we talking about you, mate? And that a person of 90 can feel that sort of unassuageable envy is a good comment on human nature.

Nolan refused the training of the Europeans. And this was something that always intrigued and delighted me. He’d done that, and was the only Australian artist to come up with something the Europeans were interested in.

So then, this sort of criticism of Nolan as a non-artist, did it surprise you at all to see Australian artists to be spoken of that way, still?

No, I’ve seen it often.

Not only was he unconnected from the art world, but he was working class. And somehow he leapt the fence and beat them all at their own game, which most of them didn’t forgive. Plus he was a hard bugger. Whereas Pat Donlon, who’s the figure in my book based loosely on Donlon, is not.

Well he’s hard enough.

Hard enough, yes. But he’s not vicious, the way Sid was.

Where would you draw the line, then, in terms of how much of a Sid cloak you put on Pat?

It’s not a matter of putting a cloak on characters. Characters either find you or they don’t. This story’s been a long time maturing for me. It’s had a long history, beginning with me being fascinated by those photos by Sid Nolan. So much so that I came to Australia alone when I was 16 to find that place.

It’s the first book where my interest in art and the Australian landscape have come together. But the inspiration in Holland Park in September last year was that the story should be told through the voice of this old woman.

How much had you developed the story up until then?

Yeah, I’d written a chapter. I mean, I didn’t know yet how to write the book, but I began by writing. I don’t begin by researching, but by writing. And if I write myself into an area of ignorance that is still attracting me, then I’ll go find out something about it. But unless that happens I’ll just keep writing. Because often with me it’s an aspect of myself I’m dealing with. Based on the masks that I’ve assumed, and these are the masks of fiction.

And in this case Autumn Laing came to me as a surprise. I didn’t intend to write a book about Sunday Reed. I didn’t know her. I’d never met her. Sunday ended in despair, partly because of the way Sid Nolan persisted in treating her so meanly and horribly til the end. Which was something I don’t think Pat Donlon would do.

Well, no, but Pat removed himself from the scene entirely.

It was too difficult for him and it wasn’t going anywhere. What was he going to do, be her toyboy?

He was too proud for that.

He didn’t have a lot of choice. Was he going to hang on and grow older there? He was 21, 22 in my story, and there wasn’t a lot of choice. ‘You either hang around with me and Arthur, or you move on.’ And he did move on, as anybody would, unless you want to be caught in a place where there was no room for them to be themselves or develop. But Autumn came to me as a surprise. She was 10 years older than Sunday Reed was when Sunday died, and Autumn is not bitter. She’s not defeated.

But she is angry.

She’s aware of her own guilt. And sets out initially, she’s triggered by seeing Edith Black, to feel that guilt. When she sees Edith, she realises, ‘that woman could have been my oldest friend, instead of my oldest enemy’. But as you know, she vastly overestimates the damage she’s done.

Vastly.

But, we don’t know what we do to other people. I feel guilty about when my son was young, I used to work assiduously on Sunday morning, until lunchtime, and he’d slip a little note under the door, and I wouldn’t read the note until I was done. And it would say: ‘Can we go to the park or kick a ball or something, Dad?’ When I look back on that, I feel almost tearful with guilt over it. Ross, who’s 33 now, and a banker, with kids of his own, says, ‘oh for Christ’s sake, Dad, we used to have a great time with Mum. We used to say, “geeze, I hope Dad doesn’t come out!”’

So it’s quite different, and it was the same for Autumn and Edith. Autumn remembers what she sees as the destruction of this woman by taking her man and taking away from her and the child and destroying a potential family. There are a number of reasons why a person like her would feel so guilty, because her own relationship to children is a very complex one, right to the end of the book. Finally she says, ‘I had one child.’ And I think there’s a catch in her throat when she says that. You had one — what did you do with it?

I think it’s towards the end of the book when Autumn says of Edith, ‘she’d been a character in my story and no longer a real person, and they no longer inhabit my reality but my private fiction, which represents the truth of things to myself only and only for today,’ which is interesting, the way she circles round this memory and casts it in different lights.

How can you not?

You can’t.

Your memory is yours, not somebody else’s. In a sense one of the problems with memoir, is we assume that the memoirist will tell the truth, will say, this is how it is. But no memoirist – Michel de Montaigne, the French 16th century essayist, said of Voltaire, ‘yes he did, he did admit his faults, but only his endearing ones.’ It’s almost impossible for a memoirist to portray themselves as odious.

Whereas Autumn doesn’t seem to have a problem with that — she seems to revel in portraying her faults.

She is prepared to tell the truth truth, warts and all, as they say.

Well, her truth truth.

Yeah, her sense of herself and her sense of her guilt, requires her to deal in the coin of her own guilt. Which she does, and exaggerates, as we find out.

When you’re writing a character like that, how much are you seeing her through the eyes by which she’s looking at herself, and how much do you step back and say, ‘well, this is how she really was and this is how I’ll allow her to depict herself’?

I don’t see it that way at all. When I realised this story could be told by Autumn Laing, this woman who was originally a side issue and was based on a period of Nolan’s life, I realised, ‘it’s her, she’s going to do it’. And it came to me, this realisation, along with the sense of her feistiness and her determination: ‘There’s nothing left to lose, I can do it now, I can tell the truth, stark as it may be. For me, I can tell my truth. Who else’s truth can I tell? Nobody’s, we don’t know another person’s truth.’

So it makes the last year of her life, and there can’t be another, surely, she says, she’s done with it, her body’s had it, she doesn’t have any friends any more—

Her friends are gone, her family’s gone, her lover’s gone.

Her last friend is gone, left her quite upset, by all that. The only person who’s come along is the bloody bollard, the scavenger, who’s going to have the last word, as biographers do—

And she did.

And she did. Only fair. So they do. And they correct the mythologies of the person who has lived the truths they’ve inquired into, and theirs becomes another truth, the biography becomes the biographer’s view. Not many biographers view kindly a fictional treatment of their subject.

You say it wasn’t Sunday, and there’ll be some degree of defence that you’ll have to put forward when people continue to link these things—

No, I don’t have to defend it.

I don’t mean in a negative sense, but people will always be curious about where that line is drawn—

Of course.

You said you started out with this idea of writing about Sidney Nolan, and then Autumn hijacked that, and there are enough parallels that people will persist in seeing this as an ‘officialised’ account.

I see her as emblematic as the Australian, well-educated woman of means. Very independent about her views of life or anything else. Couldn’t be English, couldn’t be Irish, couldn’t be French. There’s something to me very Australian about the woman, and her belief in Australia and Australian art, never having thought like our friend in Italy, ‘I should go and live in Europe,’ or somewhere else. Australia was always going to be where she was going to do it, whatever it was. Like Patrick White did. He had a choice, absolutely, and said, ‘we’ve gotta make it Australian, if we’re going to do this.’

What I find so interesting is that you have such a dominant character in Autumn, and so much of the book revolves around her relationships with the other women in her life. And yet so much of that is in the orbit of the men in their lives. And Autumn talks about this gift of recognition that her uncle recognises, and she talks about how her true talent is to see talent in others.

It was. There’s a class of such women. Numerous people, young, scruffy, working class, gifted artists, or poets, artists, writers, whatever, over the years, over the centuries, have encountered an upper-class woman of means who’s recognised them as authentic. Other people might have recognised them as authentic and not been able to do anything about it. The woman that scrubs the floors once a week, she night have recognised them as authentic but so bloody what? You’re not going to be able to do anything about it. So there’s always a sense of a selecting-out process, where the woman who acts as a muse often to a younger man, and I’ve brought Pat as nearly 10 years younger than Autumn. She’s 32 and he’s 21, it’s a huge difference at that age. And also the attraction of an older woman at that age is something mesmerising too, someone who’s confident and approaches with that confidence. And also the power, her ability to seriously help him and see him on his way. And also the acknowledgment is very seductive.

But who recognises the recognisers?

Yes, good question. Autumn’s been there at the coalface, when it happened. She’s helped, she’s had her hands on the paint herself—

She’s in the pictures.

—And more and more in that series she appears at the window, a solitary woman, which she is. And remains. It’s very sad.

Without her what would Pat have achieved? Can we even speculate?

I don’t think so. I can’t. It’s not the novelist’s place to judge. It’s the reader. The novelist observes. And hopefully they observe accurately. Because accurate observation is at the base of it. Accurate observation of human behaviour, intimacy of one person with another, whatever level, your relationship with whatever it is, needs to be accurately observed. And when it is, it’s a delight to read. When it’s not, you can’t quite go along with it, you don’t believe it, doesn’t feel authentic, you’re not dragged into that world, you don’t become part of it yourself, and the reader makes those judgements, the writer doesn’t.

As you’re writing, how much space do you leave for people to read for themselves? Is that something you think about or something that happens unconsciously?

Both. The only thing I can tell you is, tell them nothing.

Bare bones.

Tell the reader nothing. Let the story unfold. Tell them nothing, otherwise the reader doesn’t have to read the fucking book. If you tell them anything at all, it’s like saying, ‘don’t worry about this, stop being interested, I’ll just tell you what’s going on.’

And in Autumn Laing, there is that back and forth between her very present first person narration and her own biography, the memoir she creates herself—

Her fiction.

Yeah. Her fiction. Which is interesting in a character that’s so determined to tell the truth, that doesn’t seem to extend any further.

The mask of fiction. She’s following Oscar Wilde’s perception that you have to give someone a mask before they’ll show you the truth of themselves. Also the mask goes back to Balinese theatre and that sort of thing. You can’t behave like that normally. People will be disgusted, unnerved, or uneasy.

You’ve got to put them in the confessional box.

Yeah. But you put the mask on and you can behave within the landscape behind the mask. And it’s vast. In a sense it enables you to call upon the unconscious. And that’s what she’s accepting. She says, ‘you’re not going to hear it all from me.’

Meanland Blog — (Overly?) Optimistic End of Year Thoughts re the Novel.

2011-12-12T11:51:16Z

It’s been a tough year for the print novel. February saw the demise of the REDgroup which proved a boon for the Kindle and other eReading devices, according to Malcolm Neil, Australian head of the Canadian-based eBook company Kobo. On the back of this Guy Rundle posited the end of bookshops altogether. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, author Ewan Morrison predicted the end of everything bookish including the writer. The News of the World shut up shop (well perhaps it wasn’t all bad). And Bob Stein, Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, in response to the question, ‘What advice would you give to emerging novelists today?’ replied: ‘Go work for a game company.’

How refreshing then to end the year with a good news story about a print work. A story that flies in the face of the above trend and that contradicts the accepted narrative concerning the future of the novel. That work is, Dead Island, a novelisation, in print (!), of the video game of the same name. It’s not interesting because it’s a first — it isn’t — there have been several novels based on the Halo and Resident Evil games for example. Nor is it interesting because it is particularly well written or innovative (it might be — I don’t know _ it hasn’t been released here yet). It’s interesting simply because it exists when it really shouldn’t.

Sophisticated, modern video games offer an interactive narrative experience, which is, supposedly, replacing the novel as the storytelling medium of choice for a sizeable chunk of the population. These games allow players to join in the creative process, to make decisions about plot and character development; they give the player co- control of the story. They’re a classic iteration of the dialogic, user-driven nature of Web 2.0. They’re everything a digital native should desire.

Why then, if players are happily immersed in the narrative permutations of self-generated content would they want to buy a story in a non-interactive form in which all decisions are made for them i.e. a novel? Perhaps, as Mike Fahey writes on the game-focussed blog Kotaku, it’s just another form of promo, or adverteasing (great word). But if so, then surely it’s a fairly expensive one. I’ll admit that may be partly the case, but I’d like to think (naively perhaps) that there’s something else at work here too. Could the publication of this novel suggest an acceptance on the part of the gaming world that there is something the printed text can do that a game, as yet, can’t? Perhaps gamers, increasingly as attuned to story as they are to splatter, are searching for a still more stimulating narrative experience, one in which they can totally immerse themselves, one that looks a little like a novel? After all, there is no better screen that the imagination, no better sound effects, deeper emotions or better sex than that created in the mind.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the very medium that is supposed to replace the novel as a storytelling force might actually serve (albeit in a limited sense) as an advocate for it? Wouldn’t it be mind bogglingly ace if the increase in narrative-heavy gaming lead to an increase in novel reading? Please Santa.

The Dead Island novel is interesting from a book selling point of view too. Its publisher, Bantam, sees an opportunity to sell the novel in game shops — previously very book free zones. Wouldn’t it be tre-fu&^%ng-mendous if this led to the installation of bookshelves in game stores? Might the book publishing and retailing industry see this this novel as a ground breaker? I love bookshops, but perhaps they and publishers could look at placing their products in other outlets too. Rather than waiting for the market to come to them, couldn’t they go to it: Candace Bushnell novels in fashion boutiques, Bear Grylls books in Camping stores, Sports books in sporting goods stores, Ulysses in… any suggestions?

I’m not some rabid paper-loving Luddite. I’m not against the e-ification of everything, nor am I saying that any of the above proves anything about the future survival of the print novel. I just love surprises and the possibility that the story of the novel, like the story in any good novel, might take a couple of unexpected turns before it’s done.

BTW, The cover of Dead Island is a hoot. It actually reads Dead Island: THE BOOK. Have gamers drifted so far from the page that we need to tell them what a book actually is? I have visions of Bill and Ted types becoming increasingly frustrated as they try to jam the book into the DVD drives on their PCs. “Maybe it’s a Wii game dude?”

You’re Not An Emerging Writer Unless You’ve Published A Book

2011-12-01T18:01:18Z

Let’s not get away from ourselves: writing is a privilege. To pursue it as a vocation is a choice — a fiscally tough choice — but a choice, still. So let’s not whine too loudly about funding bodies, or our life choices.

Still, I’m going to whine about a funding body, a bit.

Currently the Australia Council is calling for applicants for emerging and established artists fellowships. They are offering a not-inconsiderable amount of money. It would be in fact, for anyone who received it, a pretty life-changing amount of money. The idea being that it can be used to line up mentorships, to attend workshops here and overseas and to fund your practice over a two year period. To get some time set aside during which you could quit your day job to see a project through. Only idiots would not apply for it.

Looking into what the literature board classifies as “emerging”, it comes under this definition:

You are a contender as an early career artist if you have some achievements under your belt as a professional. This means you can highlight some key achievements that demonstrate a professional outcome for your art. For example, this could be having a book or play published.

So here, quietly, is the definition of ‘emerging writer’: it’s no longer your publication history in peer reviewed journals and national/international magazines, it is already having a book published.

On the one hand, it is obvious why grants awarded to writers would go to those with proven track records of publication. In fact what I was told over the phone by the council that so many writers apply (last year over 450) that a way to thin them out now is to define emerging as ‘having published a book,’ and that in many cases those were the successful applicants in the first place.

However, this provides a clear rock and a hard place bind for emerging writers: how are you to fund the completion of that first book when you are not eligible to apply for any funding? Having a book contract or long form commission of significant length signed off on doesn’t put you in an eligible category either.

And further to this, there is no category which specifically recognises long form reporting as a literary art — though you could paint it as creative non-fiction in order to make long form journalism eligible: the sort of journalism which is time-consuming and resource-heavy to undertake and produce. If you were a broadcaster having written non-fiction works for television, radio, print and online, you might think that would classify you as an ‘interdisciplinary artist’, but it doesn’t, and therefore you are ineligible also for that category. (‘That’s more for mixed-media artists. People who say, mix science and music,’ I was told, interestingly. I have a patent here for a auto-playing Bunsen burner I’ve been trying to get into production.)

Some might argue that it is not the job of the country’s premier arts body to fund journalism — not even the literary, creative non-fiction kind — because it pales next to fiction as a literary art. I would disagree with that, obviously, as I am not a fiction writer. But funding for that kind of journalism hardly comes from within the journalism industry itself, awash with commercial publications that pay pitiful amounts ‘per page’ and online outlets which pay $50 ‘per post’ regardless of length, or far more frequently which don’t pay anything at all.

At some point or other most writers have written for free, or do so judiciously in return for the freedom to write what they are most passionate about, to support a publication they believe in or for the ‘visibility’ it brings (try paying the rent with visibility.) Again, this is a choice: as a vocation it has always been a tough nut to crack. Advertising has always been the writer’s great patron, and it is not an industry where work is soon to dry up. However, it would be ideal to be at least eligible for the opportunity to secure funding enough to stop writing guff for banner ads most people have blocked from their browser in the first place, and to instead devote everything to producing something meaningful. An endeavour that will always take fully-focussed energy — and more crucially, time — to do justice.

Elmo Keep lives in Ballarat, Victoria and last wrote for Meanjin about grief and digital graveyards.

Reading: What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam

2011-11-28T12:36:38Z

Sometimes it takes extraordinary power to survive the everyday. This is the premise of Steven Amsterdam’s second book, What the Family Needed, which follows the domestic dramas of sisters Ruth and Natalie, and their extended families. This idea may be something of a truism, and in the hands of a lesser writer it would remain so. Lucky for us, we are in Amsterdam’s, who deftly renders a far-reaching family portrait that is witty, warm and wistful in equal measures.

Like Amsterdam’s award-winning debut, Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009), What the Family Needed could also be termed ‘speculative fiction’. Structurally, the two novels are quite similar. Each chapter can stand alone as a short story, here traversing the lives of seven family members across three decades. But Amsterdam’s tone is far less apocalyptic this time around.

Where previously he imagined a dystopian not-too-distant future in which near every impending global disaster was realised, in this novel the threat comes from the inside — the emotions, behaviours and actions of families, and the ways that their after-effects can ripple across other members’ lives. The novel’s central device is a kind of wish fulfilment made real. As each character struggles to cope with the stresses of family life, Amsterdam offers them a yearned for supernatural ability to help them on their way.

We open on the family at crisis point. Told from Ruth’s daughter Giordana’s perspective, her mother has just deserted her alcoholic father, packing up the unsuspecting kids for a ‘holiday’ at their Aunt Natalie and Uncle Peter’s house. The roles between adults and children have grown indistinct, and the teenage Giordana longs to disappear. So when her seven-year-old cousin Alek asks, “Ok, tell me which you want: to be able to fly or be invisible?”, she instinctively picks the latter. In Amsterdam’s world, however, this is not merely a child’s imaginary game of superheroes versus supervillains, nor are the stakes purely good versus evil. And as Amsterdam stresses throughout the novel, “just because it was magic didn’t mean that it was easy”.

“Single-most single” Sasha is bestowed with a cupid-like power that makes any two people fall blindly in love if he touches them simultaneously, acting like a romantic conduit. Yet his power is futile in fixing his own love life. Sasha must instead swallow his all too human pride and confront his ex-boyfriend Damon with humility. After Natalie’s death, Peter is given the power to alter reality through the power of his thoughts, which grants him everything but his ultimate wish — to bring her back. Moreover, some powers are not necessarily a blessing. Night nurse Ruth is given the ability to read thoughts, but in a hospital bustling with grief and regret it doesn’t really seem like a gift.

It is Alek who bestows these powers onto his family, granting him the kind of control normally reserved for Amsterdam himself as the writer. As Alek implores to Ben, “All we have to do is pick a different story, one where we get what we want”. Alek believes he can alter the fabric of time, change history, implant memories — hell, he can even give his family superpowers. But the drawbacks of Alek’s gift could well describe the way Amsterdam apparently conceives of family life — for every action there is a reaction, a kind of butterfly effect where each character’s movements, however minute, will invariably alter the flight paths of those around them.

By the novel’s conclusion, the revelations of Alek’s power throws the surrounding narrative into disarray. If Alek has the ability to alter not only the present but also the past, each character’s story cannot be trusted. We are unable to tell if we are inside the mind of a visionary or a psychotic suffering from delusions of grandeur.

This is much a novel about the passing of time as it is about family, and the ways our actions and the actions of the people around us can influence the way our lives unfold, often not in the ways that we envisage. Amsterdam’s concept of temporality acts almost like an antidote to that of Jennifer Egan in last year’s A Visit From the Goon Squad — what if time were not a goon that catches up with us all in the end? What if we had the ability to alter our pasts as much as our future?

What each of Amsterdam’s characters must discover, however, is that they are not the “authors” or “conductors” of those around them. No matter what superpower they choose, the lesson that they each must learn is the ties that bind families are not so easily severed.

As in his debut, Amsterdam places a lot of trust in his reader. He knows that as much meaning exists in what is unsaid as in the stories themselves, and bestows us with the power to fill in the blanks.

What the Family Needed is out now through Sleepers Publishing.

Meanland Blog — Diane Simonelli

2011-11-23T15:14:12Z

Speaking of Paywalls…

Months ago I received an email from The Paris Review. For the price of a few café lattes I could extend my paper subscription to include full digital coverage. It seemed a chance too good to refuse. I adore the journal’s elegant design and have been known to disappear when reading one of some 213 interviews on The Art of Fiction. So I tagged the email with a reminder. Then I ignored it.

Once I let the literary offer expire, I sat back. A tightness had developed in my upper back and neck, accompanied by a vague memory of surviving Myer sales to bring home bargains I subsequently failed to use. I stared at my laptop’s screen. Surely others were benefiting from a race up escalators to grab at severely reduced items? What was the old girl holding up: bath towels at a pittance? At least with the Myer Boxing Day Sale I know what to expect: doors open at 5am, over 2.3 million people cram into stores and discounts range from 20 to 70 per cent. But the PAYWALL. It’s the age of a young teenager and apparently, the term’s passé. Forget paywall. It’s digital subscription.

We’ve come a long way, it seems, from the hostility and negativity with which newspaper producers first protected their online turf. Crikey editor, Sophie Black, tells Peter Clark in a great podcast called Paywalls: the good news and the gamble that there has been a marked shift in attitudes since news publishers originally started talking about paywalls. The Crikey website is a firm example of an independent news site that after ten years, on the strength of digital subscriptions and advertising, is doing well. While much of the Crikey site is free, it cannot do with a loyal following of savvy readers who are willing to pay for the ‘really juicy stuff’ as part of an ‘inclusive’ insider group.

So, what to make of the New York Times’ new digital subscription model? It’s a metered website. Once you’ve read more than 20 articles a month, you’re meant to pay. If you link to articles via a blog though, you can get around this small anomaly. But don’t think the staff of the New York Times are stressing over it. This is ‘a feature, not a bug,’ writes Felix Salmon. To illustrate, he lines up two photos; one showing a ‘Please Keep Off The Grass’ sign, the other of a traditional thick brick wall, under which is a caption that reads: Which one is more attractive? The porous paywall may be, as Neil Perkin describes, ‘counterintuitive to traditional media practices,’ but herein is its power.

When you come across the website, after having jumped from links and information pieces, back to social media, via another blog, it doesn’t stop you in your tracks. It is part of the curate and share flow. It feels like it fits with the openness of the blogosphere. ‘It turns out,’ Jeff Sonderman writes, ‘people will pay for things even when payment is not required. Motivations such as convenience, duty or appreciation are more compelling than coercion.’ Since March this year, 340,000 readers have subscribed digitally. Because online costs are few when compared to print, the revenue can support staff wages. Former Wall Street Journal publisher, Gordon Crovitz, says the news is encouraging and predicts it will become ‘the rule for news publishers’ to charge ‘for their access digitally, not the exception.’

Where does this leave the reader of The Australian, given its recent move to paywall city? After accessing a few free articles, depending on whether you’re coming to the site cold or through a social media site like Facebook, you’ll be hit with a subscribe bar. Yes, it’s a pain. Resist your desire to click out of the site. Once you’re in with your free 3-month ‘digital experience’ pass, voilà. Not surprisingly, those who could be revelling in the joy, are less than satisfied. Read Tim Dunlop’s rage here. See Jeff Flannagan’s lament. It looks as if The Age’s app for iPhone and iPad is being received more favourably and has been listed, along with other Fairfax productions, as one of iMonitor’s 10 best newspaper apps. But it’s an app, not part of the web. If the paywall has morphed, then it’s become an app that’s easy to install, buy and read.

My biggest question about furthering my subscription to The Paris Review was: would I use it? I had envisaged a subscription to blocked essays and stories on the web, aka The New Yorker, not an app subscription correlating to print editions I receive quarterly. As wonderful it would be to choose between print and digital depending on whether I was in work or relax-mode, I couldn’t warrant paying almost double my yearly subscription for this little luxury. Which brings me to another question: why are online digital subscriptions so pricey?

All this talk about money. To keep online content free and staff in jobs without print and digital subscriptions, support must be sourced through other avenues including crowdfunding, donations, philanthropic and/or commercial sponsorship/advertising, and governmental grants. Curator Maria Popova has one of the loveliest online donator call-outs I’ve seen so far: a virtual tip jar. Interestingly, having fully embraced the nature of the web, with open access for all, The Guardian has increased its readership by over 40% in the last two years. How are they cashed up? I was surprised to learn that in addition to print and other supports, some revenue comes from the online sales of non-news items – like trousers!

If readers could pay according to the pleasure or learning derived from content, not its availability and price sticker, could online creators and curators be remunerated appropriately? With John Paton forecasting that print is ‘dying a lot faster than anyone thought,’ embracing fresh online payment models to see what works may be an ongoing experiment.

What I'm Reading — David Mence

2011-11-18T01:44:41Z

I often go through phases with my reading. Recently I had a huge American phase (because I was in the States) and then a nineteenth century phase (when I got home) and then these phases joined up so that I had the combined power of a nineteenth century American phase! Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago, I got sucked into what I think is the literary equivalent of a supermassive black hole: Russia.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve always been very dismissive of Russian literature. I don’t know why. Probably just to be contrary. But also because every novel is half a mile wide and I resent having to swim through a book unless it’s Moby-Dick. I think reading Anna Karenina (which everyone seems to love) when I had nothing else to do on a three day train ride in India did irreparable damage. I can’t stand Tolstoy: too long winded, too didactic, way too many Russian aristocratic parlor-room conversations contrasted with the vibrancy and authenticity of Russian peasants and their native wisdom. But recently I’ve developed a bit of a man-crush for Sir Isaiah Berlin and, when I stumbled across his books Russian Thinkers and The Soviet Mind in the National Library, they lit some sort of a fuse in me. The way he writes about Imperial Russia with its Tsarist regime and censorship boards and secret police and gulags and radical dissidents–like Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin–all mixing wildly and bumping heads in the looming shadow of Bolshevik Revolution of 1917…I found it mesmerizing.

Since then I’ve been reading Turgenev’s short stories (translated by Berlin) which I really like, Gogol’s Dead Souls (translated by Robert Maguire)–I’ve discovered I really dig Gogol–and dipping in and out of The Brother’s Karamazov (translated by superstar pair Pevear & Volokhonsky) which I’ve read before. I broke the nineteenth century thing a little by reading Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and peeking at the first twenty pages or so of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago before getting scared and putting on the movie, with Omar Sharif, who I love. I’ve also been listening to some particularly awesome Chekhov stories read by Kenneth Brannagh. Despite loathing Brannagh’s movies, I am forced to admit that he is an amazing voice actor, and he really nails the balance between comedy and tragedy in Chekhov. His reading of ‘Oh! the Public’ is hilarious. If I just think about that poor train conductor I start giggling! I’ve also been reading Orlando Figes’ cultural history Natasha’s Dancer from which I now know that Peter the Great built St Petersburg on a swamp. In my limited experience, I have found that building cities on top of swamps is not the soundest of policies.

The only thing about all this Russianness is that it sends me into paroxysms of ‘which translation?’. It seems I am not the only person with this debilitating disease as I’ve spent hours on the internet reading various generally long-winded opinions on whether one rendering of Pushkin is better than another. I found a sympathetic post about this problem on Steam Boats are Ruining Everything. However, I sense this phase is starting to lose its grip on me, as I recently picked up a non-Russian book and did not immediately fling into the corner of my room in a maniacal rage.

Men Call Me Things

2011-11-17T14:40:07Z

If you use Twitter, you have probably seen the hashtag #mencallmethings coming up in your feed over the last week or two. If you don’t use Twitter, and talk of hastags and feeds causes your eyes to glaze over, then what I’m referring to is the world-wide discussion taking place about the verbal and written misogynistic abuse that women face, particularly as a result of expressing themselves online.

There have already been many articles and blog posts written about the #mencallmethings discussion, but I was particularly interested in gathering some stories from Australian women.

When I asked, via the Meanjin Twitter account, if anyone had any stories or experiences they’d like to share, several people replied, both publicly and privately, and graciously agreed to contribute to this post. Some of them asked to remain anonymous, and a few later decided they’d prefer not to be involved after all, wary of provoking further abuse.

Below is a selection of stories that were sent to me. I want to thank everyone who got in touch, whether or not your story appears below.

— Zora Sanders

...

My name is Kath and I’m a fat activist and feminist. I have been blogging now both personally and in a professional capacity for about 5 years. As my online presence has grown with my activism, so has the amount of trolling and abuse I have been subjected to. There has always been abuse for being a woman with an opinion—forums, message boards, mailing lists, comment threads are all rife with trolls and haters who feel the need to tear women with opinions down simply because they are, well, women with opinion. There is a distinct difference between disagreeing with someone, and trolling or abusing them. The minute it gets personal, and the attacks become ad hominem, you know that line has been crossed.

Over the past couple of years, as I have made a name for myself not only in Australia but around the world as a passionate feminist and fat activist, the abuse has taken a more sinister turn. I have been threatened with rape and murder, I’ve been called the most horrific names, and I’ve had my appearance and weight used as abuse to be hurled at me, no matter what I write. Sometimes I’m tempted to change the name of my blog to ‘Ugly Fat Cunt’, since that is how I am most regularly identified. I have also had people write to and call my workplace (usually anonymously) and use my name, workplace phone number and email address to sign me up to every gym, weight loss service, obesity clinic and diabetes/heart clinic in Brisbane, which wasted both my time and that of the businesses and organisations that contacted me in good faith.

The usual response to complaints of trolling and abuse online is ‘Don’t feed the trolls’, ie don’t respond to them or pay them any attention and they’ll go away. They don’t. They’re still there, no matter what you do. But not feeding the trolls creates a culture of silence, where women feel that they are alone in the abuse they are suffering. Only by exposing it can we beat it.

—Kath Read, Fat Heffalump

...

I was the sole content editor of a mountaineering website for several years. I ran the site with my husband—he moderated the forum and took care of some of the technical aspects of the site. I did the bulk of the work on the site, mostly content production, and posted often on the forum, whether to promote new content that had been published, put out calls for new content, or to contribute to and start discussions.

I was regularly insulted on the forum—I was once told I needed a bitch slapping after I stood up to a guy who insulted me. I was regularly told I was a ‘crap climber’ and a ‘desk jockey whose talk was cheap’, meaning that I didn’t climb hard enough to be allowed to have opinions on climbing. When I stuck up for myself or for other women climbers, I was accused of ‘publicly denigrating’ my attacker and received comments such as: ‘I’m gonna call it as I see it. Stop playing the victim. Quit acting like we’re all mean men trying to bring you down.’

My husband and I shut the site down in July this year after enduring a two-year hate campaign that had been waged against both of us (but especially me) via email, another rock climbing website and a climbing blog, which were both run or dominated by men. This hate campaign saw both my husband and I, and my husband’s business, being routinely ridiculed and slandered. We don’t have the money to go after our online attackers for defamation, but I kind of wish I could.

When we shut down our website, I also shut down my Facebook account and my freelance writing website to remove myself from the Internet as much as possible. As a result of shutting down these sites I have lost the online record of around eight years of my published writing and editing work, which hurts. I was proud of my online CV and the website I worked so hard at.

Like many of the women who have commented on Twitter, the consensus among the men who insulted and slandered me is that they’re just ‘stirring’ and ‘poking light-hearted fun’. But when I stick up for myself, I am ‘going postal with baseless allegations aimed at destroying their (the men’s) social standing’.

All of the men who have attacked my husband and I are adults. Most are professionals in their 30s. One is even in his late 40s. Some have wives and kids.

I have to acknowledge that one of the people who consistently attacked me was a woman. She did this by spreading lies about me both online and in real life, to poison other people against me. She was quite successful. She even took it so far as to email my own husband and lie to him about me, accusing me of having insulted her friends. I think being attacked by another woman can be more painful than being attacked by men. I would like to think women would take the ‘we’re all in this together approach’ and have each other’s backs. But sadly, this is so often not the case. Not only did this woman stand back silently while the men insulted me, she also joined in.

I feel better knowing I am not alone and seeing that other women are going through this too and fighting back.

—Anonymous

...

My blog The Chook House is a literary blog and so probably doesn’t attract the kind of abuse being mentioned. Weirdly though people will stumble upon your blog who have not sought it out and who have got there through searches quite unrelated. That’s not always a bad thing. Being called The Chook House sees people with an interest in the feathered type end up here, but I guess they are quick to find their way out of the coop.

Early on in the blog I wrote a lot about my father’s demise from dementia and penile cancer. It was pretty gruesome and not being one to shy away from grotesqueness I was blunt and open in my descriptions of what he went through. The mention of the word ‘penis’ probably didn’t help me get the literary types I was hoping to attract and maybe I ended up with all that spam advertising Viagra because of my frequent mentioning of male genitalia. I just deleted it.

As far as the abuse suffered by female bloggers—it hasn’t come my way. When I think about the blogs I follow—they are nearly all written by women. It seems a wonderfully engaged and connected community. I would never comment in a mean way on someone’s blog and likewise only receive supportive comments on my blog- mainly from people I know. When you blog you are writing a diary to the whole world, but of course, as you write, you seem easily to forget this, and it is like writing to a penpal, a real and concrete friend. Those are the blogs that read the best to me.

—Nicole Lobry de Bruyn, The Chook House

...

I’ve been pretty lucky in my four and a half years of blogging. There has been the odd sexist comment, but not many. There was one more disturbing incident, where a man began leaving cryptic comments, which then became more critical. At first I though he was perhaps a bit mentally ill (the comments were quite odd, drug-fuelled?) and I tried to reply, when I understood them or if I deemed a criticism worthy. He started to talk about how he emulated certain violent movie characters, came back to comment several times on issues not relating to the immediate blog post and haunted the rest of the blog. Then, when he didn’t agree with one review, he let loose the personal insults. I decided to block his comments, as they were becoming abusive. From here, he flooded my inbox with emails. I had to block his email, and block him from the blog, Twitter and Facebook. I have to admit, when I think about it I feel very anxious. Some people I know have had much worse experiences. It really just makes you feel upset that there are some very bored and angry people out there who seem to enjoy this kind of trolling.

The commenter really does still give me a chill. I still feel like he might show up at something one day, but then again, these people are often much braver when they have a screen to shield them.

—Anonymous

...

Most of my experiences through blogging have been quite positive. However I have encountered some malicious behaviour. This usually comes in the form of personal emails sent to me. I find it interesting that many of the things I get sent via email aren’t posted online as comments. I write about a range of subjects on my blog, but some of the recurring ones are feminism and the Holocaust. Some of the most vicious emails I’ve gotten, sometimes repeatedly from the same individuals, have concerned these two subjects. I’d like to point out that most these emails have been from men. I’ve been called a bitch, stupid, man-hating and pretentious for daring to raise the subject of feminism on my blog. Similarly, my posts on the Holocaust have been met by some pretty disturbing anti-Semitic emails from Holocaust deniers and others who are simply racist and prejudiced.

One of the most striking things for me about the general tone of these emails is the assumption that it’s somehow acceptable to physically threaten and crudely insult women when they have a strong voice and dare to share it online. I have male friends who blog about some pretty serious issues themselves, and they haven’t received such nasty emails. Most of the time, I don’t talk about such emails publicly. But recently I’ve started to respond to them on my blog through what I hope to be mature discussion that bypasses the call to silence of these emails. I think one of the functions of such emails is to keep women in silence, or even to infantilise them by suggesting they should only blog about light-hearted topics. Even the less threatening (though, still critical) emails I’ve gotten suggest that it’s somehow okay for a man to send a women an email ‘correcting’ her on her own subjective interpretation of a piece of art, film or book. Like I said, this doesn’t happen to my male friends. Ironically, the personal attacks I’ve received have convinced me of the need to talk about such issues, despite the demoralising affect they sometimes have on me personally.

—Hila Shachar, le project d’amour

Meanjin and Overland added to the ERA 2012 Journal List

2011-11-09T16:55:17Z

The Australian Research Council have recently released the final version of the 2012 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Journals List. Under the new system, both Meanjin and Overland have been added as ERA-recognised journals.

What does this mean for readers? Not much at all, except maybe some bureaucratic kudos. The content of either publication will not change. But for academics who have been published in Meanjin and Overland during the 2012 reference period (1 January 2005–31 December 2010), or who are looking to submit in the future, this means an official recognition that work printed in these publications is scholarly and peer reviewed.

For those unfamiliar, Excellence in Research for Australia is a Labor government initiative to measure Australia’s research output and quality in higher education institutions across all disciplines. Using data compiled from academics’ publications in ERA-listed journals, as well as conference papers, books and book chapters, the ERA report compares Australia’s research output nationally and on an institution-by-institution basis with international averages in each field. With the first report produced in 2010, the ERA is designed to highlight Australia’s research strengths, and to justify governmental spending on research in the future.

The new ERA Journal List was compiled after two consultation periods earlier this year with discipline experts, academic peak bodies and interested members of the public. During this time, people were invited to comment on a journal’s eligibility for inclusion and to suggest eligible journals to add to the list. The key difference between the 2010 and 2012 list is the change to journal quality indicators with the removal of A*, A, B and C rankings — the most controversial aspect of the 2010 evaluation.

Under the old ERA ranking scheme, journals were rated according to their ‘quality’ on a scale from 0% to 100%, with the top 5% of journals being classified as ‘A*’. The following 15% of journals were classified ‘A’, with ‘B’ and ‘C’ journals containing 30% and 50% respectively. It was not clear, however, how these ratings had been arrived at or who had judged each journal’s purported quality. And as critics such as Dr Ian Dobson noted in University World News, “there isn’t necessarily any link between the quality of a paper and the journal it is published in”. In some institutions, it was reported that research managers were targeting publications in the top 20% while obstructing researchers from publishing in the remaining 80%. Considering the instability of tertiary funding at present, Dobson claimed that, “in effect, at some universities, economic rationalism overtook research impact as a driver of research”.

The Research Council acknowledged these “unintended consequences” by dropping the rankings in May this year. “There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings,” said Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr in a statement on May 30. “One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers.

In light of these two factors — that ERA could work perfectly well without the rankings, and that their existence was focussing ill-informed, undesirable behaviour in the management of research — I have made the decision to remove the rankings, based on the ARC’s expert advice”. Journals included in the 2012 list are catalogued with their name, their ERA ID, up to three Fields of Research and their ISSN numbers. Rather than rankings, the 2012 report will instead include a publication profile of each listed journal that indicates how many papers were published during the assessment period in each given field of research, and how often academics chose that journal as their forum for publication. The change is designed to provide academics with a more transparent way of analysing whether a journal is an appropriate publication to submit their research to, and whether it is highly regarded by other academics within their chosen field.

There is still some disquiet that the journal publication profiles will have similar consequences to the rankings system, but we’ll have to wait until the 2012 report is released to see.

For further information on the ERA, visit the Australian Research Council’s website.

Writing Misplaced in Cyprus

2011-11-03T17:01:01Z

I’m not missing home. I’m missing my daughter but not home, because, I am home. My novel, Misplaced, was the reason for my 5th trip to Cyprus, my parents’ birthplace, but now, I don’t seem to want to leave. One quarter of Misplaced is set in Cyprus, the rest, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Six years after writing the first words of my novel, I knew that in order to finish, I had to come back. It was actually filmmaker Anna Kannava, my friend and mentor that told me I needed to go back. She told me this a few weeks before she died.

One of my aunties said to me the other day, ‘It’s difficult to have two countries.’ It is, and my road seems somehow lost. I’m trying to piece Misplaced together; trying to piece my identity together, but I think, they are both the same thing. I ask myself, how it is at the age of 32, I still don’t know who I am?

Then my laptop dies. When you spend most of your savings travelling to the other side of the planet to refine your art, only to have your laptop die, the self doubt creeps in. The road is even further skewed. It can’t be fixed, they tell me at the service centre, and I need to sit down when they tell me. But they are able to retrieve my files. My cousin’s boyfriend lends me a tiny laptop that does the job and I’m thankful. You can’t rent laptops here. Then I think about words, and what they worth. What are they worth when they are gone forever? What if someone took all the words ever written and pressed the delete key?

I go and visit Anna Kannava’s grandmother in the old town of Limassol. I feel her energy as I walk down her street, replay images from her film. She filmed it right there on that street. I see Anna, young and beautiful, alive, not sick, and brittle, like the scleroderma made her. We gather at her grandmother’s house—her brothers from Australia, me, and another very close friend of hers. The bond between Anna and her grandmother was strong. She was named after her. We all say that it is strange that we are all in Cyprus at exactly the same time.

Nobody says it, but we all know Anna is present too. I tell her grandmother what a beautiful person Anna was and how she changed my life, and how she should be very proud of her. It feels nice to say those things. She’s ninety-seven years old but her mind is as sharp. She cries good tears. It’s good to have a cry, her brother says. He asks her if it is okay to record a poem with her and she is okay with it. Her brother says she’s used to having artists around her, and won’t take offence.

I take my tiny laptop and go to another auntie’s house. The last time I was here, my grandmother was alive. I sit at a desk and write my stories with her photograph beside me and wonder if she is watching me and what she thinks of my stories and my poetry. Cyprus is different without her, and I am glad that I didn’t see her when she was really sick in the nursing home and that I lived with her when she was semi-well and would sit with me and tell me stories and sing songs whenever she felt like it.

I have another granny too. I take the tiny laptop and go to the remote villages of Cyprus to write more. My uncle from Pafos happens to come and visit. He didn’t know I was here and he hasn’t been here since Easter. I think it’s a strange coincidence. I think my aunty had something to do with it but I didn’t want to say that because she has passed away and I don’t want to upset my granny.

In the bedroom where I sleep there is a wardrobe and my uncle shows me that on the inside of the door, are all of their birthdays. Every time my granny gave birth, she would rise from the bed and write the name and the date on the door so she would not forget.

My granny cracks chestnuts with her carer Rosa from Sri Lanka. She came to Cyprus two and a half years ago and knew no Greek and my Yiayia taught her Greek. My Granny is up with the latest technology. She Skypes with her family all over the world. My Granny is losing her memory. She forgets how long I have been here. She can walk, but only small distances so she can’t leave the house, but my granny is a busy bee. People are always dropping in to see her. My granny has chickens in her yard and we eat fresh eggs.

My granny is a poet. I didn’t know she was until six months ago, Dad said to me as a passing comment ‘ah, you’re grandmother wrote poetry too’. My family back home don’t really like that I write. They would prefer I worked as a programmer, which is what I studied out of highschool. But my Granny, she’s rapt that I write. We have a chat about creative processes. She says that after her home village was occupied by Turkey, one day she had the urge to write. ‘The story came out,’ she tells me, ‘without sitting down and thinking, it just came out, and I didn’t change it, I just wrote. Then I sent it to the radio, and they read it. They’ve read it a few times. Yes, I have had poems published in newspapers as well.’ We sit and she reads me poetry and stories laced with nostalgia, lyrical poetic imagery and heartache. I write my first Greek poem at my granny’s house. It is written in the Cypriot dialect.

‘I will kiss you,’ she says to me before she goes to bed while I am busy at my laptop writing stories. I smile, and we exchange a kiss on both cheeks. ‘I wish you all the best with your writing,’ she says to me. ‘That you publish books and succeed in your career.’ Nobody in my family, extended or otherwise in Australia, has said that to me. I smile. ‘Thanks, Yiayia mou’.

The next day I record a poem in her yard about my other Granny.

Koraly Dimitriadis is performing at LaMama Poetica on Monday the 7th of November and at Polyester Bookshop in Fitzroy on Friday the 11th of November. Visit www.koralydimitriadis.com for more info.

Meanland Blog — Catherine Moffat

2011-11-03T16:25:04Z

Blind on Blind

In his lecture Blindness from his lecture series Seven Nights, Jorge Luis Borges writes of losing his sight. After ‘… the slow nightfall, that has lasted more than three quarters of a century. In 1955 the pathetic moment came when I had lost my sight, my reader’s and writer’s sight.’

Borges famously had a series of people to read to him after he went blind. Alberto Manguel wrote about reading to Borges in With Borges and A History of Reading as have, amongst others, Nicholas Shakespeare and Paul Theroux. In a blog piece Greg Bales speculates that more people may have claimed to have read to Borges than actually did. An even greater number have probably claimed to read Borges, but never have.

Sadly, for most of us, when we reach the point of blindness there won’t be a queue of young boys or visiting authors waiting to read to us.

John Milton went blind at forty-two, publisher Joseph Pulitzer at forty-three, James Joyce suffered from periods of blindness, and perhaps if Jane Austen had lived beyond forty-one, the blotting paper she used to hide her writing may have had to get bigger as she succumbed to age-related presbyopia and became long-sighted.

Milton wrote Paradise Lost after he went blind and part of Borges’ thesis in Blindness is that there are compensations when darkness falls—or in Borges’ case when the ‘vaguely luminous’ bluish or greenish mist descended. Borges credits blindness with leading him to study Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature—‘replacing the visible world with the aural world of Anglo-Saxon language’. Yet the failing of the ability to read and write, or the ability to hold a book, or perhaps to even understand it, seems like a savage loss to writer and reader alike.

Mervyn Peake completed Titus Alone after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Terry Pratchett is documenting the changes Alzheimer’s is bringing him. He finds reading difficult, and dictates his novels now—sometimes using a speech-text device that he has to train to the idiosyncrasies of his language.

Forty may be the new thirty, but ultimately the body doesn’t lie. Watch those gym-buffed forty-thirties in the supermarket holding that jar of peanut butter at arm’s length so they can read the fat content.

Age and disability can come to us all.

Many years ago I saw Dorothy Hewitt at a poetry reading. She fumbled pages, held them up to her eyes, moved them away again, turned her head this way and that in an attempt to see the words.

‘Would it kill her to put on a pair of glasses?’ muttered the man next to me.

I don’t think glasses would have helped. Opaque blue eyes stared defiantly at the crowd beneath Rapunzel-white tresses, but I’m not convinced she saw any of us.

Hewitt suffered from osteoarthritis and a variety of other ailments in later life. Her writing arm became so painful she had to train herself to write with the other. I’m guessing that reading, too, became difficult. Holding a book, turning a page, seeing the words—activities most of us take for granted.

I’ve had problems with my sight for a good part of my life. If I hold the page about 5cms from my eyes, I can read books without my glasses. It’s a different, slower process of reading. I can’t see the whole page, or even the whole line—just a circle of writing blurring into nothing at the edges. It’s difficult to read a newspaper that way, or a magazine. So much of reading is as much about what we discard as what we leave in—choices we make in a micro-second. Webpages without glasses are difficult to read too for the same reason and I’m uncomfortable holding a screen so close to my face.

My mother, who has glaucoma, sits with the sun behind her, and a lamp on to read large print books. My uncle needs a magnifier that projects to a giant flat screen to read his gas bills, centimetre by painful centimetre. He writes notes in A4 exercise books—one word to a page. They look like flip poems, or a Bob Dylan music clip. If the words are long they run off the page, the ending lost, written somewhere on the table, the tablecloth, the bench top.

We forget that while we live in a world that is changing, so are we.

When I opened the spring edition of Meanjin, I had a moment of melancholia when I discovered that no matter how I angled the page I couldn’t read the yellow text used for headings and emphasis throughout. If I were directing a bad movie, that moment would be the scene when the protagonist looks out the window and watches a leaf whither and fall, and understands that time is passing. It was the first time I’d not been able to read something that others could.

I opened another journal and found the same yellow headings. I think I was most disappointed because I found the poetry the hardest to read. Somehow I’d always imagined that no matter how difficult reading or movement became, poetry with its careful tracing of word by word would be the last to leave. Then I read a review in the Australian complaining about the use of ‘buttery’ texts in literary journals and felt immeasurable better. Not just me then.

My mother would have told me to get over myself, and Borges too would probably be laughing. I’m glad I live in an age of devices. If it were 1911 instead of 2011 and I began losing my sight or mobility, my options for continuing to access books would be limited to having someone read to me. I can see myself now like Great Aunt March in Little Women, irascibly importuning my family or bribing them with trips to Paris in order to get them to read aloud.

Even 20 years ago, people who lost the ability to read normal text were largely restricted to audio or large print books. Although it’s much better now, the catalogue of audio or large print books has never been large. The realities of the market mean that new authors and literary fiction are unlikely to make it into large print or audio. Even best sellers arrive late, long after the rest of the community has moved on to the next thing.

There are radio stations that broadcast people reading the newspapers. It’s strange to listen to. They’re not like the summaries we hear in news broadcasts—it’s literally someone reading every word, every column, and every sidebar in a clear, flat voice.

That Kindles, iPads, Kobos and other e-readers have their accessibility problems is well documented. A number of schools and Universities have halted their headlong rush to introduce e-readers as ways to deliver set texts because of law suits mounted by students with disabilities. Jacqui Cheng summarises some of the issues in an article at Ars Technica. But as accessibility expert Jakob Neilsen pointed out in 2009, and as many people with sight impairments or elderly relatives have discovered, the ability to change font size and colour together with improvements in text-to-voice synthesizers may mean the difference between someone being able to read a book or not.

E-book readers can also extend access to people with some forms of other physical disabilities, as this review at Disabled and Productive explains. Hands up everyone who’s planning to get one for Grandma this Christmas?

E-readers have extended the range of reading options for many people. We may not all get to discover the delights of Scandinavian literature like Borges, but I’m hopeful now, that even if our fields of view begin to shrink, or we start to lose colours, if we find it difficult to turn a page, the current devices or the ones yet to come will help many of us go on reading into the future.

“Literature should get to the heart of human interaction and sex… is that beating heart”: An Interview with Krissy Kneen

2011-11-02T13:17:50Z

Brisbane author Krissy Kneen is not afraid to write frankly about sex. Those who read her 2009 memoir, Affection, will recall a work of at times painful honesty, in which the author lay bare her unconventional childhood, her sexual history, her desires and her insecurities. Her latest novel Triptych, published in early October, follows suit.

Triptych is a series of three interlinked novellas, all of which take famous works of erotic art as their starting point to explore the outermost reaches of sexual desire — internet sex, bestiality and incest. Kneen set out to test her own boundaries in writing the book, and many readers will find their liberalism stretched to the limit. That said, you’re unlikely to find another writer who can describe a girl having sex with a dog, a pony and an octopus with such delicacy.

But while sex, taboo and transgression may be Triptych’s central concerns, this is a surprisingly moral work. Across the book’s three parts, sex and love remain, well, close bedfellows. Kneen does not pathologise her characters, but rather attempts to understand them and their unconventional desires.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross chats with Krissy Kneen from Paris, where she is currently at work on her next book.

RHC: What have you been up to in Paris? I read on your blog you’re starting research for your next book.

KN: Paris is half play, half work. It is my 20th anniversary with my partner and we wanted to go somewhere romantic to celebrate, thus Paris. But whilst thinking about the trip I was drawn to the idea of writing a travel memoir about the sex museums of the world. After visiting the erotic museum here I think that has changed. I think my erotic museum book will actually be fiction, with each story inspired by the museum and something I have seen in it. It is still very embryonic and to tell you the truth I have spent my writing time here editing what will actually be my next book, which is a novel that I submitted to Text before giving them Triptych. It needs a big rewrite and I have been struggling through that while I am here. I have been taking notes for the museum book but I think I will have to come back to that later.

RHC: I’ll start with quite a broad question: what is it that draws you to write about sex and desire?

KN: I feel that sex is the primary motivation for all human life. It is so central to our lives and our relationships and yet it is the one area that we often skip over in our literature. People tend to close the bedroom door and then open it after that central interaction is complete. Sex changes everything between people and yet it is often left out. I think literature should get to the heart of human interaction and sex or the lack of it is that beating heart. It isn’t the only thing I write about but it is certainly a major theme of mine.

RHC: Where does the dividing line between ‘erotica’ and ‘pornography’ lie? Where do you place Triptych on this spectrum? Is it necessary that such a line be drawn?

KN: I prefer to use the words ‘pornographic literature’ to describe Triptych. For me Susan Sontag’s definition of a work, where sex is at the centre of it subsuming plot and character, fits best. Triptych is genre. I refused to let the book stray too far from the sex. I felt like the characters and situations were there to move the sex forward effectively. I suppose it was an experiment for me, to concentrate only on what I wanted to say about the sex. I wanted to present perverse sexualities as central to the book and I feel like I have achieved that. For me the term pornographic literature is what best describes the pornographic stories of Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille novellas and the work of the Marquis de Sade. All three of these writers were concentrating on the sex first and foremost.

When I think of erotica I think of gentler stories that brush against sex without plunging into it. I feel erotica speaks of romance and innuendo. I don’t mind people calling my work erotica. Certainly my publisher had done so on the cover of the book. If this is more comfortable then that is fine, but my focus was on the pornographic and I am not afraid of the term. Some people use it to describe pornographic videos exclusively and that is certainly not what I am doing here. I suppose the pornographic and the literary cannot be separated in my use of the term. I also think that what is considered pornographic is absolutely culturally defined. What was once pornographic may now be considered erotic and vice versa.

RHC: In writing Triptych, what came to you first, your characters or the sex acts that they partake in? Are the characters in some ways vehicles to explore different sexual behaviours?

KN: The first novella came as a whole. I started it for two reasons. I was about to begin my PhD on perversity so I wanted to start work on my perverse narrative but I also wanted to clear my head from the novel I had just finished a draft of, and so I began the first novella as a treat. I was going to write a sexy novella quickly and painlessly to shake off the difficulties of the novel. I was at Varuna [the national Writers’ House in Katoomba] and had just had an interesting writerly experience with a game of Chatroulette and a bunch of great writers there, so the internet was always going to creep into that story. I did not intend internet sex to be one of my perversities for the book, but when I had finished the novella I knew I was onto something. The second and third novellas are closer to what I was going to explore with the book, looking at the sex acts and finding characters that could lead us into them safely. The second one was the one I spent most time researching and thinking about because I knew that bestiality was going to be a tricky high-wire act to pull off. I was certainly thinking of the acts first and the characters second with those second two.

RHC: Triptych is like a catalogue of sexual taboos. Did you set out with the intention of exploring boundaries? Or were these simply acts that you found erotic?

(Side note: the bestiality bit certainly pushed my boundaries. You write about having sex with dogs very well. I saw my family dog on the weekend and I didn’t want to pat him. It really freaked me out.)

KN: My original list of taboos stepped from the warm waters to the scalding hot. My list started with kissing and got increasingly more taboo till bestiality and paedophilia were at the end of the list. I knew I would have trouble if I went anywhere near paedophilia, so I decided to avoid that completely. The novella format seemed to work for me so I basically decided to choose three acts and work with them. I am really not attracted to animals and found that novella difficult to write because of it. I grew up with dogs and therefore found those scenes the most challenging. Dogs are basically kind of gross. I have seen this close up. The ocean stuff was easier to find erotic. I was really trying to challenge myself in these novellas, trying to write about acts that are not particularly erotic to me and trying to trick myself into finding them erotic. I figured if I could trick myself into it I could lead a reader there with me, which was the central challenge of the book. I wanted to seduce a reader into going to places they would not normally be comfortable with, which would in a way make them into an ethical reader. They would be forced to question why they usually had a problem with these acts, which would make them consider them in a new light. I know this sounds like a PhD thesis because that is how it started, but the actual writing of the work also had to be something a reader would be convinced by so it had to be much less academic in practice.

RHC: In Triptych (though not in Affection), I found there to be something quite cold about the prose when you weren’t writing about sex. I found a lot more was said about the characters in the moments of consummation than in the surrounding descriptions. It’s something that I find in Anaïs Nin’s fiction as well. Was that a deliberate stylistic choice, and if so, to what ends?

KN: I suppose the centre of the story is the sex so all other bits were just linking the sex scenes together. I suppose that is what makes it more pornographic literature to me. I was reading Lolita while I wrote it and his style is infectious. I have to admit I stole a look at the world through Nabokov’s eyes during the writing of this book. I just read Lolita and when I had finished it I turned around and read it again. In fact at the end of writing Triptych I was distraught that my book was never going to be as good as Lolita. I think the voice in Lolita has that distance, but hopefully I have channeled some of his humour too.

RHC: Tell me about the way art has inspired these stories. Does art always influence your work? Was there a particular painting that gave you the idea to construct the book in this way?

KN: Art is always an influence on me. When I write a novel I have one central image I pin up near my desk, and I keep trying to capture the balance and style of that painting or photograph. This is how I have always worked. It comes from being the last born in a family of visual artists I suppose. In this case I had the image of the three books separately but I always imagined them next to each other in three gold frames. I have a plan for a second triptych; in fact I have written one of the novellas already and in this case it is three works of modern art. Having these pictures in my head help me to understand the shape of the work. I often see writing as sculpting. A first draft is getting the clay on the table. Then comes all the shaping and detailing. Bizarrely, I didn’t see Affection as a work of art, but I studied some of my favourite documentaries whilst writing that book. I see that as a very different form. Memoir feels more like crafting a doco to me.

RHC: Tell me about the idea of consent that is explored in the second novella, ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’. While it is explored most explicitly here, this idea seems to run through all three parts of the book.

KN: This is a very moral book. I wanted all the characters to be very moral people, flawed but generally well meaning. Even though each of the stories deals with a different perverse act, the people performing these acts have very strong moral compasses. Consent is paramount. Sex without consent is no longer sex for me, it then becomes an act of violence. In my next triptych I will look at this lack of consent, I will look at violence, but in this book I thought that it would be enough to challenge a reader with the perverse acts themselves. I wanted consent to be unquestionable.

Many people have had a problem with the idea that animals can consent to sex and I did a lot of reading about this. Eventually I realised that this is my make-believe world. This is fiction, and if I make that animal want the sex then that is consent. Also I really have a lot of difficulty understanding how keeping animals in captivity even keeping animals for food, is often unquestioned and yet the moment sex is involved that is a terrible sin. We can torture animals it seems, we can keep birds in cages and pigs in pens. We can steal their milk or kill them and eat them but if we touch their genitals that is suddenly the worst crime ever.

I specifically made my characters female as it is easier to show consent if the animal is male. Ultimately though this is fiction, this is fantasy. This is not real life. In fantasy I can pose interesting questions and I can also assume consent. Some people have jumped up and down about the bestiality saying that I should have studied animal psychology before writing this book, but that really isn’t the point. The point is to question sexual norms. I am not saying we should all go out and sleep with our puppies. I am saying we should not blindly assume that what we consider normal sexual behaviour is morally right. The idea is to point out that sexual norms are culturally assigned and that we usually blindly assume that some things are sexually better practices than others. I am just throwing these assumptions up for questioning.

RHC: The internet as a gateway to exploring one’s desires is also a theme that carries across the book. But I found it interesting how in the first novella, ‘Susanna,’ you draw connections between the voyeuristic gaze in Susanna and the Elders, a 17th century painting, and the scopophilia enabled by the internet and digital culture. How, if at all, do you think the internet has changed sex and sexuality?

KN: I think we have always been voyeuristic. We invented cave painting? Ok, so here are some sexy pictures on a cave wall. We invent photography? We start taking nudie photos. We invent film? Voila! Pornographic cinema. The internet is one more method of telling stories, and pretty much sex is the first use we find for any new form. Sure, it means that people can look at naked people and sex acts in their own bedroom. We no longer have to go out searching for under the counter smut, but if half of the fun is the procuring of that illicit material then we are going to find new ways to find that illicit thrill. Parents need to get their head around the idea of child safety and the internet, but it is still true that most kids that are abused are abused by a relative or family friend. People blame the internet for so much because it is an easy target. It is a medium that can deliver information quickly and easily, but that is all it is. We are the ones who create that information. The internet is just a tool. To tell you the truth, I don’t think we are particularly good at using that tool yet. I am pretty excited about finding new ways to deliver literature using the internet. I am really glad I am alive and creating at a time when I can be at the cutting edge of using this new and amazing tool.

RHC: There is such a strong sense of isolation for all these characters. In the end, I got the feeling that their desires had as much to do with feelings of isolation and the struggle for connection, albeit in different ways, as they were about exploring the outer limits of sexual behaviour?

KN: I think the struggle to connect is another one of the themes that I will always return to. I don’t suppose I am alone in feeling lonely most of the time. I spend most of my life feeling that other people won’t be able to understand me. I think we all feel like that. Even our loved ones are strangers. We can never really know and understand someone else. We can’t get into their heads. The closest we can come is to read their books or look at their art or watch their films and feel like we connect to their art, but really we are just understanding ourselves and not them at all. Even when I love and feel loved, deep down I am lonely because I know no one will ever see the world the way I do. I am certain this longing comes out in my work.

RHC: There is some sense in the way that you describe sex and desire, particularly in the moment of orgasm, of a momentary obliteration of identity (I got this impression in Affection too). Is that in some ways what these characters are searching for?

KN: There is a relief in orgasm. It is the only time that I feel truly happy. It is a moment when nothing else matters. I don’t need to explain anything or search for anything, I can just be in that moment of physical release. If I could live in that moment permanently it would be wonderful. But it is so fleeting and then it is gone and after a while all the troubles of life flood in again. I suppose we probably all are just searching for ways to extend that bliss. My characters are the same.

RHC: The note that the book ends on seems to be a significant one. Brother and sister Aaron and Katherine, living as husband and wife, have grown as weary and uninspired as any other couple approaching middle age. It is through the rediscovery of transgression, through Katherine’s infidelity and Aaron introducing her to online sex, that they are able to rekindle their desire for each other. Do you think the transgressive or the taboo is inherent to desire?

KN: For me the idea of transgression certainly keeps desire alive. When we are completely familiar with a partner the frisson does dissipate. The only way I know to keep it alive is to mix it up a bit, play around with sex, introduce taboos, explore new territory. I suppose the third novella is closest to my own world as I have been with my husband for 20 years now, and as a result it has to be all about finding new ways to keep sex fresh. Imagination is a powerful thing. We don’t need to physically enter taboo territory. We can do so in fantasy. Desire is defined by the idea of something that is beyond reach. When we have the object we no longer have the desire for it. The trick with sex is to keep that desire just on the tipping point, just out of reach so that we still have to strive for it. It is very tricky.

RHC: For all the acts of transgression in Triptych, there is rarely a sexual encounter in this book that is not an act of love, or at the very least a yearning for human connection. Is this really a book about love?

KN: This is the most romantic of my writing. I specifically made it romantic to subvert the perversity. The juxtaposition of love and the perverse seemed to balance nicely. Normally I struggle with the idea of romantic love. I am not sure how committed I am to the belief in capital L Love. Love is more complicated than the romantic version leads us to believe.

RHC: Another broad question for you: is sex ever just sex? Is writing about sex ever just writing about sex?

KN: I wanted this book to be genre — just sex writing. But still it seems that all my themes and preoccupations have crept in there. Maybe something shorter could be just sex, but when you start to expand on it, it would be quite boring without other stuff simmering away under the surface I suppose. I love The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and at first I thought this was pure sex writing, but it isn’t. The sex is presented in such a way that it seems to carve new channels in your head. Suddenly sex connects things that you don’t expect to connect, nightmares, images, ideas, death, body parts. I love what Bataille does with pornographic literature but yet again it isn’t just pure sex.

RHC: What do you hope that readers will take away from Triptych? Is the ultimate purpose of the book arousal?

KN: I would be delighted if my readers were aroused and disturbed by the fact that they are aroused. I would love it if they found themselves thinking about things that they usually wouldn’t think about. I hope it will make them look at sex from a different angle. And I also hope they laugh. It is a comedy and it made me laugh so I hope it makes the readers laugh too.

RHC: What’s the next project you’ve got coming up? Can you ever see yourself writing a book that is not about sex and the erotic?

KN: I am editing this novel for Text, and although it is driving me mad at the moment it is less about sex. It is about sisters and the difficult relationship between them. It does have a disturbingly sexual heart but there is very little actual sex in it. I am also working on a kids’ book, believe it or not. That has NO sex but I am finding that it is a little violent. There are a couple of sex projects I have also started to work on including Triptych Two, but the novel is the thing that is of primary concern at the moment. Novels are so difficult. It is almost impossible to write a good one, let alone a great one. I read the work of Nabokov and Salinger and Steinbeck and more recently Jeffrey Eugenides and I am both elated and despairing. I want to write like that. All I really want in life is to write something beautiful, something as perfect as Of Mice and Men or Lolita or The Virgin Suicides. When I do that I will be able to die happy. I apologise in advance if you have to see four or five novels from me that aren’t even half that good before I finally get there, but my only hope is that one day I will get there.

Triptych is out now through Text Publishing. Krissy also blogs regularly at furiousvaginas.com.

What I'm (Not/Half) Reading — Sam Twyford-Moore

2011-10-26T15:39:21Z

I am right now reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation published as part of Picador’s BIG IDEAS//small books series. I have not finished it yet — to be unnecessarily precise, I am on page 56 of 184 — but I am happy to humiliate myself by writing about it from such a limited, uninformed point of view. This is partly because I think that the thesis Koestenbaum is trying to put forward is that all writing and reading needs to be a process of humiliation.

Laura Kipnis writing in the latest Bookforum details Koestenbaum’s enquiries into humiliations as including “having a tiny penis or any form of smallness, soiling oneself or virtually any other physical process, writing or being written about, being jealous, being cheated on, being Googled, being mistaken for the wrong gender, being Michael Jackson, electroshock therapy, impotence, hair loss, inadvertent erections in awkward circumstances, smelling like liverwurst, vomiting onstage before a musical performance, voyeuristic curiosity about death, failing to visit a dying colleague in the hospital, and being photographed after you’re dead.”

The idea of affecting a sense of humiliation interests me and something I think I am more than capable of doing. And while I could relate to most of the list above — although I have never been Michael Jackson — why not act according to the space that I am in? To wit: how can I humiliate myself on the blog of the second oldest literary journal in the country? By writing badly? It’s not enough to say that all that I have written about Koestenbaum so far has been lifted from another source. It’s not enough to make a bad pun about that source, Laura Kipnis (Kipnis is the author of How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behaviour which sounds like a pretty delicious match up for Koestenbaum, but I would prefer if there was a typo in her title and we got How to Become a Sandal: Adventures in Bad Footwear).

It’s probably not even enough to admit that when former Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham asked me if I had watched the fifth season of The Wire after I pitched an essay about the show, I lied and said that I had and that I also knew I wouldn’t be bothered to watch it for the essay either [in my defense, the season was not screening on Australian TV and only available on DVD via import, and I didn’t know how to Bitorrent yet, and I had also just finished Nicholson Baker’s U & I, his book-length essay on John Updike in which he admits to probably only having read a quarter of Updike’s output].

But maybe we can take this confession further and find humiliation at the endpoint: I have not finished a book in over a year. I have read plenty of parts of books, but have not been able to get to the end of even a short book like Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and The Murderer, which I guiltily began this year, more than five years after it was set for a creative non-fiction course I completed at university. I failed to read it then, I fail to read it now. I also failed to finish Slavoj Zizek’s Violence which was also published under the BIG IDEAS//small books umbrella and which, like Koestenbaum’s essay-book, can not have been more than two-hundred pages long.

The problem is partly technological. Koestenbaum, like Zizek, is almost more entertaining in his Youtube videos than on the page, and so instead of reading the book I spend more time with them in his video lecture form. (Koestenbaum’s series of videos promoting Humiliation, titled Dear Wayne: I’ve Been Humiliated, are particularly worth checking out)

I have a friend who describes herself as being monogamous to her books; she only reads the one thing at the one time. I am a whore. I am often reading three or more books at once. I am greedy and sloppy and an inattentive lover, who fails to get to the book’s climax. The books on my desk spill out and trip over each other, until I get fed up with them, and place them in a towering pile, behind the desk where I cannot see them or have to deal with them in anyway. I blame this on Book Depository, for the fact that when I am only one hundred pages into a book, there is already another in the letterbox, ready to be ripped open after its retrieval. But blaming Book Depository is disingenuous — the blame lies at my own lazy feet.

Being a writer who is not particularly good at reading is perhaps a constant humiliation. This reminds me of the Onion parody of a weekend supplement, that featured verbose David Foster Wallace on the cover with the confession ‘I Never Learned To Read’. I so very much wanted that confession to be true when I first read it; for it not to be a parody, but a searing expose. It would have made me feel much better about my own inability to finish books. But Geoff Dyer saved me from this humiliation though by writing an essay called Reader’s Block, which explained that we naturally go through periods where our attentiveness falters and we fall into a non-reading lull, particularly as we get older. This makes the blow of humiliation less forceful when I admit that I could not finish a certain book.

But maybe humiliation recedes too. All of my humiliations since high school seem to me to have been pretty manufactured. They only appear as humiliations outwardly, which begs the question, if my cheeks are not flushed with embarrassment is it really a humiliation at all? Recent humiliations seem more likely to fit in the category of self-deprecation and so are more artificial (real humiliation, surely, I feel, needs to come down from others).

For instance, if I overshare and tweet that I had a Don Draper style nap in my office — slightly less sexy than Draper, what with drool running down the side of my face — I am not particularly embarrassed by the fact, signified in the publicizing of it in the first place. If I drink too much before a reading event, and am basically unable to read in any coherent way, as was the case at a recent Melbourne book launch, I actually end up with a positive response from the audience, and so humiliation becomes something of its own reward. Maybe this contradiction is something that Koestenbaum talks about later in his mini-book. I would be willing to put money on the chance that I won’t be the one to find out.

But even admitting this and trying to make my inability to finish a book my humiliation is a kind of further humiliation now, because it is no longer true, having heroically just finished Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot, in between not reading the Koestenbaum. Dyer again provides the soothing lotion here; we are ‘always not reading something in favour of reading something else’ and so the opposite is also true.

Meanland Blog —The Revolution Will be Tweeted and Televised

2011-10-25T15:59:06Z

On July 13, Adbusters sent out their first email announcing a Twitter hashtag and a call for redeemers, rebels and radicals to occupy Wall Street. They had ‘just a few thousand dollars on hand’ and ‘no idea who would show up’ two months later. On September 17, a crowd gathered. Collectively, calmly, the people made a stand.

“You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.”

Finally Obama is responding, albeit, in his careful to ensure it looks like he’s listening, but not committing to anything concrete, kind of way. While the first city to be Occupied was Madrid on April 15, #OccupyWallStreet was the protest that spread to numerous other cities. On October 15, Julian Assange removed an Anonymous mask in front of Saint Paul’s Cathedral to speak to an assembly of more than 2000 protestors, and Martin Luther King III said to protestors in Washington, ‘I believe if my father was alive, he would be right here with all of us involved in this demonstration today.’

We’re yet to see what is to come of the protests. If ever there was a question, surely it is: what next? Meanwhile, living in a time when the Internet can be cradled in the palm of a hand, many of us watch in awe as a campaign blossoms from digital initiatives and groups from around the world continue to occupy spaces today. What part did digital media play and how did so many groups come together under what ideologies to show so publicly a government that has been happy enough to bail out the big shots, but not the 99%?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his 2010 essay Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted that the ‘Platforms of social media are built around weak ties.’ How can we forge deep friendships, he asked, when we have a thousand friends on Facebook and Twitter to entertain? Such ties ‘seldom lead to high-risk activism.’ If Facebook was used successfully to find a bone marrow donor for Sameer Bhatia, it was because those who registered themselves on a bone-marrow database to perhaps spend three hours in hospital, if a match, were engaging in a low risk activity. Twenty-five thousand people may have answered the call, but this was because little was asked of them, with a reward, ‘social acknowledgement and praise,’ that was great.

‘Boycotts and sit-ins and non-violent confrontations,’ he went on to explain, ‘are high-risk strategies.’ To take on ‘a powerful and organised establishment you have to be a hierarchy.’ No room in Gladwell’s argument for traditional and digital activism to ‘overlap and complement’ each other. No acknowledgement of the role of social media, blogs, YouTube, apps, good old-fashioned websites, email and more in deepening ties between people. No letting us sit and marvel at how new technologies are enabling striking visuals and gut-wrenching words swift and far reach. Yes, revolutions have occurred without the Internet. Yes, it is difficult to untangle what could have been possible without the web and its fast moving, networking capabilities. But if the Arab Spring has proven anything, it’s that digital media has become the inexpensive tool to make transparent what has, and can be, so difficult to nudge into the public arena. If Occupy Wall Street has proven anything, it’s that a ‘leaderless campaign,’ as described by Jamie Kilstein, who has been visiting Occupy Melbourne the last few days, confirms. Something can be achieved by groups with “affinity” for one another, including Occupy Wall Street and Adbusters working alongside each other for the common good.

I want so much to enjoy the success of horizontally organised think-communicate-do tanks in initiating a kind of Mexican wave of protests on October 15, with more than 950 demonstrations in over 80 countries. Here is what every thinker hopes to see; people talking to each other in various physical and virtual gatherings. Now we wait to see what will come of the stand people had to take.

For writers, there is much to love about, and learn from, this campaign. Etched in our memories are now autobiographical photos. I can still see one man’s face in black and white. He looks as if he has worked hard and long. He looks as if he has nothing to show for it. He lives in America, the seeming lucky country. His placard tells me he is one of the 99%. Just as striking are images of young protestors with 99% labels branded over their mouths like gags.

A twitter account (#occupywriters) accompanies a website which encourages all writers to join an already impressive list of supporters including Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Micheal Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Paddy O’Reilly, Ann Patchett and Salman Rushdie. If you go to the site, you’ll delight in original works relating to the protest by Francine Prose, Lemony Snicket, D.A. Powell and Duncan Murrell.

There there’s that wonderful article on the rise of digital natives that helps a reader see “the nerve centre of the Occupy Wall Street protest is a makeshift media tent full of serious young people fussing over laptops in tangles of cables.”

Occupy Cities is about holding governments accountable to care for 100% of the people, not just the privileged few. There are so many other websites, twitter accounts, applications and ways of opening the conversation. In a gesture of solidarity, should there be any digital initiatives you are aware of and would like to report, please feel free to comment below.

Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth

2011-10-18T18:15:08Z

Pratibha Parmar is a multi-award-winning filmmaker currently working on a documentary about Alice Walker entitled Beauty in Truth. Parmar answered some questions while she completed preparations for Beauty in Truth’s Indiegogo campaign.

Q: How did you come to make Beauty in Truth?

The idea was conceived over a Christmas break four years ago when Shaheen (my partner and co-producer) and I were watching a stack of DVDs in a cosy hideout in Northern California. These DVDs were all biographies of ‘iconic’ men, such as Frank Gehry, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan.

Immediately we wondered out loud about the absence of cinematic visions of ‘iconic’ women. Where were the STACKS of films on women who have challenged, changed and shaped history and impacted on contemporary culture? I came to filmmaking from a passionate desire to see stories about women, particularly women of colour who are rarely seen on mainstream television or cinema screens in all our/their complexity and nuance. So it isn’t a surprise that my default position is to always ask questions.

Where are the in-depth explorations of women as thinkers and public intellectuals, women as history makers and shapers, women who are inspirational leaders and role models for upcoming generations? Where indeed was a film on Alice Walker who is rightly considered one of 20th Century’s most significant writers? And so started the journey of this film.

Q: How far has production come?

I am focusing on completing Beauty in Truth before the end of 2011 and want to launch the film in 2012, the 30th Anniversary of The Color Purple.

We have had many funding challenges in the last few years yet we are proud to say we have completed 85% of our filming with just a few small grants as well as major extensions on credit limits on our personal credit cards. We have interviewed some amazing people including Danny Glover, Steven Spielberg, Gloria Steinem and of course Alice Walker herself.

For me the most frustrating thing about the whole process has been how it’s had to stop and start as we apply for funding, wait for news on our application, pick ourselves up again when the answer is not we hoped for, find another grant to apply to and so and so on. This has meant that for the first time ever in my filmmaking life, I have had to work with different DPs (Directors of Photography) and not the same one throughout. My work as you know is very visually led and so for me the crucial relationship is with my DP.

Q: Has funding been problematic for this project because of women’s lack of access to capital in general? Or to our collective reluctance to support women filmmakers, even though we want more women-centred stories?

Okay let’s start with some startling statistics, which give an idea of what women filmmakers are up against—only 7% of directors, 13% of writers, and 20% of producers are female. Given such a dearth of female representation in front of and behind the camera, is it any wonder that we continue to have a struggle to get funding for female stories and voices.

And within this context many of us especially those of us who are declared feminists are experiencing acute funding challenges. It’s hard especially when you make films that don’t fit into the dominant white, male paradigms at the best of times but right now its pretty dire.

Women are usually the first hit in any economic crisis as we are witnessing all around us right now and when it comes to our voices in the media the situation just gets worse. Alice Walker’s outspokenness on issues such female genital mutilation, as well as the Palestinian people’s struggle, makes some funders nervous about supporting the film. I know this to be the case from some of the comments we have received.

Recently there was an article in the New York Times about the documentaries screening at the Toronto Film Festival and there was not one mention of a film by a woman. Documentary is a genre in which women have always been very prominent. But suddenly when the genre becomes ‘sexy’ and more publically profiled because ‘named’ male directors are turning to the genre, it’s only the male filmmakers who get name checked. Melissa Silverstein who writes the Women In Hollywood blog did a great piece on this.

Q: How can we help?

Crowd funding is an exciting way to raise money through grassroots outreach and potentially an excellent way to build community and audiences to have dialogue and discussions with. I truly believe that there is a diverse and widespread international community of people out there who want to see this film. Films like this do and can make a difference. But we need YOUR help.We are asking people to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, tweet/ email their friends, post to Facebook and donate to our Indiegogo site.

Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker, photograph by Shaheen Haq

This post is extracted from Marian Evans' blog Wellywood Woman. To read the whole post and interview, click here.