Blog - Meanjin

Meanland — Sometimes what we can't do makes what we can do even better

2012-05-23T09:54:16Z

I came to read Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are for the first time in my thirties. Blame poverty and how it made my parents concentrate on land instead of words. They didn’t know of this classic picture book when I was a child, just as I did not pick it up until a novelist friend recommended it to me.

At that time my eldest son, Frankie, was two. He grew up, as many of my generation have, with Where the Wild Things Are as a staple, after-supper treat. And while this illustrated text hasn’t lost its lustre for adults returning to it long after having first loved it, at that time for me, just as for my son, it was completely new. We entered into its terrific menace and came out renewed. The next night we read the story over and again.

When my son turned three, the Jewish Museum in St Kilda held an Exhibition called Where the Wild Things Are: Maurice Sendak in his own words and pictures. We had to go. Many of the images shown were from the original art in the Maurice Sendak Collection, housed at the Rosenback Museum and Library in Philadelphia, PA. After leaping up ancient stairs, my boy dressed up as a Wild Thing and pranced around in a wooden boat while my pregnant feet warmed on the planks of Sendak’s visual imagination.

Thus continued a relationship with a picture book I will hold in any home I happen to live in. So it was interesting to me that two weeks ago, while trawling through the State Library’s gorgeous Facebook photo collection, I came across this:

Friday fact: Maurice Sendak first planned to write a book called Where the Wild Horses Are. Then he realised that he couldn’t draw horses, and so Where the Wild Things Are was born.

That thought returned me to my struggles with to a 90,000-word monstrosity scattered in parts across three different computers: my first novel, set in early 20th Century Sicily. I couldn’t draw horses either, figuratively speaking.

Its mistakes became bigger than me. Those who knew best told me to let it go, editors suggested that I simply add non-fiction to the narrative. No one told me how much I would have to learn before I could arrive at a place where the writing of half-decent non-fiction might even be possible. Humbled, I put my manuscript in a drawer; but as I tried to pull away, my fingers stuck. Inside was not a dead tree, but to a sapling yet to find its shape. I couldn’t let go.

Could I, as a student of Sendak, turn my deficits into an asset, as he did? Might my roundabout life, messy heart and lack of fiscal prowess allow me to hold a candle to these historical texts and so illuminate them? Might my life’s recent events – leaving a 12-year relationship to start over – help direct and reshape my story.

I try. I empty out hours and sit inside them. Truth loosens from me wet, icing up just enough that I might jump from one chapter to the next vignette without falling. Will this approach work?

In snatches of spare time, I stumble on shots of music, text, drama and art online instead of watching TV. I show Lacrime Di Giulietta to my son. He replays it for the sixth time.

I see a local Montmorency boy’s torso become a painting and his song top the charts.

I learn more about Sendak’s life with its passing. I find Where the Wild Things Are, not on a shelf in my boys’ bedroom (now they’re asleep I’m loathe to disrupt them), but bright on my iPad in the dark:

Sendak’s croaky voice wakes me up to further investigations. I find and read a fuller version of the horses-to-things story. After three months of Sendak not being able to draw the very animal on which the title of his picture book was based, editor, Ursula Nordstrom, asked: “Maurice, what can you draw?” To which he thought, well, things. Soon things were middle-aged relatives from his childhood with hair unravelling from their noses and who would eat anything and who were, well, wild.

I watch and listen to a Tateshots interview. Passion pours from Sendak¹s lips. I wish that I could thank him, first for the music he makes without realising he is making it, and second, for wearing his heart on his sleeve.

I understand Sendak is no longer alive, but for this moment, on screen, he is. The Tateshots interview stays with me. Sendak says of William Blake, “I don’t understand him…but I love him”. He urges artists to be brave:

“Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die, or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back up and do the best work you ever did. But you have to take the dive, and you do not know what the result will be.”

Once I swam with a school of yellow fish after exploring the scarlet, carrot and auburn coral of the Great Barrier Reef. Astounded by underwater brilliance, my heart leapt to live in an age when sea diving was possible, before this wonder of the world was depleted. Prior to swimming with the fish, mine had been a walk into the sea. This time, if I drop into the deep, the plunge will mean that at first I will sink, but slowly, surely, my body, if intact, will begin to float? Even if eyes are blurred, arms will grasp for what is to come next? Why adhere to plans and overly structured designs when writers like E.L. Doctorow suggest something else:

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

There is beauty in not knowing. Sendak, in his interview, calls it mystery. Part of being human, perhaps, just as is an ability to make mistakes, or not be able to do something, and from this space, create something more.

As I stand on a precipice, understanding a little of the digital terrain makes the jump a tad more educated, but fear remains. Will my long read – once, and if, complete – find an audience? If so, will readers be moved? Am I being reckless trying something new? What will I have to show for having dived, and if the worst is averted, survived?

Josephine Ulrick

2012-05-21T10:53:13Z

Griffith University in Queensland manages one of the richest short story prizes in the world, and yet it seems to pass under the radar of many writers. To their credit, GU don’t buy into the fanfare of publicity that surrounds many literary prizes, which perhaps allows lesser known luminaries to be in with a shout of taking home the moolah, which is significant.

The Josephine Ulrick Literature and Poetry prizes offer an eye-popping $20,000 to the winner in each category. Now in its tenth year, this is the first time the twenty grand prize pool has been awarded to one unique winner for the best short story and the best poem. In previous years there have been four prize slots, with the winners collecting $10,000, second place $5000 and two commended stories or poems receiving $2,500 each. Twenty thousand dollars is a remarkable amount of dosh to hand over for a short story or poem, more than some well-established literary prizes give out for novels and it is thus a wonder the prize is not talked about more.

Former winners of the short story prize include a pre-fame Chris Womersley and Catherine Harris, who have both gone on to have their books The Low Road, Bereft and Like Being a Wife shortlisted for major awards. The latter two books were up for The Age Book of the Year in 2011, though had they won they would have received the same amount of cash as they did when taking out the Josephine Ulrick.

This year’s short story winner is Matthew Lamb, and whilst twenty thousand bucks would come in handy for anyone, it is hard not to be pleased that it winds up in Lamb’s pocket. He is the editor of the Review of Australian Fiction, a new fortnightly digital short story venture that pairs up one established Australian author (who must have written three books or more) with one ‘emerging’ Australian author (less than three books). The more experienced writer picks the lesser known one in each case. For $2.99 readers get two long short stories to read on their digital device. Given all the talk I’ve heard about short fiction being perfectly suited to reading on Kindles, Kobos, iPads and other smartphones, it’s gratifying to see someone actually getting off their backside to do something about it. Half of the three bucks goes to the writers involved and the other half to promoting the magazine, so it is doubtful Lamb himself will have made anything at all. A deserving win then, for an entrepreneurial editor who has already published new stories from Christos Tsiolkas, Kalinda Ashton, Georgia Blain, James Bradley, Bruce Pascoe, Marie Munkara, Linda Jaivin, Susan Johnson and many more—a fiction honour roll any magazine would be proud of.

The winner of the poetry prize this year is also worth noting, as it’s the same writer who won it last year—Maria Zajkowski. She has been working on a manuscript entitled ‘The Ascendant’ for some time now, and it must be extraordinary indeed for suites of poems from the piece have claimed victory two years running, netting the Melbourne-based writer a cool thirty thousand dollars in total. That’s more than most poets earn in a lifetime.

For more information on the Josephine Ulrick Prizes, which are usually open for submissions around December, check the Griffith University website.

Willy Lit

2012-05-17T16:51:04Z

The Williamstown Literary Festival is now in its ninth year, drawing crowds to the rather opulent Town Hall of this pretty western bayside suburb, home to former Victorian Premiers Steve Bracks and Joan Kirner, not to mention funnyman Shaun Micallef, who attends the festival every year. I sat in on two events recently, one on travel writing with Transit Lounge authors Aaron Smith and Amy Choi, and another on converting sex and murder stories to the small screen, with Hilary Bonney and Kerry Greenwood.

Transit Lounge is a small publishing company run by the entrepreneurial and extremely affable Barry Scott out of nearby suburb Yarraville. Punching well above its weight with a nice selection of travel memoirs and well-edited fiction titles, Transit Lounge is proving to be a classy outfit. They published Patrick Holland’s superb Miles Franklin longlisted The Mary Smokes Boys in 2010 and Peter Barry’s criminally underrated literary sniper story I Hate Martin Amis et al last year. Both authors have new novels out in 2012—Barry’s We All Fall Down has just been released and Holland’s The Darkest Little Room is due out September.

Amy Choi’s clever three-part memoir Playing House presented her with a conundrum. The initial section detailing her extensive travels was written fifteen years ago, which placed the author in the odd position of having to face a previous version of herself she at times did not recognize, and as she readily confessed, became judgmental of. This raised the question of how much fiction a memoirist is permitted to insert into their narrative. Choi opted to keep the warts-and-all version of herself rather than succumb to the temptation to rewrite her past.

Well-travelled journalist Aaron Smith’s travelogue Shanti Bloody Shanti is more of a Hunter Thompson-style romp around India, where the author fled after a contract was taken out on his life by an Australian drug dealer. Smith is every inch the grizzled travel reporter of yesteryear, and has several more gritty books in the pipeline, covering South America and Africa. It is refreshing to be reminded such journalist writers still exist. The vivid passage Smith read aloud had him almost killed in a motorcycle accident on an Indian mountainside, and could easily have been lifted straight from the diaries of Che Guevara.

There was a change of pace later in the day when I shared a stage with Hilary Bonney and Kerry Greenwood. Bonney is a barrister with two non-fiction titles to her name—The Society Murders and The Double Life of Herman Rockefeller, two excellent journalistic accounts of lurid sex crimes. Bonney’s document of how millionaire Herman Rockefeller met a grisly end after dabbling in the swinging scene is a compelling example of how to impose a narrative structure on a real life murder investigation without sacrificing tension. It is no surprise that Bonney was a story consultant on ABC show Crownies and is moving into crime fiction. She is definitely one to watch.

Living legend Kerry Greenwood is due to release her 60th book this year and is riding high on the successful TV adaptation of the Phryne Fisher series. She informed a thrilled crowd that a second season goes into production in October, and that the show is proving extremely popular with European and American networks, who are loving the crisp, authentic portrayal of 1928 Melbourne.

When I quizzed her as to why the series had not been made before now, her answer was simple: “Me.” The television option had been bought several times over the years but on each occasion Miss Greenwood vetoed the production (as per her right in the iron clad contract she drew up herself—she works as an advocate in magistrate’s court for the Legal Aid Commission). As she elaborated, one of the main reasons behind the show’s achingly beautiful set and costume design became apparent—Greenwood requires every single tiny detail to be correct. If an object on set does not date from the period, it is removed. If any phrase spoken by the actors did not exist in 1928, she knows immediately. She was annoyed, for example, that ‘ok’ had slipped into the previous evening’s episode, as it did not enter the popular vernacular until after World War Two.

The dedication to the world she has created in the Phryne Fisher series is admirable. She viewed one hundred and twenty eight actress audition reels before deciding on Essie Davis the moment she saw her, rejecting many of the others because they were too young. Greenwood is a tremendous festival guest, loquacious and rambling, witty and erudite, full of anecdotes. Her singularity of vision on the Phryne Fisher TV series will surely hold her in good stead once American audiences are inevitably conquered by the sexy Melbourne detective.

Binet's Brain

2012-05-17T10:04:06Z

History is replete with so many unlikely stories of triumph, adversity, failure and heroism that it’s a wonder novelists strain to invent tales of their own. With all the juicy human history at one’s fingertips, it is often easier to pick an historical event or personage and simply write a novel about it, or them. The issue then becomes one of fidelity—how much leeway should an author give themselves when dealing with actual events from the past? Is it important to accurately portray the facts, or does artistic licence give writers the freedom to alter history to suit their narrative needs?

Discussion around such matters is often heated, and invariably takes place in the media after the release of an historical novel, or during panels at writer’s festivals. Laurent Binet’s novel, HHhH takes a whole new slant on this controversial topic by dealing with the issues as the narrative unfolds.

Every article on this extraordinary book has to at some point explain the nutty title, so here is that mandatory paragraph: HHhH is an acronym for the German phrase ‘Himmler’s Hirn heisst Heydrich’, which translates a little awkwardly into English as, ‘Himmler’s Brain is called Heydrich’. This mildly frightening phrase was bandied about by wags in the Nazi SS during World War Two to illustrate the fact everyone knew the scariest person in the SS High Command was not its leader, but Reinhard Heydrich, who also had several less amusing monikers, such as ‘the hangman of Prague’, ‘the blond beast’ and ‘the most dangerous man in the Third Reich’. Heydrich was one of those responsible for drawing up the Final Solution and ruled occupied Czechoslovakia with shocking brutality. Hitler loved him.

Just about everyone else in Europe hated him, and so two exiled parachutists, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, a Slovak and a Czech living in London, were sent to assassinate the man who was murdering their people. This was Operation Anthropoid, an ultimately successful mission with enough drama, mishap and all out action to fill three novels. French author Laurent Binet had heard snippets of the tale when he was young, and investigated further when he taught in a Slovakian military academy. His research revealed the full story had not been brought to light, other than in a few obscure novels and telemovies, often with contradictory stotylines. HHhH is the resultant book, part novel, part creative non fiction investigation, part confessional, an original, highly unusual take on a much maligned genre.

Binet speaks directly to the reader throughout, in a series of 257 short, diary-style chapters, documenting the various minute details of the mission as he uncovers them himself. What makes HHhH revolutionary is Binet’s honesty and willingness to undermine his own research. When he discovers new evidence, he questions much of what he has already told us, and in some cases refutes his previous assertions. This makes for a charming, if somewhat jarring reading experience. Binet subverts conventions and plays with the reader’s expectations of historical novels. On occasion he fills in gaps in the narrative with cracking passages of prose, exciting moments that propel you deeper into the plot but then pull you roughly back out again when it is revealed that Binet made up the chapter that just had you so thrilled. He will guiltily admit to his every exaggeration, a technique that risks making the reader feel foolish but in fact is tremendously successful at keeping you on guard, ready to examine each new fact with skepticism.

The uncomfortable truth revealed in Binet’s book is that readers should always have this guard up, and rarely do. Even though we know we are reading an historical novel, and authors ram that message home at festivals and in interviews, it is so easy to conflate historical fact with historical fiction, particularly if we are reading about a period or personages with whom we are unfamiliar. I fell for it several times whilst reading HHhH, haughtily informing my partner of some historical nugget I had just learned from Binet as if I was suddenly some clever expert whose duty it was to edify her. Turn the page and Binet slaps you right in the face with a reminder that you only think you know what happened because he just told you what to think and he may have been lying, or simply not aware of all the facts yet. Astonishing then, to read a history book that is brutally honest about the failings of history books, fiction and non-fiction alike, to capture the truth without resorting to convenience.

Hunting for Blood

2012-05-14T14:46:26Z

This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist has gone a long way to lifting the dour cloud that has hovered over the award in recent times. Many of the established heavyweight authors from the longlist have not progressed to the final five, whereas three debut authors have — Anna Funder, Favel Parrett and Tony Birch. Funder is renowned for her non-fiction classic Stasiland and Birch for his two short story collections, Shadowboxing and Father’s Day, but All That I Am and Blood are their first novels. Parrett’s popular Past the Shallows emerged from the Queensland Writer’s Centre/Hachette Australia manuscript development program, a ringing endorsement for a program that is only in its fifth year (and is incidentally currently open for submissions).

As if that wasn’t enough, the Miles Franklin Trust Company have finally managed to alter the restriction that has caused so much argument in the past, that novels “must present Australian life in any of its phases.” Judges are now permitted to “use their discretion to modernize the interpretation of Australian life beyond geographical boundaries to include mindset, language, history and values.” This should encompass all books of note in years to come, and prevent frustrating exclusions.

In another heartening development, an indigenous author is on the shortlist for the second year running. Kim Scott won it last time, and Tony Birch is in with a red-hot chance of making it two for two with his contemporary gothic masterpiece Blood. I reviewed Birch’s latest for Australian Book Review upon its release last year and was particularly impressed with the language and pace of Birch’s prose. Mr. Birch gave a humble speech at the shortlist announcement in which he noted that writers are not part of an elite, that they are generally working class people who toil for precious little reward. That fits nicely with the tone of his novel, which eschews the clichés and corny ockerisms that have plagued too many Australian books in recent years. Both Parrett and Birch have written novels that in some way herald a new contemporary Australian realism that is stark yet vivid, honest and bereft of pretension. These are the stories an outsider might imagine modern Australian writers would produce and that will appeal to a younger literate generation who have scant interest in 20th Century historical melodramas mostly written by old white men.

Every writer who breaks the mold needs a supporter, and in Birch’s case this has been John Hunter. Appointed as the publisher at University of Queensland Press in 2010 to cover maternity leave, Hunter made several deft acquisitions during his tenure, the impact of which will be long reaching for Australian literature and UQP. Having published Birch’s previous short story collection Father’s Day through his own tiny imprint in Melbourne, he stuck by the author when no one else did and as a result UQP have a book on the Miles Franklin shortlist, a return to form for a publisher who had perhaps fallen by the wayside a little in recent years despite launching the careers of David Malouf and Peter Carey. His stint at UQP now complete, it is worth watching the career trajectory of the affable Hunter, a publisher with one of the sharpest noses for talent in the country. Several more books from his tenure are still to be released, most notably Josephine Rowe’s anticipated short story collection Tarcutta Wake, in late July.

The result this year could go any way, and good luck to all the shortlisted authors. The winner will be announced on June 20th in Brisbane. Having read all five books for a change, I can proclaim Blood as my firm favourite. If you haven’t read it and your interest has not yet been piqued, perhaps this extraordinary passage of film will persuade you. The novel was influenced by Charles Laughton’s 1955 movie The Night of the Hunter, and captures its strange mood with aplomb, transforming Robert Mitchum’s terrifying preacher into meth dealers Crow and Limbo, in pursuit of thirteen year-old Jesse and his eight year-old half sister Rachel across a rain-drenched southern Australian landscape:

View video here.

A Sporting Chance

2012-05-09T16:01:49Z

Melbourne high school teacher Paul D. Carter has just won the $20,000 Vogel Award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under thirty-five, for his novel Eleven Seasons. Carter was inspired to pen a story focusing around the world of AFL after reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld, an odd starting point for a book about a Hawthorn Hawks-obsessed teenager perhaps but a clue to how significant and rare good sports novels are.

One of the motifs in Underworld is a baseball, but not just any baseball—the one hit for a home run by New York Giant Bobby Thomson with two men on base in the bottom of the 9th inning of the final pennant playoff against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Giants won the game 5-4 with that hit and progressed to the 1951 World Series against the New York Yankees, which they lost. Still, Thomson’s homer is considered one of the most famous moments in the sport, nicknamed ‘the shot heard ‘round the world’ and for baseball aficionados the actual ball itself is a much sought after memento. Strangely, no one knows what happened to that particular ball, and this is what DeLillo plays on. The prologue of Underworld takes place as Thomson hits the home run and the ball is recovered by young tearaway Cotter Martin, setting up a neat narrative thread that runs subsequent.

Carter enjoyed the fashion in which DeLillo portrayed the lives of baseball fans so much he began work on a novel that might replicate some of this fervor in an Australian sporting environment, namely AFL, which the author himself had followed since he was a kid. (For those dying to know, Carter barracks for Collingwood.) Given that sport is our national obsession it is curious to note the lack of depth in our squad when it comes to AFL novels, rendering Carter’s debut a welcome addition to the field. That’s quite enough sporting jargon, methinks, though it is worth pointing out that Carter’s manuscript changed over the nine years it took him to complete from a ‘pure’ football story to one that would have a wider appeal.

In Eleven Seasons, promising teenage player Jason Dalton suffers a turnaround in fortunes that leave him teetering on the precipice of mediocrity, a storyline that is echoed in Chad Harbach’s much lauded The Art of Fielding. Harbach has captured American imaginations with his story of wunderkind baseball shortstop Henry Skrimshander’s crisis of confidence and the novel has found a wide audience amongst non-baseball purists. Carter’s assured Vogel winner should do the same here, despite the oddly cherubic choice of cover model.

On the subject of cherubs and DeLillo, the film version of his 2003 novel Cosmopolis, starring the much-maligned Robert Pattinson, better known for his portrayal of pasty-faced vamp Edward Cullen in the Twilight series, finally has an intriguing trailer. DeLillo’s parable of a Wall Street broker’s downfall as he travels across New York in his limousine is perfect fodder for tumultuous times, and who better to direct such a huis-clos of paranoia than David Cronenberg? This looks great, and may be Pattinson’s salvation.

Cosmopolis: Coming Soon

The Zoetrope Story

2012-05-09T15:28:49Z

Purchase a ticket on any of the cheep and cheerful bus tours around San Francisco and within ten minutes the tour guide will be pointing out, on your right please ladies and gentlemen, Columbus Tower, a green-ish, slightly dilapidated, rather beautiful seven storey building on Kearny Street, located on the corner just before the bus turns towards the famed City Lights bookstore.

The reason this distinctive building makes the tour is because it is owned by Francis Ford Coppola, who bought it at the height of his fame in the 1970s, renovated it and set up his various businesses within. Whilst everyone knows him as a filmmaker, what passes a lot of people by is his eclectic and rather wonderful literary journal, Zoetrope: All-Story.

Although the first issue was released fifteen years ago in 1997, I had no idea it existed until stumbling upon an issue four years ago, my curiousity piqued by the odd design and M.J. Hyland’s name on the cover. A magazine in size, shape and feel, Zoetrope: All-Story generally comes in around ninety or a hundred pages, always seems to have different paper stock (sometimes several kinds within one issue) and never runs more than two advertisements, one for fashion label Marc Jacobs, the other for Coppola’s own brand of wines. The contents are consistently made up of four or five pieces of short fiction, one of which is always a reprint of a classic story that has at some point been the inspiration for a movie.

Given Coppola’s fame, it is perhaps hardly surprising that there is always at least one major name listed on the contributor’s page. Perched alongside the likes of Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami are often strange, more experimental stories by lesser-known writers, including first-timers. The current issue, for example, has a long, brilliant piece by Bennett Sims, an MFA student who must be apoplectic with delight to see his work included on such an exclusive list. (The story is about two neighbours arguing over ownership of a bookcase, and is superb.)

My knowledge of mid-list American literary authors has been greatly expanded since I took out a subscription, with some of my favourite short stories of recent years being penned by writers I had not, to my shame, previously heard of. Thanks to the editors at Zoetrope, Stuart Dybek, Elizabeth McCracken, Fiona McFarlane and Lysley Tenorio are now all on my watch list.

The most alluring aspect of Zoetrope is the fact no two issues look alike. A guest designer is brought in for each issue, leading to a wildly varying aesthetic that can admittedly, at times, be distracting. If you think the list of heavyweight writers contributing to the quarterly is impressive, the designers are even more so, coming as they often do from the world of music and film. Prior to my subscription commencing in 2008, I missed out on issues designed by Wim Wenders, Tom Waits, David Byrne, Dennis Hopper, Helmut Newton and David Bowie. Since then I have been on occasion astonished to find a magazine devoted entirely to fiction arriving in my mailbox designed by the likes of Lou Reed, Marjane Satrapi, Guillermo del Toro, PJ Harvey, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Beck and Rodarte.

Zoetrope fights the good fight for emerging writers too, by running an annual short story contest that not only has cash prizes but introduces the winners to all the major literary agencies in the United States.

Unsurprisingly, the quarterly has already won a National Magazine Award, and is up for another this year. Given its heavy lean towards more unusual short fiction, lack of advertising revenue and artistic design ethos, it is fair to say Zoetrope wouldn’t last more than a couple of issues without the backing of its patron. Coppola must be given credit for keeping the magazine going, and for providing an outlet for esoteric art and fiction.

Even when I receive an issue wherein precious few of the stories are to my taste, I still believe it is important such a magazine exists, for readers as well as writers. It’s also flat out priceless to read fiction in an A4 glossy magazine format. Many of their back issues are still available to buy on the Zoetrope website too, a steal at only eight bucks a pop if you’re after some excellent, offbeat fiction all wrapped up in a unique package.

Commonwealth Writer's Prize

2012-05-09T15:07:26Z

The plethora of literary prizes that abound is at times bewildering, and occasionally tiresome. It’s hard for a reader to maintain one’s enthusiasm for awards when there are just so many of them, particularly if it’s the same titles appearing repeatedly on shortlists. Prize fatigue must have settled on the shoulders of the Commonwealth Foundation in recent years, with their award for best book largely dominated by big names, authors with whom readers were probably overly familiar, and who didn’t really need the publicity (or prize money).

In 2011 the Commonwealth Foundation announced a clever reboot of their awards by eliminating the Best Book prize and bringing the Best First Book to the forefront. Now, there is only one award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, which is given out to the best debut novel of the year. This makes good sense for the Commonwealth Foundation, whose aim should be the promotion of fresh new voices from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Canada and Europe, rather than plonking yet another sticker on the cover of some worldbeater’s latest opus.

Directing readers towards lesser-known titles that perhaps passed under the radar of many reviewers and media outlets is arguably the finest possible use of a literary prize and a technique that the multitude of Australian awards might want to take under consideration. How different would the long and shortlists for the Miles Franklin, Prime Minister’s and all the State literary awards be if authors were automatically ineligible after penning their, say, third book? Do Alex Miller and Frank Moorhouse really need the boost that another Miles Franklin would give them?

Australians have traditionally done well in the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, taking out the Best Book award eight times since the award’s inception in 1987. Christos Tsiolkas, Kate Grenville, Richard Flanagan, Peter Carey x 2, Murray Bail, Alex Miller and David Malouf have all won. The Best First Book has only gone to an Australian twice (Glenda Guest & Adib Khan), though Aussie authors have made the final shortlist on eleven other occasions.

The relaunched Commonwealth Book Prize has just announced its shortlist for 2012, and all four books in the Pacific zone are Australian. They are: The Ottoman Motel (Chris Currie); Me and Mr Booker (Cory Taylor); Purple Threads (Jeanine Leane) and The Vanishing Act (Mette Jakobsen). Three of these titles are published by Text in Melbourne, the fourth (Purple Threads) by UQP. One of these four will be anointed as regional winner on May 22nd and go on to compete against the winners from other zones for the overall title, to be awarded on June 8th at the Hay Festival in Wales. Great news for one of these promising Australian authors, who will be packing their bags for a prestigious overseas trip this Winter.

Heartening news too for each of their books, which from memory did not receive the media attention they deserved at the time. Currie’s novel may ring a bell for many, given he proposed to his girlfriend in the acknowledgments. Thankfully she accepted, though the alarmed couple could not have anticipated the media frenzy that surrounded their engagement, with TV appearances and coverage in such far-flung outlets as the Guardian. Gratifying then for the book to receive attention for its merits, rather than the love story surrounding its release. A slowburn mystery with Hitchcockian overtones, The Ottoman Motel captures all the discomfort of the classic 1988 Dutch movie The Vanishing (remade five years later by the same director in America, starring Jeff Bridges) and casts it into a contemporary small Queensland town that is decidedly creepy. My money’s on Queenslander Currie (who works in Brisbane’s Avid Reader bookstore) to take out this year’s Pacific zone award and go on to represent Australia in June.

Wheels Keep on Turning

2012-05-09T12:26:04Z

Melbourne’s hub for books, writing and ideas, The Wheeler Centre, has just made public its second program for the year, running from May to August (they take a short break from programming in August whilst the Melbourne Writer’s Festival occupies centre stage). As always, an impressive cavalcade of literary guests is set to visit the city, made all the more juicy by the presence of a bevy of international stars who just happen to be on Australian soil for the Sydney Writers' Festival in May. The good news for those impoverished bookish types (is there any other kind?) who have been enviously eyeing the SWF program whilst cursing their paucity of funds or lack of days in lieu to fly north for the Autumn is that – huzzah! – those good eggs at the Wheeler Centre are marching your heroes over the border for an intense week of double-bill literary legend action.

In an inventive move, those who jump at the chance to hear Roddy Doyle, Jeffrey Eugenides or Jeanette Winterson expound on the merits of their latest tomes will also witness a lesser-known but equally worthy writer shoot the breeze onstage. Doyle is matched with Sjón, an Icelandic writer whose work I first encountered way back in issue fifteen of McSweeney’s, in 2004. His story in that compendium, ‘Fridrik and the Eejit’ was a cracker, though he was better known as a songwriter at that period, having written lyrics for Björk and been Oscar nominated for his work on Dancer in the Dark. Two eejits together, then, and one guest that has everyone struggling with Microsoft Word’s symbol browser.

The tag team partner for Eugenides is Joshua Cody, whose cancer memoir [sic] (that’s not a typo) documents how the then 34 year-old dealt with his diagnosis through a cocktail of chemotherapy and wild, sex and drug-fuelled nights on the town – this promises to be a spicy meatball. Winterson should be a pleasure to listen to as she holds forth on her new memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and sliding into home plate alongside is rising American star Chad Harbach, whose baseball novel The Art of Fielding many felt should have nabbed the fiction-Pulitzer-that-never-was. Given the other two enticing double-bills feature former spy Stella Rimington matched with Libyan dissident Hisham Matar and behemoths of science writing Dava Sobel and Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, the week of 14th-20th May will be one to clear the diary for as you celebrate your very own mini-SWF in old Melbourne town. The week is rounded off by a visit from Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), which will see every parent in Victoria dragged along to the Town Hall, which must have been the biggest venue short of the MCG they could find.

Outside of the regular Wheeler Centre events, the heavyweight guest list dies down for a bit after that, until twenty-five million man Christopher Paolini visits in June. His YA series has coined it in since he wrote the first one, Eragon, aged just fifteen. From then on, the winter run-in is populated by the likes of Richard Ford, Katherine Boo and Jodi Picoult, all of whom are sure to sell out so I wouldn’t dawdle on securing tickets early if you’re keen.

Half the pleasure of having a year-round literary festival is in the regular events, which are always free and good to drop in on should you happen to be in the vicinity of the State Library building. Debut Mondays gets knocked out of the schedule in May by the visiting internationals, but returns in June and July. No guests are listed yet, so keep an eye open on the Wheeler Centre site for updates. The Thursday Lunchbox/Soapbox rants are always good value too, and I see Sean Condon is booked to wax lyrical on how his career took a nasty spiral after his agent upped and died. Having heard him speak on the topic before, I can recommend popping in on your lunchbreak for some eye-opening edification on the vagaries of the literary world.

The Stories of John Cheever

2012-05-07T11:52:47Z

The short story collection I find myself returning to more than any other year after year is The Stories of John Cheever. When it first appeared in 1978 as a hardback compendium bringing together a substantial body of Cheever’s work, it quickly became one of the best-selling, and most highly regarded short story collections of all time, and is still so today. The year after its publication it won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The 1981 paperback edition won the National Book Award.

Such plaudits were hard won by Cheever, whose novels had often been on the receiving end of less than laudatory reviews. Whilst The Wapshot Chronicle (1958) and Falconer (1977) are fine, quietly accomplished books, Cheever will be best remembered for his mastery of the short form, in which he had early success. He sold his first story to The New Republic in 1930 when he was only seventeen and within five years he was published in The New Yorker, who continued to support his work for decades.

This early promise was almost curtailed by World War Two. Cheever enlisted in the Army in 1942 and would have landed on the beaches of Normandy with the rest of his infantry company a few years later had his first story collection The Way Some People Live not fallen into the hands of a sympathetic Major who pulled him from the front lines to work back in New York. Most of Cheever’s company were killed during the D-Day invasion.

After the war he lived with his wife and daughter in an apartment on 59th Street, New York. Every day for five years he got dressed in his suit, caught the elevator to the empty maid’s room in the basement, stripped to his boxer shorts and wrote until lunchtime. His dedication paid off, in the shape of several more story collections and two novels, earning him an appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1964, a rare honour for a writer.

One of his best short stories, The Swimmer, became a movie starring Burt Lancaster in 1968. This trailer is a clear product of the era, failing to capture the bleak atmosphere of the original short, but is amusing all the same. Cheever had a brief cameo in the film as a drunken party guest, appropriate given his lifelong battle with alcoholism.

As is the case for many writers, critical success and awards came late in Cheever’s life. His 1976 interview in The Paris Review is a frank and revealing exercise in tetchiness. Cheever detested talking about his work and would often escape overseas when one of his books was released, specifically so interviews could not be conducted. Despite repeatedly evading his interviewer Annette Grant — “Aren’t you bored with all this talk?” Cheever nonetheless comes up with some zinging responses to her occasionally pedestrian probing.

“The first principle of aesthetics is either interest or suspense. You can’t expect to communicate with anyone if you’re a bore.” And in response to her painful query regarding whether characters sometimes took on a life of their own: “The legend that characters run away from their authors — taking up drugs, having sex operations, and becoming President — implies that the writer is a fool with no knowledge or mastery of his craft…The idea of authors running around helplessly behind their cretinous inventions is contemptible.”

At the culmination of the interview, Cheever and Grant go for a walk in the woods. Upon espying a pond, Cheever tells Grant to go ahead to the house and pack up. He strips naked and leaps into the water, cleansing himself from the questioning.

He was to win the Pulitzer for his short story collection three years later, though his health began to fail soon after. When he received the National Medal for Literature at Carnegie Hall in April 1982, attendees were shocked by his appearance, ravaged as he was by cancer in his kidney, femur, pelvis and bladder. Upon accepting the award he declared, “A page of good prose remains invincible.” John Updike, a friend of Cheever’s who was present that evening, reported that, “All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith.” John Cheever died less than two months later, on June 18th 1982.

The Stories of John Cheever is a massive tome, containing sixty pieces of fiction. Readers coming to Cheever for the first time might want to begin with the following, which are deservedly among his most famed. * The Enormous Radio*: Jim and Irene Westcott live in an apartment building in New York. Their radio breaks down and is replaced with a monstrosity of a device that picks up conversations from other apartments. Like some early version of a reality show the couple become addicted, and disgusted by what they hear, leading to a breakdown in their previously harmonious relationship.

The Five-Forty-Eight: A businessman called Blake is accosted at gunpoint on the train home by his mentally ill former secretary, with whom he had a one-night stand, leading to an unbearably tense standoff.

The Swimmer: Neddy Merrill decides to swim home from a friend’s house through all the pools in the county. Initially, friends greet him enthusiastically but over the course of the afternoon the seasons seem to pass and those Ned encounters begin to mention financial and personal problems of which has no recollection. Finally he arrives home to find his house deserted and decrepit.

Goodbye, My Brother: In what is perhaps my favourite short story of all time, two brothers fight during a family holiday on an island off the shore of Massachusetts close to where the patriarch drowned. Cynical brother Lawrence finds fault in everyone, causing the narrator to bash him on the head with a rock on the beach. Their relationship forever soured, Lawrence leaves on the ferry early the next morning. The following excerpt is the story’s ending, told by the narrator as he watches his brother depart.

“Lawrence’s eyes would think of the bottom, dark and strange, where full fathom five our father lies. Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming — Diana and Helen — and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.”

The Glittering Prize — Pulitzer, Orange & National Biography Awards Roundup

2012-05-02T17:33:55Z

What would the literary world do for gossip without prize shortlists and the various snubs associated with who’s on the list and who’s not? 2012 looks set to be another bumper year for controversy, kicked off this week with the announcement of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize, or in the case of the fiction category, how no one was good enough to be a winner.

Twenty-one Pulitzers are given out each year, in a variety of disciplines relating to journalism, arts, letters and fiction. The six categories in letters are drama, history, poetry, biography, general nonfiction and fiction, with judges announcing a shortlist of three finalists at the same time as the winner in each category. The victor takes out $10,000. Awarding the prizes is not simply a matter of finding a majority vote amongst the jury—the Pulitzer board has the power to overrule their decision, and has done several times in the past, notably in 1941 when Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was deemed too offensive and in 1974 when they overturned a unanimous jury decision to snub Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The fiction award was also withheld three years later, the last time this happened, until now.

A brief glance at previous fiction winners reveals the prize has not been awarded on average twice every decade, and that some surprising books missed out on the gong. (Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was beaten by Richard Russo’s Empire Falls in 2002, for example.) This year’s jury was made up of Susan Larson, Maureen Corrigan and former winner Michael Cunningham. The finalists they decided upon were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

A strange shortlist perhaps, with no sign of The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides or State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, all of which could have collected the prize with nary a peep of complaint from anyone. Patchett, an erudite, outspoken author who has her own independent bookstore in Nashville, was particularly put out and let loose a salvo in the New York Times as soon as the announcement was made.

“Most readers hearing the news will not assume it was a deadlock. They’ll just figure it was a bum year for fiction. As a novelist and the author of an eligible book, I do not love this. It’s fine to lose to someone, and galling to lose to no one. Still, it is infinitely more galling to me as a reader, because there were so many good books published this year.”

Patchett goes on to savage the committee for not carrying out what she sees as its responsibilities towards good literature, at a time when the entire industry is under threat from Amazon, and the domination of pop-fiction titles such as The Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey is turning readers away from more rewarding titles. Some will read her op-ed piece as a grumpy huff that may damage her chances as a future winner but at least she is sallying forth on a matter that renders most writers mute for fear of recrimination.

Patchett can take some solace in the fact she was shortlisted for another prominent award a day later, The Orange Prize. Having won the award ten years ago with Bel Canto, it is perhaps more likely to go this time to 84 year old Cynthia Ozick for Foreign Bodies, though with a shortlist including Anne Enright (The Forgotten Waltz), Georgina Harding (Painter of Silence), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles) and MAN Booker shortlistee Esi Edugyan (Half Blood Blues) it’s going to be a close race. The winner, announced on May 30th, takes home a juicy thirty thousand pounds.

Closer to home, the National Biography Award longlist has just been announced, with a shortlist arriving on May 1st and the winner receiving $25000 on May 14th at the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Some interesting and unexpected books in this list too, in particular Delia Falconer’s Sydney and Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne. My personal favourite is David Walker’s excellent Not Dark Yet, in which the genial professor explores his family history with great humour whilst going blind. The hot favourite however, will undoubtedly be Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark, which already has Victorian and Queensland Premier’s Awards under its belt, the last such title to receive a government supported award in the Sunshine State.

Food Writing 2.0

2012-04-23T15:58:14Z

Food critic Matt Preston’s star may have increased in brilliance thanks to his judicious appearance as the stern, cravat-toting gunman ready to execute quivering contestants on Masterchef, but his column in The Age was always a heady treat long before he began mopping up egg yolks with Handee Ultra paper towels. Engaging food writing is perhaps not something a lot of readers are used to, given most cookbooks are purchased for the recipes rather than the accompanying text, though in my case they are purchased mainly to look at the mouth-watering pictures of food I will never get around to cooking.

The 21st Century Australian food revolution has sparked a new interest in food writing that is more than just a list of ingredients readers regret not having in the cupboard. Bloggers in particular are at the cutting edge of criticism and invention when it comes to dissecting what is served up in contemporary restaurants. In America, a site like Yelp has proven to be an invaluable tool for anyone intending to eat out. Restaurant reviews on Yelp are brutally honest, to the point of being nitpicky, with the most competent reviewers attaining an almost mythical status in the food community. These arbiters of taste are often invited to restaurant openings and exclusive events, much like the print food critics of what now seems like yesteryear.

Melbourne food blogger, social media maven and front of house manager at Chin Chin, Jess Ho, is one of many influential young Australians who are striking fear into the hearts of diners and chefs alike. Chin Chin is one of those restaurants that are so popular they don’t need to take bookings, though woe betide any punter who calls up asking for one, or who attempts to circumvent the queue on a Friday night. Jess Ho’s blog is an eye-opening mix of incandescent fury and frank, often very funny opinions on food, restaurants and the industry in general, backed up with a deep understanding of ingredients and process. It is no wonder international star chefs such as David Chang seek out her company when they come to town.

Jess Ho’s naked, eclectic style of food writing may position her as an obvious inheritor to the throne of traditional food critics such as Matt Preston, but she is not the sole voice of dissent in this precarious world. In the April edition of Australian Book Review, Gay Bilson lays the head of Stephanie Alexander on the block before promptly chopping it off. Bilson is mildly horrified at Alexander’s naïve style in her memoir A Cook’s Life and her, “extreme preoccupation with self”. It seems in the world of food writing, fresh ingredients are required.

Hailed as the best new food magazine to hit the shelves in decades, Lucky Peach is a collaboration between ultra hip San Francisco publishing house McSweeney’s and Momofuku’s David Chang (Momofuku is Japanese for ‘lucky peach’). Even TIME magazine critic Josh Ozersky, who has had a long running feud with Chang had to admit the magazine was a “masterpiece of modern food culture.”

Apart from the dazzling design, kooky themes, inventive use of illustration and easy to follow unusual recipes, Lucky Peach takes food writing to a different, almost surreal level. A lot of the articles explore not only the history of food but go a step further by examining its role in shaping and expanding the way we live. Anthony Bourdain and Chang himself hit the road on assignment like some modern day food obsessed Hunter S. Thompsons and the conversational style of writing matches Thompson’s best articles for Rolling Stone. In fact the magazine Lucky Peach most resembles is a 1970s version of Rolling Stone, without the ads and with a fun, irreverent modern perspective. In its pages you’ll find articles on traditional Japanese knife making, the art of toilet cleanliness, how long after the expiry date you can eat mayonnaise, guides to ramen noodles and recipes for how to make the perfect barbecue chicken pizza. Food writing doesn’t come fresher than this.

Meanland: Too Much Free press?

2012-05-01T09:45:22Z

Speculating on the changes that the Digital Age will wreak on our culture seems to be an international pastime these days. Jonathan Franzen, celebrated novelist and American Writer du jour, keeps popping up in the news, loudly proclaiming the various deleterious effects that Twitter/Facebook/eBooks will have on Democracy/The Future/Our Children. (I wrote about some of his remarks earlier for Meanjin)

I find this kind of prognosticating extremely frustrating, grounded, as it usually is, in misunderstanding of the nature of new technologies on the part of white men too old to adapt to them. Franzen just doesn’t seem to get Facebook, or Twitter, and that’s okay. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t get Facebook either, and he wrote a movie about it.

Annoying as I find this gainsaying, I am unable to stop myself from indulging in it as well. I am incapable of convincing myself of why I think Franzen is wrong, without also thinking about the various ways in which he and thinkers like him are maybe a little bit right. Lately I’ve been chewing on a particular idea of how our culture might be affected by the Digital Age. I’ve been thinking about how not just the nature of new publishing technologies, but the sheer number of new platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and all the various blogging websites, could impact on how the political discourse of our society is conducted.

We take it for granted that Western culture is grounded in the free spread of information. It’s not for nothing that the invention of movable type with the Gutenberg Press, and the consequent explosion in literacy levels, is credited with being a foundation stone in Western democracy. Our society is surely premised on the public being conscious and aware of the issues that affect their state, and is thus premised on the ability of the publishing industry, and publishing technology, to distribute that information. Hence the great rhetorical emphasis placed by politicians, pundits, and activists on freedom of the press.

But I wonder now whether the traditional operations of Western democracy are founded on there being an equilibrium in the levels of information being distributed. Or, in other words, is there such a thing as too much free press? Is it possible to have a citizenship overstimulated by information, saturated to excess by a panoply of voices, opinions, and publications of varying levels of respectability and value?

The newspaper industry is probably the most obvious face of this issue today. David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire and an ex-reporter for the Baltimore Sun, has suggested that the death of newspapers also means the death of a certain kind of reporting, a loss in the quality of publicly distributed information. High-end reporting, as he puts it, is a profession requiring extensive time commitment and expertise on the part of well-trained practitioners; a kind of reporting, that is, which will be lost in the age of bloggers, citizen journalists, and news stories broken via Twitter or YouTube. As he says, “The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day I will no longer be worried about journalism.”

Huffington Post, the new titan of American news websites, is indeed the lightning rod for everything that is different, or wrong, about contemporary journalism. It is notable for two things. The first is that much of its content is generated not by experienced, well-paid journalists, but by unpaid citizen bloggers or celebrities. So instead of getting Bob Woodward on the issues of the day, you get Alec Baldwin. The second is that its profitability as a business is not tied to the quality of its journalism, but to its mastery of Search Engine Optimisation. By publishing huge numbers of pieces, often with trivial content but containing key words or issues, the Post ensures that it remains high on the list of Google’s search results, and therefore that its page views and corresponding ad revenue remain high as well.

In this respect the Huffington Post is emblematic of the worst fears about how the internet will change media and communication. Quantity of information over quality, and the value of information itself replaced by the value of content; trivial, empty, and useful only for its own self-perpetuation.

(Nevertheless, the Huffington Post does get kind of a bad rap. While newspapers are busy laying people off, the Post has been hiring hundreds of journalists on staff, and, in fact, has just won a Pulitzer Prize.)

The obvious political consequences of the changing distribution of information have already been seen worldwide, in the Arab Spring, Iran’s Green Revolution, and in the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements in the West. All of these protests are attributable, in some sense, to the way that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have afforded new possibilities for the transmission of information between disparate groups, and the building of new social networks and connections. All these movements illustrate, in one way or another, that the proliferation of publishing platforms can bring about a change in the character of political discourse within a society, and, in some cases, a change in the political makeup of the society itself.

It is the combination of these two factors, the change in the standard and character of information being distributed, and the change in the nature of the networks in which it is distributed, that interests me. Together, I wonder if they herald a fundamental shift in the way our society exists in discourse with itself.

Western commentators were often eager to proclaim that the Arab Spring was proof positive that freedom of press breeds an increase in democracy, but we may be overlooking the effects that these new freedoms are also having on our own democracies. Take, for instance, the way that the Tea Party was able to thoroughly dominate the political discourse during the 2010 midterm elections in the US, and so contribute to the way that country’s political dialogue is veering inexorably to the right.

Western democracy, rightly or not, seems to exist on a binary system, with two major parties for left and right, and various subsidiary parties on either side. This is, to a certain extent, reinforced and perpetuated by the distribution of information through media publications, with newspapers and their parent corporations often characterised by their association with a particular side; think of Rupert Murdoch’s supposedly right-wing Newscorp, or The Huffington Post’s own left-wing slant.

On the one hand, more publishing platforms could mean more variety in political opinion, more voice for previously marginalised positions. But when this is combined with a new paradigm of information that prizes content and quantity over insight, I see a possibility for political deadlock: a society confusing itself, and in the process degrading the semblance of consensus upon which democratic action is founded, and letting specialised interests imbalance the discussion.

There may be nothing new about any of this. After all, publishing platforms have always been available to the determined; even if it was merely vanity press, or a locally distributed ‘zine or pamphlet. And its probably a fallacy to declare that the state of contemporary discourse is any more vacuous than it has ever been; hindsight tends to blind the eye. (It would certainly be a mistake to assume that newspaper reporting two-hundred years ago was in any way superior in expertise and intent than it is today.) But the internet could be the tool that metastasizes the situation, and exposes the fault-lines that have lain beneath our culture all along.

On Beauty

2012-04-23T17:11:57Z

During a recent interview with former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, who has just released a sequel (of sorts) to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island entitled Silver, I raised the spectre of book design. Silver is an attractive book presented in the old style, with wood block carvings inked on the page at the start of each section. These wonderful illustrations are by Joe McLaren, an example of whose work can be seen below.

Motion was delighted that his book should have such considered design, and said the following: “If I were a publisher I’d deal with the threat of digital media by making books really beautiful. Not too expensive, but really beautiful.” It’s an obvious road for publishers to take perhaps—certainly every reader loves to own books that are physically beautiful objects, since bookshelves often form a central role as furniture in most people’s homes (incidentally, in the unlikely event that physical books were to be completely subsumed by their digital cousins, what would we do with all that empty space in bedrooms, lounge rooms and studies? Is the extinction of CDs and potentially printed books forcing us towards a more minimalist interior design ethic?)

Every writer wants their book to look great too and the argument has already been floated many times that physical bookstores may in the future become havens of curated beauty filled with books whose digital versions simply cannot compete, but what are the obstacles preventing publishers from splitting their businesses into two distinct halves, one for books that don’t really need to have printed versions and one for those that absolutely must exist in the physical world?

Cost is of course the main stumbling block. Most small and mid-range publishing houses cannot afford to release hardbacks, use heavy paper that feels silken to the touch or include full colour photographs and illustrations. Such delights are usually reserved for cookbooks such as Christine Mansfield’s Tasting India. A huge hardback published by Penguin, Tasting India weighs a ton but shows a commitment to design and presentation that is extraordinary. Another Penguin title whose design caught my eye this year is Geoffrey Blainey’s A Short History of Christianity. Whilst Penguin have long been renowned for innovative design, both these books are notable in that they would each have cost a considerable amount to print. The colophon reveals their point of commonality—designer Allison Colpoys.

The importance of a talented designer cannot be underestimated when it comes to the presentation of books as objects, and Penguin look set to continue their rich tradition with Colpoys in place. (An interview with Allison Colpoys can be found here on The Design Files) Neither Mansfield or Blainey’s book would have quite the impact in digital form, though with digital book design still in its relative infancy we can surely expect astonishing work to emerge on that front in the next few years as developers begin to harness the medium to enhance the reading experience rather than simply present a digitized version of the print form.

A digital/beautiful object symbiosis is already happening in some quarters. American publisher McSweeney’s is well known and much lauded for their commitment to attractively produced print books, with their quarterly always an eye-opener. They have begun releasing enhanced digital versions of certain novels and are rumoured to be working on several groundbreaking digital projects that will attempt to blend the physical and digital world through reading, whilst maintaining the standard of beauty and design for which they have won awards.

Meanjin too has made significant inroads in recent years to creating a physical and digital juxtaposition that provides a satisfying experience for those who get a thrill from running their fingertips along several years worth of attractive issues on a bookshelf but who also desire a significant digital footprint that does not compromise aesthetic standards. Legendary Australian designer Jenny Grigg is responsible for the current Meanjin design ethos, following the extraordinary Chase and Galley era under former editor Sophie Cunningham. Despite the naysayers, it seems printed books will be with us for some time, though Andrew Motion is correct to point out they must be beautiful in order to survive (and in order to merit the cost of printing). The love for and evolution of digital books into desirable properties that illuminate our tablet screens is also worth keeping an eye on, for it is beauty itself that endures, irrespective of its form.

Review: Pat Grant's 'Blue'

2012-04-24T11:06:23Z

Pat Grant’s Blue is a tale of the fictional Australia east coast industrial town Bolton and of the protagonist, Christian’s, experience growing up there. As an adult, Christian is a council worker, but at thirteen he was hanging out with his buddies Verne and Muck. The novel follows a day in the life of Christian and his friends, wagging school in search of a wave or a dead body they hear is splattered across the train tracks. But there are also strong allegorically themes of immigration, racism and localism throughout Blue. These ideas are conveyed through a secondary narrative running parallel to Christian’s, that of the newly arrived tentacled blue aliens and the impact they have on Bolton.

The narratives work in tandem, each adding new depths to the other, though they can of course be read as separate stories, allowing the reader to focus on whichever interests them more or whichever their unconscious reading of the book gravitates towards. Whether this was intentional or not on Grant’s part, it is one of the core strengths of Blue.

Blue is very much a surf comic (though there is next to no surfing depicted within its pages). Grant replicates panels from the infamous surf comic Gonad Man (one of Grant’s inspirations for Blue) that the kids read at the newsagency as they ‘surf’ the comic rack, otherwise, the only actual ‘surf’ sequence is near the beginning of the book when the adult protagonist Christian reminisces about his youth as a surfer. This is the first very obvious display of Grant’s control of story and panel flow. Over five pages Grant takes the reader from Christian today through ‘the surf of time’ to his youth and to the day when the core story of Blue takes place. Its used to great effect, forward moving cartooning whilst winding the clock back and vice versa, as the present and the past are bound through a thought balloon of surfing happened and surfing that could happen.

There is a strange duality Grant creates with words and picture. The art looks very fluid and natural, yet is very deliberate. And this is reflected in the writing. The youths’ dialogue, a barrage of cussing and colloquialisms are almost interchangeable—they could be saying anything as long as it holds the same rhythm. This is an aspect of Blue in which Grant is very successful, the dialogue closely reflects the fluidity of the line work.

The art is limited to black and white with splashes of blues and sepia tones. Restraint is evident throughout the book as Grant’s busy-looking pages are actually given lots of room to breathe. He isn’t afraid to utilise the landscape format of the book to maximum potential, happy to have wordless double page spreads and not to rush the story.

Blue should feel slight as a book due to the speed that it can be read. But it never feels that way, which again is a testament to Grant’s storytelling abilities, the narrative is sparce and considered. It also doesn’t hurt how well packaged Blue is with high production values and design sense.

At the end of the book there is an extensive essay written by Grant that is part personal history and personal comics history; part surf comics history and part Australian comics history. In this essay Grant states ‘Truth be told, I’m not a very good pop-culture historian.’ In actual fact he is quite good but this could be due largely to his control of the written word.

The ending to Blue is left open, which is fitting considering the focus of the book is a discussion on racism and immigration in Australia, a continuing debate.

And the Award for the Best Graphic Novel goes to…

2012-04-23T17:03:18Z

Literary Awards are front and centre in culture news feeds at the moment. The indignation about the abrupt cancellation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards was quickly followed by the New South Wales government pledging continued support of their own award, a kind of ‘yah boo sucks’ to their rivals in the north. On April 26th the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards will be thrown open for submissions—this year categories include Fiction, Non Fiction, Drama, Poetry, Young Adult, Unpublished Manuscript and Indigenous Writing. That just about covers everything, right?

Not quite. Given the superb graphic novels written for adults that have appeared in Australia in recent times, a gap is beginning to form in awards categories that will at some point have to be addressed. Graphic novels may not have as rich a history in Australia as in the American market but we are beginning to see some beautiful publications written and drawn by uniquely talented artists who fall between the cracks of classification.

Technically graphic novels fall under the purview of fiction but it is hard to imagine any awards judge shortlisting Mandy Ord, Nicki Greenberg, Pat Grant or Bruce Mutard ahead of the Careys and Grenvilles of this world, let alone handing them a much-needed winner’s cheque. Those graphic writers/artists whose work can in any way be classified as being suitable for children are hastily diverted in the direction of kids’ awards, even if their books are largely bought and enjoyed by adults (my suspicion is that Shaun Tan is read by more adults than children—tell me I’m wrong).

Admittedly, the current small output of Australian graphic novels would mean that a shortlist of say, six, would some years be tricky to fill and be largely dominated by Allen and Unwin titles but that doesn’t mean pioneers in a form that is much more adaptable and appealing on digital devices than straight text should be punished, or at the very least ignored.

Pat Grant’s wondrous 96 page hardback graphic novel Blue is a prime example of a book that were it released as a text only debut novel, would have critics lauding the writer as the new Nam Le, or whomever else debut novelists are compared to these days. Instead, Blue’s chances of appearing on the various Premiers’ Awards shortlists are close to zero.

One of the few Australian books to tackle the issue of racism towards boat people (is it currently the only one?) Blue is set in the fictional coastal surf town of Bolton and follows the story of three teenagers who skip school to check out the grisly corpse of a blue, tentacled alien immigrant who has come a cropper on the railway lines. In his much-lauded press release, Grant flippantly describes the book as “District 9 meets Stand By Me.” He goes on to say, “the story is part science fiction part autobiography. It was inspired by my first-hand experience of the infamous race riot on Cronulla Beach in Sydney in 2005.” A far cry, then, from the 20th Century melodramas that have a tendency to populate awards shortlists.

Grant’s project is an unusual collaboration between Giramondo, US outfit Top Shelf Productions and Grant himself, all of whom contributed to the production costs. In a sobering blog post, Grant gives a complete and honest breakdown of the money situation. His print run of 3000 copies cost $11746.75, added to which were $1197.95 in marketing costs, meaning the project came in at just under thirteen grand. If the entire print run sells out, Grant stands to make a profit of $2152.00, for twenty months work. That’s sixty-two cents an hour.

Such dedication to the craft should be rewarded, despite what Premier Newman thinks. Pat Grant’s Blue is exactly the sort of book we should be producing in contemporary Australia—politically and socially relevant, satirical, aesthetically beautiful and deserving of a prize.

Don't Fear the Reaper

2012-04-19T15:36:02Z

Facebook’s recent purchase of the mobile photo sharing app Instagram for the brain-searing sum of (US) one billion dollars, just about sent certain sections of the internet into an apoplectic meltdown. Setting aside the speculative reporting centred on the looming tech bust that this sort of buying would appear to point to, the web was quickly flush with opinion pieces and irate Twitter updates bemoaning the fact that users' previously somewhat underground photo sharing community of 30 million was going to be absorbed, turducken-like, into Facebook’s behemoth all-you-can-eat product buffet. That Instagram was no longer cool now that it was set to go exponentially mainstream and welcome around 800 million new Facebook users to its fold. This means that your mother will soon add photo filters to the next snaps she emails you of her herb garden. And I mean, this is terrible. This stuff is really, really bad. People being able to play around with filters on their mobile phone photos? This stuff is the end of the world.

Or you would think, judging from some of the reactions (some of which were also hilarious) that greeted the acquisition. The most interesting thing about these kinds of changes taking place on the internet is how transparently, and in real time, they reveal the deep resistance and distain that many people harbour for change.

The New York Times Magazine recently devoted a sizeable feature to the effect Twitter and the Web have had on cultural currency, where the writer bemoaned the sudden lack of worth of her music collection. In short, that a culture of plenty has rendered scarcity obsolete; that a hard-earned knowledge of cult artists is now meaningless thanks to Google. It contained the particularly cringe-worthy passage:

“That the bands were often lousy didn’t matter to us. What mattered to us was that noone knew anything about them.”

If your sense of self is intimately tied to how much arcane knowledge you can accrue about pop culture, then yes, you will feel assailed by these changes. And you will need, evidently, several published pages in which to elucidate why the inexorable march of time leaves you feeling like you aren’t cool anymore. James Murphy already did that with a single, masterfully self-aware pop song.

But there’s more going on here than the just cool kids feeling threatened by squares, more than the old people resenting their hipper youngers. There’s a palpable sense of a more ferocious iteration of ‘get off my lawn’; that Janie-come-latelies should stay in their place. Don’t call yourself a photographer just because you use Instagram, is how this reasoning goes. Never mind that the majority of people use Instagram as a form of self-expression to share among their immediate friends; that they are playing, literally, with tiny aesthetic choices which they find personally pleasing. But hey, don’t call yourself an artist! Okay? We can only have so many artists, apparently.

Author Dom Knight wrote recently of Instagram, “I’d rather take the best possible representative photo without any cheesy effects, so that the emphasis is on the subject rather than the whizzbang filters. I’ve no real need for a 1977 filter, since I already have actual photos from 1977, that being the year of my birth.” This manages to convey both the inherent superiority that ‘being there’ at the time automatically confers, while also placing authenticity above all other measures of worth. The solution here is simple: don’t use Instagram. As it happens, he writes later in the same paragraph, “… despite having downloaded Instagram, I’ve barely used it,” which makes the decision to write at length about its inherent lack of worth in a piece called “I Am So Over Instagram” illogical.

A lack of knowledge of the technology being critiqued is evidently not a reason to not espouse your thoughts on it. Aaron Sorkin deigned to use Facebook for a two-week research period in preparing to write the almost hysterically overwrought Social Network. He compared it unfavourably to reality TV, as only two weeks of cursory use will allow. Jonathan Franzen will call Twitter the antithesis of in-depth thought without so much as being connected to the Internet. Roger Ebert is happy to declare video games exempt from the “real art” canon without ever having played one. All these failures of imagination seem to spring from an age old knee-jerk reaction to the New: it is far easier, and takes less time, to dismiss something foreign outright than to properly interrogate and investigate it.

The democratization of technologies threatens the pre-existing order, whichever form that order takes. It dissolves a degree of the privilege once required to engage in certain spheres when the tools drop in price from several thousand dollars to a few hundred, as is the case with mobile photography. You don’t need thousands of dollars' worth of gear to take a photo worthy of an international photography prize. You do need balls and an eye for composition and the ability to capture a fleeting moment — the hallmarks of all great photographers.

Technologies which allow huge numbers of people to pursue vocations that were once extremely specialised narrow the digital divide, though never completely. We’ve seen this argument play out in the media several times already: that blogging isn’t real writing; that noone will listen to mp3s; that online reporters could never do the job of print journalists; that shooting on digital formats will never produce the warm authenticity of film; that using Final Cut Pro doesn’t make you an editor; that ereaders are terrible for literature. All are arguments which even the slightest interrogations reveal to be hollow. The proof is all around you, in all the media you consume, and in all the legacy media properties grappling to stave off their own deaths which are now coming about for their having succumbed, stunned and inert, to the shock of the new.

Almost without exception the voices which are loudest in these debates are those whose vested interests are in preserving the pre-existing order in which their previously specialised knowledge was vital. It’s a debate that can be very similar in tenor to those which argue for the vitality of criticism: it’s rarely the audience who digests the resulting criticism who argues for the importance of its ongoing existence; it’s critics.

This is circular logic par excellence. These threats are particularly strongly felt by people whose careers are built on specialised knowledge. But what if noone will pay you for that knowledge anymore, now that everyone has access to it? News breaks on Twitter. Blog writers have supplanted professional critics. Directors get hired from their self-produced reels cut in iMovie and uploaded to Vimeo. A best selling record can be cut in someone’s bedroom. Uni students mod around with a video game and get hired by a studio. Someone sits at home and painstakingly puts Cassini and Voyager images to music that you can then watch, incredibly, from the discomfort of your desk at work.

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

So best to cry about how these kinds of people are all unworthy amateurs as a way to argue your case, then. By all means contribute to your own inevitable obsolescence, it will make it easier for us to step over your corpses (just like the kids learning Photoshop in primary school right now are poised to climb over ours). Otherwise, adapt or die: this adage has been true since the invention of the printing press. It wasn’t by accident that one of the first mainstream blog publishing platforms named itself after Moveable Type.

In an ideal scenario, the fact that almost anyone can produce almost anything should mean that everyone making stuff just has to do better, be better. There are so many more voices, still only the truly great ones will travel far, and to be heard you have to be just that much better than you used to have to be. The cream rising to the top today should in theory be the tastiest cream to have ever existed.

Newness should be embraced, investigated, integrated and then only if truly rigorously tested, discarded if found to be lacking. Not dismissed outright without even the pretence of real engagement. Come on baby, don’t fear the reaper. You can’t just turn everyone away from the party, it’s too late. They’re already here and they like it so much now that they live in your house.

No one wants to come to a place where their hard earned knowledge and experience means less, suddenly, than it did. But that’s progress. It’s tough. It means always being open to new ways of working if you want to survive. It means changing some of the ways in which you have always thought and behaved. It means that it isn’t the specialised tools anymore — or your place in the world, the access you had to education, the money you were born into, the connections you have — those things now matter so much less, though of course they always bestow an advantage. It’s the strength of ideas that is what counts now, what is valuable. Anyone can have a brilliant idea. And some brilliant ideas are worth one billion dollars.

Ready Player One

2012-04-18T17:35:43Z

With the worldwide videogame industry valued at roughly $65 billion, it is a wonder there is not more fiction on the subject. The paucity of gaming stories perhaps goes some way to explaining the runaway success of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, which despite not having touched a console in almost a decade, was easily one of the most enjoyable books I read last year. The plethora of puff quotes covering the first three pages are quirky and quite different from the normal rhapsodizing/back slapping.

“If this book were a living room, it would be wood-panelled. If it were shoes, it would be high-tops. And if it were a song, well, it would have to be Eye of the Tiger. I really, really loved it.” That from Daniel H. Wilson, who wrote Robopocalypse (soon to be a Spielberg movie). Other blurbs are similar in tone: “…like a dream my 13 year-old self would have after bingeing on Pop Rocks and Coke.” (Charles Ardai) “Cline’s novel is a nerdcore odyssey; engaging and fun, this Gen-X popcult thrillride drew me in like a Galaxian machine set to free play.” (James Swallow)

Ready Player One is an extremely rare beast, the sort of novel that makes readers wonder why it hasn’t been written before and makes writers kick themselves for not thinking of it first. It is a seamless blend of light sci-fi, wry humour and 1980s pop culture references written in a friendly, literary tone. Imagine a blend of Douglas Adams and Lorrie Moore, if you can, or a more playful William Gibson. Cline may be a total geek, but he’s a genuinely great writer and it comes as a huge relief to find a novel set in the gaming world that has some literary chops.

The plot is part delicious satire, part nerd fantasy, part action adventure. Thirty years from now the planet is wrecked and us wretched humans spend all our time plugged into the OASIS, a beefed-up version of the Internet a little like the Matrix, only benevolent and with more infinite possibilities. Kids go to school in the OASIS and receive a much better education than they could in reality. Users can travel between worlds on their own spacecraft. You can ride around on a dragon if you like, and it all seems totally real. The utopian aspect of the OASIS stems from its founder, the Steve Jobs-esque James Halliday. He has kept it free for all to use, and free from corporate influence. Halliday is adored by billions of users and despised by Innovative Online Industries (IOI) who are desperate to wrest control of the system away from him in order to monetize it.

When Halliday dies heirless, he leaves a short video will indicating that he has left an ‘Easter Egg’ somewhere in the OASIS. The person who finds it and unlocks the puzzles within will inherit control of OASIS, not to mention a huge fortune. The problem is that OASIS is truly vast, and Halliday’s obsession with 80s pop culture is impenetrable to most denizens of 2044. Years pass, and the will is considered a wry hoax. Enter our hero, teenage gamer Wade Watts, whose knowledge of old video games enables him to understand Halliday’s conundrums. With the first puzzle solved, his name shoots to the top of an old scoreboard on Halliday’s homepage and he attains instant fame. Now he must solve several other riddles with millions of rival gamers and IOI breathing down his neck.

Cline has been clever enough to recognize that Gen X’ers love nostalgia and thus the book is structured to cash in on a bewildering array of juicy pop culture references. Watts must, for example, re-enact the entire plot of 80s movie Wargames by saying all of Matthew Broderick’s lines and later play a perfect game of Pacman. One glimpse of the author on his kooky website will explain everything. A former poetry slam champion, Cline now owns a Delorean, which he has tricked out with a Back to the Future flux capacitor and a Knight Rider on-board computer. He drives around in it dressed as a Ghostbuster. If this sounds unlikely, visit his car’s website and blog here.

Tapping into a niche of game playing readers has proven fruitful for the affable Cline, with the book fast hitting the New York Times bestseller list and a movie option picked up by Warner Bros. It’s not just fans of 80s nostalgia who are riffing on the novel’s many joys either – the book has been a huge hit with teenage boys too, not an easy readership to capture. If you live with one, buy him Ready Player One and watch him devour it, though be warned—you will too thanks to Cline’s successful navigation of the cross-generational divide. To be fair though, he did have a time travelling Delorean.

The Sour Hatchet

2012-04-16T16:44:33Z

Are review pages a forum for bitter writers to criticize the popular culture they are currently missing out on being a part of? As a casual reviewer myself I’m beginning to wonder if I’m just not mean enough to be cut out for the task. On 7th February the first annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award was given out to Adam Mars-Jones for his review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, a book I will readily confess to enjoying immensely. The Hatchet Job is for, “the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months. It aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote honesty and wit in literary journalism.”

Fair enough — I’m all for a bit more honesty and wit, especially in the review pages, which can too often be odious glad handling and back patting rather than the objective critical viewpoint we’d perhaps expect from journalists and professional critics. But there is something troublesome in The Hatchet Job’s mission statement — shouldn’t book reviews, and call me crazy here if you like, be about the books? What purpose can be served in a review that is designed to ‘raise the profile’ of the person penning it? Honesty and wit are surely qualities that reviewers can include in their missives without making it all about them. Whilst no one will argue that a review is always a personal opinion, should that opinion not be limited to a personal opinion of the book in hand, as opposed to the reviewer’s opinion of the author’s proclivities, or indeed, their own?

I mention this because an alarming number of reviews I have read subsequent to the publicity around The Hatchet Job seem to have been written in the spirit of sour grapes and exhibit an amount of personal axe-grinding that seems more prevalent than usual. Two interesting examples are David Gates’ review of Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper in the New York Times, and more recently Neil Genzlinger’s review of Game of Thrones season two (which, yes, is a TV show based on a series of books). The tone and content of these reviews makes me wonder if the allure of The Hatchet Job is having a detrimental effect on the art of reviewing by encouraging snark.

Firstly, to Adam Mars-Jones, this year’s winner. The review is not nearly as witty as I had been led to believe. In fact, it seems to be full of Mars-Jones dispensing advice to Cunningham, since he clearly believes himself to be the superior talent. Mars-Jones takes exception to the many literary references in By Nightfall, as he feels Cunningham is showing off. Despite feeling they were too ‘explicit’, I’ll cop to having noticed precious few of them. I am thus doubly grateful to Mars-Jones for pointing out how pretentious Cunningham supposedly is whilst also managing to tell me how stupid I am as a reader. He goes on to question how Cunningham deals with his protagonist’s sexuality (not very well, apparently) and ridicule how Cunningham writes about art (the protagonist is an art dealer) whilst hating on the use of words like ‘prone’. Judge for yourselves, but for my money it is a review that says precious little about the book, quite a lot about how hopeless Michael Cunningham is, and volumes about just how clever Adam Mars-Jones believes himself to be.

The Street Sweeper may have been longlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin whilst selling a huge amount of copies but that didn’t stop author David Gates from eviscerating it in the Times. Gates claims his annotated copy of Perlman’s latest could serve as, “a textbook on how not to write fiction,” since he clearly knows much better than Perlman, who has, despite not having a clue how to write books, a string of awards and nominations to his name, not to mention a sales record that most authors would love. Any pertinent criticisms Gates has are sadly buried under an avalanche of bile as he repeatedly attacks everyone involved with the book – publishers, editors and of course, Perlman himself, “a writer who, whether through inattention or inability, hasn’t engaged effectively with his characters or his language, who won’t or can’t take the work of fiction seriously.” Gates is evidently taking his own fiction writing very seriously indeed – both of his own novels were released in the 1990s and he has not written one since. He teaches in several graduate writing programs at American institutions, which is apt given his style of reviewing is more akin to a lecture than a newspaper article.

Theatre critic Neil Genzlinger manages to insult millions of people with his recent review of Game of Thrones, no easy task for a critic but one he takes to with relish in an offhand dismissal of what is one of the most satisfying TV shows to be broadcast in years. Genzlinger comes perilously close to calling readers of the George R.R. Martin fantasy series a bunch of morons, its fan base made up of “Dungeons and Dragons types” with a “fairly low reward threshold”. It’s staggeringly snippy stuff for a publication with the reputation of the Times to be printing and offers virtually nothing in the way of critical analysis. Genzlinger seems content to complain about the abundance of sex, violence and characters on the show, which leave him confused and frustrated. I came away from the review knowing a lot more about Mr. Glenzinger than I did about the second season of Game of Thrones but perhaps that is the point. In penning these scathing ‘reviews’, Adam Mars-Jones, David Gates and Neil Genzlinger have all used news media platforms to do little more than raise their own profiles.

Rekal, Inc.

2012-04-12T17:25:23Z

‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ is a short 1966 novella by Philip K. Dick in which everyman Douglas Quail, bored with his humdrum existence, visits Rekal Incorporated, an agency that for a fee will implant false memories in lieu of a sending you on a real vacation. When Quail chooses a secret agent memory stream the implant malfunctions, as it seems he actually used to be a secret agent who has subsequently had his memory erased. Thus begins an identity crisis in which nothing, not even reality, can be taken for granted any longer.

This is classic Philip K. Dick material. Dick was a prolific, award-winning writer who died in 1982, aged only 53. During his brief career he wrote 44 novels and 120 short stories, only one of which he saw adapted to the big screen— Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—filmed as the all conquering, enormously influential Blade Runner. Dick managed to see some of the rushes during production but sadly died before it was released. His work has proven to be a treasure trove for filmmakers ever since, with movies such as The Adjustment Bureau, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, Next and Screamers all stemming from Dick stories, with varying degrees of success. Strangely, one of his most popular novels, Ubik, which was included on Time magazine’s 2005 list of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923, has never been adapted. Several directors have expressed interest over the years and Dick himself wrote a bizarre Ubik screenplay in 1974 but nothing concrete has ever emerged. Michel Gondry is the latest name connected to the project.

If the storyline to ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ sounds familiar, it is because former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in the 1990 film version Total Recall. In addition to the protagonist’s awkward surname changing from ‘Quail’ to the much tougher sounding ‘Quaid’ (amazing what a hard ‘d’ can do), the action packed Total Recall bears little resemblance to the original story, outside of the central premise. As you might imagine with a Schwarzenegger flick, the story of its making is equally extraordinary.

The original screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (who famously wrote Alien) spent most of the 1980s in development hell before it became a Schwarzenegger vehicle. The script endured 43 drafts all up, including 12 by David Cronenberg, who was dropped when his version steered too close to the original Dick story. He also wanted to cast William Hurt in the lead role (Richard Dreyfuss and Patrick Swayze had already been considered). The project was finally greenlit once the Austrian oak got his considerable mitts on it. Total Recall was one of the last major Hollywood productions to use miniaturized effects rather than computer generated ones. The only sequence in the movie shot in CGI is where Quaid walks through an X-ray machine that reveals his concealed weapon. In the now ubiquitous tradition of science fiction blockbusters, the film was an enormous success, grossing over $250 million worldwide, a lot of money back in 1990.

A sequel was written, casting Quaid as a reformed lawman who captured criminals before they could commit the murders clairvoyant mutants predicted. Sound familiar? It was based on another Dick story ‘The Minority Report’ (1956). Never filmed, the screenplay knocked around for a while before being adapted into a more faithful standalone version of the Dick tale and released in 2002 by Steven Spielberg. The movie version of the story has the central character of Anderton played by a very fit and handsome Tom Cruise. In the original story Anderton is in his fifties, balding and smokes a pipe.

Coming full circle, there is a new version of Totall Recall due out in August. It is apparently much more faithful to the original story, though the amount of karate in the trailer would indicate otherwise. What’s interesting is how similar the production values are to those of Spielberg’s Minority Report, grey and drained of colour. Colin Farrell is in both movies, providing another link. With a production budget reported to be close to $200 million it is astonishing to note that movies now routinely cost what they used to gross. This time the action is set entirely on Earth and incorporates much more of Dick’s political upheaval themes, with Quaid trying to bring down a corrupt joint European and American government who keep citizens in check with severe austerity measures. Yet again, this is all sounding awfully familiar. Perhaps the reality of today’s citizenry will provide memory fodder for tomorrow’s bored, unwitting secret agents. Where he alive today, it would not be much of a surprise to Philip K. Dick. He knew all this would happen fifty years ago.

Link to Total Recall trailer

Link to hilarious Total Recall 1990 trailer: Lines to watch out for— “He’s got a hologram!” and “Consider that a divorce.”