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Meanland Extract: Bookless shelves and ‘Myspace or whatever’

2010-09-08T16:29:24Z

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. – Tom Robbins

Martin Hughes and Zoe Dattner interviewed Richard Nash at the Wheeler Centre and replayed the interview on RRR’s Max Headroom on 22 July 2010. Due to the miracle of modern technology, I listened to it the other day.

Richard Nash described print-books as ‘talismanic things’ that were passed between loved ones with the same emotional sensibility and heirloom potential as ‘a piece of jewellery’. He said, ‘Bookshelves are a kind of way of telegraphing to a person that comes in our front door for the first time, who we are.’

Zoe Dattner asserted that it’s the stories that matter, not the books themselves. In the ebook/e-reader future: ‘Bookshelves will just be called shelves and we’ll put all sorts of stuff on there so when we go to people’s houses we’ll still do that stuff – or their Myspace page or whatever – there will be lots of spaces where we can display that kind of personal expression of ourselves …’

Ah Zoe, you break my heart.

The book, the old fashioned print-book, is not a download. It’s not words on a screen. I have nothing against online publishing. Look, here I am, publishing online. I love the Internet. But the online book and e-reader type device is not a print-book; they are different beasts and I think it’s a kind of tragedy to imagine, as Zoe suggests, that there’s no need for both. Why does electronic technology have to obliterate the material, papery, dog-eared artefact? I agree with Richard Nash. The artefact of the book has a meaning, it is a jewel.

Imagine this: I’m 20-something and standing in front of the bookshelf explaining to my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend that the difference between he and I, is ‘all these books, all these books are inside me, they’ve informed me, shaped my thinking either by osmosis or rejection or examination or some kind of tunnel I’ve been through. An initiation. And not just the words but the circumstances around the words – everything I brought to the words at the time. All these books are places I’ve been without you – and they matter.’

Read the rest of this post over at Meanland.

Man Booker Prize Shortlist 2010

2010-09-08T09:25:23Z

The shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize has been announced – Carey is in (with a chance at winning the Booker for a record three times) but unfortunately longlisted Christos Tsiolkas didn’t make it. The winner, announced on Oct 12, will receive £50 000. The six shortlisted titles are as follows:

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Room by Emma Donoghue
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
The Finkler Question Howard Jacobson
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
C by Tom McCarthy

Keeping Secrets

2010-09-07T16:13:36Z

This morning I watched a TED Talk by the bright and enthusiastic (at least from this one talk) Derek Sivers. Like every other TED talk I’ve watched, it spoke very immediately to a practise that I’ve been guilty of, but never quite realised I was doing: telling people my goals and then completely failing to achieve them.

According to Sivers (and psychological research stretching back to the 1920s) the act of telling people about something you are planning to do greatly decreases the chance of you doing it. The reason is simple once you think about it. By telling people what you are planning to do, you are already receiving some positive social feedback regarding that activity. Your friends are already enthusiastic and congratulatory: ‘Wow, that’s great/good on you/good luck!’ Some of the satisfaction in being recognised as a success by your peers has already been transferred to you, and you feel less inclined to actually do whatever it was you’ve planned.

While Sivers’ example is that of, say, losing weight, I think it applies equally to creative projects. While I acknowledge that the support of a writing group or artistic collective can be a great thing (my own output has certainly increased since joining one), it can also be dangerous in that here are people that really want to hear your ideas. They want to see you succeed, and spilling the beans can be awfully tempting. I recently did something really dumb: I had two seeds of stories half-drafted for Twelfth Planet Press’ Speakeasy anthology and I announced this fact at my writing group, and then again on Twitter. Congratulations and admiration all round, except then I didn’t feel like finishing them. There was no real reason why at the time, just a sudden lack of motivation. I’m fairly certain that what I experienced was exactly what Sivers is talking about, and looking back I can see a lot of points in time where I’ve boasted things and then failed to follow through. Conversely, recent occasions where I have decided to do something and just got on with it have proved to be very fruitful (the most recent examples of which I can’t tell you about, as they are ongoing and I don’t want to jinx myself).

So in the future, I’m going to try and maintain a balance in my goal-setting. I’m going to get as far as I can on the back of my own motivation, and if I run out of steam that way, I can always rely on my friends and peers to give me a pick-me-up (or a ‘put this down and walk away’, if it’s truly awful).

Cross-posted from Tooth Soup.

Announcing the Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize 2010

2010-09-07T13:02:37Z

The Dorothy Porter Prize – for the best poem accepted for publication in Meanjin by our poetry editor Judith Beveridge – is on again for 2010.

The winner, selected by judges Andrea Goldsmith and Felicity Plunkett, will be announced at one of Meanjin’s special anniversary events in December this year, and receive a cash prize of $1000.

Goldsmith is the author of five books, including Reunion and Under the Knife. Felicity Plunkett is the Poetry Editor at University of Queensland Press and her most recent collection, Vanishing Point, is shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.

Dorothy Porter was one of Australia’s finest writers. Two of her verse novels, What a Piece of Work and Wild Surmise, were short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award – Wild Surmise alongside partner Goldsmith’s novel, The Prosperous Thief – and another, El Dorado, was short-listed for the 2008 Prime Minister’s Awards. Porter and Goldsmith were partners for 14 years and lived together in Melbourne until Porter’s death in 2008. Meanjin is proud to be able to run this prize once again in her memory, along with her agent and co-sponsor Jenny Darling & Associates.

Last year’s winner was Jean Kent for ‘The Polish Guitarist’s First Paris Concert’.

Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Winners 2010

2010-09-07T12:34:52Z

Here are the winners for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards 2010.

Fiction Book Award

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

Emerging Queensland Author – Manuscript Award

RPM by Noel Mengel

Unpublished Indigenous Writer – Arts Queensland David Unaipon Award

Purple Threads by Jeanine Leane

Non-Fiction Book Award

The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir by Mark Tredinnick

History Book – Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland Award

Sydney Harbour: A history by Ian Hoskins

Children’s Book – Mary Ryan’s Award

Toppling by Sally Murphy, illustrated by Rhian Nest James

Young Adult Book Award

Drink the Air by Richard Yaxley

Science Writer Award

Catching Cancer by Sonya Pemberton

Poetry Collection – Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award

Apocrypha by Peter Boyle

Australian Short Story Collection – Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award

Little White Slips by Karen Hitchcock

Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate – The Harry Williams Award

Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change by Clive Hamilton

Film Script – Screen Queensland Award

South Solitary by Shirley Barrett

Drama Script (Stage) Award

Whore by Rick Viede

Television Script – QUT Creative Industries Award

Sisters of War by John Misto

Meanland extract: Copyright vs Creativity

2010-09-07T12:23:23Z

Cory Doctorow spoke in Melbourne on Thursday night as part of the Meanland and Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Big Ideas’ lecture series. For those unable to attend, I have transcribed below as much as I could from my indecipherable notes on the lecture, ‘Copyright vs Creativity’.

Rule number 1: If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit.

Digital locks are there to prevent unauthorised copies of digital works. However, warns Doctorow, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is there to reinforce the greatest lie: DRM exists to help you (the artist) and contain losses to piracy. Most countries have laws that prohibit breaking technology (or breaking DRM). You as an owner of a device cannot remove DRM from anything you’ve purchased for that device.

In actual fact, what it does is stop creators from authorising users across platforms, or having audiences across platforms. Therefore, we have a situation where creators are locked-in to distribution. It used to be that copyright belonged to people who created things. Now we live in a world where creators – and audiences – are locked-in to both distribution and platform.

‘Imagine audiences buy your books through the iPad,’ Doctorow put to the audience. As a creator, you could not authorise users to move to the Kindle if, for some reason, you decided to move platforms (or distributor). ‘It would be like Borders telling customers they could only use Ikea bookcases on which to shelve their books.’ If you as creator decide to change stores, you have to be certain that all those customers will follow – meaning they have to throw away all of their old books and buy new ones, or be satisfied owning parallel collections. He gave, as an example, the millions of apps touted for iPads and iPhones. On average, most of these app creators make very little, but can’t afford to go somewhere other than Apple because they risk alienating their audiences.

Read the rest of this post over at Meanland.

Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Shortlists 2010

2010-09-07T12:18:28Z

Here are the shortlists for this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, which are now administered by the Wheeler Centre.

The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction ($30,000)

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

The Bath Fugues by Brian Castro,

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

Truth by Peter Temple

The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction ($30,000)

Popeye Never Told You: Childhood Memories of the War by Rodney Hall

A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty by Kirsten McKenzie

Captain Cook Was Here by Maria Nugent

Otherland: A Journey With My Daughter by Maria Tumarkin

Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life by Brenda Walker

The Young Adult Fiction Prize ($15,000)

Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar

Swerve by Phillip Gwynne

Beatle Meets Destiny by Gabrielle Williams

The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry ($15,000)

Beneath Our Armour by Peter Bakowski

Possession by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

The Adoption Order by Ian McBryde

The Louis Esson Prize for Drama ($15,000)

Moth by Declan Greene

And No More Shall We Part by Tom Holloway

Furious Mattress by Melissa Reeves

The Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate ($15,000)

‘Patriot Acts’ by Waleed Aly, The Monthly

‘Stupid Money’ by Gideon Haigh, Griffith Review

‘Seeing Truganini’ by David Hansen, Australian Book Review

The Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer ($15,000)

Winsome of Rangoon by Michelle Aung Thin

House of Sticks by Peggy Frew

Cambodia Darkness and Light by Andrew Nette

The John Curtin Prize for Journalism ($15,000)

‘Shutting Down Sharleen’ by Eurydice Aroney and Tom Morton, Hindsight, ABC Radio National

‘Who Killed Mr Ward?’ by Janine Cohen and Liz Jackson, Four Corners, ABC Television

‘Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull’ by Annabel Crabb, Quarterly Essay

The Prize for First Book of History ($15,000)

From Superwoman to Domestic Goddesses: the Rise and Fall of Feminism by Natasha Campo

Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 by Clare Corbould

Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France by Julie Kalman

The Prize for Indigenous Writing ($15,000)

Legacy by Larissa Behrendt

Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth

Hey Mum, What’s a Half-Caste? by Lorraine McGee-Sippel

Six questions for Chris Womersley

2010-08-26T10:41:37Z

Chris Womersley’s debut novel, The Low Road, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book in 2008. His latest, Bereft has just been released by Scribe and will be launched at Readings on September 15. Spike sat down with him across the digital divide to talk about ghost stories, Tom Waits and what it would be like to have an army of trained typing monkeys. Chris’s essay on the role of place in fiction, ‘No Place Like Home’, appears in the current Spring edition of Meanjin.

What’s a typical day spent writing like for you? Can you describe your routine?

Routine? God, I wish… My wife and I share work and parenting responsibilities; at the moment I only have one whole day when I am not working my day job or parenting our three-year-old son, in which I am free to write. The rest of the time I write at night for a few hours after work or after my son has gone to bed. While writing ‘Bereft’, I was getting up at 4am to get a few hours done before the tyke woke up, but that craziness has since fallen by the wayside. Lucky I have my trained monkeys who can type some things up for me.

I haven’t yet started a new novel, but have instead a few short stories that I am trying to get up and running, with limited success. Although I can’t write with music on, I like to put some on while I’m booting up my computer and settling down, just to get me in the mood. I often think of a story in terms of a style of music or a particular song; I was intrigued by Christopher Hitchens’ recent observation in an interview with Jennifer Byrne that those who write fiction are often also music lovers.

The short story I am working on at the moment (currently called ‘A lovely and terrible thing’) is about a strange, floating girl. I have been listening a bit to Coco Rosie, who have that frail and ramshackle beauty I am striving for in this particular story.

Tell us about your writing tools – what do you prefer? Parchment or pen, Olivetti or iPad?

These days I tend to make notes about things – words, phrases, story ideas – in a notebook or on a scrap of paper, then type directly into the computer. Failing that, I speak into a dictaphone and hand that over to my army of trained monkeys who type it all up for me in the dead of night. Then I go through that again and try to make sense of it all.

Just kidding. I don’t really have an army of trained monkeys. It’s probably just a battalion. A division? Anyway, I guess there’s 20 of them, working on a rotating basis so they don’t get tired and screw up and mistype things. ‘Bereft’ was, for some time, known as ‘Berft’, which is not even a word! Stupid creatures.

How did the idea for Bereft begin?

The basic premise for ‘Bereft’ — of a man who meets a young girl he comes to believe is the ghost of his murdered sister — was always very strong. It was a matter of finding a setting for the novel and the period of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919 — in which tens of millions of people around the world died — snagged my attention. I decided to use the pandemic and the post-WWI setting as the background — the ‘Triumph of Death’ meets ‘Wuthering Heights’ in the Australian bush, with a soundtrack by Tom Waits, if you can imagine such a thing. And if you can’t imagine such a thing, then read ‘Bereft’, for I have done the imagining for you.

Did you do much research for the novel? How did you go about it?

Initially, I intended ‘Bereft’ to be set in a real place and envisaged myself hanging around in the historical societies of small country towns digging through musty archives and maps and old newspapers and things. I find, however, that I work far better when my imagination is allowed to break free from reality, and attempting to cleave to historical realism bored me. I like character and story. Added to which, I have to work for a living and can’t really spare the time researching.

Having said that, I read a fair bit about the period. Obviously I had to get my facts straight in regards to WWI and the battles in which my main character Quinn in which might have fought. Les Carlyon’s ‘The Great War’ was the prime material for that. But ‘Bereft’ is, in part, a ghost story and one of the interesting things about the period was the rise in Spiritualism, so I read a fair bit in that area: Marina Warner’s ‘Phantasmagoria’ and Martyn Jolly’s ‘Faces of the Living Dead’ (on the rise of spirit photography) were both important sources of inspiration. I also read old newspapers online in order to get the flavour of how people might have spoken, or for little details like the types of cold remedies advertised and so on.

Do you keep a writer’s notebook (or equivalent)? If so, can we take a peek – what’s something you jotted down recently?

I have a large notebook, which is my main notebook that stays at home on the kitchen table/desk and a small one I carry around, when I remember. Even the best ideas get lost pretty quickly, so I need to jot things down as they occur to me, if I possibly can. Sometimes I draw in there, as well, or paste in pictures that pique my interest, or quotes from people much wiser than me. I also have a small notebook of interesting words I stumble across and figure I might need somewhere down the track. Rebarbative, anyone? Trauerarbeit? Obligato? Perhaps not.

Here is a page from my large notebook. God only knows what I have written there. Clifton Hill med Centre. Something something something. GIRL. The man with the stretchiest skin, the girl with dragon hair. Blah blah blah Lovely and troubling thing. Hmmm. Genius…

Finally, what’s the last book that you loved, and why?

The last novel I really enjoyed was ‘Wolf Hall’. Fantastic characters and an absorbing study of both a person and a period that I knew very little about. It’s a novel that sacrifices neither its period detail nor its modern appeal, something extremely hard to achieve. I’ve also been dipping into ‘Landscape and Memory’, by Simon Schama, which is a cultural history of Europe as revealed through various nations’ and cultures’ relationships with the landscape. Apart from the wonderful prose and great ideas, there’s a fair bit about fairy tales and myths, which I am very interested in.

The week of festivaling dangerously

2010-09-06T16:54:50Z

Meanjin had a big week at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. Below is a bit of a round up.

I began the festival by going on a walk with Gary Presland where he talked about Melbourne’s landscape pre-white settlement, and the area’s first people: the Eastern Kulin of Melbourne, Port Philip & Central Victoria. It was a terrific couple of hours and I rushed to buy his book, published by Museum Victoria, on the subject. (It’s an updated and expanded version of a book McPhee Gribble published 20 years ago called Aboriginal Melbourne.) I never did get to Seamus O'Hanlan’s walk through docklands, but I grabbed a copy of Melbourne Remade and read it yesterday afternoon. It too is a terrific book and I recommend to anyone interested in Melbourne’s recent history. Congratulations also to Arcade, the book’s publisher, who are doing really good work.

Later that first Saturday, I gave a quick speech, at an Australian Centre Awards ceremony in the festival club. Those awards included the Peter Blazey Fellowship – established to honour the memory of journalist, author and gay activist, Peter Blazey. The Fellowship is awarded annually to writers in the non-fiction fields of biography, autobiography and life writing and is intended to further a work in progress. The winner was Robyn Davidson, for her work-in-progress ‘Self Portrait with Imaginary Mother’. Mark Mordue was highly commended for work on his Nick Cave biography – a work that originated as an essay in Meanjin 68:3. The Kate Challis RAKA Award for indigenous creative artists was also announced. The $25,000 award is offered in a five-year cycle with a different area of the arts – creative prose, drama, the visual arts, scriptwriting and poetry – being rewarded each year. In 2010 it was for poetry, and the winner was Yvette R. Holt, for the collection anonymous premonition (UQP).

On the Sunday evening I talked to colleagues Jeff Sparrow (Overland) and Lisa Greenaway (Going Down Swinging) about our magazine’s respective birthdays – sometimes those events are in danger of being self congratulatory, but in this case we ended up having an animated conversation about the pleasures and pitfalls of magazine publishing, and enjoyed an engaged and enthusiastic audience. (Thanks to Jim Lee for the photo he took of the event).

On Thursday evening Cory Doctorow spoke on Copyright versus creativity. More than 300 people attended a dense and extremely interesting talk. Jacinda Woodhead has written up what Cory said, over at Meanland.

On Friday I was honoured to be a part of a really successful session, : ‘From Woolf to Wolf ‘ with Emily Maguire and Monica Dux. I spoke about Woolf’s A Room of Her Own, Dux spoke on Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Maguire talked to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. It all came together – we spoke well because we all felt so passionate about our subject, our chair, Jo Case, was just fantastic. The audience was wrapt. It was the kind of event that reminded me why I do panels, why I read books – and why feminism is so important. If you’re at all interested in the topic of feminist texts and their ongoing relevance, I can recommend Rachel Cusk’s article in the Guardian, on Woolf and De Beauvoir, which I quoted during my talk.

That evening I went to hear Noel Pearson’s John Button Oration and the awarding of the John Button prize to MUP’s The Politics of Suffering, by Peter Sutton.

On Saturday Jessica Au and I hosted a small, but enthusiastic audience in the shipping container lovingly (and sometimes not so lovingly) know as Magazine. I do suspect that if Ben O’Mara didn’t have so many fans, we would have been very lonely down there, in the rain, by the river. Belinda Rule gave a great reading of ‘The Secret of the Dark Elves’ (from our current edition), and Ruby Murray read her award-winning story ‘The Things that Lucille Did’ . We were frustrated on behalf of the talented Daren Shiau, at the midday lull, which meant his audience was tiny. We didn’t know of Daren’s micofiction before he read for us, but we won’t forget him anytime soon – and hope to publish him in Meanjin next year.

On Saturday night I headed over to Overland’s launch of its 200th issue. It was a crowded, drunken and debauched evening and reinforced all my worst fears as to what would happen if a group of literary types, some of them communists, all ran towards a bar at the same time. I won’t caption this photo of a Scribe editor who used to work at Meanjin, sculling tequila, but he knows who he is. As does the young associate editor in the background of the shot.

I was, as you can imagine, pretty stuffed by Sunday morning, when I was interviewing Hilary McPhee about the McPhee Gribble Story, a session organised by SPUNC. It was a good session, but it suffered from its timeslot – early on a rainy Sunday morning, and not many people heard what was a really good conversation between Hilary and myself on the early days of McPhee Gribble, the editorial relationships it nutured, the unique fictionalized non-fictions Australians were producing (Brian Matthews Louisa, Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy), international rights both then, and now, and the problems for smaller presses getting adequate distribution.

Our best session was, indeed, our last one (yesterday, at 5.30 pm). ACMI’s studio 1 was full to capacity when Kate Crawford talked about white noise in a networked world for half and hour before the two of us spoke more generally about ‘noise’, creativity, and twitter. Phrases I jotted down give a sense of how varied and thought-provoking the session was: technology is neither the problem or the solution; total focus was never possible, nor desirable; society for the Suppression of Unecessary Noise; anti-symphony concert, 1919. New York in a Blizzard. And, most importantly: ‘we are at an adaptive moment’. And there I’ll leave you.

The Morgue

2010-09-02T17:04:14Z

In the September issue of Meanjin, Racheal Weaver reminds us that, not so long ago, morgues were a place where the town’s citizens went to be entertained. From Paris to Melbourne, this dark tourism saw corpses and heads on display as curio for all to see. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page. Bronwyn Mehan’s post on the inclusion of a grisly photo in the print edition can also be found here.

The conditions and placement of the Melbourne morgue long remained a regular topic of public debate. Its various incarnations at the Australian Wharf, at Prince’s Bridge, at Cole’s Wharf and finally in Batman Avenue were viewed, at different times, as horrifying, unsanitary and inadequate. Reports of rats mutilating the corpses so that they had to be covered with wire mesh, of the building surrounded by a deep layer of mud in wet weather inhibiting the approach of visitors, of stifling heat in summer and miserable cold in winter, a lack of ventilation and adequate light and an unbearable stench all made the news over the years.

The Paris morgue was often invoked as a point of comparison in the cases both for and against the relocation and redevelopment of the Melbourne morgue. A letter to the Age in 1870 described the very idea of a morgue as ‘a gloomy emanation from the morbid sentimentality of the French mind’ and suggested ‘that forms the very reverse of a recommendation for its adoption among us’. Others argued that, despite its visibility and potential sensationalism, a purpose-built morgue offered a greater sense of decency in its management of the dead, as in a letter to the editor of the Argus published in May 1868: ‘You have, no doubt, seen the morgue in Paris and other continental cities. There the unhappy dead are treated with the utmost consideration, although, for the purposes of identification, they are properly exposed to public view. Here the accompaniments of their exposure are only filthy and disgusting.’ There seems to be no question here that sightseers will always be around when there is a corpse to be viewed. The concern is not to prevent people looking at dead bodies, but to control the nature of the spectacle by locating it within a clean and properly institutional setting.

A similar argument was made two years later in an Argus editorial, which moves between a knowing indulgence of the Paris morgue’s sensationalism and an argument for its importance as a social institution. The writer notes that ‘everyone has heard of the Paris Morgue … We have no doubt, indeed, that there are many worthy colonists among us who are accustomed to relate with some gusto their experiences among the crowd at the wooden window, and how shocked were their Anglo-Australian eyes at the sight of an exposed corpse.’ While the Melbourne morgue ‘equals the Paris prototype in sensationalism’, the writer continues, ‘it goes far beyond it in matters of dirt, inconvenience and ill-odour’. The scandal here, once again, is not to present a dead body as a spectacle to be viewed by the public, but to fail to provide it with an appropriately clinical context.

Furtive and recreational viewings of corpses by members of the public seem to have been commonplace in Melbourne in the second half of the nineteenth century, regardless of complaints about the uninviting exhibition spaces. One article describes the use of lime chloride on the dissecting slab when the morgue was located at the Australian Wharf, to ‘remove all unpleasant traces when the “relatives” and idlers come to view the body’. Gaps in the building walls, meanwhile, would ‘make peepholes through which the blackguards of the wharves could criticise the operating surgeon at his work, coarsely jesting with each other on the appearance of the corpse’. Another article mentions that it was a ‘common thing for the children of the neighbourhood to go and open the window when bodies are lying there, and to regard the loathsome exhibition as an amusement’. Such allusions to tourists and thrillseekers illicitly viewing dead bodies appear regularly in the press. But it was not until early 1899 during a sensation surrounding a mysterious murder that the Melbourne morgue drew crowds to rival those of its Parisian counterpart.

Winners of the Ned Kelly Awards 2010

2010-09-01T16:38:28Z

The winners of the Ned Kelly Awards 2010 were announced last Friday at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

True Crime
Pitcairn: Paradise Lost Publisher by Kathy Marks (Harper Collins)

Best First Fiction
King of the Cross by Mark Dapin (Macmillan)

Best Fiction
Wyatt by Garry Disher (Text)

SD Harvey Short Story
‘LEAVING THE FOUNTAINHEAD’ by Zane Lovitt

Lifetime Achievement
Peter Doyle

Colour to fade out

2010-09-01T17:02:18Z

I could I think spend all day browsing through the archives of but does it float. Here’s a sample of the more colourful visual fare:

Vintage poster by Koichi Sato (via)

Geometric abstracts by Zanis Waldheims (via)

Book covers by Eyke Volkmer (via)

Review of Kingsley McGlew’s 'Distance'

2010-09-01T17:35:29Z

‘Tell us a tale ta start the day.’

Imagine, for a moment, Thomas Pynchon and Kenneth Cook sat down in an outback pub, one haunted by Banjo Patterson’s ghost, and decided to collaborate on a story to poke some harmless fun at Isaac Asimov…

This is a fictional backdrop for Kingsley McGlew’s Distance, but one that fits like the seam of a cricket ball into the hand of an A-grade spinner. Aussie tall story-thickness, sporting metaphors and thongs mix space uneasily with dreamscape androids and space-travel, the kinds that would’ve made David Bowie blanche, and maybe call for a strong pot of coffee.

As the title would suggest, and the author often re-states—sometimes unnecessarily—a variety of distances are explored, along with their relative closenesses. Relationships between people, between ideas, between philosophies and between viewpoints expand and contract, and Hans Angel struggles with controlling these things, the need for control, whether control is important, and the kind of free-fall gravity-based consequences that can arise from the distances that so develop. For Angel, perhaps like for all of us, it is easy enough to fall, but harder to chart the space between where-from and where-to.

And, in the end, what that space means.

And perhaps McGlew’s answer appears too conventional, but the question he has posed, and its delivery, is anything but.

McGlew exhibits a type of subtle science-fiction that levels a modernist challenge to the notion of the speculative: Structurally, the notion of who speaks is often called into question—since this is another distance—and the narrative style uses a mix of free-flowing Aussie yarn all the way to a kind of mechanistic staccato series of simple sentences, like action reduced to binary commands.

Maybe McGlew sometimes oversteps the boundary between flowing story-telling and dramatic style where the method is more available than the means, but once you’ve made the leap with him it’s as if you’re tandem sky-diving with his protagonist: there’s nowhere else to go.

Jeremy Davies once painted a fingernail black and no one really noticed. He was disappointed. He has had poetry/fiction/non-fiction published in a variety of places, in a variety of publications, in a variety of forms, in a variety of moments: Canada, Wet Ink, SMS and twelve minutes past three in the afternoon being some of these.

Fat Cactus

2010-09-01T17:28:18Z

This week from the fattest, baddest cactus around:

Death to Humans! Visions of the Apocalypse in Movies and Literature
The triple j Joss Whedon podcast
Variorum of Classic Tracts and Pamphlets by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
Bats in the Bookshelves: The Perils of Literary Social Networking
Ben Eltham shares his thoughts on the two Australia Council arts industry reports
The 1983 Penguin cover of Monkey Grip, with Noni Hazlehurst as Nora
Guilloches – a look at the geometric patterns used on banknote design
Mudmen, folklore and golems
Why ‘[a]dapting a short story is a different animal from novel-to-movie adaptations’
‘And as soon as the winner is announced and it isn’t you … the cameraman just walks away, and you are left there at the table trying to look composed, and you want to die.’ – literary losers
Mic Looby writes the guide on guidebook writing
And, finally, for all the stationary die-hards: first impressions of the new Blackwing pencil

Way Down in the Hole

2010-09-01T16:34:26Z

Don’t pay heed to temptation 
for his hands are so cold. 
You gotta help me keep the devil 
way down in the hole
– Tom Waits, ‘Way Down in the Hole’

The opening credits of any series are probably not something you’d give much thought to (in fact, you’re probably more likely to click fast forward after a few episodes). Yet watching yet another season of David Simon’s The Wire, it struck me that there is something to be said for the way in which a good opening sequence can really set the scene for all that is to follow.

True Blood’s writhing, sultry evocation of the Deep South immediately comes to mind – blood, scales, swamps, religion, sex and death are all there, coupled with the dirty rhythm of Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ – a perfect preface to a vampire drama without ever actually having to show any. The credits were done by Digital Kitchen (also of Six Feet Under fame). According to the making of on their website, most of the footage was shot in Louisiana, Chicago and Seattle, with the team even going so far as to make their own road-sign inspired fonts for the cast and crew.

Nowadays, credits are just as likely to consist of nothing more than a single grab, as in Lost and Glee (the thinking behind this I suppose is that long credits provide an easy ‘out’ for all us attention-lazy viewers). So the 90 second sequence at the beginning of the The Wire provides something of a counterpoint. As fans will know, this is retouched slightly each season, and overlaid with different versions of Tom Wait’s ‘Way Down in the Hole’ – Blind Boys of Alabama (season one), Waits (season two), the Neville Brothers (season three), DoMaJe (five Baltimore teenagers, season four) and Steve Earle (season five). Incidentally, Earle also plays Walon, Bubbles’ sponsor in the same series.

When quizzed about his favourite rendition, David Simon had this to say:

I like all of them for what they do—each one reflected a season of the show and a tonality that we were trying to convey. If I were going to put one on to listen to it, it would either be the Tom Waits original (from Season 2) or the Blind Boys of Alabama (from Season 1). But if I put one on to express what we’re trying to say about a given season, it would probably be [season four], because it’s 14 year olds singing and it says so much about the main characters this year.

This article by Andrew Dignan in Slant aptly sums up the appeal:

… The Wire’s opening credits are not an ordinary credits sequence, but a series of four short films that distill each season’s themes, goals, and motifs. On most TV dramas the credits sequence is little more than a contractual pecking order with flashy graphics and catchy music—examples of what job-hunting production houses would call a “sizzle reel.” Even the credit sequences on HBO’s other programming, which are always evocative and given a full minute to breathe, usually seem detached from the shows themselves, to the point where they work as stand-alone mood pieces. But The Wire’s four credits sequences don’t fit any of these descriptors; the images are taken out of context from the season’s individual episodes and arranged in a pattern that only makes sense if you watch the show closely.

Further nods must also go to:

Big Love

Mad Men (despite incorrect used to Lucinda Sans)

and The Sopranos

Five Questions for David Astle

2010-09-01T16:11:52Z

David Astle has driven the world to delight and despair as crossword setter DA, appearing in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. He’s currently the host of the SBS quiz show Letters and Numbers and his latest book, Puzzled has just been released by Allen & Unwin. In the latest of our Spike mini-interviews, JA traded vowels with DA over the digital divide to find out about the BBC’s scruffy dilettantes, looking sideways at Trattorias, and why a good word combo should always be al dente but delicious.

What’s a typical day spent compiling crosswords like for you? Can you describe your routine?

No matter how rabid any week gets – with writing projects or the Letters and Numbers show – I live for the calm that crossword-setting brings. It’s like a narcotic, but purer. Any time I can steal the chance, the quiet of man-versus-grid, I love that impossible quest to make the perfect mesh, using the latest swag of words and clue ideas I’ve gathered in the meantime.

I make two crosswords a week for Fairfax, plus a daily word puzzle called Wordwit for Sydney and Brisbane. On top of that, I compose a weekly code puzzle called Radar Trap, playing with topics like Famous Quakers or Edible Geography – plus a word column every Saturday for the Herald’s Spectrum. Yeah, it keeps me honest. Besides, it’s important that I keep Garson Hampfield in coffee and cigarettes.

If we made a surprise visit to your workspace, what would we see?

My acute embarrassment, probably. It’s a dump. Though the essential pencil is in reach. My office sits down back in the family home, an old extension jutting into the begonias. Directly at my back are two bookcases loaded with language titles; at my fingertips is a PC for extra help with the more difficult interlocks. By the way, since you’re here – you want a cup of tea?

How do you come up with ideas for clues? Can you take us through the process of one you did recently?

Recently I look sideways at TRATTORIA. Not only does it end with A (a nice rarity) but the word spells AI-ROT-TART backwards, the raw material of a reversal clue. So when the pattern and moment were right, I inserted the word across other selections (like LOBSTER and GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA), inspiring the clue: Restaurant served up fine baloney dessert (9).

Other times the word comes first, usually because nothing else fits the grid, and these entries can often trigger inspired clues. It’s like creating at gunpoint. One example, from the same puzzle, was LULL: Calm upstart, mid-fifties (4).

If you weren’t a professional puzzler, what would be your alternate career?

Aside from being Thom Yorke you mean? (I am prone to passing band obsessions…) I’ve always envied the savvy of Andrew Denton, and there’s no doubting the immense pleasure that teaching brings – swimming in language amid others who love words. I don’t know. Maybe one of those scruffy dilettantes who haunt the BBC, introducing you to St Petersburg or the Luddite Movement.

Everyone battles to solve your puzzles, but whose puzzles do you battle to solve?

I may be difficult, but there’s a good reason for that. If you like computer games, you can’t keep playing Pong all day. You need a new labyrinth, and ditto goes for crosswords. If you find the midweek stuff breezier by the year, and you feel like something chewy – I can help.

That said, there’s no point tackling the maze if don’t have fun along the way. Humour and ahas have to make the trip worth it. For me, those setters who offer this combo – al dente but delicious – are Paul and Araucaria in the Guardian plus Loroso, Cincinnus & Mudd in the Financial Times. I could list more, but that’s a fine bunch for starters.

A more secret pleasure is a passion for American crosswords. Oh boy, can these dudes get creative with squares and letters. Their work may not be cryptic, but their themes and patterns can be wonders to behold. Seek out setters like Quigley, Hook, Blindauer, Gorski, Berry and Reagle. That’s enough. At their best, they are alchemists.

Crossword Challenge Winner: Right back at ya!

2010-08-25T18:19:59Z

In Meanjin Vol 69/1, David Astle laid down the gauntlet – readers were asked to complete our seventy-year crossword challenge and then use the answers to create a literary response. Our winner, Alison Sampson replied with a cryptic story of her own: new clues (in italics), same grid, different answers.

The solutions will be posted on our website on October 1 2010.

First I thought I’d write a poem, perhaps an ode, but that might be a turn off, please (7) no-one. I could essay an essay, or two essays at that, yet the context suggested otherwise.

Interviews do not bury, lack directions to compete (3), so that ruled out journalism. Could I write a bio – but whose? I have no story of abuse, nor the chance to treat addiction (sounds like fourth poison) * (5). I’m no handsome young man, back in, pop up* (6); neither tweeting nor hip-hopping, I’m not active in the arts.

A headline caught my eye: Two members of SPUNC caught in confused lazy drive away (6): a risk for that coterie? My thoughts in a swirl, horse lost direction (4) as I gazed at a banksia, musing. Then the nag threw me. I sprained my writing arm, and had to strap it tight. Cursing, I left the horse to graze, and thought by rail instead.

As words slowly formed, the rattle of the German train shook two vowels from damaged bandage (3). Injured again, I disembarked, and dreamed myself a boat. Cruising down the Moselle between steep rows of vines, I wondered what will again turn on the jumbled barge (7)? One who sailed in and out of weeks to the mostest (3) came to my assistance, stolid, even though he’d lost his way (3). “Here,” he said. “have some breakfast.” And he handed me toast and some conserve or pickle (3). Raspberry, my favourite!

I had no modernist printer’s measure floundering at sea (5), yet in a tick, Cunningham, given rest (7) by my repast, my thoughts raced along. This lit mag is a stingy demon (7), reputed no good for three wishes – not even one! For my dream to come true, to be published in that bastion of culture, I’d need to try something a little more mad.

Saw, devoured outstanding (3,4) idea: a crossword of my own! That should please the ump. Thought I’d use the twenty two words in the clues, and use the same grid sans ‘seventy years’ – a challenge. Nothing daunted, no, note a cryptic genius (4)!

I fetched my dictionary – adored, less 55 (3) – and a set of implements, too, left above Christopher (7): pencil, eraser, and plenty of paper. Poured a cup of mocha, and set to work.

So I’m throwing it back at you: my tilting at windmills, my picaresque adventure into the world of the word. A set for the setter. This devil’s a tad cryptic (5,5), but I know the script.

It’s only fair to warn you: one answer is an initialism. There are a few proper nouns, and a German word, too. The (5,5) answer spans the top of the grid. Overall, nothing too ponderous, nor very arch (4-6); just a bit of fun, that’s my motto. Yet creating this, I admit, annoyed my family. The effect of mother’s attempt at crossword-compiling on confused adolescent state (6,4) is terrible.

Corrections (and apologies)
In the print edition of Vol 69:3, two grid squares in the last and second-last row, six across, should have been solid colour instead of blank. The correct grid is published above.

Cory Doctorow. Melbourne, tomorrow night. Copyright vs Creativity.

2010-09-01T17:40:44Z

This is Cory Doctorow.

You may remember him from such popular, madcap adventures as Boing Boing. Or one of his many, many books, including his latest, Little Brother. Or the Makers revolution (no, I do not mean his novel by the same name).

As you read these words, he’s flying across vast, most likely mountainous, terrain, racing from London to Melbourne to deliver to the hungry Melbourne Writers Festival crowds another in the line of stimulating Meanland – this time in partnership with the MWF ‘Big Ideas’ – lectures: Copyright versus Creativity.

He will traverse such topics as: How can writers seize the possibilities of the digital future? Are copyright and creativity compatible, or is it merely a war of attrition?

MWF describes the event thusly:

The internet and digital technology is challenging traditional notions of copyright, but many authors are finding new and innovative ways to circulate their work — and to make a living while doing so. Acclaimed SF writer, blogger and commentator Cory Doctorow looks at the perils and opportunities of this brave new world.

Cory Doctorow is co-editor of BoingBoing.net and the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was named one of the internet’s top 25 influencers by Forbes magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He hopes you’ll use technology to change the world.

Cory Doctorow is brought to you by Meanland (a collaboration between Meanjin, Overland and if:book), The Wheeler Centre and Melbourne Writers Festival.

For further reading, see Jessica Au's recent rousing and well-researched Meanland post on the whole phenomenon that is Cory Doctorow, ‘Doctorow and the Copyfight’.

So, to recap:

What: Big Ideas: Copyright versus Creativity
Starring: Cory Doctorow
Where: RMIT Capitol Theatre
When: Thursday 2 September 6pm
Tickets: $30 full $25 conc, available at MWF.

On Interns

2010-08-31T16:05:49Z

In the New York Times review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, the critic comments: ‘it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it.’

When Zoe and I started Sleepers in 2003 it was just a crazy idea on a Monday morning before the midday bottle of wine in a cavernous Collingwood warehouse. We knew we needed other people involved, but for a long time we had trouble convincing anyone to take us seriously, so, in the absence of staff, we invented them. There was Narelle Britney Ciccone on Reception (short skirts, gum, attitude), Todd the mail boy (roller blades, ear phones, Blink 182) (who eventually knocked Britney up), and Wendy the webmaster (blue-black hair, horn-rims, irony). We realised, after a time, that it was a bit sad only having made up people we could rely on, so we did a call-out for Interns. It wasn’t a term in use in the Australian publishing industry at the time but we liked it and it served its purpose.

Since then we’ve had loads of Interns, many of whom are names you know: Louise Pine, Jessica Au, Bel Monypenny, Adam Tucker, Ian See, Olivia Maher, Kate Freeth, Sam Cooney, Emily Kiddell, Luke Meinzen, Katie Wyatt, Johannes Jakob, Lucy Nelson, to name but a few. Some of them have gone on to work at Hardie Grant, Text, Scribe, Arts Victoria and Voiceworks. Taking Jess as a case in point, she went on to intern at Meanjin, and is now the Deputy Editor. Interning can take you places, but it might not, too. I do understand that people might be reluctant to work for free – not everyone is in a position to – and there are no guarantees that working for free will lead to paid work.

When I was studying at RMIT I did work experience at Meanjin. It involved (mostly) calling bookstores to talk to them about stocking Meanjin, and (a bit of) slush-pile reading. It was the first time I bore witness to an essay being edited – actually got to see the author and editor work on the piece together. It was incredibly useful. A course can only teach you so much – you need to learn hands-on how to negotiate these tricky things, and applying for even a poorly paid entry-level position can pit you against fierce competition, so it’s a good idea to get some experience under your belt first.

Interning is unquestionably a good thing but not everyone has the free time to do it, particularly people returning to work later in life, and with families. We receive applications for interns or work experiences at a rate of about twenty a month – way more than a minuscule business like us can possibly make use of.

Our Interns work on a part-time capacity dependent on what else they have on in their lives; they proofread, copyedit, write grants, maintain databases, sell books, represent Sleepers at events, liaise with authors, and read and respond to manuscripts. But they do way more than this, and it’s the unquantifiables that are much harder to describe and explain, and it’s these other things that really help keep Sleepers afloat.

Zoe and I started Sleepers seven years ago from nothing, by which I mean we quit our publishing jobs (not big publishing jobs, small ones – we didn’t have reputations or lists, we weren’t known in the industry) with the goal of starting our own company. We knew we wanted to publish books we got to choose right from the start, and we wanted to take them through the whole process – edit, design, market, promote, sell. We didn’t have books already signed up and we didn’t have backing, neither financial nor emotional – we didn’t really know many people in the industry. We had never edited a novel or written a grant application. We didn’t want it to be a passing phase; we didn’t want our dream of great stories to fade; we got Sleepers tattoos. The excellent thing about having a business partner is that when one of you stops believing in the value of what you’re doing, or simply runs out of energy, the other one keeps on keeping on. We are lucky to have each other and our different views and our mix of skills; and the culmination of our efforts is Sleepers.

Everybody knows in theory that there’s no money in publishing but the realities of that are sometimes overwhelming. I know you, reading this on a site attached to a literary magazine, you are probably in the same boat – you are writers and reviewers or somehow involved in this scene, so you know the deal. Our first book, The Sleepers Almanac 2005: The Deathbed Challenge, we got some bad format advice so the printing costs were $11,000, we didn’t have grant money, and we sold very few copies. We never sell as many copies of the Almanac as we do receive submissions to it. Since then, thankfully, we’ve had some success with the books we’ve chosen but if what we did was in isolation, away from the rest of the world, if we felt like we really had no audience, then it would be much harder – I’m not sure we’d have made it this far. What our Interns offer that is much harder to put a value on is people to rant at, people to share with, a sense that we have a tribe, a readership, an audience, people to tell us what to read, people who actually care about our books and our vision, people who support us out in the world.

What do the Interns get out of it? A whole heap of hands-on experience. An insight into different aspects of small publishing, including the most mundane aspects (so much of our job is just replying to emails, putting books in mail bags, talking to distributors, filling out spreadsheets, shopping around for Salon venues). They make contacts; they get a chance at discerning the writing that comes through a publishing house, good and bad; they have editing experience – and the aim is that what they get out of it equates with what they put in.

I don’t mean to complain that it’s a tough life being a small publisher – we have chosen it and it is not something I regret, not for a minute, and it’s an incredibly rewarding vocation. Really, what could be better than doing what we do? I know how lucky we are. I understand our position in the world as middle-class, white, educated – how lucky we were to even think we could start a publishing company. I also understand how tenuous this all is – there really isn’t all that much holding us all together. Having people to validate our creed, to accept our plan despite its failings, to keep on bringing the energy, and to whip us into shape; its impossible to say how important to Sleepers this has been and continues to be. So to all our Interns – eternal thanks, and love.

Louise Swinn is the editorial director of Sleepers, crafters of gourmet books and iPhone Apps here: sleepersapp.com & sleeperspublishing.com; and tweeting here: @sleeperspublish & @MsLouiseSwinn

Reading in an Age of Change essays now online

2010-08-25T17:43:41Z

Our two Reading in an Age of Change essays are now available on our editions page, as well as the Meanland site, your longform reading leisure.

McKenzie Wark writes on publishing A Hacker’s Manifesto and the beginnings of a copygift economy:

I wrote a book once about intellectual property. Basically, I’m against it. As I wrote in this book, called ‘A Hacker Manifesto’: ‘Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.’ The digital—an age-old property of information—is an idea whose time has finally come. The relation between digitally encoded information and the material in which you find it—the page, the screen, the disc, the drive—is now perfectly arbitrary. Pretty much the same information could be on this page or that disc or that website. A weird ontological property of information, something in its very being, is now fully active in the world—and causing all kinds of trouble. Not least for authors. Not least for me.

Sherman Young explores how the book as a physical object enables control of the industry, and what ebooks mean for key stakeholders:

Books as physical objects are easily controlled—they need to be printed, sold and shipped. And the entire book industry is based on that premise of control, extracting revenue at key gateways. Replacing the physical object takes away the existing means to exercise that control, allowing disruptive new possibilities—and non-incumbent players are often better equipped to take advantage of those than traditional stakeholders. Resistance to the introduction of e-books is as much about the struggle for business survival as any romantic notions of ink and paper.