Meanjin does Sydney

May 25 2009

Thursday

To start at the beginning. Head to airport for 8.30 a.m. flight to Sydney, to be confronted by this: Which means I sit around the airport for several hours, get grumpy, and miss a panel on Indian Publishing which I'd been keen to go to. Get there at 1 pm just in time to have lunch with the wonderful Judith Beveridge and to talk about plans for the Dorothy Porter Prize which we're launching any minute (ie. as soon as I'm organised enough to formalize arrangements). (Yes, I am aware I now move to the past tense. Too tired to fix this). Then three writers, Alice Nelson , Christ Bray and myself got to wander around with very nice people from The Insiders for an hour. The results, from what I could gather from friends who saw it, was that we were on screen for about 3 seconds each talking about politicians and their mortgages. After that I interviewed Eva Hornung about her recent novel Dog Boy, because I think the novel is so extraordinary. Hornung is quite brilliant - learnt Russian to aid the writing of it which put my own occassional attempts to immerse myself in character to shame. That interview will run in either September of December.

Next stop (well okay - the stop after the stop where I had a quick drink with Jenny Darling, Donica Bettanin and Andrew Humphreys who's story 'Baby, It's Colditz Outside' we published in 67:4) was to hear The New Yorker's Alex Ross speak about his book The Rest is Noise. This was a bit of a radical choice as most people were off to hear Overland's Germaine Greer Session which got more than 1000 people. Ross was low key, but gripping so I was happy with my choice. I then wandered into the night with the plan of meeting up with people post-GG, but GG spoke for about two hours longer than expected so I bailed and returned to fancy hotel room with a view directly on the Sydney Harbor Bridge Pylon. Who doesn't love a night spreading clothes from one side of the room to the other in a fancy hotel room? Just. Because. You. Can.

Friday

Woke up early. More nice walks around the Rocks. Went to see a session on Citizen Journalism which included Sally Neighbour. Interesting panel but it focused more on the future of journalism and would have been improved by having an actual citizen journalist on the panel (such as Anthony Loewenstein) rather than journalists who worked in the mainstream. Too homogenous a panel was a potential problem for the panel I was on later that day with Overland's Jeff Sparrow and Griffith Review's Julianne Schultz. That is, it might have been good to have someone who wasn't pro-journals on the panel as we all, predictably, seemed to think they were pretty important. There was, however, a bit of competitive banner erection. I like to think we won, even though our's almost got drowned in a downpour on the way to the event. .

The audience did try and reassure us that we had been interesting, which was very nice of them, but perhaps they were encouraged by the fact that Overland and Meanjin plied them with drinks after the panel then continued on to a Chinatown with them as well. Meanjin went to bed before 2.00 a.m which was, according to gossip later heard (and a black eye later witnessed), around the time Mark Dapin (yes, Meanjin author and journalist about town) asked a young publicist to punch him so he could demonstrate his boxing skills (ie -capacity to move out of way quickly). She punched him in face and now he has a perfect black eye. You will be able to read more on that, no doubt, in an upcoming column in the Good Weekend.

Saturday

Went to MCA and saw two terrific exhibitions, one on contemporary Australian drawing which included a wonderful work by Jess Johnson, (a cell of which I snapped here). It seemed to capture writers' festival social angst rather well. I was particularly blown away by Yayoi Kusama, which, given my previous incomprehension of Japanese avant garde installation art (ie. anything by Yoko Ono) felt like a bit of win - the way I thought about art was really expanded by her infinite, repetitious forms.

In the afternoon Lynne Spender gave the Meanjin lecture on Intellectual Property and the Digital Age. It was full - really could have done with a larger theatre and the discussion got pretty heated - which we think is the sign of a successful event.

Evening involved a few drinks in the bar and then a trip to see some old friends in my former-and-still-much-loved suburb of Bondi.

Sunday

In the afternoon I read, alongside eight others, at an event which was a tribute to Dorothy Porter.We read Porter's favorite poets. I read Sappho: 'I will not be forgotten when I am gone'. We were all a total mess by the end of it - I was taken aback by how emotional it was. The final reader was Porter herself, on video. The poem was, of course, about sex, 'Exuberance with Bloody Hands'. Final line - 'whose throat would you cut to have it happen again?' - winded us all. Was hard to rally for the interview with Morris Gleitzman an hour later and I'll leave it to that audience to judge whether I succeeded. (I do know that the Madonna style headphones and hiccups were a bad moment for me, personally).

After a tough day Mark Dapin cheered me up by buying me a drink, showing off his black eye, and explaining split infinitives. Then I went to BBQ King (again! second time in 3 days!) for more of that salt & pepper squid. That was shared with one of my oldest and dearest friends who moved to Sydney when I did, but who failed to return to Melbourne. Curses. Late plane. Home after midnight. Slowly rallying today. I will, of course, leave it to a lolcat to express the state I am now in.

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