Last weekend Julian Barnes wrote at some length on Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, for the Guardian. The book has been adapted for the BBC by Tom Stoppard and is currently screening in Britain.

Greene wrote that "The Good Soldier and the Tietjens series seem to me almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English. They are our answer to Flaubert." In subject-matter, certainly; but also there is also a consanguinity in technique. One of Flaubert's great developments (not inventions – no one really invents anything in the novel) was style indirect libre, that way of dipping into a character's consciousness – for a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, sometimes for just a single word – showing things from his or her point of view, and then dipping out again. This is a direct ancestor of the stream-of-consciousness narrative so richly deployed by Ford. Much of Parade's End takes place within the heads of its characters: in memory and anticipation, reflection, misunderstanding and self-justification. Few novelists have better understood and conveyed the overworkings of the hysterical brain, the underworkings of the damaged brain (after his first spell at the front, Tietjens returns with partial memory loss), the slippings and slidings of the mind at the end of its tether, with all its breakings-in and breakings-off.

Melbourne Writers Festival would not be complete without a lavish and swinging event from prominent multimedia journal GoingDownSwinging, a Melbourne institution of over thirty years' standing of avant-gardedness:

TICKETS HERE - $25  gets you in, gets you a copy of the journal.

Issue #33 features a full-colour collaboration between Cate Kennedy and artist Simon McEwan, a stunning commissioned essay from straight-talking theorist Briohny Doyle, and a radical new design from Santangelo and Hall. It will take you from Thailand to rundown apartments in Minneapolis to the depths of the ocean to a run-in with Czech border guards. Andre Dao contemplates Catholicism and mourning, Paul Adkin looks at 9/11 translated by Edgar Allan Poe, and Michael Trudeau leaves you speechless with his take on aimless masculinity.

 

Highlights of the accompanying CD include Tom Waits' iconic theme from The Wire, covered by Darwin soul stars Sietta; alongside hip-hop artist Mantra and a spellbinding performance from Felix Nobis; as well as new work from Joe Dolce, PiO, Emilie Zoey Baker, and The Bedroom Philosopher.

 

Issue #33 will be launched on the closing night of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The launch will showcase some of Melbourne’s best spoken-word artists; introducing brand new performances from the acclaimed Cate Kennedy, blues-soaked Benezra and Frente singer Angie Hart, who responds to a special performance from spoken-word legend Adam Gibson.

 

Hey there, hoopla, daughter's circus is in town again. It's that fringey time of year...

I have enjoyed all of Maddy's posters so far, but I really love the retro look of this one, designed by Rena Littleson.

Facebook has the details.

Fringe has the tickets.

Be there quickly, as the venue is cosy 

Olympik Phever is performed by Madeleine Tucker, and was developed by Madeleine Tucker and Danny Cisco: 

It's the middle of the Olympics and bespangled entertainer Madeleine Tucker has been given her big chance to shine, filling in as the presenter for a late night Olympics TV special. With interviews, live ads and musical numbers, she’s set to cram in as much high-quality entertainment as she can!

Not one for sports fans, this colourfully kitsch extravaganza will pay surreal homage to the faded world of variety television, with catchy songs and segments galore!


TICKETS ARE ON SALE NOW now NOWW noooowww
 

If you can't make it to the show, you might like to take in some of Maddy's videos at her blog. (Look for Rodney The Goblin.) 

Is Maud the only book blogger on Pinterest? she certainly has one of the most attractive "Books I'm Reading" pages.

There is a very fine Victorian Premier's Awards website up at the Wheeler Centre with a terrific collection of reviews on each shortlisted title in all categories. Go, be informed, and vote in the People's Choice awards. 

At The Millions, Sonya Chung interviews James Salter.

From ReadWriteWeb, a video of fifthgraders in 1995 who made some interesting predictions about the future of the Web.

Pleasing to see that the first of Australian Book Review's Fireside Chats, on Jonson, Donne and Shakespeare, is booked out. So be sure to get in early for the second (scroll down at that link), on September 12: Peter Rose and Michael Farrell will read from their new collections, and hopefully chew some fat regarding Peter Porter.

I am following a new blog which carries some pretty impressive infographics (that is, posters designed to communicate a lot of information visually. As you all knew). 
Here then, if it pastes into Typepad in a satisfactory manner, is a fine example which shows what one can do with pictures when one doesn't accept that the number of medals is what really counts. The poster was created by Paulo Estriga.

This infographic was originally published at CargoCollective.com – via Cool Infographics.

If you buy the Saturday Oz, there is a cracker review for Toni Jordan's new book Nine Days from Peter Pierce, so I am going out to buy that at the first opportunity:

Dickens' exuberant example happily infects the speech of several of the characters, while the grisly scene in which Jack Husting's parents introduce him to a prospective marriage partner is worthy of Patrick White.

Motifs are artfully woven into the narrative, such as "the bitter-sweet of twin-dom". Jordan's story gives free rein to chance and to coincidence. So much is packed generously into Nine Days as to belie its considerately moderate length...This novel is a triumph. Another signal career in Australian fiction is well under way.

Natalie Bakopoulos: For the games Athens created a new airport, a gorgeous subway and tram system, and a national highway, all which function still. Athens is a certainly a city of ancient ruins, and because of this we often conflate the ancient with the modern. But ruins of an ancient civilization are not the same as the wreckage of an economically devastated city. Viewing it through this lens takes pleasure in its devastation, stunts progress and change, and completely disregards the living, working humanity of the city. Athens has seen better days, but it is still kicking and alive. 
(Athens, 2004) 

David Karashima 

Tokyo, 1964 (and 2020?) 

Last summer, Tokyo lost its lights. This summer, they’re back, as bright as ever. And in every fluoro-lit subway station – running again on a minute-by-minute schedule – hang posters advertising the city’s Olympic bid. 

‘Ima, Nippon ni wa kono yume no chikara ga hitsuyoda (Japan needs the power of this dream now)’ asserts the official slogan for the games they’ve dubbed the Japan Revival Olympics. 

But whose dreams? Whose needs? Whose power? 

Whatever the legacy of the 1964 games, whatever the benefits of bringing them back in 2020, they seem to have little to do with restoring the dreams and lives shattered last spring. 

But the brightness, it’s blinding. 

Read these and several other writers' accounts of life after the Olympics, around the world, at Granta magazine.

Minor, major—those words have never done much for me. I don’t understand them. The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living? That’s a major question, a huge question, but the best way to ­answer it might not be to crank the novelistic universe into a crude, lurching ­motion by employing a big inciting incident. Sometimes life provides only the tiniest of inciting incidents—that your left shoelace snaps within a day of your right one. That’s enough for me. When something is beautiful, it can’t be minor. Also I think it’s neat when a novel offers you miscellaneous helpful tips or tricks or facts. When it’s a friendly companion, when it does you good on various levels. A lot of novels bully us into assenting to their importance. I’m tired of that.

 

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 212, Nicholson Baker

I really enjoyed the slideshow at the Melville House blog on writers attacking other writers.

And I was chuffed to discover there another nod to the title of this blog (whose derivation you can familiarise yourself with here ):

Elizabeth Bishop’s oft-quoted put-down of J.D. Salinger — make that oft-mis-quoted — may be all the more withering for being made privately and off-hand. In a letter to Robert Lowell, she made a passing comment on Seymour: An Introduction (not Catcher in the Rye, as is usually claimed): “I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?” 

What is it she disliked so much about it? Perhaps it was that Salinger had his character write poetry. As is rarely quoted, Bishop’s comment went on: “Perhaps Seymour isn’t supposed to be anything out of the ordinary, nor his poems either, so that all that writhing and reeling is to show the average man trying to express his love for his brother, or brotherly love? Well, Henry James did it much better in one or two long sentences.” 

-Dennis Johnson

But it gets better. While looking for a quick link to Alice, I found this.  A treely ruly live university course in...

Taught by Michael Hulse at the University of Warwick, EN273 Reeling and Writhing is described on the university website as a "hybrid module... combining intertextual scholarship with poet-to-poet skills...described in student feedback (2011) as “bloody brilliant”."

 I will have to update my About Page,  Ninety-Nine, our lives may depend upon it.

Some not so fresh stuff. Slow blogging is slow, as we might say on Twitter.

Putting Shakespeare's First Folio on line during the Olympics means you have to "Sprint For Shakespeare". Via Corsair Books on Twitter.

A very attractive way to document train readings, and also to present potential readers with the library's holdings. Via Karen Andrews (@Miscmum) on Twitter.

When I find a typo in a piece of work that''s already sent out...

Introducing Spineless Wonders Audio, along with a bunch of links to other Australian fiction recorded online. 

Cabaret writer-performer Michael Dalley's new show, Mademoiselle, will finish at fortyfivedownstairs on the 19th of August, so be quick.

If you haven't seen my tweet already, here is Bill Murray doing more stunts for Poetry House. Here he reads Wallace Stevens, with some reverence. Rather delightful.

Laura Massey from The Cataloguer's Desk, a rare books blog, has written recently about Ernest Dichter, one of the few advertising men working in the late 30s who had training in psychology and psychoanalysis.

Using in-depth consumer interviews, he learned that when shoppers picked a particular brand,

“it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or ‘personality’ of the soap.

This was a big idea. Dichter understood that every product has an image, even a ‘soul’, and is bought not merely for the purpose it serves but for the values it seems to embody. Our possessions are extensions of our own personalities, which serve as a ‘kind of mirror which reflects our own image’. Dichter’s message to advertisers was: figure out the personality of a product, and you will understand how to market it” (The Economist).

Dichter published a book on the subject which became a bestseller, though eventually his methods fell out of favour with Madison Avenue.

There are links to two other articles on the subject, one from The Economist. I'm very happy I've found this blog, though I've now forgotten where I found it (probably things magazine, as is often the way!) Enjoy.

Giramondo Publishing

warmly invites you

to the launch of the 

new poetry collection by

 

Michael Farrell

open sesame

to be launched by Alan Loney

poet and bookmaker

on Thursday 2 August

6 for 6.30 pm

Collected Works Bookshop
Level 1, 37 Swanston Street

Melbourne

Michael Farrell is highly regarded for the unique rhythms, and the gestural and comic qualities of his poetry. His poems set language, syntax and punctuation in motion, heightening the expression of wonder, drama, attitude: or simply relishing the richness and resonance of each new word situation. His new collection, open sesame, includes sonnets derived from Edna St Vincent Millay (‘saints & or’) and from the British police drama The Bill, a sestina on John F. Kennedy set in a laundry, an improvised parody (‘et tu supermarket’), an Oulipo poem (‘debit of a pirate kino’), and four long poems on friendship. The book concludes with a series of collage poems, including one which takes its cue from the legendary Phar Lap.  

All right, I know most of my posts in the past couple of reloaded weeks have been about poetry.
But.You.Must.Visit.This.Tumblr.

Found via the newly launched Haplax, in turn mentioned in the Writers Victoria weekly news email, the SoLong Bulletin Of Australian Poetry And Criticism is edited by Elizabeth Campbell,  LK Holt and Petra White.
LK Holt's posts in particular look snappy and fun, though there is an illustrious bunch of contributors already. It seems to have been here for some time.
 
The search box on that Tumblr theme is more effective than some I've played with too.  (All blogging platforms have their Achilles heel.)
Go, enjoy. It's a fine surprise.

Michael Orthofer reports from the Complete Review that Milan Kundera refuses to sign contracts to release his titles to e-publishing:

...for several years, he's insisted on a clause in his contracts stipulating that his books only appear in 'traditional' (i.e. printed) form -- no e-book versions. And, indeed, you won't find any Kundera titles on Kindle (etc.).
       Not many authors are still holding out from e-formats -- and, indeed, presumably few have enough clout to be able to do so. Kundera can afford to -- though one has to wonder: to what end ?

Or as Bud Parr has said, read now (or never).

The publishers of this anthology of Latin American writing wanted to draw attention to the very short life of new writing in our times. Using vanishing ink seemed like a fine way to do it.

The buyers of the first print run were clearly in agreement, but one wonders, what were they buying? A novelty, a talking point - or a journal? would they leave it closed on the bookshelf for fear of losing the book?

The editors remark that most first books vanish anyway. They are currently investigating further publications in the same format:

'we think that this is a magical and poetic way of confronting a real problem,' explains javier campopiano, regional general creative director of draftFCB.
'we wanted to make a book that was a message in itself, that encourages us to read those authors, before their stories disappear for real, right before our eyes.'

while potential purchasers are likely to object to the impermanence of the object-- which defies being returned to months or years later for a second reading--
the project highlights both the difficulties that face emerging contemporary authors, as well as our often-neglected enjoyment of text, and the perhaps overly
confident opinions we hold about the permanence of written material. as the video documentation of the project suggests:

'books are very patient objects. we buy them, and then they wait for us to read them. days, months, even years. that’s OK for books, but not for new authors.
if people don’t read their first books, they’ll never make it to a second.'

Read more at Design Boom. (Noted also at Wired, Gizmodo, the Independent and the Boston Globe, among others.)

According to Helena Nelson of Happenstance Poetry Pamphlets, purveyors of cakes and publishers of poetry have a great deal in common.

This is a clever little satire that grows on you very satisfactorily and delivers some fine jabs around the middle:

You spend more and more time advertising. You need to get new customers into the shop somehow. It’s hard work though, and several things happen.

1. You turn down nearly all the offers of new products. You really do have enough cake to be going on with. The wouldbe bakers are hurt. They take the rejection personally. They stop buying things in your shop.

2. You hardly ever bake yourself: you haven’t the energy. Besides, you’re surrounded by cake. Why bake more?

Have a browse of the catalogue while you're there. Link via the dumbfoundry blog.

By Diane di Prima

(I imagine academics teaching IP law will try to sneak this one into lectures one of these days.)

A judge in the United Kingdom dealt an unusual punishment to Apple for losing a court case against Samsung last week. Apple sued Samsung in the U.K., claiming that the South Korean manufacturer's Galaxy Tab tablets copied the iPad. This, the judge said, was not true. Yesterday, the judge ruled that Apple must issue notifications on its U.K. website as well as in newspapers and magazines saying that Samsung did not copy the iPad. While the punishment may seem extreme, it may be just what the mobile device industry needs.

Apple has been fighting patent and design lawsuits against Samsung in courts across the world. The U.K. case hinged on design similarities between the iPad and the Galaxy Tab series, specifically the Galaxy Tab 10.1's back and rounded corners. 

Last week, Judge Colin Birss said that Samsung did not infringe on Apple’s design because the Galaxy Tabs “are not as cool.” They “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said, according to Bloomberg. 

The judge's ruling yesterday is a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for Samsung. In terms of tangible benefits, the South Korean company definitely wins. Its products will remain on the market in the U.K. and Apple must do penance for the “prejudice” its lawsuit thrust upon Samsung’s Galaxy Tabs. On the other hand, Birss basically called Samsung’s tablets dweebs compared to the uber-hip iPad.

More on this at ReadWriteWeb: report by Dan Rowinski.

I had a blast reading The Anthologist on some kind folks' recommendation recently. So it gives me great pleasure to quote the following from the Paris Review interview with Nicholson Baker:

Have you ever been tempted to write books that are a little more orthodox?

BAKER

Oh, absolutely. Before I wrote The Mezzanine I tried to write a murder mystery. I’ve always wanted to write a spy novel. I read a lot of Len Deighton at one time, and a lot of John Dickson Carr.

INTERVIEWER

What happened?

BAKER

Something comes over me in trying to write the opening paragraphs—it’s actually a physical sensation of unhappiness. It physically hurts me to plan out a series of reversals, things that will go wrong. It just doesn’t come naturally. My murder-mystery plot was extremely elaborate, with lots of strange clues involving balsa wood, and that was going to be fun, I thought. But then there was the dead body. The dead-body part was the thing I just didn’t go for. You have to start with it. If you don’t have the dead body, you do not have the murder mystery.

INTERVIEWER

Isn’t The Mezzanine, in a way, just a giant, overcompact mystery novel?

BAKER

It’s a novel about the mystery of what life actually is—life when there is no corpse to propel people along and make them lock the door and say, We’ll all stay here until we figure it out!

The whole interview is delicious.  ( I also love the bit where he is saving some pot in a sock for an emergency, but feels he should not smoke it because he wants to write for the New Yorker.)  Thank you, Charlotte, for the heads up.

A drawing of Alice by Lewis Carroll, from his personal illustrations for Alice In Wonderland.

Charles Baudelaire's self-portrait.

More writers' artworks can be seen in this post at the Imprint blog, including a fine rebus letter from Mark Twain to his family, carrying a note to the effect that he was not sure if the children would be able to read the letter, so he included pictures.

Link via Maud, on Tumblr.

(see Mulberry Road for the other 25, if you will.)

At Granta Online, six poets are interviewed about Poetry Parnassus, an enormous poetry love-in happening at Southbank in London this week.

Susan Hawthorne reviews Robyn Rowland's Seasons of doubt and burning: New and Selected Poems at Cordite.

Jerry Seinfeld's new web comedy, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, premieres online on July 19.

How to sort out Facebook and those tiresome not-so-new email addresses they have lumbered some of us with. (Apparently they may have synced with your friends' email on your phone as well! Who knew?) From ReadWriteWeb.

Finally, a 76-strong booklist of upcoming titles for the second half of the year from The Millions.

And the Complete Review reports on the rentrée littéraire in France. Not the Tour. Just for a change.

His verse was omnivorous, one could say, ranging tonally from the church fathers to forthright Willy Sutton, the habitual bank robber. It came in chunky stanzas, buoyed up by his delight in the English language, and its American cousin. Peter wrote verse about kitchen herbs and airlines, Assyria and Scrooge McDuck, Jimmy Durante and Montaigne, even the remembered air force bullring of his youth. Latterly, the birds and bush of seaside Anglesea made their appearance more often, as in these rejoicing lines:

On the eggshell rink above us all they are wheeling
       in Lincoln green or burred gold,
hanging from wings that hang from nothing, and stealing
      the apple of grace from air’s hold.

via meanjin.com.au

This beautiful farewell from Chris Wallace-Crabbe at Meanjin is one of several fine things written about Australian poet and academic Peter Steele over the last month, since his death.
Read it all, it is splendid. Here also is Brendan Byrne's eulogy, at Eureka Street, and a piece from Morag Fraser.

Yes, Australia has lost two poets and it might look like carelessness to some. But we speak highly of them when they are gone.

Many of you will have already read bookmaker and artist  Caren Florance's tribute to Rosemary Dobson, published a few days after her death in late June. It is very touching, and there is a link at the end to Jason Steger's obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Here is an obituary by poet David McCooey, in The Age.

David Malouf's review of her Collected Poems appeared in The Age on June 2:

Spare poems point to natural phenomena, ''a small storm, tethered in the garden'', and the lives of friends. Take, for example, this tender but wickedly observant picture of a dying Christina Stead:

I sit beside the bed where she lies dreaming
Of pyrrhic victories and sharp words said,
She will annihilate the hospital …
Suppose her smouldering thoughts break out in flame,
Not to consume bed, nightdress, flesh and hair
But the mind, the working and the making mind
That built these towers the world applauds …
I have dreamt her nightmare for her. She wakes up
And turns to smile with quick complicity.
''I wasn't asleep. I watched you sitting there.''

The poems in Collected offer something more than the usual record of a progression. To read them is to follow a quiet mind, but an acute one, through a writing life that over the decades is increasingly responsive to what is near at hand and to the oddness as well as the grandeur of things.

She is a poet I readily admit to having glossed over and I look forward to remedying that, quickly.

Highly Appropriate & Funny Comic Convention Information Signs

From Laughing Squid.

  Barbara Temperton reports from Cordite on poetic activity in her new neighbourhood, and includes a shot of a beautiful new book to be launched at the end of August:

Graham Kershaw (Hallowell Press) has been working for some time now on the production of the poetry anthology: Dark Diamonds: poems from the south coast of Western Australia. Dark Diamonds has been printed on a treadle platen press – an Arab, designed in the 1870s – using traditional letterpress techniques, with Centaur metal type imported from a foundry still operating in California. The books are hand-bound, as cloth-lined hardbacks. Alison Kershaw’s illustrations are copper relief etchings printed on the Arab. Dark Diamonds will be launched at 3pm on Saturday, August 25th, at the Butter Factory Studios, 8/12 Mt Shadforth Road, Denmark.

Notes from Narrogin and the Great Southern | Cordite Poetry Review