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Readings bookshop had the announcement up before the Melbourne Prize Trust did. Congratulations to both winners: richly deserved. I am sure Mr Miller will carry it off another day.

(Note: I'm sure the reference on the Readings website will be rephrased speedily, but not all of Murnane's works are actually available from the Readings catalogue at this point in time. There are two other titles available as POD from Sydney University Press, here,  but at least two other short story collections, Emerald Blue and Velvet Waters, are currently out of print. I do hope plans are afoot to change that tout de suite.)

PS I won't re-edit this again - apologies to readers of feeds, I'll be a cleaner blogger from now on.

At the Varuna blog, Cate Kennedy talks about the need for feedback during the writing process from other writers and editors, and her appreciation for readers' remarks on her work.

It’s one thing for a critic to praise your deftness with imagery or whatever, but when someone feels moved to write that they’re planning on staying alive to read what you might come up with next…well,  that’ll get you back to the desk – elated and close to mysterious tears, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

There's a review of Judith Beveridge's latest collection, Storm and Honey, by Libby Hart up at Cordite.

Here's another beautiful bit of writing from Ampersand Duck, this time on some of her own work. What a fine photo-essay this is, on the story and making of pillow books. Get her into Black Inc tout de suite.

Looking for something silly? John Williams' personal collection of personals from the LRB is a hoot.

And here is something rather gorgeous I will get in my letterbox at some point, as a subscriber. John Williams comments that "It looks stunning. Not sure how it’s supposed to make the newspaper business feel any better, though. Not exactly a feasible model . . ."

Finally here's a great post by Alec Patric about the latest issue of Page Seventeen, and the life of small mags in general.

Ralph at Currajah was very quick off the mark last weekend! picking up the news of Beverley Farmer being awarded the Patrick White prize, and spreading the love, along with her misgivings (see Susan Wyndham's report, here).

(If you cannot read that bio on Austlit because you are not a subscriber, you should be able to join using a public library card, or a State Library one. Or you can read this older bio by Laurie Clancy, with some good notes on her books, which does not include her latest publication, The Bone House.)

One of my favourite books is Farmer's collection of diary extracts and short stories, collected mainly around their writing, A Body Of Water. There is a story about a Buddhist retreat in that volume, complete with a diary account of the retreat, that provides a magnificent study in how to render fiction out of memory.

Farmer is a prose poet in many ways - from her notes from October in that book comes this account of reading at Mietta's, a fine restaurant with literary leanings, at some time in the eighties:

Heat and sun for the first day of daylight saving. I read a story in the "Readings with Readings" program in the Lounge at Mietta's, among the fringed lamps, clustered gold bubbles of light overhead, black statues bearing flowers - heat and smoke drifting. The dappled grey marble of the round tables, bright with the light of wineglasses.

At seven o'clock tall buildings still reached up into the sun.

In the livid night sky - never black in Carlton - a crescent moon lay on its back holding a smaller moon clasped, a dim full one. (On top of a stupa they have an orb in a cusp.)

Further up that page, she writes of a house she had rented by the coast, somewhere near Lorne:

Skirting the full frog pond with a chilly scud across it, over the road and dunes you go down onto the surf beach. The tea-trees up there in the dune-folds are whiskery knuckles, leafless and lichen-splattered, scraping the sand. Though the sea is so near, there's not a whisper of it, as if this really were another time.

I liked living back there, deep in the tea-tree. Glaneuse Road: after the French barque Glaneuse, wrecked off the surf beach in 1886 with her bottles of contraband cognac. (And Glaneuse, gleaner: what I was and am.) For those six months I was suspended out of time in a glass lantern, not swinging - still, somewhere between two seasons. An old life, a new.

From A Body Of Water, UQP: 1990, p.188 (the one with the Matisse painting on the cover, yesss. Iss mine, preciousss.) A volume of Farmer's longer, meditative essays on art and life, The Bone House, is available from Giramondo. I don't know how many of her other books are in print - her Collected Stories have been on school reading lists from time to time. She spoke with Clive Hamilton and Alfred Yuson on Radio National's Book Show on the art of the essay in 2006 and a podcast is still available, here. I have also found an essay in Island from 2005, 'The Dog Of The Work', in my travels...Enjoy.

Finally. The news is out on this year's PM's literary awards.

Minister for the Arts Peter Garrett has just announced the winners of the 2009 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.

The winner of the 2009 Fiction award is Nam Le for his book of short stories The Boat. The judging panel was impressed by the daring scope and excellence of its execution, the generous breadth of its emotional and social traverse and the excitement generated by every story.

In 2009, two books and three authors share the Non-Fiction award. The winners are Evelyn Juers for House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds for Drawing the Global Colour Line.

Both books explore important racial, moral and political issues of Australia's past. The Non-Fiction judging panel said "With great intellectual authority and international research Evelyn Juers, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell their stories magnificently."

The link for this Bookforum review of The Boat comes from Nam Le's reviews page on his website - scroll right on down...

The most recent Latrobe University Bulletin  carried these remarks on Reynolds' and Lake's prizewinning book, here, and the Cambridge University Press catalogue entry includes (somewhat chunky bits of) reviews. 

And my March '09 review of House of Exile, with links to other sources, is here.

As noted at Spike, Ampersand Duck has written a splendid post about Richard Jermyn's Common Press launch in Pambula some weeks ago. Run, read it here  and a couple of other places. Thanks to &Duck for permission to publish photographs of the first printing from Richard's press, built with Australian timbers.

Jennifer Mills' cracker essay in The Reader, the first anthology from the Emerging Writers' Festival, is published in full on her blog. The trials of the festival circuit are discussed with complete frankness, something rare and precious these days.

People who are good at writing books (and I hope to one day count myself among them) are not necessarily also good at selling them. Or, indeed, talking about them. And yet, if you don't have a media-friendly persona, the publishing world doesn't seem to want to know you. They are looking for an angle to distinguish you in the crush of new books and new writers, but you know yourself to be a complex individual who is made up of more than just angles. You have curves and straight lines and scribbly bits. On the upside, journalists will sometimes recast you as the mythical, romantic figure you have always suspected yourself to be. But the process of being marketed is deeply compromising and can actually feel like some kind of identity fraud.

(Also noted by the Overland blog.)

I swear that there are things in Colm Toibin's books that just cut me open, they do (and the interview in that link deals with a few of them, as well as being quite wacky in places). I remember finding The Heather Blazing, the first book of his I read way back last century, a bit clinical: Brooklyn, while returning again to Ireland, seems more assured than his earlier work, even than the precisely calibrated Blackwater Lightship.

There is an almost miraculous engineering of narrative tension in this beautiful book. Toibin conveys the helpless ratiocination of demure Eilis Lacey in a third person narration that is barely coloured with her emerging sympathy for others, so that she just manages to stand out as a character from a cast of much stronger people and two vibrant, colourful backgrounds in Enniscorthy and Brooklyn.

The total effect is just riveting, and perhaps those who were expecting a noisier book may not be in complete sympathy themselves with Toibin's utter success in placing us in an inarticulate Irish migrant girl's shoes. There are several moments where the sheer pity of it all is just overwhelming: Rose prefers not to marry, as she notes what it has done to her friends, while later Eilis waits for her mother to tell her that she will miss her, and waits in vain.

Lives of quiet desperation indeed - the bitterness of the young women in Mrs Kehoe's boarding house could supply a pickle factory. I have some thoughts on how Anne Enright's comparatively tougher style may have influenced Toibin's work here, but for now I really just want to read it all again ASAP. And then his earlier books as well.

Another book that has given me a powerful buzz recently is Cate Kennedy's first novel, The World Beneath, which I found magnificent. The only fault I can find with this book is the use of the noun proletariat as an adjective on the first page, by Sandy, who it transpires is a bit clumsy with words anyway. Apart from that, it is a flawless, absorbing, zeitgeist brokering threehander. (And 'zeitgeist broker', as far as I know, is Kennedy's phrase.)

There's a fine, if brief, review in the ALR by Kerryn Goldsworthy and some notes here on her blog, and I concur completely with the parallel she draws with The Slap: I certainly noticed a similarly acute observational bent in this novel. Jo Case in her ABR review  is concerned that structure sometimes detracts from the overall achievement in this book, but otherwise notes Kennedy's skill in bringing characters to life:

Kennedy crawls expertly inside the skin of her three central characters, assembling word pictures from telling details that enable us to know them better than they know themselves, and avoiding the novelist's trap of sacrificing nuance to secure the reader's sympathy.

(That link may endure for a few more weeks as the ABR website seems to be in flux. It may even stay there for a couple of months if we are lucky.)

Australian Bookseller and Publisher Online announced this afternoon that Random House Australia (RHA) has launched a print on demand (POD) program that will allow it to produce single copies of out-of-print titles:

The program, which has been 18 months in the planning, is in partnership with Sydney-based SOS Print+Media and will cover out-of-print in-copyright Random House titles that sell nine or less copies per year. (Books which sell in small quantities of 10 or more fall into the publisher's short-run program and are printed by Griffin Press.)

Random House sales director Gavin Schwarcz told WBN the program would ensure the publisher's books stayed in print, but that it was as much about meeting customer expectations as making a profit.

‘It's a reduced margin for us,' he admitted. ‘The author will make the same [royalties on these books], but it's all about service. I think with the world the way it is, the consumer nowadays just thinks if they want something they don't understand why they can't get it.'

Schwarcz said the POD initiative would mean booksellers could satisfy customer requests and added that such a program could even help to promote some out-of-print titles.

This is another reason I did the tinkering and am trying to read fewer feeds - so I can return to the odd spot of browsing and happen upon people like Lisa, a friend of George Dunford's  who is studying journalism in Paris.

Her views on the difference between zines and blogs are news to me, and fascinating  - she says in an earlier post, "Among the ex-pats here, zines are a rarity, with blogs the main way of keeping touch with people back home. And yet, most blogs do not have the same kind of sincerity or passion that's found in a zine. There's a real love for the zine making process which gets lost when sharing your thoughts becomes as easy as clicking the "Publish" button. "

One of my Facebook friends uploaded photos of his favourite zine front covers. Oddly, I was thankful that none of my zines were among the list. Every now and then there are discussions about digitising zines – but to do so would to lose its meaning. I love reading back on my old zines because it reminds me of who I was at a particular time in my life, and how much I’ve changed (or haven’t changed) since that zine was made. There is an honesty in these early zines, an intimacy between myself and the 50 other people who managed to get a copy. Many things shared in the zines are things that I would not tell an online audience, where strangers from all over the world could find and read it without its original context. Rather than trying to get as many web hits as possible or having an eternal presence on the World Wide Web, I want my personal zines to remain ephemeral. Perhaps the same could be said about squats.

Shortlists? Vic Premier's, Age Book Of Year? we haz them.

As well as a wacky bestseller list from Readings. Just look at the first two there, don't they look cosy together?

A little while back Lee Bemrose of Twobluefish posted his correspondence with Les Murray over the rejection of a story of his by Quadrant.
I came across it not long after reading some of Mr Murray's comments on an early poem of Chris Wallace-Crabbe's in manuscript at the remarkable Independent Type exhibition at the State Library of Victoria.

It is well worth visiting the exhibition just to read Murray's wry comments on the CWC poem. I would have loved to snap it but hey. You should see the whole thing.

I have skated around it once, and have ample opportunity to return as it will be with us till October. It then nips around regional centres, five weeks here, five weeks there - so I am hoping they take exceptionally good care of Marcus Clarke's lovely cabbage tree hat with its delectably raffish scarf (which looks to be silk. I think it must be silk.)

 Other thrills include Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter, a very flattering portrait of same by Rupert Bunny, Sonya Hartnett's letters to publishers and her Astrid Lindgren award, an issue of Gino Nibbi's magazine Stream from the thirties, bits of the Jerilderie letter from Ned, and plenty of other ingenious lovely things. There's a raft of events organised around the exhibition for the months up till October 25, with extended opening hours and events on Thursday evenings. Enjoy.

Susan Varga, Headlong. University of Western Australia Press, 2009.

Recently Helen Garner was criticised by some for using her outstanding novel, The Spare Room, to describe the brutal reality of dealing with anger and grief while caring, for daring to approach that side of caring that we like to pretend doesn't exist: she was criticised for being truthful about that within fiction, for refusing to make her fiction about caring 'pretty enough', and for being honest about her real-life sources.

Susan Varga is successful at invoking that kind of brutal reality purely through the immediacy of detail she provides and the speed with which it is accumulated. Sometimes she moves too quickly to the next stage without giving enough attention to 'inscaping' the force of those details. Things move so fast in the first half of the book that it is difficult to pause for a minute and absorb the horrifying rapidity with which Julia, recently widowed, succumbs to the grip of incapacitating, severe depression.

On page 73, therefore, I could not quite keep up with her daughter Kati as she baldly states her belief that she will soon assist Julia to die. Some of that necessary detail is filled in at a completely different pace in part two of the book, giving it a structure that swings open and shut from the middle like an artist's handmade book.

I can't think of a precedent for such a structure and it seemed risky to me, making this book provoking in two ways; one is listening endlessly to people seeking answers to life and death questions throughout, while also asking, can Varga pull this challenge off?and flipping back to the beginning chapters while reading the second half.

It's worth reading Headlong just to see how she figures that out, but also this book is very compelling simply for the portrayal of the frightening collapse of Julia after her husband's death.

The second half of the book almost didn't work for me, occasionally sounding so immediate and raw, so like a real journal, that one wonders if it is fiction. This is a deliberate fictional choice, perhaps, but had a slippery effect that was sometimes jarring.

I think the answer to why HG's last work is a success as fiction may lie in comparison with this book. The happy and admirable fault with The Spare Room does not lie simply within the work and the questions it asks us to consider, but with the author's inability to silence herself, meekly, in a suitably feminine fashion, about her sources.

If Varga had a real-life source for this story, she has chosen to protect it, although I believe a prototype for Julia can be found in her memoir, Heddy and Me (which regrettably I have not read). And as another reviewer has noted, she also protects Kati by marginalising her within the narrative, by appearing to allow Julia to dominate.

(In response to that reviewer I would answer, though, that it is Kati who has the last words, a whole half-book of them.) In the process, she has presented us with something so harrowing that it is hard not to wonder if there is some truth in it.

Most readers will be happy enough to overlook this rather useful proximity to the terrors of real life, and be grateful for Varga's gripping and poignant account of a suffering family, as well as for the brilliance with which Garner's work shines by comparison. The Spare Room is the work of a master, but Varga's second novel does not suffer for being placed in such company.

One short quotation from the second half of Headlong puts to flight all those who enter both books looking for something idealistic about life and death. It's the crushing gears of the machinery of emotional survival we're hearing about here:
'...Dr. Clark is too nice, too gentle. She doesn't touch on the untidy cruelty of grief, or its occasional beauty. Nor the sheer grind of it.'

The only problem I had with this book was with suspending my disbelief that someone would not inform their sibling overseas that their mother was hellbent on killing herself.

That is something it was hard to understand, both times I read this book, perhaps the giveaway that it must indeed be fiction. But if I agreed with everything Varga had done here, I doubt she'd have done the job she set out to do: to ask, as indeed I think Garner does about a different issue, "What then must we do?' Yes, Headlong is that kind of a book.

There's a lot of wisdom in this book, and it is only preachy once, a mere slip on page 151 which mars an almost perfect reflective moment. Kati, addressing us as 'readers' of her journal, says:

'If, as my life moves towards its end, and I can no longer work and if Gill should, God forbid, die before me and I lose my friends one way or another, I will only have what is inside me. And when I look inside, I see that many of my inner rooms are sparsely furnished or empty.

That's the work ahead. It's work Julia didn't do, to her great cost at the end of her life.'
Perhaps not very smoothly put, but nonetheless very wise.

Note: This is the last book review I'll be putting up for a while - I'm taking a break from this, and probably from general blogging as well. Things will be slower, anyway.
I have some remarks on the book reviewing I've done here to try to put together for a longer piece of writing - I've been watching the stats attached to each review I post, as well as where they sit in search results, mainly to test the contentions of others that reviews on blogs are ranked higher in Google results than other sources. We'll see where that ends up.

In the meantime, remember there are plenty of other places to visit in the right column in that blogroll, and please drop me a line if you come across something fun in your blog travels, at [email protected].

The zine fair that was once the total Festival has truly emerged -

sitting alongside our usual cultural icons in this Marvellous City of Literature and GT Fords.

A very fine ten day festival, and I  only got to a tiny bit of it. The wrap at Arts Hub reports director David Ryding expressing delight at a 55 year old writer's ability to get four publishers interested in her work due to contacts made at the festival.

People are, justifiably, making very agreeable noises all over - Estelle has given some great reports on 3000 Books especially - leaving me scratching my head saying, "Who IS David Ryding?" (apart from being the nice man who answered my complaint about the proposed change to the name of the Scrabble event some time last year, after my emerging comedian took part in it.)

Anyway. Early last year enterprising young theatre blogger Chris Summers of Theatargh went head to head with Ryding  about what he is hoping to achieve as festival director, and I feel is close to realising after only two years in the seat. It's a fine interview, and captures the feel of EWF in lots of ways - Ryding turns the interview format on its head and asks a few questions of his own, in much the same way his festivals do.

The program advisory committee has also played its part - with people of this calibre on board, a good result's guaranteed.

I enjoyed three sessions on Saturday. (My memory of one session I attended in 2006? or 2007 was that it was sloppy and unfocussed, but one session does not a festival make.) 

Ryding and his team seem to have gone all out to engage as many fascinating potential mentors for emerging writers in this state as they possibly could.

My only criticism of what I've seen is that with panellists of the quality I saw on Saturday at the Town Hall, they can afford to allocate more time to sessions or create more space.

The excellent State of the Divide panel started late and should have run at least another half-hour longer - it was a pity to bring these people from all over the country and only allow them about eight minutes each to speak (less for some, regrettably.) Simonne Michelle-Wells' presentation in particular was remarkable and I am waiting to link to her post summarising it, so watch this spot.

Estelle  captured how this festival approaches the matter of assisting writers to emerge in a nutshell here:

The events I saw were sprinkled with these kinds of refreshing and sometimes fruity admissions, often beautifully put - David Mence, speaking at Honesty and Truth in Writing, heard 'historians' feet drumming down corridors' (or something like that) when he commenced researching his play on the founding of Portland at the State Library of Victoria.

It was good to hear from some imports from vital sources like Newcastle's amazing TINA festival (this old blogger might get up there one day, to see some 'colour and movement', as Dame Edna might say) - Scott Patrick Mitchell asked enticing questions around the topic while discussing his poetic street art project The Trickster's Bible.

Rachel Hills has posted some pointers from an earlier session I did not get to, and is a dynamo I am ashamed to admit I had not encountered. (Who don't you know, Ange?)

It was also great to meet Tom Cho, who came out and matched his face yet again to his new book at the Page Parlour, as the zine fair is now known, and to buy Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison's work, to buy the latest Blue Dog at the APC table, to visit Karen Andrews, and to see a constant crowd around Arlene TextaQueen's table (damn, I forgot to try to photograph that), to buy Mandy Ord's book from the author herself, and pick up a back copy of Tango.... yep, book budget blown again.

So keep the finance coming - this wheel's on fire, rolling down the road. (And affordable, too.)

Some of the stories and short prose pieces in Tom Cho's first collection, Look Who's Morphing, are perfect magazine pieces, the kind that gives a literary mag a shot of Viagra if it's too uniform in tone.
Taken all at once, the effect is somewhat unsettling at first, but a completely unhealthy and all consuming obsession with pop culture on the part of this writer does not wear thin, as Cho is playful enough to keep things fresh and lively (see this interview at Peril magazine for more on that).

If I was writing his profile for an Internet dating service I guess I would say that 'Tom Cho has quite an imagination and a great SOH.'
'The Exorcist' and 'Dinner With Auntie Ling and Uncle Wang' were both very funny - everyone should have a possessed relative to inspire them when writing grant applications, and an uncle who has some C++ bugs in his system, shouldn't they? Of course they should.

'Today On Dr Phil' succeeds admirably in making both theory and pop culture look silly together. Intellectualise first, and then riot in the studio. I would like to see what Cho could do with Blazing Saddles, let alone what his Uncle Shen can do with a streetcar named lingerie and the " v*g*nas of strangers".

And I would like to see what he can do with novellas - 'CockRock' is a clever take on Swift and it would be good to see him, shall we say, fully extended. I also liked the short and pithy 'Dinner With My Brother', where Chinese names are discussed - 'if patchy employment history has a name, then that name must be Tom Cho'. 

This collection is a sparkling and polymorphous addition to that history - the energy drink you have when you're not a transformer, but kind of wish you were. I want to see him skip and hop through clover again sometime soon.
(A great time for the Giramondo website to do a morph, as well. Looking GOOD.)

This has been driving huge amounts of commenting traffic to Cordite, so go have a look. The slowly maturing result is magnificent, too.

Remember book trailers? and how awful they were? Apparently they are improving. (It looks like Sloane Crosley, of eating cake fame, put a lot of work into hers too.) Via Boldtype.

People are never satisfied, are they?

Here is a fine swag of Queensland writers, via the Empty Pages blog at the Queensland Writers' Centre. (I guess I could have tweeted that, if I was small-boned enough.)

Posted this mainly because I just like the name of the feature (and our shed is in need of a Howards Storage World makeover). I like the Cloffice, too, mainly because I have half a room...and it's a real mess right now.

This book has a foxy cover, as Kath might say - but even more impressive is its author's completely silly rider.

This is such an impressive use of technology. Flick on the slide show and enjoy your own West Wing.

Here's another amazing local cover, coming in October to a shop near you.

And finally, why did I not know about this till I got an OzBallet newsletter? It's already been going for a month: check out David McAllister's post on the So You Think You Can Dance final (and note he was not given a seat in the house on the night, tssskk.)

Maud has reviewed Will Elliot's terrific debut novel, The Pilo Family Circus, now published in the US by Underland Press, for NPR. (I reviewed it for the Australian Literary Review when it was published here, in the October issue in 2006.)

Maud's review is at NPR in the Books We Like segment.

She quotes from its introduction in which a 'literary bigtop master', Katherine Dunn, compares the book to 'Kafka, Chandler, Swift, Orwell, King and The Three Stooges.' There's an excerpt to read.

I called The Pilo Family Circus " a fiery allegory for our times, a Jungian dragonfest in which there is a kind of twisted honour amongst slaves, thieves and carnies." (Not online, unfortunately.) So I am mightily pleased to see it's being read by the haute bloggerie and hope it rises to attention elsewhere as well in the States, having attracted some strong notices in the UK on its publication there in 2007.

Elliot has written an essay for Largehearted Boy's Book Notes feature, too, and you can read it here. He has a memoir coming out with ABC books next week, and is currently at work on a fantasy project, The Pendulum Trilogy. I shall have to start a category called 'Go You Good Thing'.

There be a Meanjin blog, with name Spike, where high-quality content is just pouring in, including editor Sophie Cunningham's top-notch travelogue pieces. Google Reader has discovered its feed - just look at that! how pretty! so I can kill the Twitter feed now.(Well, I might...and I might not.)

Recently George Dunford has posted there on blogged novels (I hear also that Max Barry is publishing his latest online in serial format; the indefatigable Angela Meyer of the fabulous LiteraryMinded site at Crikey has interviewed him here. Links via Matilda.)

At the Overland blog it is business as usual, with a spirited post from Jeff Sparrow about writers being ...well, generally boring folk.

In other Australian blog news, Perry is going to work through Jamie Grant's 100 Australian Poems on a weekly basis, which will make for some excellent reading. Go, you good thing.

And at Ragged Claws, comme d'habitude, there's plenty to talk about. Not always strickly Orstralian, but lots of commenters and a great new talking space. I am grateful to James Bradley who first alerted me to its presence at his excellent blog, City Of Tongues (word is on the street that it's having a makeover, so watch that space for a possible name change.)

With all of this sparkling, nay, champagne blogging going on (including everything on The Rachel Papers), it makes me wonder, in a Bex-and-a- lie-down context of course, what could I possibly be missing about Australian books and writing on Twitter?

It does feel funny to be old media in a twinkling like that.

(ReadWriteWeb says Twitter has grown faster in Oz than - well, anywhere, recently. Just look at that graph. I assure you, my brain is way too small and wizened, and I am no part of it.)

Europeana reports that its interactive features are now fully functional. If you haven't yet checked out this mammoth digital project with search tentacles reaching across Europe's museums and archives, maybe it's time.

Beautiful writing from this lady, as always. Not as frequent as she was, but Dervala Hanley is still close to the best of my web in the life writing category.

As Ron Hogan noted last week, it was Helen Sweetstory's birthday and she is 59. That would have been a swell party.

Haven't been reading Mr Rosen for a while, but hey, he's sure been busy.

I do not think we will be able to ignore this book when it comes out. Talk of putting colour back into your life (or your books)!!

Finally, more of Waugh from Picador. Amazing.

Presently living here due to an uncooperative host and housekeeping hiccups, but still fresh and sparkling as always.

Alison and Meredith have kicked off at Sarsaparillalite with posts on Chunky Move's latest offering and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, while a seasoned campaigner is webbing up a storm in the background with Mr Sheen and other handy Intertube tools.

Do adjust your sets/readers in order to receive upcoming transmissions, and stay tuned.

Intelligentsia, a retrospective exhibition of Louis Kahan's celebrated portrait series for Meanjin, has opened at one of my favourite art spaces, the quietly shiny Potter gallery at Melbourne University. A goodly crowd turned out in searing heat last Wednesday to hear guest curator Vivien Gaston and writerly/academic representative and poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe speak on the singular experience of standing in a room full of 'faces with thoughts inside' as Wallace-Crabbe so succinctly put it.

 Kahan's portrait of Patrick White,which garnered the Archibald Prize in 1962, is on display, as well as many fine ink drawings of top writers and thinkers published in Meanjin from 1955 to 1974, including a couple of people I used to know and barely recognised, as of course they were MUCH younger then. Also on display is a video of writers included in the portrait series talking about Meanjin - I did glimpse Dame Mary Gilmore, but will return to watch it in a quieter moment as I could not hear very much of what was said.

Of the process of sitting for Kahan, historian Geoffrey Blainey is quoted as saying, "When I left, I had a slight feeling that I had been x-rayed."
Poet Fay Zwicky is quoted in Gaston's notes, which can be found on the Potter site:

'it seemed an easy thing to do, to sit

and let the master work his miracle,

humming away over black pots and nibs,

the sunny room, the light, the harmless ease of it.'

There are some beautiful photographs of Kahan at work in his studio too.

This is quite a show, and I am assuming that some of these were among portraits by Kahan collected in a volume by Melbourne University Press in 1981, Australian Writers: the Face of Literature. The mind boggles at the thought of the cost of similar commissions for such a journal today. Many thoughts, many voices, indeed, and Kahan's inimitable style, fluid and emotionally intelligent, unites them all.

My favourites at first viewing I think are the captivating, surprisingly angular Patrick White portrait, the Miles Franklin, Francis Webb, Marjorie Barnard, Alan Marshall and the series of dinner sketches capturing Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray-Smith and a bunch of others at Meanjin's 21st anniversary dinner. There's a sense of listening in over their faces, rather than their shoulders, that's quite arresting. (So nice of Ms Gaston to pop all the notes on the website like this. Made to blog, and I hope they stay there.)

Louis Kahan was born in Vienna in 1905, and had a rich and fascinating creative life in Europe, North Africa and the US before coming to Australia in 1950. He was qualified as a master tailor, like his father, but used his father's customers as his first artistic models before taking on portraiture in the Army in the Second World War, where he felt his true artistic apprenticeship was served:

From 1943-5 Kahan began his personal contribution to the war effort, drawing thousands of portraits of wounded allied soldiers, mostly Americans, signing them modestly "by a guy from Paris". Copies of these portraits on 'Victory Mail' were sent to loved ones back home and many of the original drawings are held in War Museums in Australia and the United Kingdom.

In 2005 several hundred of these were presented to the Red Cross Museum in Washington by his family. Through these portraits, Kahan honed his skills and his ability to capture the essence of his subject with economy and speed. These qualities proved useful on his return to Paris after the war, when Kahan was employed as a staff artist by Le Figaro to cover the war trials of Pétain and other collaborators and they remained the hallmarks of his work.

(http://louiskahan.com)

He designed sets and costumes for the National Ballet and Sadler's in the UK as well as for Australian theatre and opera productions, and on his 90th birthday his peers awarded him the Australian Painters and Sculptors Medal, an honour given only to a handful of artists. More about his remarkable life and work, here; I hope to borrow Lou Klepac's 1990 bio soon from a public library near me.

Kahan drew painters and musicians in Australia as well as writers, and clearly had developed the art of capturing the face of creativity, if that's not too hackneyed a way to come at it. My thanks to Dena Kahan for inviting me to the opening, a truly moving and momentous occasion in Melbourne life and letters.

The exhibition will be at the gallery on Swanston Street (near the corner of Elgin Street) until April 22nd.

Margo Lanagan's advice is dispensed at Summer Read this week, and all the rest of the time here. What a writer, what a blogger.

Susan Johnson has been making writerly notes here, also, following up some leads on that struggling writer par excellence, Richard Yates.
 I like the quote from Mr Porter at the end very much.

And author and critic (and contributing ABR editor) James Bradley has been blogging here for the last couple of months. Do note his discussion of book reviewing, carried on from a post on Matilda. I have a brief response to his questions in the comments scribbled in a notebook...I will get back there eventually.

From a link on her blog comes this story of M.J. Hyland's in October's Manchester Review. It reminds me of something Tobias Wolff might write, if he was in a flinty mood and inclined to be a little less lapidary. I long for her memoirs - or do I? perhaps she is taking the more interesting road, after all.

And best of all, a NEW BOOK IN 2009. Thrilling.

As I reviewed Musk & Byrne a while back elsewhere, I did not comment on Fiona Capp's post on reluctant blogging on the State Library's Summer Read blog, but I am going to quote her here on writing and writers' festivals because I think she has written something rather fine about the matter.

I have been nattering there to Nam Le, who has written at length about  blogging and festivals, but Fiona's come up with a physically evocative simile that begs to be shared more widely. (Also there's a commenter on this post who has a ripper suggestion for festival promotions, too.)

As in the work of Robert Gray where simile is deliberately favoured above metaphor, we are left to consider for ourselves deeper questions posed by this perfect picture - are readers, then, surfers on an ocean of writing, waiting for a wave?
And with regard to  Fiona's Readers' Festival, I can't help wondering if that's what we do when we talk about books online. Is it?

Interrupting the interregnum to report:

(a) you can vote for the best literature blog in the Weblog Awards for 2008, but be warned - the field is very limited, and one person has a ridiculous number of fans voting. (Gee, I wonder who that could be...)

(b) some terrific blogging over at the State Library's Summer Read, from Ann Blainey (from a boat, no less), Greg de Moore and Dennis McIntosh, whose posts on his memoir of life as a shearer, Beaten By A Blow, are quite affecting.

(c) the flowers at Cloudehill gardens in the Dandenongs are looking amazing.

As we were.

Three cheers for Jennifer Mills, who has been travelling but nonetheless has managed to pick up lots of good stuff. (There is more about her writing here.)

Everything I have read by Mills here and there makes me prick up my ears. There are some great posts on her blog about South America:

 - guatemalingerer

Shades of Mr Chatwin here ( everywhere, really)...

-alert now orange

When people like this are blogging it makes one glad to be alive and plugged in to broadband. Jen is an online poet (who sells her own zines too ). She remarked recently that she doesn't blog often, but man, when she does, I sit up and scan that screen with greatly increased attention. I'll be looking out for her debut novel, The Diamond Anchor, in 2009.