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Last weekend was a great one for reading about Australian writing, with the launch of two new e-publications.

The University of Western Sydney is supporting the brand spanking new Sydney Review of Books, which launched with several articles on Friday. There will be fresh reading every week for the next two months of this pilot project headed up by critic and editor James Ley, so get along there.

First postings include critical essays and reviews by Kate Middleton, Evelyn Juers, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Peter Pierce, Mo Yan and Nicholas Jose, as well as a call to arms for a watch on criticism by Ben Etherington.

Charlotte Wood, author and essayist, has begun a series of interviews available by subscription, The Writer's Room Interviews. You can sign up for them here, at an annual cost of $27.50 for six issues. The first interview was with Tasmanian writer and Patrick White prizewinner Amanda Lohrey, and I found it completely absorbing, probably because I love her work.

There were two things from the interview, among many, that struck me.

Firstly, I liked what Lohrey had to say about how taste affects the reading of fiction:

CW: A painter friend of mine says people think they don’t know what good art is, but that in every show he’s ever had, the best pictures sell first. You don’t understand it,but you know it.

AL: You do know it. It’s instinctive. But at the same time I think that’s more true of the visual arts than of literature. For it’s also true with fiction that there is no single standard of excellence. A book is a meeting of subjectivities and the subjectivity of one writer will speak to one reader but not to another. There are some writers who don’t speak to me at all but I can see why they speak to other readers, can see that they are in the same zone in terms of their preoccupations, and their conditioning, what’s important to them. It’s just not important to me and I’m not interested. So I don’t mean to say — I’m not trying to posit an idea of excellence that everybody responds to. I think literature is very much a one-to one conversation, which is why I cannot argue with someone who says The Alchemist is their favourite book when they’ve obviously got a lot out of it.

Secondly, Lohrey made some useful remarks about what she called 'inventive' realism:

I’ve always been interested in exploratory and inventive modes of realism, not for their own sake but because each new project demands its own aesthetic. I could get very technical on the subject but this is probably not the time or place. I would say, however, that one of the important functions of university writing courses is to encourage students to interrogate taken-for-granted modes of representation. If you decide to write in a conventional way, at least know why you’ve made that decision. Traditionally, film-makers have been much more concerned with issues of representation and more innovative. And to be fair, the camera gives them more scope, but that doesn’t mean that we as writers shouldn’t think about it. You don’t have to be obviously ‘experimental’, you don’t have to write like Gertrude Stein or James Joyce — small unorthodox manoeuvres can have potent effects.

Small and unorthodox. I like the sound of that.

I've been so busy reading these two publications that I did not have time to blog about them at the time. Which speaks for itself. Go, enjoy, be enlightened or enraged, as you will.

"Graham Greene was right. He said that if you're going to be a novelist, working as a subeditor is the perfect job. You write during the day, go to work at night, the best of your energy is during the day. An old editor of mine said subeditors were people who change other people's words and go home in the dark."

John Banville  interviewed in The Guardian by Stuart Jeffries, ending thus: 

Banville stands to go: "You have enough. You have the jokes, the arrogance and the sermon." I wanted more, I tell him. Over his shoulder he gives me a parting joke: "It's no good – I can't do humility."

Alice has been walking and taking photographs at her mother's command. The results are bewitching.

Writing at Desktop, Australian blogger Gerard Edelson calls Banksy's film, Exit Through The Gift Shop,

'that rarest of things in the internet age: a cinematic Trojan horse.'

His full review will be posted on his own blog, Celluloid Tongue, in good time, in good time.

One of my favourite short story writers is putting one up a month as a podcast, and selling the print version from her website as a zine (and Jen makes pretty ones.) We are lucky punters. Get over there and listen, and send off for a bundle when she has a few more up. I will be.

Polari's first issue features an interview with Edmund White, poetry by Pam Brown, the short fiction of Dallas Angguish and the writing of Staceyann Chin. This new international journal is is currently holding an open call for submissions from LGBT and queer writers for its second issue, with a publication date of October 1st 2010.

And finally this link from John Williams at The Second Pass, to an interview with US historian Jill Lepore, carries a very sweet tale of an inspiring letter with it. What an interesting idea for a teacher to have, taking letters every year from 15 year old pupils and posting them back five years later. I wonder if he ever got any of them mixed up...(yes, that would be me if I was that teacher.)

A change of scenery has worked for Lethem in the past. “The way people respond to this news is ‘Oh no, what will this do to your writing about New York?,’ as though I have to be on the streets. I wrote most of ‘Fortress of Solitude’ when I was living in Toronto and most of ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ at Yaddo.” It may even be, he told me, that getting out of town was necessary to his development as a writer (he lived in Berkeley in his twenties): “There was something about working from the margin and not right under the shadow of the publishing industry. You should find a way to slow that down and dwell in your apprenticeship and take pleasure in being playful and unfinished while you can. Once you professionalize this activity, there’s no turning back.”

I really liked this news piece from the BookBench blog at the New Yorker. Hopefully there will be something as intense as Fortress of Solitude coming out of the California dreaming.

Typically, she makes light of being 53. "What does that mean ? When I was 52 I used to say, at long last, I have a full deck. Now I say we're into the joker years. I mean, every deck must have two jokers..." Professor Moore (she teaches creative writing) can laugh about "my first joker year" but – as in her short stories – there's an undertow of melancholy. "Actually, it's not funny, or wild, but we'll see. It's only March." In the next breath, comparing her 40s to her 50s, Moore, who was divorced in 2001, remarks, "at 53, you think I've had my marriage, my fun. I'm moving towards the solitaire years, the nursing home..." Her conversational arpeggios of gravity and mirth are delivered with such a sparkle that you know she's only half serious. But which half?

Not also is its author fun (interviewed a couple of weekends ago by Robert McCrum) but A Gate At The Stairs is also very good. I do hope to read Ms Moore's earlier novels sometime.

I'm not sure if this is quite what I think has happened in the book I've read (for a start there are several wounds, not just one), but her epigrammatic summary of her way into fiction does sound like those painters who need to make a mess in order to find their way into the work:

She herself says that she relishes those moments when the even flow of time gets snapped by a sudden crisis and "something's broken". She says her stories begin "with an injury. Then the story becomes like the bandage round a wound."

It's quite a long interview, but worth persisting with for her remarks on creative writing programs, one of which she has been involved with for over twenty years:

She concedes a certain scepticism about creative writing. "I have a friend," she says, "who says it's a pyramid scheme – but at least it's our pyramid scheme." She also evinces a distinct toughness about the necessary qualities of the professional writer. "My students," she says, "are so competent and sympathetic – and nice, because that's what the course requires. I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers."

William Skidelsky, in the same publication, does point out that David Mitchell is considered to be 'extraordinarily' nice. But as his readers know, that's a different pack of cards entirely.

Some bits of this interview with Nicholson Baker in The Guardian are really ...sweet.

Baker made his entry into the literary scene in the "age of Raymond Carver, although we now know it was the age of the editor of Raymond Carver. But it was all plain paragraphs, whereas I had read a lot of Samuel Johnson and wanted a sentence to really fly and have internal clauses, baroque ornamentation and more things going on per cubic centimetre. Looking back it was all too much, but when you haven't lived long, all you have to offer is plumage."

There has been a lot of wild speculation afoot regarding the potential release of an Apple product which might (gasp!) combine e-reading with other things. Mitch Ratcliffe of Booksahead is trying to put out some of the flames before there's a fire. Bookseller.com has more information here.

The Guardian has a great interview with Shaun Tan, as well as news of the discovery of some previously unseen letters of Flaubert's in a British stash.

I have been following this guy so I can find out things like this quickly. Richard Nash speaks to Publishers' Weekly about his past at Soft Skull and his newest venture, Cursor.

I have enjoyed reading Kris Hemensley's correspondence with his brother in Dorset this week. And I am very fond of the Australian Ballet's excellent blog, Behind Ballet. Here is their tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, by Martyn Pedler, complete with video.

"A girl home from America is different from a girl home from England," he says. "She will go as one person and come back as someone else, with a new wardrobe, a suntan and new manners, even a new confidence."

-Colm Toibin, speaking to Robert McCrum (he didn't link to that post, though.)

Tagged to:buy on delicious, then - Brooklyn, and MJH's newie. (And why the hell didn't he just talk to her, then? old enough to know better, I think.)

'Richard Ford reminds me to look around at my world anew, to take nothing for granted. He is the best antidote for this false culture of celebrity and excessive materialism that I know.'
Christos Tsiolkas spoke to Angela Meyer at LiteraryMinded last week. It's a terrific interview so do set aside half an hour and read it.

The interest in Ford is quite significant, when one thinks about it - Ford is also quite happy to let his own racism be queried, to leave nothing uncovered in the quest to understand modern life. It is not a connection I would have made on my own, so a fascinating one to unearth in such a discussion, and thanks are due to Angela for getting this down. Great stuff.

This has to be one of the nicest posts in this series that I have read so far, along with Philip Hensher's, who may have sympathised with Kipling on the uses and abuses of a designated writing space.

"We've been in this house over 40 years and I'm 79 years old, so this room is full of my past. ". Alvarez issues a warning about helpful cleaners, and admits to playing poker online if his work is not going well.

Those of you who have been keeping up with the series will of course have seen this, and this (which you will no doubt remember next time you see a crowded desk.)

The Festival will wind up tomorrow night and I had two days there this week, which was quite enough as there is a lot going on chez nous just now. I found something electrifying on Thursday which I probably would not have bothered with immediately. though I was aware of its release, and that's poet Robert Gray's most recent volume of autobiography, The Land I Came Through Last, from Giramondo, which he spoke about at the Festival Club around lunchtime. I am powering through it now and will review it later in September.

The David Malouf session was a little less predictable than these things can be, though the usual stuff about how do you write, how do things develop, was gently pushed around by himself and Ivor Indyk, without many surprises presenting themselves; one point which I'm sure Malouf has made on other occasions like this was that his second book, An Imaginary Life, could really have been written at the end of his career, and all the others written between that and Johnno. He spoke at some length about family history, a classical education and the impact of Ovid, and bilingualism in children.

There was a funny question from the floor about the 'physicality' of Malouf's writing practice, in the sense of 'how do you move around the house? do you go for walks?' to which Malouf replied with a nice anecdote about Patrick White ringing up to ask if he was interrupting the ironing, complete with vocal impressions.

He also made the rather remarkable suggestion that grappling with 'the matter of Australia' had been a task authors took on over about the last forty years, but that it was now pretty much over - that young Australian writers are not interested in it. I wonder what someone like Julienne Van Loon, who set her latest book in the Pilbara region, would make of that suggestion.

I think I was here this time pretty much to see how Fed Square rates as a MWF venue, to watch old people struggle with BMW Edge steps, in much the same way they would do at the Beckett or Tower Theatres at the Malthouse (where there must have been lifts, I guess.) Fed Square has tremendous potential apart from the access issues in several areas, and the bloggers who were there this weekend will have seen more of that (links to follow) than I did on the relatively quiet Thursday and Friday.

It would be good to have something slightly smaller available for smaller sessions, as well as the Festival Club in the ACMI function space  - one of the younger Americans I visited professed herself a bit intimidated by the size of ACMI 2: Mark Sarvas, of course, took it in his stride, and it was lovely to finally meet him and be able to thank him briefly for the inspiration of The Elegant Variation, on which a lot of newsy book blogs are based.

I enjoyed the Thursday session on small(!) mags with Julianne Schulz of Griffith Review, Sally Warhaft of the Monthly, and Philip Gourevitch of the Paris Review. Having these three, along with Briton Michael Burleigh, chewing the fat on the coverage and editorial practice of their publications was pleasurable, if only for the heartwarming thrill of hearing these smart, smart women give enthusiastic and articulate summaries of their considerable achievements. The blokes were also fine - the women, though, were particularly fine, went for GOLD, you might say.

The blogging session the following night was also very good - Antony Lowenstein and Margaret Simons, along with blogger extraordinaire Professor John Quiggin, did not let the chairperson, John Lenarcic (from RMIT Business no less), get away with any nonsense about blogs versus mainstream media, or pyjamas and cats.

Evidence of the digital/techno divide was steadfastly dismissed by Margaret Simons (Lowenstein did try to address it in part) and I felt for the poor lady who begged for some elucidation of how one found worthwhile blogs to read ("I have children and I work, what am I going to do when the paper is gone? I don't have time to blog") - feed reading is something that I think libraries could offer classes in, and is maybe something you're more likely to get information about from the ABC than a newspaper (though they do offer explanations of what RSS is on their websites, I think).

The working family woman made the salutary point that radio is surviving. That is interesting in itself, of course, and sometimes users do manage to win some fights with technology.

The title of this presentation maybe should have been, "Growing and Changing Media", with the focus squarely on changes, rather than the potential destruction of traditional media: change was certainly discussed intelligently by all panel members, and they were generally able to maintain that focus in the face of small, ineffectual diversions by the convenor.

I met Angela Meyer of LiteraryMinded there, which was terrific - what a top blogger about books and writing this dynamic young person is, and what contacts in new publishing she has! do subscribe to her feed at once if you haven't already. Angela recommended Lowenstein's book to me, so I snapped that up along with the latest Meanjin, which is damn pretty - bravo Sophie, the design overhaul was long overdue and will have to go some ways towards increasing sales in a design crazy town like this one.

I also took in the Going Down Swinging commission, Static: White Noise, which again was beautifully framed by Beamer Edge.
Festival highlights for me then - saying hi to Mark, and picking up Robert Gray's book, which I've hardly put down. But a truly sublime treat was sitting in Teh Edge and hearing Orlando Figes and Alison Croggon discuss and read Anna Akhmatova's poetry: like Oliver, I want some more.