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Truckit Fest: Food trucks, crafty vendors, chairs breaking, eating yummy churro tots, fun with my friends Brenda and Melody, meeting cool people and selling my Pendants and artwork. It was an interesting and valuable experience for me. I am now entering the world of craft fairs. Note to self for the future: bring sturdier chairs next time, make more mini pendants (because people have been asking for those) and work on building a more effective display and presentation of my work. Definitely make a banner with large letters “Whimsical Fantasy Art” with lot’s of posters of my work to draw the crowd in.

Confession time. This post has nothing to do with writing or reading.

I just gotta say it: I love rings.

And not ordinary ones.

Crazy, kitschy, funky rings. Big and loud.

I’ve spent too much time trying to act my age. And why? I’m a picture book author! I should be able to wear Legos on my fingers, right? And polymer clay sushi. And dictionaries. Yes, dictionaries.

Let your inner goofball shine!

Summer time fun!

Last night, after becoming bored with paying work (which is something my wife says REALLY needs to stop happening) I took a little break and sketched some of the characters from the children's novel I'm currently writing.

I would say that I'm about halfway though the story, which I think I may have to extend out to a second book in order to tell properly. Thus far, I like what I've written - which is weird because I'm usually my toughest critic.

This is either a good thing, or a very, very bad thing. Only time will tell I suppose.

Steve

World's longest INSTALLED novel. (Link via Ben Dooley at The Millions.)

I saw Lee Miller's photos at the Monash Gallery of Art recently. Among several that were astounding, the shot of Miller in Hitler's bath, with the dust of Dachau rubbed firmly into the bathmat, was the one I returned to more than twice. Ali Smith discusses Lee Miller's photography and writing in The Guardian this week.

Speaking of light and shade - Grand Text Auto comes recommended by Christy Dena of Cross Media Entertainment, and I am really enjoying this addition to my RSS reader, especially when catching up on things like this.

The State Library of Victoria gets a mention in here, just after a shot of the Sorbonne's library.
Way to go. And yes, the crowd at Curious Expeditions do credit Candida Höfer's magnificent tome for some of these pictures (which is where I've seen them before.) As well as offering a link to a Flickr account. (Link from the ALIA New graduates mailing list.)

I'd like to see Nabs try this.

In the last of the Melbourne Writers' Festival news, David Prater covers his session with John Tranter, and the Speakeasy at AWM Online is going to be a regular reporting spot for writers' festivals down the coast -they did Byron a few weeks back, and now they're doing Brisbane. So do watch that space.

Thanks to Jill Jones for pointing out this feature on Australian poetry at British poetry site Metaroar, which developed organically into a group interview by New South Wales writer Angela Meyer with Jill, David Prater and Paul Hardacre. I will read more of it later, but partly due to my recent communications with him, I have to say I was tickled by David's answers to the questions of the role of poetry in society ('Sometimes I fail to see what role poetry has, other than to keep poets sane'), and things poetry should be able to do but cannot (' I wish it could bring down a government').

I really enjoyed Sophie Cunningham's great piece in The Age this weekend on writers and blogging, where she draws skilfully on her personal blogging experience and then weaves that of others into the article to give a broad and detailed picture of how blogging and writing do and don't mix (among other things). I especially liked the ending quote from fellow Ozblogger Boynton, which first appeared here:

I wonder what writers can learn from blogging? (the electric speed of playful language for one, where ideas seed).

The blog of the Internet marketing director for Holtzbrincks', Jeff Gomez, carries the ominous title 'Print Is Dead'. In this post he gets pretty excited about the future of book flogging using videos of only the most attractive authors. According to Jeff, if you're not a good looking writer in the future, it won't matter how good your book is, you'll be as high and dry as silent movie stars during the rise of talkies.

Christy Dena has noted some of the first examples of this over at Cross Media Entertainment, and puts a more positive spin on the development than Mr. Gomez, suggesting that video podcasts can communicate more information in a shorter amount of time than audio podcasts (as you'll see if you go take a look, Simon and Schuster's output at BookVideoTV is video podcasting).

Christy is an advisor to the Australian Literature on creative opportunities for writers in new media (among other things), as well as a tertiary lecturer in games and alternative worlds and a consultant in universe development. Her perspective on all developments in publishing, wherever it occurs, is always worth a look, and I really enjoy her blog and another website on text arts forms she contributes to, WriterResponseTheory.

While I agree with her that video podcast is not such a bad idea if your only option is to listen to the promotion of a book, I think that the speedy provision of detailed information is where print reviews have a huge advantage over all these whistles and bells. Not only does the writer get to hide - useful if you're not as photogenic as Allison Dubois, or you don't like getting caught in the wind like Marianne Wiggins, here. (God, she handles this well, I'd have been throwing a whopping tantie to get a better day for my shoot if that was me).

But print reviews and interviews are really easy to read FAST. And I can't see a great deal of benefit anyway in promotional material where the writer sits with you to tell you what a great book this is. No way am I going to read it just because the ad is on the telly, or a computer screen or mobile. The Book TV videos are not giving us much information, and whatever they do offer is prettified up to make us feel there's a product involved somewhere, and the author loves it so much they're happy to stand out in the wind on a beach and tell you all about it with their mouths full of hair.

I really doubt that this will work for readers who have always made considered buying decisions based on print reports. But perhaps we have always been in the minority.

Over at Dan Green's Reading Experience a few weeks ago, Colleen of Chasing Ray discussed the nature and purpose of the reviews she writes for the American Library Association's book review publication, Booklist. There's a place for short, sweet and devoid of literary criticism, even in reviewing. (I'm not sure if I need shots of seagulls and piers as well, though.)

The recent campaign of US bookreviewers to keep book reviews in newspapers has brought the whole function of reviewing under closer scrutiny in the US across several book blogs, and deserves a post on its own. For now I'll say there are reviews, and reviews - and there are also floggings, now available weekly on a phone near you.

This article (link from Miriam Burstein, the Little Professor) points to a range of difficulties emerging with the Google Books project, including poor cataloguing.

Found while researching my recent piece for Cordite, this great review by Theresa Lauf of Jane Smiley and her 13 ways of looking at you-know-what (which I don't really like). From TEXT Review.

Will Self is a fan of Nick Cave's lyrics, using this to briefly unpack an argument he had with a rock writer on the comparative strengths of Dylan and Smokey Robinson:

As I recall, the argument eventually came down to a single couplet from Dylan's song "Visions of Johanna": "On the back of the fish truck that loads / While my conscience explodes". Barney contended that this, in and of itself, meant absolutely nothing at all. Therefore, it could only be viewed either as a self-indulgent verbal riff, or as filler, marking time until the beat cranked up again.

Being forced to analyse the meaning of this trope was, initially, unwelcome. I had no desire either to descend into the nerdish, psycho-biographical slough of the Dylanologists or to ascend to the arid heights of those academics, who have hung on to their tenure by maintaining the view that some songwriters may be considered quite as much "poets" as their unaccompanied counterparts. So far as I'm concerned this approach has always prompted the question: if lyricists are poets, then what are poets? Presumably one-man bands without a band?...

Nowadays, if we picture the poetic muse at all, it's as a superannuated folkie, sitting in the corner of the literary lounge bar, holding his ear and yodelling some old bollocks or other. Whatever need we have for the esemplastic unities of sound, meaning and rhythm that were traditionally supplied by spoken verse, we now find it supplied in sung lyrics.

Bombastic nonsense, really, but it's nicely expressed bombastic nonsense. (I'm obviously easily impressed.)

Not a new lit site, but one I aim to examine more closely  - Western Australian Writing, an Online Anthology.

There's a good review of Ondaatje's newie here at Boldtype, with links to interviews on Salon and CBC.

Also Sara Paretsky speaks to the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, about their campaign to keep reviews in newspapers and the gender imbalance in crime reviewing.

Hay-On-Wye has been running over the past two weeks and is blogged at the Guardian's Comment Is Free blog, here. Around the blogs there have been some concerns aired that it's becoming a bit of a bun-fight - too many political sessions, not enough about books, and tiny toilets to boot. (When I remember where I read that, I'll come back and post it.)

This interview with John Banville has been noted by Mark Sarvas for its discussion of the origins of his novel Shroud, which Banville based on Paul de Man, and his remarks on famous people being slightly fraudulent in some way.
What I've noted in it with some glee is his snarky remarks about Graham Greene, who I'm not exactly crazy about either (let's face it, neither was Shirley Hazzard and she actually knew the guy):

... He was on a panel of a prize given in Ireland [in the 1980s]. And he wanted to give it to somebody else and he behaved very dishonorably. But you know [laughs] he was that kind of man. And I had amusement parodying him, pillorying him, in The Untouchable [Querell, the character based on Greene, is quite fond of child prostitutes]. But I think he would have been amused by my revenge on him.

I don't think Graham Greene is a very good writer. People felt in the postwar period that they were getting this high moral and intellectual questioning when they're reading Graham Greene but they're really actually just sentimental fluff. Evelyn Waugh said a wonderful thing to Graham Greene once. He said, 'You know, it's a good thing that God exists because otherwise you'd be like Laurel without Hardy.'

In my Quirke book, there isn't any moralizing at all. I mean everyone is bad. The only person who is maybe halfway decent is Sarah, and she�s obviously doomed. And Quirke as we discover at the end has been carrying his own dirty little secret for a very long time indeed.

I also note with some delight his departing words to the interviewer, Nathan Ihara:

I'm still agreeing to review books: I got one yesterday from the London Review of Books, one is coming from The New York Times, and I have one from the Irish Times. I'm the girl who can't say no. I can't resist. Who can resist new books?

and his disarming honesty about The Sea, which he does not think is his best book, and which he thought his publishers would turn down, all of which makes this one of the better
writerly interviews I've read in recent times.

I'm about due to re-read the section of Intimacy and Solitude to which Stephanie Dowrick is referring in this interview from her website, with Orchard Somerville-Collie:

'I am lucky enough to be writing about what eventually matters most to people – their personal and social relationships, their questions about meaning. This is an incredible field to work in. You can never run out of new things to know, reflect on and puzzle through. My subject matter never fails me. But – it is also extremely daunting to work with these topics. I take it seriously. I doubt myself over and over again. I spend months and months sometimes on a single chapter. The first section [on the Self] of Intimacy & Solitude took me a couple of years! Perhaps I wrote it fast, but preparing to write it took most of that time. There are many times when I wish I could be more pragmatic and just get on with it. But I can’t. I am an absolute perfectionist. I can let something go only when I believe this is the best I can do.

I know, you're thinking, what a snob Genevieve is, just because it took a couple of years she's going to give it another look. Guilty as charged. But Dowrick is one of the few writers my husband and I have both read and enjoyed. He likes The Universal Heart, I'm the Solitude buff. I also have a copy of May Sarton's book, Journal of A Solitude - I certainly don't have a solitary life at all, but it makes me feel a bit better about occasionally pining for some quiet time. It's even made me better at saying 'no' more graciously - my family would say I probably never really had a problem with saying it, but I do hope that I've got better at doing it nicely.

As well as being a best-selling writer on self-help issues, Dowrick is now an interfaith minister. She no longer practises as a psychotherapist and has recently released a book on journal writing along with running workshops in same, which are very popular. I receive emails from the Universal Heart network about once a month - Stephanie's newsletters, like her books, have the ring of shared experience rather than the bling of promotional buzz, and are always good reading.

And I'm rambling here, if only to disguise the fact that I found the saved text file to blog this and still haven't reread the first section of Intimacy and Solitude - that's still to do. However I do remember that in general Dowrick is not afraid to call selfishness by all its names, but walks a constructive path between high individualism and our need for greater community, using possibly her greatest gift, her way with words. I say 'possibly' because in this case we're talking about someone whose therapeutic skills and care for the world cannot be easily separated from the courageous achievement of her written work, so what the heck, why not celebrate both and be done with it? Long may she run.

Over at the Bat Segundo site, they have passed the hundred-podcast mark, and here's Jorge's interview with Martin Amis  - check it out.

Richard Ford has been thrown a sucker-punch just prior to the semis at the Tournament of Books, courtesy of Maud Newton. I thought Lay Of The Land and Against The Day would be facing up for sure, and was cursing the possibility, but she has saved us the trouble that might have been occasioned by such a lousy draw. Part of her problem seems to be resenting the leisurely, mannered but (to my mind) masterly and assured pace of Ford's last run with Mr. Bascombe:

'...while One Good Turn is not as rich, true, or perceptive as the novels I gravitate toward, it held my interest. The book arrived while I was sick in bed with the flu, and I read it that day.

The Lay of the Land, on the other hand, took 10 days to slog through. Ten days is not a problem, per se — I spent at least that long with Moby-Dick and Anna Karenina and Remembrance of Things Past—but two weeks after finishing Ford’s book, I still have no idea what the point of it was.'

Ouch.

These articles seem to belong together - one's called 'Think You Know How To Read, Do You?' ( a short ad is required watching to access this on Salon). 
And the second, a fun piece of Auden's reprinted in the Times to mark the centenary of his birth, is equally encouraging.

'It is a sobering experience for any poet to read the last page of the Books section of the Sunday Times where correspondents seek to identify poems which have meant much to them. He is forced to realise that it is not his work, not even the work of Dante or Shakespeare, that most people treasure as magic talismans in time of trouble, but grotesquely bad verses written by maiden ladies in local newspapers; that millions in their bereavements, heartbreaks, agonies, depressions, have been comforted and perhaps saved from despair by appalling trash while poetry stood helplessly and incompetently by.'

(Links via Laila Lalami and Matthew Tiffany.)

How Henry James would have hated hypertext, says Matt Christie. But 'he might have liked Hegel'. (now where did that bit go I wonder?)

Stephen Mitchelmore links to an interview over at the Harper Collins poetry weblog, Cruelest Month, with Gabriel Josipovici about his new novel and his lack of affection for historical novels: 'I don't believe in them or think they are a viable road for the modern writer to go down.'

I told everyone at the Library Uncon that Stephen Mitchelmore was good - I don't know if this is, but it certainly has curiosity value and I thank him for the link.

And Simon Sellars has noticed that Baudrillard died - but did anyone else in Oz blogging?

This probably is hard to swallow, but apparently AWP was top of the pops on Technorati t'other day. Link via Laurel Snyder, poet (and occasional prose-writer) of Jewishy-Irishy.

Lastly:
Tsk, not even in a handbag.