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Ian Britain

Meanjin vol. 66, no. 2 edited by Ian Britain & Griffith Review 17 edited by Julianne Schultz

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October 2007, no. 295

They were once called literary magazines, or journals, though dailiness was never aimed for. Monthliness is popular now, or, in the case of Meanjin and Griffith Review, quarterliness. But what kind of currency do these two magazines aim for? ‘New writing in Australia’ proclaims the subtitle of Meanjin’s latest volume; along with the banner title ‘Globalisation and Postcolonial Culture’, and the subheading ‘Before and After’. ‘New Stories’ and ‘New Poems’ are also listed on the cover, along with a serious frontal portrait of novelist Amit Chaudhuri, on ‘The Fate of the Novel’. There’s quite a bit of semiotic activity going on here, not to mention marketing. Currency – newness, fingers on the pulse, predictive ability – is on the agenda.

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The quirky kind of pleasure’ provided by coincidence; the ‘rightness’, whether logical or poetic, of connections between seemingly unconnected people, particularly connections that are inadvertent or may remain unknown to the people concerned; the ‘pleasing symmetry’, in retrospect, of various experiences we share with another human being, even when the experiences concerned were painful ones and their circumstances tragic: these are but a few of the broader observations, incidental but also integral, strewn throughout Two Lives (2005), Vikram Seth’s recent memoir of his great-uncle Shanti and Shanti’s German-Jewish wife, Henni. Integral not only to their nephew’s story of their fortuitous coming together in Nazi Germany and subsequent lives in England, but also to the life experiences of Seth’s readers, including (in my own case, certainly) the experience of reading the book itself. Such riches as are to be found in this story of ‘strange journeys’ and ‘chance encounters’ may also be found, Seth observes at the end, ‘behind every door on every street’. For me, the coincidences, inadvertent connections and serendipitous symmetries I found in the author’s trajectory and mine came to border on the uncanny.

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Philistinism and anti-intellectualism enjoy each other’s company so much that it can be bracing to be reminded that it is possible to be both an intellectual and a philistine. That, at least, was a charge levelled at the British Fabians by some former members of the Fabian Society – and by some historians too quick to take those apostates at their word. The Fabians had unimpeachable intellectual credentials, but their preoccupation with policy, the mechanics of municipal and national government, and strategies for getting their policies implemented (initially by ‘permeating’ existing political parties, and later, in the case of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, through the Labour party) was such that they could appear ascetic and unmoved by the pleasures – and the potential – of literature and the arts.

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Meanjin edited by Ian Britain & Overland No. 181 edited by Nathan Hollier

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April 2006, no. 280

Like Monaco, journals are sunny places for shady people. Black sheep and dark horses have often found a first sanctuary there. Precarious principalities, they are built on the shifting sands of subsidies, sponsorships and subscriptions. But their lifeblood is won or lost at the roulette wheel of submissions and commissions.

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Australian Literary Studies edited by Leigh Dale & Meanjin edited by Ian Britain

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September 2005, no. 274

In his Structure of Complex Words (1951), William Empson counted fifty-two uses of the words ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ in Othello. Nikki Gemmell, the publicity-shy cover star of the latest edition of Meanjin, manages to cram ten references to honesty (her own) into five lachrymose pages of her essay ‘The Identity Trap’, in which she explains that she refused to publish The Bride Stripped Bare (2003) under an assumed name because ‘a pseudonym is a lie’. How comforting it is to know that a writer of fiction should be possessed of such integrity, even if she does say so herself. Gemmell’s revelation does, however, constitute a severe blow to the reputations of George Orwell, Henry Handel Richardson and those lying Brontë sisters.

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A full-blown history of sperm can’t be too long in the coming given the current academic vogue for studies of the body, and the huge spurt of curiosity prompted a few years ago by the appearance of a couple of tell-tale stains on the dress of a White House intern. It is possible the subject (or the object) first came into its own as a more than private matter when, nearly a hundred years ago, Lytton Strachey spotted a similar stain on the dress of his just-married friend Vanessa Bell and dared to name it in the mixed company of his assembled friends, the legendary Bloomsbury group in its embryonic days. ‘Semen?’ he enquired, with forensic candour, and forever after, so the legend goes, the group would never recoil from calling a sperm a sperm. ‘With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down … Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips.’ So recalled Vanessa’s sister, Virginia, about a decade and a half later, when she had long since become the wife of Leonard Woolf and was already on the way to becoming one of the twentieth century’s most famous novelists and pin-up feminists.

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Meanjin edited by Ian Britain & Overland 177 edited by Nathan Hollier

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March 2005, no. 269

Meanjin,’ writes Ian Britain, ‘always aims for a blend of the astringent and the convivial.’ A worthy aim, and one that is well realised in its ‘Psychology’ edition. It may simply be a consequence of the theme’s depth and complexity, but On Psychology also feels weightier than previous issues. Britain shares responsibility for this edition with guest co-editor Robert Reynolds, a Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales. Reynolds contributes an essay arguing for the importance of distinguishing between a valid sense of sadness and full-blown depression. He also seems to have influenced the overall tone. There is a touch of academic dryness about several of the essays and slightly less emphasis on personal reflection, although cover-star M.J. Hyland’s account of her experience of depression is central.

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Taboo – or not taboo? That is the question you soon start asking yourself if you bother with the text of this book and its purported revelations on the subject of ‘male beauty’. It is a stimulating question, but you end up wondering if the publishers, at least, mean you to go to such bother when they’ve hardly gone to any themselves, in the way of editing, to ensure some cogency in their celebrity author’s arguments. There’s little here, in fact, that you could call argument, in the sense of a coherent succession of reasoned propositions: nothing so solid or stable to argue against; nothing so stolid or boring. When not beguiled by the next image of upwardly nubile flesh, sumptuously reproduced from the work of the world’s great visual artists, you’re more at risk of being left stupefied by the next authorial assertion. Oh, yes, it will be provocative, but the provocation often lies in its brazen countering of the assertions that have preceded it. Silly you for craving consistency.

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As mouths go, it must be one of the most fabled of the century past. The lips, as widely parted as they could be, suggest the contours of a distended heart. There is an upper gallery of teeth, slightly imperfect, and glazed by spittle mingling with the crystal darts and droplets of a powerful jet of water issuing relentlessly from above the face. A mottled tongue is ...

What do the fab four of this book have in common? Not simply that they are Australian and expatriate, that they are writers who have achieved a degree of celebrity and performers who have made skilful use of television.

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