Commentary
It is Sunday and that is all it is. I have just read the Australian. It is not Australian. It is The Cringe. I have struggled to like Phillip Adams for years; I liked him when he was Phillip Adams – I guess he did too. He worships Mammon when he once seemed to worship cries in the street and whispers from above. No God in him.
... (read more)Are we in Sydney or Singapore this January? Tinsel Town gives off the same driving ram, the same steamy conditions as the city-state shaking on its financial foundations. Some days of course the sun shines, the beaches are bright with bikinied or semi-bikinied naiads and the surf patrols strut. However, it is Tinsel Town as described by its literati that has kicked the year off with a bang.
... (read more)New York snow storms may blow outside his window, but Sumner Locke Elliott is feverishly busy indoors writing a novel set in Australia between the wars. He hopes to complete it by late spring.
... (read more)Dhvanyaloka, the Literary Criterion Centre at Mysore, derives its names from a classic Indian work of literary criticism and, by way of Cambridge, from T.S. Eliot’s journal of the 1920s. The Indian work saw literature as a spreading of the light, Eliot saw it as the maintenance and renewal of tradition. Mysore, Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah applies these two principles to the study of Commonwealth literature.
... (read more)There must be something horribly deformed about a society in which the lowest paid work is often the most demanding and the least dispensable. Why, for instance, is the wellbeing of our elderly not worthwhile enough for people to be paid to deliver Meals on Wheels? Who doesn’t believe that the nurture of children is an enormously responsible job? Does a rubbish tip attendant get better paid than a clerk? Course not.
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Have you ever noticed how otherwise intelligent journalists find it almost impossible to write seriously about Adelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week? Predictably, they seem compelled to joke about the prodigious quantity of booze consumed – but perhaps they have never attended a business or an academic convention. Then well-known visiting writers apparently must be called ‘literary lions’ – an alliterative cliché suggesting that these writers are somehow not really human. There is usually some marvelling at the miracle that for once the big names (the lions) haven’t dropped out – as though there have been no Writers’ Weeks since 1976, the last time they did drop out. And inevitably there is an awkward, giggly tone to their articles, suggesting acute discomfort or embarrassment.
... (read more)In the UK Bookseller, the self-named ‘organ’ of the VAT-proof Thatcherland, the gossip columnist, one Horace Bent, speculated that Simon and Schuster International were running their New York eyes over Thomson Books UK. However, Thomson, the umbrella sheltering Nelson from the noonday sun, along with pedigree icons Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, and the slightly more louche Sphere and Abacus paperback lists, has chosen the dignified flippancy of Penguin over any other suitor. My source was impeccable, Penguins never lay eggs that don’t hatch, and the news is now yesterdays, unless of course you happen to be a Nelson employee crystal-gazing into the Penguin pond!
... (read more)In Australia, few publications regularly review children’s books for the information of the general reader/buyer. ASA chairman, Ken Methold, suggests that Australian writers need to advertise their varied skills and publicise their works. I agree.
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