Commentary
The last thing a highbrow hack needs is to find himself in a sustained bout of controversy with a blockbusting writer from the other side of the tracks. A few weeks ago at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I found myself a participant in a discussion about reviewing (and whether the critic was a friend or a foe) which rapidly turned into a sustained accusation on the part of the bestselling novelist Bryce Courtenay that I and the chairman of the panel, Professor Peter Pierce of James Cook University, were literary snobs with no conception of any popular genres in general and no apprehension of the critical injustices (and personal pain) which Courtenay in particular was subjected to by us and all our ilk.
... (read more)A player of the calibre of John McEnroe constantly thrills his audience with strokes so perfectly timed that they appear effortless and lethal – and it is this combination which regularly amazes spectators. They may at times sense that what contributes so effectively to this timing is an early preparation of his strokes. He seems always already ready. It is, I suspect, only on fewer occasions that an admiring audience can see, and appreciate, what lies behind that: an ability, seemingly an uncanny one, to anticipate the play of the opponent. So uncanny sometimes that spectators come close to laughing, embarrassingly, at the supposed ‘luck’ of the player – to manage even to ‘get the racket at’ some extremely difficult or unexpected shot by the opponent, but then perchance to hit it for a winner. But the wise audience ‘knows’ that only the exceptional player has such ‘luck’ and has it so often. It is uncanny.
... (read more)I opened up my last issue of ABR to see my photograph. It’s there because I was mentioned at a conference at La Trobe as evidence of an ascendant antiintellectualism. I suspect my new reputation as a villain on the black hat side of the Culture Wars has a lot to do with my play, Dead White Males, or, more accurately, the fact that the play proved popular with audiences. Dead White Males satirised the dominant theology of the humanities, variously called postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, social constructionism or what you will.
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The Australian literary scene has always been more depressing that it is lively, especially when critics and writers are quick to display their battle scars in public places where oftentimes the debate hardly rises above fawning or fighting. The walking wounded are encouraged to endure. This is about the only encouragement extant. I remember the Simpson episode, not O.J. but Bart, who arrived in Australia for a kick up the bum. Perhaps the emulation of Britain has reached such an unconscious proportion that no ground can be explored beyond the grid bounded by Grub Street and Fleet Street, where youngsters need to be caned for reasons more prurient than wise, and where small ponds become the breeding pools for goldfish pretending to be piranhas dishing up more of the same stew. Thus, British writing, apart from its internationalists, hath come to this sad pass. Or where, given the brashness of being itself a young nation unused to finesse, Australia’s grand ideals end up as populist opinion – a talkback republic of letters irrelevant to its real enemies.
... (read more)‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’
Can I begin like that? It’s risky, and contentious, and will probably come back at me. But it’s no less a stupid comment for all that. In my experience it is usually the ones who say it who are the ones who can’t.
... (read more)Some years ago the poet John Forbes was addressing himself to that national monument, Les Murray, and he had occasion to remark, ‘The trouble with vernacular republics is that they presuppose that the kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere.’ It was, I suppose, designed to highlight the fact that the homespun qualities of the Bard from Bunyah were dependent on an awareness of the metropolitan style Murray willed himself to transgress and that there was an inverted dandiness, if not a pedantry, in all that Boeotian ballyhoo. It does not seem to me a remotely fair remark but it is a good epigram notwithstanding and it takes on a range of meanings depending on what light you look at it in. Presumably Forbes thought, or feigned to think, that Murray’s poetic demotic was a variation on that Colonial Strut which is, in fact, a version of the Cultural Cringe. In any case his words came into my head the other day when I was reading Simon During’s new Oxford monograph about Patrick White.
... (read more)The French literary world was agog last year with the news of the awarding of two prestigious prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, to a novel called Le Testament Français, by a writer called André Makine. The unusual nature of the novel is that it was written in the most beautiful, yet freshly distinctive French by a man whose maternal tongue is not French at all, but Russian.
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The fanzine is not a magazine. It bypasses and subverts the economics of commercial publishing and it reasserts the creative link between writing and production. Zines can also, because of the ‘terrorism’ of their production and distribution, bypass the convoluted legalistic boundaries of copyright. Graphics, slabs of text, photos, and images are photocopied, scanned, and pasted into fanzine, then cut-up, reassembled, and often made to assume an oppositional symbolic meaning to that of the original image.
... (read more)Have you noticed what’s happened to the daiquiri? It’s been reinvented, by the Teen Literati. Now it doesn’t seem fair to blame the Industrial Revolution for what happened to the daiquiri, or to Writing in Australia in the 1990s, but the Industrial Revolution started it – you know, the steam engine, World Wars, radiation poisoning, filter-tipped cigarettes, Mickey Mouse, germ-free hamburgers, and air travel holidays for the working family. And the Industrial Revolution was kick-started by the bourgeoisie. That’s right: you people, the middle class.
... (read more)I remember hearing about the first Somerset Celebration of Literature when I was in Europe last year. The letters and postcards arrived: imagine a private college paying for Peter Carey to fly out first-class from New York to attend a literary event. Everyone was fixated on the details: limousines for authors; personal minders taking care of presenters; an army of volunteers looking after every detail.
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