Journals

Here we have one brand new literary journal, Etchings, and one which, by comparison, is practically geriatric: Famous Reporter. There is now a proliferation of literary journals, and SPUNC (Small Press Underground Networking Community) has emerged to advance their cause. We know that mainstream publishing is producing less diverse material, and that it is increasingly not Australian. The vast majority of publishing in Australia, as Michael Wilding has highlighted, is now done by local branches of big transnational corporations. Malcolm Knox has revealed the ‘governing management principles’ of such organisations. These include ‘segmentation and internal competition’: whereas in the past a publisher subsidised ‘book sections’, now a publisher will say ‘each of these books is a discrete unit and is at war with each other unit, and if the CSIRO Diet Book does well, we will reward the diet books section with the money to repeat that success. And if the poets continue to languish, we’ll have no more poetry.’ Poetry, of course, was effectively given the flick by mainstream publishers Penguin and OUP in the 1990s. As Mark Davis says, publishers are now akin to gamblers who ‘back winners’. This may always have been true, but now they’re putting more money on the favourites and none on the roughies. In this environment, literary journals that publish poetry are crucial to maintaining a diverse local literary culture.

‘Nothing bad has ever happened in the last 218 years of European settlement – and if anything ever did, it has been inflated out of all proportion by self-serving lefty academics.’ The perpetually angry right-wing commentators that dominate the so-called ‘history wars’ would never write anything so crass, but that is the message which appears to permeate the ‘three cheers’ school of Australian history supported by the present neo-liberal establishment. In contrast, recent contributors to Australian Historical Studies (AHS) provide a more nuanced version of Australian history that transcends pointless debates about the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ of the past. In general, the essayists seek to understand past realities rather than to pass judgment on historical actors and their eras. Race is one of the strongest themes in both issues of AHS. David Walker’s ‘Strange Reading’ (No. 128) is a well-written assessment of Keith Windschuttle’s The White Australia Policy (2004). Walker shows that by ignoring key evidence and through selected use of edited historical quotations, Windschuttle has constructed a bogus Australian past in which racist attitudes towards Asia represented a minimal part of the national story. Gillian Cowlishaw (No. 127) also tackles the history wars and the construction of national myths. Cowlishaw stresses the importance of creating Aboriginal history that reflects the personalities and values of the participants: ‘Indigenous Australians remain shadows in the scholar’s margins, passive recipients of “our” actions in the past and “our” regrets in the present.’ This problem can be hard to rectify, because the public record has a tendency to focus on European attempts to ‘manage’ the indigenous ‘issue’; the perceptions of indigenous people regarding cultural change and continuities are not always sufficiently documented, even in recent times.

The American poet William Carlos Williams often admitted how much he owed to the ‘little magazines’ that first published him. As they lapsed in and out of existence, he regarded them all as essentially the one publication and was grateful for the lifeblood they gave his (at first unpopular) writing. It is to be hoped that Australian literary magazines of various political shades and aesthetic proclivities, from Quadrant to Overland, are doing something similar. Indeed, when so much else is in flux in the publishing world, it is amazing how enduring Australia’s top literary magazines have been, despite their often small subscription lists. Even Island magazine, which is something of a junior compared to Meanjin, Southerly, and Westerly, has been around for twenty-seven years. Space: New Writing, on the other hand, has just appeared in its third number. To judge from the best material in the current issues of both magazines, Australian literary culture is not being ill-served here. If not everything is of equal interest (how could it be?), there is plenty of satisfaction to be had in both.

The idea that literary journals gain something by being yoked to a single theme seems to me one of the mildly dubious aspects of the enterprise. I suspect the tendency grows from a fear of disorder – ‘the anarchy of randomness’, as Adam Phillips puts it. But if these organs do require some unifying concept, it should ideally be a determination on the part of their contributors not to be herded into acquiescence with any one position. The true pleasure to be had from their pages is the jostle of selfhoods, the dust and din of competing subjectivities, rather than a communal reinforcement of, or opposition to, the status quo. As with any muster, it is the breakaways that provide the best exercise.

St Augustine suggests that it is impossible to love something until we know it. Yet desire, he continues, prefigures the amount of love we will have for it once it is known. With an alluring collection of new writing, and the support of a prestigious advisory board, Wet Ink has made its début in the market of print journals, and it clearly intends to woo.

Towards the end of the current issue of Antipodes, Bev Braune asks the questions, ‘Who is the reader? And how many of us are there?’ Braune is not referring to Antipodes and its audience. Nonetheless, the questions stand. Academic journals challenge our more romantic notions of readers and reading. As a general rule, they make poor bedtime companions; they deter greenhorns and lotus-eaters; they tend not to provide diversion, entertainment or consolation; and they serve a public and professional, not a private and recreational, function. One could hazard that they exist less for readers than for writers – that they are less read than written for.

‘The best preserve of our humanity’, Ian Britain writes in his editorial to this edition of Meanjin (Only Human, 63:1, edited by Ian Britain $19.95 pb, 236 pp), remains words. Whatever ‘our humanity’ is, it is protected, kept alive, maintained, conserved – in language. ‘[C]ertainly’, he clarifies, in the ‘honed, considered words of the good … literary artist’, but perhaps even in ‘verbiage’.

A thematic offering on sexuality from Australian Historical Studies (AHS) and an assortment of political history from the Australian Journal of Politics & History (AJPH). The first promises a diverse collection of articles that ‘not only speak productively to each other but also provocatively continue the project of putting historically framed sexual questions, and sexually framed historical questions, into scholarly debate’ but actually delivers something more modest. The second lacks this kind of thematic ambition, yet manages to surprise us with the weight of its straightforward historical sensitivity.

Evil empire or fellow citizen? It seems to me that the arguments and counterarguments about America’s role in the world today run parallel to the debates concerning cultural studies’ standing in the humanities. It’s a thought that would have Raymond Williams rolling in his grave, of course. As an academic discipline, cultural studies was born Marxist, and reared to champion the local, the underdog, the oppressed. But intervention of all kinds, good and bad, is a form of influence. Act on behalf of others and for every round of applause, there’ll be a competing cry of indignation. Perhaps I should declare my hand? I’ve been in and out of English departments for the last fifteen years. I feel a sense of overwhelming gratitude to cultural studies for loosening literature from New Criticism’s explication de texte. That said, I mourn the loss of a community of readers that the canon – and the existence of English departments, discrete unto themselves – ensured. I also baulk at the idea that readers are mere consumers – that catch-all term – as if curling up with a novel was experientially no different to eating, shopping or watching television.

In this special anniversary issue of the North American journal Verse, sub-titled The Second Decade, one can find a poem by Ethan Paquin called ‘New Form’. Its first line reads: ‘Ablution when stitched with pertussitine hate.’ Pertussitine? One of the most striking things about this large, impressive collection of contemporary poetry is its penchant, indeed rage, for the obscure word. After a while, I just left the Shorter Oxford next to me when I was reading, but it didn’t always help when I came across words like ‘usufruct’, ‘blisson’, ‘eldritch’, ‘rutabagas’ (North American for ‘swedes’), ‘alginate’, ‘geode’, ‘arroyos’, ‘aretes’ (those last four from one poem), ‘catafalque’, ‘cartouche’, ‘penetralia’, ‘solatium’, ‘griffonage’, ‘exogamous’, ‘matutinal’ and (twice) ‘pled’ (the past participle of ‘plead’). It’s a mildly interesting parlour game to see which words my computer recognises.