Of course!

That's why books like Never Coming Back

"Struggling with fear, despair, and suspicious Swedish authorities when his wife fails to return home, Mike endures a nightmarish existence with his daughter, unaware that his vigil is being secretly filmed and shown to his wife by her abductors in a nearby cellar..."

have moved, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, out of crime or mystery sections and into general fiction sections everywhere! It's the pandemic corruption.

General fiction has always covered war (Stendahl) adventure, comedy (Defoe), domestic fiction, adultery (Flaubert, Tolstoy), and horror (Shelley) - the plain bloodsimple used to be mystery (Hammett).

Between them the drug trade (begun in earnest during the Vietnam War and continued throughout the Latin American sectors of the Cold War and the Friedmanite collapse of the Soviet bloc) and the War on Terror have corrupted everything. Middle class reality (Chekhov, Cheever, Updike, stretching to Burroughs & Heller) is turned to genrefic.

The Structure of Autumn

The Word's the Thing

I was tripping around my local facility the other day, looking for and at this and that, reading the intervening spine-labels, when it occurred to me that the shelf-dividers & other descriptors on offer have been somewhat overwhelmed by developments in the publishing industry.

So, with great humility, I offer the Library of Congress the following possibilities for fiction and non-fiction, print and other formats:

Belleslettristic trash

Hipster epistemology

Debordian spectacle

Gormless clusterfuck

Further suggestions wined, dined, & entertained below...

On Being a Publisher

Publishing – small press, micro press, book packager, co-publisher… Over the last 10 years GobQ has published Gobshite Quarterly – a multilingual quarterly magazine (now back I print after a long hiatus), co-published Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, a multilingual dictionary of language from the dark side; a bilingual edition of Gato Eficaz, an early novel by Luisa Valenzuela; and Golems Waiting Redux, an account of the vandalism of local sculpture in downtown Portland in 2002.

The first time I ever held a manuscript in my hands was when Oriel Gray let me take Scraps of Paper home to read. It was her memoir, fresh and vivid. There was something about the unbound pages and the indented lettering (Olivetti portable) that made me shiver – some life or power fresh from her mind and hands came, straight and unmediated, to my hands and mind.

Though that manuscript became part of my furniture for almost 30 years, I forgot what handling real manuscripts is like. When RV Branham suggested starting a magazine I wasn't paying much attention, truth to tell. But when the manuscripts started coming in…. I'll never forget the day Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Words arrived at the Gobshite Quarterly office, as a mailed fax from Marilyn Hacker in Paris. It was a delirious experience: I couldn't focus on them, the sense of awe and strangeness and déjà vu was so strong; I couldn't stand quite upright. I put them down and picked them up again, read them, and finally took them to my own office – a quiet, west-facing room upstairs, with nothing but a desk, 2 chairs and 2 windows – even northern light on the one side and filtered western light on the other – and laid them on the desk, in order, and began again. They were so good, and so far outside the realm of English poetry that having them in my hands felt made me feel as though something I'd never known but always known was trying shake itself free of the categories I always thought in, or lived in.

We ran them all in issue 1, in French and English. (That is, we ran 14 in French and 13 in English: The New Yorker had bought one of the translations.)

In that issue we also ran "Sirens," a short story by Frederic Raphael (Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes), which hadn't placed in England. It's a great story, another world-view shatterer. I couldn't believe it'd been "Good luck placing it elsewhere"-d. In England. Couldn’t believe it.

The 3rd most wondrous experience was an email from Palestine (long after we'd given up hope), allowing us to reprint some of Mahmoud Darwish's poems. (Typesetting the Arabic was an adventure – it was eventually done by one of the partners in a local printing business, who'd studied Arabic and been to Syria for a year as a Fulbright scholar. As we didn't have the right font at the time we scanned the page as a jpg and InDesigned it that way.)

Marilyn Hacker also brought us the French poet Marie Etienne. Writers from Cuba and Mexico and Argentina contacted us, looking for translators; translators contacted us, looking for publishers (Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Poland), and we found translators and published them.

On a visit to Portland Julienne Eden-Bušić chanced to see us mentioned in The Oregonian. She brought a treasure-trove of new Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian poets – Tomica Bajsić, Barbara Korun, Dubravka Oraić-Tolić and Ferida Durakovic, as well as prose-writers Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović. Tomica Bajsić's poetry was – seeing it in manuscript was just a rush, it really was. Seeing something that good, and new, already accomplished and huge with future possibility – fills you with hope and joy and repletion, all at once.

The other astonishing thing about publishing, perhaps particularly about Gobshite, was that the printed object travelled roads we'd never imagined. People kept saying they'd run across a copy in a train in Spain or some other obscure way-station. The Algerian poet Amari Hamadene contacted us after seeing a copy in an Algerian café.

And just as well the manuscripts shake the world and then travel beyond imagining, because the financial dance of publishing is awful. We were just beginning to get some ad-revenue when our major distributor collapsed, leaving us with pennies on the dollar, unable to return to print until very recently.

And we are beginning to return to print, using Portland printers and very small runs. Issue 12 came out just before last Christmas, featuring a short story by Lidia Yuknavitch, essays on the Occupy movement by Richard Melo and Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Occupy sketches by Shannon Wheeler, an excerpt from a lost Russian novel about the Revolution (by Anatoliy Mariengoff; we are hoping to co-publish the entire book when translation is complete), an etymological reminiscence by Katherine Dunn; short, surreal prose-poems from Denmark – all sorts of things that do not appear elsewhere in English, and certainly not in conjunction with each other. We intend to print issue #13-14 this coming autumn.

Though I usually function as factotum, reader of first or last resort, proofreader, poetry editor, image-bank, and bookkeeper for Gobshite I am preparing a couple of books for publication later this year. One is almost ready; the other, which will be larger, I haven't quite mentioned to the writer, yet… I'll drop by later this week, and have a word.

Sometimes the World Works

Perhaps it was the hint of rain in the air, but this morning I did things in the front garden instead of what I'd usually do. The moss and ferns (largely unwanted on the one hand, struggling on the other), reminded me of a terrarium -

The first writer's organization I was a(n associate) member of was SFWA. (Sometimes the world works in very strange ways.) From the early '80s to the early '90s,LOSCON was local and we went to it every Thanksgiving. For 2 or 3 years during the late '80s there were wonderful terrariums in the dealers' room, fantasy castles on moulded plastic cliffs, and wizards with staves topped with orbs of opalized or coloured glass in among ferns and mossy things; they were small and whole fantasy worlds, made with real, living plants from this one. You could look into them and find them surrounding you.

And at work there was a young lad who'd come to study in the Library every morning before his first class, always awkward and overwhelmed. One day his mother came in with him, bringing his lunch in a brown paper bag, and urging him to do well. She was badly dressed and missing some teeth: they were clearly very poor and the boy was both the apple of her eye and the family's great hope. His frailty and burdens worried me. I wanted to tell him about the terrariums in the dealer's room; I knew the plants would comfort him; but I didn't know him well enough to talk to him about anything at all.

I suppose he graduated; he stopped coming in in the mornings. In the brutal way of the daily grind I forgot him.

Some years later I was walking back to the library from the cafeteria (I worked there a very long time), and I saw a tall young man talking to some students. I bristled and asked him if he needed anything, unknown adult male on campus, talking to a group of quite young girls. He replied that he was talking to his sister. Naturally I wasn't convinced. And then he said, "Don't you remember me? I'm Carlos."

And yes, it was Carlos. More than 6 feet tall, in fatigues (name-patch at the join of clavicle and shoulder), out of the Army now, studying to be a Forest Ranger.

The Inside-Out, Utterly Hypocritical, Pre-Paid, Jerry Who? from Where? "Review" "Scandal"

It's a Gordian knot of bad faith and absurdity.

Firstly, the matter of e-book authors writers paying a supplier for positive (5-star) reviews from "readers" who may not have read the books in question. (That's actually 2 matters - firstly, the automatic 5 stars, and secondly, and the one I assume the hoo-hah is about, is the availability of the paid service.)

Now this could not happen - the reviews wouldn't convince potential buyers - if customer reviews hadn't already been a large feature of Amazon's database, if people hadn't already been using them to make buying/reading/viewing decisions.

I've used the customer reviews there many times to decide about DVDs I wanted to use for some of the DVD film-festivals at work a few years ago. I needed them particularly for things I wasn't personally familiar with (Korean TV series, films from Mongolia and Iran, some older new-wave films from China I hadn't seen, and so on). I liked Amazon customer reviews because they are, generally, without guile. If people got bored half-way through, or even ten minutes into, they said so. There were usually enough reviews of a title to form a balanced judgement before setting in motion a lot of possibly needless activity in setting up the festival, and to save myself a lot of embarrassment.

So that was valuable knowledge. I appreciated its existence.

And, once more, there are 2 things to consider here.

Firstly, how can I go on trusting Amazon customer reviews if they can be bought and paid for?

Secondly: why do I value Amazon customer reviews for their honesty, if the old-media, "professional" reviews, are also honest?

Answer: because the professional reviews are not honest.* They are every bit as pre-paid as the "scandalous" e-book reviews - they just work in the 2.5-4.5 star range. (Their question seems to be: Is this book a good or bad example of its type?)

(Publishing is an assembly-line; the assembly-line mass-produces predictable objects. The potential book should announce its similarity to previous books; it  should not take place in a particular locale, but be equally local to all potential readers...) (But that's old news. This development began in the mid-'60s, when profits were first going to be "maximized" and corporate mergers were still just proposals and plans. It took another 10 years for the doing away with the mid-list to become an explicit, effective policy. Norman Spinrad was one of the first to raise that alarm among writers, in 1978.)

The function of professional reviewers has always been to keep the books selling, and, hemi-demi-semi-consciously, reviewers feel the pressure. (How many times have you read a negative review that revised itself into positivity before your eyes and its own end?)**

This is another kind of silencing of dissent, trivial, creepy, and indicative. If you can't tell the truth about a book you've read, what can you tell the truth about?

In an understandable effort to create an island of sanity/probity in this steaming swamp of payola, this anyone will do anything for money - which is a definition of slavery, among other things - 49 British authors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph, condemning the widespread use, by authors, of fake identities to puff their own pieces and slam those of their "rivals". (See the introductory article here.)

Yesterday I came across a hard copy of Steve Lawhead's The Spirit Well (Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 2012). This is a transcript of the first two pages. (Emphases in the original.)

==

What Readers Are Saying about The Bright Empires Series

"His mastery of the art of description is beyond belief. (I had to stop several times to jump up and down because I loved his style so much, seriously.) His level of attention to details like period mind-set and speech is a delight to behold (especially for die-hard background-first novelists like me)." - Sir Emeth M.

"This is a story that has it all: mystery, history, damsels in distress, and a mind-bending meditation on the nature of reality. It is in equal parts Raiders of the Lost Ark, National Treasure, and Jumper. Highly recommended." - Chad J.

"Filled with descriptions that beguile all five senses and all the beauty and charm of the language I have come to expect from Lawhead, this book is a fascinating blend of fantasy and sci-fi." - Jenelle S.

"... a hold-your-breath beginning to a new series. This novel mixes ancient history, time travel, alternate realities, mystery, physics, and fantasy, to create a story so compelling that I find myself recommending it to any who will listen." - Sheila P.

"[A] sure winner for eager sci-fi readers... The vivid imagery and witty lines help keep the reader on the edge of their seats." - Jerry P.

"Time travel and high adventure abound in this brand new title from veteran author Stephen R. Lawhead." - Ben H.

"Imagine Narnia merged with Hitchhiker's Guide, and you have a starting point for the adventures of Kit Livingstone." - Rick M.

"Lawhead vividly describes the sights, sounds, and smells of the markets in Prague, the streets of Restoration England, and even the dry heat of Ancient Egypt... The premise of ley-line travel is fascinating yet mysterious, with scientific definitions that are detailed without being too technical. The characters are personable and complex, and it's easy to get caught up in their search for that elusive map." - Malinda D.

"... an excellent, mysterious storyline that draws the reader in." - Kieran

==

Let's leave aside the fact that The Spirit Well is volume 3 of the series and that at least one of the quotes does not strictly apply to the item in hand.

What I immediately notice is that:
*the punctuation is surprisingly correct for the level of prose - "I loved his style so much, seriously"
*the pitch-points/selling-points (bolded) are surprisingly concise for people who are "beguiled" by Lawhead's prose, which is flat, sloppy, flatly under-imagined and flatly overwritten, awkward in contemporary scenes and awkward in period.

None of these accolades is credibly sourced. They sound like some Amazon reviews but they don't sound quite real.  They smell of over-eagerness; they have such a sameness of tone and intent, such a single thrust of argument, they smell of some sort of fix.

A major publisher including such "reviews" in the book itself, is, to me, an even greater scandal than writers puffing themselves, no matter how deceitfully and underhandedly.

These pages in the book are not accessible to greedy individual authors, mavericks who suffer an unfortunate ethical insufficiency, and who will be discovered, eventually, pass through the mandatory brief public shame and so be absolved, i.e., forgotten and left to begin again under a pseudonym.

The beyond-Amazon, hard-copy corporate sponsorship of this kind of review is not being mentioned. The "scandal" is being confined to the behaviour of flesh and blood individuals. Corporate persons are exempt from, defined as above and beyond, whatever rage results from the hijacking of the mouths they call ours.

===

*Writers glad-handing each other's work is not just a recent occurrence: writers reviewing each other favourably and arranging exchange professorships / lectureships / fellowships for each other goes all the way back to the New York Review of Books, which was founded by publishers, notably Random House. (NYRB also pretty much founded the travelling writer's lecture business, another medium for promoting some writers, some books, some ideas.)

All this is detailed in The End of Intelligent Writing, by Richard Kostelanetz (Sheed and Ward, New York, 1974). This book is invaluable about the history and shape of U.S. publishing - and if nothing else, will explain why is is so important to know that Jason Epstein was Jeff Bezoz' mentor.

**In the Australian case I see the fear that bad reviews will kill a genuinely tiny industry. Unfortunately, that  industry can also die of good reviews. The precariousness of Australian book activity, like that of the other English-language publishers, comes from trying to make a branded, assembly-line industry out of an essentially unpredictable, low-margin business.

Poor Fellow, My Language: What Language Is This?

And so I pick up this book, runner-up for the 2011 Miles Franklin, and the apparatus of mediation and apperception – everything from The Australian Book Review to The Independent to The New York Times bestseller's blurb – says it's great – "fierce economy of style" and so forth: and I pick it up and find that it's written in dead-speak. Perhaps, I think, this is meant to be some sort of analogue to the early C20th newspaper accounts of disasters; perhaps it's meant to be like that. (This is the first chapter, where the murder takes place in the storm.)

I am slightly surprised to find, in the second chapter, Quinn, the falsely accused brother of the 12 year old girl, isn't 13 or 14, but 16. That seems old, for the father to have been so worried about them in the storm and flood. You'd expect a lad of 16 to have some physical strength and sense, enough to look out for a 12 year old; enough, at least, for that thought to have crossed the father's mind, even in a monstrous storm.

And then, in the midst of the stiltedness, the book begins to be populated by sentences like this: He steadied himself against a tree and was afraid. (p. 24).
??
"He was afraid and steadied himself against a tree"?

Quinn, waking from a nightmarish dream, frantically struggling with his gas mask, says to himself: Move it, move it, move it. (p. 32)

Not in 1919, in Australia, he doesn't. The Australian idiom was "Move!" or "Move your arse!" "Move it!" is American.

He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun's warmth. – General tone & flavour. (p. 37)

Quinn visits Mary, his mother, who is dying of influenza. She speaks of going into the murdered girl's bedroom, hoping in her grief that handling the girl's things, reciting lines of poetry over and over again, can bring her back.
She says to Quinn: Your father hates that I go in there. (p. 57)

That's a particularly New York Jewish construction. You'll hear it in Woody Allen's early films. Neither Mary nor anyone else would have said that in outback NSW in 1919. There's no indication in the book that Mary's first language is Yiddish.

The woman in question was perched in a green armchair. Her thin and restless fingers wrung a pair of black gloves in her lap, as if to death. Her husband stood at her shoulder and each of them wore a startled, pensive expression like they had steeled themselves for bad news so many times that their faces were permanently set thus. (p. 62)

If the narrative voice of this novel is, in its stiltedness, attempting to evoke the starchiness of early C20th Australian newspaper speech, then "like" meaning "as though" is completely out of place. It is an Americanism that became familiar to Australians when American TV did; it entered Australian English (where it still clangs) no earlier than the mid-'50s. Combined with the fussy and self-important "thus," the passage becomes a whipsaw of USUK usages posing as a period Australian sentence.

The mise en scene is muddled... The hardscrabble of dry land and people driven crazy by poverty is well evoked (the Irish placenta on the river flats… Although by this time you are ready to suspect Kurosawa or the Chamberlain affair).

What's not clear is how the lush orange and nectarine orchards near the richer part of the town (named Flint), relates to the rest, where the water ends, how the grass high as his knees could survive away from the river. The farmer that must have brought his flock up here to graze – whereabouts would he have gone afterwards? What of the sheepdogs? (Never a bark, a nose, a threat of being sniffed out; never another allusion.)

It's all very well for The Independent to say the descriptions of the Australian bush have "a precise and transporting intensity." The Independent has no way of knowing these descriptions haven't got a feasible, realized geography. The Independent would never have let D.H. Lawrence get away with crap like this.

I have no objection to Australian writers or anyone else using American or English idioms whenever they like. What a good novel requires is that writers know what they're doing, where and what period the expressions they're using come from, and what their origins suggest; writers need to use them to build to deliberate and successful effect. Novelists need an ear for dialogue...

I don't even care that by my lights this is a bad book. Bad books sell well all the time; in certain moods I'm ready for a really bad book.

My real objection here is twofold: that the writer has no ear and no idea; and that that the "critical" apparatus of at least two countries has made a concerted effort to tell me this is a good book. More than a good book, a Miles Franklin runner-up. Does the critical apparatus of two countries have a tin ear? Doesn't it know what it's doing? (Doesn't it know that it doesn't know?) (Is it just that the cheques keep clearing?)

There are Henry Lawson stories that are pitch-perfect, still, a hundred and twenty years later. The Slap is pitch-perfect. They're written in a particular language.

This book's not alone in its lack of an actual language.

Another recent award-winning Australian novel featured, in its first chapter, an American soldier in WW2 Sydney describing Australian mouths as being (as thin as) "letter-boxes," when the word the character would use is mailslots – the American word, where the emphasis lies on the horizontal line the character is actually registering. A page or so later this same man sees a girl sitting on her "bottom" and not on her butt or ass…

So I end at my beginning. What language is this, where Australian characters normally speak Yiddish or standard American, and American characters speak in English euphemism?

==

Womersley, Chris, Bereft: a novel, New York, Silver Oak, 2012
McConnochie, Mardie, The Voyagers, a love story, Melbourne, Penguin, 2012.

==

I didn't finish Bereft; I read slightly past the 100-page mark, where I found it turning into a detailed treatment for the film it always wanted to be. (I won't mention Quinn training himself to be still for hours on end, to avoid snipers in the War, and then standing still in the bush, and noticing his stiffness after, as though it were not routine.)

I've only read the online chapter of The Voyagers.

I haven't read the rest of these novels. If I'd been in a bookshop looking for something to buy, the clear lack of command of the material in these books would have killed the sale.

Poor Fellow, My Language: 'Im Bugger-Up.

It was when I was editing library catalogue headings for the University of Sydney, around 1996-1997, that I first began to realize just how non-standard Australian English had become. I had been gone from the country about 15 years at that stage, and so had lost any sense of the texture of Australian life.

Since then what seems to me to have been some kind of linguistic – movement, more than revolution – in the quality press. Fairfax, to be particular: I have not been able to overcome my dislike of the Murdoch media long enough to actually read The Australian since 1975.

I used to read The Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald online before going to work. I did that from late 1996 till, I suppose 2008, when they had both become tabloid: everything was sport, conflict, sex, crime – lurid and inescapable. I found that frustrating because I wanted to know what was going on, and footy and gangland murder, drug arrests and police corruption were what I was being given instead of political and social coverage. I used to find Michelle Grattan interesting and informative, but her column appeared to have denatured itself. The books pages – originally updated weekly, and particular to the papers they appeared in, first became more toothless, then began to be updated less and less frequently until they finally became one page pointed to by two different URLs, and almost changeless.

However, the period between 2001 and 2007 was interesting because language which had never before been in the register of newspapers of record regularly appeared on the front page, and this language was what would once have been called "coarse."

The first example that comes to mind is the word "stoush." It means "fight" – verbal or physical conflict long after the initial point of contention or conflict has been identified, and argued about. Originally the word belonged to the street. It would have been used in good and earnest by the Irish gangs of Sydney before the turn of the last century, and to comic effect by C.J. Dennis in the 1920s.

These words are Australian in the sense that they have been in Australian English for a long time (carried over from Cockney or London working-class or criminal or semi-criminal speech). They have not been part of the standard Australian English. Thirty years ago they were archaic. But like "bonza" and others, they have been resurrected and injected into the mainstream of Australian English as Australian identifiers.

To complain about "the coarsening of language" is not only to sound Victorian, but to miss the point.

Language like this is intensely political. It does not signify the sudden inclusion of formerly excluded groups, a new and pervasive flavour of Scottish shop-stewards, as it were.

This kind of language was being introduced and intensified as the "children overboard" incident was passed on as truth so John Howard could win a Federal election, as boats of Afghani or Iraqui refugees were being intercepted by the Australian Navy and turned back to Indonesia or offloaded at the prison on Christmas Island, as refugees were imprisoned in horrifying camps near Woomera or other places on the mainland or off-shored to camps / prisons on Nauru (paid for by Australian taxpayers), as the infamous Cronulla riots occurred.

Language like this is:

a) historically Australian, and so guarantees the "Australianness" of what is being said - that the matter is particularly or primarily Australian, unconnected to other happenings elsewhere, or virtuously Australian - that this should be thought or done to or for, by, with, or from Australia(ns)...
b) inflammatory

And, being inflammatory, it limits the scope of what may be readily perceived about what is being said.

It's the language of and imprimatur for right-wing street-thuggery, a la National Front, but without the embarrassment of an explicit political link.

Free Will and Determination

With more 

• anger
• humour
• history
• geography
• moxie
• wisdom 

 and sheer philosophy than ever before -  the Knitting Alone post originally called "The Myth of Balance" has become the first part of:

"Free Will and Determination" - an essay on the blog at Red Lemonade.

:)

Shock! Horror!

The new job's not hideous!

This is kind of what it's like.

My Father, Geranium, South Australia, 1919

How Memory Works

Because memory is visual verbal and communal and rehearsed, it can disappear under dominant images. I lived in L.A. for about ten years. I've been to Venice Beach a few times (housecleaning, showing a friend from home who wanted a particular book). And so I have visual and muscle memories of the canal, the boardwalk, and the cavernous 2nd-hand bookshop that had been there for years. (That must have been in '91.)

After seeing Dogtown and Z-Boys I now have visual memories of Venice Beach since the 1970s, when I was actually living on the bottom edge of the other side of the world in small patch of rich dairy-farms, and on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, and in Melbourne.

So what happens in a densely populated, media-rich location such as L.A., is that underground movement proliferate, document and ultimately broadcast themselves; the wealth generated by corruption is so fabulous it makes its own myths – Chinatown and the rest of L.A. noir from Chandler on – I will mount that film festival sooner or later – and these images become our not only our images, but also our memories. We remember going to the pictures; we remember what we saw. Seeing them was what we did.

I almost remember World War 2: until Sputnik it was the largest thing in our mental landscape. My parents and brother had lived through it. The first film I have a whole sense of is The Dam Busters. The radio serial we all listened to was Five Fingers. (Adapted and directed by Morris West. Yes, that Morris West).

I remember having anxiety dreams about the Korean War. I remember the Catholics fleeing the Communists, an exodus from North Vietnam – a 16mm film at school shown by a visiting priest.

There was nothing epic, filmic, beautiful, dramatic, noteworthy, about going to work or church or school, cooking, gardening, going to the beach or the hills.

And so to the vexed matter of Australian film.

There had been a silent film industry which never gained a truly sound footing.

Efftee Studios and Cinesound Productions foundered, in 1935 and 1936, repectively, on the Australian Government's failure to introduce a quota for domestic films. (The British did introduce one, giving rise to the "quota quickie" and, via Korda's Private Lives, to Von Sternberg's failed I, Claudius.)

Once Efftee and Cinesound and failed, there were very few Australian films. Some wartime action/morale boosters (40,000 Horsemen, directed by Charles Chauvel, The Kokoda Trail, directed by Ken G. Hall), and then almost nothing.

The only genuinely working production facility in the country was the Commonwealth Film Unit, the documentary arm of the Commonwealth Government. (Tim Burstall, Bruce Beresford, and Mike Thornhill worked there.)

When I was seven or so there was Smiley Gets a Gun at the drive-in; the same night, before it, a trailer for The Sundowners. We never saw that. My family didn't go to the pictures much and this kind of thing rubbed us the wrong way: Peter Ustinov & Robert Mitchum weren't Australians, couldn't get the accent, didn't reflect our lives; the flick was a foreign concoction, an exotification, a falsification, and we weren't going to pay to go to it.

(At the same time, when I saw South Pacific I kept wanting the camera to swing around and see us. I spent decades waiting for them to turn and see us.)

And so, from the mid-'30s until the early '70s, there was a dearth of images of Australia connected to anything the movies and the world thought important: and which we, therefore, might also find  defining and iconic now that cattle-drives and droughts and generally faux-Western tropes had stopped reflecting our lived experience in even the remotest, most analogical way. (1)

In 1971 there was Walkabout, another exotification, a journey with a hilariously mad geography.

Australian Literature was by and large out of print. Henry Lawson and Judith Wright existed in school editions, like Nevil Shute, Colin Thiele, and Kylie Tenant. Frank Hardy wrote on the Gurindji struggle for land rights. Wake in Fright was passed from hand to hand among teachers who'd never intended to be teachers (a terrifying Lord of the Flies at the edge of a country school). White was... too unique, adult, aristocratic, sophisticated, bizarre, to become a generally understood vision. (2)

Lawson's world was 70 years gone. For sense of place attached to the memorable – it all boiled down to the stark landscapes and dispossessions and implied genocides in the Wright.

1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock. And there, finally, the hills we'd driven through since I'd been a small child; the hill I'd looked at through my schoolroom window as a young teenager: stubble in summer, green in winter, round, low, inevitable, the true last shape of mountain and stone.

But Picnic gave rise to a spate of chocolate-box historicals, and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith was something you could only watch once, like Wake in Fright.

When I go to think of Australia there's only a rectangle of yellow-green, fading into over-exposure.

...

My family's photos have been largely destroyed. I met my father at the back door by chance one morning in 1988, as I came home from an errand; his hands were full of packets and books of old photos I'd never seen. He was on his way to the incinerator. (I'm so like him in so many ways I know what he was thinking. My mother had died; his life was over; there was no point to the images.)

Seeing what he carried I took everything with a cheerful, "I'll take those, Dad" – so smoothly I'm still amazed at myself – and mailed them to our L.A. address. When I sorted, ordered, and annotated them (nothing between 1927 and 1947 had been dated), I realized there were dozens from the 1950s that have utterly disappeared.

Nostalgia for the Light begins as an account of the astronomical telescope in the high desert of Chile and ends with a consideration of the deliberate suppression of evidence of the dispossession of the indigenous population before the suppression of evidence of mass murder by the Pinochet regime. That felt very familiar.

...

My parents were both very good dancers. My father loved musicals; my mother loved dramas.

"Cities are supposed to stimulate you, but Adelaide just puts me to sleep," a cousin of mine said to me a long time ago. Every time the tram crossed Greenhill Road on its way to the Bay I agreed, and thought of my mother wrestling with the washing and the shopping and the garden (that hard Adelaide clay), thinking of Joan Crawford.

...

So, if memory is visual and verbal and communal and rehearsed, then what is memorable is determined by authority. In colonial situations what the colonizing power wants suppressed will be buried. What the colonizing power thinks important will be believed to be important, and what the colonizing power deems unimportant will fade into unimportance.


Because the political has inserted itself into the personal, the personal is political. We must remember and create our own stuff. Our masters won't.

===

1. There was something called Jack and Jill: A Postscript, which arrived (I seem to remember a film can of huge diameter) when I'd asked for something else for my Film Study class in 1971. It came from something called the South Australian Film Corporation, instead of from the Education Department. I showed it, having nothing else: it turned out to be about a bloke with a motorbike and his mate and his girlfriend. It had been shot on weekends over 5 years, as funds and the availability of the actors allowed, by Phillip Adams. (He never did anything as unfunded, difficult, frustrating, unrecognized and unrewarded again. He continued in advertising.)

2. Having Patrick White for your national novelist is like having Pablo Picasso for your portrait photographer.

History

The three most unlikely sentences of my life:

My father in law fought at Guadalcanal.
Fresh out of high school, my husband's uncle worked on the Manhattan Project.
As a child my mother in law used to play with Shirley Temple.

History isn't history - it's close and palpable.

By contrast my own history seems bleached, leached, and empty.

Is it the massive documentation of the Americans in WW2, the doccos, the movies, the books and doccos and movies about the development and invention of the atomic bomb (which is the final image of that war, not the bombing of London or Dresden, nor the piled and walking skeletons of the camps)?

Is this bleach of memory another facet of empire, anything local overwritten by the Cold War and its genesis at Almagordo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the vivid nuclear nightmare of forty years - my own nightmare since the Korean War?

Is it the goddam silver screen, and our theatres bought and closed and replaced by chains and contracts for American films, American tv product dumped overseas, another massive cultural overwriting...

Or is this fading into white created by being far away, on the southern edge of the Pacific, never a major actor in the world's great events (disasters though they be), a colony of another, previous empire of dominant images, with a colonial past we don't dare remember?

Arundhati Roy Speaks of Our Fridge

The fridge died sometime Sunday afternoon. Stuff in the freezer was melting. There was no running sound.

This had happened several times over the life of this particular fridge. It was 8 years old when it died on January 15.

The life-span of a refrigerator used to be between 20 and 30 years. (Remember The Secret Life of Machines?)

Since this was Sunday afternoon and Green Bin Day wasn't till Tuesday, we had to throw out anything that might have been damaged wholly or partially by defrosting or wholly or partially by de-cooling. Between $200 and $400 dollars' worth of groceries. Between one and two thirds of a week's net income for the household. This had happened at least twice a year for 8 years, and after the 3rd year Amana refused to reimburse us for the losses.

We emptied the freezer first.

Frozen tacos, chicken-legs, ice-cream, ice-cream bonbons (for my birthday the night before); buffalo burgers, chicken legs, frozen sections of Italian loaves, & French baguettes (for toasting later), the ice-packs for strains & muscular treatments.

Then the fridge. Half and half, non-dairy hazelnut vanilla, butter, olives, artichoke hearts, salami, brie, cheddar jack, pancetta, bread, English muffins, tortillas, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, chili sauce, vinaigrette, balsamic vinegar, peanut butter, almond butter, cranberry spread, pumpkin butter spread, English muffins, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, As the contents went down the sink or into the Green Bin I almost began to cry.

Greek olives, Italian salami and pancetta — all that work, growing them pickling them pimento-ing them transporting them, unpacking them stocking them storing them — all those ships across all those seas, all those trucks across all those mountains, along all those valleys — all that history and effort. The whole world was going down that drain.

The Amana: $1600. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.
The new Frigidaire: $1500. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.

Between them a month's gross income. This year we will donate a twelfth of our income to large corporations for products which have, in the first case, already proven to be — what, glossy rubbish? A waste of time, energy, steel, and oil, of the ships and the lives of all who made & moved the food, and all who bought it to prepare and cook it to eat.

And in order to enable the continuing production this glossy rubbish, civil wars are being fought in India, warlords are running slave-mines in Africa... And the question — whether corporations will permit any mindset but their own to survive — goes on walking through the Adivati resistance movements of India, and the loss of habitat everywhere.

Walking with the Comrades, Arundhati Roy, Penguin Books, New York, 2012

How to Measure Inflation

Around 2006, on payday, I'd write the cheques & pay the bills. I'd feel accomplished and relaxed for about a week. Then I'd feel in need of another payday, get more and more anxious as the bank-account approached zero. Don't spend any more, I'd say to the other half of the household. Just. Don't.

We still eat cheaply, go nowhere, drive our old clunkers to the same job and the same supermarkets.

But now, on payday, when I write the cheques & pay the bills, I relax for - well, I can't. I look at the bankbook and the distance from now till the next red dot on the calendar, and just go into constant, quiet, low-level alarm.

Lyric Prose

Lyric prose is supple, nuanced, accurate, exact; it is grounded, it illuminates.

This is lyric prose:

From the Fosseway westward to Isca Dumnoniorum the road was simply a British trackway, broadened and roughly metalled, strengthened by corduroys of logs in the softest places, but otherwise unchanged from its old estate, as it wound among the hills, thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness.

This is lyric prose:

With the coming of dusk the rain had stopped, but a mist had risen, creeping knee-high through the trees so that they stood like ghosts, and the grazing horse floated like a swan. It was a grey, and more than ever ghostly because it grazed so quietly; he had torn up a scarf and wound fragments of cloth around the bit so that no jingle should betray him. The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king's son. If they caught him they would have killed him. He was just eighteen.

Lyric prose is a horse.

This:

Ellie gawked like a child, unironic. She remembered something from schooldays: Janus, with his two faces, is the god of bridges, since bridges look both ways and are always double. There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher, Miss Morrison, drawing Janus on a blackboard, her inexpert, freckled hand trailing the chalk line of two profiles. With her back to the class there was a kind of pathos to her form. She had thickset calves and a curvature of the spine and the class would have snickered in derision, had it not been for her storytelling, which made any image so much less than the words it referred to. Roman God: underlined. The Janus profiles not matching. A simple image on a blackboard snagged at her feelings and Ellie had loved it because it failed, because there was no mirror and no symmetry. And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her.

is a hippopotamus.

---------------------

1 - Sutcliff, Rosemary, The Eagle of the Ninth, 1954, the first paragraph. There is the startling and exact "corduroys". The last clause "thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness" lays out the first half of the main action of the novel. The repeated "farther" plants the motion of "far" strongly in the mind of the reader, giving a sense of depth to the landscape and the reality of the setting.

2 - Stewart, Mary, The Crystal Cave, 1970, from the Prologue. "Betray" introduces the notions not only of danger but also, literally, betrayal. This is leads directly into "would have killed him".

3 - Jones, Gail, Five Bells, 2011, from chapter 1.The paragraph is 9 sentences long and contains 3 framing devices for the central image of Miss Morrison at the blackboard. ("She gawked" "She remembered" "There was the limpid memory".) They alone account for a lot of this paragraph's herkey-jerkyness. The phrasing of "And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her" is imitation middle-period White; it draws attention to itself as an imitation because there is nothing else to counter-balance or be seen or weighed against it. The answer to the question (of why Miss Morrison's calves reassured) is simultaneously raised and suppressed; nothing is either resolved or deliberately left hanging. Every sentence whipsaws between the abstract and the concrete, with no link to what comes next except the bluntly explicit.

"There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher..." We had been lead to believe that we were in Ellie's mind, and yet "limpid" in that position reminds us that we are not; Ellie's limpidity is more limpid than ours - the memory is over there, not here. "... made any image so much less than the words it referred to" is a stunningly awkward construction.

---------------------

This wouldn't irritate me nearly so much if Five Bells weren't being universally touted for its lyric prose, when its prose isn't lyric.

A Strange Case of Truth in Advertising

As we were unloading the car for the Gobshite launch, I happened to look up and see a - drop-down, vinyl? - banner on the building at the end of the street. Two sports heroes, one black, one white. The banner was huge, so the faces were larger, even, than the heads of statues of Lenin in the Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union. The further from Moscow, the larger the statues: in Central Asia and Mongolia Lenin was, iconographically, a god.

I was surprised, but I haven't been downtown for a long time. The images might have been there quite a while.

The festivities finished. We left in full dark. And there they were, lit by streetlights: the gods of the night and the city. 

Night so much bigger than the other gods.

In the playback screen there was a white streak in the centre of a dark area, where I wasn't expecting one. I looked at the banner again, to see exactly what had happened to the camera I can't afford to repair.

There were strips of white light at intervals through the length of the black man's face - neon night-lights on the ceilings of the various floors the banner covers; under the banner - beneath the face, in terms of the photo - the lights continued on their way, obeying the laws of perspective.

Two brooding gods of the city. Both their tenures will be brief: sports careers are. But the godhead of the young black man is revealed as hollow, even while it's still his.

Tell the FAA

Well, yeah: but every one of these petitions

1) assumes & reinforces the idea of American exceptionalism
2) is written at a low middle-school reading-level
3) is couched, verbally & emotionally, as protecting small children from potential owies

I've signed it. I always do. But then I puke.

The Myth of Balance

It’s been clear to me for a very long time that my body and mind move in very long cycles of writing, not writing, or writing first muddles and drafts of complex things and then refining them, also over a long time. It is even more clear to me now that I've moved into another one of these periods of assembling the basic material for something new.

At work we have an employee program run by fellow-employee volunteers, called the work / life balance program. My HMO also recommends work / life balance and runs, sometimes, free classes for those of us having difficulty finding time for our actual lives.

It has escaped their notice however that jobs – such as are left to us – are not structured to accommodate this kind of cycle. And as long as the economy uses the employment / income model of roughly the last hundred years, they won't be.

There is no balance possible when I need a month or two to concentrate on what I’m doing – not because I'm a poncy pretentious artist, but because my mind cannot be in two modes at once. When I'm in this phase and totally preoccupied I can barely do arithmetic, let alone the myriad things I need to do to stay competent at my job.

This complete mind-fog is part of my fundamental cycle.

There is no balance possible. The job takes precedence: I have to earn our livings, housing, food, clothing, medical care.

It's very likely that most of what I feel ready to produce will never be completed, or maybe even begun.

Just don't tell me it's because I lack time-management skills.

The notion that work of originality or depth can be done without something close to total immersion – that promulgated, amplified, prettified, zen-veneered, pietistic, blame-shifting, money- and interest-laden notion – is false from top to toe.

It's (another piece of) industrial propaganda.

Tri-X, Carlton, April, 1975

Song for Moving the Winter Doona

Raise paw, lower paw,
Roar, roar.
Lash tail, breathe fire,
Roar.

(repeat as necessary)

Stow, Schepisi, White, Craven, Joyce, McCaffrey, Stow

7.8.10

Took A Counterfeit Silence to work to look at it. Towards midday I found I wasn't feeling well and looked forward to being lunch behind a closed door... Then I made what turned out to be the mistake of reading an article in The Australian.

Fred Schepisi filming The Eye of the Storm – Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush – Schepisi doing an Australian pic (at last, again), doing White, and I hadn't known, hadn't known, and it was happening, and it was going well –

Except that the article was by Craven. Sprawling, sloppy, fundamentally unorganized, reeking of stale alcohol (no Hepworthian lyric or charm, nor even Gopaleen anger/wryness); just critical gush about White, the sensitivity of Schepisi's direction and its necessary femininity in this case.

Now look: I've read enough over the years to know that Schepisi doesn't normally whisper emotions into his actors' ears. Rampling only had 3 weeks for the shoot. So this essentially feminine whispering, this seductive mesmerism, instead of being a function of Rampling's schedule, is, in Craven's universe, Schepisi becoming a Rampling-White Svengali, channelling gayness and White, bringing forth the hidden feminine –

Schepisi's never less than sensitive! Doesn't Craven remember Uluru at the beginning of A Cry in the Dark, remember how The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith turns on the difference between a cut and a dissolve?

But that's not enough. Now Craven has to claim that The Devil's Playground is "the greatest representation of an Australian Catholic childhood ever done"…

What does he know of Australian Catholic childhood? He doesn't know that nothing had changed since The Dead, not even the cooking: there were still heavy, thick, cut-crystal bowls at Sunday lunch, the big meal of the day (roast lamb, also had cold for dinner), long discussions about Irish tenors (the Irish tenor voice now in Gilbert and Sullivan, the G&S societies everywhere), lace curtains, Sunday afternoon visits, verbal political brawls, all held below hung portraits of those gone to The Great War and in front of mantlepieces with smaller upright photographs of those from Changi and Tobruk.

He has no idea how as very very small kid you dreamed in all but Gaelic, how those Sunday afternoon visits took you to the house of the great-aunt who remembers Sydney Kidman coming to say goodbye to her mother when he left for the interior, to create an empire and the over-grazing that has been Australia's bane.

He has no idea about the Pellegrini's, suppliers of incense & other necessities: rosary beads, prayer books, missals, scapulars, holy pictures, Immaculate Conception medals, first communion medals, confirmation medals, ordinary saints' medals, statues – he has no idea of the bric a brac made a Catholic childhood of that era, the happiness of the school holiday on St. Patrick's Day, the rose-petals on Holy Thursday (still weeping for Adonis)...

He has no idea that The Dead is more relevant to Australian Catholic childhood than Portrait of the Artist or The Devil's Playground. He doesn't mention Catherine Keneally's books at all. He doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, doesn't care because it doesn't matter: the copy's in, the paper's out, right, wrong, or blue in the face – no one's going to challenge it or him because Australia can only have one eminence at any one time – critic, climate scientist, poet, director, jurist.

Craven knows The Devil's Playground is a critique of the Catholic Church; he doesn't bother or have to bother to distinguish the church from the childhood. He's read Portrait, and there's a speech in Devil's Playground straight from it, so there's Irish Catholic Australian childhood for you: subject signed, sealed and delivered. The church stands in for the childhood and male stands in for all. There's your bloody article and that's that.

As for Devil's Playground itself: Arthur Dignam will never be convincing as a heterosexual, Thomas Keneally will never be convincing as anything; the speeches about The Rules, The Rules, are heavy-handed, forced and false; the ominous music by Bruce Smeaton laid over the opening shot as we peer around the bend in the very muddy river makes us wonder if Picnic at Hanging Rock has taken to the water. It's a far less perfect film than we thought it was or wanted it to be. It was a first feature by a new director; it was achieved against formidable odds; it was the work of a potentially great film-maker with an already impressive control of sound perspective and a visual technique that remains unique, and who has done outstanding work since.

So why does Craven even bother to make the claim? He doesn't know the subject or he'd know The Dead is more relevant than Portrait. He's telling us, again, that he knows more about everything than any of us ever will, no matter what experience or expertise we may have been forced to inherit or internalize, no matter what knowledge or experience he actually lacks.

And the writing! The badly-constructed sentences, the implicit dissing of everything he's not in the act of praising,  the self-aggrandizement via the utterly unnecessary inclusion of his own history ("now so different from reading it at 20"), the sheer sense of dissipation the prose always exudes: reading it's like being within reeking-range of a drunk man spewing.

A spewing drunk. That's what we've got for a critic. No wonder I feel ill.

And so, lunch. A closed door, some cold water. Some more cold water.

After a while I betook myself to the Stow. When he died I looked him up – Wikipedia, probably – and found a biography so painfully discreet it screamed. The first paragraph of The Merry Go Round in the Sea, quoted somewhere on the web, a detailed description of the central iron post of the of the merry go round rendered in terms of tailoring / costume, is not something any straight man would have written. Well, no straight man after Henry James.

And it was clear as I read, with greater and greater depression and horror, that Stow's closeting had destroyed the poetry: it was opaque, portentous, hysterical, and twee; lots and lots of borrowing from Judith Wright, and not much done with that… The best thing in the book was the adaptation of Lao Tsu, though at times he seemed to be calling the Tao God (I can see why, but no)… But if I want to read Lao Tsu I'll read a translation that starts at the beginning and goes through to the end.

It was miserable… I won't be critiquing Stow, though; I've heard and am glad to have heard that the novels and the stories are good.

For the rest of the day I read an inept Anne McCaffrey book, that being all the strength I had; it was derived from The Sword at Sunset and The Crystal Cave and the knife-fight at end of Dune; it had an utterly Sutcliffian plot-structure.

It seems I like the story of Artos the Bear getting horses from southern Gaul no matter how badly it's told – hope at the beginning of the tale set far in the past, all the arguments done with.