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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. As part of the Festival of Sydney, the writers, wits and raconteurs descended on the venerable Sydney Town Hall to talk, to mime, to gesture and to entertain. The crowd response was electric and a headline in The Sydney Morning Herald of Monday, 20 January summed it all up, ‘A sell-out if it hadn't been free’. The results were staggering, the book-stall was successful, and most importantly, not as the spin-off of a formalised, dry as dust, pedantic event, but life in the raw complete with cancellations, last minute reluctance to appear, and all the trauma expected from such collisions of creativity. Much credit must go to Tom Thompson, he of the Byronic pallor and literary locks, whose drive, coordination and coercion were largely responsible for this bell-peal heralding 1986. For those who have the temerity not to live in Sydney and to tangle with Tinsel Town, a book of the 1985 predecessor of the 1986 event titled The View from Tinsel Town, complete with a Ken Done T-shirted designed cover is available, published as a joint venture by Southerly and Penguin books. It is recommended that you read it to explain the hedonistic flowering of literary talent here in the city of King Wran and Kermit the Frog. A quibble and only a tentative quibble to ripple the smooth satisfaction. Why Tinsel Town anyway? This soubriquet was initially reserved for Hollywood and the glitz of Los Angeles. Tinsel as in tawdry, tarnished, triviality. Perhaps the name should be changed from Tinsel Town to Thunder Dome. Spectacles such as the view from Tinsel Town are boisterous and entirely optimistic. However there are some authors who rely on their writings to make their own point. John Fowles springs to mind in the United Kingdom and David Malouf in Australia. A writer does not have to be and may not be a superb raconteur, a major publicist, and possess the oratory of a Churchill or a Menzies. If writers enjoy performing then the performance is valid, powerful and wholly constructive. Authors and their work are competing head on against all other forms of entertainment and information not only for the consumer dollar but for the consumer attention. But a slight warning to budding authors – let your writing at least begin to speak for itself and make the basis of a reputation before you begin to speak for it. It would be sad to ever arrive at the situation where authors as recipients of literary grants are seen to sing too loud for their suppers, or too often. Sydney has its own version of the famous round table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the days when Dorothy Park and S.J. Perelman held court. Our Algonquin in the racy spirit of hedonism sits at the corner of Sydney's premier trotting track. Writers are on display at the Harold Park Hotel, on Tuesday nights at 7:30 pm. For a mere donation of $2.00 you can listen to Jean Bedford, Gabrielle Lord, Patrick Cook, Tom Keneally, and the other fire-eaters of Sydney strut their stuff. Literature is alive and well and with the people. That’s real pen power.

Michael Johnson

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The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altruism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei

We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain

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