Commentary
The publishing world and other allied industries, namely the media and literary critics, tend to promote authors on a ‘star’ system. Especially women writers. They allow certain women to become ‘flavour of the month’. Recently, if you remember, it was Beverley Farmer, and then Kate Grenville. For a short period, every newspaper, magazine, or radio program with a literary bent featured them and their fiction. This treatment is reserved for fiction writers. Never is such sustained coverage given to that awesome creature, the ‘woman poet’.
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Books flow steadily from the northern to the southern hemisphere through the traditional conduits of empire. To get them to flow back the other way is difficult but it can be done. The real task though, it seems to me, is to overhaul the plumbing so that writing and writers can flourish, and that’s a long haul.
... (read more)When the Writers’ Week organisers asked me to come and talk on a panel of literary agents, I naturally asked what they wanted me to talk about. (I knew that jokey anecdotes about publishers, writers, and agents would be just the thing; I also knew that my delivery would fall horribly flat, even if I could remember any.)
It was suggested that I might talk about pitfalls for writers – a subject on which literary agents can wax lyrical for hours – but that seemed slightly arrogant from where I sit, and I began to think of pitfalls for agents. And from there I started to think about what agents can and can’t do, how useful we are or aren’t, and by the time I’d thought all that through, I had the bones of what I wanted to talk about.
... (read more)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!
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