Commentary

The year 1937 was the centenary of the death of modern Russia’s first great poet, Alexander Pushkin. Celebration was mandatory in the USSR, and it wasn’t a good year to ignore the dictates of Stalin’s bureaucrats. So the Soviet satirist Mikhail Zoschenko takes us into a grim but determined apartment block in Moscow, past a slap-dash artistic rendering of the great poet wreathed in pine branches, into a room where the tenants are gathered and a slightly flustered youngish man is preparing to speak. There is a general doziness and smell of old onions.

This is issue no. 250, and the twenty-fifth consecutive year, of Australian Book Review. Issue No. 1 appeared in 1978, edited by John McLaren and published by the National Book Council. Since then the journal has survived and thrived, through changes of editor (though not very often) and of editorial policy (though not very much); through changes of appearance, ownership, sponsorship and affiliation.

The Underside of the fish is just as tasty as its upper flanks. Life is also like that. And leadership is not just a matter of will, power and grandeur not just like A.D Hope’s image of such power when he writes in ‘Pyramis’:

When Arthur Phillips conjured up the cultural cringe fifty-two years ago – he was Arthur then, only later becoming the more formal A.A. Phillips – he had little idea how that phrase would come to haunt us. When interviewed by Jim Davidson in 1977, Phillips was rather dismissive about his original 1950 Meanjin article, although he noted that it was ‘twice nearly strangled in infancy’, first by editor Clem Christesen who hadn’t liked it, and then by a member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund Board who urged him not to include it in his collection The Australian Tradition (1958). But he attributed the popularity of the phrase to its being ‘catchily alliterative – and alliteration is the most facile stylistic trick there is’.

September 8. Feeling like I have been away too long, I visit Warsaw to meet up with Zygmunt Bauman’s people; Budapest to catch up with Agnes Heller and her son, Yuri; Prague, just before the deluge; Leeds, to work further with Bauman; Chicago, for the American Sociological Association convention; New Haven; and Boston, where my sanity is restored, my daughter having arrived to stay with me in Cambridge. Today we are upstate New York, on the Hudson; yesterday we were in downtown Manhattan, where the aura of September 11 is strong, and more than a bit spooky. We walked down Broadway, stayed in Greenwich Village, and decided to visit the site of Ground Zero another time, if ever. The whole of America is flagged – a weird show of strength, defiance, patriotism and anxiety. The shops, in particular, all seem to bear compulsory flags on the windows and doors. You get the sense that there is not much room to move here.

I have resigned from my dream job. When I leave in October, I will have worked on the ‘new’ Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) for all of its five years, a lustrum in which I have met some extraordinary people and forged many fruitful relationships. I truly doubt that, despite the odd scandal and beat-up, many industries are as friendly and collaborative (not in THAT way, Allan Fels) as the book industry. We are all a little evangelical in our desire to share our favourite writers and books and thoughts with others, and our belief that reading brings enlightenment.

Primo Levi, in two interviews given almost twenty years ago*, set a standard of critical sympathy that is not only exemplary, but peculiarly apt to the fraught debate about the post-September 11 world and the USA’s place and reputation within it.

At seven o’clock on the morning of 2 February 1999, I was due at the Memorial Hospital in North Adelaide to relieve my older sister at my mother’s bedside, where she had been all night. The alarm was set for six. At five-thirty, I was woken by the phone; my mother had died, as we had known for a couple of days that she would, from complications following a cerebral haemorrhage.

You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover) ...