Correspondence
The Cult of the Middlebrow
Prize lists, which Ivor Indyk discusses in his brilliant and piercing piece ‘The Cult of the Middlebrow’ are symptoms of what constitutes literary value. There are, of course, other symptoms that indicate the system as a whole and at present we still lack an adequate understanding of middlebrow taste from a sociological and aesthetic perspective.
Curiosity
I thank Paul Carter for his acute, sensitive and elegant reading of Battarbee and Namatjira. It is, as he says, a curious book; but I do not think that is a result of incuriosity on the part of its author. My overwhelming impression, when I began to research the subject, was of the weight of interpretation that had been placed upon the lives and works of these two men.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
I was very struck in Martin Edmond’s finely calibrated review of Scott Bevan’s Bill: The Life of William Dobell with his sentence summoning up Bevan’s view of an important aspect of Dobell’s personality. ‘His homosexuality was known in the village … but considered irrelevant. Bill was a good bloke. End of story.’
1 May 2015: PEN and Freedom of Speech
Asking people to decide for themselves how much offense they want to take misses the point, unless you are advocating open slather on offensive remarks. Surely the more important question is how, why and to what extent might this be offensive to someone from a particular background or who has particular beliefs.
20 February 2015: Hebdo and satire
It seems to me that piece ‘Hebdo and Satire’ makes a number of unwarranted assumptions. First, that if some of the humor in a book is satirical, then all of it is. Second, that if some of the humor in a book is good, so must all of it be. I see no reason why the episode of Panurge and the married woman need be considered as satire, anymore than a great deal of the physical and verbal humor in the book need be.
The same but different
I enjoyed Stephanie Bishop’s review of 10:04 but I thought it was worth sharing a little piece of trivia that seems relevant to her reading, and that perhaps she missed. The 10:04 scene from Back to the Future is part of Christian Marclay’s The Clock. The title of Lerner’s novel might thus come as much from that moment as it is recontextualised in Marclay’s work as it does from the original film.
The Poet Tasters
Thanks very much Ben Etherington for ‘The Poet Tasters’. At last, some sense of objectivity in poetry criticism. Ben’s fundamental point seems to be to me that, ‘the criticism of poetry is falling short of its civic responsibility’. How I so agree. Why is it that after reading many reviews, and because of those reviews purchasing the book, I feel so let down from what I had been led to expect?
The Wall, the Gate, the Balcony
Any author, be it of a novel, or an essay such as David Brooks’ ‘The Wall, the Gate, the Balcony’ on my novels Out of the Line of Fire and The Snow Kimono – or anything else I imagine – who floats something out into the world hopes that it just doesn’t fall into an echoless abyss. Feedback is a wonderfully humanising thing. But the elephant hidden in the eloquent room of Brooks’ essay is: well, that’s interesting, but I wonder what Henshaw thinks? I hope what follows goes some way to answering that question.
Years of lead
What a pleasant surprise to find a review – a fine review – of seven books by the great Italian writer, Leonardo Sciascia. Like most Italian literary figures, Sciascia is little known to the Australian reading public. The themes he explored and his style are often seen as ‘foreign’ compared to those writers closer to literatures in English. Pity.
Render it barely
When a reviewer praises a book as ‘a major achievement’ and then devotes a further 4000 words to finding fault with its rationale, you can be pretty sure that the fault-finding and the so-called ‘major achievement’ are connected, otherwise why would you bother?