Week in Review

For anyone interested in the arguments about cultural value and authority, the competing interests and agendas involved in those arguments, and the various ways in which particular ideas and works come to be validated and venerated, it has been a week of provocative juxtapositions. One day after the ABC’s long-running television program The First Tuesday Book Club was admonished for not doing enough to promote Australian literature an Australian novelist took out one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.

Last night, Australian time, the Swedish Academy of Literature announced that the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature was Patrick Modiano. The Nobel Academy awarded the French novelist – the eleventh writer from France to win the eight million kroner ($1.26 million) prize – for his mastery of ‘the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation’.

Last week, I was given a copy of Marja Mills’ memoir The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee (2014). So far I haven’t been able to read it. The problem is not the quality of the prose – I haven’t ventured into that yet – it is connected to the controversy surrounding the book. Mills has become embroiled in a serious dispute with Harper Lee.

In a week that saw the kinds of destructive political emotions that Nussbaum identifies – fear, disgust, contempt – reclaim their place at the centre of the national conversation (they never seem to be too far away), a week in which all the talk was suddenly about limiting freedoms and enhancing powers and increasing surveillance, it certainly didn’t seem to be the case that anyone’s right to be a bigot was being unduly curtailled. Quite the contrary, it was being enthusiastically exercised by a number of our elected representatives.

Next week, on Tuesday 23 September, Stefan Collini will be giving a public lecture at Sydney University entitled ‘What’s Happening to Universities? Historical and Comparative Perspectives’. Collini has been an outspoken and trenchant critic of the deregulation of the university system in the United Kingdom, and his lecture is sure to be relevant to the present situation in Australia.

This week readers, students, colleagues and friends are mourning the death of Martin Harrison, who was widely regarded as one of the country’s finest poets, essayists and teachers. Harrison died of a heart attack on Saturday 6 September. He was 65 years old.

At the Araluen Arts Centre, Aboriginal artists are now converging (at the time of publication) for the twenty-fifth Desert Mob Symposium to discuss arts practices, projects and the experience of working within Aboriginal-owned arts centres. The symposium, which is driven by Desart, is one of the vital arts initiatives for Aboriginal artists in this country. Artists speak directly about their work, practices and cultural practices, as well as the joys and challenges that come with being an arts practitioner in remote Australia. This year, the theme of the symposium is ‘reflection and projection’ and it will be worth following the conversations that emerge.

Libraries are doing it tough. Never have they been so popular (see the American-based but locally relevant PEW study, ‘The library in the city’), and yet so under-funded. The sector continues to grapple with cuts, often leading to reductions in staff, services, book access, and occasionally branch closures. The statistics behind some of the cuts are revealing. In 1939 when the NSW Library Act was first introduced, the state contributed 50 percent of the funding. By 1980 that contribution had fallen to 23 percent. Today, the state contributes just seven percent, leaving local councils to carry 93 percent of the load.

2014 has been something of a watershed year for books on Australian politics. Of course, this is hardly surprising. The soap opera of the Gillard and Rudd years will probably exercise politicians, analysts and biographers for years to come. But we are currently facing something of an armada – to steal a phrase from the popular media – of political memoirs and biographies.

In the opening chapter of her biographical study of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee recalls her subject’s troubled relationship with the literary form. ‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West, lamenting the difficulty of writing the life of Roger Fry: ‘How can one deal with facts – so many and so many and so many. Or ought one, as I incline, to be purely fictitious? And what is a life? And what was Roger?’ Some 60 years later, Lee found herself facing similar questions. How should she deal with a life so voluminously documented?