Updates
26 June 2015 | Wallpaper Ecstasy
It’s always interesting, when you have a big investment in the performance of literary titles in the marketplace, to see how completely, and constantly, the marketplace disappoints your expectations. The current craze for adult colouring books is a good example. Books for adults to colour in! Books without words! What a relief!
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.
Bookaneers and Copyfights
For centuries, pirates have captured the imaginations of both children and adults. The swashbuckling adventures of Long John Silver, Calico Jack and Captain Hook have won legions of fans, who dream of their dashing adventures across the high seas. We can now add Pen Davenport, the protagonist of Matthew Pearl’s latest novel The Last Bookaneer (2015), to the list of notorious pirates. Unlike his predecessors, however, Davenport’s interests lie not in piracy at sea, but in an illicit trade known as ‘bookaneering’ – flogging stolen copies of novels and other creative works to punters keen for a bargain.
i.m. Jann Harry
If one were to make a single claim for Harry’s significance in Australian poetry, I think it should be that she was our first and foremost ecological poet. She wasn’t a ‘nature poet’, in the way that this term is used to describe poets of an earlier generation like David Campbell or Judith Wright. Though she shared the visual acuity of the one, and the passion of the other, her poetic idiom is distinctively contemporary.
Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Excellence
Now, I am strongly in favour of ‘excellence’ in the arts, because I am as a general rule strongly in favour of any non-specific concept with positive connotations. But the many writers and artists Minster Brandis appears to be targeting with his evisceration of the Australia Council, though they may well be his perceived ideological opponents, are also people who know and care about art, music and literature; they are the ones creating the culture.
Patron Brandis
The Australia Council’s six-year funding program, on which the Sydney Review of Books and other literary journals had been depending, has been suspended. If there is no corresponding program forthcoming from the Ministry for the Arts, our existence will be threatened. The cancellation of the June round of funding will have an immediate effect on the publishers of Australian literary titles, requiring the cancellation or postponement of some of those titles.
Ali Smith and Being Both
Art is an intervention in reality, a presence. And it is this ontological status that interests Ali Smith, whose most recent novel How to be both (2014) is, I think, one of the most slippery, intriguing and stimulating works of fiction to have appeared in recent years.
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.’
Simple Poems
It must be disconcerting for those who find poetry difficult, to discover that the simplest poems are often the most enigmatic. This is because they depend largely on implication. What they don’t say is as important as what they do. If you’re not alert, nothing happens.