Updates
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.
Hebdo and satire
To be able to laugh at someone who is being humiliated, it is necessary to feel that they are getting their comeuppance, that their pretensions are ridiculous enough for them to deserve mockery. This is why satire is an edgy business. There is always the risk that it might miss its target, misread the social context and its power relations, and thus appear cruel or unwarranted; there is always the risk that it will be interpreted entirely differently by someone from a different background.
Tony Abbott and Fifty Shades
Two remarkable things happened this week that cannot pass without mention. The Liberal Party proved to the Australian people that it wasn’t at all like the supposedly ‘dysfunctional’ Labor Party by behaving uncannily like the Labor Party, and one of the world’s worst best-selling novels, Fifty Shades of Grey, turned a nightmare into reality by showing up in Australian cinemas daring to call itself a movie. For what it’s worth, the Prime Minister Tony Abbott has read Fifty Shades of Grey.
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.
Harper Lee
A second novel by Harper Lee. It was the one we couldn’t have predicted last Friday when we published our list of upcoming 2015 releases. But that was the news that came out of the US on Tuesday when Harper Collins announced it was publishing Go Set a Watchman, a novel written by Lee in the mid-1950s, but shelved on the advice of a publisher, and then later presumed lost.
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 year ahead
As the first issue of the Sydney Review of Books for 2015 has been taking shape, we have been contemplating the coming year in publishing. Given the recent speculation about titles and leaders at the national level we think it’s only fitting that we begin the year by nominating our ‘captain’s picks’ for 2015 — a list that reads like a roll call of contemporary literature’s knights and dames.
19 December 2014: the book council
The announcement last week of the inauguration of a ‘new but rather hazily defined’ Book Council did not include the information that it will be funded by a cut to the Australia Council of $2 million per year for three years. This is about half of the Council’s traditional literature budget – a massive hit. The Australia Council was informed of this just a few hours before the budget announcements on Monday, and is still working through what it will mean, in a practical sense, for the funding of literature.
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards
The ceremony for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, which were announced in Melbourne on Monday evening, outdid itself in its awkwardness. I wasn’t there (though I did have my spies in the audience), but thanks to the decision to broadcast ‘highlights’ on SBS, I was able to soak up some of the unusually excruciating atmosphere. The Prime Minister seemed to radiate discomfort.
Cuts to the ABC
Tonight marks the end of state-based television current affairs on the ABC, with all eight Friday night 7.30 programs preparing to air their final episodes. The state editions, which for more than two decades have covered local politics, arts, sport and cultural issues that would otherwise miss out on coverage beyond the local papers, have been axed as part of the much-discussed (and criticised) federal government cuts to the ABC.