Updates
Serial
It is something of an understatement to say that Serial has become a cultural phenomenon. The statistics are widely quoted – each episode averages 1.5 million listeners. It is both the number one and the fastest downloaded podcast in the history of iTunes. The show has inspired countless opinion pieces, interviews, analyses, memes, google hangouts with program ‘characters’, and even a parody. There are dedicated discussion outlets. Slate has its own weekly Serial forum, podcast and aggregated feature story site, for example; while Reddit, in typical fashion, has taken its obsession to another level, with its devoted citizen-sleuth pages.
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.
21 November 2014: The Everything Change
Margaret Atwood, on a world tour to promote her new collection of fantastical stories, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, when asked if she wrote climate fiction, responded thus: ‘I don’t even call it climate change, I call it “the everything change”. It’s a change of everything.’ Atwood was recently announced as the first contributor to Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s 100 year artwork, Future Library — Framtidsbiblioteket in Norwegian — for the city of Oslo. A thousand trees have been planted in a forest just outside the city, and they will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years time.
Bad Sex Award
Perhaps the most significant news of the week for the book industry is that the dispute between online retailer Amazon and publisher Hachette has apparently been resolved, though the precise terms of the agreement have not been made public. At issue was the right to set prices for e-book sales. Hachette was unhappy at Amazon’s attempt to use its clout in the marketplace to dictate terms and drive down the cost of e-books in a way that Hachette regarded as detrimental to the interests of publishers and authors alike.
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.
Whitlam, Blanchett and Bolt
There was a moment during the speech Cate Blanchett delivered at Gough Whitlam’s memorial service on Wednesday when the headlines got up and wrote themselves. It took 51 seconds and began with the following eight words: ‘I am the beneficiary of free, tertiary education.’ While the majority of the crowd showed their support for the actor’s agenda with a thunderous seventeen-second round of applause, a small coterie of others set their faces to a stony neutrality.
Higher Education
In his excellent book The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, UK scholar Andrew McGettigan gives one of the best analyses of market-driven approaches to university reform that I have seen. McGettigan shows how education has moved from being a public good to an ‘individual financial investment’, one that – in the end – will not only be detrimental to economic interests but also to students, society and democracy at large.
24 October 2014: art and money
Cultural diplomacy in a different form may have resolved one aspect of the Shiva issue, so called, which appears to have queered Radford’s chances of staying on in a job he had held for more than a decade. The work in question, an eleventh century Chola bronze statue of a dancing Shiva valued at $5.1 million, was among 21 items the NGA purchased from disgraced New York art dealer Subhash Kapoor, whom Interpol has called ‘the world’s biggest commodity smuggler’.
Richard Flanagan’s win, Barry Spurr’s emails
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.
The Nobel Prize and creative writing programs
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’.