Updates

Thanks to Kerryn Goldsworthy for her review of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride. My correspondence comes at a tangent to the substance of the review. I was brought up short in the course of reading the review by the statement ‘This may or may not be technically incest’, which follows a description of the rape of a niece by an uncle.

Australia has enjoyed a range of literary happenings this week, with festivals, awards, and even the unmasking of a pseudonymous reviewer making headlines across mainstream and independent media. Here is the week in review.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that in 2008–9, the arts contributed $86 billion to the Australian GDP – that is, 7% – $13 billion of which flowed directly from our field, literature and print media. It is worth noting that the mining sector only provides $121 billion to the GDP, and employs fewer workers (187 400 directly, 599 680 indirectly), yet receives far more government financial support at federal and state levels.

It is with some delight then that we launch our newly expanded newsletter. With over 2000 subscribers and more than 14000 unique visitors to our website every month, we thought it was time to widen the conversation about literary culture. Our new format will continue to alert you to the essays and reviews we are publishing, but we are also making space for a weekly round-up of literary news and events.

I have just read Kristin Otto’s review of Gardens of Fire by Robert Kenny. I much enjoyed it and am keen now to read Dr Kenny’s book, which sounds fascinating. I found myself pulled up, however, by something Ms Otto said near the beginning of the piece: ‘… multiple strands of narrative are expertly woven, with no more than the currently expected amount of editing shortfall’.

Well done James Gourley, for taking a look at Thomas Pynchon’s astonishingly good Bleeding Edge, including the curmudgeonly critical reception, but finding a way to move beyond that. It is extraordinary how many of the reviews of Bleeding Edge got bogged down in what Gourley calls the ‘interpretive assumptions that have come to surround Pynchon’s work’.

Guy Rundle’s wise and witty review of Richard King’s On Offence: The Politics of Indignation raises the question: who uses terms like ‘political correctness’ or ‘cultural relativism’ anyway, and to what end? My impression is that they are largely straw men or stalking horses for reactionary commentators, who claim to have been oppressed (or dare I say offended?) by these doctrines in a way that is somehow comparable to the victims of totalitarian regimes – let alone the victims of sexism, racism or exploitation.

Justin Clemens’s review of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life indirectly confirms his own contention that Benjamin continues to have ‘a bad time in and with universities’. After some apparently thoughtful opening paragraphs on the perils of biography, Clemens proceeds to enact his own thesis in a glib assessment of Benjamin’s character that reveals more about himself than his subject…

I also have read The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I must disagree with Susan Lever on one point – that Richard Flanagan is writing to entertain.

What a pity Michael Wilding’s excellent piece Libraries under threat did not pick up on the demise of the National Drug Sector Information Service (NDSIS), a subsidiary of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, which the Abbott Government defunded in November 2013.