‘Daisy and Woolf’ book launch – Better Read Than Dead

Goodness what a big evening for me, I’m usually in bed by eight o’clock but last night I was traipsing around Newtown. I left home too early as usual so I was the first person seated at the book launch, right next to the kids’ books so I spent a bit of time reading the spines. The room was full when the right time for the opening arrived and I learned a lot about Michelle Cahill, the author, that I didn’t know before. The book part of a PhD done with the University of Wollongong.

Michelle has written a lot of poetry as well, and she also runs a literary magazine called Mascara. I’d known about the novel, ‘Daisy & Woolf’ and I have a review copy the publisher kindly sent me but I haven’t read it because of Putin and his dreadful crimes, it’s been so distressing to think of the waste of life and treasure Russia is perpetrating in the name of some old grievance. Regardless of my ongoing distraction – which has brought me back to creative activities myself – I did enjoy listening to the panel, including the author, talk about the gestation of the book. Michelle did a short reading from one of the sections in it, so I had a taste of the prose, which seemed on hearing it to be poetic and rich. I’ll reserve my judgement about the whole until I can summon up my powers of concentration

I had coffee next door in the cafe just before the launch. The coffee was very good and I sat for about 30 minutes by myself watching the world go by.

Apologies for interruption ..

 .. I will be back, I just need time. With a rough start to the year punctuated by excessive violence in Europe, as well as troubles on a personal front, I've taken a break from reading novels and books of history. Please be patient, this break is temporary and I'm already planning a return. Just not right now.

This photo was taken this morning just before writing the post you're reading. Proof of existence at least!

More on the new literary mode of Divergism

Back on 1 March this year I published a post I had written to outline what I see as a new literary mode. I called it Divergism in order to encapsulate the variety of different styles that are available, now, for writers and readers in the marketplace for books. But when I recently read through the post, I saw that it was quite spare and I felt, on review, that there were other things to say that were germane to the case. Hence the current blogpost. What you are reading now is an attempt to fill out the gaps that I see, on a second look, in that original post. You might want to go back to read that post first, before going on with what’s below. It might help you to orient yourself as I won’t repeat here everything that was in it.

The first thing to say about Divergism is that it builds on the gains that were made in the art of novel (and short story and novella) writing as a result of Modernism and Postmodernism. To illustrate what that means, I’ll insert a case study here.

Recently, I read a novel written by a second-tier novelist who publishes all of his work in French and who is not as well-known in the Anglosphere as he is in France. He is very old now and his most productive era was the 1990s. Reading his book, it struck me how old-fashioned it felt to me. One thing that was missing here were the internal processes of the individual’s mind. The rich tapestry of thoughts and impressions that help us to understand the motivations of the individual characters. There was also a lack of detail in the depictions of the environment in which the characters moved.  I felt that the book was a bit jerky, like a film that is not running at the correct speed on the spool. It was like seeing an uncoordinated animal trying to walk, like a foal just out of its mother’s womb, standing up jerkily on the straw of the barn and moving uncertainly forward.

The book was an historical fantasy and it was very good in the end but I noticed something about it that the author if, when the book was originally published, he had been told what I felt, would probably have been puzzled by. He might have said that he wasn’t writing a literary masterpiece. The kinds of detail that you find, say, in the novels of James Joyce or Marcel Proust, were not relevant for his purpose. But in today’s book market this kind of separation is no longer necessary. Even books that are deliberately aimed at a specific market – crime thrillers, say, or romance – now often have in them elements that derive consciously from the innovations that people like Joyce and Proust introduced into the canon at the beginning of the last century.

But the situation is stranger even than this, even. There is, now, a rich croop of hybrids available for readers to consume. It’s not just that genre novels are more literary in their style now than they had been, say, 20 years ago. It’s also that writers who want to send a message are using both genre elements and literary elements in their books. The market for literary fiction is small (and always has been; people benefit in many ways from what is classed as literary fiction but they won’t take the risk to buy a book by an unknown author who aspires to producing high culture) and so authors are pitching their work at the middle market. To do this they wrap a plot that is heavily influenced by genre norms (for example, by the norms common for crime or science fiction novels) in a package that also contains a poetics that is heavy on literary fictional devices.

These new hybrids both challenge – through the use of secondary colour and through the deployment of detail that relies often on imagery – while also reassuring the reader that he (or, more often, she) will get something that is fun to read. In a hybrid novel these things do different things and they complement each other. The genre plot ensures that the story has strong forward movement. But the stream-of-consciousness and the secondary colour help the author to create drama.

Both give the reader an opportunity to engage with the book. You keep turning the pages because you want to find out who did it, or what happens to the protagonist at the end of the book. But you are also entertained by the feelings that the secondary elements evoke in the spaces between the end of one chapter and the end of the next. Reading this kind of novel is doubly fun: through access to their personalities and interior feelings and thoughts you get insight into the nature of the characters who animate the drama and, as well, you are compelled by the need to know, by the overriding suspense that runs through the novel like an electric current, to find out what happens to the man, woman, boy, or girl (or non-binary individual, or animal, or plant, or rock) sitting at the centre of the web.

Not everyone likes books that actually challenge the reader’s way of seeing the world. Most people want the reassurance of what they are used to, and they will stick to their favourite type of novel loyally: not just the author’s name but the cover design will orient them toward their preferred type of book in the bookstore. But the aspiration to express things in a novel that cannot be expressed in any other way and that go to the core of who we are and what the world is, remains in any number of complex and beautiful (or flawed) novels that can be found in your local independent bookstore. This kind of aspiration is found especially in novels that cleave to our legacy Postmodern mode.

And the stylistic elements that you find in such novels are also often found, today, in genre novels which are, more often than not, an example of the hybrid form of novel I have described above. These novels also express things that can be expressed in no other way than through a novel, but the messages they send, and the ontological superstructure they rely on to create meaning, is rooted in the world rather than in the realm of ideas. Novels of ideas are still being written and they are still being read and they are still being enjoyed – by a few – but the mainstream now has the same goals. Writers of the new hybrids want to change the world in the here-and-now and their readers share their desire for novelty on the political front. Who would have thought, in the 1990s, that the most completely engaged fiction would turn out to be crime thrillers?

I want to add a short note at the end here about the ways that novels are talked about in public. Because of the large number of books I read and because of the necessity of putting books somewhere once they are read, I get most of my books from the Kindle store now. I use a standard non-backlit Kindle that I bought a few years ago. But I still go to bookstores from time to time. I might combine a walk to the bookstore with an outing for lunch, and while at the bookstore I will browse the new-release shelves looking for things that look interesting. I have found some real gems this way and I have also found some real stinkers (often, topical nonfiction).

But most of the recommendations I get nowadays are from social media. I use Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. With the first of these, especially, every week I see the titles and covers of a large number of new releases. If I see something that I think I might be interested in reading, I will write down the name of the author and the book’s title on a piece of paper I keep next to my PC for this purpose. If I am out and about and see the title of a new book on the Twitter app I will use the Notes function of my phone to capture it for future reference. People tweet book covers frequently to their followers, and they also tweet the titles of books and the names of authors they like. You also see, from time to time, magazine articles with a specialist angle. An article a friend posts on Facebook might contain the titles of 20 new novels from one part of the world and, if this happens, I scribble furiously for a few minutes in order to capture as many new items as I can.

People want to share in order to create community and so book recommendations are a staple of social media; they give people an opportunity to express something about their own personalities and to signal to others where their allegiances lie. My magpie-like behaviour is also a facet of Divergism. There is a plethora of new works out there are and, even if you even only pay occasional attention, they will come to you without your having to do anything more than sit in front of the computer or look at your mobile phone. Just choose good people to follow.

Divergism: the era of the post-Postmodern novel

It’s true that sometimes it feels like a writer who creates a story for a reader to enjoy is like a man who throws a stick for a dog. You set up a scenario, you give the reader a puzzle to solve, then you release clues over the length of the novel until you reach the denouement, at which time all the problems are tied up in a neat bundle. Fini. Applause. Buy the next one.

But writers at a certain point began to feel that this kind of pattern was inauthentic and they started looking for new ways to engage the reader that would be “more meaningful”. In a sense, what Modernism was about was writers saying “No” to traditional methods of characterisation and habitual stylistic forms. They began to try to find ways to represent reality using texts that did the job more faithfully and more accurately. New forms and approaches were investigated for a period spanning about a century, right up to the emergence, in the middle of the 20th century, of the postmodern mode. You might be forgiven for saying that the Modernist project takes in everything from Melville (1819 to 1891) to Proust (1871 to 1922) to Faulkner (1897 to 1962).

Things began to change with the appearance of writers like Nabokov (1899 to 1977) and Cortazar (1914 to 1984), who interrogated the very stuff of the fictive process itself, and whose books are therefore called “self-referential”. For these writers it wasn’t just about style and character, it was also about plot. I think the ultimate exponent of this type of novel is Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Unconsoled' of 1995 in which there is no denouement and every new beginning just leads to another new beginning. It is an unrecognised masterpiece of the novelistic form in the postmodern mode. Much better, in my mind, than Italo Calvino's more famous 'If on A Winter's Night A Traveller' (published in Italian in 1979 and translated into English in 1981).

But what next, then? What you have now I think is a return to the traditional plot structure, as in the novels of Haruki Murakami. In the new post-Postmodern novel you return to the roots of the medium but what you often get also is a deliberate cleaving to a popular form, such as crime or science fiction. In this new era, it is not so easy to classify novels because their authors are like magpies picking different bits from many different traditions. What you usually find however is that the author has come to terms with being a man (or, as often as not, a woman) throwing a stick for a dog to chase. In the new era, the novels of which could be called Divergist, enjoyment is of prime importance but serious issues (especially, for women novelists, violence against women) abound. It is an age of writers for whom Orwell (1903 to 1950) as much as Austen (1775 to 1815) are the models.

The thing that is especially worthy of note is that the adoption by some novelists of a Divergist approach will not invalidate the choice by others to stick to the Modernist or the Postmodernist. Diversity is at the core of the new mode of understanding the relationship between the reader and the writer. You already have a small group of writers these days writing Gothic fiction, notably women (women were the big producers and consumers of Gothic novels when they first appeared in the 18th century). It’s a free-for-all, a cultural grab-bag where you can draw out any sort of work to read if you fossick around for long enough. And books are easier to find then ever before. You don’t have to rely solely on reviews from established media outlets or the ads that publishers used to place in periodicals. Blogs and social media now supply an endless feed of new titles in a dizzying range of different styles, one of which, you would think, must match your tastes.

The Tao of social media

People nurse their hatreds, they coddle them as though they were favoured children and give them free rein whenever it comes to making a comment about something that is taking place in the public sphere.

People urge each other on as they deploy their creaking rhetorical constructions on social media, and when hatred is shared by someone else there is a small celebration, as though the child were having a birthday party. Candles are lit to solemnise the event and the cake of scorn is carved up and distributed among the gathered there, in the ether, in the places that are formed in innocence by electrons that animate the unsullied elements of silicon and copper. In this way we give thanks to the tiny, dark gods that keep us alive in this artificial world that we have colonised like a vengeful pantheon.

Often people will use ridicule to attack you personally if they have no answer to what you have to say. In fact, if they are overtly hostile it probably means that you have already won the argument because this is the only way they have to placate the feelings of shame and anger what you have written inspires in them. So, take courage from rudeness and spite. It means that you are stronger and have justice on your side but beware, as your children might turn bad when they grow up and kill their parents.

The way people behave on social media bleeds in my imagination into other questions that preoccupy me as I sit, closeted and alone, before the windows that look out over the city’s flashing skyline. I am reminded of a conventional type of compliment that is used to describe a book where you say that it is "challenging". This reminds me, in turn, that there used to be an event every year in Sydney called the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, which borrows from the same quiver of ideas used to make authors feel good about themselves and to flatter audiences with praise.

But there's actually no truth in either of these formulations. Those arrows are warped and can fly neither straight nor very far. What people precisely do not want is to be challenged. What they want are the same, comforting routines that they have become used to consuming every day of the week, year in and year out. The last thing people want is to be challenged or asked to think for themselves. What people want is the familiar. The usual. The normal. The safe.

And the cultural elites who compliment themselves by giving credit to authors who use language in creative ways – authors who try to create their own realities by endowing the words that they use in their texts with new meanings – are equally addicted to the routine, the normal, and the bland when it comes to politics. They, too, merely follow a line given to them by the policy wonks in the major political parties, people who, themselves, wouldn’t recognise originality if it was thrown at their faces like a raw fish.

The result is that a small coterie of experts is left in charge of the judging of high culture but their opinions lack credibility because they are so completely beholden to ideologues for their political opinions that the mainstream as embodied by the tabloid press ridicules them or ignores them. The situation is particularly bad because so much of what passes for deserving of the praise of this class of pundit or seer is only good in the sense that it mimics their political ideas, while the art that is used to convey them is often of poor quality. But still it gets applauded by the high priests of Oz culture. (They do sometimes get it right, but mostly it seems by accident rather than by dint of sound principles.)

This is why artists are mostly poor and we are mostly unhappy. It is also why Hollywood studios produce sequel after sequel in an effort to separate people from their money. So the doors to futurity stay closed because we cannot be bothered to knock, and we sit, afraid and alone, in silence, as we glumly imagine the rest of the world alive with celebration. In this context culture becomes merely a series of opportunities to enact revenge on others on account of our own suffering.

On reviewing

On 28 January this year, 10 days after getting out of hospital, where I had gone with a heart complaint, I was idly listening to the ABC’s 'Backroads' program on the Coorong region in South Australia and Heather Hewett, the host, was talking about the new 'Storm Boy' movie which, like the original (which was based on a novel), is set there. Locals, Hewett was explaining, hope the new movie will raise the profile of the district so that it can better be protected.

This kind of attitude toward art is uncontroversial. Art, it is assumed, must have a practical, utilitarian function. It must be able to "do" something in society in order to fulfill its destiny. This view seems to be the main reason why so much modern art is so mediocre. Especially with movies, they have to have a "message" that justifies the time and money spent on them. I think this fails to respect what art is in reality. The transformative things that art can achieve are not so easily classified as the policy statements of political parties. And in fact when we look back at what worked in the past, it was the style, rather than the content, that was innovative in the movies and books that have lasted the distance.

When I review a movie or a book I don't really spend much talking about messages or signification. What I am more interested in is the art itself, which is the only thing that has any lasting value. The message is of course designed to be commented upon and covered in a review but the main part of the piece will be concerned not with what is being conveyed in the work but rather with how it is being conveyed.

I’ve written before about these things on the blog. On 3 August last year I wrote a review of a new book. My review contained the following exegesis. This little story exemplifies the thinking behind my understanding of what a work of art is.

The author Vladimir Nabokov said that art should never be made to be in the service of ideology, and given his background (his family were dispossessed of their land after the October Revolution and he ended up living in Germany in a community of emigres) that is not a surprising thing to hear from him. His brilliant 1938 novel ‘The Gift’ (which was finally translated into English in 1963) has a long chapter about a Russian writer, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who was said to have been Lenin’s favourite author. Needless to say, Nobokov ripped into [Chernyshevsky] with a vengeance for his use of literature to push an ideological line. The novel when it first appeared was so controversial in the community that this chapter of it was omitted in the publication the rest of it appeared in, even though the émigré community was largely politically against the Soviets.

So it is clear that attempts to use art for utilitarian ends has a long pedigree. Even earlier, in the 19th century, after Jane Austen had made her great advances in the art of the novel, some parts of the community in the UK were dead-set keen to conscript novels for the purpose of “improving” the morals of young women. Once they found that young women wanted to read novels (and women had been, in the early days of the novel, the great novel readers par excellence), these busybodies wanted to tame the animal, to make it domesticated, and useful, so that it could perform what they saw as an essential function in society. Well, that worked didn’t it …

Every time you try to corral this particular stream between concrete banks so that it can be more efficiently used to help people with their industry, it is going to flood. You cannot tame this beast. Every time you try, some writer or painter or director will come along and rewrite the story of the art in order to inject originality and vigour back into it. Beauty is everybody’s wildlife. Studios and publishing houses that bring out formulaic rip-offs and sequels designed to capitalise on the success of an earlier production will find their expectations dashed as they fail to gain traction in the community. Then an outlier, someone separate from the pack, who has been working alone on something original, will arrive in cinemas or in bookshops and steal all the attention. Wild it is and always will be.

But the new cannot be so new that it confounds our understanding. A certain quantity of formula is always involved in art. Writers have favourite tropes that they deploy in an effort to advance the plot and keep people reading their book. To a certain degree the writer has to flatter the reader, give them things they will immediately understand in order to smuggle in the bits that are out-of-the-box strange, that they might never have seen before. With certain types of fiction, such formulaic plot devices become almost routine, as in genre fiction (spy thrillers, crime novels) where physical violence and death are ever-present elements in the narrative, lending it its unique texture and providing the author with opportunities to move the story forward in desirable ways.

I read a lot of genre fiction and I find some of it is better than others. Not all genre fiction is bad and not all literary fiction is good. Duds appear in both camps, and you have to pick out the good ‘uns and censor the bad ‘uns if you are to do your job. As a general rule however I prefer a literary novel to a genre offering because it will provide the author with more opportunities to display real insight and to use art to telling effect. And stories where very little happens are the very best of all. I love long, lazy sentences and narratives where not much happens but much is revealed about the world. In that sense, I am probably best described as a Modernist.

The thing about fiction that most engages people are the characters. Characterisation is the most basic structural element in a work of fiction, allowing the writer to bend the plot to follow a given trajectory in a way that appears to be “natural”. It is this naturalness that is so compelling for readers. If they feel that a character is acting “out of character” they might just put down the book and stop reading. So establishing a reliable cast of credible characters is the novelist’s first task, and this applies equally to movies. The same basic rules apply with both artforms, although the measures that writers and directors use to solve given problems will be specific to the medium. Both movies and novels use characters in the same way however.

A character is a useful thing for a writer. If you want your plot to go in a given direction, you can get a major character to do something that makes it seem inevitable. So the delineations of character are at the very base of the tree of meaning, in a novel or movie. If your character has a mental illness, they might one day while out walking go into a particular shop because they are afraid of someone they see on the street. Inside the shop, they might see another person who will become important to them for a completely different reason later on. So the plot advances on the back of character. The outlines of character are determinative of practically everything in a novel that has this basic quality of “naturalness”.

In what follows I am going to focus mainly on prose at the expense of cinema. The reason for this is that I want to talk about the particular ways that writers achieve the effects they use to make their stories. If I spent too much time also looking at cinema, things would become too complex. I am not going to talk about poetry at all in this piece, as in the main it uses a different kind of writing from the kind that is used in novels and short stories.

The first distinction I want to make is between literary fiction and genre fiction.

With the latter, language is mostly used in a different way than it is in the former. With genre fiction, because plot is more important than character or anything else, there is not a lot of the kinds of writing that I am going to talk about in what follows. The writer of genre fiction thinks that his or her job is to advance the plot at all times, so there is not much space given to slowing down the story in order to achieve poetic effects. This can have adverse effects, because it can lead to characters being rather thin and lacking in colour. As a result we might not put ourselves in their shoes, which can be bad for an author. But that is just a side concern at this stage. Literary fiction, on the other hand, often deviates from the plot in the narrative in order to embed different types of writing into it.

Both genre fiction and literary fiction play with time in order to construct the story. You get changes of scene and changes in focalisation in order to both hide and reveal parts of the story. (Focalisation is the use of characters to reveal the world inside the novel. A character that is used to focalise the narrative has his or her point of view revealed. You “see” the world through his or her eyes.) Changing focalisation and going forward or backward in time, or moving from one place to another, allow the writer to build suspense and to develop character, both of which are desirable for the reader. I’ve already talked a little about characters, but we also thrive as readers on the slow reveal of relevant details. It is what keeps us turning the pages. We want to “find out what happens next” (even though nothing in fact actually happens at all; it’s all artifice).

Especially in literary fiction, you also get to see the workings of the minds of the major characters. This can be done using different techniques but in general it allows you to actually “see” what the characters are thinking as they go about their business in the story. Novels have always been places where psychology has been examined and the techniques writers use to relay the thinking of their characters have changed over time. Back in the early part of the 18th century, before the revolution that led to the emergence of the modern novel, psychology was often developed through letters written by the major characters in novels. These types of novel were massively popular (again, especially with women) and what to us now seems a clunky device (how can you reveal your way of thinking in a series of letters written to a family member?) was lapped up with relish by a devoted readership.

Context can also be added by using poetic language to describe places where the action unfolds in a novel. If you think back to the great novels that came in the period immediately after the artistic revolution of the early-19th century, you find things like houses, city streets, country lanes, and other places are often used to create meaning by revealing things about the time and place in which the drama unfolds. This type of counterpoise to the main thread of the narrative can be very powerful, and in fact can encapsulate the majority of the poetry contained in a novel beyond the psychology of the major characters. Dickens and Gogol are of note in this regard.

This kind of context is important if the writer wants to create an understandable “world” in which to situate his or her narrative. Helping to orient the reader in space is a major element of the fictive process, as is the creation of an arc of time over which the drama is meant to unfold. Again, all of this is pure artifice. The only truth is the ideas that exist in the reader’s mind, which is in an eternal present. The creation of a simulacrum of space and time in a novel is merely meant to “do things to” the reader and so lead to the release of the chemicals that our brains thrive on. Everything is in the present of the reader’s mind but everything is compartmentalised along a timeline, in space, and in the various characters the write deploys in creating his or her fiction.

It’s a glorious con. The perfect lie. We empathise with characters because they mean something to us. We find our own ways of thinking reflected back to us and so we invest ourselves emotionally in the narrative. All these things are done in order to keep us turning the pages, to make us want to get to the end, in order to lure us, like some sort of outlandish trout, out of the depths and into the shallows where we can become hooked and so, confronted by the artist’s sublime power and ravished by our own helplessness, we become faithful readers. Slay me! Who needs God when you’ve got a good book?

The plasticity of poetic language

At 5.57pm on 18 July, ABC Perth tweeted: “The parents of student Mehreen Ahmad say they are trapped in a ‘never-ending darkness’ after she suffered brain damage at the hands of a Brazilian man in an attack in a Perth apartment block stairwell.”

The drama in the words of the parents is present and the feeling of helplessness is palpable but on second thoughts the expression used is a little overblown. Parents of a child who has just been killed are supposed to express feelings like this, right? But it’s hard to imagine anything in this life being “never-ending”, for a start. “Darkness”? Certainly, things seem pretty bad right now but given a few years and the restorative action of justice the world will look a lot better at some point in the future, surely. It can’t rationally be all that bad. Forever and ever.

It’s not. But this is the thing about language: its plasticity. It is malleable and casual expressions using language, even carefully thought-out incidents of it such as poetry, can be made to do things that more stubborn artefacts of civilisation, such as the law or the economy, cannot. (Even though language is in both of these cases the medium of communication.) This is the great blessing of poetry: that it fits whatever shape we design for it without complaint or resistance.

Almost. There is the matter of style. You have to get other people to believe what you are saying, otherwise the strength of the words is reduced. Or annihilated. People who write poetry experiment with style never-endingly as they seek out ways to engage with the community, in order to amass wealth. If they are very good, their fame will outlast even their own lifespan, and they will be recognised as a minor poet by posterity, if not a great one.

The thing about poetry (literature in general) is that it can be produced in almost any conceivable circumstance. Regardless of the nature of the freedoms available in the country you are writing in, you can write anything you want. Publishing however might be a different proposition. Many great writers have had to live in countries other than their native land in order to publish their work. But in the main, poetry is tolerated by the authorities even in oppressive regimes because it is seen to be a harmless type of writing not linked to political activism, as journalism might be thought to be.

Which brings me to the point of my post. Some of the best literature we have was written at a time when the political settlement was inimical to the types of freedoms that people in the developed world today take for granted. This brings me back to the opening of this post. Strong, affective language that is designed to highlight the cause of your pain, such as the words used by the Pakistani parents of Mahreen Ahmad when speaking to the media in Perth, are characteristic of what you can hear in places where basic freedoms are not available. There, you are forced to overstate your case because you know, from the outset, that you are going to come away unsatisfied unless you appeal to the something buried deep inside the person you are talking to. Official channels will not bring redress and so alleviate your burden. Your only hope of relief rests with a sense of pity that might be possessed by the man standing in front of you. So verbalising hyperbolic claims to emphasise the strength of your feelings is a way to cut through official obduracy.

I want to take a small detour here. People who grow vanilla beans know that in order to get the plant to produce them you have to restrict the amount of water the plant receives. The judicious application of stress to the plant in this way results in the desired outcome: dozens of the delicious, pungent beans that we have used to flavour food since the plant was brought back to Europe by the Spanish in the Renaissance.

With literature, the same rule might apply. The high-toned, pathetic literature that we like to read in our leisure hours might be possible only in repressive political climates. Take Rimbaud, for example, who lived mostly during the period of the Second Empire during the second half of the 19th century in France, under Napoleon III. There was no free press in the country at the time, as there was of course in Britain, and the French legislature, which had very restricted powers, was ultimately controlled by the executive headed by the emperor. But Rimbaud’s poetry is far more interesting than much of what was appearing in England at the same time, although Swinburn is an obvious contender in the originality stakes. Great strides forward in literature were therefore made under inauspicious conditions. But it might have been precisely the lack of individual freedom in France at the time that led to Rimbaud’s extraordinary inventiveness.

Look for contrast at what appeared in Australia in roughly the same era: poetry such as the verse of Banjo Paterson (1864-1941), that we nowadays consider to be practically indistinguishable from doggerel. In the colonies of New South Wales, Tasmania, and Victoria, voting for members of part of each of the legislatures was introduced in 1856. South Australia gained the same privilege in 1857, Queensland in 1860, and Western Australia in 1890. And the press in each of the colonies before federation in 1901 was highly vocal and influenced government policy. Having the freedom to decide your destiny does not necessarily lead to the production of a fine quality literature.

In fact it might impede it. Look, for another example of attitudes held by people in the Australian community, at the motto of the University of Sydney, Australia’s first university. The plan to establish the institution was first mentioned in the NSW Legislative Assembly in 1848 and the University of Sydney Act was signed into law by the governor in 1850. ‘Sidere mens eadem mutato’ is the motto, and it translates from Latin as “The constellations change but the mind stays the same”. In other words, the new university would be made on a model already established by the two universities that existed at the time in the UK: Oxford and Cambridge under the Southern Cross. The poetry being published in the colonies was just like this: pale copies of what was appearing “back home” in the British Isles.

Under such oppressive conditions (from the point of view of the arts), strange episodes might however result, such as the Ern Malley hoax that was carried out by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart. They cheekily wrote some “Modernist” verses one day in 1943 and submitted them to the magazine Angry Penguins, which was edited by Max Harris and John Reed, who printed them in an issue of the magazine along with enthusiastic commentary. The hoax became public knowledge, Harris was put on trial for and convicted of publishing obscenity, and the magazine folded in 1946. Nowadays, no-one reads McAuley’s poetry. Rimbaud is a star.

The problem with the literary ecosystem in Australia is bigger than Bob Ellis

Fairfax reporter Jacqueline Maley published a story on Friday about the renowned late progressive author Bob Ellis, informing us that he indulged “grubby impulses” when he sexually assaulted minors in the 1970s. Kate and Rozanna Lilley, daughters of the late poet Dorothy Hewett, say their mother knew about the abuse they experienced. “Kate says she had consensual sex with Ellis four times when she was 15 and 16. Rozanna said Ellis ‘shoved my hands down the front of his trousers’ when she was 14.”

Meanjin editor Jonathan Green now says he regrets publishing what he now considers to have been misogynistic productions submitted by Ellis to publications Green controlled. Ellis died two years ago and his reputation has been comprehensively trashed as a result of recent revelations. But in Australia the problem is that success depends so much on your name value, and so little on your actual talent or the inherent quality of your writing.

In the literary magazines, which struggle, God knows, to survive, even the oldest and most prestigious of them, you see the same names appearing in issue after issue as editors rely on writers with a proven track-record of pulling readers to fill their pages with appetising content.

A dull readership, the product of uninformed literary taste in the community more generally, reduces editors’ appetite to experiment and try something new and out-of-the-ordinary. The reviewing that could help to improve the community’s judgement fails to do its job. It is far less than robust because everyone knows everyone else in this small pond: relations between people who review and those who write are too close for the kind of complete honesty that you need to inspire the public to reward true quality. This point can never be repeated too many times in Australia.

The slender margins with which literary journals operate ensure only sure bets get the nod. This results in an impoverished literary ecosystem, a place where the strength of your name value is more important than the quality of your writing.

It has to be remembered, too, that not every new book by a writer, even one who has had success in the past, is necessarily as good as the previous production. But it doesn’t matter to the great unwashed or to the editors who supply them with material. A high-profile name gets them interested and they respond predictably when offered the same as last time, regardless of the inherent quality of the work itself. It’s a popularity contest and the loser is the Australian public itself, because we have to consume the same bland pabulum that functioned last time to get the volumes out the door and into people’s hands.

The same laziness that supported Ellis in his later years keeps people ignorant of the splendours that lie buried in the culture surrounding them, in places where they never look. Instead of enjoying the soul food in a book written by Gerald Murnane, Melanie Cheng, Maria Tumarkin, or Anthony Macris, we gobble up a tired Tim Winton’s most recent rheumy eructation or the latest brain-dump from Richard Flanagan, like a sty full of pigs intent on filling our guts as fast as possible.

People need to be challenged and stimulated with fresh perspectives. We need to follow an original artistic vision, not bribed with celebrity to buy a stale product just because jaded gatekeepers believe it will do the trick. Australians arise! Awake!

It’s easier to do democracy than to do literature

Miles Franklin is to Australian letters what Washington Irving is to American letters: a competent practitioner with more than a little talent who nevertheless failed to set the world on fire. In America, the fire was first lit and nurtured by Edgar Allen Poe in the 1830s. In Australia, it wasn’t until about 1940 when Patrick White started to publish the novels that would lead to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Democracy began to be practiced in Australia earlier. In 1856, the Legislative Assembly in New South Wales was for the first time filled with elected representatives. In America, of course, we mark the beginning with the signing in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence. After these events, it took a generation or two in these countries until substantive works of literature were to be published that would cause the world to pay attention. White’s Nobel has already been mentioned. For Poe, the gauge of his importance is to be found in the fact that Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, translated his works into his native language in the middle of the 19th century.

Why is literature harder to do than democracy? Well, it’s not always the case that it is. Take Egypt, for example. Just as one example in the modern era, they have produced Alaa al-Aswany, a novelist of some talent whose family has been connected to politics for generations. They also have Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. But they haven’t managed to negotiate a settlement that takes into account the demands of religion in the country. The elected president Mohamed Morsi was in power from 30 June 2012 to 3 July 2013 before the generals deposed him.

I think it has something to do with culture. When Jurgen Habermas, the Frankfurt School thinker, wanted to find the origins of the public sphere he went to the English coffee houses of the 18th century. I would qualify that finding myself and extend the notion back a century to the 17th century, a time in England when public discussion of politics was animated by the demands of religion as people fought for supremacy in a struggle for domination that finally ended with the installation on the throne of William of Orange in 1688. Religion would continue to be a distinguishing element in the realm of personal identity for a long time after this, but never again in England would so much blood be spilled to prove a theological point.

Australia inherited its disputative culture from England after London agreed to allow some NSW residents to elect representatives so that they could make decisions about the collection and expenditure of public money. Just as American settlers in the years after 1759, the year Montreal fell to the British, were vocal in demanding the same rights as natural-born Englishmen. The reason for their disagreement with George III was the same as that which had animated Parliament in London in 1649, when Charles I lost his head: no taxation without representation. Charles had prorogued Parliament but then had gone ahead to raise levies on the people to replenish the Treasury.

New Zealand pipped Australia at the post when it came to demanding suffrage for its residents, which was granted in 1852, even though the jurisdiction continued to be a colony until the following century. New Zealand is notable also as being the first place in the world where women were granted the franchise. And Australia became the first place where women could be elected to public office.

Jane Austen and the invention of the modern novel

This blogpost draws on an earlier blogpost from 12 September 2015 on this blog and expands it in the light of recent conversations with friends. I apologise for the undergraduate language used in this piece, but I have forgotten most of the literary theory I read for my first university degree.

When I first read Jane Austen, back in 2002, her novels quickly came to represent for me a point of excellence for the craft. I was struck by how mature they seemed despite having been published 200 years ago, and I came to the conclusion that she had discovered something new. What that was, was at first not entirely clear, but I had the inkling that it had something to do with the even tone she employed throughout her novels to describe every kind of emotion experienced by her characters from the greatest joy through to the deepest sorrow.

In my readings around her work I came a across a lot of books published prior to hers that lacked this sort of authorial disengagement. In epistolary novels, for example, which became popular in England in the 1830s, you can get some very strange orthography indeed when the writer is trying to express extremes of emotion experienced by his characters. The sentences break up in a cascade of dashes as the writer of the letter loses control of her emotions and they go careening off into the realm of the inexpressible.

Austen, who was born in 1775, critiqued such writing in her juvenilia, in the form of a series of short comical sketches written for domestic consumption during the 1780s and early -90s. In these sketches, she experimented with tone while also playing in a very critical way with the kinds of novelistic tropes - as she saw them - that fostered the emotional highs and lows she had grown suspicious of over years of novel reading.

She objected to the excesses of secular power implicit in the clunky plot devices that such writers used. Kidnapping, rape, elopement, murder, disinheriting, withholding of wages. The literature of the 18th century is full of democratically-minded writers using high-toned events in their narratives to achieve certain fictional outcomes, essentially to help to civilise a still very unfair era. They wanted people to be better, kinder, more empathetic. The political and legal structures that gave shape to the lives of people living in the broader community to which Austen herself belonged favoured a narrow ruling class. Austen, it has to be remembered, was a Tory, a backer of the king against Parliament, and so she found a lot of what was being published politically alien.

However she wanted to retain the psychological drama that Samuel Richardson had introduced into popular culture. It is notable nevertheless that her favourite Richardson novel was ‘Sir Charles Grandison’, which is about a good man with power and how he conducts himself in the world. Richardson wrote the novel because his readers were getting a bit tired of the venal male characters he was used to using in his books. Like Austen herself they wanted a bit of variety.

It should be remembered that the Austen family were great readers. Everyone from the youngest daughter to the head of the family read novels for pleasure, so young Jane had a wide audience for her hilarious sallies into the genre. Those were also the days of visiting, and a sheaf of papers would no doubt be taken along down the country lanes when the women went to pay a visit on a friend or neighbour.

What Austen came up with in order to support the kind of emotional registers that would allow the development of the psychological drama she sought to generate for readers like her immediate family was something that also enabled her to incorporate a quantity of humour into her novels.

This was to flatten out the expressive register of events throughout the novel. If everything was described with a delivery at a regular level of tone she would also naturally produce humour because what was something that in the realm of the novel was actually quite high-toned for the character would be uniform within the locus of description regulating things between the characters and the reader, in the fictive space itself. In this space, the author’s unique voice could be deployed effectively.

Austen manipulated the dramatic texture of her novels and introduced the irony that people nowadays still find so refreshing. The two things happened in tandem. In order to effectively introduce her authorial voice, she had to have realistic characters being driven by a realistic plot, a plot that your average reader could personally relate to. And she was quite aware of this quality of her books. She once in a letter described her work to a correspondent: “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.” You level out the dramatic fabric of the novel and this allows you to do other things, such as deploy humour and investigate the psychological processes the characters are going through. Character development is something that Austen uses with great skill, and it is another aspect of her writing that sets her above most of her coevals.

The writers Austen herself admired came closest to doing something on the same level that she herself attained. I have already mentioned one novel by Samuel Richardson. There is also Maria Edgeworth, the Irish writer who was just a few years older than Austen herself but whose fame at the time was far greater than hers. And then there was George Crabbe, the naturalist-parson-poet whose short stories in iambic pentameters, like Austen's works, belong to the Augustan stream in the Romantic river.

Of course, everyone would agree that Austen tends to limit the scope of her novels by concentrating with such dedication to such narrow concerns as marriage and sex, but others would go on to furthering the reform project, such as Charles Dickens, in whose novels you get a much wider set of experiences and types of characters involved in the dramas the author invents. I think that Dickens is a wonderful writer, but I have to be honest and say that what he achieved would never have been the same without the example Austen offered.

Prettifying Jane Austen

In the UK, they have created a new banknote with the portrait of Jane Austen on it, and while I enthusiastically applaud this use of public real estate to recognize the unique contribution of a woman who almost single-handedly invented the modern novel, I have strong reservations about the source used to generate the image. The first picture below shows the new banknote. The second picture shows the portrait of Austen created by her beloved sister, Cassandra, in 1810, when Jane was still alive. The third picture below shows the sanitised portrait created by professional artist James Andrews based on Cassandra's portrait. This portrait was used for the fourth picture below, which is an engraving used for the purpose of illustrating the memoir about Austen written by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, which was published in 1869. What we're not seeing in the new banknote is a portrait based on Cassandra's original drawing, but rather one based on the sanitised, Victorian-era portrait made by Andrews.

Writing poetry again

This morning I had an inkling about the first line of a poem and instead of ignoring the inkling as I would normally do I sat down to the computer and opened up the last Word file from 2015 and copied it with a new name: '2017 sonnets'. I had a nervous feeling tinged with excitement in my stomach as I wrote the first words of the poem I had started in my head. The next line followed and as I put it down I planned the rhyme for line three.

Thus it was that I started to write poetry again. It has been two years since I last wrote poetry. Exactly two years, it transpires (because I date all my poems in the Word file; the date comes directly under the title of the poem). The previous poem was written on 5 February 2015. After that: nothing for two years. Until this morning.

I went back to read the other poems from other years, including the prodigious year of 2013 and the next year of some output: 2014. There are only three poems in 2015. All my finished poems have been saved as PDF files, so that I can quickly go back and read them in isolation. Removed from the company of what precedes them and what follows them in the flow of writing they are more like themselves, and of course inside the folder on the hard drive they sort themselves in alphabetical (not date) order. Rereading the old items I felt something like that same nervous feeling in my stomach. It's as though when I read the old poems I am revisiting a mood, seeing again an image that I had first seen on that day so many years before when I wrote them.

But the interesting thing is that most of the poems in those years were conceived in the summer. It seems that I am most fecund when the weather is warm and the breath slips in and out of the hot body unencumbered by any chill or other temperature-based abeyance. Up in Queensland in 2013 and 2014 I was accompanied, as always in those days, when I wrote poetry, by the twin presences of the park with its enormous paperbark, and the cries in the morning of the magpie. The birds used to settle in ones or twos on my balcony up there in southeast Queensland. And the paperbark was like a sentinel for me - in fact I think on one occasion I likened it to exactly this type of thing in one of my poems.

Down here those things - those totems of my spirit - disappeared replaced by the sounds of the city. The helicopters that fly by over the CBD on their endless quests, and the cars that roar up the street nearby in the night and during the daytime too. These are the new totems for my productive soul.

The sensation of movement in the pit of my stomach is the thing that characterises the experience of poetry for me. I feel vulnerable, exposed. Perhaps that is why it has taken me so long to revisit the experience of writing poetry, now that I am down here in Sydney. I needed to build the ties that bind me to the new totems of my life here. Perhaps that is why it has taken me so long to go back to writing poetry.

Who cares if books are coming back, I have an ereader

Well here we have another learned boffin being wise in hindsight - if this article on ereaders versus printed books had been published five years ago it might have had some merit - and pronouncing on the death of the ebook. For myself, I love my ereader. I used to go to the bookstore and buy half-a-dozen books at a time, and maybe get around to reading three of them, if I was lucky. Now, with social media, I buy books that have been recommended by people I know and I read almost all of them.

The other great thing about the ereader is that I don't have to store bloody great slabs of books on shelves - which have to be bought and delivered as well - because everything fits inside the ereader itself, and that takes up no space at all.

Ereaders are also easier to read in bed; they're lighter and more handy; and they don't have to have bookmarks added because the books are marked electronically when you stop reading with a simple tap of your finger. Turning pages is a snap - you just tap on the page at its margin - and then you can put down the thing when you're done and go to sleep.

What makes me so annoyed with the kind of superior reverse shamanism embodied in the article in question is that anyone could have written it. There's no great revelation about the fate of books. There's no forecasting and deadly accuracy to make it shine. It's just a bit of fluff beaten up with a few random facts to make the author sound interesting. It's the worst kind of opinion. I call it humbug!

Island Press 45 year celebration at the Harold Park Hotel

On stage, from left: Martin Langford, Les Wicks,
Philip Hammial, Roberta Lowing.

This was a pretty unusual event in the Sydney culture calendar but it gave people like me who enjoy poetry as a unique form of cultural expression an opportunity to touch base with peers. The email notification for the event was from Roberta Lowing, who had previously been responsible for organising reading nights at Sappho Books in Glebe (although she doesn't do that job anymore).

Island Press is also a pretty unusual institution in Australian poetry. Established in 1970, at the time and for decades into the future it gave local poets an outlet who might not match the publishing criteria of poetry stalwarts Oxford University Press or Angus & Robertson, then the only two houses putting out poetry (I learned at the event). In 1979 the founding editor Philip Roberts returned to his native Canada and handed operations to Philip Hammial (see pic). The press went on to become a stalwart itself in the Australian poetry scene, publishing early works by some of our most renowned poets.

For me the location of the event at the Harold Park Hotel had added significance as there had been many evenings of readings by poets and others in my early days in the 1980s at this place. On Saturday the crowd who turned out for the Island Press event tended in general toward the senior end of the age spectrum but there were younger people present as well.

During the afternoon's program I spoke at length with a woman who turned out to be the mother of Roberta Lowing (see pic). Early in the proceedings Roberta read from a new book of her poetry that has been published by Island Press. Her mother Pat was originally from Queensland and in her youth attended the University of Queensland.

Two other meetings on the day were notable for me. I met Adam Aitken and Richard James Allen, who are both well-known Sydney poets but who also used to work with me on the young poetry magazine Neos during the early-to-mid-80s. The doyen of that venture was Neil Whitfield, then a Sydney secondary school teacher but who is now retired. Neil unfortunately was not at the Island Press event yesterday. It was nice to meet up with these old friends again after such a long period spent doing other things apart from nurturing poetry. As I mentioned to Pat, we all undertook the entire range of tasks required to bring out a magazine, from selection of the poems to publish, to editing and typesetting and layout, through to distribution in bookshops.

It was a grand adventure. And from listening to the current editors of Island Press, who were seated during the afternoon on the stage, the same can be said for that imprint as well. As someone said during the proceedings, you get involved in this type of activity for no other reason than that you have a passion for it. There is no other word adequate to describe what it means to publish poetry in contemporary Australia.

Should you review a book if you don't like it?

I've been struggling with a book over the past few days. I might pick it up at bedtime and read it for five minutes or so, until I get to the end of another section, then put it down and turn off the light, happy to get some rest. At other times, for example during morning hours when I often read books in my living area, I won't even think about approaching it on my Kindle. At these times I'm happy following conversations on social media or writing blogposts about politics or the new public sphere. And the book languishes, even though I paid the dollar price for it and it is sitting there, waiting patiently - like some digital hound wanting to go for a walk - to be picked up.

With the book before this it was similar. I would read a bit before going to sleep but that's it. This is not the way you show appreciation for something that really engages you. If you like a book inordinately you will rush to open it as soon as you get a chance, and you will stay up reading it into the small hours of the morning in an effort to finish it. That's how I finished Bernard Keane's Surveillance, which I reviewed at the beginning of this month. Not all books get a good review, however.The issue at hand here is whether to do a hatchet job on something you don't really like, pointing out what you see as its flaws. In some cases, for example with Atule Gawande's Being Mortal, which I reviewed back in early August, the review will be negative.

In Gawande's case I went to the trouble of doing a review even though I didn't really like his book because he's a successful writer who probably doesn't need the accolades of an obscure Australian reviewer like me. Gawande has been a feature writer for the New Yorker for as long as I've been aware of him. He's also a practicing surgeon. So I guess that he won't really care what I think as he has plenty of other people to support his authorial practice in a way he has become accustomed to. For the two books I recently tried unsuccessfully to finish however the case is not quite the same.

The first of these books is a memoir by a famous entertainment figure in Australia. To start with I found the book betrayed a very ordinary imagination. There was no sign in it of a special intelligence that might shine out to illuminate my experience. Not only that but the writing itself has problems. In a memoir you often talk about family and it is easy to lose the reader as you are describing these blood ties in all the intricate detail that your memory demands. The problem in this book is that the reader just cannot keep up. After a while you don't know who "he" or "she" are. I put this failing down to more than just poor execution alone however, but also slate it home to inadequate editing. This is the sort of problem that the publishing company should be able to help the writer to correct.

The second of these books is a social study with a basic thesis that the author chooses to express in two words, which are both capitalised. The major problem with the book is that the underlying idea ostensibly encapsulated in those two words just is not clear. What is she talking about? What is the main gist of the book? What is its thesis? It's all very confusing, although you do get the idea that the author herself is able to string the ideas together into a solid formula. The writing is sometimes analytical and sometimes she uses the forms that we are all familiar with from reading journalism, especially the interviews. The underlying concept that is supposed to tie the book together was not properly articulated for me however so I put the book down and didn't pick it up again.

My problem is that in both of these cases I consider my opinion to have the potential to cause discomfort, so I don't feel right about writing the review to include the title of the book and the name of the author. I do not want to be the cause of pain to anyone and so I keep my own counsel. I do fear however that by behaving in this way I help to impoverish the Australian literary world, as I think that my opinions on books are valid and useful. A bit of temporary discomfort might result later in new ideas and different ways of approaching the task of writing, for the primary subjects, the authors involved. But I don't have the courage or the heart, and I fear that this is a failing of my own.

Where humour comes from in novels

Recently when I was reading a novel published this year in Australia I thought about where the humour in it came from. Partly this was because it seemed to me to have the same kind of humour as you find in the novels of Jane Austen, a writer I have written here about in the past because of the degree of acquaintance I have with her.

The thing is that when I first read Jane Austen, back in 2002, her novels quickly came to represent for me a level of excellence for the craft. I was struck by how mature they seemed despite having been published 200 years ago, and I came to the conclusion that she had discovered something special which she had rendered in characters and plots. What that was, was at first not entirely clear, but I had the inkling that it had something to do with the even tone she employed throughout her novels to describe every kind of emotion experienced by her characters from the greatest joy through to the deepest sorrow.

In my readings around her work I came a across a lot of books published prior to her era of publishing activity that lacked this sort of authorial disengagement. In epistolary novels, for example, you can get some very strange orthography indeed when the writer is trying to express in his characters extremes of emotion. The sentences break up in a cascade of dashes as the writer of the letter loses control of her emotions and they go careening off into the realms of the inexpressible. For Austen this would not do. In her juvenilia, a series of short comical sketches written for domestic consumption during the 1780s and early -90s, she experimented with tone while also playing in a very critical way with the kinds of novelistic tropes - as she saw them - that contained the emotional highs and lows she had grown suspect of over years of reading novels.

It should be remembered that the Austen family were great readers. Everyone from youngest daughter to the head of the family read novels for pleasure, so Austen had a wide audience for her hilarious sallies into the genre. Those were also the days of visiting, and a sheaf of papers would no doubt be taken along down the country lanes when the women went to pay a visit on a friend or neighbour. The eighteenth century in England was a great time for books.

What Austen came up with in order to support the kind of emotional registers she sought was something that also enabled her to incorporate a quantity of humour into her novels. This was to flatten out the expressive values of events throughout her novel. If everything was described with a delivery at a regular level of expressiveness she would naturally produce humour because what was something that in the realm of the novel was actually quite high-toned for the character would be flat within the locus of description regulating things between the characters and the reader, in the fictive space itself.

What results is a kind of loaded irony. When we think of irony however we normally think of something that is cold and calculating, but in Austen irony nevertheless allows her characters' emotions to emerge in the fictional space that both the author and the reader are present in. What results is a kind of "present" author, as well, which can further enrich the reading experience. This third presence offers a further sort of "distance" between the characters in the novel and the reader.

The writers Austen herself admired came closest to achieving something of the scale of what she herself achieved. There was Richardson, for example, but Austen was careful to single out the flattest and most "novelistic" of Richardson's epistolary works, Sir Charles Grandison. There is also Maria Edgeworth, the Irish writer who was just a few years older than Austen herself but whose fame at the time was far greater than hers. And then there was George Crabbe, the naturalist parson-poet whose short stories in iambic pentameters, like Austen's works, belong to the Augustan stream within the Romantic river.

Getting back into publishing poetry

A couple of days ago I drove down the highway to the capital for an appointment and I also spent a couple of hours catching up with a friend. On the way back home in the car I listened to music on the radio. The music made me think about my poetry. I haven't written anything for a year. The task of managing mum's illness and getting her into care took up all my energy last year, or most of the year anyway. When I got home I decided to talk about the poetry, and I posted something on Facebook, then yesterday I went into Google Plus and did a solo hangout on air (where you capture the video in a recording and it is stored on your YouTube channel).

The hangout goes for about 9 minutes and in it I talk about the problems I had last year. At the end I go on to recite a poem that has been up on the Patreon sponsorship site for a year, titled 'Giants', which is about the weather. We have had some terrible hot weather in the past week so it was timely.

Then I decided to post another poem, again a poem from a year ago which had not previously been published. As usual, I made a note of the publication in my publication spreadsheet. I like to keep track of what is published, and where. This makes it easier to manage poems in the publishing world, because normally a publication won't take a poem that has previously been published anywhere.

All this publishing activity on Patreon does not necessarily mean that I will be writing more poems any time soon. I do however have a fairly large stock of unpublished items that can be published on the web if I want to do that. But the activity is a change for me. I have been cooped up in my shell for so long - really, as I've mentioned on a number of occasions, from March through to November - that breaking out of it in any way (such as publishing poetry online) is remarkable.

The other thing that has happened in the past few days is that the dates for the move have firmed up. I will be moving down to Sydney on 9 February. I have to go down there by plane once before then to take mum to a specialist's appointment, but the date of the move has now been set. I should be ensconced in the new apartment by 12 February. It will take a bit of time to unpack and get rigged up but everything else being equal we're looking at a few weeks to a month at the most before the move is complete.

Rereading Houellebecq

A most extraordinary thing has happened. I have read Michel Houellebecq's 2012 novel The Map And the Territory for the third time. It's of particular significance because it's frequently the case that I do not even get past the first 50 pages of a book. For particularly bad books, that is. Houellebecq's novel has allowed me to metaphorically snuggle up with emotions and ideas that have made me happy in the past. In this way, the rereading of the novel for the third time is a kind of virtual comfort blanket where the overriding sentiment is a kind of gentle nostalgia, a fond regard on what has passed that stands in opposition to the bright exaltation that suffused my being when, in my childhood, I finished a particularly gripping novel. I still remember finishing the Tolkein saga, for example, and I can happily say that finishing The Map And the Territory for the third time was nothing like that. This time, I felt pleasantly sad, as though I was aware of having done something pleasant for the final time.

Or like looking back over the past week and thinking about all the wonderful television shows I have watched; the police dramas, the comedy shows, the news telecasts. All of them leave a residue on your soul that is not removed by future viewing, but which rather is somehow enhanced as in a palimpsest so that new things appear amid the old, things belonging to the old but which were not visible yesterday, and these things become visible in a muted and subtle arrangement.

Not unlike in the final works of Jed Martin, the hero of Houellebecq's novel.

It would be natural for me to go on and reread Houellebecq's 2005 novel The Possibility of An Island, a reading that could then segue into my finishing Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault, since they both deal with cults. It doesn't really matter which one I read because I will always be looking for the emotional effect that rereading The Map And the Territory produced in me; if I don't find it in one book I can always try another, and another ad infinitum. There are an unlimited number of books in the world to choose from. So I can go on picking up books, trying a few pages, then possibly putting them down again if the desired effect is not achieved. I can then class the successful candidates as "books to read when mildly depressed". Maybe I can make a new narrow focus blog dedicated to this one concern, and generate a following of mildly depressed people throughout the world. Then the blog can be turned into a book and become a bestseller.

That's something to look forward to, but it's unlikely, as the requisite dedication and application of my mental faculties on such a small area appears right now to be completely beyond me. I shall just go on shuffling through my book collection and scanning the new release tables of independent bookshops in search of the next book that will attune itself to my mood.

Pamuk packaged for New York's lower east side

In his meditative and saccharine portrayal of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, The New York Times' Joshua Hammer goes for a leisurely stroll with the famous man through the streets of Istanbul, picking up tid bits and folklore on the way. Finding something essential and unexpected in the tony streets where Pamuk lives, and in the neglected by-ways he frequented as a child Hammer comes up almost empty handed. The article would suit Vanity Fair; all that's missing is the Hollywood sign in the background, and you feel that Hammer would have preferred to see it at some point just to reassure himself that Pamuk is as westernised as many would like him to be. But the essential Pamuk exists elsewhere.

Hammer tells us that Pamuk as a young man would drive his father's car to the bookseller's district and load the car up with translations of European fiction, and that he passed up on participating in civil protests during his university days because he was too busy reading at home. There's little of a literary nature in Hammer's article although there's plenty of food. There's also little analysis of what Turkey really feels like today; maybe Pamuk doesn't know, although that's hard to believe.

For example the article ends up in a district populated by devout Turks - Sunnis - and Hammer and Pamuk then scuttle quickly home. You wonder how Pamuk is viewed by such people, and how he views them. In fact there's little about Pamuk's views at all in the article, just as there's little about what Pamuk apparently always loved the most: literature. What did it mean for Pamuk to read European literature in his youth? How did that place him as a member of his society? What kind of aspirations did he have in his youth and have those ideas changed with time? We learn nothing of this kind in Hammer's story. We're too busy sipping the caramel-coloured concoction from southern Russia and admiring the cup used by Kemal Ataturk.

It's a shame the article is so flimsy, although admittedly it's a travel article and appears in the appropriate section of the website. But Pamuk is an interesting person not only because he's a good writer but also because he writes in the European tradition of realistic novels. But how does he see his own country, which has been trying for decades - unsuccessfully - to become more closely integrated with Europe? What does he think of that project? What does he think of the Islamist project that is running concurrently, and apparently at odds with the first? We hear nothing of this kind from Hammer, which reminded me of the weird and sanitised appearance of Egypt's Mohammed Morsi in the New York Times a couple of years ago when he visited the city to speak at the UN. Islamic identity politics is a bridge too far it would seem for the newspaper's readers, more used to trying to understand Californians than Anatolians.

Three giants of world letters die from embarrassment

The picture here is one of the twee, cleaned-up portraits of Jane Austen that have sprung up like privet in the centuries since she died, a species of weed cultivated in good faith by generations of admirers with the most recent being the sensitive new-age guy who rhapsodises elegaically about her mastery of prose and her whip-like humour. So tie me up, I'm one of them. It's a supporting role in letters that has historical resonance of course: think of the young democrats living in Jane's day who tortured their listeners with paeans to the wonders of Shakespeare's unaccountably complex language. But think also of people like the influential Australian democrat William Wentworth who named his vast Sydney estate Vaucluse in honour of the genius of Petrarch, one of the early exponents of the 'dolce stil novo' - the new, soft style pioneered by Dante - which in the late Middle Ages lent such credibility to the vernacular; to popular speech.

Popular speech. Democracy. What is going on here? "Are you saying, man, that literature has influenced the devolution of power through the ages? Is that it? Be clear!" Well Dante was self-consciously working in the tradition of Virgil, the most revered poet of the Roman oligarchs and despots - whose organs of power (the Church, the Law) contemporary elites still in his day relied on to continue to govern Europe - so you could say that by writing his Commedia in the vernacular he was handing a petition to those in power on behalf of the popolo, the plebs. a document of such persuasive power that, combined with the technology of printing, its message resulted in generations of civil conflict in Europe that would change the world in uncountable ways, one of which was to be that all English boys received a classical education. And so enter Shakespeare, who grew up in what was effectively a cultural backwater but who had access to all the resources of millennia of learning. And the little bastard could read them.

And it's no surprise that he emerged in the place where power had devolved away from the despot to the greatest degree imaginable at the time: in England. Without discounting his hit-the-ground-running early plays and strong female roles it's in his late masterpieces such as Hamlet that we see the emergence of the individual as a new cultural species. Sure, there were other innovations appearing at the same time, particularly in the great proto-novels of Cervantes where again it's the individual who struggles to emerge amid the restrictive structures of contemporary social modalities, but if you want to talk about greatness you have to acknowledge the lifetime achievement of the Bard because of the sheer bloody influence it wielded in successive generations: just go into any large university library that still makes its historical holdings available to see how many annotated editions of Shakespeare there were in the centuries since his death.

In England bardolatry was so prevalent that for generations publishers and their hired pens "cleaned up" Shakespeare's language - because there were so many infelicities there, don't you know, dear chap - so that it wasn't until around the time of the American War of Independence that accurate editions became available. Jane Austen was born the year before the Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed, and it is within the heated morass of debate about the rights and privileges of the individual that she developed her ideas about writing that were to emerge in the first recognisably modern novels, so modern in fact that millions of people still read them today. Again, as in Shakespeare's case, it's not surprising that Austen emerged at a time of violent discussion about who should hold power and what would happen if power was devolved away from the despot into the hands of the popolo, the plebs. The women!