Reader's Digress

A book in the (second) hand...

2009-11-01T16:02:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago the media went into overdrive after it was revealed that the Amazon-developed Kindle e-reader had surreptitiously reclaimed a story sold to punters when the publisher changed its mind over offering an electronic copy of the text. Amazon electronically deleted all the copies of the books it had sold and credited customers’ accounts, notifying them after the fact. All to perfectly, it turned out that the e-books were none other than George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. The pre-packaged poetic symbolism of this story made it a hit but it also very neatly demonstrates one of the advantages that printed material has over digital formats. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos can’t sneak into your room at night at take back the hard copy of the book sold to you.

Stories don’t get much more perfect that this, really. Amazon played the role of Big Brother, sneaking into people’s homes via the glossy Kindle screens, taking control of something that people were under the mistaken impression that they owned. This is another of the interesting circumstances about digital books so far barely investigated. No matter what the hype digital books are in many important ways not at all like regular old books. One of the most interesting of these distinctions is the fact that once we’re finished reading e-books, we can’t resell or even donate them. There a re no second-hand bookstores in digital heaven.

Not only does that make me a little pre-emptively nostalgic for all the marginalia, bookplates and long forgotten inscriptions I might miss; it points also to one of the significant and primary functions that independent publishers will continue to offer readers in one shape or another. A book in the hand. Sure, you might still lose a book or two to a cunning house-guest, or an unscrupulous ex, but it’s unlikely it will be the publisher doing the stealing.

Frenemies

2009-08-13T21:27:00.000-07:00

So, I'm working on a little something about the notion of the "Frenemy" as one example of new forms of friendship...

I'm researching the origins of frenemy and what do I find of Wikipedia? That Walter Winchell (the first gossip columnist) was also the first guy to coin the term 'Frenemy.' What does this mean? Something exciting - I'll wager....
More later. xo xo

Shoot the hipster

2009-07-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, so... This is my first attempt to get to grips with a project I'm working on about indie publishing (in Melbourne, mostly). I might cover some other stuff about the project in a future post but right now I'm trying to work out just exactly *what* to say that hasn't already been said before. So, anyway, my brain works like a little bower bird collecting bits and pieces from anywhere and everywhere, so forgive me for beginning where I'm about to: with a murder.

For the longest time I've been meaning to read Richard Price's Lush Life. I've just started. I get to page 77 and make what seems like a significant discovery about our 'vic' [this is detective fiction. go with it] - he's "gonna start up some online literary magazine, raise money for a documentary, we're all gonna collaborate on a screenplay; la-la, la-la, the usual bullshit." Price paints a portrait of the guy who caught the bullet and he chooses this particular piece of info to tell us what kinda guy he is. And know what kinda guy he is? An insufferable upstart - a online literary mag type-of-guy. An insufferable hipster. Shoot him. Quick.
It struck me that this guy, Ike, is pretty much cast in the Eggers mold. And shouldn't come as any suprise to learn that the guy suspected of shooting poor old Ike is a washed up dude in his forties. Jaded. Over it. Disappointed. Jealous. This seemed to me to be a pretty neat metaphorical summation of the way indie publishing is currently examined. Indies are seen as full of energy but somehow naive. Yet to have their hopes dashed. Or else, a fascinating curiosity. An underground 'scene' that seem to matter mostly to themselves. That like the sound of their own voices. That like playing at things - diletante style. A lit mag here, a screen play there, "the usual bullshit." Of course, this is not to say that sometimes the coverage of indie press doesn't celebrate this energy and enthusiasm. But it seems like we need a little something *more*. And, let's just assume for a minute that these indie types are insufferably hip and display an unwarrented self assurance... well, so what? Doing stuff is hardly a crime, nor is it some cute little hobby. More than a century a go most writers did their work on the side. They were lawyers, doctors, what-you-will. They came home and wrote stories because they felt like it was something they wanted to do. Some were politically motivated. Others just felt they had it in them. Now, publishing/books/literature are all part of a "lifestyle" (writers, publishers, editors are all professionals; readers are still hobbyists, but most particularly are *consumers*) and so talking about people who want to work publishing stuff on the side also inevitably involves talking about a 'scene.' So, how to get beyond discussions of a scene in the indie culture without ignoring the obvious culture that does spring up around these kinds of projects?

An Embarassment of Riches...

2009-07-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

It's a smorgasbord this morning... All of it fine blogging material and ripe for some serious consideration.
First a curio:
HarperCollins Buys Series From James Frey - NYTimes.com
Frey seems to have weathered the hoax storm quite well, and might be on his way to being the next Lemony Snicket. Though, this book of his which he is reported to have 'conceptualised' (but not actually written, it seems) is about a bunch of alien teenagers who come to earth to escape something-or-other which just sounds like someone got together over Starbucks and said "Right, how do we make ourselves a fat wad of cash on movie rights". Which, of course, is precisely what happened. A sociological study of Manhattan publishing industry-types, NOW, that really would be a study worth doing...

Next up, inspired by the Frey story I linked my way over to the full NYT rundown on Herman Rosenblatt (who came after Frey but before Seltzer). Read the whole deal here. Basically, Rosenblatt wrote a short romance story that was really too good to be true, he won a competition and took his wife out to a swell restaurant. Nice. Somewhere along the line in 1996 Oprah read about the story and the Rosenblatts when on the air to celebrate the trueness of their love. Which is funny, right? "True love" - fake story. Anyway, Rosenblatt never bothered to mention that his story was, erm, a *story* and so the whole Holocaust-survivor-love-story shtick turned out to be a real column-hogger (who'da thunkit?). Now we discover Rosenblatt fabricated his memoir. Awesome. Perhaps most awesome is the comment by Kurt Anderson noted at the end of this article which I think will be the basis for the next article I write... "Mr. Anderson compated Mr. Rosenblatt to Bernard L. Madoff, the money manager who is accused of frauding investors of $50 billion." Fraud and the fall-out of our GFC? Literary frauds, the crisis of confidence...

And finally a little coda on the case of the Bitter Novelist Who Tweets story. It's this story that makes me think we're crying out for some kind of investigation into digital media and its influence on good ol' gentlemanly publishing... Snark, Eggers, the hoaxing authors, the frantic publishers without fact checkers, the Amazon critics who turn out to be authors... It all just goes to show what a sneaky (snarky) bitchy world the writer lives in. It's like gawker but with beards....

Snark + Twitter = Trouble

2009-07-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/06/30/critic_fight/index.html

A great story from Mark Elizabeth Williams about an author who took her frustrations at a bad review out on her Twitter account. Needless to say it didn't play well.
A couple of stellar highs include:
"If you want to tell xxx off, her phone number is xxx" (nice!)

and the classic apology:
"I never meant to offend anyone, and I'm truly sorry if I did" (yeah right - this is like the apology you give in class when you get caught passing notes and know you've got no power to do anything but look contrite...)

Anyways, it reminded me of the Eggers snark brouhaha a while ago, where Eggers took it upon himself to respond to his critics in a 10,000 wd email. As the author rightly notes, "that a lot of tweets!"

2009-04-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

Been a while. No doubt.

Have been working on something for publication about hoaxes and authorship, specifically JT LeRoy.

In the process have been reading all about one of the other recent hoaxes involving Peggy Seltzer (what a great name for a hoaxster, huh?). Nancy Rommelmann did an excellent interview with Laura Albert a while back and has blogged about the New York publishing industry's gullibility when it comes to memoirs which seem to be a stitched together bag of cliches (which Seltzer's surely was). Anyone who's only been as close to gangland life as an episode or two of The Wire would certainly be a little suspicious about the claims in Love and Consequences. Starting to think there's really quite a large project in here about 'Otherness' and the need for people adopt these personas of victimhood in order to get attention (for themselves, for good causes like drug rehab, protection of children or women, poverty, etc). Telling (made up) stories as first hand truth. Anthony Godby Johnson is another (much older) example. The talkshows salivate at the stories of kids being fucked and beaten and then coming through the ordeal to write a book about it. WTF? Like a book is the highest pinnacle of being "over it" or "moving on". This is weird right? What does a book symbolise about recovery? About normalness - recuperation into the sphere of "Us" not "Other." Is it something to do with literacy, privledge, authority - I'm thinking Frederick Douglass style empancipation via writing (not just telling) own story.

Ok - low battery (literal, not metaphorical).

Boys, boys, boys

2008-09-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

Just discovered here about a new book regarding men in America: Guyland.
Interesting stuff - mostly useful for any ideas about New White Males - entitlement, anger, lassitude. Definitely good material for research on my American White Dudes...
Which reminds me, I must get my hands on the new Gessen...
Enough elipsis - time for work.

From My People to Your People

2008-08-17T21:44:00.001-07:00

I saw this one day on Amazon and just couldn't resist so I threw it in the virtual shopping cart along with a bunch of other stuff (of which, more another day).

I'm curious about the nerd. Have been for a while now. I'm interested in the nerd as symbol for all kinds of outsiders. So is Benjamin Nugent. The man responsible for this book:
American Nerd: A History of My People

Aside from some interesting observations about D&D and Creative Anachronists and Polygamists (the examination of nerdishness is refreshingly broad and open to application) Nugent gets down to the details of how the term 'nerd' is being deployed in culture today. And the answer is: every one is doin' it. (Well, with the exception of anyone still young enough to be sensitive to the title). Here's one little sample of what I'm talking about. Check this excerpt from Ben's book. Read it and enjoy the photos of Williamsburg hipsters who have invested in the worlds most heinous eyewear in order to connote how truly 'un-hip' they are. I seriously love this whole "ugly is the new pretty" look - if by love you understand that I mean I both love it and find it slightly sick-making (like donuts or fairy floss or red fizzy drinks). [And on that whole 'ugly is pretty' schtick, I suppose we could look to Ugly Betty, too as an example of the new fashionability of the nerd. Certainly the glasses and the cardigans fit the nerdy bill.]

And another thing: fascinating that hyperwhite is the new black. Like it's all white irony, or something. "White" in inverted commas. It's all starting to go a bit David Foster Wallace at this point - though the notion that irony, nerdism, and whiteness all sit together somehow seems... right somehow. At least in this post-hipster era. And hey, if Weird Al is on the bandwagon appropriating Chamillionaire the white/nerdy/ironic thesis would seem to write itself...
[And hey what of the Revenge of the Nerds premise that the Nerds must join forces with the other outcasts, black/gay men in order to successfully be recognised by the jock-ruling forces of campus life?]

Somethings don't need analysis, however, and this is pure pleasure of ubernerd proportions. Check out Bill Murray and Gilda Radner on SNL as Todd and Lisa.

Flat white (middle class) habits

2008-07-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

I realised something over my morning coffee today. Sometime in the not too distant past coffee became the new wine. It’s probably not going to come as a suprise when I tell you that the coffee in question was decidedly average and I was sitting there trying to work out just exactly what the barista (I’m being charitable) had done wrong. Was the coffee overcooked? Was it the milk? Did it have something to do with the kind of beans? All these questions, are, you see prime examples of just how coffee is these days, just like wine, something to bitch about.

This probably explains the cuts backs at Starbucks . There’s nothing to be gained by drinking Starbucks coffee these days because it just doesn’t cut it in terms of cultural cache. In Australia at least its just *too* easy to make fun of the bad coffee at Starbucks: the big cups, the bad uniforms, the decor (oh! the decor!)

I’m not really saying anything new here. You know it, and I know it and we all bitch about Starbucks. And others, much to my chargrin have said it all already and with lucrative book deals behind them. So, hats off to those guys. It still doesn’t explain however just when and how coffee got to be so indelibly associated with aspirational lifestyle culture. I’ve been to Italy, people don’t swan around wanking on about an adorable little spot just by the Lido where Antonio the barista knows just how you like your morning macchiato (NB: Tourists do this). One of the refreshing things about Italian coffee is that it gets slung out to you across a bar by people who are largely indifferent to your preferences and you get one of two choices – espresso or cappuccino. The coffee is unfailingly good no matter whether you’re in Rome at a cafe or in a bar on the side of the railway platform watching Italian lottery on the TV. Even the auto-machines on the trains make excellent coffee. And not once does anyone have to comment on the incredibleness of this consistency. No one says a word about Antonio’s sheer brilliance or about his masterful handling of the machines. You order, you drink, you leave. You don’t make a song and dance about it. It’s not because Italians are exceedingly restrained – or don’t give a care about coffee. Both of these things are patently untrue.

I’m just going to put forward an educated proposition here and say that for Italians coffee is just life, rather than lifestyle. And it’s not like the Italians have one up on the rest of us here. About a decade and a half ago, America shared a very similar attitude (though their coffee was a little less palatable to the rest of us). Anyone who’s seen Twin Peaks can attest to Lynch’s love affair with drip filter coffee. Garfield used to drank great mugs of the stuff, and he was a cat! A cup of joe is as American as well, as apple pie (for which a coffee is a great accompaniment). So when did coffee change and become something you could drink to increase your cred?

Well, I’ve got a book here on my desk which might hold some answers (Hip: The History by John Leland). But as a rough thesis I’m going to suggest that Starbucks did a lot to establish the idea of coffee as something cool and worth paying more than 50 cents for. I’m also going to say that the Olsen twins have been a serious force. Those two are photographed more often with oversize Starbucks cups than Britney is with underwear–which is saying something.

Unflattering Author Photos

2008-05-25T05:10:00.000-07:00

A new, irregular column I've just decided to start. Inspired by this effort discovered while browsing Guardian Online. Contributions are welcome.

George Eliot: deeply unattractive

Celebrity Schadenfreude

2008-04-09T15:22:00.001-07:00

I'm slightly confused as to whether this post really belongs here or is better housed at my summer residence - the beach house - where I take a playboy bunny and a crate of Bombay Sapphire every year and just, y'know, cut loose...
Anyways, comments welcome on where it's best for this to live.
It's like The Atlantic.com has become my new Salon. Found a couple of great things on here in the last few days and no doubt I'll blab about the rest in due course. This, however, was simply too delish to ignore. What you'll find here is a great article about the "new papparazzi". I like to think of the new paps as akin to the "New Journalism" - And I wonder if there's a specious argument to be made advancing that idea... I'm thinking, yes. [Incidentally, and this is of no interest to anyone but me in the future reading this, I'm reading Tom Wolfe at the moment and it almost seems like the "vanity" at stake in his novel and his new journalism stylisitics (relation to reality tv?) are a neat match for the idea of "new papparazzi"]. But I digress...

So, David Samuels, our intrepid reporter, gets to grips with the world of the new paps. I won't bore you with the details, but things have changed, my friends - theres a whole new economy of selling photos of stars and the business model is one more example of accelerated, globalised, electronic communication, blahblahblah. Believe me, it's good - just read the damn article for yo'self. What grabbed me though were the minor details seems somehow more revealing in this fascinating story about life today, about - excuse the obscure pun which follows - Us.
Interesting stuff - consider for instance that most of the shooters who work for the new agencies are Brazilian; shooting pics of stars in their Prius as they cruise by the local Starbucks is - get this - their first job in America! Welcome to the land of frikken opportunity! Something about this is so surrealy exciting that it needs a novel devoted to it - seriously. The "shooters" work together in gangs (complete with gang names that also act as trading names: MBF, X17). They shoot video as well as pictures - though the video seems to be used mostly as "proof" of their work tracking and staking out stars.
Then there's the fabulousness of Us Weekly. A magazine which seems to have somehow been responsible with changing the role of photographers, celebs, mags, audiences. You name it. Here's the deal:

"The evolution of Hollywood paparazzi from a marginal nuisance to one of the
most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry
is a phenomenon that dates back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor
named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly [...]
What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. “...what was
interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and
pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like
us.”
The genius of Bonnie Fuller’s new approach was that almost any picture
of a celebrity doing something ordinary would do, with a little help from an
inventive caption writer who could come up with a snappy one-liner"

And we haven't even got to the best bit yet [stay tuned fans - Perez Hilton is coming up!] Samuels suggests that this new currency in star photos also tapped into a drive in audiences: not only did we all feel better knowing that Lindsay pumped gas - one step closer for us to our idols, right - but in feeling that bit closer we started to get a taste for "getting personal." Right now, as I type this, there's a mag I've fished out of someone's recycling bin [guilty, your honour], the cover of which features Lindsay Lohan and proclaims beneath "I'm Fat & A Failure." So, you get where this is going yes? If they pump gas just like us, then the have cellulite just like us, drink too much, screw around, get cold sores. Stands to reason. BUT, and here's the kicker, when we get to see them in this less glamourous light we like to attack them for it. Maybe part of it is celebrity schadenfreude ? (Yay! She's wealthy and can do what she pleases but she's also crazy and has fat ankles and ohmigod who let her out of the house in that!) But I'm inclined to think that it's also a big big helping of some of the less flattering aspects of human nature. Something akin to the hothouse social environment of the school yard. Perez Hilton is, probably, the best demonstration of that tendency. And, hell, it's nasty, but it's also funny. Perez is a bitch and he brings out the bitch in his readers, but it sorta seems to me that it's no different to the schtik of Southpark.
Ok, I could go on and on. The last thing that grabbed me is this concept of "giving it up" devised by the paps. "Giving it up" is their term for celebs who are willing, or at least, consenting participants in their own papping. When the see the boys coming they at least try to act natural and do something photo-worthy (like, what, keep on pumping gas?). As Samuels rightly notes this sexualised lingo suggests something nasty and special. Giving it up is all about being popular; like the cheerleaders in the teen movie. Giving it up makes the paps like you, they treat you good, they give you the publicity you need as a starlet confined to driving around LA in search of another double mocha latte. The real worry is, I suppose, the next inevitable step (one which Britney has already taken) instead of metaphorically giving it up to paps stars will give it up "for real" thus ensuring a complete union between the two sides of celebrity industry. Brit might be crazy, but there's method in her madness.

Cheque's in the Mailer

2007-11-12T18:46:00.000-08:00

Lamest blog title EVER. I know, I know. But serious guys, what gives? I have to wait two days to discover that we've lost that little crazy little nugget? Couldn't somenooe have called? I was looking for things to blog about and everything! This suggests that I ought to spend some time reading newspapers rather than exams or Facebook profiles.

One thing I noticed about Mailer in recent years is his slow transformation into Yoda - the tuft of hair, the large floppy ears, the increasingly incoherrent ramblings: "Mailer I am"; "Sorry when I beat you to a pulp, you will be"; "Mailer, famous novelist, mention did I?"

Even better than Yoda-Mailer is the image of the author captured in this short but sweet Obit from New York Magazine.
[http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/11/norman_mailer_warhols_inverse.html]

His hair looks like a craft project completed by first graders. But I digress...

Homans makes a neat point that Mailer and Warhol were two sides of the same coin - a coin destined for the slot machine of fame. Three cherries and you hit the jackpot. So the argument goes, Mailer's greatest art was his public life. Like my man DE before he turned nice he was out to make himself a star - a grumpy, irrasicble star. A legitimate star at that even though his public life was filled with enough wild and violent public outbursts to rival Britney. Once again I'm back to the same question (for which I still don't have an answer) - why authors, do you long for somekind of "stardom"? Why do you love the attention? I mean, hell, we'd all love the attention, right? We'd all like to fake it til we make it. And yet, and yet, authors seem to do it through the guise of writing. Not, note well, that they hope their writing will earn them fame, but that writing will be a act through which fame will be thrust upon them. It's like the writing is an act (Barthes talks about this), a performance that will attract attention - like dancing on a table after midnight, or stepping out of a car without underwear. This act isn't noteworthy in itself it's the balls-out bravado of the act that's worth talking about. And no one had his balls out more often (metaphorically speaking) than Mailer. Like I said, DE did it for a while til he got tired of people telling him that rountine was tired and maybe we'd all like to hear a little more about gee, I don't know, something other than how cleverly self-aware he was about being clever. Now he just keeps it to himself and his buddies.

And Homans is right, Warhol did it too, but in the opposite direction - he invited every exhibitionist to the party, plyed them with booze and waited til they ALL got up on the tables to dance. Then he stood on his own in the middle of the dancefloor and waited for people to pay attention to that creepy pale guy standing on his own. That, at least, was a suprising role reversal.

It's nice (in a kind of *wrong* way) to think that of everything a writer might be capable of having done in their career their lasting legacy is that they helped invent modern fame. Balls out fame. No underwear at the nightclub fame. Reality TV fame. It's nice to think that writers had a big impact on our culture.

RIP Norm - see you in hell.

The Great American Slumber Party

2007-11-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

There’s a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off for a few years and this is it: how is it that contemporary fiction, post modern fiction (what-you-will) is somehow associated almost exclusively with a small coterie of young(ish), white guys? Eggers, Franzen, Foster Wallace, Euginedes, Lethem, even the newer ones like Kunkel. Go back a bit further: Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerny, DeLillo, my latest flame The Pynch. Ok, now keep going (and yes we’re moving away from Post modernism here but go with me) Roth, Bellow, Updike, Mailer. In this list the closest thing we get to “not white” is Jewish. The closest thing we get to “not guys” is Euginedes channelling a hermaphrodite (female body, male identity) in Middlesex. So, what gives? I’m not complaining exactly, I’m just trying to work out where being a “dude” fits in with the whole “postmodernism thing.”

[Side note: I’m curious to know where I fit into all this. Don’t I disprove my own theory? I’m a girl. I like postmodern, clever, show-offy stuff. Aah, yes, but, dollars to donuts I don’t like it for the same reasons many dudes do. And sorry guys, but for some reason when I think about this you’re all “Dudes” – is it the pernicious influence of Lebowski? Likely, and certainly the “dudeness” of The Dude in that film is the result of some uber-white-guy cool that so many of these novelist and their male fans aspire to, surely.]

And so, while scratching my head and browsing the stacks I happened to stumble across this on Salon today. [http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/07/teen_girls/]

This, I thought, is an eye opener. Enough of the white guys/dudes. What if teenage girls were to constitute the new literary zeitgeist? Now, THAT would be SOMETHING. It sorta makes some kinda sense too given that we’re all living in a Facebook, MySpace, virtura-land where we mediate ourselves down to the last detail in order to most faithfully project the simulacra image that is our true self-i(sh)-ness. Teen girls are experts in this field. Their self obsession is no different to that practiced by the newer (or the older) white guys mentioned above – perhaps just skewed a bit differently. Where the Dudes agonise about TV and indie music and technology and charity and ethics and international travel and proving that they’re worthy, these girls are trying to find ways to capture the experience of being young and female – itself an exercise in proving worthiness. Look! At! Me! I’m an outsider, a rebel, a sexpot…
Really, there’s much difference at all when you spell it out. And now here’s a compelling thought: Norman Mailer as the self absorbed debutante at the Super Sweet 16 party. Franzen as the hormonally charged girl on the dancefloor grinding her way to various ecstatic levels of gratification. Eggers as the deadpan ironist who refuses to join the swim team. It’s the Boys Club meets the Baby Sitters’ Club…

And what’s the deal with me and my inner teenager over the last few days?

W.W.W.D? (What Would Warhol Do?)

2007-10-27T16:24:00.002-07:00

Another morning, another entry. Saw intriguing doco last night: My Kid Could Paint That.

Here's the lowdown: Marla paints abstract expressionist works that take the art world in America by storm. From humble beginnings on the walls of the local coffee shop Marla's work makes it to the major modern art galleries in New York. Stuff she's dribbled paint on is selling for $20,000. Then someone proposes the theory that her work is not her own. The word "hoax" is whispered. Great stuff, right? Thing is, Marla is a four year old girl. Ooh yeaaah. This is a dream come true for people like me. Who doesn't love a hoax, who doesn't love a scandal, who doesn't love a cute kid story gone bad? (ok, maybe that's just me).

Clearly I'm not the only one... Artist and gallery owner Anthony Brunelli is actually caught on tape telling the director that even better than the art itself is the fact that Marla and her little brother Zane look like they could be in a GAP ad. Classy! It should come as no suprise that as a character in the film Brunelli comes across as the most opportunitistic sonofabitch who plays each side against the other. At one point he claims that Marla is a genius then, upon rumours of the hoax, promptly backflips, statinging that his whole hand in this affair has been simply to hold a mirror upto self-righteous modern art. "I specialise in hyperrealist works" he says dismissively, "modern art is really just a sham." This from a guy who spends his time painting pictures which resemble photos.

Things don't get neatly resolved. We never really know if Marla is totally responsible for her own work, but I think you'd have to be foolhardy in the extreme to even contemplate that a 4 year old has any concept of the "abstract" as a counterpoint to the representational given that all kids of that age are struggling to use art to get to grips with the representational world: "I'm painting a picture of the sun, and here's me and here's Timmy and that's my new red truck". At best all you can be sure of is that Marla seems pretty happy to sit around most days pushing paint around the canvas. More than once the film captures Marla telling her father (who, it is rumoured, is the real author of her works) "you tell me what to do" or more painfully, "I didn't touch that one Daddy, that was ALL Zane". Aah, kids, bless 'em.

What she did or didn't do seems pretty immaterial, really. What's most interesting is just how much people have invested in the notion of what constitutes "Art" and "Talent". One collector of Marla's work tells the camera tearfully that her work captures the poignancy of youth - it shouldn't come as any suprise that this particular art lover just happens to be a middle aged woman who teaches art to other middle aged ladies. We see what we want to believe we can see. Art, like religion is all about faith.

The demands of some faiths do, however, boggle the mind. In one of the most amusing scenes a dedicated "Marla collector" talks about the narrative in her work - he sees a green path, a blue door, two shadowy figures at the threshold, a blurred image that resembles a sonogram of a foetus. What, he asks Marla, stonefaced, was she trying to communicate with these images? Mr Collector finishes this anecdote by telling us that Marla only replies cryptically by saying, "I don't know" ("in her sly and knowing way" according to Mr Collector). Now, I don't know about you but when someone says "I don't know" I don't see that as a really, err, cryptic concept. And when 4 year-olds say it it tends to mean: "You bore me, old person, with this constant questioning. Give me a horsey ride and some ice cream and maybe you and I can discuss CareBears, but don't bring up that shit about the blue door again or I'll cry."

So, it's funny isn't it - where/how people invest meaning (not to mention money) in art...

This film touches so delicately on so many interesting ideas without ever whacking anyone over the head with things. First and foremost, the movie isn't so much about the "did she/didn't she?" problem but about a much bigger problem: modern art. One of the subjects interviewed talks about how her mother was so offended by Jackson Pollack because his work seemed to make a mockery of the "little people" (who liked their art representational and straight up); for her mother it was like a big "fuck you" to those people who just enjoyed the simplicity of being able to easily tell if something was good or not. And that's it in a nutshell really - How do I know if it's good if I can't even work out what it's supposed to be? Here's a comment I found in the Salon review of the film which summarises the love/hate relationship the modern public has with modern art:

As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman discusses in the film, Marla's story appealed to two contradictory popular prejudices. First of these is the idea of prodigal artistic talent as a lottery prize handed out to random toddlers by God. Second is the notion that modern art (at least in its abstract or nonfigurative guises) is a pseudo-intellectual con game that has no standards and conveys no meaning, so the apparent success of a 4-year-old debunks the whole enterprise.

While I was watching this movie I could help but think to myself: "What Would Andy Make of All This?" Would Marla have been one of the new muses at the Factory? Or would Andy have privately schemed to get this little cutie-pie scrubbed out? Is she a further example of his preference for the brightly coloured "blank" canvas? Or would she have been capitalising on his market; outplaying him at his own game with her "GAP ad" cutsiness? I was heartened to discover that Warhol had some real foresight before his death: in a curious move that seems to preempt the existence of Marlas in our future Warhol was in the 80s making art tailored for children (read, displayed a kid height in the gallery). Sean, aged 8, noted that the paintings would look "sort of" good on his bedroom wall at home. Neat, I thought, given that "sort of" is about the only response you can give to Marla and her artistic authenticity.

An interesting side note: In the Salon article a line from New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm - every journalist "is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Once again, the second? the third? time in as many days that I've encountered someone advancing the theory that writers (of any stripe) are dodgy motherf$%^ers who live to make us hate them. Are writers like the new cops or what?

Reflections (Projections?) On Screens

2007-10-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

Happily for me Salon just keeps on giving.

The review is for "What Happens Next: A History of American Screen Writing" by Marc Norman.
More interesting than the book itself are the reflections offered by Laura Miller. In particular:

Writers (of any sort) invoke deep suspicions in the rest of us and ought to be treated cruelly to keep them on their toes [witness, Sunset Boulevard]. Aside from a steady diet of Tuna sandwiches and milk and an indentured space in the darkened cell known as the "Gag Room" (seriously, read the essay) screenwriters were regarded as worse than hacks...

Norman attributes some of this animosity to the essential mystery of the writing process. To the tough, practical, working-class men who founded the movie industry, it looked suspiciously like loafing. "None of them were quite sure what a screenwriter did," he writes, "or even how he did it. Certainly he or she delivered an artifact, a screenplay, that worked or didn't, but where did it come from? ... Did it take them a year to write a screenplay, or only one day and then they waited a year to hand it in? There was no telling because nobody could see the work occur."

And here's something REALLY curious for those interested in literary connections to the cinematic:

Screenwriters have it worst of all because (and Norman really only grazes this point) writing is invisible and internal and movies are all about -- really only about -- what you can see. The movies need writers, and are intermittently struck with the desire to celebrate and enrich this one or that one, but can never entirely trust them, and vice versa. The movies and writing transpire in fundamentally different worlds. Norman winds up his book with a paean to the screenwriter's privilege in getting "to see the movie, first, entire, in their minds," but the whole point of a movie is that it's not in your mind -- it's right in front of your face, 15 feet high. Otherwise, it's a radio play, maybe. Or a novel.

A couple of points here--
There's a striking similarity between the suggestion of the screenwriter having access to the "movie in your mind" first and yesterday's recounting of JK Rowling as having a personal TV set in her head on which she could invent and rerun as many charming stories about Ron's socks or Hedwig's lineage. So, what gives? Writers aren't writing books in their minds but movies or tv shows. That's a pretty fascinating development in the conceptualisation of the creative work of the mind.

And another thing... This article makes the claim that screenwriters are in a bad way because they work with words but the medium for which they are creating "product"cares only about the visual. The suggestion being, what exactly? That telling and seeing are incompatible? That telling what you see is a fundamentally different thing from seeing what you see. Ok, fine. Then what?
What about this question of TRUST. Is this guy/gal doing the work I want them to? Or more importantly - are they even capable of knowing how to tell a story in images by using words? Don't trust a writer (a scriptwriter/ a cinematic writer) to capture something which can only be experienced firsthand. So then, are all these writers inherently suspicious because they take something and make something else from it? The answer is probably, probably. Certainly I'm feeling more suspicious than normal but I suspect that has rather more to do with the narrative lines of James Ellroy. And so, I offer this all too perfect moment at the closing of Miller's article:

from film critic David Thomson:

"a writer is like a divorce lawyer or a private eye: when you want them you have to have them; but later you despise them."

I love the obsessive quality in this characterisation...
And, we ask for them to hurt us. Ouch! That's some cold hard truth.

Big Mouth Strikes Again

2007-10-24T15:40:00.000-07:00

Found this on Salon today:

"What happens when authors like JK Rowling can't stop telling their own stories?"
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/10/23/dumbledore/

What's interesting here isn't just that JK Rowling can't seem to keep quiet but that she's meddling in our minds in the most Eggersian way. When Barthes proposed the author was dead I don't think he had any idea that s/he might resurface, but just between you and I, I always had my doubts. When authors take control yes it's annoying but maybe it also tells us something else, maybe it tells us that these people can't stop furnishing their inner world - like obsessive collectors.

The article also makes reference to the "little TV screen" playing inside Rowling's head and how she really ought to keep such daytime dramas to herself. Using the TV screen is an interesting idea - like we're always re-running stuff on there all the time but it's inherrently private. Public stories AREN'T on TV screens they're on cinema screens, in books, controlled by people other than us. But TV? We're in charge of that. Writers have pens and paper, film makers have celluloid - but absolutely everyone, it would seem, has that little tv screen in their head on which they run through their favourite story lines and invent new ones.

PS. Hey, Dumbledore is gay!

Cloaks, Pashminas and Berets... Oh My!

2007-08-15T22:51:00.000-07:00

So, I have the technology. And we all know what that means: photos – secret photos at that. Yes, straight from the fields of Byron Bay Writers Festival I bring you Scenes From a Festival (Unauthorised Edition). This was partly an excuse to test out the resolution of the camera on my new phone and a good opportunity to get some shots of the usual festival goer. All this time I’ve been thinking about the usual stereotypes at writers fests and it seems that I’m not alone. Discovered this opinion piece by Kate Holden at the Age, encouraging Melbourne Festival goers to get into the inherent drama of the festival. Read the whole thing if you’re keen, but here are my edited highlights (and bitchy rantings in response):

"At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival I noticed a striking preponderance
of long velvet cloaks, smart fedora hats, thrillingly swathed scarves. It seemed
some wanted to assert just how artistic they were, even if they were only in the
audience. Melbourne can top that."

Gee Melbourne, you’re so big and strong and virile. Holden, you don’t need to lay it on so thick, we get it: Melbourne: good. Sydney: loner tryhards in cloaks and hats (what is this, a Dungeons and Dragons convention?). Elsewhere in the article she notes that Melbournians are notoriously stuffy audiences; Sydney-siders by contrast are the easy whores of audiences, giving it up at the drop of a hat (a fedora, no doubt). The strange thing here is that this is a complete reverse of the normal stereotypes we often read about. Sydney is meant to be all eye-rolling, too cool for school when it comes to the work of being an audience. Melbourne, by contrast, is genuinely engaged, transported and in ectasy when presented with the chance to engage with pure art. Holden, I think it's safe to say, is dreaming. Anyway. Let’s move on. Ah yes, the drama, the action, the pashminas.

"The atmosphere at a festival venue is giddy: audience members surreptitiously
eyeball guests; the guests fugitively eyeball each other (to avoid confessing
that they've not actually read each other's books); normally dignified people
gabble ridiculously at their heroes; ticketsellers are getting hysterical,
fights are breaking out in the queues, the cafe is selling 20,000 lattes a day,
and from time to time an auditorium'sdoors open to emit a puff of gesticulating
punters to swell the great mass of people. It's madness.”

Hmm. Giddy? Things don’t look too giddy here:

Well, maybe… if one consumed all 20,000 of those aforementioned lattes then things would really get giddy. The closest things got to giddy in Byron was when I looked up quickly to take this atmospheric shot:

As for eyeballing… there is certainly quite a bit of eyeballing going on though whether that has much to do with literature is questionable. Largely, that’s a fact of human nature. Get a group of people who don’t know each other, stick them in a room and then watch what happens – they start to check each other out. Hell, isn’t that the pitch for Big Brother? One of the panelists I spoke to at the festival mentioned to me that the nice part of a festival like Byron is that the emphasis on local talent meant that the uncomfortable eyeballing between guests was kept to a minimum. Apparently, there’s a pretty heavy caste system at the usual metropolitan fest. The international guests are treated like celebrity royalty which leads to the smaller fish starting to stratify amongst themselves: the novelists look down on the thriller writers, the journalists sniff at the children’s writers, the poets… well, what poets? Mind you, if sneaking pics on a camera phone can be considered the digital equivalent of eyeballing, then I think there’s definitely something going on in this picture:

As far as I’m concerned these two are the archetypal lit fest audience members. And you might be able to guess from the shot I’ve captured that they did their fair share of talking all the way through the session we shared. And just in case you were worried that there wasn’t a pashmina in sight:

When I get to Melbourne Writer’s Fest in a few weeks I’m gonna go nuts documenting festival berets. Might even get one for myself…

Judging A Book By Beck's Cover

2007-08-07T23:51:00.000-07:00

So this interesting.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2139740,00.html
I’ve been wondering about books and music for a while now. I have this hunch that the sure fire way to “sex up” books, especially for the MySpace generation, is to link them with music. Eggers has been doing it for a while now, and it seems to hit the right note (ha ha). Now Penguin, who are never one to miss a trick have come up with this idea. This notion of “cover versions” (yep, book covers designed by musicians) is just the kind of marketing pun that drives me to distraction. What’s brilliant about this is how it brings together so many levels of cultural capital (or to put it a less fancy way, this new pitch from Penguin brings the traditional game of “my record collection beats your record collection” together with the less-well-known battle of indie cred known as “my bookshelf beats your bookshelf”. A game, incidentally, that until recently was limited only to attendees of literary festivals, although Facebook offers a rather neat plug-in now which means you can tell everyone what you’re reading, and what your friends are reading. Which is pretty presumptuous when you come to think of it. Half the time I don’t even want to know who your friends are, let alone what the hell they’re reading! Sheesh. (Mind you, I'm dirty on Facebook right now since I discovered a virtual highschool reunion taking place amongst these so-called "friends" of mine). Nothing says “legitimacy” like literature. And nothing says indie cred like name dropping Beck, or that dude from Razorlight who’s dating Kiki Dunst. It’s like a game of celebrity Six Degrees of Separation for the literarily minded. I’m eager to know now how well these editions are going to sell. Can authors name drop bands and gain cred – undoubtedly. Now musicians can name drop books and look cultured. Everyone wins! Neal Pollack wrote an entertaining essay on this idea a while back. I should dig it up. Stay (i)tuned.

Fan Fiction?

2007-08-05T23:50:00.001-07:00

I laughed... Then I wondered whether these people are at writers festivals too? Maybe at TINA
Am wondering if I'll make there this year. Certainly an antidote to the berets and pashminas on exhibition at the metropolitan writers fests. Speaking of which. I'll upload those pics of the Byron Writers Fest just as soon as I can get the software downloaded to get them from my phone to the web. *Sigh* Maybe I should start writing fan fiction?

“I’m English, we read novels”

2007-07-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

Apparently, this is what Hugh Grant replied when, in the fallout from the Divine Brown affair, he was asked by talk-show host Jay Leno if he planned on seeking therapeutic help for his “problem.”

It’s a fun joke. It ticks all the boxes: stupid Americans, genteel Brits, the whiff of self satisfied one-up-manship which is crucial to a good punchline. And really, when we get to it, isn’t self-important posturing what good literature is all about?

I heard the Hugh Grant anecdote while sitting in the audiences at the first day of the Byron Bay Writers Festival [an editorial aside at this point: is it a Writers’ Festival (a festival belonging to writers) or a Writers Festival (a festival that can be described adjectivally as possessing the quality known as “writers”)]. The first panel of the day was entitled Books I’ve Loved, Books I’ve Loathed [come on down: Jennifer Byrne, Robert Drewe, Susan Wyndham (SMH Lit Ed) and Carrie Tiffany (whose name sounds perfectly improbable)] but, in an effort at full disclosure and critical accuracy it would appear that the “Loathed” part was really just thrown in to sex things up a bit. In a nutshell, books “loved” include: the Milly-Molly-Mandy and Silver Brumby series, anything by Dostoyevsky (anyone Russian, infact), Madame Bovery, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Remains of the Day, Cloud Atlas, Gould’s Book of Fish. (My ears pricked up slightly to hear Wyndham name drop A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Corrections).

I anticipated that the tent would be a haven for much appreciative “oohing” and “mmming” as the panel luxuriated in their “passion for books.” I wasn’t disappointed. There’s really no better place to start for a researcher looking for material on what attracts audiences to Writers Fests. Interesting, isn’t it? This passion is so much more approvingly regarded than, say, the passions Hugh Grant was indulging roadside in downtown L.A. Which is funny, since the price for a blow job is often less than a new release hardback, and (depending what you’re reading) a satisfying blow job might at least serve as a respite from wanking. But I digress… Ah, yes, the passion for books. So self-approving. Such smug satisfaction.

A passion for television. A passion for Nascars. Neither has quite the same ring to it. The aura is definitely not 24 carat. The question is, why not? I suspect it has an awful lot to do with the idea that Hugh Grant hinted at – novel are all about therapy and self-correction.

Reading books is good for us. Those who do it regularly have the smug satisfaction of being able to report to others our unashamed “passion for books.” Think of it as therapy: “My name is Jo and I’m a book-a-holic.” Or a different kind of self improvement group exercise: aerobics classes for the mind. Surely it’s this kind of group therapy that is a big factor in the appeal of book clubs. Who likes them, really? Don’t we drop out of uni to avoid having to read books to a deadline, to discuss them solemnly, to disclose some kind of lesson we can draw from our reading to the group. Imagine Oprah or Jennifer Byrne as the spritely young, lycra-clad instructor who inspiringly castigates us: “C’mon, 40 more pages, feel the burn!”

Maybe the appeal is that reading is one of the last things you can do while still feeling supremely virtuous. Reading is the intellectual equivalent of the fat-free French fry. No wonder so many people around me are nodding and making appreciative sounds while we listen to the panel discuss their socially acceptable addiction. “Mmm, Dostoyevsky…”

Reader's Digress - "You May Already Be A Winner!"

2007-07-18T01:22:00.000-07:00

As a child it always seemed to me that the hallmark of adulthood was the receipt of mail. Occassionally, my parents would allow me to open letters that were otherwise addressed to "The Occupant". One letter which arrived with suprising regularity was from the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes. Often these letters were large and sported a gleaming gold seal, almost always the envelopes bore the tempting phrase: "You May Already Be A Winner!" I never submitted the forms required by the Reader's Digest folks that would have put my family in the running for the untold millions that we were already so close to winning. I just liked the notion that there was a thick envelope full of promise (and stickers) that I got to open.

So what's the big idea? I guess you might suppose from that little anecdote that I like packaging and I like the promise and potential that those Reader's Digest envelopes implied. I like books for the same reason. Half the pleasure of a good book is the contemplation of it sitting there on your shelf (or the floor, or on top of the TV) unopened. This blog is not, for what it's worth, meant to be a self-conscious exercise in litblogging (gawd knows we don't need anymore) nor is it a catalogue of one woman's attempt to "read her way past menopause." (Ok, ok, I don't think such a blog or book exists, but give it time people, give it time). In short, the aim is to just jot down ideas about books or things related to literary culture. At times I anticipate it may be dismally light on actual content about actual books but that in itself might be more than half the point. I like books, and I like packaging and envelopes and big shiny stickers shaped like stars and hey, no one ever said the Arts were an exact science. Every so often I just like to imagine that I'm an adult, with my own mail, addressed to me. And now, I have a blog. Go figure. You May Already Be A Winner.