Cloaks, Pashminas and Berets... Oh My!

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

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?

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”

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!"

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.