Christopher Hitchens’s piece on Gore Vidal in the February issue of Vanity Fair, “Vidal Loco”, is a fair if sad account of the decline into irrelevance of a once-influential and provocative American voice (Vidal was occasionally referred to as a contemporary Oscar Wilde). Before recounting the ways in which Vidal has become an unreliable and possibly slightly unhinged public intellectual, Hitchens pays Vidal sufficient respect to first relate some choice quotes from his subject that Hitchens admits were “things one wished one had said oneself”:

Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: “These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.”

Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.”

Of the late Teddy Kennedy, who was then in his low period of red-faced, engorged, and abandoned boyo-hood, that he exhibited “all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal.”

I discovered this piece thanks to Stephen Romei over at the Pair of Ragged Claws blog, who said no matter what one thought of Vidal, you had to love his line about Joyce Carol Oates. Intrigued, I clicked across (up? down? over?) to find out what Vidal had said about the woman whose writing output is so prodigous I am filled not with envy but concern. (Okay, a little envy.) Hitchens writes:

Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”?

Joyce Carol Oates by Opale/Retna Ltd

Vidal’s quote perfectly captures the enervating effect of Oates’s relentless wordsmithing. I am simply at a loss to understand how anyone could produce so many novels (more than 50) and short-story collections (30). Her latest 165-page novel took her precisely two months to write. But I am in awe of Oates for another reason, too: at the age of 71, she has fallen in love and married for the second time, following the death of her husband of 35 years less than two years ago. I’ve been widowed now for about five years and haven’t dated anyone I would come close to marrying! Now that’s the book of hers I’d like to read. Instead, she has whipped up a 400-page memoir of her grief, and has a collection of short stories dealing with loss coming out later in the year. The Wall Street Journal recently ran this interesting profile of Oates.

Any writer aspiring to publication should read this sobering but, in my view, accurate analysis in The Guardian of ‘The Death of the Slush Pile’. The slush pile – that generic term for the stream of unsolicited submissions that arrive at publishing houses daily – has taken on something of a nostalgic glow in recent years, with stories of slush-pile discoveries of luminaries such as Phillip Roth. But as a refugee from book publishing, I can attest that the slush pile was the bane of editors’ lives before the internet changed … well, very little, when it comes to getting published. But that’s for another post.

I worked at a major Australian trade publisher for three years in the mid-1990s. Hardly the dark ages, I know, but still, it was a previous century. By that time, literary agents had already become influential, but their power and the publishers’ reliance on their gatekeeping role had not assumed the default status it enjoys today. Even then, we all assumed that the vast majority of unsolicited submissions – meaning those manuscripts which had not already been vetted by an agent and deemed worthy of representing before a publisher – were likely to contain few hidden gems. So the revolving door of receptionists were trained to respond to telephone inquiries from aspiring authors who wanted to submit manuscripts, by first suggesting they find an agent; and if they still wanted to submit their manuscript, to send it in marked to the attention of Margaret Rogers. Anything that arrived for Margaret Rogers was destined straight for the slush pile – because Margaret did not exist. Her initials were simply code for Manuscript Rejection. Editors took a rushed look through the slush pile when they had a spare couple of hours – maybe once every three months, in other words.

The slush pile has never been the best way to getting published. My advice to anyone working on a manuscript is to get out from behind your desk once in a while and attend events, courses, workshops and other networking activities where you will eventually bump into someone who either works in the publishing industry, has been published already, or who used to work for such-and-such a publisher but now does something else. In all of those cases, these people will have friends or acquaintances at other publishing houses, and they will be willing to give you some advice or, if you’re really lucky, to suggest the name of someone you should contact. Your job is to listen to the advice they give you. Listen to it very carefully. These people will be speaking the truth but they will also speak a little bit in code, because they don’t want to crush your hopes with the brutal statistics of the slush pile and agents and publishing meetings that focus on everything but narrative style and structure.

The fact I used to work in publishing certainly helped me to get published – but only because I had an insider’s knowledge of how the process of publication works. As a former editor, I knew my manuscript was in sufficiently polished shape to submit it for consideration because I had read so many unsolicited and agent-submitted manuscripts, and I had helped authors to develop their own manuscripts – those that had been accepted by a publisher – through to publication. I therefore also acknowledged that there would probably be further work required on my manuscript, because publishers do have valuable knowledge and insight into making a book the best version of itself it can be.

Editors and publishers are always horrified by the arms-length pile of unread manuscripts from friends of friends, from former colleagues and so on. It’s impossible for them to avoid manuscripts from people they know, however distantly. And whether they know or know of a manuscript’s author, reading manuscripts is a time-consuming and fraught endeavour. Invariably the reading experience is split into parallel thought lines: Does this speak to me, do I want to keep reading it? and Could I sell this? The straight-out no’s are easy to call after years of assessing manuscripts. A yes/no split is not uncommon, and will result in an eventual rejection of the manuscript, causing distress to editor and author alike. Occasionally, very occasionally it’s a yes. Which is what we’re all aiming for. I like this quote from Samuel Beckett:

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Here’s a thoughtful piece from retired Washington Post literary editor Bob Thompson.  In “Writing about Writers” he recounts having to interview Joan Didion about her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking – three days after her daughter Quintana’s memorial service. “What was I supposed to do?” he writes. “Ask her how she felt?” He also remembers trying to talk to Phillip Roth about his writing, on the author’s strict condition that the interviewer not ask him any questions about his personal life – when his is a life mined for fiction more overtly than most writers.

The writers festival circuit in Australia runs from late May through mid-September. This year I’m working towards participating in a couple of them by chairing sessions, moderating panel discussions and so forth. Thompson’s exhortation to ask writers about writing – about their experience of writing this particular book (the one they’re spruiking) and how it differed from what they had written before - seems like a reliable rule of thumb to follow, whatever the venue. Without this ‘Didion Rule’, as he calls it, we’re in danger of falling back on the tired tropes of book-related story-telling: writer overcomes struggle to enjoy success with latest book, novelty in book marketing, or the size of a writer’s advance.

On that last one, I’m always irritated when I come across news items about writers’ advances. They usually present figures which seem to be large, outside of any context of the complex business environment  in which those advances are made. Following this logic, such items should appear in the business section of newspapers.  There’s hardly ever an explanation of how advances work, or often don’t work, and the pluses/minuses for authors of accepting such advances. What rights has the author signed away, knowingly or not, for example, in return for an up-front sum? Then there’s the underlying assumption of intrinsic worth attached to a “large” advance for a book, when in the music industry the opposite seems to be the case. How many times do you read of some singer-songwriter who produces a record for $1,000 or thereabouts in their cousin’s garage, and it becomes – in another reporting trope – “an overnight sensation”? For me the story of the path to publication is always the most interesting, as there seem to be as many variations as there are books in the world.

Many people I know have had something of a struggle in 2009. Here are some wonderful new year wishes from the remarkable writer Neil Gaiman that are too good not to share:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope it’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.

Neil Gaiman’s website

Just came across this ode to rewriting from A L Kennedy of The Guardian. She wishes, as I do, that there were a more appetising word for what she describes as the “glorious” work involved in rewriting your prose.

No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better – they can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances. This gives you – slowly – an understanding of how you use words on the page to say what you need to. And by making a mental commitment to believe that you are not as good as you could be, you allow yourself to move forward, to mature as writer.

I love what she says here. My experience is that rewriting is much more enjoyable – though incredibly difficult at times – than the process of piecing together the first-draft scenes, chapters, sections, what-have-you. Perhaps that’s because I’m trying to figure out what I want to say; I don’t have a perfectly formed vision in my head before I set pen to paper and fingers to keyboard. Or perhaps it’s because, coming from an editorial background, my natural preference is to work with ”the whole” because I can see “the holes”. It’s probably a combination of the two. Once you’ve got something to work with, then you can start treating it like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, moving things around, removing and adding material, as it takes on – hopefully – its own shape and life.

There is such enormous pleasure to be had in knowing that you’ve produced your very best work. As Kennedy says,

Don’t mistake me: I’m not saying that my own attempts at better than best are the best, or everyone’s cup of tea, or anything other than a failure to live up to my hopes. But it seems only fair to do what we can for the reader.

Doing what we can: that’s what I’m hoping for in a holiday season of writing, as I have miles to go before I have the pleasure of rewriting. May all writers have a peaceful and productive holiday period.

This post was prompted by a piece by James Bradley over at City of Tongues in which he considers why he enjoys reading blogs by women more than those by men. His post alerted me to Rachel Cusk’s piece in the Guardian last weekend, “Shakespeare’s daughters”, on the nature of “women’s writing”.

While it’s now 50 years since Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and 80 years since Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Cusk says the challenges and compromises of women’s lives – “babies, domesticity, mediocrity” – remain the same as ever, and those challenges are also those of women writers. And so the project, for Cusk, is for women writers to own the differences that distinguish their lives, to express rather than deny a distinction between the lives of women and men: “Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man,’ she concludes.

I like this idea, even though I suspect I am one of the women writers Cusk refers to in her piece who ‘might … nurture a certain hostility towards the concept of women’s writing’. I am sufficiently well educated to know that I am the beneficiary of advances hard-won by preceding generations of feminists, and proudly call myself a feminist despite the contested cul-de-sac in which that term now resides. I also call myself a writer (among other things), although I tend not to think of myself as a ‘woman writer’, and certainly not when I’m writing. It’s not hostility but ambivalence that I feel about the concept of “women’s writing”. If I am to give voice to the great and complex silences of women’s lives, then I do so by writing about what interests me, which by definition will be filtered through a woman’s consciousness. I can’t claim to be interested in the same things as “woman” en masse, and my media consumption tends to be quite different from what the majority of women seem to want to read or watch. I want to write about things I haven’t read about – or things that I have read about, but disagree with what’s been written (whether by a male or female writer). But I don’t feel that chick lit or self-help or memoir (including my own) could be called attempts as assimilation with “man”, as Cusk suggests, unless you decide that the entire book publishing industry is designed for men. It cannot be so, because the overwhelming majority of fiction readers – as evinced by attendance at writers’ festivals – are women.

At the moment I’m working on a story of two women musicians from different historical periods. I am trying to position each character within the social and economic forces which shape their respective lives, because as a woman I am intensely conscious of the ways in which those forces – including class, financial security, sexuality, professional independence – often work against women. This is not to say that my characters are passively blown about by circumstance; rather that they make life choices from the options available to them, which, depending on the year and country they were respectively born in, are plentiful (though not limitless) or very small indeed. So I am trying to write about love, about work, about motherhood, about artists, from the point of view of a woman. I think it will be for readers to decide whether or not what I write could have been written by a man.

Just as girls grow up learning to “read like a man” – and by so doing, learning to normalise the male point of view that dominates the majority of fiction narratives – perhaps there is a challenge for male readers to consciously choose to read more writing by women. Surely there is incremental value for men to read about female desire (whatever the object) from the woman’s point of view, unfiltered by the male gaze that women have come to view (I use the word deliberately) as normal.

Cusk laments the loss of “public unity among women”, arguing that these days, marriage and motherhood are seen as “choices, about which there is a limited entitlement to complain,” leading to a loss of “political caste” even as we have gained individual freedom. “Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing,” she says. I find this a rather twee notion, though Cusk might suggest I’m in denial and have simply dissociated myself from my gender in my desperate attempt to “assimilate … with man”. I can’t understand how “chick-lit” or self-help books (mostly written by women) or memoir (including my own) could be considered attempts at such alleged assimilation. Certainly the novel seems broad and deep enough to accommodate profound variety of form and content – what else do Zadie Smith and Alice Munro have in common as writers other than their gender? Here I take issue with Cusk’s idea of the necessity of women writing the “book of repetition” – “fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life” – and her suggestion that these subjects are not tolerated in contemporary fiction. In fiction I’m always kept engaged by the writing, more than by than the subject – the most mundane scenario can be made utterly compelling by the sheer skill of the writer. And yet I would be loathe to think I had to conform, simply because of my gender, to writing about subjects which do not interest me.

Like any form of public address, the most powerful points are often made through storytelling and anecdotes, by using the indirect lighting of a well-chosen narrative – scenario, character, plot, style, tone, wit – to better illuminate the darker recesses of actual experience that are common to most women at one moment or another in their lives. Surely a sense of “public unity among women” will be the gradual and cumulative result of many women writing and publishing stories about all aspects of their lives, over a number of generations.

There I will stop. There are presents to buy, cards to write, bills to pay. There are so many more topics relating to women and blogging and the economics of writing – perhaps the stuff of future posts – but I will now push this one into cyberspace, thank you for reading, and invite your comments.

I’ve recently come across this fascinating interview with Umberto Eco on the occasion of a new exhibition he has curated at the Louvre in Paris. The exhibition is about the nature of lists, poets who list things in their work, and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. As a list-maker from wayback, to hear Eco state that “the list is the origin of culture” was music to my ears.

I don’t know that the lists that mushroom around me bear much relationship to the sort Eco would write or invent, but I’ve put his new book, The Vertigo of Lists, on one of them: my ‘must-read’ list.

A few highlights from the interview:

The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.

We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous – not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.

In the latest issue of The Monthly, Kirsten Tranter writes about the novels of Stieg Larsson, whose Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been recommended regularly to me by friends and family members with reliable taste. I clearly have commitment issues when it comes to books in series - the last trilogy I read was The Lord of the Rings at the age of 11, I’ve only read the eponymous first (though marvellous) novel of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, and I am still to open a Harry Potter – but Tranter’s piece, “Stockholm Syndrome”, was the final nudge I needed to embark on the late writer’s trilogy of crime fiction.

I stopped reading crime fiction a long time ago, but I’m not sure why. Goodness knows I’m a sucker for a page-turning story. Maybe I just wanted to keep my body count to a minimum in the fiction I chose to read. But while I no longer take my fill of mutilated and murdered women’s bodies on the page, there are endless numbers of them on television and film for me to “consume” at my leisure, if not pleasure. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed at the number of gruesome crime stories that begin with an act of violence against a woman. It’s almost as if these stories cannot get a toehold on the viewer’s (reader’s?) imagination unless a dead female body arrests their attention. What does that say about our culture?

Tranter writes that misogyny is Larsson’s “most cherished theme”, and his heroine Lisbeth Salander its “avenging angel”. Very late in the piece Tranter draws attention to this conundrum of crime fiction:

Salander’s admirable strength as an avenger is predicated on her own horrific victimisation; she has to be raped and abused before the story of her revenge can be set in motion. This is the conundrum Larsson has confronted: how might it be possible to condemn men’s hatred of women without telling stories that illustrate it?

It’s a very good question, and this is why I need to read the books in order to find out whether I agree Larsson has confronted or even attempted to resolve the dilemma. Surely it is possible to write engaging novels about women characters whose fictional journeys are not predicated upon some act of violence or abuse?

I like to think Tranter is right; that “the success of Larsson’s novels proves the role that imaginative literature … has to play in generating critical debate about the most serious social and political issues.”

My first short story has just been published in the third issue of extempore, a journal of writing, music, art, and improvisation published by Melbourne-based music-lover and writer Miriam Zolin. Miriam developed the idea for the journal from her passions for writing and music, and the recognition that there was no journal devoted to the interdependence between these art forms. The November 2009 issue was launched at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz over the weekend, by none other than pianist Mike Nock, one of my favourite musicians and an all-round marvellous human being.

I wrote the story, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, as a way of getting into the head of one of the characters I am developing for my current project. In the story young Tilda is finishing high school and has decided to audition for the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Jazz Course. During the course of waiting, and waiting, outside the audition room, the reader learns many things about her musicianship and what has led her to this moment.

If you see extempore around the independent bookstores or in your library, take a look. You will find a diverse selection of poems, interviews, essays and photographs all responding in some way to the passion for music (and improvisation in particular). I was a little surprised to see mine is the only fiction published in this issue. Miriam’s always on the lookout for interesting submissions, so don’t be shy.

For anyone who has felt a little bruised by our world’s insistence on specialisation, here’s a powerful antidote in the current issue of More Intelligent Life (a sibling of The Economist), celebrating those of us who like to spread ourselves around, intellectually speaking. Despite its doomsday title (“The Last Days of the Polymath”), the article extolls the benefits to cultural history of those thinkers who are bored by a career-long focus on one field. Playwright/scientist/Paul Klee collector Carl Djerassi puts it this way:

I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity. To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important.

I’ve often felt like a freak because of my diverse interests, but I’m convinced it keeps my brain engaged with my environment (social, political, cultural) and helps me connect otherwise disparate or discrete ideas. Writing and editing, philanthropy projects, jazz music reviewer/aficionado, competitive tennis player, pianist; these hardly strike me as an especially eclectic, impressive or unusual collection of interests. At best, I’m told I’m a Renaissance woman; at worst, I continually fail to answer the question that’s most often posed to me: “So what is it that you do?” In Djerassi’s scheme I would be considered more of a dabbler, I guess, but even in my professional life I am always wearing at least two hats - literary and philanthropic – and that causes enough confusion as it is.

The article ends with Isaiah Berlin’s famous quote about the thinkers of the world, which he divided into foxes and hedgehogs:

Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.

The article in More Intelligent Life led me to Project Polymath, which is a not-for-profit aiming to train a new generation of Renaissance thinkers. I would love to hear from foxes and hedgehogs alike.

Here are the winners in The Washington Post’s annual neologism contest. I am having trouble choosing a favourite from this witty bunch:

1. Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs. 
2. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained. 
3. Abdicate (v.) to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. 
4. Esplanade (v.) to attempt an explanation while drunk. 
5. Willy-nilly (adj.) impotent. 
6. Negligent (adj.) describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightgown. 
7. Lymph (v.) to walk with a lisp. 
8. Gargoyle (n.) olive-flavored mouthwash. 
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller. 
10. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline. 
11. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam. 
12. Rectitude (n.) the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists. 
13. Pokemon (n) a Rastafarian proctologist. 
14. Oyster (n.) a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms. 
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.) (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there. 
16. Circumvent (n.) an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

In another contest, the newspaper asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. The winners are:

1. Bozone (n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. 
2. Cashtration (n.) The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
3. Giraffiti (n) Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
4. Sarchasm* (n) The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
5. Inoculatte (v) To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
6. Hipatitis (n) Terminal coolness.
7. Osteopornosis (n) A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
8. Karmageddon (n) It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
9. Decafalon (n.) The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
10. Glibido (v) All talk and no action.
11. Dopeler effect (n) The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
12. Arachnoleptic fit (n.) The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
13. Beelzebug (n.) Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
14. Caterpallor (n.) The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.

*To broaden this beyond sarcastic wit, I suggest ironiclastic/ironiclasm would work well.

Here’s a beautiful Pablo Neruda poem I heard for the first time this weekend at a friend’s literary gathering in Sydney. It’s an untitled work from the volume Absence and Presence, translated by Alastair Reid and featuring photographs by Luis Poirot, which was published by Norton in 1990.

I love the audacity of this poem, its challenge for those who live with loss to cast off melancholy, and its suggestion that the suffering of the living is like a second death for the one who is absent. A timely reminder for all of us, certainly for me. For those readers of my book who have written to me recently, perhaps this poem will help. I thank you for sharing your thoughts and wish you well.

If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south lift your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.
Don’t call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air.
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

The promotion for the paperback of The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement is underway now that I’m back in Sydney and calibrated to local time. I am doing some radio interviews tomorrow, with ABC Central Coast and ABC Alice Springs, the latter for whom I’m judging the finals of a competition in which listeners were encouraged to write the first paragraph of their own memoir! Next week I’m in Hunter Valley wine country with six events in two days, which are listed on my website here. I hope to catch up with old friends and sample some local produce while I’m there.

My book has just been reprinted in paperback, less than one month after arriving in bookstores. It’s difficult to get much attention for the paperback release of a previously released book, so I’m grateful for the attention generated by the Books Alive campaign. I am thrilled with the support of Australian booksellers and of course my publisher, University of Queensland Press, working with the sales team at Penguin, which distributes UQP titles. In the vexed question of parallel importation currently raging in Australia, I do wonder whether my book would have ever been published in the first place, let alone granted a new lease of life in a second edition.

Illustration by Richard Tuschman

The New York Times ran an interesting article yesterday about the current prevalence of dreams about homes. The article, “The House of Your Dreams”, claimed that “Americans aren’t just living the real estate collapse. They’re dreaming it,” quoting psychologists who have seen a spike in patients recounting stressful dreams relating to the idea of home – often homelessness itself, which the article describes as “one of the most primal feelings on the emotional spectrum”.

It has long bothered me that I tend not to remember my dreams. In the first few years after my husband John passed away in late 2004, I was disappointed that there were so few occasions on which I remembered dreaming about him, or about the two of us together. Neither did I dream of the house we lived in, either when I lived in it alone, renovating it like a woman possessed, or later, when I had moved to New York and was writing a book  about John and the house and my various sorts of renovation after losing him to cancer. In hindsight, I wonder if there were so few dreams because most of my waking moments were full of thoughts about him. Writing the book took so much out of me that perhaps my unconscious decided to give me a break while I slept.

Recently I was encouraged to begin keeping a dream journal, and while it is proving a difficult habit to form, I have been struck by the number of times that homes of various kinds appear in my dreaming life. So far, I have not dreamed of the house I so thoroughly chronicled in my book, but I have been a visitor or temporary resident of many different types of houses – warm, cosy places; cavernous rooms with huge windows looking on to lush gardens; hard-edged concrete-and-steel apartments; and even a home with an indoor pool that took up the entirety of the top floor. What it all means I haven’t a clue, but if this article is anything to go by, dreams of home have “an especially powerful place in the psyche … symbolizing safety, comfort, identity and – to the Freudians – mother.” If that’s the case, perhaps my dreams of many homes reflect my rather nomadic existence in recent times.

Is anyone else dreaming a lot about home at the moment?

My memoir, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, is now available in paperback (in Australia). It has been included in the 2009 Books Alive! campaign, which means the cover features a sticker declaring it to be “One of the 50 Books You Can’t Put Down”, and I get to do some more publicity during the month-long campaign in September. I am grateful to the nameless book-loving committees around the country who selected my book for inclusion in the campaign, which annually encourages people into bookshops and offers them a guide to “good books” across a range of tastes and ages – fiction, children’s, sports, “true stories”, and so on.

 Those of you familiar with the hardback edition might be surprised at the dramatically different cover treatment for the paperback (above). It’s a fascinating lesson in book publishing and marketing. The Books Alive campaign is unashamedly mass market in its appeal, and this cover is designed specifically to appeal to women readers of fiction and memoir. I’m delighted because it means that some readers will buy my book who might never have given the hardback a second glance. This cover, in the word of a savvy friend, tells them it’s “safe” to read my book, with its soothing colour palette and its superimposed butterflies. That may or not be the case – that’s up to each reader to decide – but if a new approach helps build a readership for a first-time author, I’m all for it. I would be curious to know what readers think about this cover.

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut lists these rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root* for. (This ugly Americanism means “to barrack for”, but I am not about to rewrite Vonnegut’s sentence. And it is no less ugly than its non-American usage, I guess.)
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut also points out that Flannery O’Connor, like most great writers, broke all these rules except the first. As someone new to writing fiction, I would say that if you can adhere to Rule #1, then you don’t need to worry about the rest of the rules, although I heartily endorse #3, #4, and #5. I’m trying to be more of a Sadist – inventing terrible things to happen to my characters (as per #6) - although too much of that turns prose into the mush of melodrama.

I’ve been challenged and occasionally thrilled these past months by my weekly classes at The Writers Studio, which encourage playfulness and experimentation in approaching one’s persona-narrator. Fiction writers seek a seamless meeting of narrative style and subject matter. By trying on different writers’ styles through weekly exercises, the Writers Studio method aims to expand a writer’s technical tool-box so that she can make informed choices about how to tell a particular story. I will write about their method in more detail in a future post.

Look at these gorgeous paintings by Evan B Harris. Their whimsical beauty appeals to me. I bumped into them online while searching for something else. (As it is in life, so it is online.) I find particularly moving his literal intertwining of musician, instrument, memory and the imagination invigorated in the act of making music.

For anyone who’s interested, the artist is available for commissions.

Garden Grows Piano Keys

Salt & Sea Piano Keys

I am one of many people in the US and Australia and elsewhere who are always looking for ways to engage more people with some amazing music that doesn’t fall neatly into one musical category. We are still relying on a term called “jazz” that is often a turn-off to many (I liken its impact to the words “feminism” or “poetry” in that regard). Recently I attended a symposium in Harlem on the relationship between jazz music and jazz writing, which I blogged about at the time. The editor of the Jazz Australia website asked me to expand on my blog post for a feature article, which has just been published here. In that piece I wondered why the discussion ignored all improvised music produced outside the US. I concluded that the jazz community – its producers, its consumers and its bureaucrats – was acting as though the rest of the world did not exist, and in this way it seemed to be similar to a mindset of trade barriers and tariffs in a world that increasingly operates (to a greater or less degree) without them. In the piece I write that

The globalization of jazz in the last forty years is perhaps one of the strongest features of its recent history, and clearly a significant part of its future evolution. Yet the myopia of the American panelists ignores the opportunity of global responses and developments of what was originally a uniquely American music. The panellists’ shared impatience with Wynton Marsalis’s approach to promoting and playing jazz, openly vented during the discussion, should make them more open to and aware of other approaches to the music. The critics and musicians alike spoke of their disappointment with Marsalis’s protectionist mindset, yet the opportunities of global influences on jazz seemed not to have occurred to any one of them. One would hope that new types of improvised music, each reflecting other musical styles and traditions from around the world, would help broaden the remit of jazz music and also, importantly, its potential audience. That is certainly my hope, and one I would imagine to be shared by any musician developing his or her improvising skills in any corner of the globe.

My head is spinning after reading some statistics on the sales of music over the past decade. From their peak in 1999, the value of record sales has halved in ten years, according to the Recording Industry of America and quoted in this op-ed by the New York Times’ Charles M. Blow. He quotes other statistics on teenage music-buying habits to conclude that the media consumption of young people is “moving from an acquisition model to an access model”. With so much music available for free streaming on-demand, why would anyone pay for it? The death of the novel has been predicted for a long time, but the starvation of the songwriter may well be upon us sooner than that of the fiction writer. (Or perhaps it’s just that I haven’t yet come across any comparable statistics for books.)

In December 2008, a study by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the UK’s non-profit royalty-collection service, determined that an extraordinary 85% of all albums available for purchase online did not sell a single copy. This frightening statistic seems to contravene the theory of “the long tail” espoused by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of the 2006 book The Long Tail. His hopeful theory championed the internet as a creator of niche markets in which sellers would make money from sales of unique or uncommon products because there would be sufficient numbers of buyers. These statistics seem to confirm, however, that offline patterns of consumption are simply being echoed online, and that neither the creators or sellers of niche products are any better off – certainly not in digital music sales.

What is it about music that makes people – young people in particular – feel that their access to it is a right, and not a privilege for which they ought to pay? I cannot think of another art form in which this is the case. Anyone can go to a museum to view paintings and sculpture, but more often than not you must pay (if not directly, then through some kind of tax). Anyone can read a few pages of a book still under copyright (such as my own) via Google, but they can only read those few pages once. Individual works are still protected in a way that music is not, despite the best efforts of copyright lawyers. I despair for anyone trying to make a living as a songwriter or performer. Is this situation only the result of the replicability of electronic files, or are there more complex cultural factors at work? I’m not convinced that it’s a simple matter of technology, and I wish Walter Benjamin were here to theorise on the work of art in the age of free-streaming audio.

UPDATE: Letters to the NY Times in response to Charles Blow’s original column.

On Saturday morning I scurried uptown to 126th Street, the home of the National Jazz Museum, for a symposium on the relationship between writing and jazz music with the unfortunate title The Pen is Mightier than the Sword. As usual I was wearing multiple hats for the occasion: as a sometime reviewer of jazz gigs, as a writer looking to better understand the mind of the musician for her next book, and as a former volunteer administrator in the Sydney jazz “scene” seeking to understand the dynamics of this corner of New York’s musical culture in order to contribute usefully to a similar discussion in Australia, which for various reasons continues on a rolling boil.

The symposium outline mentioned the recent demise of Jazz Times magazine and the cancellation of the major New York jazz festival as two events calling into question the state of jazz as a “viable institutional force”. At the same time, it pointed out that in the face of relentless announcements of jazz’s death, the number of students studying jazz in college continues to rise. The symposium promised to explore whether journalists and musicians see eye-to-eye on a vision of a jazz future, and what role race and cultural background plays in the often contentious discourse between and among musicians and journalists and critics.

When I got there, the panellists outnumbered the audience, and did so for an uncomfortable while thereafter. (It was 10am on a Saturday, after all.) Their stars shined brightly, however: Gary Giddins, who for 30 years wrote a column on jazz for the Village Voice; Howard Mandel, a prolific jazz writer and current jazz blogger for the online Arts Journal; and scholar John Gennaro, who has made a study of critical responses to jazz music. They all looked whiter than white against the multiracial profile of the participating musicians, who included Steve Coleman, Vijay Iyer and Lewis Nash. Moderator Greg Thomas did his best trying to keep a formal shape to the bulging conversations, but there seemed to be more interesting questions and challenges bubbling among members of the audience, who unfortunately were given limited opportunity to contribute to the “debate”.

I took copious notes but left at lunchtime because the discussion seemed chronically limited to “what musicians think of jazz critics” and the critics’ defenses of their work  in a rather ecumenical context of “we’re all fans of the music”. Who needs to hear this again? Perhaps the discussion heated up in the afternoon, but I was looking for a much more politically conscious, provocative exploration of the position of jazz in relation to other types of music. There was no mention of jazz music produced outside the US – and there is so much interesting music coming out of Europe and Australia - and there was no discussion of race, either. This should not have surprised me after spending so much time in New York in recent years, but it did. It also struck me later that the looped question of the relevance of jazz music and jazz criticism – it has been going around for decades – is very similar to the allegations of the death of the novel, which have been uttered regularly ever since Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author in the late 1960s. Just as university jazz programs continue to accept increasing numbers of students, so too do would-be writers flock to Master of Fine Arts programs (across the US in particular; see Louis Menand’s wonderful piece in the New Yorker on MFA programs). Whether you’re an aspiring jazz musician or novelist, you pursue these interests because they are your passion, and if you care enough about it, you are trying to work on your craft and eventually produce something that might be called art by someone whose professional opinion you respect. You do so, like all artists, in the face of the profound indifference of mainstream culture, and that is unlikely to change any time soon.

In terms of a comparison with the Australian jazz scene, there are more similarities than differences. In both music cultures jazz occupies a small but significant place; it is routinely ignored by publications that believe they cover the arts; when it is written about, it is often done so in a shamefully ignorant manner that would not be acceptable in other art forms or music genres; and that the iTunes-led transformation of music consumption needs to be accepted and leveraged, rather than resisted, in order to cultivate existing and future audiences for the music. The role of the critic in such a climate is part publicist, part educator, part interpreter. This seems to me an appropriate portfolio for any cultural critic, regardless of your musical taste.

This week I was fortunate to attend a performance of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town with a playwright friend visiting from Sydney, who bought tickets to the show on the personal recommendation of none other than Edward Albee. “He’s seen it twice and loved it,” Suzie said. It seemed endorsement enough.

In many respects the play has suffered for its ubiquity – so many American school students are forced to digest the text like cereal and forever associate the play with tedium and the classroom. Its small-town scenario, full of people leading small-town lives, has sometimes led it to gather mould in theatre’s corner, as if it were an old uncle you had to invite to dinner but with whom you had nothing to talk about. Like a secret, Our Town has been hidden in plain sight waiting for an exceptional imagination to draw it once more to our lazy attention. That imagination belongs to director David Cromer, who also plays the pivotal role of Stage Manager in this production. Through his direction the wit, gravitas, terror, love and beauty in the play is unleashed, with a stunning surprise for the audience revealed in the third act. I could barely hold myself together in the final heartbreaking sequence, where the newly deceased Emily is granted her wish to revisit just one ordinary day in her life, and the audience – so close to the actors that those of us in the front rows could reach out and touch them – is unexpectedly transported into another realm altogether, a realm that only the theatre (and only rarely) provides.

On the eve of my final day as President of Sydney PEN, I am very proud of some quick work by my Management Committee member Charlotte Wood to put together a press release highlighting recent attempts by Chinese officials to pressure the Melbourne Film Festival into not screening the film The 10 Conditions of Love. The film profiles the Uighur businesswoman and leader in exile, Rebiya Kadeer. The Uighurs are a Muslim Chinese minority. The Chinese government describes Kadeer as a terrorist and blames her for instigating the riots in Xinjiang earlier in July. She is coming to Melbourne for the screening of the documentary, and must be delighted with the publicity that the attempted censorship has generated.

Sydney PEN condemns censorship attempt; congratulates Melbourne Film Festival (16 July 2009)

Sydney PEN, the influential body of writers and readers devoted to freedom of expression, has congratulated the Melbourne International Film Festival for its firm stance against Chinese attempts to censor its 2009 festival program. Continue Reading »

Having spent much of June in gumboots and raincoats, a large chunk of New York’s population streamed on to Central Park’s Great Lawn on Tuesday night to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Beethoven’s Symphony No 7. I joined some friends who had thoughtfully staked out a comfortable spot under a tree using a large red-checked picnic blanket. We secured our perimeter with cast-off shoes, a bottle or two of wine, and chatted amiably for hours, thankfully spared much of the trampling-upon experienced by other groups in less favorable locations.

Despite my preference for cooler weather, Tuesday night in New York was perfect. The most gentle of breezes caressed our shoulders, and for a long period of time, as the orchestra played in the warm evening air, around 100,000 people who usually feel harried and hemmed in by each other simply relaxed and slowed down in the company of so many strangers. I’m certain the repertoire had something to do with the crowd’s behaviour, too; it’s difficult to feel stressed listening to Mozart, and even Beethoven’s musical passion could not help but be dinted a little by the sheer beauty of the weather. It’s been years since I’ve attended an outdoor concert of classical music. In Sydney each January during the Festival the SSO performs a concert in the Domain, but they insist on programming Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture to finish, every single time, which I find quite sad.

A cellist from Manchester has successfully sued a venue under the Trade Descriptions Act for failing to provide live musicians at a “magical familiy musical”. Adrian Bradbury took his family to the Lowry Theatre at Salford, near Manchester, to see a live staging of The Wizard of Oz, only to find the performers singing and dancing to pre-recorded backing tracks rather than a band of live musicians. Outraged on behalf of professional musicians everywhere, he sued the venue.

In court Bradbury produced an expert statement from contemporary composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, which proclaimed that without an orchestra or musical director “a performance of The Wizard of Oz is best described as karaoke”. The Lowry argued that of the 133,000 attendees of the concert, Bradbury’s was the sole complaint. But the judge said Bradbury’s expectations of the concert were reasonable and ruled that the venue must repay him the cost of the tickets. (Here’s the original article in The Times.)

While Bradbury has won the admiration of musicans everywhere for staking this small victory for the enduring value of live music-playing over the mass-production approach of pre-recorded music, his win is local and nostalgic. Outside the Lowry Theatre, backing tracks have become endemic to the mass-consumption of music. It’s simply another step in the evolution of musical culture, which goes hand in hand with technology – as it has done for centuries. 

In The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali says that music “provides a rough sketch of the society under construction” and describes the musical evolution thus:

Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning.

In a bizarre twist on the recent history of the automotive industy, Audi has decided to mark its centenary by commissioning its youngest designers to come up with a new … piano. I’m as much a fan of the piano as anyone who’s played the instrument regularly from the age of six, but this decision strikes me as a classic “Titanic deckchair” moment from an industry that has been consistently incapable of finding the horizon on a flat surface. Surely Audi’s creative team, let alone its sales department, would at least have researched what’s happened to sales of old-fashioned pianos over the past century (the same century Audi has been in the business of selling automobiles). It must certainly be aware of how many customers it might reasonably expect for a flash new grand piano with the price tag of 100,000 Euros. Even after reading Audi’s official announcement about this “innovative” project, I’m at a loss to explain its purpose. To wit, project director Philip Schlesinger on the Audi piano:

Generous surface areas ensure formal clarity; there are no decorative applications, the edges and lines are sharply drawn, the joints logically positioned. All these are important aspects of the Audi design. 

Forgive me Emperor Audi, but these “important aspects” have been part and parcel of acoustic piano design for at least 150 years; possibly even longer, as upright and grand pianos alike have undergone next to no technological development over that period precisely because of declining sales. Instead, sales of pianolas in the early 20th Century, then in more recent decades digital keyboards and electronic instruments, have found favour with practising musicians due to their portability, convenience and price. Perhaps that lesson would have been a more significant one for Audi’s designers to learn: coming up with an alternative to the car that meets our needs without being so burdensome in environmental and financial impact.