Congratulations to my former colleagues Annette Bain and Tess Russo of law firm Freehills, and the team at Company B at Belvoir Street Theatre, for winning an Australia Business Arts Foundation (ABAF) Award this week for their community partnership. A beaming Tess is pictured here. I look on with no small degree of pride because it was during my tenure at Freehills (in the days prior to the community program’s formalisation as the Freehills Foundation) that Company B first approached us and we began the conversation that turned into the relationship that turned into an enduring and mutually beneficial partnership. Law firms tend to get antsy about the term “partnership” in this context, but there are few alternatives to describe the necessary interdependence of the most successful relationships between a corporation and a not-for-profit organisation. Power dynamics and egos often bruise the nurturing that’s critical for these types of partnerships to flourish over a period of years. I should also note the importance of Carmen Prince, then Development Manager at Company B, to establishing the relationship with Freehills. I’m so thrilled.

PS Look out for a glamour-shot of Annette on page 42 of the inaugural BRW magazine issue on private companies, representing Freehills as joint winner of the Excellence in Community Practices Award (with PriceWaterhouseCoopers). Go girl!

How much fun was it to see the Modfather himself, the ageless Paul Weller, at the Enmore Theatre on Wednesday night? I haven’t jumped around in my chair so much since – well, since a gig at the Village Vanguard in February, and then the one at Sweet Rhythm in March. But they were jazz gigs, and this was something else entirely. (One doesn’t get out to pop/rock [what's the right term these days?] concerts much anymore.) A former boyfriend once described Weller’s music as “Dad rock”, which I found highly amusing but ultimately reductive. Weller is that rare musician who keeps evolving. My late husband John loved The Jam, while I adored The Style Council; I guess we attach most intensely to the music we discover when we’re young, and John was that bit older than I. Weller’s last Sydney performance was in 1984, and yes, I was there – in all my awkward teenage enthusiasm, with my hopeless crush on this musician who featured both in my dreams and on my (dad’s) record player. “My Ever Changing Moods” remains one of my favourite songs ever. As a melancholy 15 year-old I played it over and over in my room as I read books and dreamed about going to New York.

On stage this week Weller explored the varied terrain of his songwriting career, and moved freely from instrument to instrument. He wore his musicianship effortlessly, in the same way that at 50 he has the casual hip of someone half his age. He proudly chain-smoked through the performance, tossing his cigarette mid-burn to the floor while he pumped out chords on the piano or one of his guitars – only to pick up the cigarette where he left off and take another puff. Now that’s cool.

It was amusing to see the different Weller “factions” in the audience. Some came to life only with his oldest songs, and I sensed that those audience members caused him slight irritation. If Weller is able to grow as a musician and songwriter as he grows older, why do the ears of some of his fans not “grow” with him? I guess that’s what separates the artist from the everyman, the leader from the pack. I hope I can keep growing older with Paul Weller.

Gosh but it’s been chilly in the mornings at my place. So I was glad to warm my heart at the news, published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, of the launch of Mission Australia’s new program called the Michael Project (press release here). The program aims “to stop the revolving door that spins the homeless from shelter to shelter” by providing guaranteed access to a range of services designed to help homeless people become independent. The program is complemented by a substantial research project that will follow 150 clients over one year, to help establish hard evidence about what works in helping people out of homelessness.

The Michael Project’s ambitious suite of services and research was made possible through the generosity of a single donor, who wishes to remain anonymous. While I applaud the donor’s decision to invest in this project, anonymity – still a common choice among major donors – is not the most persuasive tactic in encouraging other potential philanthropists to consider sharing some of their hard-earned investment income. Not-for-profit organisations seeking to tackle some of society’s more complex issues, like homelessness, would benefit from more major donors willing to speak publicly about their social investment decisions, or at least acknowledge their contributions. Nothing is more persuasive than leading by example, whatever your peer group.

In this light I would like to remind readers about a very different but powerful contribution to the issue of homelessness, which lies at the other end of the publicity spectrum. Ian Darling, the prominent founder of the Caledonia Foundation, funded and promoted the production and distribution of a documentary, The Oasis, about Australia’s homeless young people, with the specific aim of putting youth homelessness back on the national agenda. (Interesting speech here.) The documentary screened on ABC television earlier this year, and was surrounded by intense media attention, as was the National Youth Commission’s report that the Foundation funded. A copy of the film is being donated to every secondary school in Australia, every philanthropic foundation, and to leading Australian corporations.

Two very different approaches to the same complex problem. Darling’s social investment decisions assume that raising awareness is a critical pathway to addressing a social issue, while the anonymous donor must believe that, whatever the social outcome of the donation, its private origin is irrelevant. Philanthropy is not a competition. It is not a race. But it is heartening to see the efforts of these two donors, who signal Australia’s increasingly sophisticated philanthropic culture, in which such diversity now exists.

It’s been an intense few weeks, what with my writers’ festival finale, a TV appearance, scouting for new clients, and becoming “Il Presidente” of Sydney PEN. Sad to say, I’ve also been sleeping on my sofa the past few nights, drifting off to the chemical mix that coats the newly polished floorboards in the front of my house (hence being cast out of my own bedroom and into the living/sleeping room).

Like thousands of other not-for-profits, Sydney PEN operates with one part-time administrator and an entirely volunteer committee. I firmly believe that any grantmaker with the resources and philosophical interest in contributing to one or more not-for-profit programs or organisations should have some direct participation at the coalface. There is no better way to reach an immediate and unmediated understanding of the daily challenges (not to mention power discrepancies) faced by not-for-profit entitites that, despite having been established for purposes that have nothing to do with money, expend scant time and largely volunteer energy pursuing.

I didn’t help myself by driving myself to Canberra and back to host a lecture at the National Library, exhausting myself for the weekend, only to learn today that there was money budgeted for a return airfare from Sydney …

Anyone who has attended a writers’ festival or a book signing – whether as a writer or reader – should get several guffaws out of this account by novelist Ann Patchett in The Atlantic about her experiences on book tours. Although chock-full of the minor humiliations familiar to anyone who has toured or attended a book publicity event, Patchett (author of one of my favourite novels of recent times, Bel Canto) concludes her story with a powerful anecdote about two meetings between a young writer and a much older writer – first, her own meeting with Eudora Welty, when Patchett was young; then her encounter, as a seasoned author, with a shy teenager who wants to be a writer.

Yesterday I submitted an editorial to the Sydney Morning Herald’s opinion page on behalf of Sydney PEN, trying to draw sports-mad Australians’ attention to the fact that while we’re collecting medals and worrying about internet access for foreign journalists for the duration of the Beijing Olympic Games, there are approximately 40 Chinese writers and journalists who are locked up for years because they have dared to write something that upset the omnipresent censors in their authoritarian state. As I wrote in the editorial, “The death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the eve of the Beijing Olympic Games throws into stark relief the tension between the oppressive might of a political regime and the moral authority of a writer’s dissenting voice.”

The International PEN Poem Relay has been making an eloquent online protest in the name of free speech in China in its six-month virtual world tour, following the flame of the Olympic Torch. The poem relay demonstrates the power of non-violent protest. Although peaceful protest has been good enough for Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama respectively, the lack of local interest in the relay is a sad reflection of a complacent undercurrent in Australian culture. It’s looking unlikely that the op-ed will run, due to the editor’s impression that the issue “has been covered already”.

China has more writers behind bars than any other country in the world. That’s a shameful world record that is absolutely not getting the attention it deserves.

Talk about a long time coming – my pal Derek Van Gieson, the wittiest dude in Prospect Heights*, has broken through into the artistic cumulous and has a credit on The New Yorker website, in their online “cartoon lounge”. For some time now he’s been slaving away creating illustrations on spec for a weekly beauty parade with the magazine’s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff. Now there’s no need for me to even contemplate cancelling my subscription.

Check out his contribution to the web-lounge’s cartoon series “The Worst Things About Summer”. Apart from DVG’s hairy-legged effort, I liked the illustration of “butt condensation on subway seats”, which any NY subway commuter will giggle and cringe at simultaneously.

Maybe it’s finally DVG’s moment: this fall – a term which, I have to say, I have come to love fervently despite my antipodean upbringing – he also makes his debut in MOME, an anthology of something called the “rising cartoon generation” (are they armed?). In his characteristic prose style, DVG expounds here on the twisted path to publication in both outlets. His work at the moment uses pen & ink with coffee washes. As DVG himself admits, “If I don’t drink it, it goes into the drawing. Have I mistakenly taken a swig from the ink and coffee wash cup? The answer is yes.”

*DVG is also responsible for the author photo on the jacket of my book, which has come to be known as the “Hamlet shot”.

Some interesting articles have been published recently bemoaning the perils of the internet. They tend to fall into two topical camps: reading and thinking. This New York Times piece, “Online, R U Really Reading?” describes changing reading patterns among the first truly digital generation, and provides a useful summary of the debate between those who believe young people’s preference for reading online material to reading books bodes ill for the literacy of future generations, and those who believe it’s simply a reflection of changing reading habits rather than a decline, and nothing to worry about.

The internet’s influence on the way we think is a more insidious consequence of the changing reading patterns the first article describes. Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” has been much-referenced since its publication in the current issue of The Atlantic. Like Carr, I worry about whether my online reading choices – to read or print out articles from a range of publications, to monitor my favourite website, Arts & Letters Daily, to read and digest as much as possible in as short a period as possible - has led to my sagging interest in the novel. I seem to read less fiction than ever, but can’t figure out if it’s because I’m getting more picky as I age, or whether I cannot muster the required level of concentration and chunk of time that a novel demands.

What will be interesting to watch over the next few decades is the impact of the internet on public discourse, on personal communication, and on individual concentration spans. Who knows if these things can ever be tested in any reliable way. Anecdotally, however, I can already testify to a staggering lack of interest in grammar and punctuation among young people who claim to want to write. Last year at one of Susan Shapiro’s New York workshops on writing articles for publication, I was surrounded by people younger than 30, whom I usually have little to do with. Week after week enthusiastic pups turned up and distributed printouts of their material for their classmates to critique, which were full of spelling mistakes, syntactical errors, apostrophes missing or in the wrong place, with barely a comma in sight. Sentences were half-formed, and paragraphs scattered their pages like leaves falling without a care as to the order in which they landed. All these young writers were expecting others to read their work, but seemed to lack the capacity to read their own work for consistency and clarity. Only a good reader can be a good writer.

It was during Shapiro’s workshop that I began to wonder if our literacy was changing in relation to our interaction with the online environment. Could text-messaging, email communication, emoticons and internet shortcuts have combined to create an impression among the digital generation that punctuation, spelling and grammar are no longer part of being literate? 

Today marks the end of official publicity for my The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement. At almost four months since publication, that’s a media marathon for a first-time author, so I’m not complaining. It is a relief, however, to know I don’t have to keep returning to my own Ground Zero in public. Outside the covers of my book, I mean.

I ended my tour of publicity this morning. Not with a whimper, but with the bang of commercial television: a six-minute slot with Kerrie-Anne Kennerley on her national morning program. In Canberra to host the first of three lectures in Sydney PEN’s Voices: 3 Writers series at the National Library, I switched on the TV at 9.00 this morning, still in my PJs, to watch. (The Friday show is pre-recorded on a Wednesday. Thus I knew already I’d be on second, immediately following a conversation with a horse to celebrate the animals’ generic birthday on 1 August, and before the advertorial for some sort of mop.) But instead of K-A’s beaming visage in front of my eyes, all I saw was a smiling Ellen DeGeneres. I turned to my hotel room’s TV guide for clarification and discovered that down Canberra way, K-A doesn’t beam into living rooms until midday. There’s a joke in there somewhere about the sun never going down on the Channel 9 empire, or K-A never going down on … but I’m too tired, after driving to Canberra and back, to find it.