Just found Ronnie Bruce’s wonderful typographical animation of a poem by Taylor Mali over at Meanjin magazine’s Spike blog. As Mali himself says,

I have no idea who he is (and he didn’t ask for permission), but what would you do when the result is so good?

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Sometimes the animation is so compelling I suspect it detracts from the poet’s elegantly crafted lines, but I’m glad that the poem – about contemporary speech being awash in uncertainty and the need to speak precisely and with conviction – is reaching new audiences through technology. Certainly that’s the holy grail for all creative artists, and the fervent wish of arts funders.

The definition of music I learned at 13 – “organised sound” – is still the one I like best. Here’s a clip promoting an installation at London’s Barbican in which a flock of zebra finches go about their daily activities in a purpose-built aviary in which electric guitars and other sound-producing objects have been placed. The birds’ random movements within the acoustic environment result in some impressive music, at least to this pair of ears.

Here’s a timely reminder for those of us scribbling away for no money, little money, or in between earning money by doing jobs we like slightly less than writing.

Lapham’s Quarterly has published this subscription-teaser on their website today, revealing a handful of diverse paid occupations of well-known writers over the past three centuries. While it’s hardly a representative sample, I was relieved to find that none of them held down jobs as a writing instructor, content developer, freelance journalist or book reviewer. The perks and hazards attributed to each role remind me that observing human behaviour is an enduring perk (and sometimes trial) of most work environments. My favourite item from the chart is learning of Faulkner’s penchant for Mah-Jongg, which I last played as a kid with my happy-clappy neighbour with what I’m certain was no heed to the rules of the game. Possibly a useful lesson after all, given the eclectic roads to publication mapped below.

Laphams Qtly: Writers' Day Jobs

This indiereader.com article is a really useful survey of published authors’ thoughts about revision and editing their own work. How encouraging to read that the bestselling Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air) regards his first drafts as “almost always wretched”, and that Jacqueline Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean) “approaches [revisions] with great joy, as I would a Red Cross truck in a disaster.”

For many years I self-censored my own ideas for stories and articles in the erroneous and irrational belief that a writer needed only inspiration to translate their ideas into beautifully formed sentences and paragraphs on their very first pages. This I now attribute to a terrible perfectionism coupled with forced attendance at lectures on the Romantic poets at the University of Sydney. Keats and Co left us a legacy of some wonderful poems but also an unhelpful cultural trope of the writer as tortured genius. Even as I wrote my PhD and followed that up by years of working with other authors on their manuscripts, I could not connect the practical and creative work of revising drafts with my unreasonably strict idea of what constituted “writing”. I’m a very slow learner at times, but the process of writing my memoir fixed all that.

By the way, while the Indie Reader website appears to cater to a readership of self-published authors, the long list of – how shall I put it? – traditionally published authors quoted in this piece makes it a valuable resource for everyone.

Ruined-piano connoisseur Ross Bolleter plays in his garden. Courtesy World Association for Ruined Piano Studies WARPS.com

Further to some comments I made on the Meanjin blog Spiked a few days ago in response to happy endings, which took the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a recent example, I wanted to write about the fleeting appearance and disappearance of the piano which turns up at odd moments in the film.

Regular readers might be aware that the piano’s shifting cultural role is something that fascinates me. Aside from a childhood spent learning to play and (mostly) enjoying the experience, I am intrigued as to how often pianos tend to pop up in contemporary culture. In recent years they have appeared in some unlikely places; see this limited edition Karl Lagerfeld Steinway, my earlier post about the Audi car company-designed grand, and this Swedish piano staircase classic on YouTube. The piano is a rather unstable sign of technological advancement and decline; of domesticity and public performance; of fun (playing) and hard work (learning and practicing); of virtue and virtuosity (think of the piano in Jane Austen’s Emma – a site of sexual intrigue between the accomplished musician Jane Fairfax and  Frank Churchill).

In the film adaptation of The Road, the piano – which does not appear in the book – functions as an emblem of family life and of a lost world perfect in its imperfection. In flashbacks we see the mother playing as father and son look on admiringly, then later we see them destroying the instrument to keep the home’s fire literally burning. Inevitably the woman is the pianist, and inevitably it’s the woman who dies so that the father and son can travel the road. When the father remembers their old life, he does so by picturing his wife at the piano; and it is not until he discovers an old piano in a house off the road, functional but horribly out of tune, that he breaks down in front of his son for the first time. I was struck particularly by this scene because the piano stands out as one piece of technology that still ‘works’ in the film’s post-nuclear, post-apocalyptic world.

Raymond Carver (l) and his editor, Gordon Lish

The Australian Literary Review has published this review of Raymond Carver’s short stories in their unedited, pre-Gordon Lish versions, which has been released under Carver’s original title, Beginnings. The article uses the new book to explore the relationship between editors and authors in contemporary publishing.

May I start by congratulating The Australian on providing space and time for intelligent reflection on an aspect of book publishing that is usually treated with undue reverence due solely to its invisibility. It’s wonderful to read quotes from authors and editors alike on the subject. The author-editor relationship is so various and complex in its dynamics, and usually so irrelevant to those not directly involved, that it mostly occurs behind closed doors, like a marriage. Text’s Michael Heyward likens it to a confessor and priest.

Back towards the end of the 20th century, I spent a good few years working in-house as the editor of the Picador imprint at Pan Macmillan Australia. In that time I had the opportunity of working with some wonderful writers of fiction and non-fiction, and, it must be said, with authors who were published for reasons more complicated than just the quality of their words on the page. My experience was that, no matter whether I loved or loathed any particular manuscript, the process of editing their work – which incorporates everything from structural changes and spell-checking to blurb-writing and liaison with typesetters, publicists, sales reps, your boss and her boss, in addition to time on the phone and in-person with the author (when conveniently co-located) – took about the same amount of time.

Delia Falconer makes the point that editing is a thankless and – when done properly – an invisible task:

When you read a book, you have no idea how much of the editor’s advice the writer used, or how they used it.

As an editor I had the unpleasant experience of sweating blood for weeks over a debut novelist’s manuscript, only to see him reject every single change I had suggested (in pencil). I also had the marvellous experience of working with authors – who were usually not publishing debutants – who responded with openness and imagination to the suggestions I proposed to them. My approach as an editor was always to put myself as much as possible in the author’s shoes, to try to understand what they were trying to achieve, and to help them close any perceived gaps between their vision and the unedited manuscript. And, it must be said, I loved to cut. Even now I can’t stop reading books and thinking, I would have cut that sentence/paragraph/chapter. I for one would have tried to persuade Christos Tsolkias to lose the Manoly chapter of The Slap. But the novel has since won many awards and is a great achievement, so who am I to quibble now?

Ultimately, however, editing other people’s work was not for me. I had chosen to edit other people’s words instead of write my own, and that decision took its toll. My authors generally enjoyed working with me; I ended up with regular migraines and resigned after three years. Authors are best served by editors who love to edit. Thankfully in Australia and elsewhere there are plenty of those. UQP‘s Alexandra Payne, who edited my book, is one. She made a relatively small number of highly astute comments, pointed to a few possible solutions, and left me to figure it out.

James Bradley, who was quoted in the ALR article, has since posted these thoughts in response to it. He writes:

I think what’s really interesting though is what our anxiety about editorial standards tells us about our attitudes to writing, and more particularly how difficult we find it break free of Romantic notions of the artist as solitary genius when we’re talking about authors and authorship. Because in the end that’s what this whole conversation is really about: our unease with accepting that literary fiction and non-fiction are not, in many ways, all that different to more collaborative forms such as television or film.

I’m not sure I’d go as far to say that the level of collaboration between author and editor on a book is similar to that which is expected and ‘natural’ in TV/film, but I haven’t worked in those other forms. Without an author’s manuscript, a book’s editor has nothing to go on. An editor revises and makes insightful suggestions, but does not create from scratch. From what I’ve read of the relationship between Lish and Carver, the editor often forgot that he was not the author of those stories.

I think Carver’s widow, who is responsible for the unedited Carver stories (re-)entering the literary marketplace, has done the world of writing and publishing a huge favour. Wannabe editors and teachers of writing can pore over the original and edited versions of Carver’s stories, plainly see what was changed, debate the ethics of editing, and learn to write better. Beginnings will have a long shelf-life as a reference book more than anything else, I think. Carver’s reputation is impermeable at this point. Editing is an imperfect art at best, and due to the commercial context in which it operates, ambivalent: quixotic and practical at the same time, idealistic and also subject to time-constraints. Ultimately, aren’t we all?