Archive for the 'Books, Writers & Writing' Category

Speculative fiction and the nature of the current crisis

Published
by
Kim
2 days, 14 hours ago
in Apocalypse, Books, Writers & Writing, Climate change, Culture, Developing world, Disasters, Economics, Environment, International, Markets, Poverty, Security, Urbanism and War
. 43 Comments


Pirate by ~Loserbabooser on deviantART

I’m not at all so sure that the connection between current crisis and future speculation (or speculative futures) is as straightforward as Felix Gilman suggests at Ecstatic Days, but I find these questions quite the fascinating nevertheless:

Economic collapse, the heat death of the earth, and the forthcoming resource wars of the 2010s: what do these things mean for genre fiction? Some subgenres will prosper, presumably, others will decline. As we are plunged into a real-life gothic-punk nightmare, what people are looking for in escapism and exoticism seems likely to change.

What’s going to happen to all those books about gritty decaying Dickensian cities once we’re all actually living in one?

Test case: pirates. There’s been a bit of a resurgence of pirate stories recently. Fun and light-hearted escapism, with just a touch of tongue-in-cheek jokiness. What’s going to happen to the demand for pirate stories now that pirates are actually a problem again?

Future of (independent) journalism

Published
by
Mark
3 days, 17 hours ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Consumerism, Culture, Markets, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 15 Comments

A few months ago, folks might recall that I spoke at the Future of Journalism conference in Brisbane, organised by the MEAA and the Walkley Foundation. Last week, Melbourne took its turn hosting an event in the series, and Margaret Simons was there:

If it’s possible to draw a consensus from the Future of Journalism conferences, and from yesterday, I would say it is this: Newspapers in print form are in decline, some say dying, and will certainly be less important and influential in the future. But content remains important. A lot of old journalistic roles and skills, including sub editing, remain important. And, on the bright side, there is no evidence of diminished appetite for news and quality content among the public.

But everything else is changing. There is a bomb under the business models for all of our established mass media companies, and if we want to preserve what is good and important in journalism, it is a time for bold experiment.

Some of the symptoms of the decline of the business model for the mainstream media can be discerned from the state of the Walkley Awards themselves, where fearless reporters for each media org either pass over awards won by competitors in silence, or give them a passing mention. At the same time, as Simons observed today, many of the awards went to staffers of media outlets which have since collapsed - Sunday, The Bulletin, and now the Australian bureau of Time. Fairfax’ woes have been highlighted for some time, but there have also been deep budget cuts at News Limited, with staff cuts to follow. The recession will accentuate the current decline in print media.

Personally, I now only buy the Fin Review. And I don’t even read a lot of the content from the Australian papers online any more. And I’m very far from being alone. I think it was Guy Rundle who remarked recently that reading a newspaper now feels almost like an archaic habit. It’s a habit that a lot of people have never taken up, and many others have found it very easy to break. The social and structural causes are complex, and go beyond the issue of content, but while a recent theme by MSM types has been that there’s some sort of crisis if people only take an interest in what they’re actually interested in, no one is going to spend a buck on a newspaper out of some sort of notion of civic responsibility. One of the many ironies in the decline and fall of the newspaper is that editors, columnists and proprietors who happily trashed public interest concerns and championed privatisation and consumer choice for so many years now find themselves on the receiving end of the blunt logic of the market. It’s hard to summon up much sympathy, and denunciations and exhortations will have no effect if consumers don’t wish to consume the news product. So, if there is a continued need for independent journalism and investigative work, what is to be done?

Continue reading ‘Future of (independent) journalism’

Adapted from a Facebook meme

Published
by
Mark
5 days, 1 hour ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Film, TV, Video etc, Life and The Web
. 60 Comments

Maybe I’m easily amused but I really liked this one!

Rules:
* Take the closest book from you
* Open to the page number 56
* Look at the 5th sentence
* Write down this sentence as your status
* Comment on your status and copy these instruction in a comment
* Don’t look for the book you prefer or the coolest but the closest book

Mine is:

Marius’ imperious habit of awarding citizenship to whole cohorts of Italian allies as a reward for exceptional valour was gratefully remembered.

That’s from Tom Holland’s Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. It’s a great book - I’ve been watching the second series of HBO/BBC’s Rome and thought it was an apt choice to start rereading last night, so it was right next to me on the couch.

What are you reading? (Defender of the thesis edition!)

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 5 days ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Education, Life, Sociology and The Web
. 78 Comments

As those folks who are my friends on Facebook are no doubt aware, I successfully defended my PhD thesis at my final seminar on Thursday in the Humanities Program at QUT. That’s a milestone I’m really happy to have reached, and in a post-thesis universe, one thing I can do is make some more time for reading fiction! I was just thinking that it’s been ages since I wrote a science fiction post, and that in itself speaks volumes about the sorts of volumes that have been the staple of my reading diet over the semester just gone! I’ve been storing up some promising science fiction to read and have been finding Locus and blogs and online sf zines fabulous resources for both purchasing books and building up a sense of anticipation and excitement about them!

Anyway, all this prompted me to think that it’s about time that we had another thread about what we’re all reading, or indeed what we’re intending to read over the holidays. I’d also be interested in hearing from others how they pick new titles - recommendations, reviews, online, offline? Discussion doesn’t have to be limited to science fiction and/or speculative fiction, of course, but that’s what my piles of books to be read currently consist of!

Australian Fabians Young Writers competition

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Notices and Politics
. 5 Comments

Over the fold there’s a plug for a writing competition organised by the Australian Fabians which may be of interest to anyone aged 18-28.

Continue reading ‘Australian Fabians Young Writers competition’

Seducing Mr Darcy

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane and Notices
. 35 Comments

Laura Carroll will be giving a a free public lecture on Jane Austen in Brisbane, at 7pm on Monday 17 November. It’s in the dining hall of Duchesne College, University of Queensland, St Lucia campus. Refreshments served after.

“Warming the imagination with scenes of the past”: Time-travel romances about Jane Austen.

How can we really get into Jane Austen’s world? Do we fall through the looking-glass or stumble through the back of the wardrobe, or will a good old-fashioned concussion do the trick? Amongst the flood of new products recently marketed by the ever-resourceful Austen industry is a fascinating group of fictional works – novels and a television show - dealing with time-travelling contact between our world and Austen’s.

In these works, passionate Austen aficionados from the present are magically transported back to Austen’s England where they attempt to ‘pass’ as Regency types, notice what the novels exclude (dirt, bodies, servants, Americans) and encounter both the elusive authoress herself and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, who, somehow and surprisingly, appears to be even more explosively sexy in person than he is in fiction. Although the ‘reality’ of Jane Austen’s world is never exactly how they had pictured it, the time-travellers must somehow reconcile their fervent attachments to the scenes of the past with their knowledge of themselves as essentially twenty-first century persons.

Bizarre and occasionally perverse as these works are, they offer a rich vein of insight into the bizarre and often perverse nature of Jane Austen’s immense and durable popularity among readers of all varieties. These time-travel fictions make full use of the imaginative possibilities afforded by fantasy and romance to explore passionate readerly experiences of the kind that ‘disciplined’ literary criticism has difficulty thinking about.

End of the Road for Surfdom; and the future of independent online media

Published
by
Mark
4 weeks ago
in Activism, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 79 Comments

It’s sad to read that Tim Dunlop is closing down The Road to Surfdom, one of the original Australian political blogs, and one that’s been a great contributor to commentary and discussion over a sustained period of time. It’s not wholly unexpected, but it’s still sad. Tim, the other Surfdom bloggers who won’t be continuing to blog individually, and the joint itself will all be very much missed.

Tim has some reflections on the role online media plays and its value and potential vis-a-vis the mainstream media which I think are clearly heartfelt and incredibly important, so I’m going to take the liberty of quoting his last post at some length. In particular, I want to endorse Tim’s sentiments about the necessity of supporting and growing the independent online mediaspace, and I want to point out how those comments have direct implications for the sort of work we do at LP, and how that work could be enhanced. But more of that later.

Continue reading ‘End of the Road for Surfdom; and the future of independent online media’

The perils of celebrity: Julie Bishop, Peter Van Onselen, MUP and plagiarism

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Ethics, Media and Politics
. 22 Comments

One of the minor notes of the political narrative last week was Julie Bishop’s half-hearted fessing up to publishing a book chapter containing numerous instances of plagiarism under her name, though (in a move quite reminiscent of the Howard government’s attitude towards ministerial accountability) she sought immediately to deflect responsibility onto the staffer who “dashed something together” for her in a spare moment, recycling and paraphrasing eight year old banal neo-liberal nostrums from the New Zealand Business Roundtable’s Roger Kerr. The news didn’t get any better as the week wore on for the editor of Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead, Peter Van Onselen, as it emerged that Brendan Nelson’s chapter had been ghosted by Tom Switzer, whose ruminations turned up in a column under his own name in The Spectator:

“It must have been subconscious … I have just regurgitated [what] was my line.”

Pushing a “line”, of course, comes naturally to the opinionistas of the punditariat/thinktank interface. The big surprise in all this, probably, is why an increasingly furious and perhaps naive Van Onselen ever thought that he could solicit contributions which actually represented the reflections of “some of the finest minds of liberal and conservative thought”. The notion, apparently shared by Van Onselen and Melbourne University Press Publisher Louise Adler, that Liberal politicians are in “a reflective period, a phase of rigorous self-criticism and reassessment” was always risible. All we’ve seen from the opposition since November 24 2007 are the fruits of a sense of frustrated entitlement, manifesting alternately in vicious infighting and empty and cynical populism.

Adler’s commentary on the book is yet another instance of blame shifting. Andrew Elder nails it:

If Adler was concerned about morality she’d pull the book and wear the financial consequences of doing so, to protect the intellectual integrity of MUP. Instead, the next Melbourne Uni student who gets busted lifting an essay straight off the internet should get Adler to brush away any nasty consequences (”so old hat!”).

Australian accents: Speaking Our Language

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Education, History, Imperialism, Language, Media and Nationalism
. 95 Comments

Bruce Moore’s new book, Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian Language got a fair bit more press coverage - in the news pages as opposed to the reviews sections - than is usual for a tome authored by an academic. And why not? It’s a lively read, and one that is likely to inspire a lot of curiosity and interest above and beyond the questions of whether Ned Kelly spoke with an Irish or an Australian accent and whether talking like Alexander Downer and Crocodile Dundee at opposite ends of the accent pole is on the way out.

What I found most interesting about Moore’s work was the close attention he gives to the intimate links between language, place and culture. (Incidentally, there’s something of a moral here about how cultural studies first arose - a tale told neatly by Raymond Williams in Writing in Society - as a counterpart to the separation of supposedly timeless aesthetic qualities from their social contexts.) Moore tracks the creation of new words, shifts in meaning and the appropriation of Indigenous names to the distinctive geographical and social formations of a culture forged by the interplay between colonisation, landscape and dispossession. The ups and downs of the reputation of Australian English follow the ebb and flows of nationalism, particularly as related to Britain and the idea of Empire.

Moore is well placed to communicate the results of recent academic research on the origins of accents - dispelling misconceptions about the putative derivation of the Australian accent from “Cockney” (he demonstrates in passing that “Cockney” didn’t mean what we think it means in the Nineteenth Century) intermingled with Irish forms of speech. After all, as he argues, the population composition of all the British outposts in the Southern hemisphere was quite similar - yet very distinct accents developed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. He draws on research done in New Zealand to establish that new accents form through a process of selection among children of the second generation. Continue reading ‘Australian accents: Speaking Our Language‘

The Costa Diaries

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Economics, Media and NSW Government
. 41 Comments

Michael Costa has taken a leaf out of Mark Latham’s book… Forced out of office and Parliament? Write op/eds attacking your former party!

LISTENING to Kevin Rudd at Council of Australian Governments meetings as he tried to connect the global economic situation to the more mundane items on the national reform agenda was often excruciating.

Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of economics would have quickly concluded, as I did, that the Prime Minister didn’t have a good understanding of these issues.

Can a tell all book be far behind? Would it need to be a three volume set to contain slurs on all the people Michael Costa doesn’t like?

Here’s a suggestion for the under-employed former pollie - why not join the Liberal Party? You’ve already got News Limited Columnists eating out of your hand (you actually are one too!)… And your right-wing views should see you fit in nicely. Perhaps with your added ruthlessness, you could spark endless speculation about Malcolm Turnbull’s polling and leadership and unlike the Great Pretender seize the top job by the power of the Word!

What book are you currently reading?

Published
by
tigtog
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing and Life
. 113 Comments

Is it good so far?

I’ve seen this meme around a few blogs lately, and although I mostly refuse to do memes “properly” (i.e. I tend not to tag other people to post on the same meme) this one struck me as a good one.

My style of reading these days is to have about half a dozen books on the go, stashed in various areas of the house for when & where the yen strikes me to read a chapter or three. They are usually about half speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy), one good mystery novel, one historical fact or fiction, and one popular science. At the moment, I confess, I’m not really stretching myself.
Continue reading ‘What book are you currently reading?’

The Henson Case and David Marr

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Advertising, Art, Books, Writers & Writing, Consumerism, Ethics, Media, Parenting and Politics
. 51 Comments

Well, I shelled out $24.95 for David Marr’s book, The Henson Case. I’m still inclined to think that Marr is being a bit disingenuous in claiming that he’s horrified and surprised by the furore that’s arisen over the “scouting in schools” affair/beat up and I still think it raises some broader questions about the appropriateness of the use of schools for any commercial/culture industries purposes, but that horse has probably bolted now. I’m not sure everyone’s aware that this particular media storm didn’t arise via some journo or researcher for tv or radio pouring over the book and striking headline paydirt on p. 108. Marr was actually the first to highlight this aspect of the book, featuring it in an article he wrote for his own Sydney Morning Herald on Friday - tagged as an exclusive. The book wasn’t on sale on Monday, and advance copies would have been tightly controlled by his publisher prior to that - I can’t see Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or whoever being on Text Inc’s reviewers list.

I really don’t think Marr is so naive as to believe that others in the media wouldn’t pick up on that one aspect and make it into a very predictable story - as a senior journalist, and a former host of Media Watch, and incidentally someone who traces minutely and with great acuity the process by which the Henson story blew up in the first place (and displays an intimate knowledge of pr strategies) in his book. While Pavlov’s Cat has a lot of things to say that I agree with in this excellent post, I would respectfully disagree with her argument that Marr, publisher Michael Heyward and Text Inc. wouldn’t be attentive to the need for publicity for the book. Sure, Marr’s a very well known writer and the case was big news. But attention spans are short, and surely the whole point of marketing in book publishing is to create a buzz about a book and generate free publicity. When I bought it on Monday in a Brisbane CBD bookshop, it had been walking out the door and I was lucky to grab the last copy.

Continue reading ‘The Henson Case and David Marr’

Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 4 weeks ago
in Art, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Media, Photography, Politics and Sociology
. 27 Comments

As no doubt everyone has noticed, there has been a vigorous discussion in comments about the latest Bill Henson brouhouha. I don’t want to comment explicitly on the issues raised by David Marr’s “revelation” that Henson had visited a primary school in St Kilda to scout for subjects for his photographs, because I honestly don’t think the debate’s much advanced over the last round, which was covered very extensively here at LP in a series of posts, and I haven’t shifted my own view. Except to note that I agree that David Marr is probably the person who should be brought to task for dealing unethically with Henson in his rush to find a salacious story to publicise his book, which was released today. I’m sure we’re quite sensitised now to the confection of “news” to help book sales after the unending Peter Costello sales job. As a professional journalist of long standing, Marr knows better than most how to manipulate a story, and perhaps it’s the ethics of his dealing with his subject that should also be questioned.

I did want to talk about one comment which really goes to the heart of the bigger issues around Henson’s art and his professional practice - and which when viewed from a long term perspective, I think explains more of what’s going on than the framing of the previous debate in terms of “freedom of speech”. Alison Croggon, who organised the petition to Kevin Rudd about Bill Henson’s images some time ago when they were seized by police from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, had this to say:

Alison Croggon, who organised an open letter supporting Henson from cultural delegates to the 2020 Summit, said the controversy also exposed distrust of the arts community.

“The thing that shocked me most of all about the debate was the perception that artists were above the law or were asking for special exemptions, but that was never the case,” she said. “There is a responsibility in the artistic community to address that.”

It has, of course, been addressed to some extent with the development of guidelines for artists working with minors by the Australia Council, after a request from Arts Minister Peter Garrett. But that, of course, is not as salacious a topic for the media than a beatup about putative pervs in schoolyards. Nevertheless, the disjunction between “the arts community” and publics who aren’t necessarily normally aware of its norms and practices is at the centre of all this. I didn’t know, for instance, that all manner of cultural and media industries folk seek permission regularly to utilise schools for casting, which has been the defence of Henson’s actions offered - see for example, this article in The Age by Peter Craven. A while back, my interest piqued by the whole Henson furore, I read American cultural historian Michael Kammen’s Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture.

Continue reading ‘Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art’

Lazy Sunday! (Thesis finishing edition)

Published
by
Mark
2 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane, Education, Film, TV, Video etc, Life, Photography and Urbanism
. 35 Comments

Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!

Although it’s been uni break over the last week, I’ve been a busy boy. I now have a date with destiny for my doctorate - I’m presenting to a final seminar on 30 October. This is the internal examination stage of phd completion according to the QUT rules - it’s a bit like a viva voce where you talk about what you’ve done and found and are questioned by a panel of senior academics (and the audience!) - in my case from QUT’s Humanities Program (once was a Faculty…) I more or less wrapped the thing up on Friday, did a little revision yesterday, and lazed around last night and watched Maggie Cheung movies on dvd, and today and tomorrow before the teaching and marking onslaught resumes, I’m giving the thesis a final spit and polish.

So I’m very chuffed!

Folks might also remember I’ve been doing a bit of travel writing - of the insider’s guide to where you live variety. I filed my copy for that and sent in the invoice on Tuesday arvo, and it was a really neat gig. On Monday, I went for a wander around Paddington and took some photos - not for the project itself - but as an aide memoire. It turned out to be a dodgy day to be walking - 35 degrees maximum. But it did also prompt me to decide that walking for about an hour a day was a good custom to be revived - so I’ve been doing that ever since - in the late afternoon on cooler days and at night on hotter days. Anyway, here’s the photographic record of my Paddo perambulations. It’s a really nice part of the world, and somewhere I wouldn’t mind living. But the real estate market would really have to collapse before I could contemplate buying there!


White picket fence II by *phenomenologist on deviantART

If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.

Continue reading ‘Lazy Sunday! (Thesis finishing edition)’

Parentonomics

Published
by
Robert Merkel
2 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Economics and Parenting
. 93 Comments

I recently heard Hugh Mackay give a talk on his forthcoming book, Advance Australia…Where?. Amongst his many claims was the idea those thirstysomethings and fortysomethings without children are becoming increasingly separated from those with them. To paraphrase, the child-free find the child-inflicted’s endless stories about their children’s bowel movements incredibly dull, the child-blessed find their child-deprived peers’ endless jaunts rather self-indulgent.

But it was not until Melbourne Business School economics professor and econoblogger Joshua Gans sent me his latest book Parentonomics to review that this point really sank home. Intellectually, I can imagine myself in his shoes. But the issues about which he writes are ones I haven’t directly experienced since I went through them from the other end of the stick.

Continue reading ‘Parentonomics’