Hello, nice site :)

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Edited by author 01-23-2006 12:17 PM
Librarian lines

Carrie Tiffany, author of Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, writes on 'seems' and 'is' in the Aussie desert.

Books were scarce in the desert. The national park I worked on was serviced by a tourist resort that sold flyspray and wafer-thin boomerangs made in China. It did not sell books. The nearest books were in a library 400 kilometres away. I rang the library and joined up as a remote reader. Books would be sent out to me every month on one of the tourist buses. I couldn't access the catalogue so a librarian would choose the books on my behalf. My librarian was called Merv. I wrote him a note with a summary of my tastes. But I was 20 - it was the summary of a taste for something I had never eaten.

Maybe we don't all need therapists; maybe we need librarian mentors.

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The state of Aussie fiction
All is not well down under. Then again, maybe it's in great shape. Depends on your tastes, it seems.

Over the past few years we've been told it's mediocre and there's too much of it being published; it's overly concerned with historical and exotic themes; there's not enough of it reflecting contemporary life, politics and economics; it wears insipid pastel covers; it's fey, solipsistic, parochial, difficult, not difficult enough; people don't buy it and readers don't read it; and now, perhaps unsurprisingly given this litany of complaints, publishers are retreating from publishing it.

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The Truth is Down There

Oz likes non-fiction. That's funny. They seem to be buying into the novel that is John Howard's pro-Bush agenda...


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Edited by author 06-30-2005 10:33 AM
Point taken, and conceded.

Actually, the back of the OPC Gretzky card is pretty dull. You want the back of his 84-85 card so you can boggle at all the ridiculous scoring totals.

The White Verdict

Two critics debate whether Patrick White was ever worth reading. Wha?!? Um, as I understand it, this would akin to going to England and asking whether Shakespeare was worth reading. Or America and Hemingway or Canada and the back of the Opeechee Gretzky rookie card.


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Edited by author 03-28-2005 11:42 AM
Australian raconteurs dance the Matilda

Aussies have a group hoe-down. Crowd is huge, everyone's drunk, and no one notices that one man is ceremoniously slicing another's throat (see photo). Not to worry; it's all in good fun. And besides, you have to sex it up to get people out to poetry events.

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Gosh, those Aussies sure can write smutty lit gossip

I don't know who any of these people are, but I'd buy the book.



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Oz lit for dummies
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind presents a primer on Australian lit.

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There's no place like home
The Aussies wonder if it's all right to make fun of the Brits.


Let's get some of the racist insults out of the way first.

"Send Slopes back, police course told." "Pity a poor Jap: envied at home, insulted abroad." "Japies still fighting the bore war." "Am I a racist Paki-basher? No, I just hate pomposity." "Finally, real fun with a Chink." Offended? Surprised that a newspaper as reputable as the Herald would use such loaded, pejorative language?

Don't be. All the above are genuine headlines, taken from mainstream Sydney newspapers. In each one word has been changed. Instead of slope, Jap, japie, Paki or chink, the original headline writer used another term: "Pom".

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"Everything I've ever written is really about an area of 20 square miles"

John Kinsella profiled.

Kinsella's most recent book, Peripheral Light, is a selection of his poems with an introduction by American critic Harold Bloom, to whom one of the poems is dedicated. Bloom traces Kinsella's development as a poet from the lyrical early poems to his densely concentrated later poems, and notes an abiding pessimism. But what Bloom reads as pessimism is perhaps more protest, an intended goad to action.



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Canerder vs. Oz

"Significant differences between our two countries, he says, stem from the fact Australians experienced the possibility of losing their land to the Japanese in World War II. Another difference is our less brutal historical relationship with our native population." David Malouf is (right now) giving "the fifth annual LaFontaine-Baldwin lecture at University of Toronto's Convocation Hall, the first non-Canadian to do so." I know at least one little excited, accented ninja who is there. Seriously, if you haven't read Malouf, you're missing out. He's Australia's Ondaatje - a simply beautiful writer. My good pal Jonathan Bennett introduced me to Remembering Babylon and I was absolutely floored. It may be the single most memorable book I've ever read. An Imaginary Life was also incredible.



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