It's official. Please pop by.
http://austlit.typepad.com/cfn
All the posts from this site are archived there, sorry I was too impatient to list comments individually.
 The name (this update in April 2008) has been changed - please change your bookmarks if you have been kind enough to blogroll this space (and I have not emailed you already).
Goodbye little green, grey and red place, you have served me well....(yes, I know the colours have changed. My goodness this is old, isn't it. )

group blogs are GO

Another great offering, this time from a conglomerate of litbloggers who are not necessarily academics. Sorry, that should read Co-Operative. My fave blogger Mark Sarvas has rounded up all their strength and sweetness into one...umm, the Marvell parody just ran out of juice right there. But you should have a look, it's a useful space which should work very well.

Both this blog and The Valve will provide the interested reader with constant analysis of the phenomenon of litblogging. So I will be pointing you in the direction of a few titbits from time to time, saving myself the task of said analysis, as well as hanging around 400 Windmills, Chekhov's Mistress, the Australian blogs listed on the right, and The Elegant Variation.

I'm enjoying the travel to work on the train as an excuse to indulge the charming Melburnian habit of reading on the rails ( apparently not very common on public transport in the States, some bloggers claim).

Recent reading: Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album, interspersed with literary mags from the Victorian Writers' Centre ( one of which published two articles from weblogs), chunks of Don Quixote and the Phoenix Book of Irish Short Stories 2003 ( okay, I read that one at home in bed like a good Melburnian). And speaking of bed...

abandoning the print

Dan Gillmor's portentousness aside, this is an interesting and substantial piece on the flight to online news sources.

Finding a Valve - what would Trilling do?

‘Your voice is your own, if you take responsibility for it. This unimpaired prospect of suiting myself holds back concerns that the sheer volume of blogstuff has gotten appetite suppressing… Then there is the worry that compulsively reading 30+ blogs a day has all the hallmarks of mild narcotic addition. And, yes, the fact that the blogosphere has been colonized by all literary and intellectual vices known to man, and a few invented specially for the occasion.’

From a lovely new offering, The Valve, Miriam Burstein of The Little Professor and Dan Green of The Reading Experience are part of this venture and the first substantial post on offer is written with Trilling’s essay, “The Function of the Little Magazine” very much in mind.

I couldn’t help chuckling the first time I read this – I really thought they meant invented voices here, not vices. And plead guilty on all counts. Even if I’m not being paid to speak or play up, Fran.

getting around the traps

Blogrolled again - this time at Mountain Murmurs and Stack.
Mountain Murmurs is one of those lovely creations developed by yet another cleversocks who knows how to install Wordpress. Great design, Ron...There seem to be quite a few Wordpress devotees in Australia - Kent at Dock of the Bay is another.
Stack is a friendly spot for booklovers and those of you already reading overseas literature blogs. Georgina hails from NSW but despite that! we are pretty much kindred spirits. This post is pretty funny - shades of Black Books.

Writers and Blogs

Librarians love to compile search logs, and love to develope little silvery snail trails across the Web of how they did this and that.
And these tools are terrific as long as they fulfil the following criteria:
The Right Tool ( relevance, topicality, ability to be updated)
The Visible ( find it!) Tool
I intend to write a log of the blogging trip and am finding that the trap with this blog as journal/repository is that it can be all things at once – and nothing. I will write a chat piece about tools, rather than write the serious log I need to compile on this blogging trip so I can deliver materials at some time in the future to writers who might (conceivably!) be interested.

Inner voice says – but you will write the log. Put it on the list. And spend some time away from the blog. (Inner voice speaks in purest green, Arial.)

I do wonder, however, if I would write about this at all if I didn’t have a blog – which begs the question of what kind of person blogs in the first place.

Writers of fiction who have not worked, for example, as journalists or researchers, or in public relations, might find the sometimes feverish quality of this deeply hyperlinked discourse unsettling. I’m already finding it works well as a writing exercise – but what am I producing? What am I opening up when I open my Bloglines subs and start webhopping? Am I a locust? A scavenger?

Librarians are big on purpose and direction because if they have any cataloguing experience at all, they are ripping into print and online materials quickly every time they open something, trying to determine where relevant subject matter is and what their users will do with it.

I’ve enjoyed this over the past four years as I study and enter the profession, but suspect it detracts from the meditative qualities prized by writers I enjoy – Wordsworth, Marvell, George Herbert, most of the high modernists, people like Shirley Hazzard and W.G. Sebald, Carson McCullers, Randolph Stow, Tobias Wolff…

I somehow suspect the writer’s mind might work differently, though it could simply be me feeling Romantic.

What could fiction lose? if all writers blog?

How many Cantos does the world need after all?

Hang it all, Browning, perhaps it is time to read Sordello.

B for Blood (and beginning a weblog research collection)

Blood, Rebecca. "Hammer, nail: how blogging software reshaped the online community", Communications of the ACM. December 2004: Rebecca's Pocket 18 January 2005.
Blood, Rebecca."Ten tips for a better weblog", Rebecca's Pocket. 22 March 2003.
Blood, Rebecca. "The revolution should not be eulogised." ( this citation can wait, I've got a date with Typepad this Easter).
Blood, Rebecca. "There is a weblog in your future." Blogger Knowledge Base.

And D for Dan of course - check out this discussion. Topical, this whole blog will be in my collection.
Dan Green's Statement of Purpose will be filed away under Litblog Research.

Pluck out its eyes, prioritise...

If I can't get Typepad up by the end of the Easter break, I may well be putting this blog on the backburner for a few months. There will be a weekly update, but I have recently been employed! and have a lot of background management to orchestrate.

While I'm incredibly grateful to the people who have given me my break into the workforce after twenty two years at home - there are some wonderful people out there, non? - it is going to take some ingenuity, and occasionally some of my husband's carer leave, to juggle all this.

So this late- night ramble is in the form of online planning for the categories that may never happen but would be included on any future incarnation of CFN:
Litblog reviews
-Media (print, online)
-Original reviews by yours truly - a quick reference guide for the locals (and anyone else who is
interested in an outsider's opinion!)
Literature
Online writing resources
Journalism
Technology
History
Blogospherica - commentary ( mine and others) on where blogging is going in its various incarnations
- small section on Blogging Tools, resources if I find some stuff worth saving
If my employment does not resume again after its introductory period of three months ( yep, they're using up some funding on training new casuals), then these things may yet come to pass... In the meantime this corner is going to be less assiduously manned.

the cowardly lioness

Dan Gillmor reports on some interesting comments from Tina Brown, the powerful (ex?) magazine editor, on the role of bloggers. This ain't nice folks. It is not necessary to bandy terms like Stasi around - stopping just short of KGB or Gestapo, is she? I thought they were all pretty much the same in my versions of history.

I don't think I'll ever get used to female journos who say things like this about other women - this pap is directed at Condoleeza Rice, whose politics I oppose, but whose rise I am impressed by in my misguided li'l hippy heart
(okay, I know, I'm discriminating against powerful white women here ):

Condi seems to have shed gender, shed race, shed the need for any visible emotional life. Her hobbies -- ice skating, chamber music -- are intellectually pristine and demurely glamorous. As national security adviser in the Church Lady White House, she was the Policy Nun. As secretary of state and queen of Foggy Bottom, she shows signs of becoming the Bushies' Emma Peel.

I take exception to this nonsense here- it really is a lightweight piece ( Washington Post) with an aim to skewering bloggers on the pointy end of a media backlash:

We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks.

Slowly? Who the hell is she talking to here? Not the public, that's for sure. Like the print and broadcast media haven't been doing this for at least fifty years already? QUE??

And the last para is too silly really. If Ms. Brown doesn't want people to talk about her, but wants the freedom to print anything she feels like, then surely she is 'shedding' a few fundamentals herself.

we're not going on a bear-hunt again

This is quite humorous.

past the point of peer review...

The National Magazine Awards (US) have a category for General Excellence Online - it includes weblogs (though none have been nominated this year). Link via Bookslut.

free and for nothing

The contents table of the London Review of Books. Articles available online at this time appear in red. I’m not sure how much goes into the archive so that is worth a look too. I did check the subscription for this once and it is pretty expensive – a pleb like myself will have to go to the State Library ( or maybe the Carlton or City Library ) to photocopy other interesting titbits.

I decided to blog this because one of the online pieces for March 17 is called “Some of them can read” and is a review of a book on rats, specifically those in the city of New York. ( Parochial, non?)

One of the most chilling articles I have ever read in Granta magazine was about the rats Werner Herzog employed for his remake of the silent classic Nosferatu. Simply entitled ‘Rats’, in Granta 86: Film. (Unfortunately not online –get thee to a good library, go.) The sad thing is that it is probably not the worst Werner Herzog story out there either…

reading blogs

Looks like the Gaddis Drinking Club is pretty much wrapped up. Bud Parr and I have attempted to summarise the last 350 pp. for the masses. Perhaps we are both people who prefer our virtual objects in a format approaching completion? that's a compulsion, isn't it. If only I felt as strongly about my cupboards - and garden...

One of the top US bloggers, with one of the most beautifully designed blogs you will see anywhere at Chekhov's Mistress, Bud has a new project under way, still an enormous book but much better known. Definitely not an impossible dream...!! Check it out.

poets' corner

While travelling courtesy of the Guardian's Picks to the London News Review Diary, I found some comments and links to Don Paterson's T.S. Eliot Lecture of 2004. Not terribly easy to find the whole text, but I managed with the help of the Google fairy.
Notice how it is buried deep in the Poetry Library site , just in case you were looking for it or something?? Talk about the invisible Web. As it qualifies as “news” it might not stay there for long.

Paterson says some interesting, if occasionally conservative things; dismisses Pinter’s attempts at a poem on Iraq with aplomb; gets very hippy and dreamy in the middle, with a quite peculiar parenthetical remark about marsupials, and is occasionally blistering;

'Of course we should meet poets at least half-way – the poem, in fact, demands the complicity of the reader in its own creation; however the amount of running certain readers are making in the relationship should be a matter of mortal embarrassment to them.'

And is sometimes quite pellucid, not unlike his Indian friend who said to him, ‘in this country you spend a lot of time trying to connect things that are already connected.’
Unfortunately the whole thing is very light on examples and therefore confined to generalisations. That’s just what I think...And I'm going to add poet Michael Donaghy to the TBR list, and keep an eye on the London News Diary, which the Guardian suggests is akin to ' taking a peek inside the mind of your oddest, funniest friend'. We shall see...

COR this is good.

Digby send me an email… Why a senior publisher is not interested in publishing books by major journalists who are underrepresented in the blogosphere. From PressThink, the blog of New York journalism academic, Jay Rosen.
There are some very telling points made about the power of blogs in this post by Eric Nelson, a senior editor in current affairs and history at Wiley and Sons:

'...if absolutely no one is blogging your stuff, no one’s reading it in the paper either.'

Towards the end he distinguishes the experienced journo from the garden variety blogger, but his sympathies seem to lie with the blogosphere:

'The truth is most bloggers are editors, picking the best bits of the web to show their readers; they are not reporters or architects of elegant policy arguments. The ones that are reporters and architects, usually have a pretty good non-digital resume to back it up.'

All good stuff, but what spoke most eloquently to me was the first comment to this post, about the ordinary blogger ( presumably by an 'ordinary' blogger):

'We are part of the private, recent, non-geek, non-old-boy bloggers, with insignificant stats, who think aloud in public, becoming a part of varied conversations, adding a nano-gram to consensus or controversy on certain subjects, and occasionally achieving a mini-scoop by virtue of observation or privileged access in our own circle.
When in retrospect blogs are evaluated, we believe it will be this kind of ordinary educated citizens' distributed intelligence with its impact on the market and the polity, including the expressive content of millions who also read the expression of others, that will have rumbled the tectonic foundation of our common life.'

Rumble on. We may feel anxious about legislative attempts to keep the top bloggers' identities out in the open, but they are 'one and we are many, and from all the lands on earth we come.'

the shrinking life

Arrrrgh.
Car - oil all over the road in front of the Cop Shop ( as we call them down here). Mercifully the cops took no notice. They are gentlemen at Nunawading, I should have asked them to drive us all home.

Computer - re-imaged by Yours Truly ce matin. Quelle fookin' blague. ( that's franglais for what a fucking joke).

(Never mind what loathsome things I had to do with Safe Mode and floppy discs to save some precious fragments to shore against my ruins. It's often slow things that slowly bring me unravelled.
I can't ever remember computers being that slow, but they were, people! They were, and we sat there marvelling at how clever they were! How silly were we?)

Washing machine - new! wow. Technostress is setting in. When will Typepad and I be united?

Seriously, in 20 years of driving ( four cars, too) I have never seen oil leak like that.
To add insult to injury, I got home with my eldest son to discover that the young 'uns ( 18, 16) had ordered pizza from the slowest store they possibly could - but hey, that's me suffering 21st Century Stress. Thank God for our new wine cellar in the laundry, left over from the 50th. Next to my new washing machine. Three cheers for Pollyanna, I have my crutches.
( As long as my autistic son doesn't throw out my wine when I am not looking - he is very tidy right now and got rid of two whole glasses last week).

the time has come, a fact's a fact

Now is the time ( that's right, I had a sleep-in and I'm reading the paper in bed), to start the drafts for the Blog Log. Wouldn’t be a librarian’s Techie Day Out without a log, I'm afraid.
( Is what librarians do all the time Mrs. Fawlty – Actually an incredibly useful idea once you’ve learned how to file your log away in a place where you will find it again. Aaah, library school!)

I have noted these kinds of musings scattered across the blogs I read – they remind me of the old song from Paint Your Wagon,
"where are we going, I don't know,
when will we get there, I ain't certain,
All I know is I am on my way..."

I’d like my Blog Log category to be a neat little parcel of similarly themed, Quo Vadis pieces. If anyone knows the Latin for ‘How did I get here’ I’d be very happy to hear from them.

David Tiley of Barista left a comment here the other day about litblog workshopping and what the content might involve – I think he has answered the question as well, it is about where it might go next. Sometimes. It might also be about 'the beauty of the way, and the kindness of the wayfarers" (apologies there Sam B.), as it is with most blogging.
Also for writers there might be some use in encouragement to see what tech tools like blogs have to offer before going to the trouble to sit clicking through several registrations and attendant fol-de-rols. We don’t have all day, do we? To play with Typepad and Mozilla, Bloglines and Feedster, to find out who Rebecca was and what she keeps in her pocket.

Let's face it, it takes time away from producing content which is publishable ( unlike this unstructured rant). So if someone will put up a powerpoint presentation with a few links in it to take away, why not roll up? ( Please don't worry, the next post in this series will be ruthlessly bulletpointed.)

David also mentioned he has organised a 'loose' gathering at Spleen, Tuesday 15 March from 6.30 onwards, at the top end of Bourke Street. All Melbourne bloggers and friends invited, I think - check it out.

a nose for these things

A compelling review by Brenda Niall appeared in The Age today ( sorry, registration is required for this one already). I will get this book, Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing, after I’ve got hold of Sebald's Campo Santo and there will be much rejoicing ( as was remarked when Robin’s minstrels were eaten).
This is Lee's second book to include material on Woolf ( this one appears in the Amazon catalogue as Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography) and she apparently has ' sharp things to say' about the film The Hours. Niall says,

As the reflections of a professional biographer, Body Parts will have special interest for anyone who attempts that craft. Yet it has an unexpected breadth of appeal...the occupational risks of biography, which include narcissism and possessiveness, are everyday hazards in human relationships. Among many wonderful stories about the living and the dead, a few are disappointing...it is a pity Graham McInnes' portrait of his mother Angela Thirkell in The Road to Gundagai was not taken into account in Lee's chapter on the snobbish world of Thirkell's novels. Thirkell's brief exile in Melbourne brought out the worst in her. "Mother was awful," McInnes wrote, "but I loved her."

Brenda Niall has written several bios of Australian writers and artists, and I’ve yet to digest her extended treatment of Martin Boyd’s family, The Boyds. Dipping into it quickly I did find much I had already read in her book about Martin himself.
(For State-siders reading this, Martin Boyd was a lively and urbane recreator of late nineteenth century Melbourne life in his novels, the most famous being the four books known as the Langton Quartet. I adore all of them. More on A Difficult Young Man another time.
By the way, I didn't know Amazon provided citations via email.)

Visitors from Blusterhead, on the other hand, are highly likely to know exactly who Martin was and how famous his nephew Arthur and other family members are in Australia. One of my regrets ( among several, not an extensive list) is that I did not visit Bundanon before Arthur died a few years back. Imagine seeing Australia’s greatest living painter at work, as he was wont to do for visitors... and yours truly missed the opportunity.

blogclog

Some problems with comments today... only since the morning (Eastern Australia time 12 pm).
Let's see what happens tomorrow.

the Guardian's quick picks

If you can’t wait for me to dig up the Guardian list, where Mark Sarvas was damned with faint praise ( bastards!), here it is.
On revisiting this list I realise I haven’t looked at a lot of these other than Bookslut and TEV – the rest may well be English. Je ne sais pas. The time may well have come for a blog that reviews litblogs. Why leave it to the newspapers?

what book blogs can do?

Have a look at this discussion on Dan Green’s excellent blog, The Reading Experience. The number of extant articles on litblogging in the US and UK is growing slowly, I’ll file a post soon which references to a few (and maybe stick some permanently in the sidebar).
The article mentioned by Green is by J.Peder Zane: coming from a North Carolina publication, News Observer, puts it pretty much in the lightweight category, but nonetheless it triggered responses from some of my favourite people ( now more accessible since I subscribed to Bloglines). The discussion is worth a look, and demonstrates clearly to me that the charm of this kind of ‘smart cocktail party’, as Zane rather crankily puts it, is the speed with which a throwaway phrase can telescope out into a more thorough digestion of a question via the humble hyperlink.
Thinking out loud? rather than learned conversation? Perhaps, but it beats free to air TV hands down. (You may care to check out Dan's posts on Robert McCrum and Richard Curtis while you're there.)

oz poetry news

A review of the most recent collection of Andrew Sant's poetry, Tremors, is posted over at Verse. (Thanks to Ivy at North of the latte line for the link.)

what can writers do for blogging

Mark Sarvas ( he of TEV fame) has taken the plunge and networked with the L.A. chapter of PEN to float the idea of a litblogging workshop for authors. I am a tad surprised as I thought the American scene was full of blogging writers - but it appears this is 'an idea whose time has come'.
Check out also the article he links to regarding an agent's fearful view of litblogging - quite alarmist, worthy of the most timid of '80s librarians. (No more books! No more publishers! he even says, no more gatekeepers...!!)

On our patch, Express Media, in conjunction with the Victorian Writers' Centre, are having an Emerging Writers' Festival in May which I intend to check out with a view to finding out more about where young writers see blogging going in this country. It is reasonable at this point to assume they will have a stronger interest than older writers - or is it? Perhaps there'll be blogging workshops at every main writing festival in 2006...The wave approaches, when and where will it break, I wonder?

read all about it

These people are still running their Tournament Of Books : the final round sees The Plot Against America shaping up against Cloud Atlas, with a stellar list of litbloggers commenting on the stoush. Also there's an interview with Robert McCrum, literary editor at The Guardian and the author of a new bio on P.G. Wodehouse. The interviewer, Robert Birnbaum, works out of Boston and has also interviewed Louis de Bernieres, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Lethem and Peter Carey, among many others. The interviews archive is worth a look, as is the whole site.

100 bloggers marching along, 100 bloggers singing a song

Jon Strande’s 100 Bloggers book should be out in April or May. The project began, as I’ve noted in an earlier post, in December 2004 and I wanted today to quote extensively from some of the contributors’ responses to Jon’s inquiry,

1.) What does 100 bloggers mean to you?
2.) How are you explaining it to others?

The comments in full appear here.

We'll start with the comments of John Moore from Brand Autopsy:

The purpose of the 100 Bloggers project is to showcase the connectedness of blogging and bloggers and to highlight the power of a networked conversation.

Frank Paynter of Sandhill Trek wrote:

100 BLOGGERS is for me an opportunity to contribute a few tiles to a mosaic that will, I hope, when all have contributed reveal a picture of something new, broad, different that is happening in the world of arts and letters - culture and commerce.

Brendan of Slackermanager wrote:

I've been describing it to others simply as a book that has 100 different perspectives on why blogs are important and why the authors are writing. What I haven't really thought about until now is that it seems the majority of writers are business bloggers to some degree. Hmmm. As to the first question, I'm just curious to read the responses everyone gives. Unrelated note: it would be really nice to have an OPML file of all 100 feeds. The book could reference the file and readers could subscribe to all 100 at once.

Dave Pollard’s comments are not representative of the content providers as a whole but throw some light on the kind of perspective sometimes taken in business blogging, one which interests me because of the time I spent mooching around the Worthwhile.com blog before the magazine launch.( That’s right, a PR blog).

I'm very focused on the CUSTOMER. What 100Bloggers means to me is an opportunity to open up a new world of writing and connection to people with a literary bent who are now only participating as readers. I'd like to see the outcome of the book being 1,000,000NewBloggers. That's why I think it's so essential that we each convey clearly WHY we blog in our chapters -- it's more important than the rest of the content in the book, and that Chapter One be a SYNOPSIS of those reasons. Then the last chapter tells them HOW to blog. I'd love to see each blog that starts because of our book put a little logo on their blog to acknowledge us as their inspiration, and virally market the book at the same time.

One of my favourites, Jory Desjardins, had this to say:

To me 100 Bloggers is an introduction for those who are exposed only to traditional media to blog content. They are used to reading ideas diluted by editors' concerns for advertisers, editorial guidelines, etc. They assume that other forms of media are dishing out the best there is to offer because they pick and choose what that content will be. In fact, the best and most innovative "stuff" is coming from blogs, but blogs are hard to vector. You need to enter into the conversation and become a part of the blogosphere, typically, before you know what blogs appeal to you. We're cutting through that and offering up peer-reviewed work. I don't even think book editors "get" what's the best on the Web--they read USA Today to get a sense of what's out there rather than really dig for content. We're saving the public the trouble.

At least one commenter , David Wolfe, has noted the similarity between blogging and letter-writing:

Blogging has restored the pre-20th century practice of people routinely communicating informally with each other through the written word. The main difference is, bloggers can speak to an audience of many because of the distribitive nature of the Internet.100 Bloggers is a show and tell exposition that demonstrates the professional and personal benefits of blogging.

Chris Corrigan announces that new voices will be heard in this book:

I've been telling others that the book will be an exploration of voice, and that people will see how the medium of blogging is being used by voices to give rise to meaning across cultures and continents. I've also been saying that these bloggers are not the A-list bloggers we have heard from before: instead, the bloggers in this book are mostly newer voices coming at blogging from a variety of perspectives.

And finally Mick Stanic of SplaTT throws down a gauntlet to those outside the blogosphere:

How do explain the book to others? As a great way to get the perspective of 100 amazing and intelligent people on the power of blogs. You don’t have to listen to the lone voices like me…but at some stage, you are going to have to listen to the combined voices of all of us.

In the political arena, it seems to be speed that gives blogs a voice; in the literary scene, the voices are myriad and often heard but not commented on, like a quiet wave gathering strength in the background; so what impact will a book have on business, marketing and general blogging? What if it has no impact at all? How will it be marketed? ( I'm not crazy about Pollard's suggestion myself - it's certainly viral, but is it marketing?) All questions that need to be asked.

you heard him the first time - Adolf's grandson

Pretty much in the flavour of our local CNNNN, from the real CNN's Jon Stewart Daily Show.
I have to show this to my husband, he keeps bringing Financial Review articles on blogging home for me. Found via Halley Suitt and Buzz Machine.

the kindness of bloggers

Another supportive mention for li'l CFN!! at Chekhov's Mistress. (The Fernham blog is an attraction I have also visited via Chekhovia.) Bud Parr and Scott Esposito co-host this elegant New York blog, the envy of all those who visit. An erudite, considered tone and beautiful webdesign to boot. Check out (among other great things) this thoughtful summary of the litblogging scene ( and the links in the update too).

Sir Sagramore is fit, and Sir Lionel feels sublime

Keeping up with the joust? ( Click on the brackets in the right column to see other judges' deliberations in full.)

and speaking of circles

...thanks to David Tiley of Barista for his kind words and direction via trackback to another Ozblog with a general interest in literature, Troppo.
I'm not going to paste in the Haloscan code for trackback this week because I will migrate to Typepad in a couple of weeks' time, all going well.
I and my children are holding a major party for their dad next Sunday, Magpie balloowins ( only a few, mixed with silvery grey ones) and all - once that's over I'm going to get serious about managing the content on this blog.
The Gaddis blog is quieter, but hey, I stretched my brain. The balance struck on the American litblogs between pithy webchat and litcrit is very attractive. Please have a good look at any of those down below sometime and you will see exactly what I mean.
The Troppo trackback has connected me to Stack and Catallaxy - hopefully more Australian litblog connections are whistling down the cable. A while ago I found Alison Croggon's blog on theatre, Theatre Notes, and a Tasmanian blog, North of the Latte Line. The hunt continues.

where WAS salman?

We are blest here to have a gifted interviewer with the knack of getting her guests to choose music to punctuate the interview, then getting them to unwind. I was enthralled by Margaret Throsby's encounter today with Marianne Wiggins, an author whose work was temporarily derailed ten years ago by her proximity to Salman Rushdie - she was married to him at the time. Wiggins suggested in the interview that there is a book in the matter, however when pressed by Throsby as to when, then claimed it was Salman's story after all. I'm going to get hold of her latest novel, Evidence of things unseen ASAP - suffice it to say she engaged me totally.
But then Margaret is very good at letting people do that. ( The audio should be at the link for at least two weeks, so hurry along. You will not be disappointed.)

give me a home among the gumtrees

Moving right along from the previous post on Sonya Hartnett, it is possible to situate Craven’s review of Hartnett’s book in the context of a salvage operation when one considers it in the light of Andrew McCann’s blistering attack in Overland on the eucalypt aesthetic of well-published Australian writers such as Malouf, Carey, Bail and even Patrick White.
Reprinted in the same paper a few weeks ago, McCann has this to say ( and plenty more) about the state of Australian fiction:

…the various forms of intertextuality, magical realism and fabulism that we find in the work of Carey are often more important than any enduring interest in the political-historical issues Carey’s novels otherwise raise, issues that might ultimately compel us to question the aesthetic tradition in which he writes. This tendency is full-blown in Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, a novel that opens as a critique of “dun-coloured” realism and that promises to engage with the ideological baggage of cultural nationalism, but that finally settles for the seductions of storytelling and a predictable claim on the reader’s desire for textual pleasure that is bound up with a tokenistic sort of cosmopolitanism. Similarly the mysticism of David Malouf, indebted to Patrick White’s modernist transcendentalism, returns us to the spiritual and the lyrical as the bedrocks of a literary aesthetic that has apparently survived its entanglement with colonial ideology. The overwhelming tendency is to supplement one pattern of limitation (realism) with a series of gentle and unthreatening upgrades designed to consolidate the ‘literary’ character of a text without running the risk of alienating readers: “art’s reconciling glow enfolding the world”, as Adorno, full of an irony bordering on disgust, put it.

And some good points to make about the dispersal of literary texts to the public – he speaks of vertical models, Kracauer and other tasty titbits. The article has helped stir and shake me a little. And I’m pleased to have returned to Overland today to find it online.

PR, sweetie

'Huge bookstore chains on every highway, Internet retailers, blogs, book clubs and other tools of publicity have changed the scale of the [fiction publishing] business', claims Wesley Yang of the New York Observer ( found first on TEV). I find that a luxurious sort of statement, I don’t think litbloggers are in this to make the publicists’ or publishers' lives easier. Unless it's to highlight the idiocy of chasing prizewinners and hot new things. Wang' s article addresses this last behaviour tellingly.

sweet surrender

Peter Craven gives high praise to Sonya Hartnett's new book in today's Review ( Weekend Australian) - not easy to see from here however, so here's a slice:

I don't think any of the feasible interpretative systems - Laingian or Jungian, Christian or gnostic - can contain this luminous nightmare that Hartnett has thrown in our faces like a revelation. The only thing that remotely reminds me of Surrender is the verse novel by the great Canadian poet Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red, a long poem of contemporary life and one of the greatest poems of the past 50 years, in which the young hero is also the monster Geryon, red and winged.
Hartnett is a writer of vast ambitions and singular gifts. Her imagination is as savage as Dostoevsky's or Emily Bronte's and as gothic as a death's head. She has as keening a sense of the tears in things and the doom that falls like rains as any latter-day tragedian from the American south. It's fortunate that she also has the humour and the poetry to make the art she creates wonderful and bright... [Surrender] is full of beauty and terror and unearthly poetry and it traces with something like love the beauty of youthful faces that must fade and die.

Sonya Hartnett is 36 and has been a published writer of fiction since schooldays at our alma mater, Siena College in Camberwell ( a pretty bland space for such a talent to mature in - our other famous past student is Magda Szubanski, Mrs. Hoggett from the Babe films.). Other novels include Sleeping Dogs, Of A Boy, Wilful Blue and Forest. I can thoroughly recommend Sleeping Dogs and Wilful Blue, and am yet to read the others. She does have a spare, dark touch as Craven notes that is easy on the ear but not gentle on the imagination.

100 bloggers: from little things, big things grow

An interesting demonstration of the power of the blog ( to publish collaboratively in this case), here .

notes from the diaspora

This fine writer continues at full strength. The first international blogger I've read who may know someone I know. Time to start a 'Life and the blog' category in them links down there.

Mmm..what does the Lord want me to wear today?

I have saved this post to share with my daughter - she is a South Park devotee and understands such kookiness.

brouhaha alert ( okay, so it was a while ago...)

PR versus Pressthink. Words, words - who is spinning the hardest? You be the judge.

Although I do not hope to turn again...

Caught up with the Gaddis reading at last and pulled a couple of chapters of Steven Moore's book off the Internet to read. What an amazing book The Recognitions is, it is surprising that it is not better known or more widely studied. Or is it? Should I be surprised, after all Faulkner was out of print for a while. As I have already noted on the blog, perhaps there is not enough room for T.Recs on a university reading list that would automatically include Ulysses and ( maybe not automatically) some Beckett prose. A chase around the noticeboards, anyone? I just look in the Melbourne Uni bookshop de temps en temps, is worrying enough ( what ARE our students paying to read these days? Last time I looked it was The Story of O.)

should I stay or should I go

I've had a quick look at the bare bones of Blogger now and am not convinced that I can spare any more time to write 'out loud' as it were. As usual, I'm aware I need to read. Last night I chewed up more than half of Hanif Kureishi's 2001 novel, Gabriel's Gift - what a wry, sweet read this one is. And enjoyed some browsing time in the City Library over Broken Song, an enormous bio of the man behind Chatwin's concept of Australian Aboriginal songlines, T.G. Strehlow, linguist and translator of Aranda legends and songs. And all this must be done.
I had a couple more posts this week to work on, but there's Gaddis to re-read and Cloud Atlas to start, and the contents of the Australian Film Institute research collection to savour when I volunteer there on Tuesdays. Found a great book on Eisenstein and Dostoyevsky there yesterday... So I'm going to save my links in a text file and hang up the hat for a few weeks, or maybe months. Thanks for visiting and commenting, and putting up with me practising.

File under G for Gaddis, Gonzales &c.

The Gaddis blog kicked up a little over the weekend after I replied to a post: the chaps at Chekhov’s Mistress published their entries on both sites, what a good idea. My ramblings are not worth publishing anywhere and I hate to think what would have ensued had I fulfilled all the requirements for group membership and started in on my party supplies.
And thanks Ed, I’m up to speed on Mr. Gonzales now after catching this report in the Boston Globe. Has the world ever been safe for Geneva conventions ?

People who sit still think loudest

I’m going to write a full-blown evaluation of this woman’s stylish contribution to the blogosphere one day. For now, I’m happy enough to praise her categories:
Books
Boxed Sets
Brief Pauses
Current Affairs
Full-out Distractions
Long Pauses
Phenomena
Television
A blog can be a lovely thing, God wot… I really enjoy her writing style and her subject matter is a fruitful area for an ageing feminist like myself.

crying time

This is a truly shameful story. When will Johnny's government acknowledge what the coalition of the willing has acquiesced in, in the name of what exactly?

on the wickett

Interesting interviews with American literary journal editors - Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network runs these ( in chat sessions I guess) from time to time, and has interviewed two lots of litbloggers as well.

the search for knowledge - Pilgrim's Progress for the 'noughties

Mr. Locke encouraged me to sign up for a HighBeam research email alert on blogging tools which are currently being developed by this online research firm, so I did. And will try out their free trial when their website traffic is a little less hectic. RMIT University library uses this service, so it comes already recommended to me.
And yes, he has written one funny thing on his main blog about Emerson. I’m referring, of course, to his 21st century pilgrims Rank Opinion and Godly Bravado.

as they say in my country, surf's up

found a great pic at RageBoy, thank you Mr. Locke. Not trying to sound like a name-dropper here – being a librarian you want to TELL everybody where everything is all the fucking time. A bit tedious, what? But anyone who doesn’t already know the name JOHO should have a look there, here at Mr. Locke’s site and finally to the spot that started most of it – a nailing of theses to the 20th century Marketing Church door
Oh, and the picture? I just filed it under digital art – let me know where you think it really belongs. Locke simply says “wish she was my mom”.

ya ya ya, and we'll all have a glorious time

Note ye, note ye, that The Morning News and Powells Books are having the First Annual Tournament of Books.
I'm sure everyone in Australia will know once I post this ( Yeah!) and remember their Camelot choruses too.
You can find the brackets of jousting books here at The Morning News. A full explanation of this fun concept is offered here.
Given that Australians are in the grip of fourth round tennis fever here, a book tournament is probably just what the doctor ordered. But hang on, where's our Alicia? and our Lleyton?? Que??

and inside the bag there's a free choir

I'm beginning to see the light. What fun this is if you've done very basic HTML at library school and keep forgetting to try and use it.
I wonder if I could get good enough at this to offer to revamp the Monash Choral Society's website - they could do with a blog. This can be my practice ground I think. It is odd seeing I, I, I all over the page. I wonder how many bloggers feel this when they start up. Who am I talking to? I googled this site several ways last night and feel I am virtually anonymous. No one will look at this, so it's fair game for polishing the publishing without tears.
I'm off now - two bung showers in this house and the shower magician is doing his thang. It will all look groovy when my husband's four brothers and three sisters ( no he is not Manuel from Barcelona) come over for his birthday next week. That's right, they look at things that are broken. Plenty of these around here as we do most things in our heads and also have a handicapped son to care for. Off to have another coffee and read the rest of the Isak Dinesen interview I downloaded from the Paris Review archive yesterday. Delightful.

Time to blog I guess - and I only wanted a profile really

I am trying this out today. I guess librarians should know how to set up blogs anyway. All I really wanted to do was set up a profile in Blogger so I could join the Gaddis Drinking Club.

Since October/November of last year, when I first clicked through from TMTFL to Mark Sarvas' blog The Elegant Variation, I've been messing about with US litblogs, compiling reading lists to take to the library and generally having a good old stretch of the brain ( educated for free by Gough Whitlam in the very late 70s and courtesy of student loans again in the early 'noughties) in the blogosphere.

Already the book reviews in the local papers ( The Age, The Australian) look jaded to me,and the other day I found a Maureen Dowd article in hard copy around the house which I fully meant to read online when I got the password from Bugmenot to work.

Other uses I've found for weblogs? Last year I used Trevor Cook's blog, Corporate Engagement, for a bit of uni work on public relations and information seeking. And to be perfectly honest, I cut my blogging teeth commenting on posts at Worthwhile.com , and through them Frank Paynter's enjoyable SandhillTrek.
Hey, this is better fun than I thought - my son wants my attention already, he knows I'm up to something new! CYALL.