I have garlanded Tom Cho with that most sought-after of literary prizes: the suburban flower arrangement. Do you know what kind of books get this kind of treatment? Ones that I like.

My predisposition to love this book was cemented in two separate instances. First, I read ‘The Bodyguard’ in Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories 2007 while I was away over the summer. It was, hands-down, my favourite story in the collection, a breathtakingly aware literary roleplay which begins: ‘Someone is stalking Whitney Houston and I have been hired to be her bodyguard.’ No more explanation than that; an assumption you’re familiar with 90s Hollywood tripe; impassive I-strewn narration: I was fully hooked, bro. Second, hoping Cho would do a reading, I went to the launch of Look Who’s Morphing at Hares and Hyenas about a month ago. Lucky me! He read ‘Aiyo!!! An evil group of ninjas is entering and destroying a call centre!!!’, a story which certainly puts the kibosh on the ‘no more than 40 exclamation marks per page’ rule (don’t try it at home, kids). Gold-star funny piece with, rightly, no hesitation or anxious explication about bringing little-valorised South-East Asian shibboleths to Australian literature.

I hesitate to call the works ‘short stories’ (Cho calls them ‘fictions’), because, as with ‘Aiyo!!!…’ the pieces lend themselves very well to performance, and given Cho’s background in spoken word, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them passed through that medium in their development. From ‘A Counting Rhyme’: ‘One, two, buckle my shoe. Two, one, steamed pork bun.’ Don’t want to annoy myself or you by trying to discuss the ‘traditional’ short story, but most of the pieces are short, and feature a first-person point of view. The pieces are also connected through their performativity of the personal, and the inevitability of play in that performance. Reinforcing this is the cover, with Cho’s eyes, framed by cliff-high quiff and leather jacket, gazing out over a neon-pink bleed on his cheek.

Having sobbed many guilty Asian-Australian tears over The Joy Luck Club when I was ten (okay, and Mulan when I was fifteen), I admit to having developed a hardness of heart towards ‘ethnic’ as a literary flavour: writing in that genre (as with other genres, of course) is often not distinct or sophisticated or complex or interesting, and I’m not as guilelessly interpellated by it as publishers would probably like. But Cho interrupts these cardboard cutout performative accounts of racial identity. His narrators’ identities are perpetually changing and fluid, and questioned by themselves and others. With irreverence, too — ‘Learning English’ begins like a typical migrant story but, madlib-like, veers off that road pretty quickly:

Australia is very different from my homeland. I was born and raised in a town called Rod Stewart. Back in those days, Rod Stewart was a very busy town. The major industries were David Hasselhoff and coal. I think it is hard for a non-migrant to understand just how difficult it is to learn a new language while adapting to life in a new country.

Cho doesn’t limit his inquiry to racial identity, extending it also to gender, sexual and even social identity. In ‘Pinocchio’, the protagonist attempts to justify his long absence to his girlfriend, Tara (Cho’s actual partner’s name) by claiming that he has only just managed to transform back from being one of Jim Henson’s muppets. Sure, it sounds silly, but it’s not too bad a metaphor for the lies we tell each other. This piece is a well-judged reminder that the concerns of morphing aren’t only for those who look or act most differently from the norm, but that everyone is every day prodding at the fabric of themselves.

There’s also a healthy amount of irreverence towards the seriousness with which people address these selves and choices. In ‘The Sound of Music’, erstwhile nun Maria asks Mother Superior: ‘Can who you like to “do” also be bound up in issues of who you are or want to be?’, after which the two women begin sharing their fantasies about the Fonz. You might have noticed that I think this book is hilarious, and in fact spurred me to multiple ‘let me read this to you’ moments. Cho selects a matter-of-fact tone in most of the stories, and it works really well. In particular, there’s a fantastic running joke about Chinese food that made me snicker each time it appeared.

If there is such a thing as classically postmodern, Look Who’s Morphing fits that description. It’s relentlessly intertextual, openly questioning and questing, and takes storytelling to absurdist yet never inhumane extremes. But it’s also inclusive and playful. Cho’s written identities defy the linear narratives of self imposed by technology, product lust, received knowledge and ancestry to emerge as shifting sands: the endless metaphors and similes for the self eventually resolving, not blurring, into the person.

A hypocritical by-the-way: there are lots of reviews about this book already, but try not to read too many of them, because lots of them quote highlights of the book, and the book’s not very long. Read them afterwards.

Verdict: the Fonz says yes.

I went to see Peter Singer’s public lecture on bioethics last week. Singer, who I saw speak at Writers at the Convent last year, is a hook-line-sinker speaker. He’s accessible but able to put complex ideas to a layperson audience in compelling forms. He didn’t use any jargon, either, which is a plus. I’ve never studied any ethics or philosophy, so I was pleased that it was fairly broad-based and introductory.

Singer addressed the issue of what ethics is, and where it comes from. To illustrate, he used a story about a brother and sister deciding to have sex just one time, using contraception and without any adverse effects being sustained for their relationship. Singer asked how many of us thought the act was wrong, and a majority considered it not okay. Though the evolutionary reasons for humans developing a ‘yuck’ reaction to situations were isolated and dealt with in the story – no chance of reproduction, no adverse effects on their relationship – most people reacted to the story emotionally, and felt the scenario was not okay. This hypothesis was supported in studies: those who thought the scenario was acceptable took longer to come to that conclusion. That is, they used rationality to overcome their emotional objections. (Apparently Melbourne is less anti-incest, or more rational, than other places he’s used this example.)

It was all good stuff. Singer argued that ethics should come from using rationality to address practical issues related to a situation after emotional evolutionary responses to that situation are negated. The talk is supposed to be available as audio and video here, but doesn’t seem to have popped up yet.

I was amused at the juxtaposition of Singer’s talk with the events which ensued. The representative of Centre for Human Bioethics did a little bit of donation-begging, and I’m sure that Singer has stated (and I paraphrase wildly, anyone correct me if I’m wrong) that he doesn’t see giving to the arts as charity or philanthropy. Then, the ‘light refreshments’ promised were a cavalcade of chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches, and so much wine that it’s possible someone might have had three glasses. Extravagance.

I start my new job next week! Woooo.

In the ‘I am disappointed in your words’ segment this week, Commes des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo:

Kawakubo launched her label in 1969, and despite her fiercely independent point of view has built a multi-million-dollar empire (Comme turned $108 million in 2008). Though Comme des Garçons translates to “Like the Boys,” the philosophy behind it has nothing to do with feminism.
“I really felt that I was on my own,” Ms. Kawakubo says. “I never felt my work had anything to do with being a woman. I am not a feminist. I was never interested in any movement as such. I just decided to make a company built around creation, and with creation as my sword, I could fight the battles I wanted to fight.”

I get that lots of people don’t like to be branded feminists, but I am always a little bit angered by public personalities who disown feminism like it’s something to be ashamed of, or, even worse, disown it because they say it’s not relevant to them. Sure, there are lots of things that aren’t relevant to you, like AIDS research and photon science (I made that up). If someone said ‘My work has nothing to do with poverty, and I am not interested in the concerns of poor people’, it would be scandalous, and rightly so. But you can say you are not a feminist, because there’s no such thing as unequal pay for equal work, or domestic violence. So uncool.

Applications for grants from the ASA close 30 June 2009. they have $175,000. Writers! Ask for money.

Think of the tears this tattee will shed when they realise they have left out Neil Strauss’s The Game.

Uh-oh. I’ve been outed as ‘a dog person’.

Some wisdom can be had from this book, especially for those like me whose education did not explicitly deal with the rudiments of grammar and style. (Is it just me, or is the Australian educational system a bit hands-off with those aspects of writing?) The authors counsel the writer to ‘omit needless words’, an oft-heard dictum which blessedly rings in my own ears from time to time, perhaps not often enough. The Elements of Style is also entertaining, an artifact recalling a grumpy professor who had probably corrected one too many crappy essays. For example, Rule 21 urges the unknowing to ensure that summaries are written in the same tense throughout. The authors plaintively disparage useless generalisations:

Facility: Why must jails, hospitals, and schools suddenly become “facilities”?

Yet, as with any book spawned by human beings with proclivities and their opposities, readers should be wary of taking the rules as gospel. Some of the rules are specific to a geographical usage area, such as S&W’s US-flavoured preference for the serial comma (the comma appearing before the ‘and’ separating the final item in a list, as in: ‘She ate apples, cakes, and radishes.’) and veteran language mavens will find some of the rules gratingly basic. Other times, the authors distill their irritation into rules that are unforgivably misformed. Take the explanatory section expanding on rule 22: ‘Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.’ Fine, except that halfway through this section appears the somewhat silly assertion: ‘The other prominent position in the sentence is the beginning.’

I’m in two minds about this book. On the one hand, The Elements of Style is a fascinating cult book, and certainly you can learn something from its pages. Actually, it’s not so cult: have you ever wondered why your Microsoft Word document has so many goddamn green zigzag lines through it? You’re probably using too much passive language, one of the S&W bugbears. But as a reference, I don’t recommend it, particularly for an Australian/British English writer. Its reasonable advice can be easily found elsewhere, and its deleterious propositions have actually muddled in my head with other, more legitimate fodder. It’s not particularly comprehensive, either, and non-US writers are better off picking a guide that is more appropriate to their writing region.

As I mentioned earlier, my bet for stylistic curmudgeon is Fowler, even as somewhat tempered by Burchfield. Pam Peters’ The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage is an up-to-date, non-prescriptivist behemoth for antipodean enthusiasts. For US writers, The Mumpsimus recommends Huddleston & Pullum’s A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, Harper’s English Grammar by John Opdycke, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage and Patterns of English by Paul Roberts. If anyone out there champions any other Australian/British English usage guides, I’d love to hear what they are.

Papercuts has posted a trailer for Bad Writing, a documentary featuring George Saunders and David Sedaris (commenting on bad writing, obvs, not doing it). Like the idea of this, but Saunders’ comment on bad writing is an example of why I hate ‘she’ as the alternate universal pronoun — it looks like the gender of the person has been changed specifically to illustrate a negative point:

As far as I’m concerned, bad writing is always about falseness. It’s about the writer’s real view of the world and her attempt to articulate it being out of sync in some way…

It could just be a context-bereft idiosyncracy, but them’s the breaks. Don’t do it, kids. Personally, I like ‘they’. Don’t tell me it’s grammatically incorrect — it’s the most elegant solution we’ve got.

Already much blogged, but for us very timely, is this New Yorker article about The Program Era: Postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing, which debates whether creative writing should be taught. Subjectively selected and decontextualised tidbits:

Iowa merely admits people who are really good at writing; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma. “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.”

*

As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.

*

What counted as craft for James, though, was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie (who teaches at the University of Virginia) must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer (who teaches at N.Y.U.). There is no “craft of fiction” as such.

*

One of Rick Moody’s teachers at Columbia asked the class to indicate, by a show of hands, how many found Moody’s work boring. Donald Barthelme, at Houston, assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashbery’s “Three Poems.” Lish taught private writing classes that lasted from six to ten hours, a little like est training. He had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence.

Have a good long weekend! It’s the Queen’s birthday. Sweet, sweet Commonwealth.