I did not hesitate at all to buy the latest issue of Meanjin. Three main reasons:

• the cover, which features art by David Lancashire (which I hated at first, but then I realised it was bold, striking, and really different for a literary journal)
• Gillian Mears’ essay on how her new novel, Foal’s Bread, came to be
• Tom Cho’s looong story How can we reconcile the existence of suffering with the premise of a good and almighty God?

and three sub-reasons:

• the usual reasons you buy literary journals: to be surprised and pleased by new discoveries, to enjoy genres that aren’t on high enough rotation in your reading spread (that means you, poetry), to support new and emerging writers, to be informed
• other content that should not feel like it is being slighted in the least by appearing as a ‘sub-reason’, obviously that taxonomy was a mistake (I just love Tom Cho), including memoir by Melanie Joosten; a short ‘Perspectives’ piece by funnywoman Jess McGuire; poetry by Emily Bitto, who has written a couple of great pieces for Killings; a poem by Joe Dolce (yes, that Joe Dolce!); and a great collection of drawings by Oslo Davis completed during a residency at the State Library of Victoria
• a picture of Gillian Mears standing up on the back of a horse.

I ripped right through this issue – except for the first piece, Ewan Morrison’s ‘Why Y Matters: Mapping the Coming Consumption Patterns of Generation Y’, which I originally thought was actually a journalistic enquiry into the coming consumption patterns of Generation Y but turned out to be a satirical essay about the coming consumption patterns of Generation Y. I feel like this has been done before, and I’d actually love to make a bazillion dollars from my fellow Gen Yers, so I felt a bit unsatisfied after reading this.

The two stars here were, of course, the Mears and Cho pieces. This issue of Meanjin was basically a big old entree for my main meal of Mears’ Foal’s Bread, which I read straight afterwards. I challenge you to read her essay, ‘Old Copmanhurst‘, and not want to dive headlong into the novel immediately. The essay begins:

Much exclamation occurs when people realise Foal’s Bread is my first novel in sixteen years. Sixteen years ago I was about to turn thirty-one. From this distance that seems inconceivably young and I was inconceivably bewildered that only horses understood that something horrible had begun to happen in my legs and feet.

My first encounter with Mears was ‘Fairy Death‘, in Heat 24. In that essay, Mears described her experience being photographed by Vincent Long for his ‘Red Balloon Project‘. Having had multiple sclerosis for 15 years by that stage, Mears wrote candidly and beautifully about bodies, sex and memory. Since reading that piece, I’ve had an almost superstitious approach to her writing; I kept an eye out for shorter pieces, but though I’d never read any of her books before, I didn’t want to start from the beginning. I knew the next one would be the one I’d read.

‘Old Copmanhurst’ is another characteristically straight-talking essay that charts the trajectory of Foal’s Bread, from its guilty inception (the idea of the novel needed to be concealed from Mears’ sister Yvonne, who had also writen a novel manuscript involving high-jump horses) to its sprinting eventual birth years later. Again, Mears writes lucidly about memory, the body and her love for horses – a real treat.

As for Tom’s story, I’m not sure I can do it justice. Much of what I enjoy about his fiction is the dry, unfussy approach to dizzily difficult subjects. (His delivery is also sometimes wonderfully bone dry.) Here, he writes about robots in the year 2240 trying to understand the nature and existence of suffering. It’s a great first offering in the ‘Meanjin Papers’ series, which showcases one longer piece per edition.

I have never held much truck with the notion that making content free online (as Meanjin does) will necessarily cannibalise sales of a print product. (Well, we’ll see once I finally get a smartphone.) But the relevant question there is whether the consumer finds value in having spent the coin on said content in any particular format, and I certainly did: there is no question that this is a fine specimen of a print journal – wonderfully curated, beautifully designed and a special kind of immersive experience.

]]> http://www.3000books.com.au/2012/05/meanjin-12012-ed-sally-heath.html/feed 1 http://www.3000books.com.au/2012/04/the-ipad-diaries-northanger-abbey-jane-austen.html http://www.3000books.com.au/2012/04/the-ipad-diaries-northanger-abbey-jane-austen.html#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2012 23:29:26 +0000 estelle tang http://www.3000books.com.au/?p=1343 That sound you can hear is the rusty gate of this blog creaking open. Is that a mixed metaphor? I don’t even know anymore. Where am I? Who are you? Who am I?

Just kidding, you guys. My brain is totally intact and I can construct sentences (well, we’ll see). I have also been reading books, contrary to what my silence here might indicate. I have been pretty busy, what with everything – and let’s be honest, no one’s life has been in danger due to my non-updates – but there’s been a development in my life that made me keen to come back here and get to documentin’.

Late last year I got an iPad 2. Since then, I’d estimate that I’ve had a conversation about it with 70% of the people I know. That’s a big percentage. And despite the fact that this is the first post in a series about said device, I’m not really an Extoller of the Pleasures of the Tablet or anything; people are just very interested in them and the future of the book and what have you. Usually other people ask me whether I have an e-reader yet and whether I like it, and why I chose the iPad over other e-readers, etc.

Briefly, I decided on the iPad because I wanted to be able to test all the major reading platforms. I wanted to be able to read on the Kindle, Kobo, Booki.sh and Google Books platforms, to see what they were like. I also wanted the best opportunity to get any book I wanted as an e-book, so I wanted to be able to access e-books in just about any format.

Also, it was an aesthetic thing. I don’t like the look of a lot of the ink readers, even though my initial wish was to get an ink technology reader. They’re just too plasticky and the screens are too small. And finally, I’ve been burnt by non-Apple computer products before. Samsung, I hate you. Sony, I do not like you (mostly, actually, due to this ad). Asus, I really just do not like you very much. My MacBook has lasted six years, which is longer than any other computer I have ever had. I love it, and I trust it. I did not buy the Steve Jobs biography, but I would buy his products.

I have the wi-fi model, not the 3G. I am almost superstitiously weird about not wanting to have internet access at all times. I don’t have a smartphone, either. I bought this tablet pretty much for reading only, so I won’t be commenting on the iPad qua secondary computer or life-organiser or anything like that. (Yes, I realise this is somewhat akin to, I don’t know, buying a ladder so I can sit on the third rung when I’m out of chairs, but I don’t mind.) It’ll pretty much be just about whether I liked reading the book in the X app or on the Y platform. Sorry if this bores you.

Since I acquired my new friend, about 50% of the books I’ve read have been e-books, which has surprised me. I suspect the figure would be higher still if I hadn’t been reading so many review copies that are print books. It’s been an interesting and net positive experience so far. I’m interested to see if my print/electronic book ratio rises much or steadies around the 50% mark.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Since I’ve had it for a few months now, I’ll just do a quick rundown of the beginning of our beautiful relationship.

***

Zero hour: WOW! I love this box. I love Apple. Even with the gorillas and the … everything. I’m not proud of this. But it’s so shiny. I love it. I just want to get, like, ten iPads and rub them all together. They’re so nice. Look at it all pretty when I turn it on. Ooooooh.

Hour one: What do you mean I need to create a new account for every reading platform I want to use? What do you mean I need to come up with new passwords for all of them? What do you mean the passwords need to include upper case letters, lower case letters, numerals and punctuation marks. Are you kidding me? I can’t even remember my own name sometimes. This sucks. I hate this. Okay, my password is going to be Ih8uiPad:(.

Hour two: Okay, I have passwords. I have apps. I have fingers. I have a credit card. I want to buy a book. Kindle app, you get to go first. What do I want to read…oh, you can get so many free books! Pride and Prejudice! Who cares if I already own three copies? I guess I know how that happened because I’m going to download it onto my iPad right now, I’m going to have four copies, I’m so excited!!! Yayayayayayayayayayay!! Jane Austen is the best!!! I love her so much! Northanger Abbey! That’s the only one I haven’t read. Yayayayayayayayayayay!!! I’m going to read it tonight! I’m going to read it now! Yayayay! Downloading… this is so great. I’m going to get it straight away. What an ugly cover. Oh well, it’s not going on my shelf, who cares.

Hour three: Okay, all downloaded, I’m so excited, I’m going to read this book so bad. Wait…where is it? I just bought it at Amazon and it said it had been sent to my iPad, so where is it? Go back to Amazon and check what it says to do. Yep, I downloaded it. Should be available on my iPad. Back to the Kindle app. Not there. Where is it? This is so annoying. Where is it? Can you refresh this thing? What the hell. What the hell?? I hate this. This doesn’t happen with REAL books. WTF. Where is it. Go back to Amazon. Check what it says to do. Yes, I definitely downloaded it. I hate this iPad. Maybe if I turn it off. That always works. Okay, turn it off. Turn it on. Is it there? … I HATE IPADS.

What? You think I should reinstall the Kindle app? Maybe. Okay.

Hour four: Yayayayayayayay!!! I am going to read Northanger Abbey so bad. Oooooo, changing the fonts is fun. Ooooooo, look at all the ways you can change the page-turning visualisation. Oooooo. Oooo. I love this. I am going to read it in white text on black.

Hour three point five: Ow, my eyes. Change it back to the normal way.

Two days later: I love Jane Austen! I love romantic comedies! I hate Isabella Thorpe! You could just tell she was bad from the beginning! And her brother! I love my iPad! I love Henry Tilney! I love farms! I love my iPad!! I really love my iPad!!!!!

FIN

So, hope you’re going okay. The end of 2011 was just a haze of activity, so excuse the absence. As a prize for sticking around/being good at Google/being a spambot, here’s a post to illustrate my mental declivities during the final months of 2011.

Running commentary on my reading of Madame Bovary:

Page 5: God, I can’t wait until Vronsky shows up.

Page 19: Where’s Vronsky?

Page 45: Where’s Vronsky?

Page 116: Okay, there’s a big party. I bet this is where Vronsky comes in.

Page 125: Where’s Vronsky?

Page 140: I just don’t know how someone with a name like Vronsky is going to show up in this tiny French town. It doesn’t make any sense.

Page 210: This book is practically over, and no Vronsky.

Page 267: OH MY GOD, TOTALLY WRONG BOOK. IT’S LIKE I HAVE NO BRAIN CELLS OR SOMETHING.

End: Pretty good book though.

Some day I shall regret being so open with all of you.

Hope you’ve all had a great year of reading. Looking forward to another.

I’ve only read five short story collections this year so far. It’s been a big-book year; I’ve schlepped my way through two Game of Thrones books, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, an advance copy of Isobelle Carmody’s The Sending (!!!) and am currently engaging in the bicep tussle that is Don Quixote. And I also suspect I have a little bit of short-story fatigue. Reading bad short fiction is exhausting in a way that needs no explanation, and reading good short fiction can be draining too. I always need a bit of a temporal or psychological break between even each short story in any one collection, whether single-authored or multi-authored: if the writer is doing their job right, you need some time to absorb and then recalibrate for the new world each story brings.

But I had no hesitations in buying Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories ahead of his MWF session (which I didn’t end up attending in the end). This 2010 collection has been much lauded, and I’m impatient to read his new novel The Cook, which I think is spectacularly well-timed: the collective fever-dream of MasterChef is beginning to fade slightly, but notifications from every publishing corner, including the meteoric rise and power of food blogs and the success of McSweeney’s Lucky Peach point to the middle-class obsession with food and kitchens being a stayer.

To return to Other Stories. It’s a collection that should breed excitement in short fiction aficionados. Macauley’s fiction is clean, the tales made almost ridiculously accessible by his use of simple prose. In some stories, chummy, confessional first-person establishes character with the naturalism, attention to vernacular and easy representation of foible that made Cervantes’ Sancho Panza the most memorable simpleton in literary history.

In ‘A Short Report from Happy Valley’, the (unnamed) narrator, a pathologist, is dashing off an epistle to a colleague about ‘strange goings-on’ he recently observed (‘My invoice will follow shortly, by the way’). The serene people of Happy Valley display a tendency towards sleep; one man has been asleep for thirty years, waking only for meal-times or other necessaries, while others ‘hover precariously between sleep and wakefulness’. The business-like diagnostician can’t put his finger on the cause, but while possible theories range from the pathogenic to the philosophical, he’s laissez-faire about the odd phenomenon: ‘Leave them alone! Let them rest in peace!’ – his mind’s already on his next case, a sick cow in Brisbane.

Macaulay does this oblique and unperturbed chronicling of curiosities very well. ‘One Night’ contains the simplest and most charming form of this signature; the vignette describes the summer night when ‘Michael Ebeling, the panel beater’ took his mattress down into the street and was gradually joined by all his Boxstead Court neighbours. And when Macaulay refracts these anomalies through his satiric filter, which he does often, the result tickles the fancy while disturbing the civic sense. ‘Bohemians’ seems like a fun example, at first; an agent assures a client that he can lease some ‘bohemians in their purely decorative role’ so as to create some character and ambience in a community. But the bohemians, so prized for their louche inertia, can’t afford to live in the area, where ratepayers have ‘bought up all the bohemians’ houses and taken over the bohemians’ cafés’.

If this seems like a slightly dated complaint (vale affordable North Fitzroy, Brunswick and Northcote living), note too that the collection comprises stories that have been written over almost twenty years. But when Macaulay aims his sights at the prickly end of the rectitude scale in ‘The Farmer’s New Machine’, the lengths to which a farmer is prepared to go to attain bucolic bliss are chilling because very little about the story – the proud farmer, the advances in industry – places it far outside of contemporary experience.

It’s not only groups that become bewildered, slipping into interstices that protect them from the onslaught of increasing complications. One of the collection’s best, and longest, stories, ‘The Bridge’, tells of a lone soldier who attempts to maintain his loyalty while defending a post that has been cut off from all communication. In ‘So Who’s the Wrecker Then?’, the Premier – ‘a man with a wicked sense of humour and a great flair for the dramatic’ decides during an appearance at a building site in outer suburbia to use his new-found bulldozer skills to chase dignitaries and photographers around ‘like sheep’.

With his restraint and talent for observation, Macauley clads what might usually be thought of as dystopian themes in the familiarity of realist garb, and this lends real frisson to his work. He has also written two earlier novels, which I haven’t read, but what with the sharp execution and imaginative premises, Other Stories is an excellent way to introduce yourself to Macauley’s gimlet pen.

(No, I won’t be asking them that.)

Laura Miller’s New Yorker piece on George R. R. Martin and his fans (who are legion) was great, and left me dying to read Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. I like fantasy, I like complexity, I like HBO tv shows: done deal, right? I borrowed the first two books, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings from my friend James, who has read them several times since childhood (Game of Thrones was written fifteen years ago).

By way of brief description, the books describe the power struggles of various high-born families in the Seven Kingdoms, and take their plot and setting cues from something approximating English medieval history (I think Martin has said that the plot is loosely based on the War of the Roses). They are huge books – both volumes run to over 700 pages – giving other sprawling fantasy worlds reason to reconsider their level of commitment.

Game of Thrones is a much easier sell than Clash of Kings: it is laden with surprises and ends with a fist-pumper of a scene. Clash of Kings suffers from the lugubriousness of an already expansive universe that Martin only continues to complicate, edge outwards and fill in, introducing more and more characters, locations and intrigues. Of course, that’s no problem in itself, but I found the second volume a bit tedious in places, and while I occasionally skipped over pages of description in the first book, I skimmed whole sections of Clash of Kings without regret. So while it was no great difficulty to continue on to the second book after the first, I’m in no hurry to go on to the third any time soon. (Dana Jennings’ NYT review of the fifth book in the famously long-incomplete series has swayed me slightly.)

Obviously, a lot happens in the 1500+ pages I read. (If anyone is giving out prizes for understatement of the year, I’ll take one.) But a few general areas of note. (Note that because there are so many significant plot changes, there’ll inevitably be SPOILERS. And note that I’m in no way trying to convert non-fantasy readers to these books. If the words ‘meat and mead’ anger you, you shouldn’t read this at all – click here now.)

I Sex and women

When an early description of a family’s bloodline contains the words ‘for centuries they had wed brother to sister’, you know you’re in for a hard-to-defend-to-your-friends kind of read. And no bloody joke. In Game of Thrones alone, you get twincest and a very closely written scene between an adult man and a thirteen-year-old girl. It’s enough to make you realise how grateful you are for age-of-consent laws.

Many of the male characters fall somewhere on the spectrum from bawdy to lewd. Hardly a conversation goes by among fighters or in the kitchens where a man doesn’t wish for a girl ‘to tumble in bed’. Even the king does it. It’s so widespread, cumulative and repetitive that any feminist or structural editor might feel their fists slowly curling up at their sides.

But there are two great female characters in these books, who offset this constant objectification. Queen Cersei Lannister, the king’s wife, is a villain with a bottomless hunger for power. Her machinations are almost totally untempered by tenderness, and she has a hysterical edge that’s truly terrifying. And Daenerys Targaryen, exiled daughter of the dead and deposed King Aerys, begins the books as a thirteen-year-old sold off by her brother as a bride to a savage horselord, but grows into a queenhood of her own.

II Structure and size

The books comprise short chapters written in close third-person, hopping around between the tennish main characters. In Game of Thrones, most of the POV characters belong to the Stark family, who rule at Winterfell, in the North. There are lots of surprises in these books, not least of which is that one of the POV characters dies. It’s been noted many times that a virtue of the series is its willingness to subvert common conventions of the genre: whereas loyalty in fantasy series can usually be secured by one act of kindness, here it may merely be a mask for future betrayal and ambition; a talisman that might be thought to guarantee protection falls by the wayside, leaving a sympathetic character vulnerable. These upturned tables make Game of Thrones exciting in a way many hero-based fantasies aren’t: the usual sympathetic-character life guarantee is out.

If you’re not good with keeping track of a large cast of characters, you may find this series totally impenetrable. The first book is more manageable, as a good first part of it details a relatively stable period in the narrative. But in the second book, more than once a name made me think, ‘Who the shit is that?’ This is partly because the story, like a real war, requires footsoldiers. In films, they would be credited as Cruel, Ugly Bannerman #4, but here they get names and family trees. By the time I finished the book I was beyond the point of caring if I could remember who everyone was, but there is a helpful appendix for people like me, listing characters by allegiance.

III Reader sympathies

The multi-POV structure of these books makes them a huge (and sometimes very successful) exercise in engaging readers’ sympathies. In some cases, it’s not that tough a job. Six of the Starks are POV characters, and there’s a lot of foundation-laying to get you behind them: the first book follows the family very closely, with Lord Eddard Stark becoming the king’s foremost counsellor. He’s wise and nobel, and he loves his wife. He never talks  about tumbling girls. Other characters often happen to say that the Starks put honour above everything, and the Stark children are mostly winning, if occasionally one-dimensional, types: there’s a girl who’s a tomboy, a girl who’s ladylike, a toddler, a noble-by-character-but-not-by-birth bastard son, etc.

But the more interesting propositions are Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen. Tyrion is a Lannister, which family are basically the Mean Girls of the series. They are conniving, they are ambitious, they are cruel and some of them have sex with each other. Tyrion is a dwarf and facially deformed, and is not regarded well by any of his family, despite his political nous and dry wit. Daenerys, the aforementioned exile child, starts off as a passive and pliant child, whom we know comes of murderous blood. Yet Tyrion is smart and self-aware, possessing kingdom-saving good judgment. And Daenerys grows from a timid girl into a resourceful and regal young woman.

We get less of Daenerys and Tyrion in Clash of Kings, which is perhaps one of the reasons I lost interest. Martin introduces a few new POV characters, including Davos Seaworth, an ex-con turned knight, and Theon Greyjoy, once ward of the Starks.  Perhaps the main reason the second book paled a little for me was that these new characters felt totally convenient, chosen purely as Martin’s eyes and ears in each relevant new locations. Davos is a bit vanilla; I can hardly remember anything that happens in his sections, and I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in him since he is a loyal supporter of the least sympathetic claimant to the throne. Theon is a bit more interesting, but he’s also a coward and a prick.

IV Conclusion

I am feeling ambivalent about continuing with this series. New York and Melbourne are both currently covered in advertising for the HBO series, so I’ll probably try and chase that up eventually, at least. Sean Bean in armour? Sign me up! And during the course of writing this I came across some future plot points that intrigued me, both on the story level and in terms of Martin’s end game with the series. What I’ve noted above deals only with the first two volumes in a series acknowledged as genre-vitalising and truly epic in scope. No doubt one of these days I will find myself wishing for some 700-page funsies, and for those I know where I will turn.

1. Ben Law’s work uniform is a pair of ‘housing commission-y track pants and a Bonds singlet’.
2. If you are a freelance writer, ‘you will never stop freaking out’ (thanks, Penny Modra).
3. Even if your friends are in London, they can still be guests at a festival held in Melbourne (see Hamilton, Caroline).
4. It’s possible that the novel you wrote and recorded from your house in Melbourne will be downloaded over half a million times.
5. I can’t hold my drink anymore.

No matter how tired I think I might get of attending literary events and writers’ festivals, the Emerging Writers’ Festival always surprises me with its ability to direct and hold my attention, and uncover enthusiasm in my breast where I thought it had lain dormant during the cold winter of my inactivity. We’re very lucky in Melbourne to have a festival that gives emerging writers support, opportunity and venues (physical or virtual) in which to meet, discuss, debate and laugh together.

There’s still another week of the festival left, with plenty of interesting ideas yet to be hashed out. There’s a strong focus on genre in this year’s festival, and there are also plenty of free and digital events too. See the program here.

My picks are The Pitch, where editors, including KYD editor Rebecca Starford, will be talking about what they look for in pitches, and Dirty Words, where a bucketful (brassiere-ful?) of writers, including gold-shoe-wearing Scot Alan Bissett and enthusiastic planker Linda Jaivin, will form a line to disclose naughty secrets and things of that ilk. Vachel Spirason of Slow Clap will also be there, and if he’s anywhere near as entertaining as he was at the festival’s First Word event, where he danced so hard he gave himself a front-wedgie, I think we’ll be in business.