Another week, another upbraiding from a friend for only posting links to external content. Too bad!

Here’s my podcast interview with Meg Mundell, whose novel Black Glass envisions a future Melbourne where people without official documentation are forced to the fringes of society. At the same time, it’s a tale of two sisters’ search for each other in a city increasingly moulded by opportunistic shysters and government spin doctors.

Meg has been published widely in Australian newspapers, journals and magazines, including The Age, The Monthly, Meanjin, The Best Australian Stories 2010, The Sleepers Almanac, harvest and The Big Issue. Have a listen.

Hi all. Just another one of those cursory ‘direct-you-elsewhere’ posts, sorry. Hey, at least I am not stealing your money or anything like that. (Although, for all you know, I could be.)

Anyhow, I read Sherman Alexie’s War Dances for Killings and I blogged for The Book Show here about … this blog, actually. And how it’s helped me become a better reader.

Happy week!

When it comes to genre, I’m usually more True Blood than true crime. But it’s a wrench to resist Jake Adelstein’s story, as told in his book Tokyo Vice: Jewish-American kid applies for a job at a Japanese newspaper (and not just any newspaper; it’s the Yomiuri Shimbun, which has the highest circulation of any newspaper in the world) and despite his Japanese language score being in the bottom ten, he’s called in for an interview and he gets the job, only to end up sitting opposite a member of the biggest organised crime group in Japan, who is relaying a death threat from his boss. Just another day in the life, really.

Adelstein’s first posting is in half-rural, half-suburban Urawa, a ‘place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning “not hip, boring, unfashionable”’. But, as unfashionable as it is, Urawa is where he cuts his teeth as a police reporter. Navigating the complex spatial politics of the Yomiuri’s office (“Who the hell told you could sit down here!”) and getting up to speed with the house style (“I’ll expect you to know it within a week.”) are small tasks compared to learning how to update the office scrapbooks.

Starting out in any profession is a big ask in any case, but being an American who works for a Japanese newspaper has its own challenges. Adelstein’s first kikikomi (interviews related to a crime) are comedic adventures, with potential interviewees mistaking him for a salesman. The cultural differences serve him well, too, sometimes; “dumb gaijins” can get quite handily behind police tape.

Adelstein is a chummy and deft translator of Japanese culture: from the Japanese reverence for language, as exemplified by the concept of kotodama – the spirit of language that resides in every word; to the underbelly of Japanese culture, which makes our Underbelly look like Play School. Eventually, Adelstein scores a post at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where he begins to cover the extraordinary crime syndicates of Japan – the legendary yakuza.

As Adelstein explained in an interview on WNYC, the yakuza are more Wal-Mart than West Side Story. On one end of the spectrum, there are the members who ‘own’ the illegal immigrants peddling counterfeit wares on the street. On the other end, you have the supremos who launder money through their innumerable – and legitimate – loan businesses and hostess bars.

It would be hard not to admire the seemingly unassailable extent of the various yakuza enterprises, except that, unavoidably, regular people get hurt or disappear. Adelstein’s career path takes a turn when he becomes involved in the story of Lucie Blackman, a British girl who went missing while working as a hostess in Tokyo’s infamous Roppongi district. In this quest, Adelstein straddles the line between impartial observer and passionate truth seeker. And it wasn’t to be the only time he came face to face with the ugly side of Tokyo.

(Cross-posted from mwfblog.)

Picture title: ‘My Love Affair with Detritus: Part II: The Desk.’

Anyhow, Julian Burnside — what a funny bastard. For those of you not in the know about the Antipodes’ Atticus Finch, he is a QC and AO, the latter having been bestowed ‘for service as a human rights advocate, particularly for refugees and asylum seekers, to the arts as a patron and fundraiser, and to the law’. You might have noticed him around town in his natty tortoiseshell glasses. Also, he likes words quite a lot, enough to have written a very engaging book about them.

If you’re going to ask me why on earth you should read anything written by someone whom even Lisa Simpson might find an irritating polymath, then you should probably go away and think very hard about your attitude. Then come back and read the rest of what I’ve written about Wordwatching, because you’ll be missing out otherwise. Wordwatching is a blissfully accessible collection of ‘essays’ (I think of them more as ‘riffs’) about words, their meanings, and their histories. What makes it such an agreeable companion is its combination of nerdy humour (one chapter is called ‘All’s Well That Ends -al‘), industrious research, and a love of language which shines through the simple prose.

I’ve already excerpted a couple of choice bits from the innards of the beast, but suffice it to say that Burnside has a wide-ranging pen, and many of his observations in Wordwatching give rise to ‘ohhhhhhhh’ moments. There’s plenty of trivia about words, from the familiar origin of the word furphy (the last name of the Shepparton man who made water carts used in Gallipoli), to the more obscure origins of the word poppycock (from the Dutch pappekak, which means soft shit). One chapter, ‘Deadly Sins’, simply takes a look at the origins of words such as lust, vainglory and gluttony.

Observations on the coming and going of words show that Burnside sits in a mindful spot between the philologist poles of conservatism-at-all-costs and let’s-go-with-the-flow. It’s a stance that I share, and he makes it a very sympathetic one, displaying a clear distaste for the misuse of existing words, and enthusiasm for neologisms that fill the many voids of the English language. Some of the usual suspects are investigated, such as that pet peeve of many English language enthusiasts, ending a sentence with a preposition. That long-lived nuisance is put to bed without dinner, with the aid of examples from Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte.

It’s no surprise, given his work with refugees, that Burnside has included an essay titled ‘Doublespeak’, in which he discusses the troubling Orwellian propensities of the Howard Government’s neoteric, whitewashing terminologies. He also ends the book on a similar note:

The essays in this book are mostly intended as harmless play in the richness of our language. But all play has a larger purpose, and taking pleasure in the language should at least make us concerned to protect it: not from change, but from wilful misuse. When innocent victims of oppression become ‘illegals’; when immigration policy becomes ‘border protection’; when ‘global warming’ becomes ‘climate change’, it is time to be alert and also alarmed.

What a good man. Wordwatching is like a hug for word nerds. As my friend Kelvin would say, ‘get in there’.

I like short stories, and I like that short stories are garnering (in my humble, based-on-anecdote opinion) a wider audience; I talk about Nam Le and Miranda July lately as much as I talk about Haruki Murakami and Ernest Hemingway. New Australian Stories is on Scribe’s ‘latest bestsellers’ list, so that’s heartening. The short story’s a great narrative form, and I’m not going to insultingly qualify that statement by saying ‘for our time’ or ‘for my postmodern, YouTube-inhaling generation’, because I’m not sure that those kinds of things are relevant except for as PR pap.

My love for short stories explained: I like the way short stories seem like biopsies, sampling as if for your edification and entertainment lumpy segments of life. My love for short story collections explained: I really like eating at restaurants partly because I love menus — if you read about everything on offer it’s like sampling each one, if only in your head. In the case of short story collections, reading/sampling is consuming. For me, a person who finds picking and choosing hard, that’s great. A local focus is good too; I like seeing what lots of Australian writers are up to, from the ones I’m familiar with from collections, literary magazines, newspapers and small press, through to the ones I’ve never heard of (no fault of theirs, I’m sure, as the authors all have extensive biographies). It’s also great for the writers, because it puts them in touch with a wider audience. So I guess what I’m saying is that I love the idea of an Australian short story anthology, especially considering that short stories (for whatever reason) are still considered black holes for the publishing dollar.

Scribe’s New Australian Stories, most of whose constituent stories are previously unpublished, gives us stories from the likes of Cate Kennedy, Louise Swinn and Paddy O’Reilly as well as lots of writers I’ve never read (my fault, not theirs — most of the authors have extensive biographies). Stories spanning the spectrum of experience, from the beginning of life to the guilt, agony and mystery of death, can be found in this diverse collection. Re: birth, see Max Barry’s anti-couvade experience in How I Met My Daughter: ‘They dragged this bloody, howling thing from my wife’s abdomen, its limbs twitching and clawing, its face like an angry pumpkin, and asked me, “Do you want to take a photo?”‘ Re: death, see Ryan O’Neill’s ‘Last Words’: ‘Most last words, he had discovered, were banal.’

If short stories are biopsies, then the writers of New Australian Stories are skilled surgeons. The best short stories can conjure a past and a future out of a segment of present. Lots of the stories in this collection do this well. Highlights for me included Abigail Ulman’s Chagall’s Wife, whose tale of a high-school student angling for the attentions of a teacher easily evokes the nonchalance and unexamined alertness of burgeoning sexuality. It also stands out for its lean, direct prose; most of the other stories have a tendency towards fleshier prose which can sometimes be less effective. Another stand-out was Vivienne Kelly’s The Third Child. In this story, Frances writes yearly letters about her unchanging life to an aunt who lives abroad. Kelly’s restraint is admirable and pays off in an unexpected way; it’s a breathtaking story.

In relation to the talk of eliminating the territorial copyright provisions, there has been some fear that if it were to go ahead, uniquely Australian voices and stories would be lost. I get the feeling that the production of this kind of book will be negatively affected by major changes to the Australian parallel importation laws; I’d guess that the risk to independent Australian presses of putting out works by new (to books) Australian authors put is offset by their domestic sales of big-ticket overseas titles and books by established local heroes. The way the Productivity Commission is going (i.e. arbitrarily hedging their bets), if you love short stories, you should buy books like these and make them bestsellers in their own right.