Vigilante Virgin: a review in progress

This week Fairfax opened its new Media House building in Melbourne's CBD. There was much back slapping from the premier and words like 'bold', 'exciting' and 'future' were thrown around. But is Fairfax really ready for the future - bold, exciting or otherwise? Based on the technology they've put behind Text Tales: Vigilante Virgin, the present is challenging.

A couple of other bloggers have already made the point that this isn't really an m-novel. Adam Ford makes the point that it "might be the first password-protected Australian-authored online-story-in-instalments accessible via mobile-phone-delivered subscription" because you only get sent a text that directs you to web page. Essentially you'll need a web-enabled mobile to read the story. And the main advantage to this seems to be that the story can be bookended by a big picture of author Marieke Hardy and an ad for Borders. Gully Bogan is less kind pointing out that this is "the same business model that allows you to subscribe to bikini-girl wallpapers, as advertised on the back of certain magazines". Again given the Marieke Hardy in Your Hand promo, perhaps this was the intent.

And the weird thing is that the web page that you're delivered to from your mobile is the same everyday. So subscription seems pointless if you can just return to the same page when new content is delivered. Unless you just like being woken at 7am by a text.

But perhaps Fairfax don't even want you to subscribe. After the first week they published an edited version of the first five episodes in the newspaper and online. This ruined any exclusivity readers might have felt about getting a story sent to their mobile. Plus it came with illustrations and easier to read layout. Why would you prefer to read it on your mobile when the print and online versions offer a better experience?

This is a review in progress. Next time I'll look at the writing itself as the story will have concluded by then.

Holiday in Lemuria

Way back in the 1990s a group of musician pranksters called the KLF pranced across stages and charts declaring themselves The Ancients of Mu Mu. Most people thought they meant the baggy dress-like outfits preferred by the overweight and fill-in arts teachers. But it wasn't just one of the most interesting big-ups in hip hop at the time. Mu was actually an abbreviation of Lemuria, a land created to explain the travels of the indescribably cute lemurs.


Zoologist Philip Sclater couldn’t work out how fossils of the cuddly critters from Madagascar could end up in India, Malaysia and the Middle East without clocking up some serious frequent flyer miles. In 1864 he came up with a solution: a continent that must have once joined these separate continents, so lemurs scurried overland until Lemuria sunk into the ocean. It became Atlantis for baby ewoks.

With the benefit of theories like continental drift, the fossils are easily explained and the disappeared landmass seems hokum, but the idea held water until well into the 19th century. Some thought that the sunken continent hid the ‘missing link’ between humans and apes. Wilder theories stretched the underwater continent so it covered most of the Pacific and islands discovered there were just peaks of mountain villages from a much bigger civilisation. Could Pacific Islanders be survivors from an earlier and weirder society?

The smidge of evidence was more than enough to excite slightly nutty occultists. The mysterious Madame Helena Blavatsky claimed to have seen a fantastical book that explained it all. According to Blavatsky, Lemurians weren’t cuddly, but seven foot tall reptilian creatures who once had the earth to themselves until the meddling gods created mammals. When Lemurians began interbreeding with mammals the cranky gods sunk the continent as punishment for their inter-species randyness. Or was it that the ‘dragon men’ had started playing with black magic that threatened the gods themselves? Madame Blavatsky changed the story to keep selling new Lemurian books.

Some folks just couldn’t let the Lemurians go. In 1894 Frederick Spencer Oliver wrote a book A Dweller on Two Planets that said the Lemurians moved among us and appeared through a series of tunnels beneath California’s Mount Shasta wearing white robes – a little like those favoured by the KLF or maybe actual muumuus originally worn in Hawaii. Later fabulists decided that Lemurians were aliens or humans modified by aliens.

But to get to Lemuria today you won’t need a snorkel. Easter Island’s moai have long been seen as evidence of another civilisation or an alien drive-bys. Further west in the Pacific, Nan Madol on the isle of Pohnpei makes a better case for a submarine civilization. Called the Venice of the Pacific, it’s a series of artificial islands complete with megaliths and downright spooky temple-like structures. Rumours of an escape tunnel under the island’s reef into the ocean fuelled speculation that residents may have been amphibians who fled as men approached. Most of the ruins only date back as far as the 12th century but the imaginative can still perceive a lost kingdom there.

Geeks have kept the idea of the lost Lemuria alive. The continent survived in the imagination of HP Lovecraft and made cameos in comics like Namor the Sub-Mariner and Hellboy. It was even mentioned in the voiceover introduction to the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica TV series. And then there was the KLF. At the end of the video for Justified and Ancient the dance music pioneers board a submarine to head to off to the mythical land. So if you get there you can be assured of an awesome soundtrack.

Image courtesy of Ammanuel Faivre via Wikicommons.

And Another Douglas Adams

Released this week in Australia is the sixth book in the increasingly innacurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, And Another Thing. It's made even more unlikely by the death of genius creator Douglas Adams back in 2001.

The story has been taken up on the 30th anniversary of the original by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl books. It was a controversial decision and Colfer himself is frank about his reluctance to write the book because of the great legacy and the vengeful fans of the original.



Colfer begins by bringing the original gang back together. Arthur Dent is enjoying a hermetic existence on a beach, while Ford Prefect is living the dream at a ultra-luxury resort courtesy of a Dinocharge card he's fiddled last time he was in the Guide office. Random Dent (daughter of Arthur and Trillian) has gone on to become Galactic President and married a rodent - mostly to annoy her mother, Trillian. And Zaphod Beeblebrox is admiring his reflection in his ship The Heart of Gold. They're all brought together again by a bird-like droid that seems to be running low on battery.

It's reassuring to see the old characters thrown together again and there's plenty of the same playfulness of ideas that marked the original. The nostalgia ("Ha ha, Vogons!") may just be enough to swing you through the whole book or it could seem like mawkish repetition. Personally, I'm lapping it up, but still feeling a little queasey about the motivations.
Colfer seems to be writing with the reverence of a fan (he has no plans to write another) and the book was released with the approval of Adams' widow, but Penguin books seem to be talking franchise.

Part of the inspiration for this new book was Devil May Care, a sequel in the James Bond series penned by Sebastian Faulks. The book was Penguin UK's fastest seller, with readers ripping more than 44,000 off the shelves in the first four days. Marketing folks wiped a tear from their eye as they talked about the power of the Bond brand. Could the future of books be cashing in on literary legacy?

If you're feeling uncertain but curious, the miracle of globalisation means you can pop over to BBC's Book at Bedtime where they are serialising the book over the coming weeks (Update: it has almost disappeared - two episodes still available). While Adams was an advocate for micro-payments for content, he also lamented that "The world is controlled in a top-down way by large hierarchies that have control over us". Snaffling the free audio while you can could be a fitting tribute to a multimedia pioneer.

Forthcoming Carey and Hardy

November will see the release of Peter Carey's latest, Olivier and Parrot in America. I was lucky enough to snag an advance of this thumping tome and it's an impressive work. One of the things I like about Carey is that he is very much an Australian abroad so his writing looks at being stretched between two cultures. In his latest Europeans head into the belly of America just as that nation was the hope for democracy.

But don't take my word for it. Here's what the man himself has to say:

Interview with Peter Carey from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Today another Australian writer kicks off a new project. Under the dubious title of Marieke Hardy in Your Hand, The Age has launched a venture into m-fiction, or stories delivered by text. While it may be a first for Australia, cell fiction is already popular in Japan where keitai shosetsu (cell phone novels) have pulled in millions of dollars from subscriptions of less than two bucks a novel. Fairfax are relying on discovering Melbourne's own oyayubi zoku (or thumb tribes) to build up mobile business.

I'm a big fan of Hardy. Her Sex in the City for blokes, Last Man Standing, was under-rated and she's a passionate advocate for new and interesting writing both on First Tuesday Book Club and online. Hardy herself reckons the story will be ‘‘a tragicomedy with a dark underbelly" about ‘‘a socially inept woman who joins a local vigilante group’’. So I've signed-up today.

And the cost of this little experiment? There'll be twenty episodes costing 55c apiece with a sign-on fee of 25c, making for a grand total of $11.25. Each installment will be 70 words so the whole thing looks like being 1,400ish words - about double the length of her regular column.

So it's an interesting exercise - will readers (on any device) pay for stories by an author they know but can read elsewhere for free? This represents a slide of content behind the paywall and I'm keen to see the uptake. The answer is in the quality of the writing as much as the novelty of the device.

Looking for Looby: Mic Looby profile

When I meet the unshaven man in plaid zippered jacket and vintage 70s shirt he looks more like a bass player than the crisp profile image of Big Issue columnist, Mic Looby. “I shaved especially for that,” Looby quips. His eyes are ringed with tiredness characteristic of too much computer time or caring for a young child. And this Mic Looby does both.

The Looby I’m here to interview is the author of Paradise Updated. His first novel follows newbie guidebook writer Mithra as she heads to Maganda in search of the legendary Robert Rhind who wrote the first version of the guide revered by travellers as ‘the Bible’. Complications arrive when Mithra realises she has to sack Rhind while researching Maganda. The story flips between exotic locales and corporate machinations as Looby satirises the “bogus authority of the guidebook which is at the heart of a lot of what I wrote”.

And Looby should know – he’s penned guidebooks to Burma, the Philippines and Australia as well as working as an editor for Lonely Planet. “It’s so easy to remember as an ex-guidebook author because it really stays with you… And as an editor you remember doing this book before and changing these words last time and they’ve been changed back again by the author.”

He’s keen to point out that this is fiction he’s writing, not a tell-all memoir. “It’s a novel that happens to be about guidebook writers as opposed to the other way round. People will just get into because most people are travellers.” There must have been a point where he considered doing it as a non-fiction book? “You can be more true with fiction in a way,” he pauses sipping his coffee. “Because with non-fiction you’re claiming this is real and then you’re holding yourself holding yourself up to critics to say ‘That’s not how I know it.’”

His fictional country has become part of the gentrification of the Banana Pancake trail as intrepid backpackers are nudged out by resorts with on-beach parking and cosmetic surgery for tan lines. Looby reckons this scene has become all too familiar. “As soon as a guidebook says it’s unspoilt, it’s spoilt. When you’re out on the road you get that sense of ‘Should I really be putting this in the book?’”

It’s just one of the difficult choices Looby found himself making as a new guidebook author. His first book was the controversial Burma, which some travel pundits recommend avoiding because they believe travel supports the military junta. Looby remains conflicted. “You do have to go there to understand what’s going on, but if you go there you’re supporting the regime.”

But his first guide was made more difficult because he was presented with a problem much like that of his fictional Mithra: he was replacing another author. “I did him [previous author, Jens Peters] out of his royalties,” Looby explains “I wrote the bulk of it and they said ‘If you repeat one word of this guy’s manuscript in the new guide we’ll all be sued.’… I still feel bad about that.”

As much as being about researching travel tomes, Paradise Updated lampoons travellers who don’t realise that guidebooks are just guides. “It’s out of date before you’ve flown home and yet your readers don’t know that,” Looby laughs. He has a cheeky cynicism about the books he once wrote: “The problem is that people look to the guidebooks for truth and it’s not that simple. The truth is slippery.”

Looby is as mercurial as his veteran author Robert Rhind (rumoured to have died from a peanut butter overdose and fought in the last revolution on an armoured elephant). His driver’s licence tells you he’s Keir Looby, son of Archibald Prize-winning painter Keith. The younger Looby himself is a cartoonist, an illustrator of more than five children’s books, plus a degree in journalism that led to a sub editor job in Hong Kong. “I came home and thought I’d end up in newspapers, but Lonely Planet were hiring as they always are, so I just signed up with them in the late 90s as an editor in house.”

He swapped identities again to become a guidebook author, his typo-friendly nickname in several guides. That name comes from a family joke about naming him Heironymus, later to be ‘Aussiefied’ as Heronymic then abbreviated to Mic.

Confused by the many Mics, I ask what he calls himself. “Idiot, wanker,” he laughs, “increasingly so.” One thing he doesn’t call himself is novelist. “No way! I also read somewhere that you’re not novelist until you’ve written three. I’ve noticed people don’t call themselves novelists until they’re in the double figures.”

So if guidebooks are the Bible and their writers are disciples then does that make him a heretic? He laughs his lungs out before replying: “I hope so. I’ve always wanted to be a heretic now that you mention it.”


First published in The Big Issue, No. 338

Joel Magarey Q&A

Joel Magarey's Exposure is a unique travel memoir. Joel set out on an around the world odyssey while trying to leave the love of his life and cope with his obsessive compulsive disorder. Joel recently told me about the horror of re-drafting from scratch, avoiding danger and ice selling as good preparation for writing.

Hackpacker: According to your bio you've been an ice salesman, juggler and a journalist. Do authors feel obliged to play up the kookier parts of their lives when writing their own bios? How do you think these jobs feed into your writing?

Joel Magarey: Ice-selling fed into my writing by... okay. You got me. It didn't. Yeah, you feel that obligation, because you want people to see you as an interesting human not a list of publications. On the other hand developing a financially rewarding comedy juggling act required learning how to make people laugh. And I think journalism demands that you learn to see detail and hones your sense of what interests people. It also forced me to write in short and clear sentences – which, God, I needed after university.

HP: How do you describe this book - is it memoir? Travel writing? A love story?

JM: It’s memoir. I describe it as a memoir of love and travel with a psychological edge. The love story is the main narrative driver but there's also an overcoming-illness quest and a will-he-get-back-to-Australia-in-one-piece element. The three threads of the book, love, travel and mental disorder, are all woven into each other in terms of both the story and the book’s preoccupations.

HP: Exposure follows your travels while wrestling with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. So beyond the quote that the title comes from, writing this book was 'exposing' on a couple of levels wasn't it?

JM: Many levels. Most obviously, in writing the book I have as you say revealed the bizarre compulsions and obsessions I experienced when I was prey to OCD. Call them fearful illusions. But perhaps even more ‘exposingly’, I’ve also described the many non-pathological illusions of desire I had – post-Catholic sexual greed, immature fantasies of love, grand expectations of career and adventure. With these I don’t have the protection of a diagnosis which makes it almost scarier. But I had to bare all this to tell the story, because it is fundamentally about how these powerful illusions of desire and fear can sabotage the capacity to love, value and have real people and things.

Of course there’s also plenty of physical exposure in the book: nearly drowning, setting fire to my tent, snapping stalactites off my nose, that sort of thing. But the deeper sense of exposure in the book is the journey away from illusory freedoms and securities towards exposure to the dangers inevitably involved in committing to realities such as accepting you have a mental disorder or proposing marriage to a (real) woman. As Helen Keller says in the quote you refer to, cited in the book: ‘Security is mostly a superstition…Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure’.

It’s no coincidence the therapy of choice for most anxiety disorders is exposure therapy. But you don’t have to have an anxiety disorder to reap the paradoxical benefits of exposure. I recently wrote a piece expanding on all this in The Punch.

HP: In writing this book you did a complete re-write from scratch - that's pretty gutsy stuff. Were you terrified when you started that re-write?

JM: It was scary, and I felt a great inner groan at the years of work I had just taken on. But the hardest part had been earlier – deciding to abandon all that work: admitting to myself I’d spent two-and-a-half years writing a book that wasn’t up to scratch. On the other hand, that decision was the key to getting published, because I finally let go of the first version’s inbuilt flaws.

HP: The book's structure really jumps around through time and place - was that a conscious decision to cut the story up or did it evolve as the best way to tell the story?

JM: I had planned the book with two narratives in mind. The story alternates between the global journey in the present – in which I think I’m escaping but am essentially orbiting a ridiculously lovable woman, Penny – and past-tense sequences recounting the genesis and first outbreaks of OCD and the early romance and adventures of the long love with Penny. They are actually both linear chronological narratives, advancing side by side, and each past-tense sequence bears some relationship to something that’s just happened on the world trip. And after ‘touching’ in this way all through the book the two narratives meet up definitively at the end.

HP: What are you working on now? Can we expect that parliamentary reporter tell-all soon?
JM: Actually, as long as I’ve worked in Parliament House I’ve thought it would make a great setting for a thriller – a bloodied body is discovered in the beautiful, lush gardens, and perhaps there’s a Murray Whelan type in the place; a Hansard reporter perhaps? And it gets all political. Someone else can write that. My next project is to have a holiday. Then I’d like to put together a book of travel stories – half fiction, half non-fiction. A book of poems wants to see the light of day too. But after 10 years of Exposure, the holiday first.

Exposure will be launched at Readings Carlton on Friday 9th October.