Hackpacker

Whatever Happened to the Future?

2011-07-10T21:39:00.002+10:00

Pulp is the latest in a long list of 1990s bands with too-clever accountants and mortgages to service that are touring again. One of the Sheffield group's bigger hits was Disco 2000, a wry look at teen unrequited love and the hope of reunion when the millennium clocked over. Recorded in 1995, the song will take on an odd retro-futurism when it's performed this year - 11 years after the rendezvous deadline. Since this song bounced through Converse All Stars in the mid-90s we've stopped focusing on a point in the future as hopeful.

All through the 20th century, the year 2000 was something to aim for, a number that became synonymous with the futuristic, from the ABC TV science program Towards 2000 (which became Beyond 2000 then Beyond Tomorrow) to the British comic 2000AD. But the hope for the year 2000 became infected with the Millennium Bug as Y2K became something to fear. By 1999 Silverchair snarled in their Anthem for the Year 2000: "Never knew we were living in a world/ with a mind that could be so small". The shift from hope to betrayal was captured in the recent Threadless T-shirt which opines "This was supposed to be the future - where is my jetpack?"

So it's interesting to see the positive future making a comeback. The Future Timeline looks to capture predictions for the coming centuries including robot insects acting as spies and the disappearance of Nigeria's rainforests. And that's just the next ten years. Technology brings most of the good news - why jetpack when you can teleport? Good to hear that gay marriage will finally be legal in every US state and someone has finally cured the common cold. Okay, so the site is based on predictions but references point off to projects currently underway and some show long-term trends (like the fact that by 2015 more Americans will be in favour of gay marriage than against). And while there's terrifying tales of extinction, shortages and war, there is also hope.

Literature has long favoured dystopia when it looks into the crystal ball. The 20th century saw Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, The Handmaiden's Tale and many more. In this millennium Cormac McCarthy recently limped out of the West to tell us just how grim the future is looking in The Road. So Jennifer Egan's approach to the future in 2010's A Visit From the Goon Squad has to sneak up us. The inter-connected short stories slouch through the 1990s into the post-millennium with the last few chapters tracing her characters into the future.

It's not a utopia by any means - mobile phones have become so essential even toddler text, viral marketing has become parroting and English has hollow words so "'American' had become an ironic term". But there's also hope. A girl tells the story of her brother's autism through a Powerpoint presentation (which has retro appeal in the future) and humanity is better connected. The music industry finds a younger audience and an unlikely folk hero. It's hopeful future as dirty and ragged as today.

The Long Now project saw the disappointment of the year 2000 coming. They set up in 1996 looking to shift people's vision beyond the next 5 years and think long term. Founder Danny Hillis explains it:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all."

Jean Marc Côté's 1901 vision of the classroom in the Year 2000

They're so far forward looking at Long Now that they have five digit dates "to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years". Along with a project to make a clock designed for 10,000 years and never chime the same melody, they also have Long Bets. It encourage amateur futurists to bet on their own predictions with winnings being awarded to charity. Zeus Jones reckons that by 2020 historians will reach the consensus that the early 21st century was the start of the "Second" or "New Rennaissance". Let's see if he can't be proved right.

In Other Words: Verbal Texters

2011-02-08T09:45:00.001+11:00

When your work colleague asks you “Report QUESTION MARK” you’ve got a case of verbal texting on your hands. It’s that socially awkward mode of speech that texting and emails has left us with, where people believe they can no longer communicate tone and need to spell out their punctuation. We are so sick of these guys EXCLAMATION POINT.

At its worst it can degenerate into emoticons – “You’re giving me FROWNY FACE right now and I need TONGUE POKING.” – and initialism - “Don’t make me LOL” – in conversation. Some try to specify font in conversation – “This joke is much funnier in Comic Sans” – but at its worst it becomes twitter speak. There’s nothing worse than talking to someone using hashtags in dialogue #justsayin. And it has to stop before people start trying to insert hyperlinks into speech FULL STOP.

In Other Words is a regular on the

Publish Post

Big Issue's Ointment page. Off Verbal Texters appeared in Issue No. 374.

In Other Words: Geekocracy

2011-01-25T09:14:00.000+11:00

If you’ve ever waited by your broken computer all morning to finally get a pasty kid in a Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt to visit and tell your machine is broken then you’ve already met a princeling of the geekocracy. The geeks have inherited the earth in a bloodless coup of confusing jargon such as power-cycling (switching your machine on/off), user error (blaming you for computer breakdown) or server issues (meaning “We have no idea what just happened”).

The kings of the geekocracy rarely leave their courts. With titles like Sys Admin or Chief Architect of All Time they are guarded by banks of servers and rarely deign to answer the phone preferring you “Fill out the email form and we’ll get back to you”. You are as likely to see a Sys Admin as Queen Elizabeth II popping around to explain why Windows keeps crashing.

In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue's Ointment page. Geekocracy appeared in Issue No. 362.

DRM and Writers: Fight for Your Right to Parity

2010-11-15T10:02:00.005+11:00

With the talk that e-books have finally arrived in Australia and that app reading with iBooks will open new markets, writers are getting forgotten.

There's no doubt new markets and new readers are opening up with new technology, but few of these new revenue streams are passed on to writers. Including a forthcoming app on Sydney, I've written for five apps and the experience has varied considerably as publishers try to work out the rules.

Mostly these projects have been re-purposing of text - that is getting text from a print project and using it in an app. In print this would be called syndication and an additional fee would be offered - often less than the original fee. By re-naming syndication re-purposing, publishers sidestep writer's fees.

And there are good arguments for publishers making money off the digital frontier. They've invested in developing an app, gambled on costly technologies and have to work with unfamiliar distribution methods. But when publishers create a new revenue stream, writers deserve a share.

When literary agent Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie stormed out on Random House earlier this year, he was demanding a share of digital rights for his authors. And when he didn't get it he started Odyssey Editions. The simple site design and quick retreat (he dropped from 20 to 7 titles and hasn't added any more for months) suggest it was more publicity stunt than publishing house. Wylie is now making nice with Random House again but secured for his high-profile clients close to 40% in royalties. Compare this with the more typical 25% for print royalties (usually 10% in Australia) and digital rights should offer more to authors.

Kindle edition of
Live and Let Die

More recently James Bond fired a shot at traditional publishers: Ian Fleming's estate leapfrogged Penguin to sell e-books directly through Amazon. JK Rowling must be rubbing her hands together as her publisher Bloomsbury never secured the digital rights for Harry Potter and recently her agents have been saying e-Harry may be possible.

But these are the big names making even bigger bucks. Surely smaller authors don't have the clout to demand more for their rights?

This week, I was part of #ewfchat talking about apps. There was a lot of discussion about what apps meant for publishing and if some forms of writing worked better on apps or e-books. One excellent question was "Who are the new publishers?" The answer was simple: developers.

With an app sold through the iTunes store, Apple take 30% as a distributor of content (which is similar to what a distributor of a print book takes) and leaves the remaining 70% to developers and content creators. You can see where Wylie's almost 40% for authors comes from.

If publishers don't build realistic financial relationships with authors then there are other partners out there. And new partners will invest not just financially, allowing writers to re-invent themselves and what books can be.

In Other Words: Off Gridding

2010-10-18T09:59:00.000+11:00

You’re probably already overwhelmed by iAnxiety – that rising mania as everyone you know has bought at least one iPad. Plus your inbox is full, you’ve got 14 unanswered Twitter DMs and they’ve probably just invented a new social network for you to be behind on. It’s time you embraced off gridding.

Author Susan Maushart took the off gridder experiment, telling her family they’d live screen-free, truly cordless lives for six months. The connected kids LOLed, but Maushart’s book Winter of Our Disconnect has become a bible to turn off, tune out and drop out. Though they talk about increased attention spans and appreciating boredom, off gridders are commonly mistaken for Amish.

In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue's Ointment page. Off Gridding appeared in Issue No. 356.

American Psychoanalysis: Profile of Bret Easton Ellis

2010-09-27T10:26:00.000+10:00

Photo: Jeff Burton

In the dying days of his book tour promoting his latest Imperial Bedrooms, cult author Bret Easton Ellis is so over answering questions about his novels. “I have a completely different relationship with the novel than the reader does,” he sighs. “Which is why it’s very hard to sit here and answer questions about the book, because it’s such a disconnect.” Imperial Bedrooms uses the characters of his 1985 debut, Less Than Zero, 25 years later and looks at how time has scarred both the characters and the once enfant terrible himself.

On this tour he’s survived that interview at Byron Bay Writer’s Festival where he repelled questions from Ramona Koval about his role as a satirist by joshing about his newfound crush on Delta Goodrem. Koval in turn scolded him for treating the interview as “a stand-up routine”.

But in person Ellis is entertaining yet open – his powerful chin is blunted by a navy Nike cap and his playboy image muted by glasses and an overcoat over a woollen hoody. Sure, he bats away the odd issue by laughing “That’s like a dating site question”, but he shares a swinish charm with his books – initially you’re repelled but you keep reading or listening.

His name dominates the covers of seven books, including cult hit American Psycho, but he’s recently realised that with “every book I’m working through my issues.” Less Than Zero was written when he was just 19 and coping with his LA’s peculiar isolation amid partying plenty. “I had the mind of a writer and that makes you a bit of voyeur… but I always did feel alienated from everything. That alienation made me sad and a lot of Less Than Zero was me working that out.” He rolls through his canon connecting them to his own experience – “Unrequited love – that sucks. So then Boom! Rules of Attraction starts building itself.”

His most complex book remains American Psycho and in the past he’s talked about its protagonist Patrick Bateman as based on his own father. “That was when I was blaming my father for everything – I’ve let it go now,” he rolls his eyes to let you know he’s using Californian psychobabble both meaningfully and ironically. But he confesses to a troubled relationship with American Psycho. “I was very defensive about that book because of the heaps of criticism poured on it. I wanted it to seem more important than what it actually was.”

On the surface American Psycho was criticized as sex and slash, but at its core Easton Ellis maintains it’s a satire of a lifestyle he couldn’t adopt when he moved to New York. “It was making me angry, I hated that life, I hated what was expected of me as a man in this society, the things that I’m supposed to have that make me successful and cool.” Unsurprisingly he left New York four years ago to return to LA.

This return also meant a return to Less Than Zero as he re-read his own book like a guidebook to the LA of his youth. It was an uneasy read. Many fans tell him it’s the book that made them move to LA. “And I go “Really? That’s the book that made me want to leave LA for 20 years.”

During his re-reading something didn’t sit right. His main character Clay had a “passivity that was protecting him from this blasted moral landscape that he found himself in.” He began a dialogue with the character and his own past wondering where Clay would have ended up. Ellis reckons “The Clay character in Imperial Bedrooms, I guess has something against me.” Perhaps it’s because Clay sees so much of himself in Easton Ellis. “I drifted around at 19. I went wherever people told me, to parties… I have things to do now. I’m much more active at 45 than I was at 19.”

The 25 years since Less Than Zero have rollercoastered by for Ellis – the height of American Psycho being made into a successful film plummeted when a studio churned out a horrific sequel, American Psycho II: All American Girl. The deepest low was the loss of his long-term partner Michael Wade Kaplan in 2004. Humour has long been a coping mechanism. “You find yourself going ‘Oh this is the way world works. God it plays a lot of fucking jokes on you. Jesus, it’s a tricky place to navigate.’ And you either paint it pink or you paint it black.”

Ellis’ shade of pink is both fleshily real and satirically lurid. Clay’s screenwriter has no real power in Hollywood, more punchline than player. He’s drawn from Ellis experience of having his scripts mangled by the studio machine but it’s all part of his “letting it go” ethos. He’s in pre-production a new film project The Golden Suicides with Gus Van Sant and wants Angelina Jolie for the lead. “Writers and actors are the two people treated the shittiest in Hollywood, because there’s so many of them,” he says mater-of-factly. He follows it with what might have be his Hollywood coping mantra: “The writer has no control.”

An edited version of this article appeared in The Big Issue, No. 363.

What the Haigh's

2010-08-16T15:07:00.002+10:00

One of Adelaide's biggest landmarks is the corner of Rundle Mall and King William Street, known as Beehive Corner. If you look up you'll spot the landmark insect buzzing over Haigh's Chocolate. Almost ready for its 100th birthday, the first store appeared here in 1915 and their luxury chocolates have spread to Victoria and New South Wales.

But there's something special about getting them here at the source. Their chocolate frogs pre-date Harry Potter's sweet-tooth as they've been selling them for 67 years. Today they offer them in peppermint and dark and reckon they sell more than a million a year. But the frogs are getting pushed aside by Adelaide's Panda-monium and you can now buy large chocolate blocks in the shape of Adelaide Zoo's Wang Wang and Funi. Plus there's truffles, blocks and choc-coated fruit. But the best thing about visiting the Haigh's store is coming out with a free sample - they usually insist on giving you a taster at the cash register.

Inside the Stone Wall Lunch

2010-08-15T09:18:00.045+10:00

Cellar doors used to have this exclusive feel of a mate letting you in the back door to sneakily try a glass. But now they've become part of the marketing plan. So Rockford Wines try to re-create that lost intimacy with their Stone Wall lunch by creating a secret dining society.

I'm let into this elite noshery in the Barossa Valley only because a friend of mine has been a member since he was 16 - even at that age he was tall enough to be mistaken for a tree so he must have eluded any ID checks. He's warned me that this lunch will take half the day but I need to get there early for the first glass. Predictably I'm late, negotiating the Krondorf Road but mostly because for a secret society it seems deceptively easy to find.

They pop the first cork in the Stone Wall tasting room, which my friend is right. It's worth arriving early for a gutsy flute of the 1993 Black Shiraz. Sparkling reds get the wrong end of the bottle when it comes to most Northern Hemisphere winos, but a red wine that goes straight to your head is better regarded in Australia. This one has inspired paragraphs calling it "legendary" and "sex in a bottle", but rich flavours are well leavened so you can call it "plummy", "bloody" or whatever is in your wanky lexicon for a full mouthful with a long aftertaste. And then we're ushered through to lunch.

Share tables can be nightmares. You're stuck at some some poky bench between someone opening a newspaper in your face and the guy who is winning the battle of decibels about a football game you haven't seen. But the Stone Wall lunch has limited numbers, spaciously seated so you soon find yourself chatting with neighbours. The bearded gents sitting across the table had flown down from Queensland just to attend the lunch and the group of old school friends had driven over from Melbourne to stay nearby so they can drink on after.

There's a short introduction from the cellar door manager. This is his chance to dig deep into the cellar and pull out some wines that you might not get to try at a cellar door and to puzzle out dishes that set off the best of the grape. According to the ever-changing menu, we'll open with with leeks and black olives accompanied with a light riesling and finish with the Cordon Cut Semillon and quince paste with cheeses.

The most obvious feature of the room is the large hearth that presents everything you're eating. Not sure what galangal is? The chef points it out on the hearth and encourages you to give it a sniff. Their secret ingredient is that most of it is grown about two miles away - on what was once Huffendorf Farm. The range of produce comes from a small garden so the menu is seasonal and fresh. Today, the hearth flows over with ears of corn, strings of drying chillies, green blooms of coriander and cabbage to give the impression of cornucopia. With most of it just a walk away, you couldn't get much more locavore.

But getting down to the grub, the pick of the courses is the snapper curried with the flavour of fenugreek to give the fish a lift, with braised beets and kohlrabi (on the hearth just by the cabbage). The wine matching means they pull out some little known drops, but their oft-praised Basket Press Shiraz is pretty much a must-do. Today it comes paired with a soy-soused mallard, an ideal matching of two big flavours and you've warmed up through a range of whites.

After six courses, dessert needs to be light so the pear and fig tart is clever cooking - flavours that slap you awake but don't overpower the Cordon Cut Semillion, their last word on booze. Though there's a further tasting in the tasting room and unsurprisingly bottles are bought after an afternoon of generous hospitality.

Most reassuringly, my request for a press pack is met with guffaws and, "Yeah, we'll have to get around to making one of them." The secret society is safe.

In Other Words: Fauxgans

2010-08-12T10:14:00.001+10:00

Experts trace their origins back to the blokey billionaires of the 1980s. But don’t confuse Bondy or John ‘Pig’s Arse’ Elliott with the everyday fauxgan. The yobby (yobbo-yuppy) of the 1980s is an almost extinct breed. The first fauxgans appeared in the late 1990s when tradies got scarce and then fashionable. The first signs of mainstream fauxgans were the arrival of Merrick and Rosso, who groused their way into Ocker hearts across the nation. Fauxgan royalty finally hit the telly in the form of Dave ‘Hughesy’ Hughes, who out larrikin-ed larrikins and made ‘bein Stralyan’ a performance art. Today fauxgans may comb their fauxlets back so they are barely visible, but offer them a choice of beer of a cheeky imported merlot to spot them in a field.

In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue's Ointment page. Fauxgans was the first one of the series.

Return of the Laksa King?

2010-08-07T16:14:00.000+10:00

For the last couple weeks I've been watching - with a mix of amusement, bemusement and some hope - as one of Flemington's best loved joints re-invented itself. The new signage reminiscent of McDonald's brought a smile - is the King thinking of a dynasty of chain stores? The new location on Pin Oak Crescent is confusing because the existing location was always buzzing and bookings were theoretically possible but often bungled. And the hope? Well, I just wanted the food to be as good as when the King slummed it in a grubby arcade and you came away with change from a tenner for that steaming bowl of Malaysian soup.

We arrived late for our reservation and there was a huge crowd bubbling over into the street. It was opening week and there were floral tributes piling the windows, so I expected we'd be worshipping at the feet of the King for a while before our audience. But I was wrong. The new venue seats 200, so our reservation was honoured and we're zoomed through to meet the rest of our group. The long line gave us some sneers, but the new King favours bookers.

Inside it's nicely done out. The decor is a vast improvement on the cold tiles of the old arcade spot. The walls are muted shades and light fittings are fluid drops from the ceiling with their electricity cords looping off into wall decoration. There's even a garden feature that breaks up the hugeness of the place. We're shown to a low share bench with squat stools. It's not a comfy lounge-around feel which is a shame because unlike the old location you'd like to dawdle over dinner here. The concrete floor and lack of curtains makes it too clamourous for dinner party conversation, but you'll want to linger longer with this new monarch.

And crucially, the food. I order the usual chicken curry laksa with extra eggplant and it's reliably good - replete with two kinds of noodles, charred eggplant and shreds of chicken. Others at our table want to test the new menu. The menu re-think is a good one. They've kept the namesake dishes at the lower end the same but have a fewer higher end dishes to explore. So there's a Peking duck entree at just over twenty and 'Laksa King Selections' like a rockling fillet in sweet chilli tamarind that's just under eighteen dollars. My pescatarian companions go for the sambal fresh calamari that blends tender with a lick of spice. Straight-up vegetarian is limited and you'll find shrimp paste in the belachan veg dishes. But if you're there for their laksa it's reassuring and still a bargain.

The other constant between the two venues is the service. On a busy Friday night we waited just over 30 minutes for some pretty basic mains and roti bread. The larger premises stretch the staff thinner and on busy nights it's going to be tough to keep service consistent across the area. But that just means you have to order up a few more beers, which keeps the bill ticking over...

But these are quibbles of the King. If you're an old fan he remembers your favourites but wants to seduce you into a few new dishes. And if you've never been down with the King then the new venue makes a better first impression. He's certainly thriving in his new realm so rather than plotting revolution he remains a benevolent ruler of the Flemington's culinary kingdom though I'd be disappointed if the power went to his head and he tried to annexe other realms. The King is dead, long live the King.

A Fest Full of Hollers: Shout outs for MWF tix

2010-07-18T10:03:00.006+10:00

On Friday the Melbourne Writers Festival program was a hefty insert in the Age. In the past it came as part of Saturday’s weekend supplements, but it’s all part of the new energy buzzing through the festival. New director Steve Grimwade put his program out on Friday to coincide with online bookings and the program boasting more than 400 events has more in common with Friday’s hip EG than Saturday’s brunchable browser, A2.

The big news in the program is Joss Whedon as the second keynote. Tickets have probably already sold out but it does give an excuse to show off Joss Whedon on writing for new media:

Mark Scott presenting The Quest for Truth interests me less. We know where the ABC supremo is coming from already and there will be a lot of talking up ABC 24. Cory Doctrow on Copyright Vs Creativity speaks more to the challenges of our time: namely how can we continue to create quality content when it is free? The argument is often made that we should be giving away content, “getting it out there” will build an audience, but this argument is often advanced by established media practitioners who already have a place in traditional media. Doctrow can afford to give away his novels, but for the rest of us writing may no longer be a rent-payer.

And this is particularly relevant for small journals – how can they make the move online to free content and continue to publish? Fortunately MWF gives you the chance to get the lowdown from editors and contributors with their ongoing Magazine event. In suitably alternative shipping container, this event gives publications like Overland, Kill Your Darlings and The Big Issue a platform to put their writing centrestage and meet their readers. If you miss your chance there’s also a Birthday Stories event that features editors from Meanjin, Overland and Going Down Swinging – including the all important "where are they headed" question that seems like a good point to ask about their online direction.

Finally there’s two events I have to attend, because I’m in them. I’ve had a crush on Liner Notes for a long time but have been to coy to tell them. The idea is you get various spoken word and performance artists to produce a piece of writing based on a track from a particular album. Last year’s Thriller featured Linda Jaivan debuting her guitar playing skills and Sean M Whelan's inspired re-imagining of Mama Say a Ma Cu Sa. This year it’s Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 classic, Rumours, when the band was ripped apart by sexual tension and producing their biggest album ever. I’ve been given a track and have to write a piece for it, but more on that as I write it…

The next morning I’m in the backseat on The Long Road, a session with radio broadcaster Jon Faine with his son Jack as they discuss their drive from Melbourne to London. I think this means my job is to say “Are we there yet?” and ask to stop for the loo at the most difficult times.

That same Sunday morning, Ma Jian reads in Federation Square. As one of China’s best contemporary short story writers this will be one of my festival highlights.

Between The Lines: Bruce Mutard Profile

2010-06-01T10:10:00.004+10:00

As the first volume of his epic graphic novel is released, writer/illustrator Bruce Mutard reflects on how much of contemporary Australia he sees in the 1930s and being political without the polemics.

When design-school dropout Bruce Mutard heard that his publisher wouldn’t be releasing his first comic, Street Smell, he didn’t give up. “I was naturally disappointed but self-publication was always an option,” Mutard says. “My dad helped me out as I didn’t have enough money but I just wanted to get it out there.”

Distributing it through the zine networks of the early 1990s, Mutard produced the comic for four years under his own steam, learning to write and draw as he went along. “I wanted to do it on my own terms. I wanted to tell the stories I wanted to tell. They weren’t commercial. They weren’t genre and couldn’t be easily pigeonholed so the perks of fame and fortune never came my way, but I doggedly stuck to my guns.”

With the release of his 250-page graphic novel, The Sacrifice, Mutard has both guns blazing. The first of three ambitious volumes, the book follows Robert Wells, a pacifist who finds himself gradually drawn into World War II. The book has already drawn comparisons with Art Spegelman’s three-book graphic novel, Maus, which scored the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for it’s re-telling of Jewish experience during the same conflict.

The Sacrifice has a different tack. Set in 1930s Melbourne it asks if war is ever justifiable. Mutard began work on the book in 2004 as the War on Terror legitimised itself as a necessary conflict to track down still-undiscovered weapons of mass destruction. The parallels between the two periods interest Mutard.

“Contemporary incidents fade out of memory very quickly, but the deeper structural significance of some of these issues remain. So I thought perhaps if I use analogous situations… if I can just point to those situations and my overall point will be made in a much more subtle and hopefully more powerful way. That’s why I find the historical setting more beguiling.”

The Sacrifice points out that then-Prime Minister ‘Pig Iron Bob’ Menzies was notorious for sending iron ore to Japan at a time when the nation was building up its armed forces. Today it could be uranium or human rights abuses of Australia’s trading partners. “It’s the same thing,” Mutard says, “where an economy is willing to trade arms and sensitive material to anyone all for short-term income and aren’t really thinking in terms of the consequences.”

These are big questions – surely too much for the humble comic book of superheroes? “Anyone who’s been doing graphic stories and had real ambition to take it into a real adult market has always had to confront that for a long time. You’ve just got to kick against the pricks in this regard. But you have to back it up with the actual material.”

Australian graphic novels like Nicki Greenberg’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby or Shaun Tan’s award-winning The Arrival have made inroads into an adult market. Mutard is optimistic about a mainstream readership. “If they’ve never read any graphic stories before they might struggle to pick up the rhythm, but we’re such a visual culture that virtually everyone has been exposed to sequential images via television or films. We all grow up as a child reading illustrated picture books where image and text are working alongside one another.”

Reading The Sacrifice is distinctly cinematic with plot developing in facial expressions and themes explored in action such as an old woman watering a dying tree. Tangled family ties and trouble relationships are all part of Mutard’s book that packs more than a political punch. “I used to do these rather polemical short stories where you really shout at people. You’re slamming your fist on the table and making these statements. That’s all very well, but it doesn’t endear you to a wider audience. People in general don’t like getting harangued.”

Mutard doesn’t seem the type to slam fists on tables. Although he illustrates his comics as well as writing he talks like an author, considering his words before he speaks and sometimes even editing them after he’s spoken. As a boy he “read Tintin, Asterix and Disney comics” but “never imagined I would actually do a comic. The medium was not something that inspired me to take it up.”

It wasn’t until he began studying fine art and design that he discovered the adult and alternative comics such as Maus or the work of Robert Crumb which bought him inspiration. “By seeing the range and diversity of the medium it became more attractive and I started to dabble in telling stories that way. I like to write but I also like to draw, so there was a natural synergy eventually.”

Stories attract Mutard to his projects. The Sacrifice was originally conceived as a single book, but the trilogy continues with The Fight and The Return because the narrative took over. “That was a bit of a surprise. It was never planned to be a three volume set. It was relatively late in the game that I realised that it was logical to take the story of Robert, to follow him in uniform, into the fighting scenario, then after that. How do you get out of uniform, if you’ve been a soldier? How do you come down from that completely alien lifestyle to ordinary life?” And it’s these human questions and stories that originally inspired Mutard to create graphic novels.

An edited version of this profile originally appeared in The Big Issue.

Review: Beatrice and Virgil

2010-05-24T07:53:00.006+10:00

Reviewing Yann Martel's latest offering got me thinking of a mythical phone conversation Yann should have had with his agent.
Yann: So I'm writing a new book about a donkey and a howler monkey...
Agent: Keep talking, Yann-baby. This has Booker-bagging written all over it!
Yann: ... as a fable of the Holocaust.
[pause]
Agent: Yann-sweety, I think we might have a crossed line with Art Spiegelman here...
Yann: No, no. It'll be great - because I'll bring together that essay I was writing about the Holocaust and create a way of re-imagining the history the way Camus and Orwell did.
Agent: Yann, baby-doll, you know you're not Orwell, don't you? And that essay with fiction flip book idea always seemed kinda crazy... [sounds of faux static] There's something wrong with this line. I'll call you back, lambkin...

I stayed away from Martell's Life of Pi as long as I could, because it was always being forced on me - usually by a dreadlocked friend who said it had changed their life. I'd usually shrug and say I'd keep it handy for when my life - like a flat tyre - needed changing. But I have to acknowledge that Pi was a hugely successful book and had some great writing in it.

Beatrice and Virgil Martel references his Pi success using the character of Henry - successful author who want to write about the Holocaust but gets snubbed by his publisher and looks to enjoy life outside of writing. He wants to write a book in which "The unwieldy encumbrance of history was reduced and packed into a suitcase." Except that some people don't want the Holocaust in a handy travel size.

Henry meets a taxidermist who seems to be embarking on a similar project in a play with donkey Beatrice and monkey Virgil journeying across their country which is a giant shirt that represents 20th century history. They attempt to create a sewing kit to repair the shirt which includes tools they'll use like "empty good cheer expressed in extremis" and Aukitz - a corruption of the Nazi camp.

There's some things I really liked about Beatrice and Virgil. It switches between play and narrative plus throws letters, skimmed short stories and signs at you to keep your eye on the page. There's insight into how/why we dehumanise killing and torture then pushes the reader back into thinking about these experiences by finishing with the "Games for Gustav" conclusion. And the cover design is a triumph keeping the play at the front of mind everytime you pick it up.

But it doesn't hold together as a book.

The characters are all flat with the exception of the autobiographical Henry. The animals are interchangeable and the taxidermist's "let my play do the talking" is snide take on conceited authors but is dull. The narrative points in a fairly obvious direction and the play's absurdist bent strikes a wrong note against the everyday strumming of Henry. When the plot does twist, readers shrug.

As an author Martel's attempt to advance his writing, to push towards a new kind of writing for himself is a worthwhile project. But he doesn't live up to the heights of Orwell, Camus, Speigelmann or Dante - all of whom he refers to in this book. Martel does beautiful line-by-line writing but there's nothing here that adds up to a novel. Maybe they should have gone with the flip book.

This review is based on a live discussion at the Victorian Writer's Centre Club Writers.

Writing Essential Melbourne iPhone app

2010-05-17T10:00:00.000+10:00

There's been a lot of talk about how authors need to jump on the iPhone app bandwagon. Having just written Essential Melbourne I can only agree. Will apps replace guidebooks? Inevitably.

There are obvious reasons. Most of the time I've worked for Lonely Planet, travellers have been asking if LP could give them a more portable book. From cutting out pages themselves to a ringbinder edition, the market has been talking about a book they can carry around for yonks. An app does just that and more.

Writing travel guide content has always been more than textual. Wrestling with maps on rainy Finnish streets has become plotting a point on a Google map. And those practical details like phone numbers become crucial when you know that in an app a user will use that number to call a restaurant to make a reservations.

While the maps were familiar an app uses clever geo-coding. I tagged some places "coffee" and others "kid friendly" so users could filter their maps based on this metadata. You can look at a map and know where the nearest good cup of joe is or if a place goes that extra mile to accommodate littlies.

Plus there are images. How many times have you seen a goofy traveller (not a tourist obviously) looking up from their guidebook to try to find the exact street number? Nothing signals "rip me off" like carrying a giant guidebook that you're constantly referring to. So when it came to pictures for my app I wanted to include as much signage and doorway shots as possible. Sounds boring, but if you see a sign or shopfront on your iPhone and you don't need to go back and forth from your guidebook. There's illustrative images, but there's also informative images as well.

And of course there's bugs and mistakes. As soon as you release a guidebook readers start writing in to tell you that the place you researched six months ago has closed down or gone bad. But with an app you can update anytime you want just by pushing your CMS into iTunes. I'm already looking at a round of corrections for Essential Melbourne, but more importantly there's a lot of new places I want to include. And in the old media of the guidebook I'd be waiting for the next edition which could be years off.

You can see why that guidebook brick in the bottom of your backpack is becoming a dinosaur you won't need to carry much longer.

Ahead of the Pack: A Profile of Anna Dusk

2010-04-23T10:35:00.000+10:00

In her debut novel In-human Anna Dusk mixes poetry, Aussie vernacular and a gutsy werewolf heroine.

Don’t ask Anna Dusk if werewolves are the new vampires. Sure she’s releasing a lycanthrope book just as the zeitgeist howls with The Wolfman and the Twilight franchise has been re-booted by shapeshifting spunk Jacob. But Dusk began In-human over 12 years ago so she’s hardly jumping on the fangwagon.

In-human follows Sally, a high school girl who tears out of the humdrum of rural Tasmania as she transforms into a werewolf. Her allegiances are tested between family and the pack, between hunger and herself.

Far from Twilight’s de-fanged fairy tales, In-human is powered by Sally’s anger with buckets of sex and blood. As Dusk sees it, “Growing up in a small town and having people constantly commenting on her all the time really pisses Sally off.” Dusk is no fan of Stephanie Meyers vegetarian vampires. “Where’s the fun in that?” she laughs flashing her prominent canine teeth. “People get interesting when they’re put in an extreme position. If you were becoming a werewolf how would you react or if you found that your daughter was becoming a werewolf what would you do?”

Like Sally, Dusk grew up in an idyllic Tasmania living in a small town outside of Hobart. “My very first memory was holding a kids book and thinking this is what I want to do.” But it was a long road to publication as Dusk hopped to the mainland studying commerce at Melbourne University. For several years she wrote poetry that was published in several journals, but a novel eluded her. Her first attempt at a book took her back to Tassie “and it was moving into the hidden world”. It was the horror genre, however, that gave Dusk structure to hang her poetry on and opened up fresh creativity. “Once I got onto the supernatural I felt like I could write about anything I wanted, and not even time and space were limits.”

In-human’s unconventional style owes much to poetry with lyrical text jumping between fonts and paragraphs spaced out like stanzas. “How I write is I focus on the sound of the words. I don’t think of the story or the meaning. I’m just thinking of the sound and then how it looks on the page,” Dusk explains.

Originally Dusk wrote the whole book in a gutsy Australian vernacular – in the tradition of Tim Winton’s ‘carns’ and ‘goodonyas’ – but the style almost obscured the substance. “Some of the spellings were kooky and I spent thousands of hours working out how words should be spelt. It was totally controlling because I wouldn’t let you read it in your voice you have to read it in mine,” Dusk reveals those teeth again. One publisher advised Dusk to re-draft the whole book in more accessible English, but vernacular survives in the book so it still feels like a distinctly Aussie werewolf tale.
Writing In-human took Dusk back to the familiar ground of her childhood. “There’s such mythology in Tasmania. Together with Lake Pedder, the disappearance of the Tasmanian Tiger is part of that.”

Dusk’s Tasmania has a threateningly close wilderness making the possibility of werewolves seems more real and present. “If you grow up in Tassie that’s part of being Tasmanian – that fight between wilderness and civilised life. I remember really clearly growing up with Lake Pedder protests and the devastation as a seven year old that this was a place I was never going to get to.”

And after eight years of looking for the right publisher, Dusk doesn’t think she’s over lycanthropes yet. “In my next novel I’m getting an understanding of where werewolves come from and it’s very much set in that Tasmanian environment.”

There’s a fierce environmentalism at the core of In-human. Sally makes the realisation while surveying her island that people enjoy killing even when they’re not werewolves. Dusk sides with the animals: “Werewolves kill because that’s what they need to do to survive. Anyone who gets killed by a werewolf shouldn’t take it personally.” She sees the individuality of humans tearing our planet apart more brutally than any wolves’ maw. “Humans are only just understanding that our planet is not going to survive unless we work together – not as a nation or family or tribe but as a whole. So working collectively, as a pack but at the same time allowing individuality to survive is really the way forward.”

By tackling more complex issues and clawing out a unique style, Dusk separates herself from the pack of Meyer mimickers and tween horror writers. But Dusk doesn’t see In-human as a young adult book. “I didn’t write with an audience in mind and I think it’s the publishing industry that works out an audience. My book is not for the Stephanie Myer crowd – their parents would be horrified and I’d get letters,” Dusk laughs again letting those parents know what they might be in for.

An edited version of this profile appeared in The Big Issue, No. 350.

In Defence of Independent Bookstores

2010-04-15T13:36:00.001+10:00

If you want to look into the future of books and publishing, the record industry makes for a pretty good crystal ball. The iPod took music out of the physical into the digital in the same way e-books will take books off the page.

The documentary I Need That Record looks at how music stores in the States have been gutted by the changes in music, not only by MP3 downloads but also by 'big box chains'. These stores stock the big records (the doco says 1 in 5 albums sold in the US goes through a Walmart checkout) at lower prices because of their huge volumes.

If you followed the recent parallel importation debate then you'll see similarities big bookstores and big box chains. Does it follow that independent bookstore will be pushed out by the evil machinations of the big stores and the unstoppable march of e-books?

For me the answer is: not so much. Independent bookstores remain a sensual and social experience that will be tough to replace. Going to a bookstore is as much about physically browsing. As smart as Amazon's 'Customer's Who Bought This Item Also Bought' metadata is, it's no replacement for mooching around the fiction section and skimming novels yourself. Or the serendipitous eye-catching of a face-out cover or flipping through several books without laggy downloads.

But the real trump card of a good bookstore are smart staff who can bookishly shoot the breeze. Industry speak calls this handselling, but really it's about that trustworthy human connection with someone who can really talk books. It's an idea so good Borders swiped it. Sure I could be flipping through the reviews on Library Thing or Good Reads because I get that books create communities of trusted readers, but I'd still rather chat to a human who I know isn't a publishing company shill or, worse, a Twillight fan.

Independent bookshops create communites around books. And the smart ones run reading groups or events to strengthen these communities and give their staff a good discounts or advance copies so they're on top of the latest books. Investing in the physical aspect of the bookstore is the point of difference that gives them a future.

Some of the saddest moments in I Need That Record are when book store staff and customers talk about what losing their store means to them. But this isn't the cultural apocalypse because some of these survivors have started Independent Record Store Day. On April 17th the physical record store will be celebrated with exclusive releases (like a thousand copies of the new Beastie Boys vinyl for crazed collectors) and artists spruiking their favourite store. It's either the last gasp of a dinosaur or the rennaisance of leaving the house for music, but an independent book shop day could rally readers behind the book.

What's released on Record Store Day? Chris Brown from Bull Moose tells all:

Towards an Australian Graphic Novel: A response to Meanjin and Comics

2010-03-25T13:52:00.000+11:00

Almost a year ago I wrote a piece for Meanjin called "The Written Image" about the Australian graphic novel and the developing long-form comics created in Australia. This was followed by a response blog post criticising my article as "defensive and dismissive of comics". From inside comic culture this reading might have some weight, but the article sought to introduce a new audience to Australian graphic novels.

I started writing about comics in 1993 when I chose Australian comics and the censorship campaigns of the 1950s as a history thesis topic. The history department was reluctant to take it on and suggested doing it over at the freewheeling postmodern English department. A confused English professor wrinkled his nose and asked "Do you mean a thesis about Ginger Meggs?"

Nope, I was looking to research what happened in the mid-1950s that damaged the development of Australian comics for years to come. Most Australian states introduced censorship laws to tackle what had been called "a flood of blood" of American comics. The campaigns against comics were muddled with comics blamed for destroying everything from literacy to morality but also included strange bedfellows like Australian comic artists who saw their industry threatened by "sin in syndication".

In the Meanjin piece I talked about "so-called horror comics" because at the time few horror or crime comics actually existed in Australia. The pamphlet I've reproduced here (comics as "vile mind poison" could be a marketing slogan today) had to source examples from pulp fiction and penny dreadfuls to find shocking images. Titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror were released in the USA which was the source of the moral panic that swept the world. My article mentions Japan because it is one of the few countries that didn't introduce censorship laws. Manga has developed into a diverse adult literature while elsewhere comics were hampered by a self-censoring industry.

Self-censoring? Yep. In most nations comic book publishers saw the storm of parents, educationalists and churches and opted to protect their markets. The Comics Code Authority in the US is the most obvious example which appeared in 1954 and pushed out comics that featured horror or sex. Entertaining Comics - famous for Tales from the Crypt - dodged the laws by creating Mad Magazine - as a magazine Mad could push the limits more than a post-war American comic. Robert Crumb and underground artists carried the torch for adult comics in the 1960s but it's not until the 1980s that graphic novels aimed at a new audience.

In Australia our moral panic was dealt with by censorship laws. Fearing the loss of their licences that prosecution under the new laws would bring, publishers self-censored. The censorship laws that were put in place were later used against books and magazines, but comic books largely ducked prosecution.

Australia has only just developing graphic novels - impressive longer form comics aimed at older readers are being produced by Australians like Nicki Greenberg or Bruce Mutard. Many of these artists currently creating books come from a community of comic creators that began in the 1990s, working on books that have taken years to create and get published. The Wheeler Centre has an upcoming event spotlighting some of these creators. But there are many more who've created great comics that deserve larger readerships. Getting these creators an audience beyond their community will be a real sign that Australian comics have grown up.

In a strange coda, the 1950s closed with comics as school textbooks (like the second image here). More than selling out, they'd become part of the education system, tagging comics as the stuff of school children for generations of baby boomers. In 1954 Meanjin was in the grip of the moral panic, publishing "Comics and Culture" by Norman Bartlett who feared that "comics and sex books ignore community or any other values and exploit appetites, impulses and passions." Literary journals have come a long way in how they see comics.

Illustrations from a pamphlet "Let Us Work To Ban Trashy Comics And Books Which Poison Our Childrens' Minds", authorised by the Trades and Labor Council of Qld, 1952, and educational comic Flynn of the Great Heart, cover image of by Arthur Hudson, published by Australian Visual Education Pty, 1958.

Inside Rosebank Fellowship

2010-03-17T11:56:00.000+11:00

If you've noticed it's quiet in Hackpackerstan lately, it's because I was lucky enough to receive the Rosebank Fellowship. What kind of artsy nonsense is that, you ask oddly channelling Andrew Bolt. For me it was three weeks staying in a 19th century cottage owned by Mary Delahunty to work on my novel.

It's the first fellowship/residency/retreat I've done so I was daunted by three weeks in the bush with only my manuscript to keep me sane. Luckily I could check in with my co-fellow, the mighty poet Andy Jackson. And I also sought advice from folk who'd done this kind of thing before. The best advice? Bring DVDs, because after a day bent over the keyboard you'll need some easy entertainment.

Another good piece of advice was that you'll go on a lot of walks. When I heard this I saw myself on a residency on a travellator ambling around for hours with little pen to paper, but the a stroll can be a useful writing tool. I assumed I'd be rolling out of bed and hitting the desk raring to churn out 10,000 words a day, but some days you can't find a way into the book or you write yourself into a corner the day before. That's where the walks come in.

There were two kinds of walks: the puzzler and the structural redraft. The puzzler was a short stroll down to the main road when you have a small block - does that scene really play out that way? Or how would that character handle grief? The structural re-draft was an hour plus heading up into the Cobaw State Park often involving drinking water and usually wrestling with big issues like re-telling a chapter from another perspective, junking scenes I was attached to and how to introduce zombies into a realist Australian novel. The advantage of the latter walk is that you see plenty of fauna that you can ask for advice on plot and character development. Kangaroos can be the harshest critics - if they don't like it they just hop off.

My other madness-inducing practice was blind re-drafting. This means getting a chapter reviewing it, maybe making some notes (I had scene cards to fall back on), but basically re-starting it as a blank document. It was like walking into a familiar room and noticing an object you'd never seen before then trying to work out if it was interesting or useful to your story. Some of these new ideas are bound to be useless, but you can't tell until you pick up that new object and try it out. It was a good way to reinvigorate the manuscript. And there's no way I could have done such a comprehensive re-draft without three dedicated weeks.

The Rosebank Residency is made possible by the generosity of Mary Delahunty along with the Sidney Myer Fund and Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, and is administered by the Victorian Writers’ Centre. Applications for 2011 open in August this year.

Q&A with Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo founder

2010-03-10T10:40:00.006+11:00

National Novel Writing Month is the brain child of Chris Baty, a San Franciscan who took November off to write a book and found a few friends to join him. It's become a global phenomenon with more than 150,000 participants. Chris chatted about the future of writing, the Office of Light and Letters, book piracy and the bright future for the story in the age of laptops and Kindle.

Hackpacker: What made you start NaNoWriMo? Was it a tool to beat your own procrastination?

Chris Baty: The "why" of it all is such a good question. It wasn't because I had a novel in me that I was dying to write. I'd always loved novels and worshipped novelists but had never really thought I would write a book of my own. Until I started planning the first NaNoWriMo, I believed that novelists were a (superior) alien race that had been beamed down to Earth to delight and intimidate the rest of the planet.

Then, in 1999, I quit my full-time job and try to make a living as a freelance writer. I was living in San Francisco, and the internet boom was in full flower and the streets were filled with cash and you could do things like quit full-time jobs and become a writer without anyone giving you pitying or worried looks. I was doing music writing, travel writing, lots of web stuff for different companies. I loved being a freelancer, but writing for a living also made the whole creative process feel very serious all of a sudden. Each day's writerly successes or failures felt like they had looming implications for the rest of my career.

Enter the idea of getting a bunch of friends together and writing novels in a month. By starting NaNoWriMo, I accidentally created a 30-day refuge from that pressure. It was exhilarating to know from the get-go that our books would suck. They had to! We were writing them in 30 days! But the strange thing about lowering our expectations and focusing on quantity is that we were able to stop feeling intimidated by the endeavor and just write. The books turned out okay. The month was one of the funnest times I'd ever had. And I knew that if me and my friends could write passable books in a month, anyone could.

HP: NaNoWriMo began in 1999 - happy belated 10th birthday. How does it feel to have something that started with 20-odd people become a worldwide event? When did you first start thinking it was getting really big?

CB: In 1999, I really didn't think it would be an annual event. To be honest, I didn't think we'd last out the month. And I never dreamed we'd have more than a couple hundred folks taking part. I think it says something great about the human imagination and innate drive to make stuff that a writing contest where the main prize is the manuscript itself could somehow grow to be the largest in the world.

I first realized it had taken on a life of its own in 2001 when I went to a copymat in downtown Oakland. The employee - a guy I had never seen before - handed my copies to me and then said, out of nowhere: "I only made it to 23,000 words." No introduction. Just a quiet sharing of his NaNoWriMo word count. I walked away thinking: What just happened?

HP: This year things got high tech over at the NaNoWriMo site with profiles that act as social networking between novelists and daily stats on how you're doing against the required word counts. How important is that ability to check in with other writers?

I think it's very important! It's amazing how much easier it is to actually finish a draft when your novel is a matter of public record. You're much more accountable to yourself when everyone can check on your word-count each day. Also, having 150,000 other souls noveling alongside you creates its own creative momentum that can help keep you going when the going gets tough.

HP: People who complete NaNoWriMo get a neat 'winner' badge for completing their 50,000 words. For some people that's almost enough. How many participants go back and re-draft their manuscripts?

CB: You also get a winner's certificate! Which, um, you have to download and write your own name on. But still…

To the question of revision: We do a survey every year, and if I'm remembering the results correctly, over 60% of our participants say they plan on revising their novel and finding a publisher for it. At this point, we're heading towards 50 manuscripts that have found homes with traditional print publishers, including one #1 US bestseller. Given the sheer number of first drafts written during NaNoWriMo, I'm guessing we'll be up to 200 manuscripts sold within the next couple years. And ebooks! We're about to roll out a list of folks who have sold their NaNo novels to ebook publishers, and it's going to be a sight to behold. The number of people who have self-published their NaNoWriMo novels numbers in the tens of thousands.

HP: You've written a novel for every year - that's ten manuscripts. How are they going? Do you get time to re-draft them or are you thinking about next year?
CB: Revising a novel is one of the hardest (and most satisfying) creative projects I've ever tackled. It feels like doing a wall-sized Sudoku puzzle - there are just so many ways to get it wrong and progress feels interminably slow some times. Even worse, you sort of have the rest of your life to work on, it so there's no helpful pressure to get the thing finished. I've been working hard at revising my 2005 NaNoWriMo novel for a couple years now, though, and I hope to have to have it out to potential publishers before November. Or before I die. It just takes so much longer than it should!

HP: I started doing NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago and I really appreciated the deadlines and the manic need to write everyday, but freelancing got in the way and I gave up just shy of 20,000 words. How do you get around the distractions of life when writing?

CB: I know! It is really hard. Especially since most of us aren't getting paid to work on our novels, so other activities that prevent us from getting evicted from our homes tend to take priority over fiction-writing.

My sense from running NaNoWriMo over the past decade is that the biggest thing separating people who hit the 50,000-word goal in November from those who fall short is that those who went the distance had mentally committed themselves and their month to the escapade. We have manically busy CEOs and sleep-deprived high school students and stay-at-home moms with five kids in to look after who all win every year. It's not really a question of whether you have time to write a novel. Because none of us ever have time to write a novel. It's a question of whether you make time to write a novel.

In terms of NaNoWriMo, I find it's easier to stay on track if you get a big word-count lead right out of the gate. It's also easier to stay on track if you tell everyone you know you're doing it. It's that accountability thing again. The fear of personal humiliation is a very powerful writing motivator.

HP: NaNoWriMo is run as a project of the Office of Light and Letters. OLL runs a whole slew of events now including Script Frenzy and the Come Write In events where you invite people to work in their local library or indie bookstore. Are you bent on world domination? What next for OLL?

CB: Hee hee. Yes! World domination! One of the places we're really putting a lot of resources is our classroom-based Young Writers Program. For YWP, kids choose a word-count goal (in NaNoWriMo) or a page-count goal (for Script Frenzy), and then they write like crazy to meet that goal. We provide fun, free hands-on writing curriculum for teachers, along with kid-oriented websites, workbooks stickers, posters, and other goodies for students. It's really helped kids around the world discover how much fun writing can be, and has helped overworked teachers tap into a more adventuresome approach to language arts instruction. (It also usually means that teachers get to write a novel along with their students, which is kind of great.)

HP: NaNoWriMo has spread its message really effectively over the web and gets writers using technology to make them less isolated. How else do you see writes and their writing craft changing with new technology?

CB: That's such a good question! I really think that cheap laptops with long-lasting batteries have brought writing into more people's lives because they allow us to get out of our distraction-filled homes and into cafes or libraries (where a lot of us find we can focus better). It'll also be interesting to see how the current generation of teens - who grew up completely enmeshed in online worlds - end up developing their creative selves. For awhile, it felt like every teen had a blog or a livejournal, and that seemed like a really promising development to me. There's no better way to develop a writerly voice (and hone your storytelling skills) than by condensing your life into narrative form for regular readers. Now that we're moving away from blogs and towards tweets and two-sentence status updates, I'm not so sure what will happen.

HP: There's a lot of talk at the moment about publishing changing dramatically with the arrival of the Kindle creating lower priced books. What impact do you think this will have on writers? What will publishers look like in ten years time?

CB: Another great question. I wish I knew! One of the interesting things that I'm not seeing a lot of discussion about is the fact that we're sailing into an era of widespread book piracy, where every book available in an electronic version will be downloadable for free on bit torrent sites. This will mean that a huge chunk of teens and twentysomethings will stop paying for books altogether; authors will see their already-meager royalties reduced; and writers will begin facing the same pressures that musicians currently face to make money through secondary channels like public events and limited-run collector's editions. I think this works great if you're charismatic, love being a public figure, have the luxury of being able to travel constantly, and have a publisher who is willing to make and market special products based on your work. Authors aren't traditionally known for their stage presence, though, and publishers can be slow to adapt to new opportunities.

Hmmm…. I do think that the high participation rates in something like NaNoWriMo is a bright sign for the enduring power of books and stories. In a historical moment when people are supposedly abandoning books, over 200,000 adults will sit down in November and write a novel just because it seems like an interesting or fun thing to do. That gives me a lot of hope for the future.

Photo by Susan Burdick

Reject Me Nots: How to Get and Give Rejection Letters

2010-03-02T15:20:00.002+11:00

Like most writers, I've had my fair share of "de-sucessings", "thanks but no thanks" and "If you continue to send your work to us we will release the hounds" letters. Part of 'getting your work out there' is that often it gets bounced back to you, but it makes it all the more satisfying when a reader/editor/intern actually "gets" your work.

To paraphrase one of my favourite rejection letters – they're opinions are learned but also subjective. Your work can fall on their desk at exactly the wrong time, be in the middle of a lump of stories on the exact same subject or just be the piece that’s read before an editor has a cup of coffee. Don’t take it personally because there are a thousand decisions between your submission and publication. Some writers develop such strong relationships with their work that a rejection letter hurts like getting dumped.

So like a good break-up, a good rejection letter is clear and concise but respectful. The worst rejection letter I got back in the days of snail mail was a slip of paper that was one line - "Thanks, but we have no use for your work at this time". It had been torn using a ruler. They’d been too cheap to blow a whole piece of A4 paper and had just torn off several strips probably with the same handwritten line. It was as flattering as being dumped by a text.

Conciseness is key. A friend of mine received a bulk email that apologised for the bulk email then rambled on about how incredibly busy the editors had been and had only just gotten around to getting back to people before finally getting to the point. My friend summarised it as: "Well then, faceless hordes, you're rejected!"

No-one's expecting a personal reply. But personalising the process a little can help the egos of writers. At Cardigan Press when we sent out rejection letters we had a not-quite list who we gave some general feedback with a few common reasons why we didn’t get selected. Telling people how many submissions you got can be a good way to put things in perspective. At Cardigan we once got an email back saying it was the nicest rejection letter someone had ever received.

For writers, any feedback should be good news. If an editor gives any feedback writers should gobble it up greedily and use it to improve the piece. Editors are busy folk with very little time so if they invest a second giving you feedback then it’s because they gave a good goddamn for your piece and want to develop you as a writer. Take an feedback as a compliment.

But if you're still smarting from a rejection letter try the counter rejection. It's a cathartic experience and even if you never send it writing a rejection letter to the publication that rejected you lets you both move on. Here’s a template:

Dear Sir/Madam (I'm far too busy and important to take in your name)

Thanks for your rejection letter. Unfortunately at this time I'm unable to accept your rejection letter.

I receive several rejection letters regularly and whilst yours rejection letter was of a particularly high standard I'm limited by the number of rejection letters I can receive. So while I encourage you to continue sending rejection letters, I won't be able to accept yours at the present time.

Instead I'll be going around inserting my piece into your publication at various retailers using a specially purchased industrial glue. I'll also be visiting the homes of leading reviewers to interrupt their reading of your title by megaphoning in their ears "We was robbed".

Please be assured that I won't stop short of legal action or violence against your pets as deemed appropriate by myself and the other judges of rejection letters (who are also sought by authorities in connection with several unresolved crime novels).

Thanks for your time,

Hackpacker

ACDC Lane and Melbourne's Musical Deadend

2010-02-10T14:31:00.013+11:00

As AC/DC prepare to unleash themselves on Melbourne in three gigs next week, artist and metalhead Ben Couzins has created a fitting poster tribute to the rock gods. ACDC Lane (slash omitted because it apparently offended the Registrar of Geographic Names) has become a lunchtime tourist attraction for grey suits to admire Couzins' images from across the band's 37-year career. There's a cheekiness to the posters plastered all over this city lane that makes even non-fans smirk at their pomp and majesty.

The lane was reclaimed for rock in 2004 after ditching its dreary former moniker, Corporation Lane. The renaming was partly due to the It's A Long Way To The Top video that dragged the band and bagpipers down nearby in Swanston St to the confusion of 1970s Melbournians. But the ACDC Lane is a nod to Melbourne's music culture while that same culture is getting a bureaucratic thumbs down.

A crackdown on Melbourne's liquor licencing has forced the closure of the Tote, a much-l oved live music venue that's been squeezed out by panic about public drunkeness. Connecting live music with street violence is like blaming a nanny for kids' behaviour when they're not there - live music literally keeps kids off the streets and breaks the boredom and frustration that leads to punch-ups. Who goes to a gig then feels like taking a swing at someone? Victoria's premier, however, needs an expensive psychological study to prove that people are more likely to throw a brick through a shop window if they're deprived of live music.

It may be too late for the Tote, but a couple of groups are organising to save live music in Melbourne. There's a petition asking for the state government to take a closer look at causes of violence while supporting a gig culture. Most significanlty there's a protest that heads down Swanston St where AC/DC from the back of a flatbed once belted out: "Riding down the highway, going to a show". The way to the top has gotten even longer.

The Informant! book review

2010-02-05T11:02:00.001+11:00

Amid the speculation of the extinction of the newsasaurus, a book like The Informant! is an argument in favour of the in-depth coverage papers provide. Author Kurt Eichenwald reviewed more than 800 hours of interviews along with reports and other news coverage to put together this whopping book. That's a little deeper than your average unpaid blogger is prepared to go.

The book focuses on a price-fixing scheme by US food giant Archer Daniels Midland. Business is never sexy but throw in the complexity of food additives and it sounds about as attractive as business socks pulled over the knee. So Eichenwald narrows his focus on the individuals of the case - mostly whistleblower Mark Whitacre who dobs in his own company by wearing a wire and videoing meetings, but also FBI agents like Brian Shepard. At several points in this true story people involved remark that it's like a John Grisham book, but it's much better than that.

Eichenwald uses the tropes of a thriller to keep this big business gone bad story racing along. He develops character in a very crowded space (the investigation broadens and more FBI and legal eagles are brought into the story) keeping an eye on Whitacre. But Whitacre is a mercurial figure so FBI agents are a reader's touchstone empathising with their feeling of the case falling out underneath them as Whitacre plumbs new lows.

And in terms of the Book vs Film Stoush, The Informant! wallops Matt Damon's effort. Damon's comic take on cooperating witness Mark Whitacre looks cheap beside Eichenwald's real concern that Whitacre has a mental illness. The depth of the book means that readers get impressive insight into the daily running of the FBI and machinations of corporate America. It whets the appetite for Eichenwald's next book: an expose into the post-9/11 intelligence world.

If newspapers are going extinct then investigative journalism like The Informant! is the kind of book we need in our collective museums.

This review originally mumbled through and chatted over with Alicia Sometimes on Triple R's Aural Text.

All settled? Google Books deadline soon

2010-01-25T16:31:00.001+11:00

Google has been making headlines for its new stance on China after re-thinking a censored version of its search engine within China. It's bold dragon-slaying stuff, but there's another Google story that's been bubbling away since 2005. Last week Australia's Copyright Agency (CAL) ran a series of information seminars that told authors how to go register if they wanted their slice of the settlement pie and published their notes online.

The kerfuffle started when the US Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google for its project that aimed to digitise publications for an online library. Google's defence was that their digitisation constituted 'fair use' under US copyright law, though in 2008 offered US$125 million in an out of court settlement.

This will be a one-off payment to rightsholders (usually publishers and authors or their heirs) and asks you to opt-in for future use. It's reminiscent of an episode of The Simpsons where Mr Burns is fined US$3million for polluting which he pays for out of his wallet then says "Oh, and I'll take that statue of justice too."

Still most of those rightsholders could use a chunk of change to help them through rights wrangling of the future. With over US$100million on the table you think you'd need a wheelbarrow to carry home your bucks. Well, not quite.

Turns out just over US$35million will be required to set up a Registry to pay rightholders. This Registry will continue to manage pay outs in the future and will licence content exclusively for Google. If you're paying the kind of money that sounds like a Hollywood film budget to set up an organisation then I guess you'd want that organisation to help you out in the future.

So the agreement guarantees that Google will pay at least US$45 million into a fund for rightholders. I'm not sure what "at least" entails and my maths isn't great but that sounds like almost FIFTY GRAND that's fallen down the back of a couch somewhere. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Google has to pay the plaintiff's legal fees.

So the bottom line for authors? According to the huge settlement doc (download the 170 page doc and sub-files if you have a week off work) it sounds like if you wrote a book and opt-in to continued re-use, a rightsholder will get a one-off payment of at least US$60 plus 63% of the revenue your book attracts in the future. Inserts (articles or short stories) receive a payment of US$15 though there's something called a Partial Insert (defined as "An Insert other than a Partial Insert") that sounds like an unpleasant medical intrusion and attracts a lesser payment.

But wait there's more. Before you use the lavish payment of US$60 to pay the electricity bill, be aware that this money is paid to rightsholders. Some publishers buy up your rights while other share them so this payment may not even get to the scribes that are just about to have their power cut off. And your publisher may have opted in for the partner program which may mean you've already given away your rights.

Still most authors will hit up the settlement registry site to see if anything they've written has been digitised. Some will opt in by the 28th of January deadline, but others won't which could mean that their books will be removed from Google Books. But Google Books will be so huge that some have called it a monopoly particularly for 'orphan works' where no rightsholder can be found.

One author who isn't phased by missing out in Google Books is Ursula Le Guin. She's gone a on a crusade and has amassed a growing petition of more than 300 authors against the settlement. Even if her appeal is unsucessful, there's an excellent fictionalisation that the sci-fi/fantasy author could produce based on a monster that swallows information until only a few heroic authors dare bounce on its belly to get it to cough up more cash.

Disclaimer: Hackpacker is not a lawyer and none of this post constitutes legal advice. Read widely about this issue and seek further legal advice if pain persists.

How to become a Lonely Planet author

2010-01-19T17:16:00.002+11:00

Seconds after telling anyone you're a Lonely Planet author, they'll ask how you got the job. Sometimes it's just polite curiousity other times it's because they think it sounds like a dream job, but mostly it's because they believe there's an arcane ritual that you have to pass through be annointed by guidebook brahmins. If there was a ritual then I missed it and the truth is it requires an odd collection of skills.

If you're looking to get a job as a guidebook author the first place to check is the Lonely Planet's own instructions on becoming an author. For the last year there's been a hiring freeze, but word is that this will soon be thawing as they begin refreshing the pool of around 300 authors.

There's no secret to the recruitment process. As well as normal material like a CV and examples of previous work, new authors can be asked to write a sample chapter to show how you'd write a guidebook. You'll get some instructions on how to write this so follow these as closely as you can.

Choosing where to write your sample chapter about is crucial. It needs to both showcase your writing but also be the kind of place you'd see in a guidebook. Originally I did mine on a small town and found there just wasn't enough material. Plus there wasn't much significance or history to the town so it was hard to see why it would appear in guidebook with 2000 words dedicated to it. It's about selecting somewhere that suits the word count. Trying to cover all of metropolitan Melbourne is tough and will give you only the roughest sketch, but covering a suburb in depth is going to give richer writing.

And what about your writing? Travel writing is really competitive so your sample needs to be distinctive and show that you've got your own style. Brochurese ('stunning vistas' or 'luxury options' anyone?) and cliches are the unexceptional kids picked around the middle in playground football. Challenge yourself to write like nobody else in the slush pile and even if you're bad at least you'll be exceptionally bad.

Accuracy is always important and you can bet that anyone assessing it will fact check with a phonecall or even visit. In guidebooks even the best writing is worthless if your basic information is wrong and you see a lot of reader's letters where people have got the maps wrong.

Oh yeah - the maps. You need to do a sample map that points out everything you mention in the text. Map-text consistency is important, but maps need to be both clear and complete. It's not just about writing and you'll need to be an amateur cartographer as well. Generally you can work from existing maps but knowing where to put each item is important.

Having in-depth knowledge of destinations is important and having a language or two is useful. The Lonely Planet website sometimes targets difficult destinations where they need specific skills or specialists. Getting the balance between writing skills and specialist knowledge is important though so lecturing professors need not apply (though these kind of specialists might be useful on a specific books).

Many Lonely Planet authors (including me) get experience with house style and guidebooks by working in-house. This used to be called 'jumping the fence' as even in-house staff have to do the same process of writing a sample chapter and have it assessed.

Assessment is usually done by skilled editors who've worked on their fair share of books. They're looking for something that has no errors (so don't just spell check your work) but also reads well and is accurate. Getting rejected can give you some good feedback that will improve your writing and your chances next time.

While not quite an arcane ritual, the sample is a big hurdle but if you're given the nod as an author then you can start pitching for books anywhere in the world.

Brisbane's Asia Pacific Triennial 2009

2010-01-05T09:31:00.001+11:00

Many Australians still think of the Queensland capital as a cultural backwater. Although it's Australia's third largest city, the memory of conservative premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen still casts a shadow. Once every three years Brizvegas hosts one of the world's biggest arts events, the Asia Pacific Triennial (the sixth is abbreviated to APT6). Gathering works from Iran to Hawaii, one gallery isn't enough to hold the exhibition so it rambles through the Queensland Art Gallery (known unprosaically as QAG) across to the Gallery of Modern Art (or GoMA to his old army buddies).

Entitled People holding flowers, this years coverboys decorate most promo materials, marching across the gallery floor. Chinese artsists Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu created the seriously dressed businessmen each holding aloft a lotus flower to play on Mao Zhedong's Hundred Flowers campaign of encouraging artistic opinion. Ironically the flowers and their bearers are identical much like political thought after Mao's crackdowns on the campaign after 1957.

Elsewhere Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai has created Mushroom Mantra, a living garden of mushrooms each inscribed with the Bhuddist Heart Sutra. It's a strong argument for a living religion as each mushroom needs to have the sutra re-written by the Brisbane's own Chung Tian Temple as the fungi grow.

Many of the works tackle global problems. Take Subodh Gupta's Line of Control (1), an enormous pile of brass cooking pots shaped into a mushroom cloud. The Line of Control divides India from neighbouring Pakistan and the artist is pointing to nuclear tests that both nations indulged in until they became commonplace along their shared border. It's a gutsy piece of art that catches the eye while stabbing at the heart.

APT6 is no stuffy exhibition that pushes viewers away or waggles fingers at snapshot takers. Lots of the crowd when we visited looked into Yoshitomo Nara's custom built van that was loaded up as a mobile studio for making his cute-but-creepy characters. Elsewhere there's a pile of paper planes made by little patrons of the arts from recycled materials with the best suspended from the roof or hung from the walls.

This Brisbane is a long flight from Bjelke-Petersen's parochial Queensland. The APT6 would have bugged the former premier who in a Mao-like fashion banned public protest and narrow-mindedly ranted "What's good for Queensland is good for Australia." The APT6 involves Australia in the world's most important political and social debates from a place that's anything but a backwater. It could even make a claim for Australia's most outward looking city. What's good for the world has become good for Brisbane.

New Years Writing Resolutions

2009-12-29T13:03:00.005+11:00

The new year means resolutions to break or bend. Here's one for travel writers everywhere: no more lazy writing. It's hard with the deadline breathing down on you and the cliche close to hand or the pun headline just screaming at you, but better writing is a stretch away.

For cliche junkies, you don't have to go it alone. Courtesy of Cassowary Crossing comes this link to 60 Pun Headlines That Travel Editors Love A Little Too Much. There's some groanworthy material here. I'm certainly guilty of Start to Finnish, but I'd restrain myself from Kenya Dig It and the horrendous Brazilliant. And Czech puns are as fashionable as plaid.

If you're still looking to kick the cliche then Chuck Thompson makes an excellent sponsor. His Smile When You're Lying serves up cynicism familiar to anyone who's ever felt like they'vw overdosed on sugar after reading the travel pages. He says that almost any city can be described as a "bewitching blend of the ancient and modern" and reckons words like "hip", "cozy" and "hot" should be avoided like blue ice. The book provides regular handouts in my travel writing classes.

But sooner or later we all fall back into cliches. They're the easy option, most people understand them and why should you have to work hard? To paraphrase Lester Bangs, cliches pay the same as gold. But Bangs was always more for steel than gold - sharp words stabbing at mediocrity. It gives me something to aspire to while singing Auld Lang Syne.

Image courtesy of SallyM.

Nocember the too-much month

2009-12-15T12:47:00.009+11:00

Nocember is the cruellest month - no matter what TS Eliott says. It masquerades as two months but long ago blurred into one which crams in too many events to reasonably attend. Worst of all it forces bloggers to do wap-up blogs as there's not enough time to attend and blog.

Here's my pre-Christmas fast forward:
This Annoying Opening
Kicking off on 19th of November, Paul Oslo Davis' show This Annoying Life showcases his illustrations particularly his Overheard series in the Sunday Age that joins conversational snippets with his minimalist style. The poster is characteristic of his style - several bitter dancing couples exchanging lines like "Let's play hide the resentment" or "Let's run away in opposite directions". It's humanity at it's best and bleakest.

It was a crowded little space with most of the fun in watching people making the connection between text and images. Some of the city's best cartoonists were along to raise a beer to Oslo and look at the works. The exhibition is still running at Lamington Drive gallery.

The Launch We Found
Express Media launched Voiceworks' 21st anniversary anthology, The Words We Found, with two launches. I went to the under-18s launch at Signal, a new arts space in a former signal shed just by the Yarra.

The launch featured Express' patron, John Marsden showing off his very first dictionary and anthology editor Lisa Dempster talking about how she squeezed 21 years into one book. I may be biased from being on the board of Express, but it's surprising who Voiceworks has featured over the years.

XXI Visible Launches
Also in Nocember, RMIT's professional writing and editing diploma celebrated 21 years with the launch of XXI Visible Inks. The book selects pieces from a long history of annual anthologies featring MJ Hyland, Jeff Sparrow, Chris Wormersley and, erm, me.

My piece in the anthology is embarassingly underdeveloped, but the editors reckon all the authors they selected said something similar and it's "all about the process". Long-term creative writing teacher Antoni Jach spoke about the early days of the course and many former students helped celebrate that the course and Visible Ink are still thriving.

Tangoing the Launches
Finally (and there's defintely some events I've missed) was the launch of the Tango collection plus the latest in the series: Tango 9 - Love & Wa r. Both books feature a who's who of comic artists with mature ("adult" always sounds wrong here) stories that should appeal to a broader audience. Bernard Caleo has been producing this great comic for years so it's a nice tribute to anthologise (or collectivise?) the first eight.

That about wraps it up for Nocember - with apologies for limited blogging so far this merged month.

Cross Purposes: Profile of Mark Dapin

2009-12-04T09:30:00.002+11:00

On the way to meet journalist and novelist Mark Dapin at the Kings Cross Hotel, I witness a junky couple squabbling. She’s ten steps ahead of him and he’s yelling ahead “You’d be all right if you got off the gear!” Her grubby T-shirt says “LOVE”.

Dapin, a former Cross resident, is familiar with these human dramas. “I actually had one of those scenes in the book, because it happens continually here. They’re people right at the bottom so they argue at the top of their voices to show that they’re not ashamed of what they are.”

His first novel King of the Cross centres on the characters and crims of Sydney’s dodgiest suburb. Jewish gangster Jake Mendoza is as big as the Cross’s landmark Coke sign when aspiring British journo Anthony Klein comes to interview him. Klein’s interviews chart the slimy self-rationalisations of Mendoza as he grows up with the Cross while Anthony finds his place in the seedy suburb.

Dapin is known for sticking a microphone in the face of the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Nick Cave and Chopper Read. The idea for this novel came out of a failed interview with Ramsay. The celebrity chef concluded the interview in less than 15 minutes because he didn’t like Dapin asking about his father.

But Dapin had unanswered questions from the encounter. “I thought if that’s the worst interview a journalist can do, what if that got repeated day after day after day until this evil vulgarian (who isn’t Gordon Ramsay) had told you his entire life story.” His nightmare interviewee became Mendoza, who consumes people for sex or power like they were tissues.
“It’s one long proud self-justification from somebody that has an enormous amount of self-knowledge and a strong sense of humour, but nonetheless is evil. Just absolutely completely psychotic because he doesn’t believe other people matter.”

Not all Dapin’s interviews have taken nasty turns. The notoriously media-spiky Nick Cave joked that Dapin spoke like Bob Hoskins while Dapin encouraged rock’s dark prince to draw a moustache cup when the pair bantered for a Good Weekend profile. Dapin reckons the mood was because “Cave really cared about that interview. I said ‘Why? What’s it matter to you? You do hundreds of these.’ And he said ‘Yeah, but I hardly do any that my mum would read.’”
Watching Dapin soaking up the sun and sirens on the balcony of Kings Cross Hotel, it’s hard to imagine a time when he wasn’t at home here. “I came to Kings Cross when I was 26 from England and I lived where my character lived behind the Kings Cross police station. I came here to re-invent myself and I lied about who I was.”

Dapin blagged journalistic credentials, turning a couple of months selling advertising for a local paper into an editing role. His employers were naïve about his skills because he was British and had an honours degree in social policy. “People thought my English would be better because I was English.”

Rather than a place of sin, the Cross saved Dapin. He got his first journalism job, gave up smoking and started his lifelong affair with boxing. He even edited one of his “twenty something” tattoos from a snarling panther’s head into grey and black yin and yang on his wrist. “Far from being a place for me to get in trouble, it was a place where I got out of trouble.”

But it wasn’t an easy road. When Dapin was editor of lad mag Ralph, he split up with his wife. “I went off with the features assistant. I felt really bad about that because we’d grown up together. I wanted to get in trouble, I wanted someone to beat me up.” In his memoir Sex & Money about his time as an editor, Dapin wrote he considered suicide for this bleak three years.

“The idea of getting punched hard in the face really appealed to me until it started happening. Then it got less and less appealing and I got over it.” Welter weight champion Kostya Tszyu famously helped Dapin get over it when the two sparred for an interview. Tszyu broke Dapin’s ribs and changed his mind on punishing himself.

Instead he built his journalism career, penning stories for everyone from Penthouse to Ita eventually becoming Ralph’s editor. He completed a Masters in Journalism and BA in History. But he’s characteristically casual about his qualifications. “I’m supposed to be halfway through a PhD in Media but I haven’t really done anything about it. It’s suspended.”

Writing a novel is his latest re-invention. “What I’m doing almost throughout this book, almost every single opinion expressed is the opposite to what I think.” He loved not knowing where the story would go and surprised himself by crying at a character’s death. He’s started work on a longer novel based on the Burma Railway, even as King of the Cross is being shopped around for film adaptation. But after so many stories, Dapin’s become more interested in how people tell them.

We wrap-up with his personal tour of Kings Cross: past Dapin’s first Australian flat, past building works that were once his training gym and past more than a few junkies. It’s a Cross that Mendoza would claim as his own as he spins a gangster into a businessman. Having just been subjected to a day of radio interviews, Dapin appreciates his character’s storytelling. “In a way it’s true of everybody who mythologises their life – me as much as anyone else… You tell the story over and over again and even you don’t know what’s true.”

An edited version of this profile appeared in The Big Issue, No. 342.

Eid in Western Melbourne

2009-11-27T15:17:00.008+11:00

On this morning's walk we were overtaken by women and children in their finest. 'It's a celebration,' they said hurrying past. Last night’s news came to mind and we asked the next rushing passer-by if it had something to do with the Hajj. 'Yes, Hajj celebration,' as she jogged past with her kids towards the massive congregation on the lawns outside the flats. The smile on her face – whether at our interest or our ignorance – seemed to invite us to find out more, we followed into the worshipping.

Eid-el-Adha (Festival of the Sacrifice) celebrates the end of the Hajj, or the pilgrimage that Muslims are encouraged to make once in their lives. Lasting around three days, the festival commemorates Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son for Allah, and observances include prayer, alms for the poor and sacrificing a goat, camel or sheep. Here in Flemington, there was sombre intoning from the Iman, prayer and a sermon, collection tins, but thankfully no livestock in sight. Although given the site of the celebration, Debney Park, used to be an abbatoir there may have been a sacrifice in the past.

Towards the end of the sermon, or maybe the repeat of it, where the Iman had slipped from Arabic to English, celebration was definitely in the air. Kids were buzzing, teens were preening and there was a great sense of catching up with friends and neighbours. To one side of the mass prayer site, a mini carnival has been set up. Dodgem rides for Allah, anyone? Posters at the community centre say the celebration lasts all day, so I might make my way down for lunch or a whizzy ride.

A guest post from Ms. Hackpacker.

Welcome to the Wheeler Centre

2009-11-26T16:45:00.002+11:00

A little while ago I wrote about being inside the mouthful that is the Centre for Books Writing & Ideas. A few other people must have been having trouble with the name because it is now the Wheeler Centre.

At a function this morning the curtain slid back to reveal a Lonely Planet founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler. According to the speeches, they're funding top-class or "Melbourne standard" events at the new centre named in their honour. It's all part of their Planet Wheeler foundation.

The first program of events was unveiled in a glossy brochure. The big gig is A Gala Night of Storytelling, which boasts some of Melbourne's biggest personalities from Paul Kelly to John Marsden all telling stories passed down through their families. It's an intimate look at the cities literati. Its an exciting start to Melbourne's biblio-hub.

Vigilante Virgin: a review completed

2009-11-12T07:37:00.003+11:00

Last week Vigilante Virgin, Australia's "first" m-book, wrapped up. It ran just shy of 7,000 words to the final “Thank you for reading” message and much was made of its technical deficiencies. But what about the writing? Did it stand up as a read?

As a story it’s a gentle encounter between two characters thrown together: newbie protester, Judy Bowler, and Greta, daughter of the object of the Dennis Ferguson-style vigil. From outrage to empathy, readers follow Judy as her allegiances waver, but will she be won over by the charm of Simon Markson or the social inclusion of an extra Scotch finger?

There’s good writing over the four weeks of the story. Hardy has a columnist’s wit that she cracks over the lamer characters – Markson is likened to ‘an off-the-rails Womble’ and there are well-timed deflations of pompous vigilantes squabbling over who is more committed.

Dialogue shows a good ear through Hardy's television writing. A besieged resident finds herself unable to explain herself to the mob and shouts "Just stop … putting shit on the lawn." Judy tenderly leans over to the booger-blessed Greta and diplomatically offers “You might need a little … hooter blow."

As a short story it hangs together well, but this isn’t a short story. It’s serial delivered to your mobile ("in the tradition of Charles Dickens" who totes wld hv txted Gr8 Xpectations) so to work it needs to keep you hanging for the next episode. But the pacing doesn't work well for the episodic delivery. Almost all of episode 2 is given over to characterization of Judy and, despite being the protagonist, she’s not that interesting to justify an episode to herself. The quick sketch of Greta – “the sort of blonde, gentle limpet of a child you would instantly forget if you saw her in a school concert, even if she was playing the princess” suits this tight format better.

And that dialogue – a great way to advance plot in a short story – creates long scrolling screens that leave you feeling unsatisfied by that day’s episode. The long conversations of episodes 12 and 15 particularly left the thumb throbbing from too much scrolling.

The narrative was unbalanced over episodes. By the end of the first week of five episodes, readers got little more than a neighbourhood meeting and Judy unhappy with her iPod. Episode 9 ended with a too-obvious cliffhanger:
“'And we might...'
She bit her lip, didn't want to say it.”

The real disappointment of Vigilante Virgin as an m-novel is that you had to click back and forth between episodes to re-read in a clumsy web interface. I ended up cutting and pasting it into a Word doc to make it into a very readable e-book. But perhaps this is Fairfax’s new direction.

Inside the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas

2009-11-09T08:50:00.002+11:00

This weekend I went to the first workshop at Melbourne's brand spanking new Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas. It's the jewel in the crown of UNESCO's City of Literature and, based on the construction work going on out the front, there's a bit more polishing before it's fully open to the public.

Even still it's up and running in a pilot mode with most of the resident organisations already moved in and some even starting their events. Six resident organisations - Australian Poetry Centre, Emerging Writers' Festival, Express Media, Melbourne Writer's Festival, Victorian Writer's Centre and SPUNC - all seem to be in various stages of unpacking. The centre itself starts programming events early next year.

It's an impressive building from the inside and out - keeping the State Library's classic look while making it contemporary enough to be a work place. There's still a few bugs to iron out with the entrance which was still draped in construction scaffolding so signage was impossible. While waiting to be let back in after a break, I overheard a passing couple speculating on what the building was. He wasn't sure if it was part of the nearby QV shopping centre, but she was better read and set him right:
"No, it's that cafe - Mr Hulk or whatever."

Scott vs Murdoch

2009-11-06T16:53:00.006+11:00

Rarely outside of Bond films will you get to see evil geniuses aiming for world domination, but this week ABC supremo, Mark Scott has been accused of just that in his new strategy for the national broadcaster. At the Media 140 conference (perhaps while Austen Powers was dangling over a vat of genetically mutated tiger sharks) he revealed his evil plans. And what was the dark genius at the bottom of his schemes? Widgets and soft diplomacy.

I was expecting at least a laser pointed at the UN, so freeing up the ABC's content with open feeds was a let down. A lot of ABC content is already available through RSS feeds (and videos like the one used above) so the real news is, as Margaret Simons pointed out, that content will be free to anyone including commercial users like, say, News Limited. Although as it's your ABC it could be argued that you've already paid for it.

Still this is at odds with the Murdoch's talk of locking his content up behind a paywall and stopping the parasites who leach the precious news from various web properties (that's anyone who links to news stories BTW). There were some delays with milking the content cash cow. And even speculation that Murdoch would launch a search engine - another deed for evil geniuses right?

But Simons tells us from the Media 140 conference a News Limited journo 'let slip' that there would be a 'cool new toy' with which has been jokingly referred to as the iRupert and The Sunday Kingdle. News Limited journo Mark Day says there's a clue in the Times Plus which has recently stashed culture and travel content behind a membership fee of fifty quid per year. Murdoch's The Australian has recently begun its A Plus section, so it's not too difficult to join the dots. Prepare to pay for your Sunday supplements if you want 'em online.

So the future of media comes down to these two media titans slugging it out - with their widgets and toys. And here I was hoping for at least one battle of super monsters.

(Interesting in this video that one monster has "sheer brute force... while Kong is a thinking animal" - which is Murdoch or Scott?)

Flemington by fascinator

2009-11-03T12:52:00.010+11:00

It's the race that stops the nation and keeps Melbourne's milliners in business. Living not far from the track means that I've seen heaps of feathered finery so this Melbourne Cup I snapped a couple of fascinators while escaping the throng.

Made from feathers, flowers or fur and later on in the day bits of bread, beer caps and raceday flotsam, the fascinator is best seen in the morning. By the end of the day they're teetering on the edge like the drunk on high heels who is probably supporting this elaborate construction.

The wave of style washes in early as punters are keen to find their place in the carpark and flush away a few bets on dead certs. Somewhere in the balancing of headgear (when does a fascinator beomce a hat?) there's a horse race, but mostly it's about drinking. After a long day of waiting to not be invited into a celebrity tent, most stagger home or shout at cab drivers. Some take time out to vomit in local resident's letterboxes so we can all share the excitement of the big day. It's quite a feat to keep your headgear when all inside you is let loose.

Vigilante Virgin: a review in progress

2009-10-29T11:11:00.006+11:00

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

2009-10-21T09:00:00.005+11:00

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

2009-10-17T09:35:00.008+11:00

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

2009-10-12T12:30:00.007+11:00

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

2009-10-06T09:40:00.003+11:00

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

2009-10-03T13:04:00.005+10:00

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.

So what happened to that junky Soviet car?

2009-09-30T12:39:00.010+10:00

I always hate these long navel-gazey posts about people updating their blog template. They usually revolve around some wonky demographics like "Based on my Google Analytics, I thought it was crucial to optimise users from Scandinavia by including more Viking-like navigation and more mentions of the Swedish chef in posts". They're probably only of interest to the people who designed the template. And yet here I am in the middle of one.

It's just a quick word not to adjust your set and that this is still the Hackpacker you were reading last week with a few tweaks for look and functionality. Most of the elements from the old site have been brought over and threw in bookosphere links to bookish bloggers I like or have corresponded with recently. If you're not there apologies and I'll merrily add you if you send me an email. Let me know if there's anything else you're missing or wanting.

I'm steering clear of banners and other images partly because I'm no great shakes at photography but also because my main aim is to steer users (some people even call them readers) towards the words. The insanity of this on the no-time, I'm-already-bored, I-only-have-time-for-pictures-so-quit-bugging-me-with-your-huge-paragraphs web is well documented, but I'm a believer in longer content on the web.

The tragic loss is the beat-up car that has been at the top of my blog for over a year now. It's an old Soviet-style car that someone had driven over the border from St Petersburg that I saw parked in Finland. Farewell it as it sputters and puffs to the great junkyard in the ethernet.

Who is Sam Knott?

2009-09-25T11:34:00.007+10:00

As you're driving from Melbourne towards Warburton, you might notice your health being toasted by a Father Christmas-like gent by the side of the road. Out the front of the Sam Knott Hotel in Wesburn there's a wood sculpture of an icon that decorated Australia's pool rooms and pub for just over a century.

The subject of the sculpture is Sam Knott, a prospector who came from England in 1888 just as Victoria's gold rush had run dry. Sam found work other work including in the pub that now bears his name. The current bartender reckons he was repeatedly paid the same pound note once a week that he religiously returned to cash register to clear off his weekly drinking slate.

In 1906 a photographer from the city snapped the enthusiatic drinker at the bar. When he remarked that he enjoyed his drink even though it was before noon, Sam cracked his famous line "I allus has wan at eleven" which became part of boozing and branding history. Carlton United Breweries loved the image it accompanying story - promptly putting Sam's mug and slogan onto posters that still hang in Victoria's pubs today.

Sam really needed an agent, because the lovable character never saw a cent from the image or his line. Some even claim he was misquoted as Sam reputedly regaled the photographer with:

I allus has wan at eleven
It's a habit that's got to be done
Cos if I don't have wan at eleven
I allus have eleven at one.

As poetic as Sam may have been, it's unlikely he came up with a verse mid-drink.

Still his legend lives on. Some speculate that he was really Sam Griffin and was renamed by the brewery. A story they tell around the bar at the Sam Knott hotel reckons that Sam's thirst was supernatural. When Sam died they brought his coffin into the hotel and propped it up against the bar for one last drink. They say that even as they lay the body in the ground Sam rose up again to for another drink. And some say it still happens with a shadowy figure leaning against the bar. Usually around eleven.

Image courtesy of National Archives of Australia's Virtual Reading Room.

Tango Collection Plus

2009-09-20T07:55:00.010+10:00

Working from home you develop a special relationship with the postman. Your ears become attuned to the whirr of their motorbikes, the creak of the mail slot and the gentle thump of a letter arriving. This is the symphony of procrastination.
This week the thump was not so gentle as a package arrived from the publicity people at Allen & Unwin. It was an advance of the Tango Collection, an anthology of the excellent romance comic that won't be in stores until December. Bernard Caleo is the genius editor/illustrator/writer/male model behind Tango, collecting some of Australia's best comics in a bumper edition that tackles 'Love and...'.
This plump package arrived wrapped in brown paper (very much in keeping with the DIY craftiness of the original Tango) bound in a custom comic strip by Caleo himself. It was a nice little bonus that should make it into bookstores even if booksellers find it an annoying gimmick.
The survival of the book as a physical artefact will mean more 'books plus' ideas - anything that celebrates the physical form (especially artwork) and gives physical readers a bonus. The music industry has recently clawed back sales for physical music with deluxe editions of CDs that give listeners a little more: extra tracks, a video or a booklet that features artwork you can't get anywhere else. There could be some tips for book publishers here.
But the shark has well and truly been jumped for the physical object when a band re-releases music to support its video game, which is the case with The Beatles Rockband and the re-mastering of their back catalogue to push it. There's no thrill of the postie or serendipity of unwrapping when you download from iTunes.

Southern Star dimming

2009-09-17T10:10:00.011+10:00

In 2008 Melbourne's skyline saw the building-up of a large Ferris Wheel in the re-vamped Docklands. The Southern Star was gleefully nicknamed the Melbourne Eye (likening the Antipodean to its London sibling) and, as manufactured tourist attractions went, it served as the ideal centrepiece for a new shopping centre.

For just under thirty bucks, Melburnians would find themselves (according to the marketing material) 'rising gently to 120 metres in one of 21 air-conditioned cabins' for a half-hour ride. Southern Star opened in late-2009 amid excited projections of over 30,000 tourists visiting a week. It even promised views as far as Geelong.

But early in 2009 a heatwave warped the big wheel and it was quickly shut down. Opened for just over seven weeks, it seemed that the designs couldn't take the heat and it seemed better to be safe than sorry. The $100m project has gone further into the red as the wheel needs to be repaired elsewhere and looks like it won't be up again for at least another year. Its slow disassembly has only magnified the white elephant, as piece by painful piece it's being taken down.

Luckily there's another drawcard planned for the area with the construction of the National Ice Sports Centre that is a relative bargain at only $58m. It's sure to endure summer's rising mercury much better than the wheel which resembles a slowly dying giant Pac Man over Western Melbourne.

Shadow reviews

2009-09-11T11:36:00.006+10:00

There was a marketing questionnaire that came from Lonely Planet asking authors how many reviews they reckoned they'd written. I really wouldn't have a clue. As a guesstimate, there's hundreds in any guidebook you write then there's a gagillion food reviews, plus about a billion shadow reviews. These are the reviews you start writing then work out that your subject is never going to make it in, so you keep writing it just for yuks. Some of them are pure fiction while in others only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Here's a couple from the notebooks - including my Scotland blog:

Seven-11
The ambience is bright, fluorescently so, with an emphasis on brand names and logos that lends a pop culture chic. Chef “Hi, I’m Dave”, whose career we’ve followed from the Dandenong Rd’s Shell Servo, offers us the five chocolate bars for two dollars, but go for the house special – the caldo cane. Rolling over on a unique warmer/disinfector, the “dogs” (indulgently $2.95) are lured to a perfect brown at the hands of “Hi, I’m Dave” (his step-mother hopes he’s out chroming). Drizzled with a choice of sauces (our pick is the clag-lidded sweet chilli), the dog is far superior to the disappointingly still-frozen pastie. Cleanse the palette with a boysenberry Slurpee.

Cafe Kneehighs
They skip the babychinos for industrial double esspressos at this overrun joint. Mothers dodgem car for tables inside or employ armies of under-fives to conquer tables in what must once have been a garden, but is now a warzone. Distract a waiter from having their kneecaps bashed-in with an Etch-a-sketch to order a jammy pikelet or a serve of fruit toast that will be snatched away as a frisbee. Ham and cheese focaccias come cut to look like Dorothy the Dinosaur or mulched with toddler handprint. The red whizzer has enough chemicals to keep littlies juiced-up and squealing "I am the lizard king!" until just after a recess but in a diabetic coma by lunch. Kneeshighs is the compulsory stop for mums on the way to school.

The Brigands Arms (tel: XXXX; 22 somewhere in Glasgow; hours: open for football games, closing abruptly after) is where locals and tourists meet and occassionally beat. Provided you don't order half pints and steer clear of mentioning interest in any kind of football, you should escape with little more than a bruised ego and a sore elbow from lifting pints. Food ranges from Bloody Mary's to the special, Knuckle Sandwich.

Introduction to an unamed town

While Scrags Moat has no actual attractions to speak of, there are the twin jewels of free lavatories and rivalrously free parking.

If your idea of restored period features includes black tape holding down the carpet and a pool table with original cigarette burns, then the Badger and Ampersand (tel: withheld; The Laneway, OuterHebrides; hours: no time you'd want it to) is a spot you'll want to have World Heritage listed. The impressive display of cleaning chemicals on the loo window is a nod to a hygienic history (when this place used to be cleaned) and encourages interactivity in most patrons (if you don't clean it, who will?).

Edinburgh Book Festival: Ghostly pursuits

2009-09-05T12:02:00.004+10:00

As part of our Duelling Blogs series, our good friend over at the Saturation Point of Bells sent this update (crossposted).

To be honest, a ghost-writing workshop was not my first choice for Edinburgh Book Festival. However, being an aspirational little soul, I have not completely abandoned the notion that one day someone might actually PAY me to write something that I was going to write anyway. However much you tell yourself that whipping up a research document or conference report is a fine way to hone your writing skills, it hardly qualifies as "fun". There are people in the world who get paid for things they find fun. Its food for thought.

One such individual is sports journalist and ghostwriter Martin Hannan, who seems to make a pretty good living out of this ghostwriting lark. He's made a few quid out of NOT ghostwriting as well, thanks to the services of a good agent and smattering of canny contractual clauses. The moral of the story? Get a good agent.

There was much informative and entertaining discussion about the skills involved in writing someone else's voice. Many diverting factoids, as well. Did you know that Dick Francis's wife ghosted nearly all his books? I didn't. The need to sacrifice ego for craft was also noted, with due kudos going to Rebecca Farnsworth, Jordan's ghostwriter who, according to MH, has done a magnificent job of accurately capturing Jordan's pearls of wisdom in all their glory. With spelling. (Katie: "I talk into a Dictaphone and they go away and type it. I've got so many other things to do I couldn't sit there and type, plus I didn't pass English.")

I was getting quite excited. I've written for ministers and senior executives, I thought. I can do empty rhetoric and vapid monosyllables with the best of them. A corporate voice is still a voice, however inhuman. In my head, I was half-way to being intimate friends with half the celebrities on the planet, trusted guardian of their images and secrets.

I was bitterly regretting that most of my idols were highly literate, and wondering what doltish stars I might be able to love, when a little fly in my fantasy ointment became apparent. We were asked to interview each other and prepare a little ghost-written introductory paragraph to an autobiography, with a big glossy book on Scotland as the prize. One class member left early, and I had remembered Shelley Winters was in the Poseidon Adventure when no-one else did (long story), so I was to interview Martin himself. It was at about this point I remembered the inconvenient truth that I have never interviewed anyone in my life.

However, the bloke had just talked about himself for an hour, so I did have an unfair advantage. Nevertheless, I am enough of a suck not to want to seem like a twit to the teacher and well-established local journalist. With a ruthlessness born of desperation, I poked away at that most vulnerable of areas - childhood, family and religion, and within minutes he had helpfully confessed to seven years in the seminary training to be a priest. So there I had it, the Holy Trinity of popular autobiography, religion, journalism and football.

I left feeling rather pleased with myself, and with a big fat glossy book on Scottish history under my arm.

Recommended reading: The Ghost, by Robert Harris

Australia by Boat

2009-09-03T14:36:00.004+10:00

More travellers are looking to go flightless either for green reasons or just to slow down and enjoy their trip. Unfortunately as border security tightens and global piracy increases, taking a boat to Australia is getting tougher.

Your best bet is to try to hop a freighter. The romantic days of crewing on a freighter are gone, so today you’ll have to pay. From the UK to Melbourne, for example, you can expect to pay around AUD$8,500. That’s the tough bit out of the way, now you can lie back and enjoy the journey which will take almost 40 days. Bring a book or, better yet, a set of encyclopaedias.

Travelling from Singapore to Darwin is quicker and cheaper but few companies take passengers on this route. You can travel on from Melbourne to Tahiti, California or even Canada. Ship life is fairly comfortable with meals provided and your own cabin, shower and possibly TV, plus you’ll get to make a few interesting stopovers you might not have planned.

You can start planning with companies like Strand Travel or Freighter World.

This piece was originally written for the Herlad Sun travel Q&A section. Published here at the request of Parlance.

Out of Luck

2009-08-30T22:07:00.006+10:00

When I had to write about definitively Melbournian experiences for Lonely Planet's the City Book I included this:

hunkering down in a Fitzroy pub to watch local band the Lucksmiths

If you own that book, it's time to get out the red pen, because this essential Melbourne band is no more. And their final show wasn't in Fitzroy, but at Richmond's Corner Hotel, one of the city's great remaining pub venues.

It was a bittersweet gig after a long farewell tour but the cheeky chaps behind Melbourne's best indie/folk/pop outfit put on a great final show. Stage banter between Marty, Tali and Mark has always been a big feature and this gig featured songs interspersed with good-natured scuffles about Scrabble rules and a nod to the ex-Fitzroy landmark Punters Club, which was "dear to our hearts if not our livers". They were always a Melbourne band - where else could a song like "T-shirt Weather" be such a powerful anti-depressant?

They played songs from across their 16 year career but even after two encores they were bound to leave fans disappointed. The gig sold out so the Luckies even had their own breed of scalper - a weedy bespectacled guy who mumbled "Anyone need tickets or whatever." After the show, girls cried on the footpath about how much they'd cried inside, while their boyfriends got restorative pizza slices. Sure it was the end of an era, but there's something eternal about fans. Maybe that's why I bought the fridge magnet with an elephant on it weeping, "I remember the Lucksmiths".

End of Melbourne Writers Festival

2009-08-30T20:53:00.010+10:00

As well as a beguiling name, Wells Tower has one of those author photos that promise much. It has the look of someone who is either hurt or about to throw a punch. His Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a blistering collection of short stories where you want to hear precisely what inflection the author puts on every word.

His Friday free session was packed with folks who couldn't get one of the limited places in his Sunday workshop and although he spoke quietly he didn't disappoint. He was most interesting on his writing method citing the internet as 'lethal to writing and reading', because of its distracting power. He described his ideal writing day as creative fiction for breakfast when he's fresh, then giving the afternoon over to journalism then in the evening working on his screenwriting which he reckons comes easy to him. Sleep wasn't part of the equation.

He emphaised the importance of revision by talking about the need the 'grad school' wisdom that that you begin thinking revision "is like cleaning up after the party, but you learn that revision is the party". Except for Wells there is no party. His hard work ethic and dazzling writing made me put a small note over my desk: WWWD (What would Wells do?) to stop me from goofing off on the web instead of writing.

On Sunday there was a late (but free) addition to the program in the form of a chat with US editors hastily named "Are you a writer interested in submitting work to American magazines?". It just so happened I was, so I found myself in an audience of 50-odd other "interested" folks. Jessa Crispin characterised her Bookslut as for intelligent people "who won't be adjusting their monocle or putting on a faux British accent" while reading. She was intersted in writers with enthusiam and sincerity to write about books.

McSweeney's publisher Eli Horowitz and The Believer editor Heidi Julavits talked enthusiastically about their publications. They found it difficult to characterise the kinds of writing they were after (Eli was influenced by some crocodile jerky he'd just been given and said he'd accept anything to do with crocodiles right now), but welcomed submissions. The Believer has 'a pathetically long lead time' of six months which means timely articles require a lot of organisation. Julavits pointed to the themed issues (around art, music and film) as good targets for publication and talked about her bias against the first person pronoun especially when the author intervenes in the story needlessly.

A useful side point for publishers was that both areas had a good base of subscribers (Eli estimated that McSweeney's Quarterly had "about 8,000 subscribers" and "around 5,000" sales through bookstores). It means they know they're going to sell enough to pay the printer so they can swerve clear of advertising and can concentrate on content.

As the festival rolls up its banner for another year, it's exciting to think of next year's fest with new director Steve Grimwade at the helm.

Melbourne Writer's Festival: Future of the Book

2009-08-28T09:23:00.001+10:00

Thursday the MWF got all digital. There were sessions dedicated to marketing in the info age and showing off the latest e-readers. I got along to three sessions but the whole day proved too much of a test of stamina and battery life.

The opening was called the State of Digital Publishing. Victoria Nash and Elizabeth Weiss grappled with the huge subject from the publisher point of view. They were concerned about the rise of the $9.99 e-book and how it had pushed them into what Elizabeth refererred to as "Get all out books out there and have them competing" mentality. Victoria mentioned piracy and how they saw it as "protecting our authors' copyright and obviously our revenues". It all looked very industry-focussed and I felt like the author was out of the picture.

Thirty minutes in Bob Stein got a word in about the future. He pointed out that more than a million books are available on public domain and that the book industry was facing the same challenges that video and music had online. He characterised it as seeing the book as something unique that allowed it "a free pass - I actually think it's going to be worse". It wasn't all grim as cloud computing would change the way we read and Bob pointed to newer shorter forms of writing that would thrive in this environment. Get your flash fiction ready now.

The marketing session was interesting - apparently it's all about community and SEO. But no-one really had a good way to monetise community. Lonely Planet pointed to blogsherpa (sharing traffic with bloggers rather than pays them) and their new groups. While Brett Osmond pointed to sucesses they'd had like a Where the Wild Things Are Facebook page which offered fans (more than 40,000 of them last look) of the book new content. I couldn't help but thinking that a major movie might have pushed up the fan numbers a tad. The AirBourne project Random House conducted looked amazing with 28 chapters contributed by users and the whole manuscript bookended by thriller writer James Patterson. But again it was called "a marketing exercise" rather than a big moneyspinner.

Thank god for Liner Notes' Thriller edition which ended the day on a high. Nick Earls mashed up Beat It with Masterchef while managing to sidestep Weird Al Yankovic's Eat It. But Melbourne's own shone out with Emily Zoey Baker doing a Jeff Goldblum impersonation, Sean M Whelan working his poetic alchemy on "Ma ma se mama sa ma ma coo sa" until the phrase had a new meaning and Ben Pobje told us how long lost twins getting it on was all part of Human Nature. A fitting tribute to the King of Pop that brought tears to the eye.

Cross-posted at Saturation Point of Bells.

Edinburgh Book Festival update

2009-08-27T07:40:00.007+10:00

Wondering what's happening over at the Edinburgh International Book Festival? As part of our Duelling Blogs series, our good friend over at the Saturation Point of Bells sent this update (crossposted).

My first Edinburgh Book Festival gig (the first I was let into anyway) was to see Ian Jack, who was impressively articulate and perceptive, as well as pleasingly rumpled, as a journalist shoud be. I could have happily listened to him chat with the venerable Ruth Wishart for some time, as I think could have the rest of the audience. Alas, it was not to be.The audience was completely white, mostly middle-aged, and entered with a kind of furrow-browed earnestness that said 'I'm not here to enjoy myself, my national identity is at stake.' It was wall-to-wall tweed and natural fibres. Until, that is, the speakers arrived. Enter stage left a very slim woman with perfect make-up, a blonde bob with edges as sharp as a knife, a short, red, body-hugging dress, heels and a broad patent leather belt. She had to be American.

She writes for the New York Times, apparently, but I have never read her. For a start,I don't read columnists in newspapers. If you want to witter on about nothing start a blog, I say. I did. I see no place for it in a publication whose function purports to be news. At least that's what I think until someone offers me a column, at which point I will be wholly and enthusiatically in favour.

Judging ONLY from the appearance at the Festival, one would conclude that her column consists of amusing little observations about those whacky English with their sexual hang-ups and refusal to use the word 'toilet' in polite company(really?). The overall impression was that she probably came from a part of New York that was solely inhabited by well-educated white people, and upon marrying an Englishman, now lives in an area of London solely inhabited by public-school educated white folk. Apparently, they love their dogs but have trouble expressing their emotions to humans. Well blow me down with a fucking feather.

Well, good luck to her, if she can manage to get a gig at Edinburgh festival to promote her collection of columns, she is clearly destined for great things. I am not sure that being part of a session billed as being a discussion of Britishness was the right place for her, though. In fact, having only glimpsed America through the prism of Vegas and Arizona (see above mentioned blog), I am not sure she was even going to be much use in a discussion of American identity. She claimed, among other things, that Americans - unlike the British - become Americans when they arrive on those shores, whereas the British are always looking back to their origins and staying exactly who they were in the first place (those naughty fundamentalist Pakistanis were cited as evidence).

The tweedy audience, feeling increasing hurrumphy, kept her on her toes. They have been quite feisty this year. One pointed out that both on the stage seemed to be speaking solely about some white, Christain, tea-and-biscuits version of Britain that no longer existed, if it ever had. Another pointed out that in her 15 years of living in America the people she met were constantly referring to themselves as 'Irish' or 'Italian', when in fact that had not been the case for four generations.'Well,' our American friend replied.'People got very interested in their heritage after Roots was on television.'

Please.

One small editorial note on the program. It described her take on the English as 'waspish' when they clearly meant to say 'W.A.S.Pish'. Regardless, the most eloquent statement of national identity remained the appearance of the red dress and the shiny shiny black belt.

Click Lit

2009-08-25T07:00:00.001+10:00

In a Melbourne bar, a group of people are gathering, not sure if they’re meeting each other. They swap furtive looks, raise speculative eyebrows, but no-one is sure exactly what the other bloggers assembled by the Centre for Books Writing and Ideas look like. The newly founded centre is about bringing together writers of all types, but this group are only familiar with one another’s writing – could that be author of Reeling & Writhing, Genevieve Tucker? And where is rising star Angela Meyer, whose blog Literary Minded is syndicated by Crikey?

With a white beard, Perry Middlemiss is unmistakably the wizard of Oz lit blogs. He posted web pages about Australian literature way back in 1996, then began his Matilda blog in 2004 using news gathered from across the web. In part Matilda is an answer to print media’s limited criticism where Middlemiss believes “you come away from the review wondering if the critic actually recommends the books or not.” Matilda’s independence means Middlemiss can publish straight-up reviews alongside his favourite Australian book covers and ask if the US blogger Jessa Crispin’s appearance at this year’s Melbourne Writer’s Festival marks a newfound recognition of lit bloggers. “I have a lot of news items I want to highlight and personal items come out when I have something I want to write about,” Middlemiss explains his personal approach to blogging.

Matilda has seen the Australian lit blog scene flourish. In 2005 its blogroll featured just five blogs, by 2006 they’d scrolled up to 44. More recently newspapers and print publications have hopped aboard the blogwagon. This year the The Australian's A Pair of Ragged Claws appeared while Meanjin’s Spike and Overland’s self-titled blog have both drawn new audiences to established literary journals.

In the US the appearance of lit blogs has led to the sacking of book critics at major newspapers, but Middlemiss remains upbeat. “Litblogs won't force traditional print critics and reviewers out of business, nor will it happen the other way… Traditional print criticism needs to become more relevant to the average reader.” He’s already seen newspaper journalism shift towards the personal approach of blogs and sees “the rise of writer lit blogs as a major development in Australia over the past few years.”

Sydney-based author James Bradley was reluctant to start blog, because he once believed the bookosphere “has a reputation for being a place filled with flamers and wingnuts screaming abuse.” Authors are certainly more vulnerable on the web with instant comments and potential cyber-stalking. But the author of The Resurrectionist believes “people learned to moderate their behaviour. Partly it's just that we're getting better at using the technology”. Bradley’s City of Tongues follows the writer’s stream of consciousness with posts developing his ideas for an article on e-readers or following up on his essay about depression and creativity. “The nice surprise has been how many positive relationships and friendships I've developed through the blog: that community aspect is a real joy.”

City of Tongues lets Bradley embellish his text with video and images whether it’s to comment on his favourite comic book covers or link to film trailers he wants to share. But the blog also allows Bradley to write more flexibly than his typecasting as a literary novelist/critic might allow in print. “In recent years I've found my interests are more and more out of sync with the sorts of things mainstream media will publish… I decided I might as well write the stuff anyway and just put it on the net.” And Bradley has no shortage of readers. In a new iteration of the lit blog, Bradley has recently joined novelist and blog veteran John Birmingham, Larry Buttrose and others to ‘curate’ an online lit mag, The Group.

Internationally, group blogs have proven very successful. Jessa Crispin, who Middlemiss calls ‘the queen of lit blogs’, began Bookslut in 2002 as a way of sharing her opinions. It evolved into a webzine with multiple authors just three months later. “We got a lot of attention fast because there was nothing quite like us online. Now I can't even imagine how you would launch something like Bookslut...”Crispin says.

Bookslut’s longer author interviews and reviews have been key to the site’s success. “I remember being told that people don't want to read things of length online, you can never publish quality original content online. I thought, bullshit… I've been proven right, because more lengthy content gets posted online all the time”.

And it’s this longer content that has built big audiences for bloggers and, in the case of Bookslut, even advertising income. Just as Bradley blogs about subjects that mainstream media ignore, longer writing could be moving online as newspapers find their page counts shrinking. With no printing costs, lit blogging is limited only by enthusiasm. Bradley’s passion for blogging isn’t waning. “I'm quite clear that the most exciting writing happening today is happening online, and I want to be part of that conversation.”

This article originally appeared in The Big Issue, No. 335.

Rush in Your Street

2009-08-24T17:07:00.009+10:00

Today our suburb was over-run or perhaps over-Rushed as a film crew set up at few key streets in the area. Residents were told to stay out of shot (I managed to get told off three times) though most of us just stood back and gawped.

I don't know any of the actors, but what struck me was how many people there were in orange vests surrounding the production. There was a guy who's job it was to wipe the windscreen and another who seemed employed to exclusively clean up coffee cups after each shot.

Security was like that of a presidential motorcade for a shot that lasted less than 30 seconds. The set-up for shots is amazing - one sequence that involved a hoodlum chased until he falls over featured an enormous reflective screen and several crach mats to ensure the actor fell snugly.

Normally I see Rush being filmed around Lonely Planet's Footscray offices, but today Flemington was chosen as the locale for crime sprees. With so much security and fake police it could even reduce crime in our little suburb.

Bad photography courtesy of my dodgey mobile.

Game on for Freeplay

2009-08-15T10:33:00.000+10:00

Finns are an enterprising bunch. Take the Freeplay keynote speaker Petri Purho. From his flat in Helsinki, he created Kloonigames with the goal of creating a game a week. This led to his rapid protoyping method that built his creative game Crayon Physics Deluxe. He believes the next big development will be a "YouTube of games" where developers will be able to push their work to global audiences to play, comment and refine - though he admitted to being nervous about business people crowding out the creativity for the dollars.

Purho believes making a lot of games will eventual create a good game. Make a lot of what he calls "shit games" and you'll eventually hit on something that resonates with an audience. The only way to get over your fear of the inner-critic and your lack of technical skills is to churn it out.

It's an idea that applies across the arts. Purho referenced the Scarlet Letters: Notes on Making Art, written by two visual artists. Many of their ideas can be applied to writers - including knowing when to judge your work and when to create, and my favourite 'have lots of ideas'. On a first draft anything that frees up creativity is good for writers.

A writer's equivalent of rapid protoyping would have to be write a novel in a month, which encourages writers to bash out their first draft by writing every day and coming away with 50,000 words. Where writers aren't like game developers is that we don't have a "YouTube of stories" - writers would love to have the problem of creativity being crowded out by dollars.

But what about blogs? It's true that interconnections of blogs do create little creative communities and there are writing tools developing with blogs. But do writers feel comfortable drafting on the web and refining through comments? I've seen some interesting experiments, but can Purho's rapid prototyping work for writers? Are there writers who are courageous enough to "write shit stories" in public?

MIFFed film goers

2009-08-10T07:18:00.006+10:00

As the line to 10 Conditions of Love sprawled out the front of Melbourne's Town Hall and ran a full city block up to Russell St, China's decision to oppose the film's screening was looking like the best publicity the could hope for. Without all the hackings, this 54-minute film might have got a limited release and only appeared late-night on SBS. Instead the flag of East Turkestan appeared on national and international news, international film festivals are saying they'll pick it up and Australian politicians are supporting a national struggle they may not have heard of two months ago.

Festival director Richard Moore kicked the film off saying "How sweet it is to push play this evening". The film itself follows the life of the Uyghur's most vocal proponent, Rebiya Kadeer, who was imprisioned in China for her actions. It uses the limited footage that has come out of the western province of Xinjiang (New Frontier) intercut with interviews with Kadeer herself. One film-goer remark on the way out "It's nothing that you couldn't see on Dateline." He was clearly taking the festival's "Everyone's a critic" tagline as an invitation.

But timing is crucial and this is a film that came out just as the Uyghurs were subject to some of the worst violence "in the country since Tiananmen Square". China has been keen to highlight Xinjiang's Islamic population and make connections to terrorism. Just this morning a plane from Afghanistan flyng into Xinjiang was turned back after a China claimed the airline was victim of a bomb threat - though later AP reports that there was no threat.

As Kadeer said following the film "It's the Chinese Government that politicised this, the film, and I think the media plays a very important role in basically highlighting our situation and covering our situation, so I'm very grateful for the coverage." She was joined on stage by Labor MP, Michael Danby name-dropping the Dalai Lama, who supports Kadeer as a non-violent leader. And finally Greens Senator Bob Brown said he was looking forward to the next official visit of the Chinese president "so that we can take it right up to him in Canberra, that it is time for your family and the people of East Turkistan to be free". How Kevin Rudd will echo this sentiment in Mandarin is the real diplomatic challenge.

Canberra: A Case of Over-Capitalisation?

2009-08-07T16:21:00.002+10:00

When Sydney and Melbourne tossed a coin to decide where to put the capital of the new nation, it landed on its side. The two rival metropolises had to settle for a capital that was exactly halfway between both of them. This happened to be a sheep paddock.

They've done a lot with the paddock. Architect Walter Burley Griffin "planned an ideal city, a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future". For his trouble they named a lake after him and proceeded to bugger up his plans. By the time Bill Bryson arrived in the late 1990s he pronounced it "an extemely large park with a city hidden it."

I've alway had a soft spot for Canberra having gone to university in the Bush Capital. There is plenty of Bryson's parkland and once all the politicians jet home for the weekend, it's a very livable city. One thing I can never understand is why it has such a large concentration of "Nationals": the National Library, National Museum and, more recently, National Museum of Australia. All fine institutions and worth the taxpayers busks, but why are they in a city that's mutually difficult to get to for both Sydney and Melbourne?

Bryson remarks constantly about how difficult it is to travel around the Nationals, because the public transport options are so poor. Taking a bike around the lake makes a good alternative if the weather is fine, but let's be honest it often isn't. It's a product of most pollies having a driver and car, because getting to/from the airport is usually a taxi (though it's only a short hop).

But it's not all bad in the 'berra. Once you find these Nationals they're rich treasure troves. The newest arrival is the Museum of Australian Democracy which was hustled into the old Parliament House, a federal building which was almost instantly redundant when it was built for an expanding government in the 1930s.

One of my favourite buildings is the National Library which manages to look both Modernist and classic at the same time. Its collection is huge and the Bookplate cafe is one of the best places for lakeside grazing. But my favourite landmark isn't a National at all, it's in Australia's great tradition of Big Things. The spookily named Black Mountain Tower has views across the the Brindabella Ranges and the sprawling city that can be seen without the height of the revolving restaurant. In the city that inspired troubled poet Michael Dransfield, I call the pointy object on the hill the Big Syringe.

Thanks to Carolyn Bain for the update on Old Parliament House.

Where to Workshops?

2009-08-03T08:58:00.009+10:00

Later this year I'm teaching a Travel Writing Bootcamp. It's a slightly ridiculous name I know, but it should sound like a way to kickstart your writing while sidestepping the traditional workshop model. Not that there's anything wrong with the traditional workshop. I still have a great creative writing workshoppping group and use workshops in most of my classes. But as Louis Menand points out in the New Yorker article, Show or Tell, we've been using workshops as a method of teaching writing for more than 50 years. In all that time shouldn't we have evolved some new tools for writing?

Menand's essay tackles questions like can you teach writing succinctly ('What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft.') and gives a romping history of how creative programs grew up in the States throughout the 1940s and much later in the UK and Australia. Workshopping as a technique isn't really discussed in depth, but essentially it's the process of getting a class to share work with fellow students and encourage discussion around it. Some interesting variations are offered - "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." This is the kind of bloodsport feedback that most students just aren't ready for.

Feedback should be a deep engagement with the work. Friends and family may say they like a work, but a workshopper will say why they like the work, what techniques worked and suggest new directions. Poor feedback is prescriptive and pushes the work in the direction of the commenter. In a workshopping group, it's a fine line between cross-pollination and blandisation. So workshoppers need to bring work that can sustain criticism and have some idea of direction. Bringing fragments is fine, but a workshopping group isn't going to write a piece for you.

In classes, I've seen students who just want praise. And praise will encourage you to keep writing and give you a good idea of what works. But workshopping shouldn't just be about praise. The gushy soccer mom who tells you "Good job!" isn't going to improve your work and isn't really engaging with it. When someone uses flat statements about 'liking' or 'disliking' something they should be pursued by a facilitator, because people can like stories just because they include cats, fluffy bunnies or your favourite holiday destination. A workshop likes something because it's good writing even if it says things that your fellow workshoppers may not like.

There's a great response to Menand's article pointing out that creative writing programs have filled the gap left by publishing houses. Certainly great editors can push along a work, but as publishing is being pressured for the bottom line it's harder for editors to find time to develop work. The masterclass model which includes one-on-one feedback on your piece with a teacher is an attempt to fill the gap. The 'with feedback' model is popular but pricey. Plus while students love 'name writers', developing work is about good teaching as much as good writing and that name writer may have more instinct than information about writing. Worse still is the idea that name writer will hand you a golden cookie cutter so you can write just like them. Good teachers should encourage your voice which can be difficult if a teacher just wants to hear echoes of their own.

When I sign up to participate in a class I'm looking for something that will prioritise my writing and could offer new craft or technique. Prioritising is about saying saying this class will force me to devote time and brainspace to a piece of writing. That's what I want the bootcamp to do. It will be about offering techniques and throwing exercises at students that get them to examine their own way of writing. Will it be useful to use in media res or do their stories start somewhere else? Should you close where you start for an ouroboros effect or do you want some loose ends that a reader will answer?

And there needs to be writing, as well as chalk and talk. No class hould be like one teacher Menand mentions whose "preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples." Well, maybe the vodka would be a useful teaching aid. But a writing class should work towards workshopping. If you've pushed people to write there should be a chance for them to get a wider audience for it. And a well-run workshop should be one of the most helpful audiences your writing will get.

I'm keen to hear about what techniques have worked for you as a writer. Has there been inspirational teaching that has kicked your writing in a new direction? Has there been an evolution beyond workshopping? Why do you sign up for courses, workshops or masterclasses?

Image courtesy of Cardigan Press & the Great State of Iowa.

Monologue to dialogue: Web 2.0 for Writers

2009-07-28T10:03:00.001+10:00

I wrote this piece for the Victorian Writer magazine last year as an introduction to web 2.0 for creative writers. Some of it has dated (to update it yourself: swap all Facebook references for Twitter, ignore all MySpace and yawn loudly at mentions of UGC, plus John Birmingham's new book has inspired a slew of new fanfic) but a student asked where they could find it so I thought it deserved a second life (whatever happened to Second Life?). NB. There'd be a few more additions to the top 5 (whittled down to top 4 with the disappearance of Sarsparilla) now - you'd be mad not to include Literary Minded or Max Barry's Machine Man plus a million others - but this was way back in the ancient history of last year...

Around the turn of the millennium the web looked in trouble. The information superhighway of the 1990s seemed to have led nowhere and content was largely re-hashed from print media and ‘brochureware’ and advertising cluttered the web.

Into this great web depression came the O’Reilly Group (famous for their Information Architecture for the World Wide Web better known as ‘the polar bear book’ for the bear padding across the front cover). In 2005 they began to talk about web 2.0, a rethink of how the web gets its content and how it can work. The key to this new thinking was user participation. Users didn’t just want to read the news, they also wanted to reply, parody, classify and make their own news. And now every web whiz kid and digital shaman is toting the idea of web 2.0.

Web 2.0 writers
For writers, web 2.0 promises to break them out of the safety of the lonely garret. Several writers are taking the plunge of posting their work online then getting feedback almost immediately. Wikipedia sniffs at fiction blogging calling it “small-scale fringe activity in the world of blogging”, but Australian authors like John Birmingham are big fans. As well as his personal blog he also gives fans of his work a run. The Mini-Burger publishes fan fiction based on Birmingham’s thrillers. This fan fiction throws in plot twists from Agent 86 to zombies and so far there’s more than a hundred pieces of fiction. And the author? He’s relishing his Mini-Burger and has organised two online festivals of fanfic.

It’s a challenge for writers to think of themselves not just as the creators of text, but the organisers of user generated content (UGC). With every reader able to comment and correct, some journalists are threatened, but it really means adapting to new skills. Are comments at the end of a news article really any different from letters to the editor? The major difference is the speed of responses and ease with which people can respond. If you make a mistake on the web, an amateur expert can call you on it almost immediately.

Blogs created citizen journalist, individuals who could report their stories using simple web publishing tools. One of the earliest was Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger who reported from his home in Iraq about the occupation around him. He was so successful that his blog was made into a book and he received journalism assignments in the US and UK.

Tooling up for 2.0
It’s not just blogs. YouTube means anyone can upload a roughcut of their movie onto the web and MySpace creates a stage for bands and songwriters to showcase themselves to record companies (Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen both built fans online). Writers can use these same tools, looking at creating their own low-budget film or putting fiction on a MySpace page.

In the US, sci-fi author Scott Sigler has taken his fiction to a new audience by creating a podcast of his novel: recording short episodes then uploading it to iTunes. His audience of more than 100,000 subscribers want their content on-demand so they can listen on a MP3 player anywhere. They then come back and make comments in the iTunes store, write blogs about what they enjoyed or create Facebook groups like ‘I am a Scott Sigler junky’.

Tools aren’t just about self-promotion. The physical workshop has moved online too. Some require sign-up fees or an overpriced tutorial, but there are also free creative communities. One of the more popular workshops Zoetrope was founded by US film director Francis Ford Coppola, so writers can post short stories, poems and screenplays for review by fellow members. The catch is that you have to contribute more than your fiction to be a part of this community. Before you can post your own story for feedback, you need to have written five reviews of other people’s work - a handy check for the ‘It’s all about me!’ writers.

But you don’t need Coppola’s sign-off to start an online workshop. New creative writing groups appear on social networking sites like Facebook everyday and it’s easy to start a sub-branch of a chatroom. It’s this ease of creating web content that has made web 2.0 so easy for writers.

Touring the Writers’ Web
Cordite Australia’s best online poetry journal and with their COD (Cordite on Demand) program a foot in the print media
Jacket Australia’s first online magazine of poetry and prose
Matilda A newsy blog looking at Australian lit
Undercover Susan Wyndam’s regular blog for the Sydney Morning Herald

Melbourne International Film Festival hacked

2009-07-26T11:17:00.004+10:00

Strange news today that the MIFF website has been hacked in response to their screening a film by Uighur film-maker, Rebiya Kadeer. It's made even stranger by recent Chinese government demands that the film be withdrawn from the program. The film is critical of the treatment of western China's Uighur people and has seen several Chinese filmmaker withdraw their films from MIFF, but MIFF says it will still screen the film on August 8th.

Parallel Importation of Books disappointment

2009-07-17T14:31:00.005+10:00

This week Australian publishing was rocked by the recommendations of the Productivity Commission into Parallel Importation of books. The Australian said there'd be elegantly expressed outrage as authors and publishers as they talked about how importing books from overseas would seriously damage the local industry.

Several writers have spoken out about the report's findings including Sophie Cunningham, Shane Maloney and, previously, Tim Winton using his Miles Franklin acceptance speech to point out what this means even to mega-sucessful authors.

But what about eloquent voices for the Productivity Commission? In the interests of balance I've animated the report so you can hear the commission's own words (there will be no reading in the future obviously):

Want more of the commission's report? You can buy it in book form off the website for their $18 (possibly cheaper in Britain). It's good to see someone can still make money out of books.

Too dark travel?

2009-07-14T09:03:00.005+10:00

I recently wrote a blog post about Dark Travel for News.com.au. which made me think about where I draw my own line on visiting death sites and places of tragedy. Frankly, I'm pretty damned squeamish.

Fortunately the piece was saved by some great comments from people much braver than me. There's a couple of people who recommend Dearly Departed tours for their detailed look into Hollywood's darker side. Apparently since the article was researched they now also offer a tour to MJ's death scene.

A friend forwarded me some Facebook comments he'd gotten from Kathy Charles, who has written a forthcoming novel about Hollywood Ending. It's not out until Septmeber 2009, but from a quick browse around the site Kathy has done her research including visiting sites, going on tours and buying the odd piece of merchandise from the LA County Coroner. The novel follows two teens who search out celebrity death sites. A younger generation of dark travellers if ever there was one.

Big Issue Fiction Ed hits the streets

2009-07-12T10:04:00.005+10:00

The Big Issue Fiction edition hit the streets on Friday. Already I've gone out and bought a copy for me and my mum. It features a new work by Cate Kennedy that makes for a vivid blackly funny insight into a community centre that reminded me of a few jobs I've done. There's also YA author Penni Russon with her first major piece for adults that I'm keen to read. Plus Andy Griffiths and Terry denton with an illustrated peak at their follow-up to The Bad Book. Plus the talented Jo Bowers, Alice Pung and more. It's only about for a limited time, so track down a vendor this week or next.

Bookslut: A Q&A with Jessa Crispin

2009-07-08T08:09:00.000+10:00

Way back in 2002 Jessa Crispin began Bookslut while living in Austin as a way of chatting with far-flung friends about books. She had more friends than she thought and now Bookslut is one of the most influential literary blogs. She's an upcoming guest at the Melbourne Writers' Festival so I wanted to know about her workshop and I ended up finding out that there is space for longer form content on the web, why it's better to graze the field than be a Trojan Horse and advice on how avoid stabbing your boss.

Hackpacker: Bookslut has been insanely successful scoring more than 1500 unique hits a day just six months after it started in 2002 (and even more today) plus it recently won a Weblog Award in 2008. What’s made it so successful?
Jessa Crispin: I really wish I knew how to answer this question, because I get it alot. I have no idea. We never did any marketing, and I never do anything that you're supposed to do to create a successful blog: I don't have comments open on the site, etc. I think a lot of the success we've had has to do with timing, actually. Pure luck. Bookslut was one of the very first literary websites. I think the only one worth mentioning was Mobylives.com, which is now Melville House Publishing. We got a lot of attention fast because there was nothing quite like us online. Now I can't even imagine how you would launch something like Bookslut and draw enough attention to yourself.

HP: It’s been said that getting traffic for a blog is like trying to get your message in a bottle found in a sea of bottles - how did you get your ‘bottle’ found?
JC: Again... I always just assume that if I'm interested in something, someone else will be, too. And that is my entire driving philosophy behind Bookslut.

HP: You went ‘professional’ with Bookslut in 2003 and made it your sole job – did people think you were insane? How did you explain this 'career move' to your mother?
JC: I didn't really tell anyone, I don't think. It was such an act of desperation. I was working for a magazine, and the editor-in-chief would ask the managing editor to fetch his coffee because, you know, she was a woman and so therefore that was part of her duties. We would butt heads, and eventually I found myself in the kitchenette, eyeing the knives, thinking I had to quit or I would end up stabbing this man. So I quit. I thought I would eventually run out of money and would have to find a new job, but luckily that never happened.

HP: At what point did you decide you needed to get other writers involved to help out with Bookslut? And how big does a blog have to be to sustain that?
JC: The magazine has always been a collaboration, and that part ofBookslut started about three months after the blog. As far as writers on the blog, I asked my friend Michael Schaub to co-blog with me for awhile, and we both liked it so much we kept him as a permanent fixture. He left for a while, so it was just me again, and I got lonely. So I asked people like Nina MacLaughlin, Margaret Howie, and Jason Jones to cover certain angles. Then there are the guest bloggers, Jen Howard and Michael, who fill in when, say, I move to another country.

HP: In the States there’s been a dramatic change for print reviewers and you’ve been described as ‘re-writing the rules’ for online writing. What change do you perceive has happened? And how much of that has been down to Bookslut?
JC: Bookslut is occasionally credited with things, and I always think it's nonsense. But then, when you're in the middle of it, it's hard to look outside and see, oh right, this is how things changed. For a while,the only writing about literature you could find online was short, highly opinionated blogs. I remember being told that people don't want to read things of length online, you can never publish quality original content online. I thought, bullshit. I went ahead with publishing 5,000 word interviews with authors, 15-minute videos, etc. I've been proven right, because more lengthy content gets posted online all the time: podcasts, videos, long form essays. Even from the same people who said no one would care.

HP: There has been talk of Bookslut becoming a print publication at various stages. What happened with that?
JC: I mean, I could see the writing on the wall: print is expensive, it's time consuming, it's a static thing. I've always funded Bookslut out of my own pocket, even during years when it made no money, so risking my own livelihood for a very risky print experiment seemed foolish at best. And then when you bring in a collaborator with money, they have ultimate control. I'm not great with compromise. So yeah, I'd flirt with someone with money, and then I would come to my senses. Not that it wouldn't be fun, either to be a print magazine or to go into publishing. But I like the fluidity of the online world, and I like how cheap it is, especially. (And not that I would never do it. It's just that circumstances have never been perfect.)

HP: You’re often described as a ‘publishing outsider’ because you’re not in New York and don’t work in the traditional industry. But now it’s like you’re the Trojan Horse inside the gates. How does that feel? What will you yell when you surprise the Trojans?
JC: I really enjoy being on the outside. You have a much better view from the outside. I think for a while I got out a rope ladder and thought I'd scale the walls and try to blend in, but it's so uncomfortable in New York publishing. Now I feel less like a Trojan Horse (because Ihave no desire to declare war. They're good where they are, and I'm good where I am. I like it out here. Better air quality, more room to stretch out. No laws to follow.) and more like I have a visitors' pass when I want it. Which is surprisingly not very often. I feel like my friends in independent publishing in New York are the Trojan Horses. I'm out in the fields, lying in the grass and talking to the cows.

HP: Email interviews suck don’t they? You lose a whole layer of non-verbal communication. How do you get around it?
JC: I never do e-mail interviews. I mean, conduct them. I answer many of them.

You’ve done a few video interviews recently – how tough was it to change to video?
Not at all. We had Brown Finch handle all the technical stuff, and I don't mind getting gussied up and making an ass of myself on camera. We were going to do more, but then I decided to move to Berlin. Who knows... maybe I'll find a new crew here and we can start it up again. But for now, that's on hold.

HP: I really liked Slut Lessons – your column about the quirkier aspects of reading culture like how to start your own slutty book group or how to get dates with your library. Whatever happened to that section? And what about Cookslut?
JC: I just got bored writing Slut Lessons, and that was aaages ago. I am so old. Columnists come and go. We'll have a new cookbook columnist soon, actually.

HP: You’re about to move Berlin (or possibly just have) – what will this mean for Bookslut? And more importantly for you?
JC: Who the fuck knows. For Bookslut, it means me backing off a bit. Caroline Eick takes over the day to day stuff, the review books and soon. Right now we have guest bloggers so that I can settle in a bit. I just got here a week ago, so it's hard to say how things are going toend up. As for me personally... I always keep my personal life very quiet. I'm not the type of person to post their pap smear results online. I like my privacy, but sometimes this results in people making stuff up about you. There were rumors swirling around Chicago about why I was moving (marriage, pregnancy, the usual), which I found absurd. But I guess you either have to allow for that or be prepared to issue a statement about your motivations. I moved here for specific reasons, but they're my own reasons. People can believe what they want to believe.

HP: You’re coming to Melbourne soon for the Melbourne Writer’s Festival –what can we expect from your workshop? Do you do ‘trust games’ or will there be cake?
JC: I have been studying the Stanford prisoners experiment as a guideline for my workshop. If I haven't broken everyone psychologically by the end of the day, I will have failed.

HP: Finally what advice do you have for new bloggers?
JC: I hate giving advice, because I generally feel like most of my life has been ruled by chance and luck. The most helpful thing I can think to say is don't worry about looking like an idiot. You're going to say the wrong thing, be thought badly of, trash talked, whatever. But you learn as you go. As long as you're willing to try, and educate yourself, and stay open, you'll be fine.

Is Bendigo in China?

2009-07-02T12:52:00.011+10:00

Last weekend I hopped the train to Bendigo, a regional Victorian town best known for its 19th century goldrush that drew prospectors from all over the world. A large group of diggers came from Guandong in China’s south. They packed their culture with them which is so well preserved that it had me wondering if a ticket to China was worth it.

In the 1800s Bridge St looked very different. It was legal to import opium until 1900 and the street boasted no less than three opium dens. Today it’s home to the Golden Dragon Museum, named for characters like Sun Loong (New Dragon) the world’s longest dragon who romps the streets every year at the Easter festival. It’s studded with 90,000 tiny mirrors to repel evil spirits. Wandering the museum’s creepily lifelike wax figures you’ll see Buddhist and Confucian relics because these Chinese immigrants got out before the Culture Revolution crushed their beliefs in China. Further out of town there’s also the Joss House, a tiny temple to Guan-Di, a god of many portfolios including war, literature and, in his spare time, patron of bean curd sellers.

Outside the garden is a modeled on Beijing’s Imperial Garden with a few more nods to Buddha. There’s a large dragon screen much like the one we saw recently in Datong, that repels even more of those pesky evil spirits. As I looked at the two dragons squabbling for a pearl, I was struck by how this ‘immigrant culture’ had outlasted what remained at home. Okay so you'd have to wait 700 years for it to be as historic as the original, but this Chinese Australian construction is unique in its own way.

Forthcoming fiction

2009-07-01T08:44:00.006+10:00

The weird thing about writing for print as well as the web is the lag time. With the web you hit 'Publish Post' and it's out in the world. With print it disappears into a big machine and becomes a publication that's almost unrecognisable. In a good way.

I've got a short story coming out in the Big Issue fiction edition. An editor told me they were looking at how to illustrate the piece which stretched my brain in the visual direction. The trigger for the story was seeing a Vietnamese kid doing his homework in the window of his parent's cafe. It was one of those "What's his life like?" moments that takes you off on a fictional tangent. It was a fairly mundane mental snapshot but that was where my brain went. But as an illustration it really wouldn't stand up.

As a reader it can be tough to see your favourite book adapted into a film and seeing how a director has represented a key scene or miscast your favourite character. It's best to just go with it and see the film as something different, another interpretation. So I'm thinking the same will happen with this piece. I wrote an article a while back about ethical footwear (image not re-produced here - but I'm pretty sure it was by Michael Weldon) for the Big Issue and it was published with this fantastic image of two guys with sneakers for heads just chatting. Best of all, it gave the piece a hipness and humour that my writing didn't have.

Either way, the whole visual representation wil be solved when the Fiction edition hits the streets on 14th of July. Also this week I answered a question for the Herald Sun's Travel section about how to get to Australia without taking a plane. I've got no idea what it will look like so I'll be standing outside the newsagency waiting for a glance at it. Maybe illustrations are one of those things that 'need to be read with newsprint on your hands'.

Well Readinburgh

2009-06-25T09:35:00.013+10:00

Walking around Edinburgh it's easy to see how this atmospheric town would inspire great novels. From spooky castles to backstreet boozers to university lecture rooms, every corner seems to suggest a story or have a history rich enough for a bestseller.

Any tour of the city's should start at the Writer's Museum, which covers Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Downstairs there's a cabinet made by Deacon Brodie, a nefarious character whose life informed Stevenson's work. A mild-mannered cabinetmaker by day, Brodie had a double life that saw him in brothels and gambling dens most nights. To pay off his debts he took on a nocturnal life of crime, robbing around town for two years before being caught plundering the General Excise Office. According to local legend, he ended up being hung on a gallows which ironically he'd designed and built. Stevenson was fascinated with the tale writing a play, Deacon Brodie or the Double Life which was a draft for his novel of dual identities, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Stevenson was just one of a number of graduates of Edinburgh University to pen novels. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, commemorated with a statue of the most famous proponent of the deerstalker, was a classmate of Stevenson. Many believe that Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on a university lecturer, Dr Joseph Bell, who encouraged keen observation as a way of diagnosing patients and may even have muttered "It was elementary" to explain his more brilliant pieces of medicine.

Recently another writer looked to Edinburgh for inspiration. A single mum sat drinking

coffee in the Elephant House cafe and while her

daughter slept wrote a manuscript that must have been inspired by Edinburgh's magical castle. In 2005 JK Rowling would return the favour to the city with packed reading of her Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince from Edinburgh Castle. The fame of this place has become so great that other cafes have apparently put up signs saying "JK Rowling didn’t write anything here".

Less fantastic, the hard-boiled writer Ian Rankin bases his Detective Reebus novels in Edinburgh: the crime-solver has eaten at Fenwick's and usually solves his cases in the grungy grandeur of the Oxford Bar. Rebus has become so popular that Rankin has written a non-fiction book, Rebus's Scotland: A Personal Journey
, in which he follows his own fictional detective around and makes the odd stop at a distillery.

But for real grit-lit, you have to make for Leith to get a peek into Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. A great authentic tour I went on takes you inside film locations, to Welsh's flat and even into Sick Boy's Pub. Not quite your teaspoon of heroin? Then there's always a literary pub crawl of Central Edinburgh with the literary pub crawl hosted by two characters that represent the dual natures of Edinburgh's writing - Professor McBrain and Clart, a Scottish slang word for muck.

Three Melbourne Art Galleries

2009-06-22T18:11:00.001+10:00

If you ask any other Australian what they think of Melbournians, the word 'arty' comes up as often as 'coffee'. We're known for our black skivvies as much as our long blacks. On Saturday we went out on an art safari taking in three very different galleries which confirmed this reputation, but also stretched it to breaking point.

First up was Heide gallery – the sprawling property of the Boyd family which is a daytrip in itself. The Modern Times exhibition currently visiting from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum races through Australian modernism (1917-1967). I was impressed to see the size of Australia’s involvement in this world art movement and even more pleased to hear they've developed a podtour to help you visit. Early in the exhibition a snapshot of Albert Tucker in Jack Kerouac’s New York apartment gives you an idea of Australia’s artistic influence. It’s a good companion to the current Brack exhibition. Swimwear and swim culture are a little over-represented, so bigger trends in architecture don't get quite enough time. But I was surprised to see Canberra’s Academy of Sciences (better known to ANU students as the Martian Embassy) in the same context as the Opera House – both use the sphere as their model apparently. A collection of Australian jazz records on the daggy Swaggie label also point to a much bigger culture than couldn't quite be squeezed into Heide’s space.

But size isn’t everything as Hell Gallery proves. It’s squashed into a backyard and first story of a house next door to Coles. The space is well taken advantage of by Dan Moyihan’s current exhibit: In and Out and No Funny Business. The artist has installed his version of a heist of the nearby supermarket complete with a mocked hole through the wall into the freezer. A spray of frozen peas shows the successfulness of the project. We were lucky to be there as the artist himself wandered through, blushing and bemused. He told us the grungy tools-down staff room the thieves have set up was a result of ‘many smokos I’ve suffered through’.

Finally on the way home we stopped off at Smith Gallery – a newer place in Melbourne's inner west. We’d gotten a flyer about Elizabeth Wirth’s exhibition but couldn’t work out how her spidery images were conceived. With an absence of family photographs, the artists has re-imagined them using lace and other fabrics. The effect is eerie black and white portraits sketched out in webs of material that are unpicked to their component materials as you get closer. You can only get the effect by seeing it, which really should be the aim of any gallery – to get you to spend your Saturday stretching the senses towards art.

Please ignore this technorati tomfoolery: qty3baz7j2

State of Papers

2009-06-17T10:00:00.000+10:00

Running underneath the recent film State of Play there's a struggle between old and new media. It's represented by grizzled newspaper hack, Cal McAffrey (Rusty Crowe), and up-and-coming blogger, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). The two spar with their different approaches to a meaty political story (with a few nods to All The President's Men) as McAffrey wisecracks about 'bloggers and bloodsuckers' rushing inaccurate stories to the web, while his editor (a suitably cranky Helen Mirren) points out that bloggers are cheap and file copy hourly.

It's a grim insight into the changing world of media and one that's being played out daily if not hourly. A recent post, sorry, story in The Australian takes aim at Australian political bloggers for not breaking stories but 'obsess[ing] about the mainstream media and their reporting'. There's a waggling of a finger at 'group-think' which creates self-involved communities where there is 'not only no room for news, but no tolerance of new ideas'. It seems an odd charge in a piece that doesn't allow users to comment or respond.

Another oddity for an article about online culture is that there are no links to the sites it mentions. Perhaps the newspaper is hoarding its traffic to replace physical sales or is it that articles aren't subbed for online publication to include features like links, comments or even an image? If old media is going to take a swipe online at new media, it probably should work out a few of the rules for writing online. Otherwise they're coming to a gunfight with a bow and arrow.

A real downside of this article as an online piece is that it has no context. Author Christian Kerr is an ex-Crikey writer and Liberal party ex-staffer, which you'd know if you read his column regularly but not if you just Googled your way here or came in through a link from another blog (of which there are so many - is this piece trawling the very blog audiences it attacks?). More importantly this piece should be filed under opinion or column, but it loses these labels on the web. But that might be just another concern of what he calls the 'fair-trade, rainforest alliance-certified, decaff and soy brigade'.

The Hollywood ending of State of Play has Frye deciding that the big stories need to be read 'with newsprint on your hands' and McAffrey shares his byline with the young journalist kickstarting her career. It's a nice passing of the baton but McAffrey hasn't really changed his approach much. He gets a rallying speech about the importance of old reporting, its thoroughness and deeper research, which he believes audiences still appreciate.

As a media buddy movie, it feels like one character has learnt and grown while the other has had their approach vindicated and hence doesn't change. The Australian's staff won't be choking on their popcorn at this conclusion. The final scenes are a loving treatment of the news story actually going to press - complete with old-school plates and huge rolls of paper fed into the vast machinery. The audience stayed glued to the whole process running into the end credits - as though witnessing a museum exhibit.

Is This Your Luggage: A Q&A with Luna Laboo

2009-06-14T09:00:00.008+10:00

Ever wondered what people pack when they go away? How do they cram their dreams, their fantasies and their toiletries into a single suitcase? At Is This Your Luggage, the mysterious Luna Laboo opens cases and shows us what's inside. Part art-project, part-philanthropy, totally weird, LL buys lost cases at auction then photographs them for display on the internet in the hope of finding their owners. It's a story that interested me so I did a Q&A and found out that people rarely pack shoes and how hanky folding can show character.

Hackpacker: What made you start collecting and photographing other people's luggage?
Luna Laboo: Loads of luggage went missing when they opened a new terminal at Heathrow airport. I saw a few news reports on it and started to wonder what happened to it all. I discovered through the internet where it was being sold at auction and went along to buy a case.

HP: Are there ever items that you don't photograph when you open up some luggage (and why)?
LL: No. I photograph everything in the case, I think the airports take certain items out, like liquids for security reasons. I very rarely find shoes, I don't really know why.

HP: The luggage all looks fairly generic on the site - what makes you bid on some items and not on others? I noticed, for example, that there seem to be more women's cases - is that just accidental or do you look for something when you're bidding?
LL: On the auction list the only thing it says about the luggage is if it is women's or men's clothes. I don't pick luggage on what it looks like I just bid for all the cases and end up with the cheaper ones. They sell for between £16 and £60 so I have to have a limit I don't spend more than £30. I do try to get an even amount of men and women, so hopefully my next case will be men's and even it out.

HP: Have you ever found something you've been tempted to keep?
LL: Not really, there are some nice clothes in the bags, even some brand new clothes, but they are not mine they belong to the owners and it would be wrong for me to wear them.

HP: What's the weirdest thing you've seen when you've opened a bag?
LL: The nurse's outfit was a bit of a shock, but it's little things that are unusual or interesting. Like how they have folded all their hankies differently or balled all their socks with the odd pair. These things aren't really weird just interesting, these people didn't ever imagine that I would end up with their luggage so all these little things are insights into them.

HP: There's a very meticulous method to laying things out when you photograph items - even dirty socks are paired and straightened. Why is that?
LL: I want it to be clear what the contents are, I also really like the display element. A bit like butterflies in those gruesome boxes when their little wings are stretched out. The design of the images was very important to me, I wanted this everyday stuff to look special.

HP: To me each case seems to give little character insights into its owner - Blue case big, for example, has mostly boxers and some small carpets making for an odd traveller. You call another bigman which seems a nod to character. Do you find yourself imagining characters based on the luggage?
LL: Yes. I make stories up for all of them. They are all very real people to me, weirdly I feel like I know them. I was going was going to put them on the site but then I think people should be free to make their own stories up.

HP: Has anyone ever used them as writing prompts for short fiction?
LL: Not as far as I know. I have been asked to make a book of the pictures so I was planing on putting my stories of what they are like to me and how they came to loose their luggage in that.

HP: So far no-one has claimed their luggage from the site - what do you imagine will happen when they do? Will you meet them in person?
LL: I was going to mail the luggage back to them but as it has taken a while to find someone (no real owners have come forward yet) I have decided to fly with the luggage to meet the owner and hopefully to photograph them and find out what they are really like.

HP: Given the site has had a fair amount of international exposure - have you had any scammers tried to reclaim luggage?
LL: One or two, but they are quite sweet really. One guy claimed a case and when I asked him for more info he apologised said he was drunk and had been dared to email me.

HP: I love the site's look with luggage labels as navigation and a real simplicity. Was this so it could be easily expanded?
LL: Mainly it is simple because it is the first web site I have ever made. I am a designer of sorts but not a web designer, so I am very glad you like it. I did want to keep it simple so people were interested in the cases not any fancy stuff (not that I know how to do the fancy stuff.)

HP: Some websites have called this project philanthropy, others art and a few creepy - are you happy with any of these labels?
LL: Yes, I quite like that it has divided people a bit. I guess it is rather creepy if you don't really know that I want to get the stuff back to the owners and the site is a means to an end. I think people are very mistrustful of people who do something for free or because it makes them feel good, even my friends keep saying, 'You should put some ads on the site and make some money' but that's not what it is about. It's about helping people who have lost something to get it back. The more interesting things like the nurses outfit and the pants are the things that weirdly or not interest people and that's why the site gets passed around and the more it does the more chance I have of finding an owner.

HP: You're based in the UK but the site has been well promoted across the world. Do you think you'll eventually find the owners?
LL: I really hope so that is my main aim, so fingers crossed and if you know any one who has lost a case send them my way.

Image by Luna Laboo.

Loch Ness

2009-06-04T21:23:00.008+10:00

Some friends are visiting Inverness and asked if they should check out the monstered waters around that way. Any actual natural beauty bestowed upon the area of Loch Ness has been completely obscured by the legend and mystery of an underwater beast and the few small towns that make a living off it. Since the 1930s there have been numerous reported sightings and scammings of what looked like a swimming brontosaurus, leading the loch to be dubbed a Scottish Jurassic Park. Despite key photographs revealed as fakes and a 1990s Ted Danson schlockbuster, people never stop trying to spot their very own monster of the deep.

And thanks to the plethora of tourist shops Nessie sightings are a certainty. You can spot the monster on mugs, t-shirts and pencil sharpeners, not to mention stuffed fluffy toy versions embroidered with slogans like 'Cheeky-Ness' (lizard with its tongue sticking out) and 'Drunken-Ness' (same reptile with crossed eyes). As I browsed Drumnadrochit's high street tourist shops, I was holding out for 'Crap-ness'.

Drumnadrochit is definitely the epicentre of 'Tacky-Ness' with two mini-villages of tourist shops duelling for the passing pound. Each village has its own rival short film about the monster - opt for the one that doesn't come with a tour of the concrete-looking Braveheart castle. The Loch Ness 2000 Show runs for about 40 minutes and as it was conducted in the dark I imagined I'd be able to comfortably get in a half-hour nap - partly to make up for the interrupted youth hostel sleep I had last night. But I got pulled into Loch Ness 2000. You wander through a series of atmospherically dark caves, each one tracing an era of sightings and fakes. It was all quite spooky and believable until I leant back on a fibreglass wall.

Further southwest, Fort Augustus has its own share of 'Mad-Ness', but there's another reason to stop here. Boats sailing up the River Oich are faced with the Caledonian Canal, a series of locks that they climb like a ladder to access Loch Ness. Massive yachts are led by pilots on rope so they look a little like marine Labradors slowly being walked on a sunny day. Sure, it's man-made, but it feels like a more genuine sighting. And if you want to escape the Mad-Ness completely, take the B852 around the lake's eastern shore where the scenery is just as spectacular but the tourists traps less frequent. It's so peaceful that any right thinking monster would much rather sun itself over there.

Parts of this post originally appeared as part of a Lonely Planet blog.

Back to Rosslyn

2009-06-01T21:07:00.008+10:00

With Dan Brown's Angels and Demons currently posessing the box office, I was reminded of when I was researching a Scotland book a couple of years ago. In the midst of the 'Da Vinci phenomenon', Roslyn Chapel, just 10 miles south of Edinburgh, was on every tourist map because it played a crucial role in the film's climax.

After much map-muddling, I found the humble 15th century church near the village of Roslin. I should have just followed the tourist buses that formed a determined scrum around the ancient building. The first thing I noticed about Rosslyn Chapel was the scaffolding exoskeleton as the worn old nugget was renovated. The church reputedly pocketed £7000 a day as a location fee and it looked like much of that was being used to make sure there's something for the tourist throngs to see. Apparently it's still going on today with plans to re-open completely in 2010.

'Oh man!' an awed Canadian exclaimed as he walked through my photo of the entrance arch. 'This is all so freakin' quaint.'

The Chapel is massive, possibly freakin' massive, but anything this size is hardly quaint. Construction began in 1456 as the Scottish Earl, William St Clair, sought to build a church that could serve as a priestly college for the area. Another William St Clair was buried in full armour below the chapel in 1650, which would certainly have caught the imagination of author Dan Brown when he was researching his story of Knights Templar guarding the sacred relics of the church. The vault beneath the chapel became something of a Christian lost-and-found office through the church's history, so when Tom Hanks cracks the code at the movie's conclusion it's possible that he could have found the grail in this regional church.

When I visited, however, it was a challenge to even get a peek at a stained glass window as a thick wall of tourists shuffled in front of every relic. With the noise of so many accents and a lightning storm of digital flashes it was hard to believe Rosslyn could actually function as a chapel. There were still services on Sundays and tour buses were turned away for local weddings.

I tried to light a small taper up the back of the church and found myself the subject of a movie tie-in photo. Up on the gantry that curls around the chapel's roof, things were quieter. The crowds were wary of heights. I looked out onto the moist green country and the ruins of another castle yet to feature in a bestselling novel or blockbuster film.

The current sequel film might drag the odd extra tourist to the Vatican, but it certainly won't have anything like the effect the Brown's first bestseller had on this small town. I'd like to go back and visit to see if the film fuss has died down. If you're passing through, check it out for me and maybe even light that candle.

This blog is based on an earlier blog for Lonely Planet.

Vividly Sydney

2009-05-27T23:11:00.012+10:00

Sydney has always shone out, but the Brian Eno exhibition Luminous makes it an artistic reality. As part of the city of Syd's Vivid festival, the sometimes-musician/sometimes-artist is curating an exhibition that will see 77 million images projected over the icon-loaded harbour until June 14th. The light show combines with concerts from Ladytron, Battles and Lee Scratch Perry and other events to put the city centrestage. It makes for quite a spectacle as the Opera House blushes from hibiscus flower to camouflage - the use of khaki making the building anything but invisible.

Usually the building leaves a dirty big carbon bootprint. It sucks in the same amount of electricity as a town of 25,000 and uses enough cabling to run from Sydney to Canberra (Australia's token political capital) and back. To address the balance the Smart Light Walk is a tour around the harbour that aims to turn off more lights than it switches on. By wandering through 25 light installations, you can see alternative energy sources at work and low energy options as well as be part of the switch-off campaign to make Australia's unofficial capital more energy efficient.

The yin to the city's yang is the Gloom Festival, a sly protest at the spending of $7million on Vivid that will leave Sydneysider artists out of the spotlight. Promoting itself as a "Festival of Silence, Darkness and Lack of Resources", the anti-event was to include several people lying dead in the Opera House foyer with "artist" painted on their foreheads and showing up at the Museum of Contemporary Art dressed as a pachyderm to address the "elephant in the room" of funding cuts. Was? Yep, because today Gloom changed its tune when they were contacted by the Opera House asking them to get permits for their protests and only play dead in places that wouldn't inconvenience patrons. The website has since cancelled all its events. Perhaps the Opera House is twice shy after the last time the icon made a reluctant political statement.

Images courtesy of Mondayne via his Flickr, and Camouflage - Sydney Opera House photo by avlxyz. And thanks to Amber Carvan for the Gloom tip-off.

Literally Melbourne

2009-05-25T09:52:00.000+10:00

This weekend saw the opening of the Emerging Writers' Festival, a uniquely Melbourne event that was created to showcase "the best writers you haven't heard of yet". Friday's opening night First Word was a packed program that included hilarious sketches by List Operators, launching of the 48-Hour Play Generator, a Call to Arms from comic book writer Shane McCarthy and a hypothetical about the city's Centre for Books Writing and Ideas. And all this just on the opening night.

The ever-witty Michael Nolan hosted the hypothetical which looked at what the centre for Books Writing and Ideas could be as it prepares to open at the State Library of Voctoria later this year. There were a few digs at Readings becoming the official bookstore of the State Library of Victoria (the store's owner is a board member of the Centre) and some pointed remarks about it creating an ivory tower (from memory Nolan's delightful phrase was "Stalinism with good coffee"). Poet PiO was concerned about the lack of representation of poetry in the centre though this was confusing given that the Australian Poetry Centre is one of the centre's future tenants. He went on to ask The Age's literary editor, Jason Steger, why his book hadn't been reviewed in the paper.

The hypothetical format skips between debate and comedy so it wasn't the best way to discuss how the centre would work. This may have been the point made by Michael Williams, head of programming at the new centre, when he said that he hoped that interested people would be banging down his door to make sure the centre was representative. But, in keeping with the format, he also alluded to sorting out rivalries in the centre using cage fighting. Obviously the better forum to discus out why your book wasn't reviewed.

Melbourne is also showing off its City of Lit chops with the Independent Type exhibition running at the State Library. It's a impressive ramble through Victoria's publishing history ranging from kooky EW Cole to Lonely Planet patron saints, Tony and Maureen Wheeler.

Wordsworth is my homeboy

2009-05-20T11:30:00.008+10:00

What are the first things you think of when you hear "Lake District"? Probably Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, picnics in the country and maybe squirrels. It's an area known for "pleasant weekenders" and homemade fudge, so most visitors don't come away with memories of gangster rap.

A piece of viral marketing genius featuring MC Nuts (a guy dressed in a squirrel suit) performing a retooled version of Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud seems to hit the wrong note to publicise this mild district. It was released in 2007 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the poem, but would the fusty poet enjoy this attempt to "engage the YouTube generation"? Judge for yourself:

Personally I hope we can see more of this comin' straight outta the Lakes. The red squirrels have long been involved in a turf war with the more dominant greys and yet not a single beatboxed-backed word has been heard about this gang fight. And it's a real trans-Atlantic smackdown with the greys invading from North America and driving out the reds. It's really bigger than hip hop's traditional East Coast vs West Coast rivalry with it's own martyrs and heroes. What about Potter's Tale of Squirrel Nutkin where the hero loses his tail in what amounts to a intra-gang power struggle with an owl? Surely this deserves to be represented as much as Tupac and Notorious BIG? If nothing else it could bring a new subjects to hip hop as not enough rhymes are based on discovering a particularly nice stretch of daffodils. Eminem better stop and smell the roses.

More than Rhubarb: Craig Silvey profile

2009-05-15T11:46:00.002+10:00

Two years into writing his second novel, West Australian writer Craig Silvey thought he’d blown it. Instead of quickly following up his first book, Rhubarb, with a new offering, he found himself caught up in his own notes and losing sight of his characters. “I kept expanding it and it turned into this amorphous blob and I just got lost inside it. It just got a bit big on me,” Silvey says down the phoneline from Fremantle. “I was kind of beginning to lose faith in it. I had this cold sweat and woke up with an idea of Jasper Jones.”

The success of Rhubarb put the pressure on Silvey. It was named the One Book of the Perth Festival and scored him the Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist award. There were even comparisons with another WA literary titan Tim Winton, which Silvey humbly dismisses as “very flattering for me and equally unflattering for him”. It all left Silvey cornered with an out of control manuscript and some big expectations. His solution was to “critically pan myself but then bring myself life with Jasper.”

The story came tapping at his window late at night just like the part-Aboriginal title character of his new book, Jasper Jones, comes to visit the geeky narrator, Charlie. “I just had this opening kernel of an idea and it wouldn’t let me go and I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. Once I started Jasper I felt so incredibly guilty about shelving the second book that I was working crazy hours. In 2007 I rarely left my room.”

The idea that seized him was of a small town murder that Jasper knows will be pinned on him because of his troublemaking reputation. Late at night Jasper sneaks up to Charlie’s window looking for help and we’re drawn into a story of small town outsiders. The tension between wanting to belong and being different is clearest in Charlie’s best mate Jeffrey Lu, a Vietnamese-born boy who is trying to break into the town cricket side despite the racist jibes of local yobbos and even the coach.

For Silvey characters not only dictate where the story goes but become part of his life. “You start to think of them as people you know, as old friends. The strangest sensation is when they start invading your dreams and start really appearing to you as real people. It could be the start of some sort of psychosis,” Silvey laughs.

But all Silvey’s characters share the need to escape his fictional town of Corrigan. When asked about whether Corrigan is based on his own home town of Dwellingup Silvey hesitates before calling it a "rural blend" of towns he’s visited. “Country towns are just so cloying and pressing that you really crave something else. Particularly for kids who don’t fit into the machinery of a country town. Those on the outside can have a horrible experience.”

While the book is set in the 1960s in the paranoid wake of Perth’s Nedlands murders, it feels very contemporary. Racism and outsider still strike a chord with Australians in country towns as much as big cities. “It could be a country town now,” Silvey agrees. In Jasper Jones the word ‘sorry’ is carved into eucalypts and rusty car doors as Charlie reflects it “means you feel the pulse of other people’s pain… and saying it means you take a share of it.”. It’s a reminder after lat year’s historic Parliamentary apology to Aboriginal people that there’s still a share to be taken.

Not that the book is heavy with issues and murder. Characters trade hypotheticals on how pirates could find half-fish mermaids attractive and whether it would be better to have a hat made of spiders or penises for fingers. Silvey delivers warm characters rather than sermons. This love of characters saw Silvey collaborate on The World According to Warren, a children’s book based on the guidedog from Rhubarb, because “I sort of felt like in Rhubarb he was treated unfairly so he got the opportunity to set the record straight.”

Whether it’s the Jeffrey Lu, Eleanor the blind heroine of Rhubarb or her guidedog, Silvey is comfortable in other people’s skins and occasionally their fur. “I try not to panic and deal with things as sensitively as possible and try to flesh these people out as characters first, which is what they are. They’re human beings – well they’re not real human beings, but you know.” With a five year wait between books, Silvey has already started hearing his real or imaginary voices guiding him to another book. “I’m working on the third one, but it’s just finding the time in between banging on about myself,” Silvey laughs.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Big Issue, No. 328.

An Open Letter to Vladimir Putin

2009-05-12T10:31:00.003+10:00

Dear Vlad,

I didn't know whether to address you as Prime Minister, President or Your Oil and Gas Baroniness, but out of respect I stopped short of dude. I know you're a busy guy what with the judo dvd and stashing that alleged fortune (will those journalists never stop their investigating?), so I thought I'd send you a quick heads-up on tourism in Mother Russia.

Firstly, what's up with that visa? You have to get someone to invite you into the country (who you pay a fee to), then you have to go to the embassy (who unsurprisingly take a fee) and then when you get to Russia you have to register the visa at every hotel (who also take a... wait for it... fee!). If I didn't know any better I'd swear you were trying to talk people out of visiting the Land of the Bear. And then there's all those uniformed characters (basically anyone who can match their pants to their shirt will try to be an authority in Russia) checking papers to see if they can fine tourists if they don't have all the papers registered and triple stamped. It's hardly welcoming with open arms.

Okay so let's say your visa checks out, then there's those 'tourist prices'. Nobody minds pay a few more kopecks for a few attractions but when you get into most museums there won't be any English (or French or Japanese, or... oh no wait there might be some German) signs so most tourists will feel like they've blown their cash to be confused. And how about that 'photography pass'? It can't be to protect the art works or historical artefacts, because otherwise there would be no photography at all. Plus museums seem to be staffed exclusively by cranky ex-Soviets with merit badges in yelling at photographers regardless of passes.

The weird thing is we still had fun in Russia and felt it could have a thriving tourism industry. Now I know you're going to tell me to take it to Medvedev, that he's running the show now and you're just the Prime Minister. But he's pretty busy looking out for Gazprom (the company he used to chair) and talking to the kids through his videoblogging. Tourism in Russia needs a take-charge, throw-people-on-the-ground, former KGB agent kinda guy to whip it into shape. Whaddya say, dude?

Warmest regards

Hackpacker

PS. Alternatively you could run a competition like Queensland's Best Job in the World. I mean people are still telling me to enter and the winner was annouced a week ago. You could set yours in Siberia and even if it didn't bring any publicity, it could put a lot of journalists on ice.

[Image courtesy of www.kremlin.ru.]

Great Head for Radio

2009-05-09T15:53:00.013+10:00

In the spruiking of the Big Trip, I've done a couple of fun radio spots. I was interviewed on the Peter Greenberg show, which was a phone hook-up with the host in Barbados. It zipped by in seconds and had me thinking I should only do destinations where I can tan. Another phone hook-up was with Travel in 10 with a great an excellent Canadian host. And I even got a guernsey on Life Matters with the smooth baritone of Richard Aedy. But none of these was as much fun as getting in the studio with RRR Breakfasters for a chat.

This month Breakfaster, Sam Pang, is off to Russia to cover Eurovision so the good folks at the Rs asked me back to give him some travel tips on Moscow. After much giggling, vodka tasting and scary mentions of Vladimir Putin's KGB career, there might even have been some advice for Sam (this file is 5meg and advice is in the last ten minutes - you've been warned). Mostly though it was just a yukfest with Sam saying I was just "doing a top five" of gags rather than giving him any information he could use. As I was leaving, calls started coming in from what I assumed were complaints from the Russian Australian Association and death threats from Putin's people. Still the beauty of radio is that nobody can see you so it will be a while before the hitmen track me down.

Also this week my article on Australian seasonal menus also appeared. Chefs and cooks alike agreed that Australia doesn't fit the mould for strict seasons and at the moment it's the economic climate influencing their menus more than the mercury.

Brack is back

2009-05-06T20:48:00.010+10:00

John Brack made me move to Melbourne. His iconic painting, Collins St 5pm, takes you into his view of the city as he waited for his friend to knock-off work. But more than his bystander sketching you get a soap opera of faces - from the pinching at the eyes of the Henry Lawson lookalike to the plummy cheeks of the woman pushing behind him. And they're all grimly heading in the same direction.

The National Gallery of Victoria is currently running a retrospective of Brack's work that sweeps through his career. There's the brief period in 1956 where he headed out to Flemington to paint 'the sport of kings' but came back only with gargoyle jockeys and undertaker punters. He took on Barry Humphries cross dressing as Dame Edna Everidge and captures the strangeness of both.

On the walls is a quote from Brack himself about his charicaturing of people that makes them look sometimes like horror-movie ghouls and sometimes comic book heroines:

What I paint is what interests me most, that is, people; the Human Condition...
A large part of the motive is... the desire to understand and, if possible, to illuminate.

Later Brack seems to have become disenchated with people painting objects - most notably quills and pencils that march and fight in a disappointingly human way. Then he uses postcards to summarise human civilisations in a more abstract style. It's the artist continuing to challenge himself as his career moves on.

But for many gallery visitors, it's all about Collins Street, 5pm. There's a rather cheeky piece of hanging here as the piece directly opposite it is The Bar (below). It's set slightly after 5pm as the notorious six o'clock swill means that men are throwing down pots before the pub's early closing times that blighted 1950s Australia. So there's the rush from work and the mania of the pub. Between them, stands this determinedly smiling woman who seems to get the joke of the painting she's in and the one she's facing.
(Images courtesy of NGV site, but these low-res shots really don't do them justice - you need to see them to really feel their punch).