Miles Franklin: isn't this an awfully short longlist?

Only eight books (compared to last year's twelve) have made the cut this year onto the Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist, announced today. They are

Peter Carey: Theft: A Love Story
John Charalambous: Silent Parts
Richard Flanagan: The Unknown Terrorist
Sandra Hall: Beyond The Break
Gail Jones: Dreams Of Speaking
Kate Legge: The Unexpected Elements Of Love
Deborah Robertson: Careless
Alexis Wright: Carpentaria

To my mind the most arresting thing about this list is that it doesn't include former winner Andrew McGahan's Underground, a funny, angry dystopia about Australia in the near future. I thought it was a good book within the parmeters of its generic aspirations (or, as a Margaret Drabble character with curly red hair, high cheekbones and big eyes says somewhere, probably in The Gates of Ivory, 'I was a great beauty, in my genre'); maybe not the kind of book that actually wins major fiction prizes, but I'm very surprised not to see it even on the longlist.

And if Peter Carey wins for Theft, the game's crook.

UPDATE, 16/3: Carpentaria, Careless and Theft: A Love Story were all on the shortlist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize Regional Best Book Award but were beaten to it today by New Zealander Lloyd Jones, who has a number of substantial novels to his credit and has had lots of good press for the novel he won this prize with, Mr Pip, reviewed here. (NB that shocking grammatical error in the third to last paragraph was introduced by a sub-editor. Just so you know.)

'Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back'

Even if you don't read anything else today, read this.

Then remember that David Hicks, wherever he has been, whatever he was doing there, no matter how repugnant his beliefs, if he has any left, may be, is doing time for a crime that wasn't a crime at the time.

A futuristic dystopia based on this fact might begin with a scene in which an ordinary character -- you, say -- is walking down an ordinary street in [insert name of Australian city here], chatting on her mobile phone. A year later we are mid-world-war and chatting on your phone in public has been criminalised, along security-breach and bomb-detonating lines.

And there's footage of it. There you are in the Channel 9 archives, tootling along the footpath in the background, phone to ear, as Kylie gets out of her limo.

You're stuffed.

Santoro's "charity" of choice: 'to counter feminism, defend the unborn and the traditional family'

As investigated and reported by Radio National's The World Today this afternoon, Senator Santo Santoro's idea of what constitutes a 'charity' is a bit looser than the one most of us have.

Sprung owning shares that put him squarely in the centre of a conflict of interest, given his portfolio as Minister for Ageing, Santoro claimed that he had donated the profits to 'charity' after selling shares that he should have been sacked for holding at all. But, as (unlike Senator Ian Campbell) he wasn't getting in the way of any Prime Ministerial attempts to smear the Leader of the Opposition, it hasn't been deemed necessary to remove him.

The 'charity' in question turns out to be something called the Family Council of Queensland, which, far from being a registered charity, is actually a conservative lobby group: a loose affiliation of mainly Christian groups with policies their president describes as 'pro-family' -- a term recognised by people on both sides of the debate as a dog-whistle/euphemism for 'anti-progressive in general and anti-women's rights in particular'.

While the above ABC link quotes the president's examples of 'pro-family' policies as being anti-child abuse and anti-pornography, a look at their website and those of the different organisations that belong shows that other policies include anti-abortion, anti-stem cell research, anti-contraception, and open, hostile anti-feminism. (Though you have to wonder what they think 'feminism' is.)

They have no interest in actually helping people in need; they seem 'pro-family' chiefly in the literal sense of wanting to produce more and bigger families, via the enforced compliance of traditional baby-making machines, also known as "women".

At least one of the bodies that form this Family Council is somewhere on the nutso side of truly barking. The Festival of Light is a member, but the Festival of Light looks sober and rational next to this mob here.

One wonders just how much money Senator Santoro got for his shares, and what the Family Council of Queensland plans to do with it. In the meantime, this sequence of events is being held up as an example of the Ministerial Code of Conduct at work.

Make them laugh till their knickers fall down

Sophie Cunningham had a terrific article in The Age over the weekend about sex, love and partnership, and one of the things she talks about there is the ridiculous equation in public/popular culture of sexiness with (in particular) skinniness and/or buffness.

Now, as I'm a rather traditionally built lady myself, the Mandy Rice-Davies argument ('Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?') might be said to apply, but my thinking here is actually to do with various well-padded blokes. Who among us would deny that Robbie Coltrane is sexy? Gerard Depardieu? John Howard the-actor-not-the-politician? Well, who with any brains, anyway. Who with any heart.

It's not about the voyeuristic, one-way effect of the still photograph; it's about the vitality and humanness and connective spark of the way that people talk and move and -- most of all -- interact. Which is, after all, what sex is supposed to be about, rather than onanistic drooling over a photo of some C-list celebrity's lumpy, surgically enhanced bazoombas.

It's not all good, of course; I've just been reading a novel in which the wife of a corpulent but enthusiastic husband says that having sex with him is like having the wardrobe fall on top of her, and I'm sure many a partner of many a porker will recognise the feeling. But as Sophie correctly points out, part of the appeal of the above-named and many other well-upholstered chaps is that they're funny:

'As Hollywood actor Will Smith put it, somewhat inelegantly, in Britain's Empire magazine: "Comedy is better than muscles, better than money, better than looks. It's like if you can make a girl laugh out loud, you're in. It's almost like the pressure of the laugh makes her underwear fall off."'

Can he be serious?

In The Age this morning, the Prime Minister responds with more aggression and spin to the latest polls showing that Australians are sick to death of aggression and spin:

'PRIME Minister John Howard has vowed to launch a more aggressive attack on Labor's economic credentials in a bid to secure his fifth term in office, conceding he cannot ignore the Government's poll slump.

After yesterday's ACNielsen/ Age poll found Labor had surged to a 61 versus 39 per cent two-party lead over the Coalition, Mr Howard acknowledged the difficulties facing his Government.

"I can't ignore the fact that we have had quite a series of bad polls over the past few months and I ask myself: why is it that the polls are so bad for the Government at present?" he said on a two-day official visit to Japan.

"I think one of the reasons … is that the Labor Party has successfully created the impression that … the economy runs on autopilot and it's got nothing to do with good governance. That, of course, could not be further from the truth."'

Shorter John Howard: 'Hmmm, a vicious, unsubstantiated attack didn't work ... I know! I'll try a vicious, unsubstantiated attack!'

Is he really so deep in denial that he can't see that the answer to the question he asked himself has nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with his own behaviour? That the spinning, lying and muckraking which apparently make up about three-quarters of Australian political life have finally begun to repel 'the Australian people'?

But it's part of the subculture of politics, as the title of Graham Richardson's Whatever It Takes a few years ago made repulsively clear. And beyond politics you see the same pattern in every corner of life: people inside any subculture -- not just politics, but any distinct social group -- refer everything back to its often unspoken rules, within which their behaviour seems to them to be perfectly normal. They act accordingly, and are then very startled when the big world crashes in, in the shape of the bank, the AFL tribunal, the defamation laws, the police or the opinion polls.

It's the same reason why the 14-year-old girl in hospital over the summer with serious injuries from a crash on her illegal jet ski said confidently to camera 'Oh yes, I'll do it again. Everybody breaks the law -- it doesn't matter.' It's the same reason why I have become, to my horror, much more of a potty-mouth than I was before I took up blogging. It's the same reason why so many footballers went feral over the summer. And it's basically the same reason why the Prime Minister appears unable to see, even now, what's sitting right under his nose.

New prize on the horizon (with the inevitable segue to Patrick White)

Susan Wyndham at Undercover has some advance knowledge of a new Australian literary prize to be announced at the end of this month.

If it's as lucrative as the Miles Franklin and its terms 'are likely to be inspiring to some but also controversial', then it should get a lot of press when the official announcement is made on March 31. What the 'controversial terms' part suggests to me is that the prize may favour a particular demographic. The young? The female? The gay or lesbian? The *gasps, makes sign of cross* multicultural?

If that's the case, here in the land of literary hoaxes, such a substantial offering will no doubt attract people out to make some sort of point. I know other countries have literary hoaxes too, but it seems to me that what with Ern Malley, Gwen Harwood, Helen Demidenko, Paul Radley, Wanda Koolmatrie, Wraith Picket and that's just off the top of my head, we are punching well above our weight.

I've been on a few judging panels for literary prizes over the last decade or two, and in that capacity have kept an increasingly jaded and suspicious eye out for anything that looks as though it could be a hoax. Most of these things are perpetrated by people out to either get around the terms of the prize in order to (a) win it (Paul Radley's uncle wrote the book he won the Vogel with), (b) fight skirmishes in ideological/aesthetic flame wars (Ern Malley), or (c) (closely related to (b)) make various ideological/political points (Demidenko, Koolmatrie, Harwood, Picket. Spot the real person in that list).

The 'Gotcha!' impulse behind this kind of thing has always struck me as a bit of a double-edged sword. If the motivations of the people behind the Wraith Picket/Patrick White hoax (and I still think that if they were going with anagrams then they should have called him Keith Crapwit) had been different, they could have spun that puppy 180 degrees and said 'Look: no fewer than twelve literary experts have said this guy isn't any good. Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate him. Perhaps his work was mediocre all along.'

Not that I would ever claim such a thing myself, believing as I do that literary value is not absolute, and belonging as I do to the generation for whom Patrick White's work was a major formative experience, for whom his literary gifts are self-evident, and for whom his ideological freight was and is a great deal less simple and more radical than was claimed in Simon During's correct-line little book. But it's something that they could, if they'd been on the other side of the culture wars, have very easily done.

As it is, the conservative hoaxers seem to have shot themselves in the foot. What they wanted was to cause further damage to all those naughty lefties who are trying to destroy "our" heritage by not teaching Australian literature in "our" universities. (Which is, of course, factually quite wrong, as with the claims from other conservative culture warriors that "the feminists" have been silent on the subject of repellent fundamentalist-Islamic practices and beliefs regarding women. When in doubt, make stuff up.)

What they have created instead, quite unintentionally I'm sure, is a new upsurge of interest in White himself: there's now a blog devoted specifically to an online Patrick White reading group, an upcoming conference devoted specifically to his work and reputation, and an all-day event at the National Library, where Friday March 30th will be Patrick White Day.

But creating this new wave of interest in a writer who was an acknowledged homosexual and whose work introduced the country's fiction readers to new ways of thinking about Aborginal Australia, about class relations, about multicultural issues long before that was what they were called, and about autonomous, unforgettable female characters at the centre of a story (Theodora Goodman, Laura Trevelyan, Elizabeth Hunter, Ellen Roxburgh ... the list goes on) may not have been quite what the conservative elements had in mind when they set out to humiliate the contemporary literary left and score points in the culture wars.


Cross-posted at A Fugitive Phenomenon.

In a Pollyanna moment ...

... I have, yet again, attempted to jump-start my litblog A Fugitive Phenomenon, which was dying a slow ugly death from neglect. Its name, orginally a quotation from an essay by Nicholas Jose that was published in Australian Book Review in (I think) November 2005 to describe 'Australian literature' as such, has become even more gnomic since I turned it into a blog about literature generally, rather than just Aust Lit.

Anyway, for those who just want to read about books and writing without having to wade through the tomatoes and the cats and the feminist cultural analysis and so forth, that's the place to go.

A must-read

In case, like me, you missed it at the time, Aussie Bob had a brilliant bit of media analysis up yesterday morning about the weekend's events in politics, the responses to the events in the polls, and the responses to the polls in the papers, directing us to a piece by Paul Kelly:

'It’s titled “No evidence to put Rudd in the doghouse”, and then goes on to tell us Rudd’s in the doghouse, based on the amazing logic that because Paul Kelly has to tell us Rudd’s not in the doghouse, this means that Rudd is in the doghouse!

... While assuring us Rudd did nothing wrong, Kelly then proceeds to tells us just why Rudd’s character is compromised anyway: basically because the likes of Paul Kelly have to explain why it’s not.

Totally circular logic. You figure it out.

... I wonder if they realise just how out of step they really are with public opinion? Public opinion was expressed in the latest Newspoll.

... If Rudd had tanked, we’d be reading how “the public has spoken”. We’d be reading about his “demise”. They’d be crowing from the rooftops.

But because the numbers for Labor actually went up, we’re being treated to the unedifying spectacle of pundits everywhere spinning the result.'

Not-at-all-Dolce (& Gabbana)

"We were looking to recreate a game of seduction in the campaign and highlight the beauty of our collections," the designers said.


So here's a question: if they think this image conveys a 'game' about 'seduction' and 'beauty', what sort of image would they have come up with to illustrate an actual gang rape?

Today's Crikey highlight

Under Comments, corrections, clarifications and c*ckups, journalist Diana Simmonds writes:

'While a powerful earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra yesterday in Australia, a poll was said to be indicating a softening in public attitudes towards what the Howard government sees as the inevitability of nuclear power stations being built across this country. As the Indonesians are struggling to cope with extensive damage, the deaths of more than 70 people and hospitals struggling to cope with scores of injured, it's worth remembering that the epicentre of the quake (6.3 on the Richter scale) and its aftershocks, which were felt hundreds of kilometres away in Singapore and Malaysia, is also the region where, more than a decade ago, the then Indonesian government planned to build a string of up to 17 nuclear power stations. It wasn't late onset good sense that stopped the scheme, merely a lack of money.'

The inner typing-spelling-and-usage Nazi can take no more

My right hand, arm, elbow and shoulder are all telling me that over the weekend I spent too much time reading too much of too many blogs. Which may be the reason -- that over-exposure -- why I feel compelled to offer the latest instalment of this occasional series.

1) HYPOCRISY is not spelled HYPOCRACY. It has nothing to do with democracy, aristocracy, meritocracy or any other ocracy.

2) LOSE, which rhymes with 'shoes', is a verb and is spelled like that, whereas LOOSE, which rhymes with 'goose', 'moose' and 'papoose', is an adjective denoting an absence of tightness, and has nothing to do (necessarily) with things that are lost.

3) SPEECH is not spelled SPEACH, even though it is about speaking.

4) PUBLICLY is not spelled PUBLICALLY because there is no such word as PUBLICAL. The converse is true of ACCIDENTALLY.

5) REIN and REIGN do not meant the same thing. The one with the G is about monarchs, and the one without is about horses.

6) The expression is "HOME in on", as in homing pigeons, not HONE, which is the thing one does to a knife to sharpen it. (Or to one's language skills to improve them.)

7) The word FLUORESCENT, pronounced flu--or--ESS--nt, has everything to do with fluoride and nothing to do with flour.

Thank you for your time.

Those were the days

Eleanor Hall interviews P. J. Keating on The World Today, erm, today, about the Brian Burke beat-up:

'PAUL KEATING: Oh, look, it's just Howard being Howard, isn't it, you know. The little desiccated coconut's under pressure and he's attacking anything he can get his hands on.

You know, I mean, look, Brian Burke and Julian Grill, they're the Arthur Daley and Terry of the Western Australian Labor Party, you know. They're like the wallpaper over there. You can't visit Perth without running into them ...

Look, look, Kevin has done something, he's met Brian Burke. But I'll tell you what he hasn't done - he hasn't lied to his nation about reasons for committing Australia to a non-UN sponsored invasion and war. He hasn't turned his head from the plight of a boat full of wretched individuals looking for shelter, and then adding insult to injury by saying they threw their kids overboard first, you know. And he hasn't prostituted the UN Oil-for-Food program by falsely declaring that Australia's wheat shipments were not ultra vires of the UN guidelines.

...I mean, look, you know, Howard has, you know, lied to the country about the reasons for going to war, going to war for God's sake, and now he wants us to believe it's a major problem if Kevin Rudd meets Brian Burke, you know, Brian who?

ELEANOR HALL: What did you think of Peter Costello's performance in the parliament, though, when he raised this?

PAUL KEATING: Well, the thing about poor old Costello, he's all tip and no iceberg ... he can throw a punch across the parliament, but the bloke he should be throwing the punch to is Howard. Of course, he doesn't have the ticker for it.

Now, he's now been treasurer for 11 years, the old coconut's still sitting there, Araldited to the seat ...

ELEANOR HALL: Has the Government, though, now taken the high moral ground with this by removing Minister Campbell?

PAUL KEATING: Look, for John Howard to get to any high moral ground he would have to first climb out of the volcanic hole he's dug for himself over the last decade. You know, it's like one of those deep diamond-mine holes in South Africa, you know, they're about a mile underground. He'd have to come a mile up to get to even equilibrium, let alone have any contest in morality with Kevin Rudd.

Now, my advice to Kevin is to move on, let Mr Howard, you know, he'd ... you can always tell when he's twitchy, the old shoulder starts going, and I notice on the TV lately the shoulder's going. He's in trouble.'


Sigh.

I miss him.

Let her eat cake

This cake, whose name is Dotted Swiss Dream and upon which you must imagine some lit candles fetchingly deployed among the marzipan roses, is for ThirdCat -- who has given me an excuse to write about the book from which it's taken, which is one of my all-time favourite books on the entire planet.




The recipe for Dotted Swiss Dream takes up three pages and involves some really majer esoterica, like wooden supports, framboise, non-bendable plastic drinking straws and something called Lemon Curd Mousseline, which is, says Ms Beranbaum, 'a thrilling buttercream to prepare because it starts off looking thin and lumpy and, about three-quarters of the way through, starts to emulsify into a luxurious cream.'

You can tell this woman is a professional cook from the way she is able to use the words 'thrilling' and 'emulsify' in the same sentence.

Copyright laws forbid me to give the recipe here for her Gingerbread cake, but let me just say that it contains golden syrup, dark brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger and marmalade, and that the method by which it is rendered sticky, moist and immortal is that you bake it first and then brush or baste it while it's still hot with a syrup made out of sugar, unsalted butter and lemon juice and then wrap it in Glad-Wrap till it's cool.

My personal variation, ginger and lime being so elegant a couple, is to use lime juice in the syrup instead of lemon. It tastes even better if you grew the limes yourself.

One foot on the ground

Here's the first verse and chorus of 'Fidelity', a song from last year by the very hawt and very gifted Regina Spektor:

I never loved nobody fully
Always one foot on the ground
And by protecting my heart truly
I got lost in the sounds
I hear in my mind
All these voices
I hear in my mind all these words
I hear in my mind all this music

And it breaks my heart
And it breaks my heart
And it breaks my heart
It breaks my heart

Heard this on the radio today, driving down out of the Adelaide Hills in a hot late afternoon, and I wondered (as you do), could I say that? I mean, Spektor is all of 27 and she would think such caution a bad thing, and she still has lots of time. But did I ever take both feet off the ground?

Once. Just once.

And it broke my heart, and it broke my heart ... actually, it permanently derailed my life and nearly killed me. So listen to Auntie carefully, Grasshoppers: keep one foot on the ground. You heard it here.

Every move you make

Hard on the heels of the disgraceful banning of Dr Philip Nitschke and Dr Fiona Stewart's The Peaceful Pill Handbook in the early hours of last Sunday morning -- after Philip Ruddock, in cahoots with the Right to Lifers, had successfully managed to get the original December 2006 classification reviewed and overturned in short order -- comes this new bit of über-regulation from the Feds, as reported by Margaret Simons in today's Crikey bulletin:


'The infamous Big Brother turkey slapping incident may be about to lead to a turkey of another kind – unprecedented censorship of Australian books, magazines and other media material of all kinds.

The Government plans to pass legislation in the autumn session aimed at regulating all content – including text and still images – using the film classification system as the standard.

Crikey understands that publishers would have to submit for classification all material to be delivered electronically – including book and magazine content. Any content that gained an MA or R classification would have be subject to an approved age restricted access system.

... the Government Bulletin of proposed legislation states that the Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Bill would "reform the regulatory structures for non-broadcasting communications content to ensure that existing policy principles for the regulation of content are consistently applied to these new audio-visual services".

The wording suggests the law is aimed at providers of mobile telephone and internet content – and that nobody has thought through the implications for book and magazine publishers who also deliver content online.'


I wonder in passing what the implictions are for blogging, but never mind that; this has far wider and more immediate implications. If most of the Right -- even the smart ones -- didn't hold literature, the history of literature and, most of all, the study of the history of literature in complete contempt, they might understand that the words 'Fahrenheit 451' have some resonance here.

So excuse me while I go and start memorising my chosen book before they burn it. I bags Jane Eyre: 'There was no possibility of writing a blog post taking a walk that day ...'


UPDATE, MARCH 2: Dr Fiona Stewart makes a similar point in today's Crikey's 'Comments, corrections, clarifications and c*ckups' section:

'Dr Fiona Stewart writes: Re. "Publish and be censored: Coonan moves to regulate everything you see and read" (yesterday, item 1). Crikey runs Coonan as No. 1, but in the same breath seems to have missed the banning of my book on voluntary euthanasia, The Peaceful Pill Handbook? It's all the same brush, guys, what's happening? We're swamped with angry Australians who a) can't believe a book banning has happened and b) want to order the PPH – still – and can't comprehend the fact that Ruddock and Right to Life (the appellants) have ensured they cannot. The "win" has been referred to by the Australian Christian Lobby as "encouraging." Who is pulling these strings? It's been interesting answering public enquiries this week. People don't understand the word "banned"; they still think they can order the book, that they can see a loophole. Alas, no. We tell them to try Amazon. ... Australia is the ONLY country ever to ban an end of life choices information book.'