1996 (36)
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February–March 1996, no. 178 (1)
Welcome to the February–March 1996 issue of Australian Book Review.
Were it not for the timing, it would be easy to speculate that this richly evocative collection of pieces about music was the inspiration for Jane Campion’s glorious film, The Piano. So many elements of the film – the dominant image of the beached piano, the powerful undertow of sexual passion, even the unexpected violence-are present in this book in the most uncanny similitude. I should not be surprised since Carmel Bird has already displayed her uneasy fascination with the film in her dazzling essay ‘Freedom of Speech’ (in Columbus’ Blindness and Other Essays) and in her introduction to Red Hot Notes she admits that the film was a catalyst for the idea of various writers exploring ‘the complex feelings that surround, and embed themselves in, the human response to music’.
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Were it not for the timing, it would be easy to speculate that this richly evocative collection of pieces about music was the inspiration for Jane Campion’s glorious film, The Piano. So many elements of the film – the dominant image of the beached piano, the powerful undertow of sexual passion, even the unexpected violence-are present in this book in the most uncanny similitude. I should not be surprised since Carmel Bird has already displayed her uneasy fascination with the film in her dazzling essay ‘Freedom of Speech’ (in Columbus’ Blindness and Other Essays) and in her introduction to Red Hot Notes she admits that the film was a catalyst for the idea of various writers exploring ‘the complex feelings that surround, and embed themselves in, the human response to music’.
- Book Title Red Hot Notes
- Biblio UQP, $16.95 pb, 181 pp
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The Sunken Road is an ambitious novel which sets the crisscrossing lives of families in the northern highlands of South Australia against a temporal panorama of a century and a half and forces that extend far beyond state and continent. It is a compassionate but never sentimental account of a collective experience full of hope, pain, exploitation and double standards. At its centre is a strongly rendered character called Anna Antonia Ison Tolley.
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The Sunken Road is an ambitious novel which sets the crisscrossing lives of families in the northern highlands of South Australia against a temporal panorama of a century and a half and forces that extend far beyond state and continent. It is a compassionate but never sentimental account of a collective experience full of hope, pain, exploitation and double standards. At its centre is a strongly rendered character called Anna Antonia Ison Tolley.
- Book Title The Sunken Road
- Biblio Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 224 pp
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Ramona Koval interviews Robert Manne about The Culture of Forgetting
Ramona Koval asked Robert Manne what his version of the strange story of Helen Demidenko might be.
Robert Manne: Well there was once, I think, a very strange young Australian woman of English parents, who, for reasons that we don’t understand decided to identify with Ukrainian war criminals. She decided that the Jews had got control of the history of the Holocaust and that a terrible story of what happened to Ukrainians at the hands of Jews had not been told. So she decided to take the name Demidenko because she read in a book that Demidenko was a Ukrainian who had been at Babi Yar where thirty-three thousand Jews were killed. She identified so strongly that she took the name Demidenko and wrote a high school essay in which she imagined what it would be like to be Ivan the Terrible, probably the most monstrous figure that emerges from the killings at Treblinka or at any other extermination camp. She decided to write a novel in which she would adopt the identity, imagining herself to be this daughter of a Ukrainian war criminal, with an uncle who served at Treblinka. And so she wrote a novel. Amazingly enough, not only was her novel published but it won a major award. It so convinced the literary community of its authenticity that it was regarded in 1995 as the best literary work published in the country.
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Ramona Koval asked Robert Manne what his version of the strange story of Helen Demidenko might be.
Robert Manne: Well there was once, I think, a very strange young Australian woman of English parents, who, for reasons that we don’t understand decided to identify with Ukrainian war criminals. She decided that the Jews had got control of the history of the Holocaust and that a terrible story of what happened to Ukrainians at the hands of Jews had not been told. So she decided to take the name Demidenko because she read in a book that Demidenko was a Ukrainian who had been at Babi Yar where thirty-three thousand Jews were killed. She identified so strongly that she took the name Demidenko and wrote a high school essay in which she imagined what it would be like to be Ivan the Terrible, probably the most monstrous figure that emerges from the killings at Treblinka or at any other extermination camp. She decided to write a novel in which she would adopt the identity, imagining herself to be this daughter of a Ukrainian war criminal, with an uncle who served at Treblinka. And so she wrote a novel. Amazingly enough, not only was her novel published but it won a major award. It so convinced the literary community of its authenticity that it was regarded in 1995 as the best literary work published in the country.
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The Public Intellectual | Symposium
Written by Donald HorneWhat is the role of the Public Intellectual?
Donald Horne: critics and negotiators
The general idea of ‘public intellectual life’ is more useful than the particular idea of’ the public intellectual’. ‘Public intellectual life’ is a public manifestation of what I called in The Public Culture ‘the critics’ culture’ of a liberal-democratic state. (It is made possible by the belief in a questioning approach to existence as a central force in society.) However only parts of this critical activity emerge into the public culture; it is these parts that might be thought of as its ‘public intellectual life’. They provide a kind of public acclimatisation society for new ideas. All kinds of people may play a part in working up these ideas down there in the subterranean passages of the critics’ culture and others may take over the business of negotiating them into the public sphere. Many of these ‘negotiators’ are paid public performers in the news and entertainment industries. However some of the ‘critics’
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Donald Horne: critics and negotiators
The general idea of ‘public intellectual life’ is more useful than the particular idea of’ the public intellectual’. ‘Public intellectual life’ is a public manifestation of what I called in The Public Culture ‘the critics’ culture’ of a liberal-democratic state. (It is made possible by the belief in a questioning approach to existence as a central force in society.) However only parts of this critical activity emerge into the public culture; it is these parts that might be thought of as its ‘public intellectual life’. They provide a kind of public acclimatisation society for new ideas. All kinds of people may play a part in working up these ideas down there in the subterranean passages of the critics’ culture and others may take over the business of negotiating them into the public sphere. Many of these ‘negotiators’ are paid public performers in the news and entertainment industries. However some of the ‘critics’ also have a capacity to barge in directly – but only if they have a desire to appeal to people’s imaginations, and the talent to do so. These are the ‘public intellectuals’. Some of them may be one-offs. Some become regulars. They become influential if they articulate ideas that are already in the minds of some of ‘the public’ anyway, if in a more diffuse state. They get nowhere if they don’t. Two of my books, The Lucky Country and Death of the Lucky Country, were prime examples of appealing to interests of which readers were already becoming aware.
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Richard Hall, in ‘Debasing Debate: The Language of the Bland’, had neither the grace nor the courtesy to contact me when preparing his essay on ‘the language, methods and findings’ of The Mackay Report. Had he done so, I might have been able to caution him against publishing such false and misleading material. I could certainly have asked him to correct several errors of fact but, more importantly, I could have alerted him to the many misconceptions, misrepresentations, and untruths in his article which would inevitably destroy any value it might otherwise have.
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- Article Title Debasing Debate
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Richard Hall, in ‘Debasing Debate: The Language of the Bland’, had neither the grace nor the courtesy to contact me when preparing his essay on ‘the language, methods and findings’ of The Mackay Report. Had he done so, I might have been able to caution him against publishing such false and misleading material. I could certainly have asked him to correct several errors of fact but, more importantly, I could have alerted him to the many misconceptions, misrepresentations, and untruths in his article which would inevitably destroy any value it might otherwise have.
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National Library Australian Voices Essay | ‘The kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere’ by Peter Craven
Written by Peter CravenSome years ago the poet John Forbes was addressing himself to that national monument, Les Murray, and he had occasion to remark, ‘The trouble with vernacular republics is that they presuppose that the kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere.’ It was, I suppose, designed to highlight the fact that the homespun qualities of the Bard from Bunyah were dependent on an awareness of the metropolitan style Murray willed himself to transgress and that there was an inverted dandiness, if not a pedantry, in all that Boeotian ballyhoo. It does not seem to me a remotely fair remark but it is a good epigram notwithstanding and it takes on a range of meanings depending on what light you look at it in. Presumably Forbes thought, or feigned to think, that Murray’s poetic demotic was a variation on that Colonial Strut which is, in fact, a version of the Cultural Cringe. In any case his words came into my head the other day when I was reading Simon During’s new Oxford monograph about Patrick White.
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Some years ago the poet John Forbes was addressing himself to that national monument, Les Murray, and he had occasion to remark, ‘The trouble with vernacular republics is that they presuppose that the kingdom of correct usage is elsewhere.’ It was, I suppose, designed to highlight the fact that the homespun qualities of the Bard from Bunyah were dependent on an awareness of the metropolitan style Murray willed himself to transgress and that there was an inverted dandiness, if not a pedantry, in all that Boeotian ballyhoo. It does not seem to me a remotely fair remark but it is a good epigram notwithstanding and it takes on a range of meanings depending on what light you look at it in. Presumably Forbes thought, or feigned to think, that Murray’s poetic demotic was a variation on that Colonial Strut which is, in fact, a version of the Cultural Cringe. In any case his words came into my head the other day when I was reading Simon During’s new Oxford monograph about Patrick White.
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Economics
The fanzine is not a magazine. It bypasses and subverts the economics of commercial publishing and it reasserts the creative link between writing and production. Zines can also, because of the ‘terrorism’ of their production and distribution, bypass the convoluted legalistic boundaries of copyright. Graphics, slabs of text, photos, and images are photocopied, scanned, and pasted into fanzine, then cut-up, reassembled, and often made to assume an oppositional symbolic meaning to that of the original image.
Fanzines do circulate in a market but their chain of distribution does not depend on the bloated edifice of commercial publishing. They are distributed through post-office boxes, independent music, and book shops, through nightclubs and through pubs. The individual or individuals who create the fanzine sell their publication directly to friends, peers, and to local shops. No barcodes, no ISBN numbers, no editors or lawyers. The minimal costs of production – all you need is a photocopier and a typewriter or computer (not necessarily even these; some zines are handwritten) – allow for a freedom of expression that is localised and specific. Most fanzines speak from particular sites of subculture or identity. Punk, hip-hop, thrash metal. Feminist, anarchist, skinhead. But this circulation, though limited in terms of quantity of production, can be expansive in terms of geography. A friend of mine who produces a fanzine receives feedback from Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Athens. Fanzines are often concerned with questions of music, pop culture, and radical aesthetics and their circulation across territories and locations speaks to the globalisation of culture/fashion. Fanzines are literally part of a ‘black market’. This is not to say that they are outside the control of the commercial and legal bureaucracies of capitalism, but rather they circulate ‘beneath’ and ‘tangental’ to the capital Market. (In 1995 an anarchist bookshop in Melbourne, Barricade Books, was raided by the police and the workers arrested for displaying a pamphlet on homosexuality and anarchy. They were charged with displaying obscene material in a public place. Battles against censorship remain a priority for many individuals involved in fanzine production.)
Punk
The first fanzine I ever saw was a rough ten pages of typewritten text devoted to thoughts about the punk band Buzzcocks. It ranged from badly reproduced photos of the band to sexual imaginings about the (ungendered) writer and his/her obsession to get the band into bed. The emergence of a punk aesthetic which argued that you needn’t be a singer to sing or a musician to play an instrument acted as an impetus to fans of punk music to produce their own publications devoted to individual thoughts and musings. You don’t need to be a writer to write, a publisher to publish. The aesthetics of punk were cheap, confrontational, and, most particularly, anti-professional. The producers of fanzines don’t necessarily have to concern themselves with questions of readability, accessibility, and quality which are of paramount concern to commercial publishers and to commercial writers.
Punk imploded and gave rise to the New Wave and to an increasing demarcation of musical genre and subculture. This splintering had the effect of destabilising the dichotomy of mainstream/alternative on which punk music depended for its identity. Quickly the punk style became assimilated into a fashion conscious youth culture, epitomised by the success of magazines such as The Face and ID. The confrontational graphics of punk, symbolised best by the poster for the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ single (Queen Elizabeth with a safety pin through her nose), found their way into commercial popular culture but competed for space with the increasingly classical lines, typography, and imagery of the New Wave. Rap and hip-hop also began to have an increasing global audience and its initially confrontational statement of black-American frustration clearly revealed the racist underpinning of western popular music. The pale-faced punk culture could not compete with the urgency and power of rap and the punk slogan ‘Death to Disco’ took on uncomfortably subtle racist connotations when hip-hop was revealing the rich history of funk.
The fanzine did not die. They continued and continue to be produced but its association with the specific locations and aesthetics of punk undermined its relevance to the new identifications with hip-hop, reggae, industrial, goth, house, new wave, call it what you like.
Pre-Punk
The fanzine may be identified with punk but its history can be traced further back to the experimentations of the Dadaists and the Situationists. The Constructivist graphics of the early Bolsheviks also continue to supply inspiration to current fanzines. Pamphlets and newsletters of the left and of the right can also be understood as predecessors to the fanzine, both in terms of economy of production and in that they were communicating an urgency to, again, a specific and localised audience. The excursions into cut-ups and assemblage art also act as a reference point to a hesitant history of the fanzine. The effect of punk was to assert the primacy of music culture as the direct reference point around which fanzines circulated. This is not to argue that fanzines do not often have a direct political and/or intellectual intent but rather that the mutating forms of western popular culture became the focal points around which identification was inscribed. I want to resist an easy equation of fanzine culture with anarchist or left-radical politics. Fanzines can be a call to revolution, a critique of capitalism, but more often they are a send-up of Barbie, an attack on Madonna, or a celebration of a local garage band.
One precursor to the fanzine I came across in a second-hand bookshop years ago was a six-page photocopied collection of homosexual pornographic writing from the late 1960s. These small pamphlets circulated through the urban American homosexual communities before the rise of Gay Liberation. Though their production is confrontational and necessarily political in that it is a response to the censorship and repression of the period, the pamphlets’ uncritical celebration of pornography and violence (a couple of stories are about the pleasures of bashing) cannot be adequately made sense of within our dominant political paradigm of left-wing/right-wing. Porno fanzines still circulate but even more covertly than music fanzines. This is still an area where the State will not look the other way when it comes to the black market economy of the Zine.
Sampling
Cut-up, assemblage, juxtaposition are terms widely understood to refer to practices within the visual arts. Rap music popularised the use of the cut-up in music by relying on the technology of the computer to remix, reassemble, and distort recorded music into new configurations and sounds. Sampling quickly became embroiled in legal questions of copyright but its influence has been vast across the genres of what constitutes popular music in our contemporary world. This is not a digression from a discussion of fanzines. The technical experimentations of rap and hip-hop accelerated the breaking down of divisions which had segregated music into black/white, rock/funk, art/pop. In the late 1980s with the ascendancy of acid-house this cross fertilisation of musical genres allowed for the hard beats of house music to be matched to the thunderous chords of bass guitars. In late 1977 punks maintained a clear-cut separation between themselves and other musical subcultures. Nearly twenty years on this segregation no longer seems viable or necessary. The mainstream may still exist – the play list of the Top 40 – but even there the explosion of musical genre is visible. A rap record is number one. At number five is a song that is reminiscent of the Beatles. Grunge at number thirteen and funk at twenty-three. Within a particular youth subculture an understanding of a tribal ‘us’ may still be at play, a rigid definition of style and attitude, but the ‘them’ it is in opposition to is no longer clear-cut for the cultural landscape is now too diffuse. In 1996 the fanzine can no longer be simply identified with punk.
Riot Grrls/Homo Core
In 1995 Anne Summers published an article in The Good Weekend, the yuppie supplement of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, in which she decried the lack of commitment to feminism from contemporary young women. What struck me as absurd about the article was that around me I had visible signs of a passionate engagement with feminist politics by women as young as twelve. The Riot Grrl scene developed in the early nineties, loose collectivities of women who shared a passion for loud music and a commitment to breaking down the gendered divisions of popular culture. Girls with guitars or with samplers were on stage and on CD, but they were also producing fanzines, writing on the Internet, and sending out vitriolic posters and pamphlets arguing for the necessity and imperative of feminist politics. Much of the musical influences of Riot Grrls could be traced to punk but in their engagement with politics of race and identity, the influence of other musical forms was self-evident. Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem I Will Survive may be as much of an influence as X-Ray Specs’ punk anthem Bondage, Up Yours! While the daily tabloids moaned about political correctness, fanzines were being produced that cared not a toss about the acidity of their observations or the partisan nature of their proclamations.
My reintroduction to the validity of the fanzine came with a growing awareness of the Homocore movement, a burgeoning subculture of gay and lesbian punks who were sick of the homogenising lifestyle politics and aesthetics of the urban commercial gay culture. My awareness of homocore came from reading cheaply produced fanzines from the US and the UK which ranted against the body-fascism of gay culture and which incorporated porn, politics, and music reviews in one grand, incoherent, and vibrant mess. In Melbourne a homocore fanzine, The Burning Times is being produced which allows for debate, dialogue, and passion not visible in the slick ‘official’ gay magazine, Outrage. The Burning Times is part of a media intervention which refuses to be dictated by the economic concerns of mainstream gay publishing and refuses to concede to notions of sexual identity as coherent or uncontradictory. And by not prefacing homosexual identity as consumption oriented it does not depend on the market forces of publishing to allow its contributors and artists to have a voice. This is not to say that The Burning Times will not alienate some people but in the cut and paste world of the fanzine the response is simple. Create your own fanzine and give yourself a voice.
Apologia
The above is not an attempt to explain or justify the fanzine. The existence of fanzines is proof enough of their necessity and impact. The economic ‘black market’ of the fanzine finds its symbolic correlation with the ‘underground media’ of art terrorism. By art terrorism I mean symbolic, creative activity that attempts to subvert and confront the meanings and disseminations of popular media (everything from billboard graffiti to the zaps of ACT-UP and the Guerrilla Girls Art movement). In a world increasingly dominated by the proliferation of the image the fanzine, by prioritising creativity and localised production, enables a countering of the passivity demanded by the television and the computer terminal. Whether handwritten on paper or transmitted through the Internet the fanzine refuses to acquiesce to a reduction of human subjectivity to the level of consumption. I’m not celebrating the fanzine because it is necessarily radical or alternative or transgressive. It can also be conservative or banal or infantile. But by delineating a space within which any individual or collectivity can labour to create, to experiment, to get a view across into public discourse, the fanzine allows for a media practice which is ultimately egalitarian and which will not be silenced by the dominance of the media moguls. Imagine a fanzine devoted to cruel ways of assassinating Ray Martin and Jana Wendt, or a fanzine juxtaposing the golden arches of McDonald’s over the blood-filled floor of an abattoir.
The fanzine can be about anything and by anyone. This is what is worth celebrating.
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The fanzine is not a magazine. It bypasses and subverts the economics of commercial publishing and it reasserts the creative link between writing and production. Zines can also, because of the ‘terrorism’ of their production and distribution, bypass the convoluted legalistic boundaries of copyright. Graphics, slabs of text, photos, and images are photocopied, scanned, and pasted into fanzine, then cut-up, reassembled, and often made to assume an oppositional symbolic meaning to that of the original image.
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Thomas Shapcott reviews 'Double Take: Six incorrect essays' edited by Peter Coleman
Written by Thomas ShapcottI approached this collection of essays with some sense of anticipation, thinking ‘Do David Williamson, Beatrice Faust, Jamie Grant, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, and Christopher Pearson have something in common? If so, what?’
When I read Peter Coleman’s introduction with its language of battle lines and militarist imagery, I was certainly aware of an Us vs Them program, with the demon as Political Correctness. ‘There have been many victims of this bazooka conformism’, Coleman the strategist asserts, though he does have the good sense to concede that ‘The political correctors could never have the field entirely to themselves in a country with democratic traditions. Inevitably there were voices from the Resistance, even if they were confined to magazines with a small circulation.’
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I approached this collection of essays with some sense of anticipation, thinking ‘Do David Williamson, Beatrice Faust, Jamie Grant, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, and Christopher Pearson have something in common? If so, what?'
- Book Title Double Take
- Book Subtitle Six incorrect essays
- Biblio Mandarin, $14.95 pb, 194 pp
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‘But beside me I had a new laptop computer …’
The publisher’s promotional material which was included with the review copy of Philip Salom’s new poetry collection, The Rome Air Naked, indicated the book would be launched ‘with an innovative exhibition which will use computer technology to extend the written work into an aural, visual and multimedia presentation’. After reading the author’s introduction and then dipping into the poems for the first time, I only wished I could be there, to listen to, and participate in, the promised performance which will combine visual image and sound, animating the poetry, allowing it to breathe off the printed page, to dance freely in space.
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The publisher’s promotional material which was included with the review copy of Philip Salom’s new poetry collection, The Rome Air Naked, indicated the book would be launched ‘with an innovative exhibition which will use computer technology to extend the written work into an aural, visual and multimedia presentation’. After reading the author’s introduction and then dipping into the poems for the first time, I only wished I could be there, to listen to, and participate in, the promised performance which will combine visual image and sound, animating the poetry, allowing it to breathe off the printed page, to dance freely in space.
- Book Title The Rome Air Naked
- Biblio Penguin, $18.95 pb, 134 pp
- Author Type Author
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‘Byron!’, said Max Beerbohm ‘– he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Com Laws.’ As we know, things turned out otherwise, and Byron lives on, in the hallowed phrase, as flash as a rat with a gold tooth.
Dorothy Porter’s Crete would be a natural home for such ironies, in that it constantly turns the givens of the literary past to new purposes – usually in the twinkling of a tongue, often at the tilting of a heart. Her Byron, or Tsvetaeva, or Mandelstam is nobody else’s, but here they all are, attended by Porterian flourish.
What is she up to in Crete? Readers of her earlier work will not be surprised to learn that the enterprise negotiates (at least) two zones of being. One is that of physical intimacy – not only that between one embodied self and another, but the jumpy electric charge between the I who knows and the known I. The other is that of blazoned imaginations – in this case, for instance, Arthur Evans’ rendition of archaic Crete, or George Seferis’s psychic hinterland, or George Steiner’s.
Something a little like this happens in all poetry. Unless something called to be fleshed out, nothing would be written; at the same time, we all borrowed the alphabet and its sleeping messages from other people. In Porter’s case, though, the transaction is intensified. It is as if she is being romanced, night and day, by word as by world.
The resulting thrill often takes the form of a question, with which many of the dozens of poems here begin. ‘What do the Minoans teach us – / exuberance with bloody hands?’: ‘Is the gaily painted trussed bull / still alive / as its slashed neck bleeds / into the sacred vessel?’: ‘Is poetry a strange leftover / of Minoan bull-leaping?’: ‘Am I the Arthur Evans / of my own lost city?’: ‘Is my blood too thin / to serve the gods of ecstasy?’ Such interrogations face outwards towards the palpable with all its vivid names, and inwards towards the revolved, customarily impassioned, self.
The easiest thing to say about still romantic poetry is that it resumes the argument between love and death, but that does not make it the less true, and it is certainly apropos in Crete. ‘The Labyrinth of Intimacy ‘, after an epigraph from Steiner referring to the ‘absolutely alien which we come up against in the labyrinth of intimacy’, goes,
How far did the Minoan thread go
in the labyrinth of intimacy?
Was there less tear and tangle
when they loved their dead
more than each other?
The world of gorgeous hallucination
is a sweeter place to visit
than the mucky lair of another’s heart.
The Minotaur helpless
the Minotaur bleating
blind in the brutal sun
is this the truth of love
none of us could bear?
If the poet nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth, such accumulated questioning will still lead us to go one way or the other: a yes or a no germinates in the mind, and possibly in the heart. But part of Dorothy Porter’s success as these poems unfold is in her appropriating that immensely durable imaginative resource, the labyrinth, which by design goes on giving and taking, leading out and leading in, and making play both with pattern and with chaos. Many of the poems in the long ‘Crete’ sequence – like others in other sections of the book – are homages to passion, as suggested by titles like ‘Wild Honey’, ‘The Law of Volcanoes’, ‘Why I Love Your Body’, ‘My at-last-lover’: many of the same poems are also investigations – deployed probes, testings of the angles and surfaces of experience’s labyrinthine ways.
Improbably, as some will think, but not in vain, the book includes a sequence which is in effect a celebration of the cigarette, that sixth finger in so many millions of hands. The first part goes,
The dove of peace
no Longer brings
an olive branch
the dove of peace
offers the halo
of the shared cigarette
that glow
between your lover’s fingers is the red-tipped palm
on your oasis
it smoke-signals
your shared
alert drowse
you have never heard
the war so hushed.
If still-life were a vital artistic genre today, the cigarette would have a good claim to a place in it: it is not surprising after all that it can also belong in a book so exercised by love’s subjection to, and defiance of, mortality.
Since the fire never says,’ Enough’ and desire is in principle infinite in pitch, the open-mouthed voracity of question can always claim a place where love is at issue – another reason for its prominence in this book. But question’s near relation, fancy, is also accommodated generously. One of the most attractive and illuminating, poems here is ‘Liberties’, with its Wildean epigraph, ‘The secret of life is Art’:
The Minoans took greater liberties
with nature
than squinting Arthur ever took
with them
blue birds, flowering ivy,
wild roses with an impossible
number of petals
a reckless geyser
blooming over polished agate
they painted what they fancied
not what they saw.
Myth is a way of taking liberties with history, history a way of taking liberties with myth; Wilde’s aestheticism may be shaky when taken to extremes, but at least it can alert us to paradoxes innate in most ways of registering experience. Dorothy Porter’s ‘they painted what they fancied / not what they saw’ seems to me to catch much more than a central element in her own poetry. The very old argument about whether we are moved principally by knowledge or principally by desire is not likely to be decided in any one generation, which means that the ways of ‘fancy’ are likely to remain the paths of poetry. In ‘Vanished’, Porter writes of ‘An extravagant boy / deified by extravagant art / deaf to personal questions.’ Her own art manages to make the extravagant and the personal neighbours.
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‘Byron!’, said Max Beerbohm ‘– he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Com Laws.’ As we know, things turned out otherwise, and Byron lives on, in the hallowed phrase, as flash as a rat with a gold tooth.
- Book Title Crete
- Biblio Hyland House, $19.95 pb, 114 pp,
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The French literary world was agog last year with the news of the awarding of two prestigious prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, to a novel called Le Testament Français, by a writer called André Makine. The unusual nature of the novel is that it was written in the most beautiful, yet freshly distinctive French by a man whose maternal tongue is not French at all, but Russian.
Makine has only lived in France for eight years, although he has known French for much longer; yet his novel appears to epitomise France in a way which is quite extraordinary. At least, so say the critics, but to me it is much more extraordinary than that, for more than any other novel, in French or English, that I can remember reading, it expresses perfectly that ‘langue d’étonnement’, that ‘tongue of wonders’, which is created by the bilingual writer who is at home as much in two languages as it is possible to be. For Makine, French is as much a part of his soul as Russian; being of both, of neither, all at the same time, gives him a life in that gap between cultures, between languages, which is what he calls the ‘langue d’étonnement’. Something composed of gaps, of silences, as much as of difference: in its very nature, something which seems to speak the universe both more clearly, more truthfully, yet also less comprehensibly, than is found within the work of someone steeped in only one language from birth.
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- Article Title A 'tongue of wonders'
- Article Subtitle Writing in between languages
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The French literary world was agog last year with the news of the awarding of two prestigious prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, to a novel called Le Testament Français, by a writer called André Makine. The unusual nature of the novel is that it was written in the most beautiful, yet freshly distinctive French by a man whose maternal tongue is not French at all, but Russian.
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Robin Gerster reviews 'Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities, ethnicities, nationalities' edited by Suvendrini Perera
Written by Robin GersterOnce the scourge of the conservatives, some practitioners of cultural studies are starting to make the stuffed shirts of English Departments look like mad-eyed anarchists.
Asian and Pacific Inscriptions, a special book issue of Meridian edited by the La Trobe University academic Suvendrini Perera, is a collection of theoretical considerations of cultural constructions of ethnic, national, and sexual identities in the Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on the insidiously colonising Australian cultural strategy of rapprochement with Asia. These are voices ‘situated’ on the margins (plural), probing, undermining, deconstructing the centre (single, more-or-less), tracking the way colonialism has traversed the geographies of ‘subjectivity, collectivity and place’. Yet to this reader, at least, the book reads like the collective work of an Otherhood of Right Thinkers, all speaking the same language, all waving approved ideological banners, all determined to be on the side of the angels.
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Once the scourge of the conservatives, some practitioners of cultural studies are starting to make the stuffed shirts of English Departments look like mad-eyed anarchists.
- Book Title Asian and Pacific Inscriptions
- Book Subtitle Identities, ethnicities, nationalities
- Biblio Meridian, $30.00 pb, 254 pp
- Author Type Editor
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Until I reviewed Marion Halligans novel Lovers’ Knots, I didn’t really know much about what a lover’s knot was. And now I know more than I used to know about the word ‘cockle’.
Quite simply, the cockles on cockle shells are the distinct ribs, and since the ventricles of the human heart resemble in some ways the shape and ribbing of the shells of scallops, we have the expression ‘cockles of the heart’. Certain furnaces are called ‘cockle stoves’ because of their shape, and something that appeals to your deepest feelings is said to ‘warm the cockles of your heart’. Christian pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela, the legendary burial place of St James the Great in northern Spain, have always worn the cockle shell because it is one of the attributes of St James.
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Until I reviewed Marion Halligans novel Lovers’ Knots, I didn’t really know much about what a lover’s knot was. And now I know more than I used to know about the word ‘cockle’.
- Book Title Cockles of the Heart
- Biblio Minerva, $15.95 pb, 266 pp
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‘Curiosity is a muscle,’ Helen Garner declares in the first essay of this selection, displaying again the metaphorical spark that marks her out and keeps her readers plundering her pages. She is writing about writing, and her revelations couple a disarming intimacy – Garner the wry, lifelong apprentice, confiding trade secrets – with shrewd and reflexive moral admonition. Here, in a brief paragraph, is laid out the disciplinary ground of fiction and reportage, plus a private view of Garner’s workshop and tools: ‘Patience is a muscle,’ she continues. ‘What begins as a necessary exercise gradually becomes natural. And then immense landscapes open out in front of you.’ It’s a beguiling act, this ability of hers to be forever the journeywoman but in the assured allegorical diction of a latter-day Bunyan.
True Stories, a selection of her non-fiction works, is the yield of a quarter century of Garner’s habitual, patient, writerly curiosity. And of something else as well. Call it tenacity maybe, a stroppiness that is part anarchist perversity, part determination to winkle out the truth in complex human affairs. And always there is the mark of the scourge that she wields against narcissism, her own and others.
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‘Curiosity is a muscle,’ Helen Garner declares in the first essay of this selection, displaying again the metaphorical spark that marks her out and keeps her readers plundering her pages. She is writing about writing, and her revelations couple a disarming intimacy – Garner the wry, lifelong apprentice, confiding trade secrets – with shrewd and reflexive moral admonition. Here, in a brief paragraph, is laid out the disciplinary ground of fiction and reportage, plus a private view of Garner’s workshop and tools: ‘Patience is a muscle,’ she continues. ‘What begins as a necessary exercise gradually becomes natural. And then immense landscapes open out in front of you.’ It’s a beguiling act, this ability of hers to be forever the journeywoman but in the assured allegorical diction of a latter-day Bunyan.
- Book Title True Stories
- Biblio Text Publishing, $19.95 pb, 242 pp,
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