The Cinema of Protean Attractions

Frankenstein

2012-01-28T21:03:00.002+11:00

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

It's often claimed that Frankenstein, the 'first' science fiction novel (as well as a gothic horror novel), is a warning against the godlike ambitions of science. Our scientific creations turn into monsters that haunt and destroy us, the book suggests. This notion, wrapped up in all the gothic imagery - alien landscapes of snow, ice, lone islands on stormy seas (ruined castles, though not in this story) - that so thrilled those in the 18th and especially early 19th Centuries, who felt the social ground shifting beneath their feet. In this, Frankenstein is close cousin, probably, of Goethe's Faust. Less commented upon is the way that the novel runs up against the liberal sensibility, for in many ways Frankenstein's monster, for whom we feel the most sympathy, turns to revenge not because he is created but rather because he is subsequently, again and again, rejected by human society. Why is he rejected? Because he is an offense to 'propriety', to 'civilization,' in short, he is ugly, of monstrous form. Underlying the structure of the narrative is the idea that such a rejection is natural. At its stirring heights, the novel is powerful and moving. Like many stories of the time, there are long asides which wouldn't get past a modern editor. 'Stick to the story,' the modern sensibility says, not entirely unfairly.

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24 January 2012

2012-01-25T02:59:00.007+11:00

Focus has now turned to The Uncertainty Principle, which forges on in its new, much better incarnation. Scriptwriting is a different mode to novelising, that's for sure, just as comedy is different from, uh, the bleak world of Caeli-Amur. Though there has been some more humour going into Unwrapped Sky recently.

To take a break from the writing, today I wandered out into the cold day. It was negative twelve at one point this morning, so probably somewhere around that as I walked. At first you think it's fine. Then the bridge of your nose get icy, then the nose proper, and your hands (if you take off your gloves in order to take photos). Still, the sun was shining and that was a good excuse to wander down to the lake and consider stomping over the ice, which I didn't do, on account of self-preservation.

When I returned, I jotted down some notes for my little talk this weekend at the Jyvaskyla SF society/writers house thing. As part of my prep, I reread bits of my story "The Cinema of Coming Attractions" and thought to myself, oh, this is actually better than I remembered, at which point I began to reconsider everything I've written in the last two months. Then I thought, well, yes, I spent a lot of time on that story. Looks like there's more time to spend on all those recent things. Such is writing.

London

2012-01-23T22:52:00.004+11:00

And so I returned from London, a generally exciting place which grows on me the more I visit.

1. B and I got stuck into the script, beat out a detailed outline. The last one, ever, I think. I'm pretty sure. Now we just need, uh, someone to write it. Oh yes, that's us.

2. We talked much about comedy, and I had the sudden urge to watch a lot more of it. I stated rather grandly that I mostly didn't like musical comedy, then realised that Bill Bailey and Flight of the Conchords scuttled that particular thought. Youtube parties resulted. Hiphopapotomus and Rhymenoscerous. Bill Bailey's ultimate love song.

3. This was all good, but doesn't necessarily make humour that much easier to write.

4. We traveled to Cambridge, where I was overwhelmed by the quaintery (my new word) and the, uh, privilege.

11 January 2012

2012-01-12T03:32:00.002+11:00

I am possibly one or two days away from finishing the new draft of Unwrapped Sky. This makes me quite happy. I'm pleased with this draft. There are a few flaws, some more work to do, but it has taken a great frog-leap forward, I think. Much of this draft was written to the sound of Keith Jarrett improvising, especially the La Scala concert. The first part of this extraordinary improvisation is above, in its full glory. It has a fairly traditional construction: an introverted and classical-flavoured beginning, an experimental avant-garde middle section, a triumphant ending. It's a blend I like in all art: classical and avant-garde mixing. It's also a construction (and mood) which suits Unwrapped Sky and the Caeli-Amur stories more generally, I think.

The Second Trip

2012-01-09T02:08:00.004+11:00

The Second Trip by Robert Silverberg

Not one of Silverberg's great novels, The Second Trip is further evidence for him as a master-craftsman. A constructed personality inhabits a body once owned by a violent criminal, but when the the criminal's personality resurfaces, both men must fight for control of the same body. Silverberg shows off his writing-chops, fine as they were in this period of his career. But The Second Trip lacks the themes - alienation, guilt, redemption, transcendence - that give Silverberg's best work its heart. A fine technical exercise, enjoyable at the 200 or so pages (the length of so many of the 1960s and 1970s SF novels).

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Helsinki

2012-01-08T21:43:00.011+11:00

1. As it's dark until 9am, waking up at 5.30am didn't seem to have the heart-stopping effect predicted.

2. The snow came. At times it seemed to danced, at other times seemed to positively rain down. From the bus, Finland seemed a fantastical land of frigid waste.

3. Helsinki was pretty in the daylight, pretty also at night. The Ateneum museum was filled with paintings of northern lights, forests, bears - Finnish nature.

4. After lunch at a cosmopolitan cafe, we strolled along the Esplanadi to the harbour, back to Senate square for coffee and cake.

5. In the botanic gardens lies a greenhouse, steamy and filled with tropical plants.

6.Periodically, ideas came to me for Unwrapped Sky. Especially after the lithograph exhibition at the Ateneum.

7. It turns out I can skate, after all.

University Library

2012-01-04T02:27:00.002+11:00

This the university library, where I've been (along with the city library) rewriting Unwrapped Sky. The novel is coming along pretty well. It's a good thing to remind oneself, in the middle of a project, that it actually will improve. I have at least one more pass to go on the novel, but with each one it becomes exponentially better. Which is a relief actually. As it gets better, I want to work on it more. Anyway, I like this library, and the city library as well. The quiet, the books around, the sense of been suspended outside of ordinary life. the snow outside. The shelves close to where I sit are filled with Greek and Roman literature - Aeschylus, Cicero, Tacitus - which I still long to read.

Goodbye 2011

2011-12-31T22:47:00.008+11:00

Through the window the light snow sits on the top of Jyvaskyla's city library. Glimpses of the lake can be seen through the building and the tower - water-tower? - over the hill opposite. It's -4 degrees today, and the sun, as it does at this time of year, has only peeked above the horizon, where it will glide for several hours before giving up the impossible task of rising high into the sky.

At this time of year, I'm filled with the usual cliches: how fast the year went, and so on. The highlights of the year, of course, were the movements for change: North Africa and the Middle East, the Occupy movement. One can only hope that these are the first signs of further changes and challenges to the status quo.

Personally, it's been a good year. I've done some good writing. I like the two pieces I wrote for Overland. The first on New Wave science fiction, the second on Torture Porn Films. There are several stories yet to see the light of day, but which soon will, I hope. Almost a new draft of Unwrapped Sky, which I've worked on for the last month, some reviews for the Age, Metro, elsewhere. The Uncertainty Principle was optioned by the wonderful folks at Lailaps Films and is in the process of being redrafted. A solid year, if unspectacular. I've become even more qualified as a hypnotherapist, having done an advanced diploma, which was a lot of fun. I kept working with the wonderful people at Overland magazine. There have been movies seen and books read.

Still, the best parts of the year have been the trips. The first across Europe, including Finland, Italy (including Naples and Pompeii; amazing), France, London. The second sees me entrenched with L in the Finnish winter, writing, watching movies, eating and eating. Christmas eve was spent leaving candles at L's ancestors' graves. After that, it was spent alternately in a sauna then standing semi-naked and barefoot in snow. Was that good? Impossible to say. I mean, uh, it was certainly consciousness-changing. That Rjurik was a different Rjurik to the one writing now, so who would I be to speak for him?

Sometimes I think that the best things in a year are the new ones.

The Time Machine

2011-12-30T21:39:00.001+11:00

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

My rating:

The Time Machine suffers from that particular problem of original and groundbreaking works: they later appear obvious and familiar. Still, with the exception of the middle parts of the novel, The Time Machine holds up. Wells uses time travel like a true science fiction writer: he posits a future which itself presupposes a theory of history (i.e. how does one arrive THERE). The future world also allows Wells to critique (cognitive estrangement as Darko Suvin would have it) his own society and its class structure. Only in moments does it slip into didacticism, which I understand Wells's later work suffers from. By it's final visionary pages, full of soaring intensity, we can see how Wells is considered by some the father of modern science fiction.

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Bridget Jones's Diary

2011-12-30T21:26:00.002+11:00

I read Bridget Jones's Diary, partly because I found it on a bookshelf, opened it up, and discovered that the first two pages (Bridget's NY's resolutions) were as brilliant an opening as I've read. They capture the character and her problem, to use scriptwriting terms, concisely and hilariously. The L suggested I read the rest, and I ended up writing this little review on Goodreads:

It's pretty hard to review a book like Bridget Jones's diary. As chick-lit it's wonderful, even if it's mostly a one-joke book: Bridget embarrasses herself and fails in her attempts to diet, stop drinking so much, give up smoking. Fielding cleverly makes Jones a feminist (of sorts) and both clever and witty. I've no doubt that one of the reasons for its success is the fact that each of us can identify with Bridget's insecurities, her failure to live up to the standards society set for her and which she has, to some extent, internalised. There's a chasm, then, between the way things are "meant to be" in a fantasy world that we are told we should aspire to live in, and the real one. Bridget remains both critical of this fantasy world and prey to its vicissitudes. Still, this perhaps overstated the profundity of the book, which, in the end, is about a girl who desperately wants a boyfriend. None of the characters are studied in depth and it slows down in the typically difficult middle sections. A good laugh. Fun holiday reading. Not much more.

Torture Porn Films

2011-12-22T17:22:00.003+11:00

You can read my piece on Torture Porn Films online at Overland. Here's how it starts:

During a notorious incident at the Sundance Film Festival, a viewer leaped to his feet after the premiere of Lucky McKee’s movie The Woman and began to protest: ‘This movie degrades women! This movie degrades men! You are sick! This is not art! You are sick! This is a disgusting movie! Sundance should be ashamed! How dare you show this!’

As security approached, he continued: ‘Anyone else who’d like to talk in a similar mind about the degradation of women like this come outside and we’ll talk …’

A woman yelled in response: ‘Are you a woman?’

Footage on YouTube shows the man arguing his point as he is led from the building. ‘This is not art; this is bullshit! This is degradation of women, in an absolute way.’ The hurt look in his eyes is striking: they rove around as if he is searching for something, trying to make sense of events.

Becoming more strident, he says, ‘This film ought to be confiscated, burned.’

Then he calms a little. ‘I couldn’t take it,’ he reflects. Then he turns on the audience: ‘They cheered, for women being beaten up, abused, raped, boys being taught to rape. They’re cheering for that!’

Openings and, uh, editors

2011-12-18T06:07:00.003+11:00

Over on his blog, Michael Swanwick writes:

I've always regretted I didn't have a video camera with me the time I dropped in on Gardner Dozois at the Asimov's Science Fiction offices and, before going out to lunch, he went through a two-foot-high pile of submissions in fifteen to twenty minutes. While we had a pleasant conversation about other matters.

The video would have shown Gardner pick up the first manuscript, read the first page, turn to the last page, read that, and then put down the story. Then he did exactly the same thing with the next. And the next. All the way down to the bottom. At the end of which he had two piles -- one for people who might someday write something good, who received a polite rejection slip; and one for those who never would, who received a discouraging rejection slip. He set aside exactly one story to actually read.

First page and last page huh? Dozois, of course, is one of the great SF editors and I always buy his years best SFs. Still, the trickster part of me wants to send Dozois (though he no longer edits Asimov's) a story of only a first page and last page. We could then discuss together what could go in between.

There is, I guess, a non-fiction version of this. Though perhaps the "hook" or the opening lines is not so paramount for us at Overland. Still, the first page is critical to interest the editor and to prove that you can structure an argument (presuming you have one). For my part, I always read an essay all the way through, but it's pretty rare that one that starts poorly and then suddenly reveals promise.

The Singing Detective

2011-12-14T19:47:00.002+11:00

In the last couple of weeks, L and watched the original series of The Singing Detective, something I had many times claimed was the best television ever created. With the recent golden age of television, perhaps there are better things out there, but I think The Singing Detective holds up. In a certain sense, it's a great exercise in psychoanalytic self-analysis, in which the symbols of protagonist Philip Marlow's fictional and imaginary worlds are symbolic representations of his inner life, created by, mostly, childhood trauma. It's also a lesson in the interweaving of narrative, and I still marvel at the complexity of these. It is rightly considered writer Dennis Potter's - who seems to have been a rightly messed up guy himself - masterpiece.

Boots and Churches.

2011-12-13T23:00:00.002+11:00

New ones. Lovely, comfy, warm. I wore them when I walked past the church in Jyvaskyla on my way home:

10 December 2011

2011-12-11T01:23:00.002+11:00

I work - mostly on Unwrapped Sky - in a library at the University. During the short daytime hours I glance out at an incline of trees and snow. Much of the time it's snowing. But today a little squirrel, it's winter coat grey, danced among the snow, popped his head up and down as it looked for food of some sort, darted to and fro happily. At one point it dived beneath the snow like a dolphin beneath water. At another it did a little pirouette against a tree. Why not?

7 December 2011

2011-12-08T03:56:00.005+11:00

1. A week ago, I arrived in Helsinki, after two torturous flights where, having not booked specific seats, I found myself jammed in the centre aisles of the two planes. Comfort was given me by Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which, if not a great film, at least was attuned (like the original Planet of the Apes itself), to the doom-ridden times. Talk of an Oscar for the ape seems also - this time sadly - attuned to the times. More comfort was offered by Robert Silverberg's Nightwings. Sitting at Helsinki airport, waiting for a predictably delayed flight to Jyvaskyla, the sun broke over the tarmac. Birch forests flanked the far side of the runway. The ghostly figures of exhausted travelers were reflected in the window.

2. Halfway through the flight to Jyvaskyla, I looked down to see little gleaming patches of snow: here, on a little hillock, there, sheltered by a patch of forest. When I came down, the landscape was one of fairytales and legends.

3. Written in the early part of Robert Silverberg's period of sustained brilliance, which lasted roughly 1967-1974, Nightwings is a breathtaking book. Sharing many of Silverberg's characteristic themes - guilt, loss, redemption, transcendence, Nightwings is first and foremost a feat of technical virtuosity. For the SF writer, Nightwings is a case study in carefully measured structure, interrelation between social and personal themes (planetary and personal guilt and redemption), careful plotting of character relations, and the luminous prose. Only rarely does Silverberg fail to make the most of his material. And yet, there is something (as I think John Clute once wrote) too-conscious, too perfectly crafted, something androidal to the formal brilliance. Make no mistake, I love this period of Silverberg's, but I am also reminded of M. John Harrison's post on the party game Black Swan/White Swan, in which he reference a party game described elsewhere as:

The party game is simple; all things can be paired up and divided into white swans and black swans. White swans have technique but black swans have essential style. The white swan is the brain, the black swan is the crotch ...

Madonna/Debbie Harry
Debbie Harry/Chrissie Hynde
Diana Ross/Donna Summer
Michael Jackson/Prince
Luke Skywalker/Han Solo

To which Harrison adds, "New Worlds had the f/sf version of this game at the heart of its manifesto, I suppose the classic distinction being White Swan: Robert Silverberg, Black Swan: Alfred Bester. But I soon began to think of them both as technicians." [as an aside, I came to think of one version: J. G. Ballard/M. John Harrison - again, I love Harrison, but that's immediately where my brain went]

4. Ted Goia describes the writing of Nightwings thus:

The circumstances that led to the writing of Robert Silverberg’s
Nightwings were hardly conducive to creating a masterpiece. A fire
had destroyed most of the author’s house, and he was living out of
crates and cartons in improvised quarters. He desperately needed
money to pay bills and cover the cost of rebuilding. He was exhausted
and stressed out from dealing with insurance
company bureaucrats, putting his life back
together, and the general craziness of that
turbulent year 1968.

In this unpropitious environment, Silverberg
wrote a 19,000 word novella called
“Nightwings” in “something like five days,”
as he later recalled. Frederik Pohl, editor of
Galaxy magazine, paid him $500—which was
a considerable sum for the time, the
equivalent of several thousand dollars of
purchasing power today. Silverberg
immediately began hatching plans for
two more related stories of approximately
the same length, with the plan to combine all
three of them in a single novel.

5. The snow melted. Then it snowed again and I found myself running from window to window, not unlike an animal searching for a way out, saying, "Look, it's snowing, it's snowing!"

6. The difference between O degrees Celcius and -3 is considerable.

7. Meanwhile, I continue to rewrite Unwrapped Sky. Each time, it creeps forward towards something worthy, even if I sometimes sit back and think, "This is unreadable!" At other times, I discover passages which seem, well, quite good.

8. Reading Nightwings as one writes a novel is both a blessing and a curse.

9. I think of who the Australian literary and SF versions of Black Swan/White Swan might be. But I resist the temptation to name them, just yet.

10. A gingerbread cake was made. L was happy. It took us four hours.

Why Read?

2011-10-17T12:50:00.002+11:00

Recently, I changed my reading habits.

For a long time, I read out of a sense of duty. I felt that there were all these books that I should read. Books from the field in which I write. Books which are 'important' - historically, or politically, or because people are talking about them. I had a shelf dedicated to them. Then two shelves. Then a pile of books next to those two shelves. This pernicious habit may have been learned when I did my PhD, when I actually did have to read certain books. Somewhere along the line, reading became no fun. I always 'had to' finish through the book in order to get onto the next one that I 'had to read'. There was never enough time, damn it. After all, I hadn't read Crime and Punishment, The Iliad, the latest cutting edge works of speculative fiction.

Then, a little while ago, I just stopped cold. I realised that feeling I used to have as a child and teenager, when I really really loved to read, was long gone. I realised that nothing was that important, really. I don't need to read anything to write my fiction, or for any other reason, really. So I changed my habits. Anytime I felt I 'should' read a book, I put it aside and didn't read it. Even if I was halfway through. It wasn't that hard, once I started. Now I only read because I want to. If I don't want to, I won't read at all (unless it's for work). Breathe a great sigh of relief - reading has become fun again.

Perhaps this should be taken as a metaphor.

Zizek on Children of Men

2011-10-15T20:49:00.002+11:00

I've long been a fan of the film Children of Men, which I wrote about in an essay a few years ago. As I've been reading Zizek lately, I noticed his comments on the film, which I think are pretty apt and worth a watch.

Creative Burnout

2011-10-14T08:19:00.002+11:00

Deb Biancotti has been running a series of guest posts about 'creative burnout' over on her blog. One of which is by me. It's a response to the report that Steph Swainston has given up her award-winning writing career for something more meaningful: teaching chemistry. The article makes for fascinating reading. Check it out.

The Library of Forgotten Books ebook

2011-09-25T17:06:00.002+10:00

Ps Publishing have released an ebook of my collection, The Library of Forgotten Books. Which you can get here.

Or on Amazon.

The Burned-Out Sixties.

2011-09-21T15:52:00.002+10:00

Over on the Overland blog, I've reviewed last year's Chapman's biography of Syd Barrett and considered him as an archetypal symbol for the Sixties.

Horror Film

2011-09-10T12:58:00.008+10:00

Following the controversy after the screening of The Woman at the Sundance film festival - which saw a man leap up screening before the Q and A session yelling, "This is sick! This film degrades women!" - I've been writing a piece on horror film and in particular 'torture porn' movies (the Hostel franchise, Wolf Creek, etc). This has led me to see a lot of horror movies in the last few weeks and read quite a bit about the genre. A whole lot of interesting things have happened.

First was, of course, viewing the extraordinary The Woman. I couldn't get anyone to come and see it with me. Responses ranged from "You'd have to pay me to see a film like that", "Um, no", to - no answer at all. So in the end, I found myself at Cinema Nova at 9.40pm one tuesday evening, to see that the (admittedly small) cinema was almost full. The central idea is simple: a well-to-do all-American family discovers a 'wild woman' living in the woods. He traps her and imprisons her in the family basement. Well, you can imagine some of the directions it then follows. Anyway, the film started, somewhat awkwardly, as if director Lucky McKee was struggling with the narrative. Then: bang. I was totally drawn in as the movie moved from unsettling and engrossing to - intense, profound and disturbing. This was the first movie that I've seen in a long, long time where (at one particular moment) I literally lost all critical sense. I was caught in my chair, eyes blinking rapidly, without a single conscious thought. In retrospect, I suppose you could say I was thinking "Is this really happening?" But I experienced it as complete frozen unthinking stupefaction. Is there a single word for this state of mind, this non-conscious response?

I really haven't followed the horror genre very closely, certainly not in film, since I was a teenager. So the last few weeks have been a catch up, and I've come to remember that I do like horror. The whole project has made me want to consciously write more horror, (although some might argue that some of my work borders on horror.) The thing which excites me about the genre is the particular frission that the genre offers: sense of disturbance which is horror's equivalent to SF's 'sense of wonder'. In my piece, I discuss what the function of this disturbance is, so I won't go into it now. But there is a reason why most defenders of horror mention its long tradition of social critique.

I've also seen a few films which were, well, not so good: the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hostel II was pretty unnecessary. There's a lot out there not to see ... believe me.

Finally, I've come across some fairly interesting theories and theorists. Online, for example, there's Socialism and/or Barbarism who writes quite a lot about horror.

Oh, and The Woman is not for the fainthearted. But it's a really interesting film.

George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons

2011-08-30T10:21:00.001+10:00

I recently reviewed George R.R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons for the Age. You can find the review here.

Drive-By Interview

2011-08-24T15:53:00.001+10:00

Over on her site, the most excellent Angela Slatter has done an interview with me.

What's wrong with the book industry

2011-08-22T15:35:00.003+10:00

Well, this really isn't about what's wrong with the book industry. It's about one of the things which is wrong with it. Which is this: James Patterson is the highest paid writer in the world. From the Guardian a few days ago:

The world's highest-paid author padded to the windows of his magnificent, yellow, colonial-style mansion overlooking the sea at Palm Beach. And thought.
"God, people think this is easy," he said to himself. He knew it was not.
"I am James Patterson. I am more than an author, I am a brand. I have a 400-page novel coming out this month. And another next month. And one the month after that."
No wonder he had become the world's best-selling author, financially at least, with sales of $84m at the last count to April. Twenty per cent up year on year, he reflected with satisfaction. More than Dickens. Better than Austen. Much better than Danielle Steel, whose works only brought in $35m. She was No2. By a long way.
Or Stephen King, the man who once called Patterson's thrillers dopey and said he was a terrible writer. King's books only made $28m. That felt good. Who was King to say that Patterson's co-writers, the ones who actually wrote the outlines, plotted the chapters, did the dialogue that he then ran through with his pencil, were terrible? What had Marshall Karp, Ned Rust, Richard DiLallo, Maxine Paetro, Liza Marklund or any of the others whose names appeared in smaller print on the fronts of his books ever done to cause King pain? Their names were embossed on the covers weren't they? They swung round every airport bookstall carousel, didn't they?
Then another plot occurred to him and he padded back to his desk. It was still only 7am and the blood-red sun had not yet risen over the horizon ... there was work to do. No time to lose.

Now I'm not saying that Patterson shouldn't be paid for what he does. I'm sure he works hard and, to be honest, I've never read a novel of his (I must admit, I am curious enough to check one out, but I suspect I wouldn't make it past the first 3-page chapter with a cliffhanger, much like I never made it through The Da Vinci Code). But, who is Stephen King to criticize Patterson? Well, for one thing, he's a guy who writes his own books. King may not be the producer of the greatest modern literature (a fact that he admits, and to be fair, Patterson says also of himself), but he never cheats the reader, never manipulates. He is, frankly, a good storyteller and a critic with generally good taste.

Interestingly, Patterson's "story factory" sounds quite similar to James Frey's. The point here is complete submission of art to commerce. In a 2008 article in the Guardian, Oliver Burkeman wrote about Patterson:

The Direct Marketing Association - which represents that maligned segment of society responsible for sending junk mail, unsolicited faxes, and "commercial email" - had invited the thriller writer James Patterson to deliver a lecture. By some measures, Patterson is the world's most commercially successful author, and as he listened, Deighton began to see why. Patterson didn't discuss literary technique. He spoke of TV advertising and brand penetration, and about how and where his books were displayed in shops. "I'd never actually heard a product speak," said Deighton, recalling the lecture. "It was like listening to a can of Coca-Cola describe how it would like to be marketed."

This article goes on about Patterson's advertising attitude to his books:

His focus is on building the "James Patterson" brand, and so it makes perfect commercial sense to find a reliable subcontractor for the manufacturing part of the operation - the writing - while he concentrates on product design - the plot outlines - and on promotion...
On one occasion, Patterson even changed the ending of a book - Cat And Mouse, published in 1997 - after readers of the advance copies complained that the ending was frustrating. That kind of audience-testing is common in Hollywood, but not in publishing.

This all pretty much speaks for itself, in my opinion. It's the complete absorption of the text into the circuits of capitalism, from production to circulation. Certainly, you have to have a product to sell that people want to buy. So there's a question of taste here also. But none of this seems to me to be something to celebrate.

What's wrong with the film industry

2011-08-21T09:03:00.003+10:00

Disney exec Hendrickson recently spoke at the Siggraph conference. Variety magazine quoted him in a recent report:

"People say 'It's all about the story,'" Hendrickson said. "When you're making tentpole films, bullshit." Hendrickson showed a chart of the top 12 all-time domestic grossers, and noted every one is a spectacle film. Of his own studio's "Alice in Wonderland," which is on the list, he said: "The story isn't very good, but visual spectacle brought people in droves. And Johnny Depp didn't hurt."

Tentpole films, for those who haven't heard the term, are usually expensive ones expected to make big profits. Hence they hold up the studio and it's less financially successful films.

This gets to the heart of what is wrong with modern film. Hendrickson here is simply reporting (though implicitly accepting) an actually existing state of affairs. The truth is, spectacle brings in the audiences (mostly young males and their friends). Society of the Spectacle, as Guy Debord called it. It's certainly chastening to hear it stated plainly by someone high in the industry. It's also sobering, for the writer. One day, we might be able to do without writers altogether.

The Hunter

2011-08-15T15:25:00.001+10:00

I'm currently writing a review of the new Australian movie, The Hunter. I'm not allowed to discuss it, but here's a really short trailer.

Dreams

2011-08-09T18:34:00.002+10:00

1. Last night I dreamed I was trying to get to Syd Barrett's house. I ventured into a verdant area of London where, in my dream, it was situated.[In reality, he had lived in Cambridge]. I met two older men, the sort of men that I looked up to as a teenager. They held themselves as if they had lived a great deal, and little fazed them, though there was a tint of resignation there too. Perhaps they had grown up in the seventies. Together we headed on our quest, but a second road with the same name split off from the first. The numbers were all jumbled up.

"It's very plain," I said to the two men. "A suburban red-brick house."

By now we were climbing up a ridge and below the houses were surrounded with the dense greenery. It was obviously very wet around here. There was a gothic church, and the whole area seemed very wealthy.

Then my father was there, and we decided we must have passed Barrett's house. On our way back we crossed a river, pregnant with rain. the bridge on which we walked had little gaps in it, and I was afraid of my phone slipping through them.

The two older men wandered off.

2. The dream did not come out of the blue. Barrett has been on my mind of late. I found videos of him on youtube, especially this one, which I'd never seen, and then a BBC radio show called, The Twilight World of Syd Barrett.

Childhood loves no. 2

2011-08-04T20:25:00.003+10:00

When I was really little, I watched this cartoon, called Hong Kong Phooey. All I recalled were fragments of the opening: Hong Kong Phooey was a dog who leaped into a chest a chest of drawers. He then emerged as a Kung Fu superhero. As to the show, almost nothing. Just little flashes of imagery: Hong Kong Phooey's getup, the way he did fast karate chops. So I made the mistake of watching one of the episodes, which had its own charm, but of course didn't live up to my expectations. Turns out Hong Kong Phooey is a bumbling fool, and his cat sidekick is responsible for capturing most of the bad guys. I wonder, as a child did I not pick this up? Or have I just forgotten it? Turns out the chest of drawers was a filing cabinet, but I'm guessing as a kid I'd never seen one of those, so I assimilated it into what I did know.

Apparently they're making a movie out of it at the moment.

Childhood loves no. 1.

2011-08-01T19:22:00.003+10:00

As I was chatting to L the other day, we got onto the childhood programs that we loved. The first that came to me was the old Adam West Batman. Like the other two - to be discussed in the next few days - I really have no idea if it was any good. I certainly remember it as good, quirky, slightly camp, and filled with plenty of imagination. Part of me wants to go back and watch a couple of episodes. But another part says, "No! If you do, you'll notice all the terrible bits, the lame dialogue, the dodgy sets, the poor plotting." Better to let it live in your imagination and memory (which here seem to blur into each other). Still, I couldn't help looking it up on Youtube, and really, this little clip makes it look like great fun. Still, another question rose in my mind. Just how much have shows like this influenced my writing, if at all? It's easy enough to trace some of your influences as an adult. But childhood shows permeate into the unconscious of a child with little mediation. Then they are, as I've mentioned, forgotten.

More Photos

2011-07-23T20:25:00.005+10:00

Thought I'd offer a few more snaps of my travels.

Ladbroke Grove, London. Somewhere along here was Michael Moorcock's house in the 1960s. I didn't know what number, unfortunately.

In Berlin, this statue was taken at an artist's market which is also a squat. There's currently a struggle over whether they can stay.

Finland at about 1.30am. The camera failed to really capture how light it was, but I still like it.

10 July 2011

2011-07-10T20:23:00.004+10:00

In lieu of anything else, I offer some photos.

The first is the mid-summer's bonfire at Ouroux, where they set alight a massive wooden steam engine.

The second Ouroux by night, as I walked home.

The last, the great holocaust memorial in Berlin, a great maze composed of square monoliths of varying sizes.

Robert McKee

2011-07-05T18:17:00.000+10:00

I've blogged over on Overland about Robert McKee.

Naples/France

2011-07-04T18:03:00.006+10:00

1. Italy. Naples has an authenticity which Rome seems to have lost. Like Prague, Rome feels more and more like a theme park. Naples, however, maintains its grittiness. There are real neapolitans. Restaurants without English on the menu. Bustling streets. Political protests.

2. France. At the lunch table, outside the farm, the man says. "The African players in the french soccer team. They spit, they blow their nose. They earn too much money and should send it back to Africa where they're from, to help their people."

"Aren't they French?" I ask. "Weren't they born here?"

Things are suddenly uncomfortable. No doubt, when the French soccer team wins, they are. When they lose, we'll they're "African."

Later, Marine Le Pen is on a two-hour talk show, which is more like an interrogation show. Everyone is combative. The kind of discussion you'd almost never see in Australia. Indeed, as in the picture above in Naples, there is a political sensibility which still exists in Europe that Australia seems to lack.

Notes from the Trip

2011-06-09T20:57:00.003+10:00

1. The Melbourne airport. The old man before me orders a chicken pie and a cappuccino. He has the air about him of dissociation, as if nothing matters much at all. He avoids eye contact: is there something over the waitresses shoulder that he finds particularly puzzling? Beneath the vacant expression is the hint of anxiety. His eyebrows are raised, as if he's constantly on guard. He sits behind his table.

A little while later the waitress calls out "Cappuccino! Cappuccino!" Nobody moves.

A while later, the waitress calls out: "Chicken pie! Chicken Pie!"

The old man wanters over. Taking the pie, he says, "I ordered a coffee too."

"There's one at the end of the counter."

They both approach the lone cappuccino. "If it's too cold, I can make you another."

The man walks away with the coffee, same distant expression on his face. He sips his cold coffee, as if it's his lot in life.

2. My strategy for the flight to Singapore is to watch movies I would otherwise not see. It's educational, I tell myself. The Adjustment Bureau is in this category because of the mediocre reviews it received. Poor Philip K. Dick. This is proof that a short-story idea a good film does not make. With more holes in it than the bedsheet in that hotel in Surabaya, it's hard to take seriously. Then again, No Strings Attached didn't rise to great heights either. But neither of them compared to The Dilemma, which didn't put me to sleep, unfortunately. Education achieved. Back to The Wire, I say.

3. The more enriching section of the flight is spent reading about Pompeii. One interesting thing - beyond the obvious parallel's between various 'Empires' - is that in many ways Roman society is actually so strange and alien. For example, the elite were always knocking off their former best friends, parents, siblings, spouses - basically anyone who was close to them. Nero had his mother Agrippina killed (after failing a number of times, including by trying to have various roofs fall on her) in one such power struggle. What, then, does love or friendship mean to the Romans? I'm still piecing it together. And of course they took quite seriously, as predictions of the future, the flight patterns of birds.

4. Three of us sit on the plane. To my left a radio personality, in his sixties. To my right a man who works for a major Australian swimming organisation. We charm the flight stewards, who give us first-class travel packs filled with moisturiser and other stuff. They give us pyjamas too. I try to convince the other two that we should put them on and walk around together in Chiangi Airport - the three amigos.

5. Chiangi Airport. Oh how I know your vast halls, filled with strangers.

6. On the second plane I check the flight path. We're somewhere over central Russia. Briefly I wonder what would happen if we went down and survived. What would Bear Grylls do?

7. I remember that Bear Grylls is a reactionary. This is why he bites the heads off frogs.

8. The train take me north from Helsinki, through hours of silver birch forests, lakes, the sprinklings of houses: are they suburbs? villages? scatterings of even urban development?

9. Thirty-two hours of travel. I think I should lie down. It will not get dark here until late. Soon it wont get dark here at all.

Television

2011-04-25T12:29:00.002+10:00

A number of people have commented that in recent times, the best writers have moved to television. Without doubt, in recent years, a number of television shows have broken new ground and made for better viewing experiences than film. One of the reasons is that with television, the writers are also often the producers, so their vision isn't compromised by other hands. They have creative control. Personally, I've liked The Sopranos, Rome, even earlier I liked Babylon 5 (though never Star Trek), Entourage and Californication were entertaining, though both definitively less ambitious and, um, fairly trashy. (And what's with David Duchovny's character, Hank Moody, drinking all the time, yet still having six-pack abs, oh, and as far as I can tell, never writing (mind you, writing probably isn't the most dramatic action for a character). Of better quality was the Danish show, The Killing, which was a little like European film does a crime show, at least until they messed up the ending, and in the process convinced me that they were just making it up as they went along. I've heard good things about The Wire and Mad Men.

Recently, I caught Michael Winterbottom's six-part BBC series, The Trip. Mostly improvised by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing versions of themselves going on a restaurant tour of northern England, it was almost plotless, yet both hilarious and moving at the same time. There's a clip here. The Trip is amazing because it shows how supple narrative can actually be. Why are we so entranced by these two? Because they are, first and foremost, interesting characters: aging mid-rank actors and comedians (mid-rank in terms of success, not talent). They constantly surprise us by their insights, their comedy, their interplay, despite the fact that very little happens in terms of major events. As someone who has done some improvisation, I can only marvel at the two of them, also. They make something incredibly difficult look extremely easy.

On the other hand, I caught the first episode of the new HBO series Game of Thrones based on George R.R.Martin's fantasy series. It has come under some criticism, among others by Ben Peek on his blog. But also by reviewers in the US. Unlike Ben, I never thought that much of the novels. I found them very well plotted but basically unoriginal high fantasy. All those knights and their wives left me cold, but most of all, I felt like it was really pretty much about nothing. Peek and others found the first TV episode sexist (and possibly racist), and I wouldn't argue with them about that. Still, if earlier HBO shows examined institutions - the family, the Roman Empire, the State/Government - Game of Thrones pretty much follows the path cut out by the novels and focusses on ... what was it again?

Years Best Oz Fantasy and Horror

2011-04-18T21:09:00.002+10:00

Over at Ticonderoga Publications, Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene have put together a massive years best of Australian Fantasy and Horror, and my story "Lovers in Caeli-Amur" will be among them:

RJ Astruc: "Johnny and Babushka"
Peter M Ball: "L'esprit de L'escalier"
Alan Baxter: "The King's Accord"
Jenny Blackford: "Mirror"
Gitte Christensen: "A Sweet Story"
Matthew Chrulew: "Schubert By Candlelight"
Bill Congreve: "Ghia Likes Food"
Rjurik Davidson: "Lovers In Caeli-Amur"
Felicity Dowker: "After the Jump"
Dale Elvy: "Night Shift"
Jason Fischer: "The School Bus"
Dirk Flinthart: "Walker"
Bob Franklin: "Children's Story"
Christopher Green: "Where We Go To Be Made Lighter"
Paul Haines: "High Tide At Hot Water Beach"
Lisa L. Hannett: "Soil From My Fingers"
Stephen Irwin: "Hive"
Gary Kemble: "Feast Or Famine"
Pete Kempshall: "Brave Face"
Tessa Kum: "Acception"
Martin Livings: "Home"
Maxine McArthur: "A Pearling Tale"
Kirstyn McDermott: "She Said"
Andrew McKiernan: "The Memory Of Water"
Ben Peek: "White Crocodile Jazz"
Simon Petrie: "Dark Rendezvous"
Lezli Robyn: "Anne-droid of Green Gables"
Angela Rega: "Slow Cookin' "
Angela Slatter: "The Bone Mother"
Angela Slatter & Lisa L Hannett: "The February Dragon"
Grant Stone: "Wood"
Kaaron Warren: "That Girl"
Janeen Webb: "Manifest Destiny"

Periodic Table of Storytelling

2011-04-16T10:49:00.003+10:00

In lieu of informing you of the extremely disappointing news, which no doubt I'll reveal soon, I offer you the Periodic Table of Storytelling from here. One of those cute little mash-ups that you get every now and then. One wonders whether these kinds of things are just fun gimmicks or whether they are any use: do they, for example, allow you momentary glimpses into the nature of storytelling, or ways in which you might consider it differently? Or are they just a joke? I suspect in the case of the former, it's because of what you, yourself, bring to the table, so to speak. Philip K. Dick once claimed that he wrote a novel (The Man in the High Castle), with the aid of the I, Ching. In what way could that be said to be true? In the same way you could use this Periodic Table: it might be suggestive to you. You might come with a problem and (say, of protagonist) and, scanning the table, your unconscious might be triggered by one of the elements. Or you could just look at it for fun and send it on to your writer friends.

Story Opening

2011-04-10T18:43:00.002+10:00

As I've been waiting for my editor to get back to me with novel rewrites, I've had a chance to mess around with a few short stories. Thought you might like the opening of the latest Caeli-Amur story:

In the long summer evenings, the whores of Caeli-Amur love to play word games. Standing in the doorways of Collegia-run brothels in the Lavere Quarter, they laughingly call out for their “un-true love.” The lucky ones who own their own apartments sometimes take the time for riddles or chess with passersby. They seduce with more than their flashing eyes or the subtle revealing of skin: the whores in Caeli-Amur know how to fire the mind as well as the body.

Drunk on alcohol and death, crowds wash from the nearby Arena like water from a broken dam, submerging the surrounding areas beneath their dank waters. Milling about the alleyways, wandering between liquor-houses, breaking into fistfights over their favourite gladiators, a sense of menace hovers around them.
On one such evening, Ariana sat in the frame of her first floor window, next to her carnivorous plants in the window box. In the summer, these caught mosquitoes and bugs, their white perfumed flowers attracting the insects, the purple leaves snapping them out of the air.

Ariana read Zoli’s new collection of poetry, Tomorrow’s Openings. It was a strange avant-garde collection, obsessed with machinery and technology. Other whores cried out to the crowd or howled like she-wolves to attract customers. Ariana’s cat, a long grey creature called Killer – a name not chosen by accident – padded around the room restlessly. Killer lashed out if anyone tried to touch him, his yellow eyes hostile.

Below Ariana, three young men, dressed in workingmen’s blue overalls, looked up lecherously. One of them whistled at her.
She ignored them.

“Hey slut.” One of the men’s face squinted up at her, his pudgy face haggard already from sun and alcohol.

She looked down. “Haven’t you had enough of games, boys?”

“Let us come up, and we’ll show you some games.”

“Run along.” She dismissed them with a tilt of her head.

“Whore!” The man’s face curled and he threw a bottle at her. It smashed against the wall, spattering her with droplets of wine. The purple and green leaves of her plants waved around briefly, sensing potential prey.

She bared her teeth at them, slipped into her hand the deadly dirk she kept hidden in her clothing. But they had already staggered on. Anger coursed still through her veins and she thought violent thoughts. Since she was a little child, Ariana was quick to anger. Her mother had hidden Ariana away in a little cupboard whenever customers arrived. Yes, the cupboard had been spacious enough, with it’s own little lamp and a pile of dolls and toys. But the latch outside had closed her in, and Ariana had not played with her toys, but sat and fumed: a little storm cloud of a child, alone.

Further down the street, Salini called, “Hey boys, why don’t you come up here.”

They spat at her, laughed and continued on.

Philip K. Dick Documentary

2011-04-05T19:47:00.002+10:00

M send me a link to this documentary on Philip K. Dick, featuring Tom Disch, Stan Robinson, Brian Aldiss, Cleo Mini, and others. It's really very good:

James Bradley and New Wave SF

2011-04-02T20:05:00.009+11:00

The multi-talented James Bradley has some nice things to say over on his blog about my essay in Overland:

And finally I’d be remiss if I didn’t direct you to Rjurik Davidson’s excellent essay about New Wave SF in the most recent Overland, which I read about ten minutes after publishing my last post. Davidson is of course the author of the justly-praised short story collection The Library of Forgotten Books but he’s also an astute and talented critic, and even if you’re not familiar with the writers lumped together under the somewhat misleading term “New Wave”, it’s well worth a read (not least because the new China Mieville, Embassytown, is in many ways an extended homage to Silverberg and Aldiss).

Bradley is right to question the use of the term New Wave. In the essay I define it in this way:

The aim of the New Wave was, as Thomas Disch (one of its members) explained, ‘to elevate SF to its true potential as the heir of Joyce and Kafka, Beckett and Genet’. In doing so, it opened itself up to all kinds of radical content – New Left, feminist, countercultural.

I explain in the related footnote that, "This is a ‘wide’ definition of the New Wave’, which some would challenge." Indeed, for reasons of space, the piece conflates a series of related movements and moments, essentially erasing the differences between them. More contentiously, I included some writers who would not have considered themselves New Wave in any way. Le Guin of Dick are obvious ones. Still, we should note that Delany himself has questioned his inclusion into the New Wave, while Moorcock has denied that New Worlds had much in common with Merrill's notion of the New Wave.

On what basis, then, do I use my "wide" definition? In fact, there are a number of common elements which span all these micro-movements. Not all of the writers I mention share all of these elements, yet the commonalities suggest that some broader unifying logic is at work. Firstly, there is the rejection of the scientism and technological determinism of the Golden Age (Ballard, Delany, Dick, Le Guin, Ellison), in its place various countercultural elements are put to work (Dick and Le Guin both turn to eastern mysticism), or political analyses (Le Guin again, Ellison, Moorock, Disch, Spinrad) or lifestyle alternatives (Silverberg, Spinrad, etc), others introduce alternate gender relations and sexuality (Delany, Le Guin, Russ). Almost all of these writers share a literary ambition (and experimentation) which, as I note in the essay, is a signal that this new content is emerging. In total, then, it seems to me that the New Wave needs to be understood as a unified movement which ultimately is a part of - and reflects - the radicalism of the 1960s. Any other understanding of the New Wave threatens to narrow this broader understanding and, eventually, misunderstand what is actually going on.

Overland Essay on New Wave SF

2011-04-01T15:45:00.002+11:00

In the latest issue of Overland, I've written a piece on 'New Wave' science fiction. You can read it online here.

There's also an accompanying interview with me, where you can see me swivel around a lot in a chair and talk about politics, fiction, the 'New Wave', the 1960s, and other things.

31 March 2011

2011-03-31T19:18:00.002+11:00

1. There's an interview about the short story with yours truly over here. Not sure I say particularly interesting things, but hey ...

2. I tend to bang on about them now and then, but some things really annoy me. Like this recent review of the film of Never Let Me Go, in which the reviewer explains:

The story may have a science-fiction premise, but it is not given a science-fiction treatment. This is the story of three friends whose lives are accelerated by a monstrous destiny. Ishiguro takes for granted that society could be this cruel. It takes only a moment to see that he is right: slavery was far more brutal.

The beauty comes in the way the story concentrates a lifetime's emotions into a short period. The ethical questions that run alongside are unstated but hard to ignore. Do we not raise animals this way? How do we judge the worth of any form of life? What if you can't draw, for instance? Who goes into the special needs class?

See the logic-fail here? Apparently the story has an SF premise, but isn't given an SF treatment. Now, it that was true, then the story should be able to be told without that very premise. Of course, Never Let Me Go cannot be told without its SF premise. It's this very premise that gives rise to the questions the reviewer considers so prescient. What, then, could the reviewer be thinking when he tries to separate these very questions from an SF treatment? One can only speculate, of course, but perhaps he really means the film isn't turned into an action story. Whatever the case, the inference is clear: SF bad, non-SF treatment good. Sigh.

23 March 2011

2011-03-23T13:55:00.005+11:00

1. The history of science fiction info-graphic has been going around, and it's very cool. There's also an interesting interview with its creator, Ward Shelley. Shelley explains the method, which is most interesting:

The underlying form of my work is a kind of left-to-right reading of time. I depend on conventions, which in our culture means that you start and read left to right. We're used to scanning maps and charts in a way, and things like an arrow show a directionality or causality. But I try to make the conventions interesting by altering the standard rectangular graph format. Sometimes I have the overall map shaped by a form it's trying to describe—almost a visual pun. In this case, it's a monster, but I've also used, for instance, a human body. In this case, I capitalize on the notion of tentacles, which of course is a real trope in sci-fi....

The two main things: One, the development of science. You can't have science fiction without science, which is the investigation of the natural world using empirical evidence. And then you have Gothic fiction, which comes out of what's called the Counter-Enlightenment, which eventually became something like Romanticism. Most storytelling forms that preface pop culture really grow out of the Gothic novel and Gothic literature, and that would include most kinds of genres like science fiction, from Westerns to horror. It's just this kind of storytelling where bad things happen. There's a narrative arc in Gothic literature that becomes the mold most plot-driven fiction relies on.

What's interesting about this, is the way the info-graphic presupposes both a theory of the genre and a particular reading of its history. We might object to the idea that science fiction must be related to science, and the scientific world view, just as we might object to the particular history that is charted (I would the first, but not the second). Indeed, Shelley relies on Aldiss' Billion Year Spree, which is not a great book.

Still, you gotta admit, the info-graphic is cool.

2. Hari Kunzru met Michael Moorcock and wrote about it for the Guardian. Moorcock is cool. Kunzru is cool. This is what you get when you have two cool people in a room.

Aurealis Awards

2011-03-22T21:53:00.002+11:00

My collection, The Library of Forgotten Books, has been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award:

BEST COLLECTION
The Library of Forgotten Books, Rjurik Davidson, PS Publishing
Under Stones, Bob Franklin, Affirm Press
Sourdough and Other Stories, Angela Slatter, Tartarus Press
The Girl With No Hands, Angela Slatter, Ticonderoga Publications
Dead Sea Fruit, Kaaron Warren, Ticonderoga Publications

My money would be on Angela Slatter, but then again, Kaaron Warren is also a wonderful writer. Alas, I haven't read any of Bob Franklin's work. In any case, congratulations to all the shortlisted writers, and special mention to Margo and Scott.

Ellen Datlow's Honourable Mentions

2011-03-14T21:54:00.002+11:00

I gots one. For "Int. Morgue. Night."

3 March 2011

2011-03-03T14:19:00.004+11:00

1. Not too long ago, I had the unfortunate experience of buying someone Ursula K, Le Guin's Earthsea books as a present. To my horror, they explained that they didn't think A Wizard of Earthsea particularly original, as they'd read stories about boys and magic schools before, in Harry Potter for example. I didn't pursue the conversation, as I was a little taken off guard. I had thought the person might have take a brief look at the publication date of A Wizard of Earthsea and noticed it was published thirty years before the Harry Potter books. Equally importantly, where the Potter books are (well, the three I've read), basically derivative and not very good fantasy (public school novels with magic), the Earthsea books have real fantasy payoffs. Where in Harry Potter quidich is just soccer on brooms, in the Earthsea novels the same story couldn't be written without the fantasy (say, the shadow in the first novel). Le Guin has herself noted some of these things in the beginning to one of her essays.

Anyway, in my opinion Ursula K. LeGuin is the single most significant SF writer of the 20th Century. The Left Hand of Darkness is probably the most significant science fiction novel, while The Dispossessed is perhaps my favourite of her works. There's a great interview with Le Guin on the BBC available here. It's amazing that at 81, she is so intellectually lively, so engaged.

2. On an interview with the ABC(about halfway through the program), Jonathan Strahan suggests that the thing that unites Australian SF is its tendency to take an outsider perspective, a third party point-of-view. He infers this from Australia's marginal position politically and geographically, and it's an interesting point. What does it mean? Whereas a US novel might place a character in the center of a power structure, would an Australian one place the character somewhere outside it, on the margins? If this is true, it's a very likable trait. But is it true? Perhaps it is of people like Greg Egan, Margo Lanagan, Deb Biancotti, Ben Peek, Paul Haines. Perhaps it is.

3. My review of Meg Mundell's novel Black Glass, which was in last Saturday's Age, is available here.

I love M. John Harrison's list

2011-02-27T08:56:00.000+11:00

And I've been thinking about it for several days:

Losers. Saps. People who don’t want anything much. Frail people, fragile people. Motiveless people (unless they’re evil). Broken people. People who won’t heal. People who can’t heal. Passive people. Disordered people. People who can’t stop themselves being bullied. People whose bullies don’t come to harm in the final chapter. People whose weaknesses of character aren’t balanced by corresponding opposite characteristics, or who are not redeemed by acceptable chains of events. Unacceptable chains of events. People who are too much this or that. People who won’t reason. People who are too rational. People whose puzzlement never lifts. People whose actions “don’t teach us anything about ourselves”. People I can’t identify with. People who walk away from their own narrative. People who are swept away by events (unless they’re subsidiary characters). Events that are too like reality to be interesting....

It goes on.

The Red Desert

2011-02-22T20:55:00.000+11:00

Last week I rejoined Melbourne's cinemateque. My first film was Antonioni's The Red Desert, in which a young woman awakes to an alienating industrial world. While the subject matter was interesting enough - a very 1960s existential story - and the script passable (is in need of continuity and editing), the film was a visual triumph. The particular intersection of industrial with natural landscape was achingly beautiful, while the framing of the shorts and the cinematography breathtaking.

This intersection reminded me strongly of the attraction of Steampunk. The factory piping, the shots of gigantic ships passing along canals, the ruined little shacks, the ancient cobblestoned Italian towns, the use of colours (reds, greens) - all of this was not just visually arresting or stimulating, but something I can't quite recall having seem on film.

These stills don't do it justice, but they give a little taste.

Writing as pleasure? Or resistance's terrible hold?

2011-02-16T17:09:00.000+11:00

At the cafe, A and I began talking about writing. We'd both read 'The War of Art', by Steven Pressfield. In the book, Pressfield spends a lot of time discussing how writers have to constantly struggle against 'resistance.' Among other things, Pressfield - himself an accomplished writer - suggests that resistance is basically a correlate to creativity. You write; you experience resistance. The artist's true path is to fight against this resistance - hence art is war - and conquer it. If not, resistance will lead you astray. It will have you make excuses, head to the fridge, surf the internet - anything but do the work you're on this earth to do. Here's a couple of selections from it:

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our
soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward
pursuing it.

Procrastination is the most common manifestation of
Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell
ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead
we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to
start tomorrow.”

Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance.
Why put in years of work designing a new software interface
when you can get just as much attention by bringing home a
boyfriend with a prison record?

And so it goes on.

A felt that this made sense (well, actually both of us relate to this phenomenon, well perhaps without the boyfriend prison-record thing...). In A's opinion, resistance was a natural correlate of writing, it was yin to creativity's yang, its necessary opposite.

I'm not so sure. It is true that many writers I know, the vast majority even, suffer from resistance. But I've found that it is not universal. There are some writers who love writing. They are happiest at their desk on a wintry day - many of the most prolific writers (Asimov say) are or were like this. You know them by the words they use: "I love writing"; "I had so much fun", whereas most writers, I think, tend to love "having written". In other words, how one responds to writing has to do with one's personality and how that has been shaped by our experiences and socialisation.

In his wonderful book Impro, improvisational acting teacher Keith Johnstone discusses how creativity is ground out of us as children. He begins his book with the following: 'As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull.' He goes on:

I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did. The damage was greatest in areas where my interests and the school's seemed to coincide: in writing, for example (I wrote and rewrote, and lost all my fluency). I forgot that inspiration isn't intellectual, that you don't have to be perfect.

Johnstone's book - really worth reading, even if you don't try improvisational acting - rings a chord in me. When I was a child, I had no 'resistance.' I loved writing, and could do it for hours, just as I could draw or paint for hours, or build ships or castles and so on. I notice this ability nowadays with children, like my nieces. The key here is that they see writing as play. It's done for fun, whereas introduce the 'seriousness' of adulthood - assessment, critique, publication - and a lot of the fun can be taken out of it. But not for everyone. For those who manage to maintain their creative activities as 'fun' and 'play', resistance doesn't exist. That, then, is the place we need to get - all of us resistant writers.

13 Feb 2011

2011-02-13T09:01:00.000+11:00

1. Summer is escaping us; it seems to have zipped by. I've always thought that there are two reasons for the sensation of time compressing as you get older. The first is that each year is a smaller proportion of your total life, Hence, for a four year old, a year is a quarter of their life, and so seems a long, long time. For a fifty year old, it's one fiftieth of their life span, just a fragment. The second reason is that as you grow older, you experience fewer original experiences. When you're seeing/doing new things, time gains an intensity. When you're do the same thing, going to the same job in the same office, for example, time becomes fluid and passes with rapidity. For this reason, when you return from overseas travel, you feel like you've been away a long time. But friends will say, "Wow, you're back so soon!"

2. It's been a great summer for films. I can't remember there being so many good or interesting ones: Black Swan, The Fighter, Blue Valentine, True Grit, The King's Speech, Hereafter (which I haven't yet seen). Blue Valentine is my pick of the summer, an excruciating dissection of a relationship falling part, intercut with the story of the couple's falling in love. The film's focus is narrow - the rhythms of the relationship without much of a wider context - and if there is one limitation to the film, it is this. Interestingly, the film never shows us the moment that the relationship shifts from a loving to an embittered one. It implies that the relationship has just suffered a long incremental decay. Whose fault is it? Again, the film doesn't lay blame, but those who have tried to rescue a relationship in the face of a passive withdrawn partner might sympathise with Ryan Gosling's character; those who have become exhausted by the lack of maturity of a partner, who simply have nothing more to give, might sympathise with Michelle Williams'. In any case, the two performances raise and already fine script to exceptional heights. Gosling and Williams are wonderful.

3.On the subject of films, Ben and my script, "The Uncertainty Principle" has been optioned:

Munich/Berlin-based international finance, development and production outfit Lailaps Pictures, which was co-founded in 2006 by producer Nils Dunker and actor Anatole Taubman, has optioned the rights to three screenplays which will serve as the first projects in its English-language feature film slate.

The projects being developed by Lailaps include Greg Latter’s adaptation of Peter Harris’ award-winning courtroom thriller In A Different Time, with Bille August attached to direct; the thriller The Spy Of God, penned by International Emmy Award-winner Sylke Rene Meyer and based on true events of how the Cold War was fought out within the Vatican City in the late 1970s; and the romantic comedy The Uncertainty Principle, written by Ben Chessell and Rjurik Davidson.

Lailaps Pictures is planning to pursue a two-prong strategy in its activities with involvement in English-speaking feature films with global appeal - either as a minor producing partner or full producer – and budgets of up to $20 million, as well as in German-language feature films and TV projects to be geared specifically to the German, Austrian and Swiss markets.

Summer films

2011-02-01T10:10:00.000+11:00

Over on the Overland blog, I've reviewed Black Swan and The Fighter.

Naomi Klein's TED talk

2011-01-18T12:05:00.000+11:00

I've been looking forward to Naomi Klein's TED talk for some time. She's not the funniest of TED speakers, nor the most original. But she's one of the most prescient.

Review of The Library of Forgotten Books

2011-01-11T16:18:00.000+11:00

Another kind review over on SCI-FI London:

I'd not heard of Rjurik Davidson before coming across 'The Library Of Forgotten Books' but what little I had managed to glean from the press release and a bit of web research meant I knew couldn't afford to ignore him. ...

It may be short, less than 200 pages total, but this is an excellent collection and well worth the investment. If there is a thread that runs through each story, it concerns love and the troubles we all have with it whether trapped by it, searching for it or desperate to get away from it, but there is also a recurring theme of layers and of things hidden beneath layers, whether it is feelings, or personality, or bureaucracy or relationships, each has multiple layers and we reveal or cover them to suit. Each of these stories is worth reading but in particular the world of Caeli-Amur, intriguing and very absorbing does stand out and I'm hoping to see some full length works in that world very soon.

An Unusual Year

2010-12-22T14:52:00.000+11:00

Years, of course, are arbitrary means of division. Life's cycles are multiple and not confined to the calender. We move and grow and shift over longer rhythms. But hey, the end of the year makes a good time to assess things, and the other day I was searching back through my memories, in an attempt to assess my year, and I thought, "Hmmm, is it possible that this had been the best year ever?" The fact that I'm even thinking about it means that, well, it probably has.

Which got me to thinking, what makes a good year? It is not the external accomplishments, though I've had some of those this year. But really - and here I risk sounding a little hippy - these are, in this case, sort of the external expressions of an inner state. Obviously not literally all of them, but the kind of world I live in now. Perhaps this is similar to the way your friends and the people you surround yourself tend to be an external expression of that inner state. If you want to know the kind of person you are, look at the people around you. They're a pretty good reflection of yourself. That's a big generalisation, but, hey, I just made it. This year, I've been blessed to be working with awesome people, but I've also managed to surround myself with the kinds of people I admire. I won't list them, but they're smart and creative, and more importantly, honest, open, loyal. The correlate is spending less time with people who you may like a great deal, but aren't actually the kinds of people you admire. We won't list them either.

Having said that, I've been lucky for my collection to come out, and it's been pretty well reviewed (including being called a sleeper cult classic by Jeff Vandermeer), I've a contract for two novels, and there's some secret news that can't be revealed but is just as awesome.

I've also made it to silver sash two blue stripes in Kung Fu.

I traveled to Fiji, which was moving in its own way, and to Japan which I loved loved loved. I may shortly be off to Europe, which is related to the aforementioned secret news. Or I may be there in the middle of 2011.

This year was probably our best at Overland magazine. Whether that was because we had the 200th issue, I'm not sure. Certainly the online presence has been a wild success. Subscriptions are going up. It's the kind of magazine that we'd (the editors) like to read.

This all sounds very positive, but as is the case with all of us, a few troubly things have happened too, a lot of growth, which is always confronting, and that may indeed be the best thing of all. I'm not at all the same person I was twelve months ago. I am, but I'm not, if you take my meaning. So in the scheme of things, a pretty good year, yes.

Oh, and I don't take a lot of photographs, but here's one of my favourites for the year. Up in the Dandenongs, there's a hollow tree in the forest. L climbed in but didn't want to be photographed, so she waved her scarf as she was coming out. And then there's the cat, Kaze, looking wise.

Avatar Review

2010-12-11T14:48:00.000+11:00

You can read a poorly edited (for the web) version of my Screen Education piece on Avatar here.

A Nice Review

2010-12-10T15:34:00.000+11:00

On his Omnivoracious amazon blog, Jeff Vandermeer writes a list of "Gift Book Suggestions for the imaginative, the curious and the weird." Of my little collection, he writes:

The Library of Forgotten Books by Rjurik Davidson (PS Publishing) – This sleek and mysterious hardcover first collection turns the spotlight on an exciting new dark fantasy writer. Visit the metropolis of Caeli-Amur, where rival Houses of thaumaturgists battle one another, ruthlessly employing philosopher-assassins. Enter the totalitarian city of Varenis, whose librarians every week consign thousands of forbidden books to obscure shelves. The product of a fecund imagination, this is the sleeper cult classic collection of the year and well worth seeking out.

8 December, 2010

2010-12-08T10:38:00.000+11:00

1. My review of Iain M. Banks' Surface Detail, published in the Age, is available here.

2. Who would have thought that Jeff and Lizzie's letter to Julia Gillard, defending the rights of Julian Assange, would have attracted so much support. When last I looked, there were over 4000 comments. I'm one of the signatories. According to the ABC news last night, it was signed by "100 prominent Australians." I chucked at that.

3. Unwrapped Sky should be called Unfinished Sky. Well, sometimes it feels like that. So much to do, so little time. A bit of a metaphor for life. Three more weeks before it arrives at the publisher.

The Magic of Disney

2010-12-04T15:20:00.001+11:00

I loved visiting Disneyland when I was in the States (both as a child and adult). My favourite moment was when I looked over to see a three Buddhist monks hugging Mickey Mouse. Now that was a moment. But I've always been aware that behind the "magic" stands a corporation which has a dubious history. At the moment, Disney employees are in a dispute with that corporation. It tells you a lot about America at the moment and how hard it is to live for so many people. When I was last in the states, I was really struck by how many people were doing it hard. Some years ago, the well-known journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book, Nickel and Dimed where she went "undercover" to investigate how hard it is to survive on minimum wage. It's worth checking out.

SF, Literature and Me

2010-11-27T09:42:00.001+11:00

Over in the Overland blog, I've posted some personal reflections on the division between SF and 'mainstream literature'.

8 November, 2010

2010-11-08T15:06:00.000+11:00

1. Over on the Overland website, you can find my somewhat overdue review of Deb Biancotti's a Book of Endings

2. A RRR presented this morning mentioned opening to door on Halloween to a group of trick-or-treaters. One of the kids was dressed as - Adam Bandt.

3. Signs last week were not the best. A) I found myself at McDonalds, surrounded by drunken race-goers after Oaks day. I was neither drunk nor had been at the races. The sun had tinged their about 20-year-old skins. A girl looked carnivorously at a group of boys across the McDonalds' detritus. When I went to the toilet, one of the boys stood swaying interminably by the urinal. It was worse than The Road. B) I found myself watching Beauty and the Geek. I can't explain it at all. At least World's Strictest Parents was funny. C) The essays I'm supposed to mark sat accusingly and untouched on the table. Not my finest week, no.

4. Tom Holland's Rubicon is a wonderful history of the Roman Republic. Holland writes with the eye of a novelist. His sense of the narrative, his character portraits, his insights into the culture and psychology of Ancient Rome - all these things are something to behold. Yet, in the end, there is an emptiness at the heart of the book. Holland's history is, ultimately, one of great men. The reader never really gets any sense that there's something at stake. Holland doesn't, in other words, move from narrative to analysis. He never moves from what the great characters think they are doing, to an analysis of what they actually are doing. His theory of history is thoroughly - traditional.

2 November, 2010

2010-11-02T11:52:00.000+11:00

1. The Melbourne Cup public holiday. I always get confused on public holidays: am I supposed to take one? Or should I write, write write? Do writers get holidays? See why I'm confused?

2. One of the things I really like about writing is that I get to listen to cool music. In fact, some days that's how I get myself onto the computer in the first place. "Oh, I'll get to listen to that album." It's always a choice between music with and music without lyrics. Without allows me to concentrate better. But in my collection, music with lyrics gives me a lot more choice for cheerier stuff. And cheerier music sometimes makes the writing easier, rather than all that maudlin or at least introspective stuff I listen to.

3. The debate with Emmet Stinson about politics and literature continues around the place. Like, on the Overland blog.

Further on SF film

2010-10-26T12:22:00.001+11:00

In the last blog post, I complained about The Book of Eli. Recently the Guardian had a piece on why Hollywood doesn't make good SF films:

If science fiction is a genre of ideas, is there any wonder Hollywood doesn't get it?...

It is often said that science fiction is a genre of ideas. The best of it brings together threads not just from the physics or chemistry, but from the arts, politics, philosophy and beyond. The best SF authors are natural autodidacts, synthesising often disparate areas of knowledge to produce their own distinct visions of reality. And the best of those visions offer invaluable insights into the modern world as we experience it.

Finely said. Damien Walter, who wrote the piece, wondered what current SF books would make great films. I'd love to see:

1) A miniseries or trilogy of Stan Robinson's Mars trilogy to outshine Total Recall.
2) A YA series of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies Series to show up the Twilight films.
3) An Ian M. Banks space opera to make George Lucas regret his last Star Wars movies more than he already does (or at least should).
4. Silverberg's Downward to the Earth to rival Apocalypse Now.
5. Le Guin's Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness both of which would be entirely new, as far as I can tell.

I'm sure there's plenty more out there: William Gibson or Bruce Sterling perhaps? Connie Willis's time travel comedy?

19 October 2010

2010-10-19T11:04:00.000+11:00

1. The final rewriting of Unwrapped Sky continues. This is the part I like the best, when all the huge narrative questions have been resolved and you can make each line as good as possible. That final run-through takes the manuscript one giant leap up in quality. For much less work. That's the kind of equation I like, though I'm expecting to reach the latter sections and think ... uh, this doesn't work at all and all this 'It's all going well happiness' will dissolve into a something more like 'Wwwwaaaaahhh'. But at the moment, it's all happening to the sound of:

2. Watched The Book of Eli the other day. There was much to dislike about this movie: as far as post-apocalyptic films go, give me The Road or Children of Men any day. But the one thing they all share is a messianism. Why do post-apocalyptic films so often lead to the messianic, or at least to a kind of religiosity (I think Mad Max 3 did this also). It's something I've been thinking about a little lately, and something I'll write about when I write on The Road for Screen Education soon. Anyone else have any ideas?

3. On the other hand, The Girl with the Pearl Earring is a really great movie, not least because you think you know how everything is going to pan out - and it doesn't happen the way your cliched expectations work.

4. Oh, over at TISF Keith Stevenson has reviewed The Library of Forgotten Books. The most interesting thing about it, for me, is that Keith considered "The Cinema of Coming Attractions" a "triumph." It's the first good feedback I've had on that story. Most liked the Caeli-Amur stories. Some liked "Int. Morgue. Night.", which Keith didn't really. Anyway, the review was generally pretty good. Here it is:

Rjurik Davidson is a writer with a unique voice. At once romantically yearning and darkly insecure, his work straddles the deep contradictions of the human spirit transporting the reader into a symbolic dreamspace where the hopes and fears of his protagonists play out...

With four Caeli Amur stories appearing together, I get the feeling we’re reaching a critical creational mass. It’s a great thing to be able to watch an imaginary world being constructed around you, and the stories in this collection, as well as delivering engaging tales with equal measures of humanity and weirdness, do just that, and demonstrate that Caeli Amur has the potential to be a richly detailed and exciting world with many more tales to tell than the ones contained here. The other two stories, ‘The Cinema of Coming Attractions’ and ‘Int. Morgue. Night.’ share a common link with a distinctly filmic feel. The second, being a Marlowesque homage is the weaker of the two. This is ground that has been well-trodden and it’s difficult to breathe new life into it. But ‘The Cinema of Coming Attractions’ works on so many levels, it’s a triumph. A riff on determinism with people who seem as trapped as the celluloid characters they’re so reminiscent of, speaking lines that similarly are almost deadened of all meaning; but still hoping, still trying. It’s a story that stays with you long after the final fade out.

The Library of Forgotten Books is a startling new collection from a writer to watch.

I got Peeked

2010-10-13T12:10:00.000+11:00

Over on his blog, Ben Peek has interviewed me. I think it's one of the best ones I've done.

7 Oct, 2010

2010-10-07T20:22:00.000+11:00

1. You really know you're sick when you are confined to bed, but even then there's nothing you want to do. The pages of a book seem to be spinning. Television seems emptied of meaning. Uhhg. What can I do? Maybe engage in a debate.

2. In his interview with Peek, Paul Haines lists George R.R. Martin as one of his influences. He credits: "George RR Martin with fucking epic fantasy to death and breaking every rule that exists in writing such a thing."

Am I the only one who doesn't love George R. R. Martin? I mean, I couldn't disagree more with Paul when he says he credits "George RR Martin with fucking epic fantasy to death and breaking every rule that exists in writing such a thing". Are we talking about the same Martin? Let's have a look at what he does well. (I say this from having read A Game of Thrones. I can't see myself continuing with the other ... five books?). He is a master plotter. Yes, he holds together multiple POVs wonderfully, and his pacing is fantastic. If you want to know how to do action-consequence, he's someone to look at. He also kills his main characters. Gotta like that. But breaking every rule in writing epic fantasy - I think not. The world is pretty generic, he has a build-up to a war, he doesn't really undercut notions of good and evil. His characters have two dimensions with the exception of the Tyrion Lannister. So Martin does a certain thing - epic fantasy - technically very well. But to me, that first book is pretty stock standard. There's more rule-breaking in Moorcock's Elric series, now forty years old. Or Harrison's Viriconium stuff.

3. I watched The Killer Inside Me recently. I've always respected Michael Winterbottom's films and his first American feature is well worth seeing. It's about a psychopathic cop in a small Texan town. It's paranoid and surprising. But I must admit that as I find graphic violence harder and harder to watch, and this has a couple of scenes where I pretty much closed my eyes. What was interesting was that Winterbottom defended the use of violence in the film as more moral than the plastic-coated violence of many movies. I'm not sure I'm convinced by that: if you did a film about torture, would you 'realistically' film a torture scene? Is that really necessary to draw out the moral point?

6 October, 2010

2010-10-06T19:41:00.000+11:00

1. I've been doing an interview with Ben Peek over the last week or so. Or he's been doing one with me. Anyway, it's been a back and forth discussion which is, I think, one of the best interviews I've done. There's something about the dialogic nature of it that allows for more than just the question/answer format. It won't be on Peek's blog for a week, because he's put one up with Paul Haines, which is well worth reading, because Haines is, well, worth reading.

2. The new title for the novel formally known as Caeli-Amur is (no, not love symbol)Unwrapped Sky. . It suggested itself to me as I read a Mayakovsky poem, perhaps to be quoted at the beginning of the book. The section reads:

Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars,
In hours like this, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.

from 'Past One O’Clock' – Vladimir Mayakovsky

When I was in Moscow, I visited the Mayakovsky museum. It's a terrific little place, filled with murals and posters and pastiche-clippings. If memory serves me right, you descend from the top of the museum down until you reach the bottom of the building, where you exit. The whole thing has the feel of the 1920s avant-gardes: cubism, constructivism, dadaism - futurism. Originally the museum had been Mayakovsky's apartment. Ironically, it's right next to the Lubyanka building, where the NKVD and later the KGB ran their affairs. They did, in a sense, contribute to his suicide. That's Mayakovsky above.

Miscellaneousness on 29 September, 2010

2010-09-24T16:30:00.000+10:00

1. The piece I wrote for Overland about creative writing had a good mention in The Age. Owen Richardson wrote that "Rjurik Davidson's valuable feature about creative writing courses gives pseudonyms to the people he talked to, as if there were something slightly scandalous about the whole business: the piece should start a conversation well worth having."

It did spark something of a conversation. Elsewhere, Emmett Stinson has this to say about it:

We need to view the burgeoning semi-genre of what I’m calling ‘the Creative Writing exposé’ with a great deal of suspicion, since anti-Creative Writing screeds actually reinforce our notions of creativity rather than critically investigating them. Two more have appeared in the last week or so (and thus constitute this week’s links), being Elif Batuman’s ‘Get a Real Degree’ in The London Review of Books and Rjurik Davidson’s unfortunately titled ‘Liberated Zone or Pure Commodification?’ in Overland. Davidson’s piece is ultimately interesting and even-handed, although it runs what currently seems to be Overland’s party line on what literature should be, which is ‘a literature that takes us back into the world – that thinks about the issues that surround and affect us – rather than away from it: a culture of engagement rather than escapism, of reflection rather than consolation’. As I’ve noted elsewhere, an extremely problematic set of assumptions underpins this notion of literature (and more on this below).

...

I replied to Stinson on the Overland blog.

2. My interview with Shaun Tan has been published in Metro magazine. One of my favourite quotes from Shaun:

"I sit somewhere in between the world of fine art and science fiction, and believe they have many similarities between them ... "

3. Books I'm reading for review. Honestly. Three for Overland. One for The Age.

Deb Biancotti's Book of Endings
Keith Stevenson's (ed) X6
Iain Banks' Surface Detail
China Mieville's Kraken

Four great books.

Creative Writing in the Universities

2010-09-12T13:57:00.000+10:00

The current issue of Overland has an article I wrote on creative writing courses in universities.

Stan Robinson In Conversation

2010-09-10T09:49:00.000+10:00

Over at Overland, I've written a post on Stan Robinson's MWF appearance.

The News

2010-09-05T09:47:00.000+10:00

My agent, John Jarrold, issued this press release a few days ago:

PRESS RELEASE –TWO-BOOK WORLD RIGHTS DEAL WITH TOR FOR DEBUT SCIENCE FICTION NOVELIST

James Frenkel, Senior Editor at Tor Books in New York, has concluded a two-book world rights deal for Australian SF author Rjurik Davidson, for a good five-figure sum in US dollars. The agent was John Jarrold.

The first of these books will be Davidson’s debut novel. It is presently titled CAELI-AMUR after the city in which it and its sequel take place.

James Frenkel said of Rjurik Davidson, “He's a unique talent, with a fabulously imagined world that is both enticing and strange, the sort of place that makes one at the same time afraid and excited, thrilling to discover as its many secrets are revealed. Peopled with engaging characters who seem entirely real, it's a world with a rich, deep history and a strange, compelling destiny.”

“Rjurik’s writing is wonderful,” said John Jarrold. “I’m very happy that this marks my first direct deal with a major US publisher. I know that Jim has admired his short fiction for several years.”

Rjurik Davidson is a freelance writer and Associate Editor of Overland magazine. He has written short stories, essays, screenplays and reviews. His short collection, The Library of Forgotten Books, was recently released by PS Publishing. His work has been published in Postscripts, Years Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volumes One, Two and Four, Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror 2006, SciFiction, Aurealis, Borderlands and elsewhere. He has been short-listed for the Ditmar Award for Best Short Story three times, the Aurealis Award once and won the Ditmar award for Best New Talent in 2005.

Contact John Jarrold for further information:

John Jarrold: e-mail j.jarrold@btinternet.com phone 01522 510544.

2nd September 2010

Adam Bandt on the Two-Party System

2010-08-20T15:45:00.001+10:00

My friend and Greens candidate for the seat of Melbourne, Adam Bandt, spoke recently at the Wheelers centre about the Two-Party system.

The Fear of White - Podcast

2010-08-16T08:29:00.000+10:00

You can listen to my story, "The Fear of White," over at Terra Incognita.

Weekend Advertising

2010-08-14T09:14:00.000+10:00

1. It's silly, and it's a pizza ad, but it's kinda fun. Apparently it's gone viral - an interactive zombie ad:

2. On the Gruen Nation on TV the other night, I caught the best ad the greens never made. Pity they didn't...

Writing and Reading

2010-08-12T17:52:00.001+10:00

1. I've rediscovered my love of reading. That's a funny statement for a writer, but for some years now, reading has felt like work. Partly, it's been the fact that I am reading a lot more. I think partly it felt like work because I haven't had enough time to actually do it. But the last month I've had lots of time, and I've read my way through the feeling that it's a labour. Doesn't hurt to be reading great things.

2. On the topic of reading great works: there's nothing like reading something which I feel I couldn't myself technically pull off. I write here of the consistent brilliance of Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. Perhaps it doesn't have the narrative drive of many novels, but sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it's amazing. And her ear for dialogue! Narratively, it's follows, of course, the rise and fall of the three Jacobins, Danton, Desmoulin, Robespierre. Often the dramatic moments are skipped over, and there are so many events in the five years of 1789-1794 that the thing seems almost structureless. It's a case in point of a novel not following anything like the three act structure so familiar from film. It seems at once to be long and rambling, and yet everything happens at its right place, not just historically, but narratively. Mantel also consistently chooses not to write the most dramatic moments, but the moments around them. If she does write them as scenes, she hides the most dramatic actions within them. By doing this, she allows the imagination to fill the blanks, and avoids melodrama at every point - A Place of Greater Safety is a novel of great subtlety, astonishing considering the most un-subtle events it chronicles.

3. In the middle of a new draft of Caeli-Amur. With each pass it creeps up in quality and control. But there are bits there which, damn it, I would write differently now. Yet they're lodged in there by the structure of the thing, and touching them might mean breaking it. At what point to you stop rewriting? Add to this: did I have to write a multi point of view novel? Did I have to have three POV characters and all their orbiters? I long for the beauty of a short story. I long not to have to fix those problems I've written in ... won't somebody save me?

4. If you want to cheer yourself up about the publishing industry, don't read Norman Spinrad's post about the "Death Spiral". There he explains:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called “order to net.”

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120....

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid.

Mr Wu and an Interview

2010-08-08T11:34:00.000+10:00

Over at Verity La, there's an interview with me about my story, "The Interminable Suffering of Mysterious Mr Wu." They've also reprinted the story.

Overland 200th Issue Launch

2010-08-06T08:43:00.000+10:00

Overland’s 200th issue, believe it or not, has just gone to print. That’s 56 years and 200 issues. Who would’ve thought a humble, left-wing magazine founded by Realist Writers group from the Communist Party would still be hale and hearty in 2010? And not just hale, not just hearty, but at the forefront of literature and culture -- and with a thriving online community to boot?
Seriously though, we are mighty proud that we still produce, time after time, issue after issue, an intelligent and provocative publication.

The 200th issue is brimming with controversial essays on culture and politics from some of Australia’s most rebellious writers like Chris Graham, Anwyn Crawford and Clive Hamilton; riveting fiction from Christos Tsiolkas, Janette Turner Hospital and Karen Hitchcock; and a poetic experiment unleashed from the minds of 20 poets working in unison – plus a graphical remix of a story from Overland 1 by Bruce Mutard.

This historic edition is going to be launched at a gargantuan and sophisticated shindig at the Melbourne Writers Festival. The night and issue will be launched by distinguished novelist Rodney Hall and current editor Jeff Sparrow, and much good humour and revelry will ensue.

Food and drinks on us (at least until the tab is exhausted) at the abovementioned party.
Writers, readers, friends and comrades: this is the must-attend event of 2010. We aim to see you there.
Pertinent details: 4 September 2010, 7pm, Feddish, Federation Square, Melbourne

Random Stuff

2010-07-26T14:36:00.000+10:00

1. You can read a brief piece of mine, "Otherworld" on the new online journal Verity La.

2. There's a short review of "The Winding Down of the World" over at Tangent Online. Kathleen M. Kemmerer describes the story:

Psychological horror is the name of the game in “The Winding Down Of the World” by Rjurik Davidson, a story about a man trapped in a hell of futility and existential angst worthy of a Twilight Zone episode ... I won’t spoil the ending, but back in the day, Rod Sterling might have bought the rights to this one. There are repeated echoes of William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” However, instead of the anarchy, dynamism, and intensity that characterize the poem, the feeling is more like the interminable waiting and sick futility of a Samuel Beckett play.

Can't complain at being compared to Yeats and Beckett, two of my favourites.

3. Another review of "The Library of Forgotten Books.":

If the book has a theme, I think it's doomed or impossible love. The first three stories concern lovers who are prisoners of their situations, the fourth a widow in love with the public image of her dead partner, the fifth an assassin in love with her target, and the sixth a librarian intrigued by the writers whose books she buries in the stacks. In but one of the stories is escape from the trap truly possible, and even then it's thanks only to the protagonist's newly discovered thaumaturgical powers. But though Rjurik Davidson's world can be bleak, it's full of beauty and imagination and ideas, where even the grossest distortions of the human body are described with careful eloquence – and in trapping its characters, or forcing them apart, it reminds us of our own freedom.

22 July 2010

2010-07-20T11:03:00.000+10:00

1. Is there a better comedian than Bill Bailey? It's a silly debate. But A and I discuss the best we've seen. Bailey, Steven Wright. Kirsten Shaal... I note, that they all have a particular surreal edge to their humour.

2. On and off I delve into Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. This rambling, majestic book about the French Revolution is a triumph. I marvel at her characterisation and dialogue - is there a cliched phrase in the novel? It shifts points of view and tense like a cat darting through alleyways. Yet it starts slowly, and at times it is difficult to follow. Who are all these characters? Why doesn't she give us more indication of place or people in a scene? Yet, I think I've learned more from it than any novel in the last few years.

3. Since returning from Japan, I have lost all drive to write. It will return. It's just a matter of filling the well, which I thought the travel would do. Apparently not. I don't think I've ever felt such creative emptiness before. I've tried to fill it with reading, sleeping, going out, improvisation classes. I've never believed in writers' block. Was I wrong? Perhaps a little read of Bradbury's Zen in the The Art of Writing . But now that I think about it, I don't actually feel like doing anything.. Curiouser and curiouser.

4. The interview with Shaun Tan went well. He's such a thoughtful artist (Check out his piece on creativity on his webpage.) Interviews are tricky things because you're interviewing for an audience, so the questions you might like to ask, are not always the ones you should ask. The ones you should ask are often the more obvious ones, which the interviewee has heard before and has a standard answer. One task of the interviewer is to somehow break through these stock answers to something new. I have a standard question to do this: "Is there a question you'd like to be asked but never are?" This question immediately engages the interviewee and the tone of the interview often changes. I'll possibly post some of the Shaun Tan interview up here, as not all of it will be published in Metro magazine.

Another Review of The Library of Forgotten Books

2010-07-15T08:49:00.000+10:00

At Rising Shadow:

I hadn't heard of Rjurik Davidson before, so I knew nothing about his stories when I began to read this collection. In my opinion he is – without a doubt – a very talented writer. His stories range fluently from fantasy to science fiction.

The Library of Forgotten Books contains the following stories:

The Cinema of Coming Attractions
Int. Morgue. Night
Lovers in Caeli-Amur
Twilight in Caeli-Amur
The Passing of the Minotaurs
Lost in the Library of Forgotten Books
The first two stories in this collection are science-fictional stories with a noirish flavour. Both stories are well written and fascinating.

The last four stories (Lovers in Caeli-Amur, Twilight in Caeli-Amur, The Passing of the Minotaurs and Lost in the Library of Forgotten Books) in this collection are stories about Caeli-Amur and they demonstrate Davidson's ability to create marvelous adult fantasy. Although I liked the first two stories very much, they're nothing compared to these four stories.

The fantastic metropolis of Caeli-Amur is an amazing creation and the way Davidson writes about the happenings and characters is wonderful. The characters are interesting and the dialogues are good. After reading all the Caeli-Amur stories I think I can say that they are triumphs of imaginative fantasy.

All these stories are amazingly powerful and they contain different kind of themes, so there's something for everybody. I loved the atmosphere of these stories – Davidson transports the reader to another world with his words. These original, thoughtful and atmospheric stories are great entertainment to readers who want quality and substance in their fantasy stories.

I enjoyed Rjurik Davidson's stories very much. It's a shame that this collection has only a bit over 150 pages, because when I reached the end I hoped they'd be more pages to read. I loved these stories so much that I would've liked to read more similar stories. I'm sure that Rjurik Davidson will go far, because his stories are among the best new stories I've read.

It'll be interesting to see what Davidson writes next, because these stories show that he has lots of imagination. I hope he writes more stories about Caeli-Amur.

I can highly recommend this short story collection to speculative fiction readers.

Paul Haines' Slice of Life

2010-07-14T14:50:00.000+10:00

Over on the Overland wevsite, I've reviewed Paul Haines' Slice of Life.

Japan Two

2010-07-09T19:54:00.000+10:00

1. The Silver Temple in Kyoto, Y, her friend, and I.

2. As I look at one of the the buddhas in a temple room at Eikan-Do, I shiver runs up my spine. It is not the most famous of the buddhas. Instead it is almost hidden away in the darkness, which makes it more beautiful than the gaudy ones surrounded by golden paraphernalia. Is it just the beauty of the surroundings, with the delicate zen gardens tended just so? Is it the buddhism I've been studying resonating within me? Am I simply cold?

3. I meet B and the others after the Germany/Argentina world cup game. Though I have no money, they convince me we should take a Taxi to Namba, where we end up in a triangle park, surrounded by young american magicians trying to impress japanese girls with their magic, churlish spanish dancers, skaters. The summer night is warm and B continues to call his friends: "You've gotta come out man. We're hanging with an Aussie! You've gotta come out." Eventually one of these friends arrive. At 5am we have udon noodle soup and regroup.

4. If you're ever in Osaka, visit the aquarium. The whale sharks are amazing, the sea otters cute, but the spider crabs are my favourite.

5. The rules of eye contact differ in Tokyo from elsewhere. Eye contact is made, and then the Japanese's eyes are able somehow to slide from yours as if contact was never made in the first place. I try to emulate it with P, who laughs when I fail.

Review of The Library of Forgotten Books

2010-06-28T22:28:00.000+10:00

Liviu Suciu at Fantasy Book Critic has written an early review of my collection. He says some really nice things about it, including:

Once in a while a book comes out of nowhere and impresses me so much that I either have to review it on the spot if it is relatively current, or write a "pre-review" post...

I have not heard of Rjurik Davidson before but the title and cover of the book attracted my attention and when I checked its contents, the second part of the collection consisting of tales of Caeli-Amur jumped at me. Standing at about 160 pages The Library of Forgotten Books consists of 6 stories, four original to the collection and one available online at the link above.

The Library of Forgotten Books starts with two alt-history tales, one set in France of the 60's and one in an Australia with an inland sea that made it a superpower in the late 40's and early 50's and then come the pieces of resistance, four stories set in the Caeli-Amur milieu of rival houses that have magicians and geneticists - including the title story set in Varenis a totalitarian rival of Caeli-Amur.

ANALYSIS: The themes of the collection are the star-crossed lovers against a harsh and unforgiving world, deception and survival, intrigue and murder, all against a noirisih city background, whether in France, Australia or in Caeli-Amur's universe...

Overall The Library of Forgotten Books (A++) is the best collection I have read in a long time - and that in a year in which I have previously read five very impressive collections reviewed HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE. No story that missed for me and three awesome ones I plan to reread for a long time to come. I really want more from the author and any Caeli-Amur story is a must for me, while a novel set in that superb universe would be a big time asap.

Monday June 28

2010-06-27T23:55:00.000+10:00

1. A little Japanese boy - rotund and aggressive - points his finger as I pass to imitate shooting me. I laugh. He clearly knows that I'm the enemy.

2. I've moved to Ikebukuro, one of the many "centres" that run around Tokyo. When I arrive, I find myself lost in a vast mall beneath the station. All of these areas are filled with criss-crossing people. Finally, I emerge from the West Exit into the bustling streets of Ikebukuro. The six and seven-storey buildings are covered with red and yellow signs. Restaurants, bars, gaming houses, cafes - the place is filled with life. My little Ryokan his hidden away in a back street, a little haven in the storm.

3. From the top of the Mori building, Tokyo looks as if it came straight out of Blade Runner. That is what L said as we looked out into the glittering lights stretching off into the hazy distance. Here's an image I stole from someone else which gives an idea of what it looks like.

4. P and I hit the warm Tokyo night. The tiny wine-bar is classy and we make friends with almost everyone there. K is apparently too "masculine" for Japanese men; when P teases her about it, she strangles him. U looks like she's about 23, but she's actually 32 with three children. It's her birthday but her husband has not come out for her birthday drinks. P and I miss the last train home, so we decide to stay out until the morning. We find another bar - this one half-filled with Gaijin, many of whom seem to have been in Japan too long. P knows one of them - the Stooge - from his time in Osaka. The Stooge circles the bar looking for japanese girls the way an old dog waits for a bone. He plays on his westernness for some kind of notoriety. Still, he doesn't seem to have much success. By the time the bar closes, P and I have drunk what seems to be Hemmingway-esque proportions. We take our new friends to a club. It's pumping with Michael Jackson and Prince. The energy in the air is wild. It's 5am. P and I laugh and laugh. The dawn is still yet to break.

5. Japan in World-cup crazy. Soccer is on everyone's lips. I'm going to find a sports bar to watch the Blue Samurai when they next play.

Tokyo, June 24

2010-06-24T21:01:00.001+10:00

1. The long train ride from Narita airport cuts first through green countryside, scattered with thick bamboo forests whose denseness immediately tells you that you're in a tropical region. Before long, this gives way to the pale brown and cream buildings of the suburbs. Many are three storied; others are looming apartment blocks. They are stained and worn. Between them run hundred of power-lines. Altogether, the Tokyo suburbs are reminiscent of Asian other cities, and this is the first of the surprises for the traveller who has absorbed the images of Tokyo as the neon-lit Shinjuku or Shibuya. Altogether - the rain coming down from the grey sky - the city seems grim. This sense of dislocation is a common experience for the traveller who ventures to a famous city or country. Nothing is quite how you imagined it, or rather, the place has a sense of irreality, as if it is an imposter, a counterfeit of the real thing that only ever existed in your mind.

2. It has been a long time since I've been in a place where I have been so ignorant of the local language. It's a humbling experience. The most simple things take on an almost overwhelming difficulty. Gesture and expression become crucial. But there's something wonderful about this, for it highlights just how much of our communication takes place on this level. So often we are caught in our own thoughts about what to say. Here I have no such problem.

3. P takes me to the tiny bar, La Jetee, in Golden Gai. The bar sits perhaps ten people - four sandwiched between the bar and the wall. Six around a table at the end of the bar. The walls are adorned with film posters: Godard's A Bout de Souffle (the wonderful Breathless) and of course La Jetee. along the walls are half-emtied bottles of spirits, each one with a name scrawled on it. These are the regulars' bottles. Supposedly Tarrantino has one there somewhere. The bar has been run by the same woman for thirty-five years. Each year she travels to france. As my Japanese is non-existence, we converse in French. Here is one of the Golden Gai alleys, where if you look closely, you might find La Jetee.

The Library of Forgotten Books

2010-06-18T07:58:00.001+10:00

For anyone interested, my little collection is now available for pre-order at PS Publishing. There are two versions: the signed and jacketed hardback, and the hardback. Here's what PS have written about it:

In this collection, PS Publishing presents the short works of a powerful, exciting new voice in SF and fantasy: Rjurik Davidson, whose protagonists wander dark cities of dreams, ravished by love and tormented by destiny...

"Rjurik Davidson is a lyrical fabulist whose stories resonate and illuminate like particularly lucid dreams. This is the proverbial writer to watch!" - Jack Dann

Visit the fantastic metropolis of Caeli-Amur, where rival Houses of thaumaturgists-half scientist, half magician--battle one another in vendetta, espionage, and murder, ruthlessly employing philosopher-assassins: killers weighed down one minute by deep thought, uplifted the next by pure ecstasy. Enter the totalitarian city of Varenis, whose librarians every week consign thousands of forbidden books to obscure shelves, in halls haunted by dead writers, half-ghost, half-demon...

"Rjurik Davidson is a unique and fascinating writer. The stories in this collection are entertaining, thoughtful, and always thoroughly original. Put this one on your must-have list." - Jeff VanderMeer

Voyage to an alternate post-World War Two Australia, whose vast inland sea has made her one of the world's Great Powers; there, in a Melbourne colossal beyond conception, criminals, communists, and government agents weave shadowy conspiracies only a weary veteran private eye can hope to penetrate. And holiday in a French resort whose cinema offers patrons fugitive glimpses of their countless possible futures, torturing them with hope, exhilarating them with despair...

"Rjurik Davidson's stories are engrossing, thought provoking, and often have a political undercurrent. You owe it to yourself to read his first collection." - Ellen Datlow

These are the visions of Rjurik Davidson: cogently atmospheric, psychologically profound, boundlessly imaginative.

Wed, 16 June

2010-06-07T20:55:00.000+10:00

1. If you're interested, the new issue of Overland is slowly edging onto the website, where I've written the editorial.

2. I finished the St Kilda Film Festival piece, and to my great delight have been commissioned to interview Shaun Tan about his short film, The Lost Thing. I saw the dance/performance version of his The Arriva at the Sydney Festival in January, which held its own by virtue of Tan's iconography. But otherwise, the narrative lost its way. I'm looking forward to this film though, as Tan directs it himself. Here's the trailer:

3. In this rewrite of my novel Caeli-Amur, I've revisited Tolkein, to see how he handles large-scale action. In fact, I thought I'd be bored during the Helm's Deep battle and the Battle of the Pelinor Fields. To my surprise, I was still engrossed. One of the reasons Tolkein's battles work is that they are populated by characters: at Helms Deep the friendship of Gimli and Legolas; at the Siege of Gondor, Denethor's despair, Eowyn's challenge of the Nazgul King. Tolkein pans in and out of the large scale: first he describes the actions of large groups, but then he immediately narrows the action to one character and their decisions (Merry's inability to open his eyes until Eowyn unveils herself before the Nazgul). Anyway, that's how interest is maintained, because if he were to keep it at the first, large scale, you would lose interest, but if he narrowed it down, you would lose a sense of the sweep of the battle. The other reason I wasn't impatient is that they're actually quite short - compared with the film version, which seems to take up most of the third movie.

22 May, 2010

2010-05-22T08:27:00.000+10:00

1. For a long time I've been obsessed with this song.

2. I'm going to Japan. There I'm reuniting with the Black Rat. In Osaka, I'll stay with R. For years I've planned this trip, and now it's finally happening.

3. After some significant time jumping from one form of exercise to another, I've discovered Saolin Kung Fu, which I love. It is like a mixture of yoga, pilates, self-defence, aerobic activity, weights and of Taoist and Bhuddist philosophy. The great thing about it is that you can practice and improve. Here's footage of me doing my first sparring. :)

4. At the opening of the St Kilda Film Festival - which I've been commissioned to write about - G (who is also a writer - she's about to hand in a thesis) and I discuss the differences between short films and short stories. The correlative form of the movie is not, in fact the novel, but the novella. The novel is too long and complex. Just as the short film is a "shorter" form than the short story. One difference, is that many short stories have subplots, something many short films cannot afford. In any case, the opening at the grand old Palais theatre was fun. The selection of films varied, but almost all were good. Noni Hazlehurst, who introduced them, noted how little support short films receive from television networks and other possible supporters. One airline, she noted, is currently showing reruns of Are You Being Served?. Wouldn't it be cool if instead, you jumped on a plane to Sydney to see a collection of short films?

Wed, April 14

2010-04-14T16:36:00.001+10:00

1. Yesterday the latest Postscipts Anthology, Edison's Frankenstein arrived. It has my story "The Winding Down of the World" in it. It's one of the most beautiful anthologies I've ever seen. It has it's own box it comes in, the inside of which has some kind of blue velvety material. Hmmm. Here's a photo of it.

2. The week in Fiji was a combination of lovely, confronting, difficult, relaxing. My grandfather's grave was on a windswept hill overlooking the bay in Suva. It's a beautiful spot, though down below trucks and cars chugg along the road and beyond that is an industrial dockland. His gravestone is no c708. It took us a while o find it. The plaque is gone, leaving only the weathered stone. Fifty years after his death, there's not much left. Indeed, it made me think, fifty years on there's not much left of anyone's life.

3. "The Siren's Call" was finished sitting on my balcony looking over the sea. It was warm. Tropical fish swam in the water. Breakers crashed on the reef about a two hundred metres away.

4. Like so many holiday destinations, Fiji has the smell of colonialism. Fijians running around looking after whites. The whole thing is so naturalised, I wonder if any of the tourists even think about it. Like all good colonialisms, it seems totally naturalised.

Writing the repressed

2010-04-03T11:58:00.000+11:00

One of the elements that seems to recur in my fiction is the repressed character. That is, the character who doesn't actually realise, or refuses to acknowledge, how he or she feels. This is both fascinating to me - who among us always recognises our unconscious needs and desires? - and the greatest technical challenge I have encountered. If one was to write it in the omniscient, things would be simple:

"Olaf had not yet realised that stirring within him was a completely different emotion."

In the third person limited and first person it becomes more difficult:

Olaf/I felt something stirring within, but pushed it away.

But these are only sentences. The matter becomes again more complex when actions are involved, because then you are balancing the characters action with the expectation of the reader. "Why does the character do that?" the reader often asks (and indeed this has happened many times to me), "when they have said the opposite. It doesn't make any sense." It's such a delicate balancing act, because (especially in the first person), the character themselves cannot express the very thing you're trying to draw attention to. (The above example is as heavy handed as you'd ever want to be.) Rather, you need to use subtle action and dialogue, if you can. One trick is to have the character surprise themself with their action, which must be the culmination of all the hints that have come earlier.

It's something I've wrestled with ever since I wrote "Domine", and it just won't go away.

15 March, 2010

2010-03-15T16:17:00.000+11:00

1. K organised tickets for A and I to go to the Malthouse for a play called The Furious Mattress, about the 1990s case where a woman died during an exorcism. It's black but its comic, and at times it descends into surrealism. Chatted with Melissa Reeves, who with Christos Tsiolkas - together with two others - wrote Who's Afraid of the Working Class, which Ana Kokkinos filmed as Blessed. The new play - now no longer on - tread that fine line that black comedy always has to: where it alternately threatens to become black and bleak or farcical and not serious enough for the subject matter. The zealous exorcist used to be a "plumber," for example. But The Furious Mattress was just wonderfully well written. It made me want to write plays again, which I've been thinking about over the last year or so.

2. Somehow my life has recently turned into a whirlwind. I think it's the 6.30 mornings, the hour-long drives, the lack of time to sit by myself. I like it by myself. It's good there.

3. The first series of Spooks is enjoyable enough. There are a couple of moments where they surprise you, and you think: wow, I didn't think that would happen. That is what you want in a series. Nevertheless, I couldn't get past the particular liberal fantasy that it is. It deploys exactly the same techniques as the West Wing. The main characters, sure they might be flawed, but we're on their side ultimately. We're asked to sympathise with them, MI5 members whose job is to, as they constantly, relentlessly, put it protect "National security." They're against "extremists", left or right. The episode on the Kurds is slightly sympathetic because they actually explore a little of the politics of the situation. But the other left "extremists" - the black bloc anarchists, the splinter from the IRA - are divorced from their contexts and represented, essentially, as criminals. I'll go for a fantasy series, but let's make it really fantasy, not the kind of thing MI5 would actually ask you to believe.

4. I said I'd give you the opening of the new story. Still draft, but there you go:

Elias spun around on the top of the boat as we steamed over the ruins of the sunken city of Caeli-Enas. He sang the old sea shanty, ““Into the water, into the wind, we’re off to catch a Sii-ren. We’ll take her with home, that wily crone and break her till she’s cryyy-in’.” His smile was wide and his head was tilted to one side like a child’s.
The rest of us looked out over the water towards the massive moon hovering just above the horizon.
“It ain’t no singing matter.” The captain glanced back at Caeli-Amur. “Take a look at that there city, boy. It might be the last time you see your home.”
“We should have brought a cutter, or another sailboat,” I said.
“Rubbish!” The captain’s voice boomed over the water. “We can’t rely on the wind for this journey. No – the steamer we can control, wind or no.”
Our fishing boat was large enough to have it’s own dingy sitting at its rear. We were steaming towards Taritia, those unmappable islands that shift and turn around each other like the spinning tops the children play with in Caeli-Amur’s alleyways. If we could navigate their deadly channels and shoals, on one of those islands we would find our Siren. Below deck lay the cage and the various nets, cuffs, and chains we would use to imprison her.
“Even so, we should have brought a cutter,” I repeated.
Elias slapped me on the behind and ran away laughing. “You’re scared.”
The silent northerner Sjorn looked ominously at Elias who stopped his playing for a moment. As soon as he looked away, Elias pursed his lips, frowned and rolled his eyes, his head shaking from side to side to jokingly imitate Sjorn.
“It’s not an easy thing to capture a Siren,” I said. “The Siren’s voice is not just as a weapon of allurement.”
Hundst shifted his great bearlike hulk. “I’ll take the Siren and shut her up. I’ll strangle her until she is broken.”
Each of us had our fantasies: the Captain dreamed of the great buckets of florens which the Opera would pay for one of the creatures; cabin-boy Elias, always joking and laughing, sought adventure; the brute Hundst liked the thrill of the hunt; while steersman from the north, Sjorn, had a darker and more despairing motive which I was yet to fully comprehend.
Once we had captured the Siren, I planned to interrogate her as we steamed back to Caeli-Amur: to study her forms of thought, her values, her notions of the world, and to produce the first full-scale treatise on the Siren from the wild. The Opera had refused to allow me to study the three Sirens already in Caeli-Amur. They were too valuable, I was told, to be wasted on the investigations of a young natural philosopher.
“Look.” The captain gestured to the waters ahead. “The weather has blessed us. At this rate we could reach Taritia within the week.”
He was right. The storm did not hit us until the Taritian archipelago was in sight.

March 9, 2010

2010-03-09T17:20:00.000+11:00

1. Getting quotes for The Library of Forgotten Books, which should be out in June. I still seem to be completely unmoved by its impending release, perhaps its stubborn refusal to recognize how cool it is - just in case something terrible happens.

2. A week ago C and I ran eight kilometers around Albert Park. By the end my knee was suffering from sharp pains. More pilates needed apparently! Tonight we went on the same run. Same result. More pilates needed apparently!

3. Work at Latrobe has begun, and I've enjoyed it. I've managed to write every morning for about two hours before I start, which is fun. The only annoying thing has been the 6.30am starts. I had planned to be staying more north of the city, but my two north-of-the-city close to Latrobe options are gone, so every day I wake in the increasingly dark mornings. By ten thirty at night I'm usually zonked, which messes with my GREAT READING PLAN.

4. For some reason, I started a new story called "The Call of the Siren." Why? Just one of those things: seemed like a good idea at the time. It's been lovely working on it compared with redrafting Caeli-Amur. My novel readers have both signally failed to actually read the novel (and I who would I be to blame them? :)), which leaves me unsure of whether to send it to others or to redraft alone without the input of others. Which sounds like a good realist story title, "The Input of Others." A story about family relations perhaps?

5. I'd give you the opening section of the new story but it's crap. Later dudes.

Whirlwind Weekend

2010-03-01T15:21:00.000+11:00

1. The Uighur food is a cross between Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern food. Of course we order too much: a delicious chicken and potato dish which is the signature dish, meat samosas, spinach fried bread.

2. Staggering and overloaded from the food, with hearts beating and absolute certainty, we head to the Opera house to see Midsummer Nights Dream. I've never seen opera before, and though this loses the language (such a big part of Shakespeare), the design - set in 1920s India - created by Baz Luhrmann was vital. In another life I think I was a set designer.

3. Continuing the culinary excellence, for breakfast we eat at a turkish inspired cafe: spiced lamb and rich tomato eggs. Almost too much. But not. But almost.

4. Maroubra beach: near the rock pool the waves crash over a ledge like a waterfall. We creep over and duck down next to the ledge as the water floods over us.

5. After dinner at Bondi, we walk up to the headland and look over the glittering moonlit water. I imagine a great sea monster arising from the water - great Cthulhu perhaps. Don't ask. It's just my brain.

6. The White Rabbit chinese gallery is filled with modern art. My favourite was a warped hologram of some ancient troll-like creature.

7. Coffee and icecream - what's not to love?

8. Dinner at Mums. I've been there enough now that I feel at home.

9. Flight home. Sigh. Sleep.

February Tales

2010-02-26T11:49:00.000+11:00

1. I've bought two great sheets of card to properly map out the world in which we find the city of Caeli-Amur. As a child I was always drawing maps of fantasy lands. It's incredibly suggestive; it fires the imagination. It's a great trick for writers who are searching for ideas. When you draw the little details - a swamp here, a group of islands there - stories immediately suggest themselves. The brain thinks "What happened there? Why is it that shape? Why is it near that mountain?"

2. The artwork for The Library of Forgotten Books is being done as we speak. I've had a sneak preview. It's cool.

3. It's been a fortnight of friends: J, L and P who are back from Montreal.

And A. A doesn't eat meat during the week because of the damage that agriculture does to the environment, especially to the climate. He admits that there is a contradiction between this action and his planned trip overseas. Airplanes are, of course, some of the most destructive contributors to climate change. In terms of carbon footprints - if we accept those terms - we would barely be able to fly anywhere and have a good conscience. For example, we would be able to fly Melbourne to LAX once a year, and do nothing else at all, not eat drink or drive, and that would take us to our responsible limit. Well, that's according to this calculator. Of course, we might not want to accept those terms.

4. In a little cafe in Surrey Hills, the ice-queen two tables down is squeezing her boyfriends blackheads. The third junky, his eyes with that thousand yard stare beneath his shaved head, shuffles around.

"Hey," calls out the ice-queen to the third junky, now across the road. "Turn off your phone. You're calling us."

The third junky looks back and waves, "Yeah."

"No! Look at your phone."

He looks down, turns the phone off and nods back at her.

The ice-queen gets back to the blackheads.

A moment later, a truck pulls in front of us. Its tray is filled with great stripped carcasses. A trotter juts out. Next to it lies a slab of burgundy mean - a liver perhaps? A man hops out of the truck, collects a wheelie-bin from the butcher across the road and a mechanical arm dumps its bloodied contents onto the rest of the meat.

Not two minutes later Justice Kirby walks past in an expensive blue suit.

Some days are hard to fathom.

A Week

2010-02-18T07:47:00.000+11:00

1. Four hundred thousand people come to the StKilda Festival, streaming across the streets in all directions. After the BBQ at MOs we head out, bouncing between places like balls in a pinball machine, one long Hunter S. Thompson-like afternoon, until we end up watching You am I. At some point W and MO and the others are gone. Another band is playing. I'm with new friends whose names I can't remember. Then other new friends. I'm speaking french with one of them. An evening of fragments.

2. The Greens Organising Launch for their election campaign takes place in Dante's. All in all it is pretty much what I expected: commitments to a campaign for the Environment and Social Justice. There are perhaps 80 people there, and a number of old friends. A is running for the seat of melbourne, so he's on the launch ad, which I feel quite ambivalent about. Formally, it's a modern PR document, shot in the style of all advertisements, and there's something about the form that makes me uneasy, because it takes away from the message with "style." It's an accommodation to the image obsession of modern politics, even though A says all the right things on it, and is completely trustworthy. You can check it out here. Still, it was nice to be at an event where people are actually doing something politically.

3. Work on the novel has slowed. Sigh.

4. I'm not one for TV, but the new Danish series "The Killing" on SBS is great. Not only is it finely written, but the techniques used are just so much ahead of American television. At times I felt I was watching a film, and indeed, European television seems to draw much more on European film - it has a sophistication that the US seem incapable of. The series starts with the murder of a young girl. The protagonist is a female cop on the last day of the job, before she moves to start a new life in Sweden. You can check it out here.

5. Tonight I start doing yoga with B at a new place in Albert Park, which is all part of operation "July." Which is that by July, my beer gut shall be gone... Operation July includes yoga, pilates, running and weights. I think I'll even fit in some fitness classes, which I haven't done for a year or so.

Stan Robinson

2010-02-15T17:29:00.000+11:00

Kim Stanley Robinson is coming to Melbourne later this year for the Utopias conference and the World Science Fiction convention. He is one of my favourite science fiction writers, partly because his fiction is so politically conscious. His work is always an argument for a more socially just world. He is also incredibly knowledgeable about science, and so he has also become an advocate - arguing for the kind of socially just ideas his novels discuss (science, he argues, is opposed to capitalism, he argues). As a science fiction writer, he stays away from the "rapture of the nerds" fantasies - the singularity, post-human futures where we're all uploaded into computers, futures where humanity conquers the universe, and so on - the kinds of things which are completely implausible. He's given a great talk on climate change here, and below is the start of a talk on science, religion and ideology. There's a beautiful structure to the speech, and Robinson has that wonderful ability to recast familiar notions to that you understand them in a new or fresh way. And, let's face it, you gotta love a writer who knows Althusser's concept of ideology:

Non-Toxicity

2010-02-12T09:04:00.001+11:00

1. I've finished rewriting the second part of Caeli-Amur, which means I'm about 300 pages through a 400 page book. It still needs more work, but it's so, so close I'm starting to get excited.

2. My dear friend S has launched a blog about non-toxic living and products. You can check it out here. She writes, for example:

Question: I’d like to live more naturally and organically, but it’s too expensive. How do you expect people to live this way?

This is the most common question I get in my workshops – the economics question – cost as a factor preventing people from buying quality or organic foods and products. It’s also been noted in many studies...

When I work with families who have children with behavioural issues, depression, anxiety, cancer, or chronic immune diseases for example, I discuss their value systems and map out their daily habits and what they commonly spend their money on – what they put on their child’s skin and hair, the cleaning agents they use in and around the house, what exercise they do, and what the family is eats. The findings are usually fairly consistent with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data on household spending. Nutritionist Shane Heaton notes of these statistics that that the average Australian household spends only 18 percent of its expenditure on food and non-alcoholic beverages. As a percent of household spending, this is less than the previous survey in 1994. We’re spending less of our money on food than we used to. On top of that, the average Australian household spends more on junk food than fruit and vegetables; more on fast food and take-away than fruit and vegetables; more on alcohol than fruit and vegetables. Alcohol and tobacco combined account for nearly twice the spending on fruit and vegetables, and we spend five times more on recreation than healthy foods.

Carnivorous Plants

2010-02-11T07:59:00.001+11:00

I love carnivorous plants, parasites and other unusual flora and fauna. Over at Smithsonian Magazine they have pictures of ten carnivorous plants. This one, Nepenthes eymae, has been found digesting rats. That's impressive.

Things and more things

2010-02-09T09:44:00.000+11:00

1. H and I saw Antonioni's Zabriskie Point a the grand old Astor theatre, which I should make more of. H said she thought it was the most boring film she'd ever seen until the last scene, where a hotel in the desert explodes to the sound of Pink Floyd's "Be Careful With That Axe Eugene" (which I've always loved), rerecorded as "Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up". But it kind-of grew on me. A sixties film if ever there was one, the opening sequences from the student demonstrations were the least interesting (though the meeting, which features a young Frank Bardacke who appears in Berkeley in the Sixties, have a sense of verisimilitude). The scenes at Zabriskie Point itself were langourous and beautiful. There were experimental patches, and the final explosion seemed to symbolise the destruction of bourgeois culture, with all the other objects as well as the developers going up.

2. The Road is among the books on my 'to read' bookshelf, and I wanted to read it before I saw the film. But, of course, I haven't yet finished the other seven books to read first, so I saw the film and thought - yes, this is fantastic. Like a New Wave science fiction novel - one of Ballard's ruined worlds or M. John Harrison's first novel, The Committed Men - it shows us a desolate world of empty freeways, silent forests, wrecked cars. The story of the love of a father for his son, in a world with profoundly different rules than our own, is just so moving. The film just overloads you with a sense of love struggling to survive among hopelessness and entropy. It's beautiful.

3. O says to me that when I visit, she'll show me the hidden places in Sydney. I've always loved the idea of hidden places in a city and when people ask me about what to do in Melbourne, I always think, "Yes, what are the special hidden things here to do and see. Not the obvious, but the unusual." What are these? A lot of them are the little places you discover by accident, I think, or you might not think of immediately. There's a little bar hidden behind Swanston St I discovered one day, the Collingwood Children's farm and that whole area of the Yarra, little streets (there are some beautiful ones hidden away in StKilda with old art-deco buildings), bits of the Dandenongs. I don't know about Sydney though, so it should be fun.

4. One of the reasons I haven't read The Road is that I'm finishing George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, which seems universally loved (well, it's a NYT bestseller and soon to be TV miniseries). I'm reading it to see what makes it so popular. Martin's strength are his narrative beats. They are strong and clear. X happens, Y is the consequence, which then leads character L to take Z action. His characters are simple, but strong. What does that mean? They have simple and strong desires (not contradictory ones), which more often than not cannot be achieved. Or if they are achieved, the consequences are not what the characters thought they would be. So far so good: it's all basically McKee's version of story. Martin is clever in his use of shifting POVs, making you sympathise with a number of characters on conflicting paths. All in all it's strong storytelling. But is there a unique idea in it? Is there anything new? I'm yet to find anything and I'm more than four hundred pages through. Do we understand anything more about anything - people, the world? Not really. So I find myself vacillating between yawning impatiently and wondering what will happen next.

Marcin Wasilewski Trio

2010-02-07T22:06:00.000+11:00

It had been a long while since I'd seen a jazz trio. Despite an unfortunate coincidental meeting, the Marcin Wasilewski trio were scintillating at the South Melbourne town hall. The concert was in a great art-deco style hall with huge patterned light-shades high overhead. When I sat down I imagined myself in the 1920s. The trio play a very European style of jazz - abstract and ethereal, and beautiful, and quite modern. The band looked fantastic: Wasilewski with his shaved head radiating intellect, the bass player like a ramshackle bohemian, the drummer like a military man pulsing rhythms on the drums. B explained to me that she imagined the pieces as great narratives, entire stories which her mind took her away on. Among the pieces they played was "Cinema Paradiso". This is them playing it somewhere or other: