The Bookshow Blog

werribee list poem (sorta)

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Simmone Howell is on the MWF regional writers' tour

At the zine workshop the yoofs called my op shop books stinky and then hacked into them with gusto
The fake Bukowski poem went in but the ’sensitive’ list poem was scorn-and-sniggered
Every sketch in ‘How to Draw’ was signed with the initials WTF
I felt giddy as a girl tore a page out of The Pearl and Burning Bright to make a ‘redactive’ poem
Someone had already written in the margins ‘Good Description’
The most hacked-into book was Earth & Space, a science/social studies textbook (1984)
I was particularly pleased that one student made a cover from a postcard of Kentish Oasthouses
We got a lot done in the hour
Later I spent some of my per diem on a gentle exfoliating facial cleanser

For visuals (of the zines not the cleanser) see here

Tags: list poems, mwf2010, regional writers tour, there are no rules
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Day 1: Werribee (Melbourne Writers’ Festival regional tour)

Monday, August 30th, 2010

At 6 the alarm on my iPhone wakes me – quacking ducks. I make myself breakfast of a toasted seedy roll with vegemite and a cup of tea. I quietly let myself out of the house to a Melbourne morning, cool and grey-swept skies but yes, there are signs everywhere that these are the last days of winter. I catch a tram andas always the rhythm makes me think in stocatto. I tweet that I am on the tram. Twitter is there to catch those moments in my life in which the mundane and the poetic intersect. I am vaguely obsessed with the odd collison of ephemera and permanence that takes place on the Internet.

I get to the rendezvous point. I find the other writers and Luke our bookseller and panel chair and Patrick, the tour manager. We acquire coffees, sign forms, consider dissolving into the commuting crowds with our week’s worth of per diem. But no.
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Tags: Jack Heath, mwf2010, Penni Russon, Simmone Howell
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Dog’s Tales

Monday, August 30th, 2010

I first found out about the renaissance of storytelling a couple of years ago while at a music festival in England. One of the most popular tents at the festival was dedicated to the performance of aural storytelling. I was amazed. To me storytelling is connected almost exclusively with childhood, big bear and John Waters. But nowadays, those kids who watched Jemima and crew weave their narrative magic on Playschool are getting up and telling stories of their own.

One of the most popular of the storytelling initiatives is The Moth in New York. The Moth is a storytelling organisation that holds hugely popular events in which professional storytellers such as Salman Rushdie and Malcolm Gladwell can share the stage with fresh faces. (Check out Gladwell’s storytelling session here.) The Moth inspired the weekly storytelling night Dog’s Tales which is held at St Kilda’s Dog Arts Hub.
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Tags: Carmel Bird, Chris Flynn, DBC Pierre, Dog's Tails, Elif Batuman, Josephine Rowe, Kalinda Ashton, mwf2010, Reading, Storytelling, Tiffany Murray
Posted in Melbourne Writers' Festival, Reading | 1 Comment »

The Thinking Person’s God-dess

Monday, August 30th, 2010

In retrospect, the hyphen in the title of Mark Manolopoulos’s panel at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on modern religion should have set off warning bells. Despite my love of language – and particularly new language – slightly altering the spelling of an existing word in a bid to try and distinguish its role in the user’s pet ideology has been a bugbear of mine ever since I first saw the word ‘womyn’ on a flyer at university. English lexicography has never shied away from the innovative, the outrageous, the clever or the subversive: any argument which rests on such a feeble linguistic twist to support even part of its doctrine, therefore, cannot help but feel underwhelming. The fact that Manolopoulos spent the bulk of his session reading out loud from a paper, rather than conversing with MC Peter Clarke – who looked first startled, then bored, and finally resigned – did not endear him to me; even so, I could have forgiven him, if what he said had made any sense. But for all his slow talk of rationality, “thinking people” and the eventual why of the hyphen (divine gender parity, in a nutshell) there was extraordinaly little substance to his theory of god-dess. If asked to describe it in five words or less, my unhesitating answer would be as follows: well-intentioned, harmless, and wrong.
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Tags: China Mieville, God-dess, Kraken, Mark Manolopoulos, Melbourne Writers' Festival, MWF, Philosophy, religion, The Thinking Person's God-dess, Thinking
Posted in Melbourne Writers' Festival | 3 Comments »

Kim Stanley Robinson: In Conversation

Monday, August 30th, 2010

On walking into the cavernous BMW Edge theatre to see Kim Stanley Robinson speak, my first thought was: why is it so empty? Or, more accurately: why are there any empty seats at all? Based purely on my own literary preferences, I’d rather been assuming that KSR’s talk would be one of the many sold out events; the fact that it wasn’t, rather than being a reflection on the speaker, seems to say more about the type of person likely to attend a mainstream literary festival – viz, readers who abstain from SF/fantasy.

But I digress.

Interviewed by the wonderful Lucy Sussex, Robinson spoke eloquently on a wide variety of topics, ranging from his criticism of cyberpunk as a genre in the 80s and 90s to his thoughts on society, environmentalism and literature. Geek that I am, it was the former of these topics which I found most fascinating, not least because it came at the issue from an angle I hadn’t hitherto considered – or at least, not in any depth. For those unfamiliar with the term, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction characterised by its dystopian, near-future settings in a context where the presence of a virtual world has created a culturally relevant divide between the real and not-real elements of society. (more…)

Tags: Cyberpunk, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucy Sussex, Melbourne Writers' Festival, mwf2010, science, Science Fiction
Posted in Melbourne Writers' Festival | 3 Comments »

A Wordsmith’s Dream

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

The English language is, in the words of David Astle, “a beautiful mongrel” – and I couldn’t agree more. Chaired by blogger Angela Meyer and also featuring linguist Kate Burridge and writer Ursula Dubosarsky, A Wordsmith’s Dream was a delightful exploration of English, with particular emphasis on some of its wilder words. My favourite, mentioned by Burridge, was gymnologise, which means “to dispute while naked.” Hardly useful in everyday conversation, but nontheless lovely! Inspired by the panel, here are some of my favourite words:

metempsychosis
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Tags: A Wordsmith's Dream, Angela Meyer, David Astle, Kate Burridge, Language, Melbourne Writers' Festival, MWF, Ursula Dubosarsky, Words
Posted in Melbourne Writers' Festival | 1 Comment »

Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Writer, Penni Russon

Today I took my wild daughters on a walk through the bush up the road from my house. We saw wombat poo and wombat holes (but no wombats), and admired the Hardenbergia violacea, also known as happy wanderer with its cheerful purple flowers scrambling over the ground or clinging to the trees. We spied the early pink flowers of the grevillea and inhaled the sweet scent of the flowering wisteria. We looked for kangaroos on the lush green hills of Smith’s Gully and were silenced by the sight of a single burnt tree (a reminder that Kinglake is just up the road, and indeed that houses and lives in our own town were lost).
In a few hours I will say goodbye to my daughters for a week, and make my way to a friend’s house for a sleepover in the city in preparation for tomorrow morning’s early start.
And there we will be, a band of gypsies: Simmone, Michael, Jack and me. Simmone jetlagged, me seven months pregnant, Jack, improbably young and beautiful, and Michael whose status updates involving his astonishing meals are a form of exquisite torture.
Sounds like heaps of fun – wanna come? Well, you can. We’ll all be blogging our big adventure so tune in to the Bookshow Blog and it will be just like being the fifth Beatle, riding shotgun in the minibus!

Tags: Jack Heath, mwf2010, Penni Russon, Simmone Howell
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The MWF regional tour: Am I ready?

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Less than twelve hours to go. At 7:30 AM tomorrow, Simmone Howell, Penni Russon, Michael Pryor and I will be in the back of a van, hurtling towards Werribee, hearts in our mouths, sweaty hands drumming our thighs. None of us knows what awaits us in the Wyndham Cultural Centre.

What if no-one shows up? Or what if lots of people do, but for the wrong reasons? (It wouldn’t be the first time a reader has been disappointed to discover that I am in fact Jack Heath, and not Jack Marx or Heath McKenzie.) What if the readers know exactly who we are, and are eagerly awaiting an opportunity to avenge the deaths of their favourite characters?
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Tags: Michael Pryor, Penni Russon, regional tour, Simmone Howell
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MyStory

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

It’s hard these days to pick up a glossy newspaper supplement in Victoria without reading something about Melbourne’s laneways. Laneway cafes, laneway bars, laneway boutiques and laneway tours, once a subject of scorn, these laneways are now used to represent the cultural heartbeat of Melbourne’s cool. The Melbourne city council has been quick to capitalise on this popularity and have commissioned a number of art projects that centre around these cement tracks. One of these is the MyStory project.

Despite my cynicism about the laneway phenomena, the Mystory project is truly a special and innovative one. MyStory is a collection of interactive self-guided tours of laneways in Melbourne by four writers: Barry Dickins, Cate Kennedy, Tony Birch and Matt Blackwood.

Blackwood who is the MyStory mastermind explained that he wanted to create a “literature map of Melbourne”. By this he does not mean a map of where literature was created, but in fact a map of where literature is to be experienced. An example of immersive narrative experience, the project utilises technology to produce site-specific aural storytelling for its audience.

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