Category Archives: Literature

20/06/2012

2012 Vogel Winner Eleven Seasons

By The Cultured Animal

I have a confession: I know nothing about football. So it’s a good thing this year’s Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award winner for an unpublished manuscript is about more than just that. Paul D. Carter’s Eleven Seasons is a grunge-era bildungsroman, an homage to working-class Melbourne and one young man’s undying love for the Hawks.

We meet Jason Dalton as a self-conscious pubescent whose first taste of football instils in him a sense of purpose and selfhood hitherto unfamiliar to him. But his single mother, Christine, is exhausted from nursing shift work, and fails to support him in his new passion. Absent from the crowd at his winning matches, she fixates on the game’s potential for violence and injury. As Jason stumbles into adulthood, their estrangement sees him lurch between feelings of guilt and resentment, with football the only release for his burning frustrations.

The story spans the 10 years of 1985 to 1995 in two parts. It’s tinged with the same nostalgic notes as other recent Australian fiction – Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones, Peter Twohig’s The Cartographer, Barry Divola’s Nineteen Seventysomething – while the careful peppering of musical references is reminiscent of Christos Tsiolkas. But despite its retrospective setting, the novel’s preoccupations are topical.

A sports philistine’s limited understanding of football culture will more likely than not be influenced by media reports of players’ poor off-field behaviour: accusations of drug abuse, violence and misogyny. These very issues are central to Jason’s inner conflict as he negotiates who he is and who his father may be. And through Carter’s well-rounded portrait of Jason, the reader is invited to challenge any prejudgments about the footballer’s identity.

Many of the story’s climactic moments are familiar set pieces: the overworked parent who never shows at her child’s most important milestones; the teenaged waywardness caused by an absent father; Jason’s sudden, emotional confession in the arms of a prostitute. Some of the plot turns are predictable too, such as the revelation of his father’s identity, followed by an almost Oedipal fulfillment of events; and the eventual reconciliation Jason must seek in order to quiet the turmoil that has raged in him for years.

But for all that, the clichés also conceal some less obvious threads. The absent father may present itself as a central trope, but at the novel’s emotional core is Jason’s relationship with his mother, and with women more generally. While his coach Arnie may represent a quasi-father figure, Jason is uncomfortable in some male groups, sceptical of their sexist jibes. We feel in him a sensitivity, a sense of being different from the pack. And yet, when he is suspended for throwing a punch at another student over a girl, he is forced to evaluate his own terrifying masculinity.

Jason’s increasingly frequent arguments with his mother reflect a rising inner tension:

‘Right. I’m a thug footballer. You and everyone else reckon so. I’m a meathead with a ball. I’m dead weight.’ She’s so close he could throw out his hand and hit her. His chest feels ready to pop.

Aside from these outbursts, Jason struggles to articulate himself. A girlfriend dubs him ‘the ice-man’. Later, enduring a crucial moment with his mother: ‘He tries out a few questions in his head but decides to keep them there.’

Yet Jason’s gentler side is expressed elsewhere. In the second half of the novel, older and less agitated, he rescues a dog from his new housemate-from-hell. Dundee is mangy, abused and antisocial, but with a bit of TLC, Jason moulds him into a trusting, friendly pet: ‘He’s a different dog than he was last June.’ By then, we are invited to see, so is Jason.

There’s so much in this book that it’s worthy of inclusion on a VCE or HSC text list. Jason’s inner voice is as strong, compelling and oblique as Holden Caulfield’s. The use of third person narrative reflects his social unease as he negotiates a seemingly continuous onslaught of difficult home truths. For the most part, Carter’s vision is splendid, and it’s easy to see why this almost 10-year labour of love was picked as the winner for this always anticipated literary event.

However, Carter’s execution doesn’t always match his vision. The narrative is uneven in places, transitioning jerkily through dramatic or delicate events, while at other times lingering unnecessarily on prosaic or banal ones. Not all the characters are convincing, either: some present as little more than two-dimensional plot devices, while many of Christine’s contributions to the slinging matches between mother and son feel like unrealistic overreactions. At times I wanted to see her drawn more sympathetically, but this is perhaps an unfair criticism – after all, there are many contemporary novels about the travails of motherhood. Here is a solid one about a son.

This review first appeared at www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com.

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07/01/2012

Didn’t get the Jobs?

By The Cultured Animal

Hmmmmmmmmmmm .....

If any of you have been trying to get a hold of Steve Jobs’ bio in Australian bookstores since around Christmas time, you’ll have noticed you can’t get it. Anywhere. What nature of fool doesn’t order enough stock of 2011′s most anticipated biography, officially Amazon’s best-selling title of the year?

Well, here’s the reason: according to a sales rep from Alliance Distribution Services, a whole container’s worth of the books – we’re talking the kind of container that causes wharfie uprisings, or gets reappropriated as a temporary inner-city bar in an obscure location – followed poor Stevie into the afterlife when the truck that was transporting them rolled. Perhaps its course was sabotaged by a Google-powered GPS system.

Image courtesy of the talented miss Nicole Firth © 2012

According to the distributor, the book will be back in stores next month. Or you could just get it as an eBook. It’s what Steve would have wanted.

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23/09/2011

Rabbit holes and rodent hutches

By The Cultured Animal
A Book is Finite.

How satisfying is it when you get to the end of a book? Good or bad, it doesn’t matter – that finiteness gives you a satisfying sense of accomplishment. The extent of your efforts is tangible: the length of the page count, the weight of the tome in your hands. You can file it away in your bookcase, on that shelf for all the other books you’ve devoured. (Underneath the shelf for books you’ve yet to read, but above the shelf for the books who still have bookmarks wedged up their dusty fannies, whom you are desperately trying to forget.) Perhaps yet the most exciting part of finishing a book is the thrill of thinking about what to start reading next.

The Internet, on the other hand, is seemingly infinite. Short of joining an ascetic monkhood ensconced in some remote tropical hills, you will never, ever be done with it. (Even when you die, a cyber imprint of yourself, however small or obscure, will no doubt continue.) Opening your browser is like being Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. No wonder that rabbit was always late – too many distractions down there.

I’m not one of those Internet-fearing catastrophists, no. I’m awed by its palatial garden of promises – even if it doesn’t always deliver the roses. Even if Nicholas Carr says it’s emptying my brain out. And so these and many other reasons are why the love I have for the Internet is a cautious one. Kind of like the love one might have for one’s parents if they’d been a bit lax in their child-rearing skills. Necessary, but not always pleasant or fruitful. Wary, but unshakable.

I get quite dreamy when I think about its utopian possibilities, and more than a little bit worried when I think about all the bad directions in which things could go.

The next few posts here at The Cultured Animal will explore some of those big possibilities – utopian and dystopian, idealistic and practical – that our cybersphere presents us.

Addendum

I know this doesn’t really count as a post. Sorry, I’m incognito. My pet ferret has borrowed the swivel chair, and this is what he has to say to you:*

1. HELP, HELP! I THINK I’M FALLING INTO THE INTERNET!

2. Do electric ferrets eat Astroturf?

3. You might find the answer here.

© The Cultured Animal 2011

*If my pet ferret had really taken up residence on the swivel chair, it’s curious that he should be presently writing about himself in third person. Well, greater minds have failed. Let’s not discount the strange and populist power of rodents just yet. Look at Mr Rabbit. (Sorry, Abbott.)

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31/08/2011

It’s hard to read a memoir without getting … personal

By The Cultured Animal

Autobiography/memoir is the most self-indulgent form of writing. It’s so self-indulgent that, if you met someone who crapped on about themselves that much in conversation, you probably wouldn’t like them very much. You’d probably tell them to go screw themselves, because that’s clearly what they’d prefer to be doing with their time.

And yet, most good memoirs are good because we end up warming to the author. Whether they’re famous or just really want to tell you about the weird shit they had to endure whilst growing up, a good memoirist must be endearing to the reader – else they’ll surely have an epic literary fail on their hands.

Just Like Old Friends

Reading a good memoir should be like making a new friend. Although it’s obviously one-sided – chances are the author hasn’t met you, and probably never will – reading about someone’s life and times should give you the same kind of warm, fuzzy feeling you get when a friend confides in you. You know, “Gee, I feel so special I was the person you chose to tell about your secret fetish for double denim. I’m definitely coming to your birthday party.” That kind of thing.

Patti Smith’s Just Kids did this. I found myself thinking about her randomly whilst walking down the street, as if she were an old friend and I might give her a call later so we could listen to Lou Reed and talk about boys over a bottle of wine.  (I think there was also a lot of denim. Leather, too.) When Patti was heartbroken, so was I. When she was giddy with wonderment, and eventually success, I was awed, proud, and felt like the world was doing all the right things: fortune was shining its golden light upon me.

A good memoir creates empathy. Patti made me fall in love with her – and, along with her, Robert.

Patti Smith: the secret to good writing is good coffee, and lots of it.

Of course, the opposite can also happen whilst tackling a memoir, and you find, rather than having imagined conversations with your new BFF for a week or two, you’ve instead had to put up with a slightly unpleasant person nattering away in your head and perhaps spoiling your lunch breaks.

Hate the book, or the writer?

If for whatever reason you don’t warm to the author, how then do you give the book a fair trial? Are your views unfavourable to the work because it’s simply bad, or because you don’t think you’d be particularly fast friends with its author if you happened to meet them during, say, year eleven at Sandringham College?

Yet you could argue that if an author fails to make you like them, the work fails too, because a memoir that doesn’t induce empathy in its reader has probably missed the point. Autobiographers pull back the curtains on their lives and invite others to watch; the compulsion to write about themselves is born from desires that just about every human being harbours: to be known and understood, acknowledged and appreciated. But if the reader doesn’t much like the author, why should they fulfill those desires and read on?

A good memoirist doesn’t have to be a good person. But the writing must compel. Any ordinary Dick or Jane’s suburban existence can be made into something awesome if the writing’s up to the job. And if the writing doesn’t compel, the life has got to. Think Chopper Read. If you check out his website, you’ll see he’s no stickler for grammar (I’d better be careful what I say – he’s no longer doing time at “Bluestone College”). But the popularity of his books indicates that reading first-hand about the life of a killer strikes a fascination, if morbid, in many people. (Cue the current controversy over David Hicks’ biography being nominated for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.)

It’s Not Me, It’s You

Failing all of the above, if your writing doesn’t make the reader love your pants or the life they walked in, try writing about something else instead, and just chuck in a few personal bits here and there. Kind of like a watered-down version of yourself (let’s face it, it’s less risky).

How To Be a Woman is the second book from British TV presenter Caitlin Moran (she wrote a novel when she was still a teenager, wowsers), whom I’d never heard of. I saw the cover of her book and thought she looked a like a cross between a girl I used to know from a place called Bogan Gap and somebody who belongs in the Addams family, and decided this was reason enough to buy it.

While How To Be a Woman is memoirish in that it’s full of (enjoyable) personal anecdotes, it’s about something other than just Moran – Feminism. It’s also riotously funny. Rolling around in fits of laughter is not the usual response to the F-word, so good on her and her furry minge, I say.

(And actually, now that I think about it, Patti’s book was never meant to be about her, but about Robert.)

Another funny lady with a funny memoir is local comedienne Denise Scott. All That Happened at Number 26 is mostly about her family, as opposed to herself. (Although, if you want to get technical, she’s part of the family.) The overall effect is that Scott comes across as the generous, loving, motherly type she most probably is, more concerned with those around her than with herself, her career and whatever else tends to be up the top of one’s list of preoccupations.

Oh, and I love a woman who can laugh at herself. More please.

Curtain Close

So, I suppose the moral of the story is, if you’re not enjoying a memoir, put it down and pick up something else, and save yourself the personal anguish. There are too many good books out there to waste your time enduring ones that strike the wrong chord, and probably enough fraught relationships in your own life already. But if you must persevere, because you are neurotic about finishing books, say, or because you are tasked with reviewing it, then best of luck to you and your skills in the New Friends department.

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02/08/2011

ABA #3: Pip Lincolne’s Guide to Online Social Deportment 101

By The Cultured Animal

If focus on community was a strong theme running throughout this year’s Australian Booksellers Association conference, then utilising social networks and having an online presence was stressed as an integral part of tapping into community.

Pip Lincolne, whose flair for social media has worked wonders for her business Meet Me at Mike’s, insists that to make that work, a business needs to have ‘really nice online manners that are the same as your offline manners.’

It’s not usual that we talk practicalities at The Cultured Animal – we’re more partial to philosophical cloud-lounging – but Pip was so endearing, I thought we’d reproduce some of her pointers from the conference.

Pip Lincolne’s Guide to Online Social Deportment 101

  • Show off: Speak in your authentic voice across multiple online platforms. Talk to people as you would in real life – because they matter to you.
  • Avoid the niche: Don’t just blog about books. That’s boring, and limits your audience.
  • Share nicely: Link, be generous, give.
  • Eavesdrop: Listen and respond to your readers/customers.
  • Thumbs up: Praise, link and credit others where it’s due. If we support others, we foster community, which in turn supports us.
  • Return calls: Metaphorically speaking, of course. Don’t let your page/blog languish – it’s bad for business. Community is about conversation. Pip says, ‘Providing a place to have a chat and then leaving the room is bad manners. It’s not a monologue.’ You wouldn’t do something like that in real life. (Unless your friends were really, really tedious.)
  • Pied piper: Lead with projects which create and nurture community. Think outside the shop. It all feeds back into business – and good times.
  • Host it: Be a place where communities can share information on events outside your shop doors.
  • Invite: Pip says to ‘smooth out the distinction between online and offline’, following up or preceding real-life events with online content. ‘Blend it together.’

Fundamentally, says Pip, having a blog is the most important thing for any business – it’s where you make yourself heard. A blog can then feed into Twitter and Facebook as secondary plaforms. But it’s important that your voice is sincere, or nobody with listen. ‘Strategy is important, but sincerity is the most important thing.’

What a shame The Cultured Animal isn’t making any money out of its excellent online social skills. But I promise to be nice, if you promise to keep reading. (At least, most of the time.)

So, that sums up our reportage from the ABA Conference for now, although some of the many inspiring ideas from what was an overwhelmingly positive couple of days may pop up again, albeit reincarnated in some other fashion. In the meantime, it’s back to cloud-lounging for a while. Or perhaps lounging on a fence, in the sun. With a real book. Bought from a real shop. (No subliminal messages there.)

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27/07/2011

ABA #2: The Times They Are a-Changin’

By The Cultured Animal

As a very famous person once said, “the times they are a-changin.”

We are in an age of rapid technological change, most of which is not worth bothering to keep up with, because you can’t, not really. The book is a form of technology that has been with us for centuries, and many have compared this age of digital media as having a similar force of impact on reading, thinking and society in general as that following the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, which facilitated the beginnings of mass proliferation of the book. Today, the ubiquity of the Internet means the ways in which we consume books is changing – not just in terms of how and where we buy them, but in what form.

One of the most tense panels at this year’s ABA conference featured competing representatives from the budding eBooks industry marketing their wares. Meanwhile, one of the most compelling speakers was Mark Higginson of Nielsen, whose audience pounced on his wealth of statistical information about consumers’ online book-buying patterns. The flurry of tweeting activity during the presentation indicated a hunger for tangible information in an industry faced with an uncertain future.

It’s certainly not just a matter of choosing between a hardback or paperback any more.

But if we’re hungry for new information about customers, they’re equally curious. Unfortunately, some very uninformed comments and queries are frequently thrown at the good people who stand behind bookshop counters. Plenty of it is well-meaning and borne from a desire to correct any ignorance. Some of it is downright rude, to the point where one’s very purpose in life is undermined. (Sort of like when my musically challenged friend bags out my favourite bands, not understanding that, as a musician, it kinda hurts my feelings.)

We understand that as representatives of the industry we are generally better versed in decoding what the hell is going on for the general public. But when faced with the same handful of recurrent questions, such as “What do you think about Borders closing?”, or “Did you know I can get this cheaper online?”, day after day, how does one quell the spirit of Bernard Black, who lurks dangerously close to the surface of one’s amiable front? How, indeed, to maintain one’s excellent customer service skills as well as one’s dignity (and sanity)?

The thing is, we might look smart (especially when wearing our horn-rimmed glasses), but as The Papa of Independent Bookselling and Publishing Henry Rosenbloom said: “While there’s no clear way forward, we’ve come to the conclusion that we know as little about it as anyone else.”

I'll be honest, I just wanted an excuse to post a photo of Dylan Moran here.

Well, if we can’t give a definitive answer to all that complicated stuff, we can at least try to deal with the yucky ‘feelings’ part of it.

Becky Anderson’s Guide to Dealing With Annoying Questions 101

In her keynote address to the conference, Becky Anderson (President of the American Bookseller’s Association, 5th generation heir to Anderson’s Bookshop, and general champion of independent and community-focused business) read to us a beautiful statement on behalf of Anderson’s, summarising their thoughts and feelings on the collapse of Borders and the state of the industry. She insisted that “first and foremost, we are not celebrating … the loss of so many jobs”, and maintained again and again her mantra: “we [independent bookshops] are still here.” Barwon Booksellers, an absolute treasure trove of second-hand books in Geelong, Victoria, sent out a heartfelt letter to its subscribers expressing similar sentiments.

It’s a good idea, and one which I urge all booksellers to follow. Either that or leave yourselves open to continued onslaughts of misinformed flak, to which you’ll be forced to respond personally each time until you sound like a broken 78. (Which would be ironic, because they’re obsolete.) You can frame your letter in Christmas lights and stick it on the shop door, so as to spare your beloved customers the embarrassment of asking any awkward questions from the get-go.

But let’s emphasise the beloved part. It may be a good idea to, er, bookend your eloquently crafted message with something along the lines of: Dear customers. WE LOVE YOU. We love you because you love us, and your custom is the reason we’re still here. We’re still here, because you’re still here. Thank  you for choosing to buy all your Christmas presents here. We hope you’re not disappointed we don’t also sell turkeys, but did you notice that Borders was kind of turning into a homewares store towards the end? One day it’s turkeys, the next – no more books! By the way – did we mention how much we love you?

And so on, and so forth.

Booksellers and customers alike, please feel free to share below your thoughts on any of these matters. Perhaps you’ve done something similar to Anderson’s or Barwon Booksellers. Maybe you’ve experienced a Bernard moment. I hope you at least got a laugh out of it, or a glass of wine.

Stay tuned for Pip Lincolne’s Guide to Online Social Deportment 101. We do like hands-on ladies.

Ciao for now xx

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24/07/2011

The Cultured Animal at ABA Conference 2011

By The Cultured Animal

Today and tomorrow, along with our wild friend Kate from Bean There Read That, The Cultured Animal will be busy drinking terrible coffee, initiating itself into the glories of Twitter, and doing a lot of listening and talking. Maybe even at the same time.

That’s right, folks – it’s time for the annual Australian Booksellers Association conference. And what fascinating times the book industry is living in!

Bookish people have a lot of ideas, let me tell you. Your Animal will be mulling them over and regurgitating them with the usual treatment over the course of the conference, and no doubt for some time afterwards too. So please do stay tuned.

Two interrelated and recurring ideas worth mentioning so far are:

1. Australia’s Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s recent faux pas predicting bookshops will no longer exist in five years is clearly still a sore point for many of the conference speakers, who have hit back at this ludicrous presumption with their eminent wit and knowledge of evidence to the contrary.

2. Physical communities appear just as important as physical books for booksellers in the digital age. The idea that online retailing is killing bookshops is far from the whole story – a story which, in any case, is only really just beginning. Or, as keynote speaker Becky Anderson of the American Booksellers’ Association and Anderson’s Bookshop put it, ‘This whole thing with eBooks is still to me the Wild West. Who knows where the dust is gonna settle.’

In the meantime, everyone should get themselves acquainted with The Indigenous Literacy Foundation and some of the fabulous work they are doing in communities (including publishing Grug in the Karrawa language). And don’t forget to pop National Indigenous Literacy Day Septemebr 7th 2011 in your diary. We heart.

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23/05/2011

The Flipback: Revolutionising the Book Trade Some More

By The Cultured Animal

Yours Truly is a bit sick to death of all this talk on about The Death of the Book, The Death of the Bookshop, and The Death of Our Brains at the hands of Monsieur Internet. (Except, maybe she’s a woman. In fact, yes – let’s call her Señora Internet. Look, she’s even got a little hat!)

In his editorial for the latest issue of McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers puts paid to all that with some encouraging statistics about the current vitality of the book industry. And just to waggle it in our faces, the current issue is “a book designed to look like a book!”

Borders might have thrown in the towel, spat the dummy, or whatever other clichéd figures of speech you might want to attach to that Dodo-ified business; but all I can say is that our “local independent” seems to be doing rather well. As a direct result of said closure? Who knows. Probably not a bunch of puffed up, Internet-fearing catastrophists.

Bringing it Back

It was with some pleasure that I was introduced to an exciting new piece of technology this week. It’s called the Flipback, and if it sounds half like a Paperback, well, that’s because it is.

Printed on super-thin bible paper and bound with its spine unattached to the cover, the Flipback only requires one hand for reading and can lie open on its own (no more panicky searches for a bookmark). You read it sideways – or you would, if the writing wasn’t printed perpendicular to the usual way. This means it’s more similar visually to reading digital text, but the experience is altogether more tactile. The idea is to flip the pages with your thumb whilst holding it in one hand. Hey presto! (But perhaps it’s a little too tactile – I found myself needing to lick my thumb in order to turn the pages easily. Maybe it just takes practice. I hope they release a Flipbacks for Dummies for this difficult new technology). Meanwhile, you could be doing almost anything with The Other Hand. I’ll leave that one up to your imagination.


When that chock-full peak-hour train suddenly surges round a bend, and the geek sitting by the aisle flounders as his slippery iPad shoots off into a sea of high heels, who is triumphant? The old-fashioned book-lover, that’s who – one hand’s steady grip on the rail, nifty little Flipback wide open in the other. Additional perks include not having to hide it from thieves, and not having to experience that annoying moment when you realise the power point wasn’t switched on after all, and the batteries are still flat.

That’s because it’s still a book, albeit one that feeds into today’s obsession with multi-tasking and compactibility (it fits easily into your back pocket). Its size also makes it kind of pretty – from a distance, you might mistake one for a cassette (remember those?), and they’re just about as sturdy. They’d look rather cute all stacked up like Lego on a shop counter.

They’ve already sold over a million of these things in Holland, where they were conceived; it will be interesting to see how we take to them when they’re unleashed in Australia this August.

Rock Will Never Die

Well, it hasn’t yet. But speaking of cassettes … Okay, so the cassettes might not be a particularly good example. How about vinyl, then? I mean, if you’re looking for an antiquated technology from an industry that has been absolutely, positively, well and truly revolutionised by digital technology, then records are most definitely it. The music industry might not be making much dosh out of vinyl, yet still it prevails.

Once the musical medium of choice, vinyl has now been transposed to a niche market for nostalgic music-lovers, serial op-shoppers, professional (and un-professional) DJs, and smug rock’n'rollers who believe noise just sounds better on vinyl. Not only are all sorts of great bands still releasing versions of their new music on record, but audio manufacturers continue to produce turntables for your listening pleasure, replete with flash 21st century packaging and super-precise speakers. If the contemporary perks sound counter-intuitive, go get one of those old boxy things with the peeling brown faux-wood. People will think you’re cool just for having a turntable, especially all of your art snob friends.

Franc Kuzma’s Stabi XL turntable. Don’t confuse it with the coffee machine.
I Heart Art

Aside from the retro-nerd kicks you might get from owning a record collection, there’s also the crucial element of art and design appreciation. If you’re downloading music, especially from an unqualified source, you’re likely to not even see the original album artwork. If you do, you’re probably viewing it as a tiny little picture on a screen. Hardly the best medium for displaying a work of conceptual art.

Which brings us back to vinyl, whose sleeves sport a large surface area, rather good for displaying album artwork. You can then sit in your velour, op-shop lounge suite and ponder it whilst soaking up the sounds of a new album. The record sleeve’s papery feel is also a bit nicer than a plastic CD case – an opinion affirmed by plenty of high-brow indie artists who prefer to package their CDs in paper (often recycled, just to underline the extent of their cultural envelope-pushing) rather than the usual plastic.

Andy Warhol’s famous cover art for The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, complete with real zip. Tactile.

The continued love for vinyl shows an appreciation for the album as a complete, conceptual piece of art and a fulfillment of a band’s artistic vision, from the choice of song order (none of this shuffle bullcrap, thank you), to the cover artwork and design, and liner notes. It’s a preference for quality versus convenience. It’s not that there’s no positive place for Internet-sourced music; rather, there is a place for the old-school to continue alongside the new. Radiohead had the right idea when they realised their die-hard fans would still pay money for the hard stuff, even if they could get the online version for free.

Bon Iver’s forthcoming self-titled album will look super pretty on vinyl.
Dear Sir or Madam, Will You Read My Book?

If vinyl can do it, is it really so far-fetched to suggest something that has existed for about 10 times as long in one form or another might also hang in there for a little bit longer? Unless, of course, they invent a solar powered eReader. Now that might really be something worth ditching your Flipback for.

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05/05/2011

Australia, the Spoilt Child

By The Cultured Animal

Apologies to all two of the Cultured Animal’s current readers. Your Dear Beast is incapacitated at this moment. No, it’s not a Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour; nor, unfortunately, a holiday to Tasmania (although that is coming, and you are warranted in expecting a post on MONA shortly thereafter). Your Most Highly Distinguished Animal is in fact working very hard … elsewhere. For now, here’s a few brief words in place of a proper post.

Robert Manne and Australia’s New Complacency

I have just toddled along to Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre to listen to Monsieur Manne say a few brief words on what he calls the current “complacency” in Australian politics (though he doesn’t credit himself as being the first to describe it as such), and consequently in our dominant cultural outlook.

Atop his soapbox, Manne outlined a few concepts which are dealt with far more thoroughly in his new book, Making Trouble (which I haven’t yet read but look very much forward to doing so). He had some rather poignant things to say, none of which were particularly new to Your Animal but which were so succinctly put – indeed, so wondrously illuminated by his Whitlam-esque, sparkly eyes – as to make one weep. Thank you, our ever eloquent Sir Manne. (I love that his surname is a like “man” but feminised, don’t you?).

Here are some corkers:

  • The Iraq war: “a castle of fiction”, the meaning of which has “never really been accepted”.
  • He encouraged his audience to participate in Andrew Bolt’s blog “by telling him he’s a fuckwit”.
  • My favourite, which is particularly pertinent to a previous entry on recent austerity protests in the UK, was his discussion about the role of more extreme protest in our political landscape. Manne predicted many young people might fight our cultural and political complacency by landing ourselves in jail through more extreme acts of protest. He specifically did not condone, however, acts of violence. He instead suggested there might be many things that young, disillusioned and angry folk can do in a “nonviolent”, “considered” and “principled” manner, in order to “prick” the offending cultural smugness he describes.
  • Just an appreciative note on design: the cover of Making Trouble features, as you see above, a red balloon. I do love such tongue-in-cheek symbolism, and I yearn to be one of the many who will yield that sharp needle …

Tanner Fights Back

Speaking of political culture, there seems to be a phenomenon where ex-Labor pollies emerge shortly after the end of their political careers, literary tomes in hand, to expose the serious mess of the party system that has just chewed them up and spat them out. Lindsay Tanner continues this trend with his new book, Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. Tanner and Manne share a disillusionment with the state of Australian politics, and both are hard at work in their recent books to parade the ruthlessness of its charade, the rotten fruitlessness of its game.

I do hope that any Australians out there with half a brain will listen to Robert and Lindsay’s words of wisdom, just as I once listened to Robert Lindsay’s words of wisdom.

Problem is, we’re all a little bit too complacent.

And would probably rather be watching season three of MasterChef.

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24/04/2011

Rebecca Stead Shines a Light on Environmentalism and Politics for Young Readers

By The Cultured Animal

NB: This is not so much a review as a critique. If you’d rather read a proper review, or just want some background information, go read something like this.

Young adult writer Rebecca Stead won the prestigious Newbery Medal last year for her fabulous book, When You Reach Me, a beautifully woven sci-fi mystery that’s largely an homage to Madeleine L’Engle’s classic, A Wrinkle In Time (which also won a Newbery Medal, back in 1962). Her first novel, aptly titled First Light, has now been released in Australia. The novel is loaded with political intrigue and progressive thinking. It does not disappoint.

Where Two Paths Cross

12-year-old Peter is on the trip of a lifetime in Greenland, accompanying his scientist parents on a 6-week climate change research field trip. While his parents busy themselves with important sciency things, Peter inadvertently crosses paths with Thea, a mysterious girl with a very cool snow dog. Turns out Thea comes from a small civilisation of people who live inside the glacier upon which they are standing (don’t ask me how they can survive without any vitamin D – just suspend your disbelief. After all, they can also telepathise with dogs, or see and hear things beyond the usual human capacity). Her ancestors fled to Greenland from England long ago, after being persecuted for their enhanced capabilities. In Greenland they founded their sanctuary, Gracehope, next to an underground lake in the glacier; their survival is aided by brilliant, sustainable technologies we normal people could only dream of. But she believes her people’s destiny does not lie forever underground, and so she defies the closed-mindedness of her community and ventures on a forbidden trip to the surface, where her chance meeting with Peter will unravel the mysteries of the past and change everything.

An Allegory for Our Times

The problems facing Gracehope are an allegory for global environmental pressures today. Gracehope’s very existence is in danger: climate change is melting the surrounding glacier, and consequent geophysical changes are shifting the underground refuge ever closer to the sea. This is a plot device which further raises the stakes in what is already a page-turning drama, but it’s also symbolic of how global warming is threatening our own lives as we now know them.

The symbolic function of Gracehope works on other levels too. As it’s a closed geographical space with finite resources, its inhabitants are able to witness the impacts they have on their surrounding environment more immediately than elsewhere. The result is a respect for their environment and the enforcement of sustainable lifestyles. This includes making do with rations from the colony’s limited food supply (you can read whatever Communist theory you want into this, too), using sustainable technologies, recycling, and making do with what they have. Again, the transposition into our real world is easy: Stead is highlighting the impact we have on our environment merely by existing, and reminding us about our planet’s finite resources and its limited capacity to offer necessities to an ever-increasing human population. Unfortunately for us in the real world, the impacts of our modern lifestyles are all too often easy to ignore, especially when measurable changes are happening far off in other parts of the world.

Stead also presents dogs (or “Chikchu”, as they are called in Gracehope) as highly intelligent creatures who are integral to the survival of both Thea and Peter. As discussed here, endowing animals with respect and importance reminds us that we humans are just one part of a complex and grand natural order, and not necessarily always in charge.

Animal lovers will appreciate the strong bonds between characters and their companions in First Light

Even Families, Politics Divides

The rebellious Thea is juxtaposed by her conservative, fearful grandmother, Rowen. Rowen is a draconian, matriarchal figure who will do anything to thwart the young girl’s ideals, including abusing political privilege through lying to her people, concealing information that might impact their points of view. In this sense, Rowen represents a backward-thinking, fearful type of Conservatism, characterised by negativity and a Machiavellian clinging to power through whatever means necessary (I can think of plenty of right-wing leaders throughout history who fit this bill). Though hailing from a family who possesses enhanced senses, Rowen seems to lack much sense at all, beyond protecting her own interests and prolonging the confrontation of her fears.

Thea, on the other hand, represents youthful, progressive thought – the kind that moves mountains through mass protest, and which has historically led to all sorts of ground-breaking movements in history, from universal suffrage to anti-war movements to gay rights. She embodies the very idea of positive resistance that seeks to better people’s lives. Her stubbornness, though at times perhaps a bit hasty, renders her character all the more believable, rounding out her youthfulness. Sometimes conviction is no bad thing – otherwise, society would be stuck in the dark ages. Or under a glacier. The metaphors, oh, the metaphors …

Understanding The Other

Finally, Stead is concerned with tolerance. While Thea’s people themselves fled persecution for their difference, it’s interesting that Rowen is also overcome by a fear of the “other”; in her case, the “other” being the outside world, and the people who inhabit it. Hers is a prejudicial fear that has been passed down through generations since Gracehope was founded, and she appears incapable of shaking this viewpoint and seeing things for what they really are, let alone embracing change.

Stead highlights the theme of difference when the citizens of Gracehope gather in the council chamber to watch their children act in “Launch”, which is a bit like a Christian nativity play, but re-enacts the story of how Gracehope was founded (including the bits about persecution and death. Yes, they have their own symbolic martyrs). During the play, Peter, who has hitherto been hiding to prevent people from knowing about Thea’s trip above ground, finally reveals himself to the crowd. As the only fair-haired person these people have ever laid eyes upon, he certainly stands out. Although not made explicit, the scene subtly invokes elements of racism as Rowen attempts to paint him as an impostor, a liar and a danger to her people’s health and very existence.

When Thea first met Peter, she too had been initially fearful. But in the purity of her youth, untainted by prejudice, this fear was quickly superseded by curiosity and engagement in dialogue. Says her great aunt Dexna (who could not be more different to her sister Rowen): “[Thea] has known the courage to reach out where she was taught to shrink back in fear”. For Peter, that courage was always a given; this bravely curious young boy exhibits next to no fear at all. Through sharing, he and Thea are able to bridge their differences, learn from each other, and better understand their predicaments.

An underground lake, Gracehope’s life-blood. Image from molon.de.

A Treasure for Young Readers

Ultimately, what I love about First Light is not solely that it smuggles these interesting politics between its covers, but that it does so within a wonderfully crafted story in a refreshingly original setting. The fact that it is such a compelling and satisfying mystery means it delivers its political messages all the more successfully. Its leanings are never spelt out; rather, they form essential parts of the story, are integral to the plot itself. And for all its allegorical parallels, the story works because we see, in the social and familial structures of Gracehope, elements of humanity that are  familiar and true to real life.

While it seems the present generation is getting plenty enough education about global environmental issues, First Light is a very welcome addition to the body of children’s educational fodder, not least because it is able to personalise issues through well-rounded characters with whom readers can empathise. This is a great read for ages from about 9 upwards (or thereabouts – everyone’s kid is gifted, aren’t they? Mine will be reading this kind of book at five), and different reading levels will in turn glean varied levels of meaning from this richly layered story.

2 comments | posted in Environment, Literature, Politics

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