Save Salt

Salt Publishing, heroic independent international publishing house specialising in contemporary poetry, is in deep trouble.

Thanks for that, GFC.

Salt is asking for people who don't want to see them go under to buy one book from their lists. It doesn't matter whether you buy it from a physical bookshop or online, but you need to do it quickly. Here's their online shopfront. They do gift books, criticism, anthologies as well as poetry collections and chapbooks. I'm leaning toward this.

Congratulations anyway.

Normally when I put up a new post, the blog gets about 70 visitors on that day. Today, it's had ten times that much traffic.

Just think of how many bazlottoes have come and gone, unnoticed, unloved, among those seven hundred Monthly-gossip seeking blog wanderers. Poor little Bazlottoes! Come back to the safe and warm arms of the ones who really love you.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the great pageant of the blogosphere embarrassing itself trundles on.

I'm sorry

Five years ago I was sitting in a minibus with a whole lot of people who were Americans. (This was in America.) One of them spoke to me and of all the people I talked with on that trip it's only her whose face and voice I can remember. That's because she was the first real person I'd personally encountered to voice that magnificently blended joint insult and compliment that Americans have been giving Australians for the last forty years. She said: "I went to Australia and I thought it was great. It was like how I imagine the US used to be, in the 60s - before it got all crapped up."

When I woke up this morning Sol Trujillo was on the radio giving his views about Australia and when I got in the car this evening to go home the talkback venom was flowing free in a manner that suggested it had been doing so for quite some considerable time.

How long did Trujillo live & work here? Long enough to notice that Australia is a racist country. So it was longer than five minutes. But that's not the reason nobody here liked him. Nobody liked him because he phlegmatically presided over the neverending postapocalyptical demoniac nightmare of hopeless, infuriatingly stupid and expensive fuckups that is the national telecommunications "provider", and he got paid a million billion dollars for doing so. But what's this about having a backward business culture compared to the leaders on the global financial stage? He said that like it's a bad thing.



Now about this whole shiny new editor of The Monthly business. Unlike the first time I gave my unsolicited opinion about The Monthly here, upon the occasion of its appearance on our wide brown mediascape, I've thought quite carefully about what I'm going to say. (Don't bother looking for that other post, because it's long since been deleted. Let's just say that one of the contributors turned up in comments threatening to punch me on the nose.) Sacking the previous editor in that manner was totally shameful and The Monthly can't really be regarded now as much more than a source of trainwreck for those of us interested in publishing.

So, new editor: I have to say that all things considered so far, the appointment strikes me as positively effulgent with possibilities for the richest varieties of farce. 23 is not too young to be editing a big-deal magazine by any means, (but is he really 23? Look at that photo in the paper. Surely he is only 8.) I know The Age has its tongue in Gabriella Coslovich's cheek when pointing out that he numbers Alain de Botton among his facebook friends, as if that's one of the accomplishments that earned him the job, but at the same time they couldn't get away with that if he'd done anything that seemed to indicate he was equipped to handle the very specific difficulties associated with this job.

This interview with Umberto Eco was pointed out in comments at LP and I have seen it seriously mentioned as one of the for-real strings to the new editor's bow. Well, I read that, and to misparaphrase Lucky Jim, it shows he's got some of the qualifications, but unfortunately he's got most of the disqualifications also. The patronising little verbal head-pat bestowed by Morry Schwartz, as quoted in that Age story, bodes extremely well too as a harbinger of future golden entertainment. Anyway, I wish him good luck, but not too good.

me again

Hi. I'm still sick. This is crap! Who is responsible!
Anyway, it occurred to me that you, Blog, have not yet been informed about what happened last week when I tried to renew my passport. Have you done this lately? You have to fill in the form online, print it out, and take it to the P.O. You can't just get a form there and write in the answers.
Although, because about half my typed-in answers somehow changed themselves into jumbled & incomprehensible code, the post office person whited them out and I wrote them in again. So I was wondering why I had to do it online in the first place when she asked me to sign and date the application.
Which I did, putting the wrong date on the form. And then they said they would not process the application so that was the end of that particular waste of time exercise.

Now I am going to have to attempt it again on Monday because we are going overseas a month and a half. We're going to England - I'm going to a lovely Jane Austen conference at Chawton where Austen used to live, then we're going to Bath and a few other places, then a week in London, then a bit where we haven't decided yet between country France and St. Petersburg (though strongly leaning toward the latter) and then a week in Venice where Dorian is also conferencing but I will probably just go to the Biennale or something.

Won't all that be fun and also horrifyingly expensive. We're not actually very organised yet but my main priority is to get next semester's teaching sorted out before we go, although organising the new passport is admittedly kind of essential. I also need to decide whether to re-attempt the unpleasantness of having the required photographs taken because the man who did it last week made me look like a horrible, old, double-chinned murderer.

carry on matron

If I said I was lying in bed with clag dripping out of my nose and weird noises emanating from the belly, what would you think? Yes, that's right I'm sick!!! It's come a bit early this year; there is actually still a fortnight of teaching to go. Dorian has had this attractive disease for two weeks and I thought I'd managed to avoid acquiring it, but obviously I thought that too soon. And sadly he is not really better enough himself to nurse me as I recline in my bed of pain.

I'll have to drag my leaking carcass off to work this afternoon as there's stuff there that must be attended to but I'm planning to sleep a lot and do little else on the weekend and my fingers are crossed that a good rest will nip this in the bud.

Despite the germs Dorian kindly accompanied me last night to the opening of Persuasion at the National Gallery of Victoria. This is an exhibition of Regency-era (loosely interpreted) fashion; they have got a lot of fashion magazines, at which I didn't really look because they were hard to see and you can get a better sight of such things online quite easily now, and about thirty garments which I did of course look at with great interest.

Only a minor miracle preserves a muslin dress or a silk pelisse or a pair of red kid shoes in anything like exhibitable condition for two hundred years - my jumpers in the cupboard managed to get mothholes in eight months - & of course it's only the costly garments that get put aside rather than being worn out. So not only is there not much in the exhibition in the way of workaday clothing, there is hardly any mens clothes at all - just one quite beautiful linen shirt. Unless you count the kind of amazing installation placed in the very centre of the gallery, namely a getup allegedly worn by Colin Firth in the 1996 P&P. ('Allegedly' because the display card says the costume supply firm it's been borrowed from *think* this is the outfit he wore for the diving into pond sequence, even though you cannot see any bit of shirt under the coat and waistcoat and stock, and the coat that *is* there doesn't appear to match any of the coats in the screenshots I can find on the Web. It's probably a good thing that my DVD is in my office or I'd have to spend the rest of the day fact-checking.) I quite see that this costume had to be displayed on its own and not mixed in with the historical garments and that's why the curator put it in the only freestanding display case, but aside from the practical reason, the placement of an interpolated fetishised Darcy-body at the centre of an exhibit nominally devoted to celebrating what women wore in Jane Austen's lifetime is, how do you say? symptomatic?



It was good hearing people's comments to each other about the dresses. The one pictured here was quite clearly labelled as a day dress, but spectator after spectator assumed it was a nightie. There are two basically red printed cotton day dresses on display and I heard a couple of people say confidently that these were unusual because women mostly didn't wear strong colours. As if they'd been to 1809 and seen evidence of this with their own eyes. I remembered that after I started reading Austen it took me several years to develop any sort of concept of how the kinds of people and places represented in the novels might have looked. It just didn't seem to matter. Now we are all pretty fluent in the visual grammar of the Regency - or in the versions of it seen in the movies, really.

Down in the lobby, at the unneccesarily lavish launch function, a young woman in costume played the harpsichord (not, as it turns out, an instrument specially suited for providing background music in a noisy cavernous room). Following the Canberra exercise I'm pretty familiar with the way dresses based on the same pattern I used tend to look, and the one she had on was definitely cut to that design. And being able to compare actual Regency garments with a modern approximation of them was enlightening. We do the bust area entirely wrong, to begin with. The breast shape is totally different - there's no under-curve - it's a smooth sort of pigeon-chested rise upward with a bit of cleavage at the top (which is probably swathed in a neck-kerchief or a fine muslin collared insert, on most women.) Also, all the sleeves are so long - fingertip length or more - that either women wore them pushed them up or their cuffs were continually filthy.

From a dressmaking persepctive I was most interested in the way Regency fashion dealt with the intersection of the shoulders and the upper back. That our recent minor Regency-style revivals have focused on Empire waist and bust line treatments (eg, 1960s style) probably says something about the modern titty fixation distracting us from all the other characteristic shapes. Regency shoulders look genuinely weird and interesting to my eyes, because they extend so much further across the upper back than our sleeves do. This makes the back itself look narrow and the natural shape of the arms and shoulders tends to disappear under drapery and moulding. The time's probably ripe for some enterprising designer to plunder Regency techniques (with a bit more realism than John Galliano's recent attempt.)

me on the radio

Tonight I'm being interviewed on ABC local radio (which as you know is the same program nationally overnight) about why Jane Austen is still and/or suddenly popular. I am mentally getting ready for this by trying not to think about my default model for any sort of public talking about research exercise, which is of course the "Merrie England" lecture in Lucky Jim. If you happen to be awake at 3.30am then you can hear the interview, and perhaps you could assist by throwing a faint to create a distraction if I seem to be getting into dangerously deep waters.

No Place for a Nervous Budgie

If only I had had a camera. Yesterday afternoon I was walking along the ground floor corridor connecting the Humanities buildings. (Which looks like this -

- not very nice hey)

And I happened to look down and to the left, and I saw a little blue budgie standing in the corner with his face to the wall, looking uncannily like Phillipe in the inaugural instalment of Achewood. I bent down and put out my hand and little budgie turned around and walked onto it. Budgie was very tame and friendly and stood quietly and trustingly on my finger while I wondered what to do with him. In the lift back up to the 5th floor he kept doing little wriggly movements with his shoulders so I decided to call him Atlas Shrugged. Atlas sat placidly on my forearm while I rang the vet we take the cats to for instructions ('I rang for instructions', I mean, not 'we take the cats to the vet so they can be instructed', although that's probably not a bad plan). They suggested taking him to the local pet shop. At this stage I was still thinking it might be possible to reunite him with his owner. I considered ringing Today Tonight but thought better of it. As a last resort I called the wildlife sanctuary that's attached to this campus and they didn't want him either, although they did seem to say that they'd had other calls about little budgie that day. (Which means some mean person noticed him and tried to do something but in the end just left him to his fate.)

So I put him into an empty copier paper box and drove him to the pet shop. The pet shop owner said he was a male and put him into a private budgie suite. Last I saw he was having a drink of water and eating some budgie seeds.

So if you know of anyone who's lost their budgie in the Bundoora / Macleod area, direct them here.

Disastro

Q. What's worse than Swine Flu? A. Keira Knightley Flu, and Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant novel Never Let Me Go is the latest tragic victim.

Truly, that is incredibly bad news.

oh dear

I was planning on writing a rather ranty post about how sad Frank Kermode's essay in the current London Review of Books has made me, but the online version is only available to subscribers so I don't think I will trouble you with that. Except to say that really, there is no point at all going on insisting that Sense & Sensibility is not as good as Jane Austen's other novels. It is just an utterly pointless, worthless critical gesture. Unless the aim is to make some sort of reverse-engineered swipe at the multitudes of people, female people almost always in my experience, to whom that novel means a lot and means it very deeply. Except I don't want to believe that can be the aim, mainly because Kermode is too intelligent and decent and good a critic to stoop to that kind of thing, but also because I don't think he seems to be conscious of how much the novel is valued, not for its movie connections or its olde-worldeyness, but for itself. Nor indeed does he seem conscious of what is valuable about it. As part of that strange critical project of demonstrating that S&S doesn't have much intrinsic value and only retains a readership (at the expense of other, better, but forgotten novels, which aren't named, I note) because it is by the author of P&P (which people apparently only like because the tv show had a wet blouse in it), Kermode quotes Elinor praising Edward Ferrars: the problem, he says, is that how Elinor talks is not how a sisterly-girly chat about a boy actually sounds. No: that's right; this is a novel, like Ulysses and Lolita and those other books where people are liberated from the burden of having to talk exactly how they do in real life, and I can't for the life of me figure out why one of the best critics alive has fallen into thinking it's a bug rather than a feature. Besides the strange animus against S&S there is also an unedifying bemusement about the project of editing Austen's texts with the same care and seriousness routinely meted out to Shakespeare (and as Kermode observes, to D. H. Lawrence, among other novelists.) Because really, who's interested in those trivial and boring little details?

Last year, at the Austen summer school at UQ, on the last afternoon, one of the younger women taking the course told us that at lunch a man from the James Joyce stream had said to her "Jane Austen brings out the absolute worst in the silly women who read her." That, my friends, is a True Story. Something* about Austen makes people feel they can say that kind of nonsense. Why, why, why, why, why. Anyway. I realise now I have written the rant anyway so there is nothing for it now but to publish. Here is a picture I took in Canberra. The sculpture is by Tom Bass.




Looking at this photo I realise that while I am here ranting I also want to record my profound disappointment in the pathetic photographs The Sartorialist has published from his Melbourne - Sydney jaunt: I don't know whether to hold the subjects or the photographer responsible for being so unimaginative and generally embarrassing, but it's the same outcome either way: LAME.


* by 'something about Austen', I probably mean 'the lack of a dick'.

Golden Clericism

When I say 'Golden Cleric Award', or more specifically Golden Cleric Award Acceptance Speech, do people actually know what I'm referring to? It is all too easy to forget that not everyone is lucky enough to know Father Ted off by heart. I haven't received my G.C. award yet but I have gotten a somewhat chuffing invitation to come to a dinner put on by one of the residential colleges here and impart wisdom to the assembled collegians. (I think the Baron might have done something similar last year if I remember rightly.) Of course I will actually think of something appropriate and meaningful to say but I do love having the opportunity to imagine delivering a G.C.A.A.S. Should I tell them my views on plagiarism? Or what I think about the 'is an Arts degree useful' debate? Or some thoughts on Literature today...? It is part of the broader fantasy of getting into some kind of position of authority and success and immediately & completely abusing the privileges accompanying it, in the most reckless possible manner.



Just one of the many many reasons why Father Ted is the best tv show ever made.

Monday morning can't-look-away

Pictures of stuff from the auction of Michael Jackson's possessions.

Thoughtfully arranged into a slideshow of incredibly terrifying compellingness.

Thank me later.

Teaching only positions

We've changed our banking arrangements recently and what with one thing and another I have been slow cleaning up the transfer of direct debits to the new accounts. I just did the last one this morning - NTEU fees. And I came damn close to resigning my membership in the process - not only because the website is the worst organised and slowest loading in the entire modern world - but because of the unbelievable fact that the senior executive of the union is flatly opposing the introduction of ongoing teaching-only appointments. If what's reported in this article by Bernard Lane is accurate (and there's no reason to think otherwise) then it seems to me that the union has pretty much lost sight of the most basic objectives of trade unionism, ie to use solidarity and collective bargaining to improve the working conditions of the most vulnerable and exploited workers in the industry. Those being casual academics. The NTEU does have a some sort of department aimed at representing the interests of casuals, but now that push is coming to shove I think the fundamental tokenism, or at least ineffectuality, of this gesture is revealed.

Lane quotes McAlpine as saying "A teaching-only academic is an oxymoron." WTF. WTF. WTF. What does this say about the union's opinion of the work done by casual / sessional / short term fixed contract academics? Doesn't he know about the excremental theory of graduate education?

The implied suggestion that research activity is necessary for effective teaching is a red herring. I think it's debatable that it is, personally, given the stupidity of many of the current measures of research activity now in use. But, in humanities at least, the casual staff who are now currently employed on a teaching only basis (and upon the steady supply of whose labour the viability of the current system absolutely depends) are almost without exception also engaged in research. They're just not being paid to do it. Which is of course an issue. But I'm not convinced it is as urgent and pressing an issue for the union to concern itself with, when the actual employment conditions of casuals are so unbelievably exploitative and insecure. I have to wonder if the union has asked its sessionally employed members at the unis considering industrial action whether they would like to be able to apply for ongoing teaching-only positions.

From the article again - "If it was about casuals and they wanted to offer them a more secure form of appointment, that's one thing," said Michael Thompson, NTEU president at Sydney. "(But) when we discussed it with them last week, they were for advertising teaching-only positions." Again, WTF is this supposed to mean?

I've only ever been in one other union - the SDA. Retail is another industry with a permanently high proportion of casual staff. The SDA looked after casuals and didn't treat them as second-class members of the workforce. The contrast is really striking.

As far as the motives of the university executives who are pressing for the introduction of teaching-only positions are concerned, of course it's right to assume the worst. But that doesn't mean that the interests of the administration can't coincide with the interests of the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

I stayed in the union for now, but if industrial action is to be taken at La Trobe I will have to reconsider.

update: today's news looks slightly better