Reading Victoria Blog

Please join Alan Brough at a celebration at the State Library on Friday 20 March, 4 - 5pm when he announces the the top five books, as voted by Victorian readers in the State Library of Victoria’s Summer Read program 2008-9, and voter’s prizes.

Experimedia
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street, Melbourne

RSVP by Wednesday 17 March 2009

Telephone                   8664 7555
email                          learning@slv.vic.gov.au
book online                summerreadawards.eventbrite.com

The CAE this year promoted the summer read 20 short list books through a ‘Tell us what you love about reading in summer’ competition.

The competition was won by Nicki Jennings from the Sale , Ladies by the Lake, CAE Book Group. Nicki wrote about what she loves about reading in summer in verse.

Holiday Haze

Sun melting, sweltering,
Shady verandah lazily beckons.
Book and cool drink in hand
I stretch into an ancient couch
while time suspends.
Immersed in a holiday haze
of soft flowing pages.
Strange times,
Different people,
New worlds unfold.

JOLT!
WHAT?
“MUM! When’s dinner? ”

Nicki says

“Ladies By The Lake is a CAE Book group of twelve avid readers. We were the book Group lucky enough to win a set of 20 Summer Read Titles donated by the Victorian State Library. I had the pleasure of collecting and opening the large parcel from the Sale Post Office. It was exciting as each book in turn emerged from its bed of beaded packing. Crisp unread books hold so much intrigue and anticipation. What a luxury to have 20 at one time!

I would like to thank CAE Book Groups for organising the “What I Love About Summer Reading” competition. It’s not hard to think of good things to write about summer reading. Thank you also to the State Library for donating such a wonderfully diverse and rich collection of books and most importantly thank you to the authors for their creativity and putting pen to paper. Twenty books circulating between twelve of us will provide many hours of reading and animated discussion. There is so much to look forward to!
Several of our members are farmers and we travel round trips of up to 140kms to attend our monthly meetings. As I unpacked the books I noticed that Dennis McIntosh’s Beaten By A Blow contains a chapter devoted to shearing on a property owned by one of our members. I am sure that as we read our way through this newly acquired library, many of the books will hold significance for us. My daughter, who is a student in Melbourne, has syphoned off Radical Melbourne to her bedroom for some holiday reading before it is lost to the hands of the book group. Our group has been reading the Booker Prize Short list over the holidays however I will now abandon that and soak up the Summer Reading Books – but where to start!!!!!”

Well done Nicki! We do hope the ladies enjoy the mini library of 20 summer read titles.

Thanks Chloe for your wonderful final posts on the Summer Read blog.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Chloe will be appearing at:

Heaths Road Library, Cnr Heaths Street and Derrimut Road Hoppers Crossing on Tuesday 24 February 2009, 7.00 – 9.00 pm
For more information phone Heaths Road Library 9748 9333 or book online at http://summerread31.eventbrite.com
Northcote Library, 32-38 Separation Street Northcote on Thursday 26 February 2009, 6.30 – 7.30 pm
For more information phone Northcote Library1300 655 355 or book online at http://summerread33.eventbrite.com

Vote for Tall Man or SMS TALL to 13 46 88

A writer friend once told me he felt he wrote about life while not having one. Sometimes when I am close to a deadline, or trying to have a book “surge”–deploying all my forces to win some war over my own lethargy– I don’t see many people, and I don’t really feel like mastering a new instrument, or learning to pilot a hot air-balloon, or whatever you’re meant to do to seize the day. The life on the page can feel more vital than my own shambling-around-in-pyjamas life. This is the way I get work done, but I’d love to learn another way.  When one’s writing seems most average, the hours sunk into the mad project of a book, seems most depressing. So, Pru—who replied to my last post–is right that JCO’s diary is an inspiration. It’s essential to try to fill up on beautiful moments in between the slog at the desk. And in an attempt to do just that I’m going on a family holiday tomorrow morning and I’ve packed a couple of books so as to catch up with reading on the plane. God Bless the Summer Read and all who sail in her.

As I mentioned yesterday, I have recently come into possession of a number of books. So…I opened Joyce Carol Oates’ journals expecting to find the musings of a writer, a book machinist, really, utterly obsessed with craft; her thoughts involving nothing but her work. So, here is a random sample of her days…

 April 7, 1978: “Last night’s party went beautifully; I was rather sad when the last guests left around 2.30am…up until 5 talking.”

April 13, 1978: “…Piano lessons. Rising early to practise for an hour….It’s no exaggeration to say I am infatuated with the piano, and with piano music, right now, the word love being, perhaps, too melodramatic.”

May 10, 1978 “Working outside, planting seeds. Ray has spaded up the rose garden and it looks marvellous…went for a long sunny windy walk.”

How has this astonishing woman written 70 books and also thrown parties, played Chopin, and planted enough food to feed herself and her neighbours? I find it a challenge while writing just to get dressed in the morning….I’m afraid this diary might end up back on the bookshelf.

According to the Reading Victoria blogging rules: “Abusive, obsene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, threatening or sexually-explicit posts or comments will not be published”, which sort of doesn’t leave me with much room to move…But, alright…okay, so…I’ve been grazing as a reader lately, unable to settle down. I do, however, have the raw materials for my own “Indian Summer Read.” Last month I was in New York where I visited The Strand Bookstore (”18 Miles of Books”) which is a cornucopia of everything you’ve ever thought you wanted to you read. Walking towards the store, trailers of second-hand books line the pavement; the perfume of yellowing pages lingers in the air. Every time, I walk inside I feel pure excitement. And this trip was no different. Books piled high on tables everywhere! Books with jackets as stunning as tropical birds! At first I thought, Don’t pick anything up. How many times have you been unable to even lift your suitcase onto the airport check-in scales because you’ve filled it up with books you could have just bought on Amazon? Then slowly, wandering through this exotic wood, I finally couldn’t take it. The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 were remaindered at $7.95; a big, cherry-red, cloth-bound edition and a chance to ascertain exactly how monomaniacal she was. Then, on the same table, I picked up Borges: A Life.  (And don’t just buy it, then pretend to yourself that because it’s on the bookshelf you’ve actually read it.) Then I went for a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which I’ve been meaning to read. Then, uncannily, I was drawn to Mysterious Erotic Stories for $5 . Then, William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasures of Hating. (Could come in handy.) Then, a copy of  Twilight—just so as to see what everyone is ACTUALLY reading and whether it’s not too late to corner the market of teenage vampire stories…Later, I told a friend what I’d purchased and he said, “Well, that sounds exactly like a trip to The Strand, they may as well just hand everyone ten books they’ll never read as they walk through the door”… So I have hauled all these titles back to Melbourne, and it’s summer, and needless to say I haven’t actually read any of them. But I will. No, really, I will.

Chloe Hooper is the final Summer Read author blogging from 25 – 28 February.

Chloe Hooper won a Walkley Award for her writing on the inquest into the death of Cameron Doomadgee, published in The Monthly and internationally. Her first novel A Child’s Book of True Crime was critically acclaimed around the world.

Her book Tall Man is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Tall Man tells the story of an Aboriginal man who dies in a watch-house cell, forty minutes after being arrested for swearing at a policeman. The coroner’s report states he died from a fall, sparking community outrage and the locals burning down the police station. The Tall Man tells the true story that epitomised Aboriginal Australia’s haunting racial plight.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Chloe will be appearing at:

Heaths Road Library, Cnr Heaths Street and Derrimut Road Hoppers Crossing on Tuesday 24 February 2009, 7.00 – 9.00 pm
For more information phone Heaths Road Library 9748 9333 or book online at http://summerread31.eventbrite.com

Northcote Library, 32-38 Separation Street Northcote on Thursday 26 February 2009, 6.30 – 7.30 pm
For more information phone Northcote Library1300 655 355 or book online at http://summerread33.eventbrite.com

What Chloe says about summer reading

“I remember lying on the beach in the summer holidays reading my school books for English; sand becoming ingrained in the books’ spines; trying to shade the pages so the white glare didn’t scald my eyes. Hours went by like this. I wouldn’t move until the books themselves seemed sunburnt. That’s how I first read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar: her semi-autobiographical account of a young American girl’s psychiatric breakdown. I was riveted—and too young to realise there were probably people breaking down all over the beach….Of course, what we read becomes ingrained in us. And now whenever I’m swimming in the sea, my pulse-thumping, I always think of Plath’s brilliant line: I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

Thanks Jack for your wonderful speculative fiction contribution as part of the Summer Read, and to Australian fiction in general.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Jack Dann and Dreaming Again authors will be appearing at:

Nunawading Library, 379 Whitehorse Road Nunawading on Wednesday 18 February, 2009 7.00 – 8.30 pm
For more information phone Nunawading Library 9873 5638 or book online at http://summerread37.eventbrite.com

Vote for Dreaming Again or SMS DREAMING to 13 46 88

It’s been a fast week for me; and now it’s Tuesday, the last day of my blogging on the Reading Victoria site, and I’ve been musing a bit about the writer’s life…my own life.

I’ve been writing an autobiography for the past thirty years. It’s first incarnation was called “A Few Sparks in the Dark,” and it was published in a magazine called Starship and a volume entitled Literary Masters. Later, at the request of Contemporary Authors, I revised and expanded the earlier work for their autobiographies series.  I found myself collaborating with two vaguely familiar past selves who called themselves Jack Dann. I called the revised autobiography “Sparks in the Dark,” and in 2007 Contemporary Authors asked me to write an update. That update turned into 15,000 words, which Contemporary Authors kindly accepted…and paid me as if it was an entirely new work. (A blessing on their heads!)  I called the last incarnation “Insinuations.”  The autobiography is due to be published as a limited edition hardcover by PS Publishing in England, and it will be called Insinuations.

As the limited edition has not been published yet, I would not put any of that material on the net, but I wrote an autobiographical introduction to my short story collection Jubilee. I thought “Out of the Blue” might be interesting to friends and readers. (I posted my afterword “Slip Me a Fiver” earlier. So now you have the front and back of that collection.)

I’ve enjoyed blogging. Thanks for all your feedback. And now back to that peculiar profession of being a writer, which means, alas, actually having to write!

Here is a small bit of autobiography…”Out of the Blue.” Seems like a nice way to end my blogging here.

Cheers!

The following acknowledgement must accompany the article or appear in the acknowledgment page: “Out of the Blue” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 2002 by Jack Dann. First published as the preface to Jack Dann’s retrospective short story collection Jubilee, 2002. All rights reserved by the author.

I dreamed of being a writer when I was in high school, and I clearly remember thinking that once I became a writer, I’d be…rich, and I’d have a limousine and a driver. Ah, the delusions of youth.

I almost died when I was in my 20’s. I was in hospital and was given a 5% chance of survival. The days and weeks and months were a series of stop-motion slides of agonizing pain and ice-blue Demerol dreams, pain, bliss, pain, bliss, and during the Demerol highs, I would ask my nurse for ice; I would place my hand in the ice and dream of “The Blue Country,” a place of ice mountains and constant blue twilight, my own metaphor for lonely peace and death.

After months of fighting for my life on a terminal ward where my friends died and the patients formed a secret club of those traversing the blue country, I began to recover. On my tray table beside the bed, I kept a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his youth in Paris, A Moveable Feast; and it became like a talisman for me. When I was too ill even to consider reading, I would put my hand on its cool covers…as if I could become a writer by osmosis. Later, I would read a passage or a page and enter Hemingway’s life, enter what the French author Jean Dutourd called the life of art. I associated books with life, with the juice and joy of being alive, and I felt…I felt that I had, in a sense, died and come back. I’d been given a second chance. And somehow that gave me the courage to take chances, live on the edge, live my dreams. I wasn’t afraid of failure. For a while, I wasn’t afraid of anything!

Thirty years later and I’m still living the dream, writing, stretching, reaching for that elusive, perfect image, living fast and hard and hot, and sometimes—when I’m sitting in front of the CRT screen and reaching for those images—I’m not afraid of anything.

#

The stories that follow are living bits of my experience and memory…alchemical distillations of my fantasies, dreams, and nightmares. They are the fictional flesh of my musings.

Magicks…

And if I’ve done something right, some of their magic might come alive for you…become part of your experience and sense memory

###

Finished a short story (and sent it out!), removed nails from decking on the farm, made a Moroccan-style chickpea stew…ah, the glamor, the romance of being a writer.

As I’ve got ever-more deadlines to meet, and it’s getting late (a thought that often shivers through this writer’s mind), I thought I might share a few quotes from one of my favorite compendiums: The Literary Life & Other Curiosities by Robert Hendrickson. I’ve had it in my library for some twenty-five years, and every once in a while I peruse it for a chuckle.

Here’s my favorite critical revelation:

“I never read a book before I review it; it prejudices a man so.”

–The Reverend Sydney Smith (1771-1845)

And here are some words by great men to give us all who toil in the spiny fields of, er, literature a bit of a backache:

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”

–Rousseau

“Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.”

–Benjamin Disraeli

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

–Thornton Wilder

And here is a standard rejection slip suggested by the author and editor Don Gold. This appeared in the New York Times Magazine:

Dear Writer

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your manuscript. It is being returned to you because:

[] This is dreadful, unpublishable and an affront to civilization. Burn it.

[] This is just plain mediocre. Sorry.

[] This carbon is too mess for me to deal with.

[] This Xerox copy is an affront to me.

[] There is too much intelligence inherent in this work for me to comprehend. In self-defense, I am returning it.

[] When I told your agent that I would be happy to read your work, I was not telling the truth. Forgive me.

[] Life is a wearying experience. I am too exhausted to give this manuscript the attention it may deserve.

[] Your information is great; your prose is unreadable.

[] With my problems, I can’t concentrate on your manuscript. Don’t nag me now.

[] I am important and you are not. Call me when you’re famous.

[] I don’t like this, and I don’t know why.

No…I never used the above rejection slip, although there were times…

And one last happy quote:

“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was famous.”

–Robert Benchley

Happy dreams, all ye readers, writers, anthologists, critics, and reviewers…