tag:theconversation.com,2011:/columns/on-writing-524On Writing – The Conversation2017-11-14T21:40:45Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/873602017-11-14T21:40:45Z2017-11-14T21:40:45ZTalking Ordinary: from Simic to Farrell<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194297/original/file-20171113-27585-1pdcrc6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">That sinister rope at the end of the trope reveals Charles Simic's dark sensibility.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Where Robert Frost might write a few lines soundly cut from the solid old tree of language and delivered in his mellifluous White Mountain voice,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The way a crow<br>
Shook down on me<br>
The dust of snow<br>
From a hemlock tree<br>
Has given my heart<br>
A change of mood<br>
And saved some part<br>
Of a day I had rued.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or where John Ashbery might offer us a backward glance as he dances formally away from every assumption we might have brought to poetry, and writes, possibly talking to himself anyway:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.<br>
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window<br>
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.<br>
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.<br>
This poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from Paradoxes and Oxymorons)</p>
<p>Charles Simic (b. 1938) gives us in his sinner’s/saint’s drawl after a night of either drinking or praying (who knows) in the voice of a night clerk in a roach hotel:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m the furtive inspector of dimly lit corridors,<br>
Dead lightbulbs and red exit signs,<br>
Doors that show traces<br>
Of numerous attempts at violent entry,<br>
Is that the sound of a maid making a bed at midnight?<br>
The rustle of counterfeit bills<br>
Being counted in the wedding suite?<br>
A fine-tooth comb passing through a head of gray hair?<br>
Eternity is a mirror and a spider web,<br>
Someone wrote with lipstick in the elevator.<br>
I better get the passkey and see for myself.<br>
I better bring along a book of matches too.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from Night Clerk in a Roach Hotel)</p>
<p>In comparison to Frost or Ashbery, Simic’s poetry is unformed and informal, almost not poetry but more like the bizarre jottings of a mind and a character who can’t stop putting down whatever occurs to him. In a lesser writer this would be the private, self-indulgent notes to himself he should never show to others because they’re not meant for others and wouldn’t interest others.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The world is old, it was always old,<br>
There’s nothing new in it this afternoon.<br>
The garden could’ve been a padlocked window<br>
Of a pawnshop I was studying<br>
With every item in it dust-covered.<br>
Each one of my thoughts was being ghostwritten<br>
By anonymous authors. Each time they hit<br>
A cobwebbed typewriter key, I shudder.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from Emily’s Theme)</p>
<p>Simic’s poetry isn’t hung upon a metrical count or drawn down along patterns of rhyme, or jumping through linguistic and logico-moral puzzles into enigmatic existence, but rather it’s there in a delicate hold on darkness and violence along with a laconic, almost exhausted humour. The jokes don’t have punch lines, they have points. The images don’t teach us lessons but give us the world. At least that is their gesture.</p>
<p>Here is part of Simic’s address To Fate</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You were always more real to me than God.<br>
Setting up the props for a tragedy,<br>
Hammering the nails in<br>
With only a few close friends invited to watch.<br>
Just to be neighborly, you made a pretty girl lame,<br>
Ran over a child with a motorcycle.<br>
I can think of many other examples.<br>
Ditto: How the two of us keep meeting….<br>
I can feel you snuggle close to me at night,<br>
With your hot breath, your cold hands—<br>
And me already like an old piano<br>
Dangling out of a window at the end of a rope.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>To compare himself to a dangling old piano at the mercy of crude removalists is funny enough, but that sinister rope at the end of the trope reveals his dark sensibility, while the simple vision of the crucifixion as a home-made theatre production expresses his determination to reduce the iconic moments of western Judaeo-Christian culture back to some minor gesture a man in a bar might make while talking to you. </p>
<p>The informal always wins over any pull towards gravitas. And the trick is to do it in a way that matters to the reader. This is poetry that does not appear to be obscure, overly intellectual or self-consciously tricky, but once the first reading is past and the reader’s questions are raised, it’s not possible really to paraphrase the poetry or say in-other-words what the message was. All you can do is go back to the poem and re-live it. Robert Archambeau in Hudson Review has called Simic’s poetry “rich with image and stingy with discursive explanation”. This reluctance to explain himself is one aspect of a lasting commitment to the surreal.</p>
<p>At nearly 80 years of age, Charles Simic is at the far end of his career as a poet, and perhaps by now is more or less looking back on it, the shattered piano reverberating strangely back along the years. </p>
<p>Nearly 30 years his junior, Michael Farrell (b. 1965) is more or less a beginner at this game in comparison to Simic — the piano not even yet an old one, let alone fated for undignified removal. His latest book, I Love Poetry (Giramondo) continues the now long modern tradition of the casual tone in poetry. As with Simic, the surreal has been incorporated into its world as something that goes-without-saying, ironic jokiness pervades imagery and arrangement of phrases and lines (poets have learned a lot from comedians), both are committed to the possibly now common idea that the truth is unsettled and unsettling, and must be discovered anew with every new poem. On Pope Pinocchio’s Angels, Farrell has this to say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They are good at small business, editing and Sunday
Childcare<br></p>
<hr>
<p>It is not<br>
Advisable to stand under an<br>
Angel in the rain. If<br>
You have the makings of<br>
An angel in<br>
A country shed they may<br>
Be quite valuable. When<br>
I fly with angels I<br>
Always book two extra seats</p>
<hr>
<p>They are often still. Sex<br>
With an angel’s worth trying once</p>
<hr>
</blockquote>
<p>Where Simic’s poetry has been touched by his experience of being a child in Yugoslavia during World War II (“the vileness and stupidity I witnessed”), then being one of millions of displaced people, and as an adult a conscript into the US army in the 1960s, Farrell has been a New South Wales country town boy, born in Bombala, and an academic and researcher for the past decade. His poems are never far from high critical theory, the chronic and anarchic disillusionment of post-modernity and post-structuralism, and the linguistic turn that criticism and poetry have taken.</p>
<p>Farrell wrote the above lines while Australian poet-in-residence in Rome at the Australia Council BR Whiting Library, one of the more surreal awards Australian poets vie for these days. Farrell’s responses to Rome in this book pay homage to this odd fit (e.g. the hilarious The Boxer). Like Simic, Farrell is a superb miniaturist, and like him the particulars he works with are the kitsch, the barren items of popular and common culture, ordinary and lost objects pressed into a kaleidoscope of imagination, suggestion and allusion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These are the uses of Poetry. It makes You warm, it replaces Cinema, it helps You put Words between Self and Heart. there’s no original poem, it’s all Sequel as far back as We can remember. We embrace this, for the Loneliness is hard enough. The Souls of our Cats power the Gloveboxes the Souls of our Dogs the Guidebooks. Our Vehicles and Minds are Parallel Worlds where the Dead live</p>
<p>You’re bent over at the Creek, pretending to pick Blackberries but crying. the Radio is pumping ‘Gold’</p>
<p>I can’t help thinking of Morning tea and the Rations and putting my Frypan in the Flight path of a Mynah but instead retrieve the Tofu from the Boot.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The repeated break-out into prose among Farrell’s poems is the logical extension of that casual, colloquial address these poets are committed to. And what is it but an expression of modesty, of poetry’s place in the dust at the back of the theatre these days, of poetry being as democratic as anything (at least in tone), where anyone’s welcome to take up the microphone. It’s no longer the law that poets lay down, no longer do poets speak as the most sensitive souls among us, or even the most literate. Poets like musicians are workers who work (sometimes hard) to reflect us back to ourselves, to bring us out of ourselves, and to shape, memorably, the world out of air.</p>
<p>Simic asks himself, “Who gave you the permission / To look at the beer can in a ditch?” (from Carrying on Like a Crow), while Farrell overhears the questions of children in a boat travelling from Corsica to Delphi: “Where is the bluest sea, we need to know, where are / The best fish?” (from The Distances).</p>
<p><em>Farrell, Michael I Love Poetry Giramondo Poets Artarmon NSW 2017 92 pp A$24.00 isbn 9781925336559</em></p>
<p><em>Simic, Charles New and Selected Poems 1962-2012 Houghton Mifflin New York 2013 350 pp Canada $30 isbn 9780547928289</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87360/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Where Robert Frost might write a few lines soundly cut from the solid old tree of language and delivered in his mellifluous White Mountain voice, The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a…Kevin John Brophy, Professor of Creative writing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/859712017-10-19T02:02:53Z2017-10-19T02:02:53ZRape is a plot device in western literature, sold back to us by Hollywood<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190931/original/file-20171019-32370-vbjntj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Harvey Weinstein: the allegations against him cast a spotlight on the stories we prize in literature and film.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Buck/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Woody Allen said it was <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41626750">“sad”</a>. Quentin Tarantino said he needed to nurse his own<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/oct/13/quentin-tarantino-harvey-weinstein-allegations"> “pain” and “emotions”</a> about the revelations. Oliver Stone took it further – it was not just that he gave the nod to Woody Allen’s fear-mongering about “witch hunts”, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2017/10/13/oliver-stone-defends-harvey-weinstein-not-easy-going/">adding warnings</a> about the potential emergence of a “vigilante system” – but that he claimed people needed to understand disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein was also having a difficult time: “It’s not easy what he’s going through, either.”</p>
<p>One of the things that makes these statements offensive – and yes, I confess, they are offensive on many levels – is that they figure the alleged sexual harassment, assault and rape of women as just another plot point in a narrative that is fundamentally about men.</p>
<p>And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, because this is the narrative that has been sold by Hollywood’s dream factory for much of the last century.</p>
<p>In popular fiction - and in the many film adaptations of these notable books - rape is often deployed as a mechanical plot device to propel the hero on his narrative journey.</p>
<p>It turns a male character into a villain, or alternatively makes him heroic because he saves the hapless woman. In either case, the women are seldom characters in their own right, and if their pain is ever recognisable, then it’s invariably as a metaphor for something else.</p>
<p>And I’m not just talking about Game of Thrones, although it is an obvious case in point.</p>
<p>If you are as old as I am, then you will recollect the way in which your average English professor blithely brushed over the issue of sexual violence in his anxiety to get to the discussion about the aesthetic complexity of the composition of a sonnet.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190933/original/file-20171019-32355-hf0n5n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Image from the e-book edition of Leda and the Swan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Take, for example, W.B. Yeats’s <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/leda-and-swan">Leda and the Swan</a>, which figures the “helpless breast”, the “loosening thighs” and the “white rush” of – well – this is a poem about rape.</p>
<p>Apologists often claim the rape of Leda is a metaphor for the conquest of Ireland, but this is hardly better. To put it academically, the “rape trope” or “rape as metaphor” displaces the actual, violent and traumatic act of rape. In short, there’s something deeply misogynistic in the way female rape victims continue to be cast as collateral damage on the way to something else.</p>
<h2>Sexual violence in western literature</h2>
<p>Any rudimentary survey of the history of western literature throws up an extraordinary amount of sexual violence. They are stories of victim blaming, slut shaming, sexual objectification, trivialisation and the denial and displacement of trauma.</p>
<p>And the rape scene is not just a problem that only concerns male writers with a predilection for adapting weird Greco-Roman myths. (Though there are many – if you weren’t learning about Leda and the Swan in English class then perhaps it was the rape of Persephone, Callisto, Daphne, Europa or Io … the list goes on.)</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190932/original/file-20171019-32345-12xqwx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p>Samuel Richardson’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/417549.Pamela_or_Virtue_Rewarded">Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded</a>, a book about the assault of a serving maid by her wealthy master, is perhaps better read as a lengthy tale about sexual harassment in the workplace – except for the fact that Pamela marries her would-be rapist; this is the “virtue rewarded” bit. In contrast the heroine of Richardson’s other well-known book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529243.Clarissa_or_the_History_of_a_Young_Lady">Clarissa</a>, gets raped, repeatedly abducted, imprisoned, and then dies.</p>
<p>Much of the history of the novel might be seen as extended portrayal of dysfunctional relationships, the cultural product of a society in which men are propertied and powerful, women are disempowered, and the boundaries between sex and violence are blurry.</p>
<p>It’s only a hop, step and a jump to the masochistic romance narratives of Stephanie Meyer’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41865.Twilight?from_search=true">Twilight</a> or E.L. James’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10818853-fifty-shades-of-grey?from_search=true">Shades of Grey</a>.</p>
<p>Even where authors have seemingly set out to create positive representations of female sexual desire, the results can be uncanny. “I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender,” says the eponymous heroine of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre?from_search=true">Jane Eyre</a>, whose paramour often seems to totter on the brink of actual physical attack. Yes, Rochester gets maimed in the end, and Jane scores a fortune, and this makes them more equal. But the fact that the hero is a man who locks his mad wife in the attic needs to be questioned.</p>
<p>Then there’s Heathcliff in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights?from_search=true">Wuthering Heights</a>. He hangs Isabella’s dog. Need I say more?</p>
<h2>Taking issue with oppressive power fantasies</h2>
<p>Of course, there are writers who have taken issue with oppressive power fantasies. Among the best known is Thomas Hardy’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32261.Tess_of_the_D_Urbervilles?ac=1&from_search=true">Tess of the D’Urbervilles</a>, a novel about a young woman who is raped by her employer, rejected by her husband, and turns on her abuser. Hardy draws attention to the fact that the habit of victim shaming runs so deep in our society that the victim has learnt to blame herself. “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk?”</p>
<p>Hardy was careful to subtitle Tess “A Pure Woman”. And his insistence that Tess remains “pure” caused great consternation to his contemporaries. Not only should such a subtitle be read as a pre-emptive strike against critics who would interpret his text otherwise. It also contains the hint of an expectation that one day the world would be different.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190935/original/file-20171019-32361-1agn1jl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roman Polanski at an event for his film, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in 1979.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">idmb</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And yet, it seems that we are no further forward.</p>
<p>Tess was famously adapted for the screen by convicted child rapist Roman Polanski, who repressed the predatory and violent nature of Alec D’Urberville’s actions. (So too, do literary critics continue to debate whether Tess was “raped” or just “forcefully persuaded”.)</p>
<p>Then there’s the question of race.</p>
<p>Racial stereotypes are too often constructed at least partly out of sexual stereotypes, and sexual violence, and the figure of the “pure white woman” – and the predatory Black, Arabic or Indian male – is standard fare in the literature of the imperial “Civilising Mission”.</p>
<p>Toni Morrison’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6149.Beloved?from_search=true">Beloved</a> stands alone as a novel for the astonishing way in which it intervenes in the representation of race and sexual violence, and for the way it addresses sexual violence as a systematic part of the culture of slavery. Often described in shorthand as a novel about infanticide, Beloved depicts a society in which the female characters are victims of rape and carry the scars of its consequences. A 1998 film adaptation saw Oprah Winfrey cast as Sethe. </p>
<p>I am certainly not advocating that any of these books should not be set on the curriculum. Or even be prefaced with a “trigger warning”. Rather, there’s an urgent need for these stories to be read again.</p>
<p>Not by interpreting power as “passion” and violence as “persuasion”, or glossing over the politics of sexual violence in order to get to the “aesthetics” of a text. These books are important precisely because they are a reflection of the oppressive societies that gave rise to them. And, indeed, function as a reminder that the oppression isn’t over yet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85971/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Woody Allen said it was “sad”. Quentin Tarantino said he needed to nurse his own “pain” and “emotions” about the revelations. Oliver Stone took it further – it was not just that he gave the nod to Woody…Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor of Writing, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/853292017-10-06T05:53:04Z2017-10-06T05:53:04ZNobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro shows us the illusion of connection with the world<p>English author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2017/">2017 Nobel Prize for Literature</a>. For some weeks now, the bookies have been offering odds on the likely winner. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was front runner earlier this week, followed closely by Japan’s Haruki Murakami. Ishiguro was some way down the list of favourites: a surprise win, no doubt, for the bookies, and one that is likely to generate plenty of discussions and debate. </p>
<p>The commentary about this year’s prize, though, is unlikely to run as hot as it did last year, following the bombshell announcement that <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-are-bob-dylans-songs-literature-67061">Bob Dylan was the new Laureate</a>. With Ishiguro, love him or not, we are unquestionably in the company of a noteworthy writer, one who has been widely honoured. He has been winning literary awards since 1982, when <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28920.A_Pale_View_of_Hills">A Pale View of the Hills</a> won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.</p>
<p>Despite this record of success – or perhaps as an inevitable consequence of the current media climate — Ishiguro seems to have been <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/10/06/i-thought-it-was-hoax-ishiguro-feared-nobel-literature-prize-was-fake-news">caught unawares by the win</a>. Not unlike <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-02/helen-garner-spam-email-200000-windham-campbell-prize/7215622">Helen Garner’s first response</a> to the email telling her she’d won the Windham-Campbell prize, he thought the announcement of the award was fake news. </p>
<p>This year’s award was <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2017/">based on</a> Ishiguro’s contribution as a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary to the Nobel Academy, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/">added that he is</a> “a writer of great integrity”, one who tackles those complex and enduring themes of “memory, time, and self-delusion”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189127/original/file-20171006-25764-2xps7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189127/original/file-20171006-25764-2xps7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189127/original/file-20171006-25764-2xps7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189127/original/file-20171006-25764-2xps7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189127/original/file-20171006-25764-2xps7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189127/original/file-20171006-25764-2xps7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189127/original/file-20171006-25764-2xps7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28921.The_Remains_of_the_Day?from_search=true">Goodreads</a></span>
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<p>Personally, I’m delighted with the win. Ishiguro’s novels have helped give shape and texture to my life. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28922.An_Artist_of_the_Floating_World?from_search=true">An Artist of the Floating World </a>(1986; winner of the Costa Book Award) and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28921.The_Remains_of_the_Day?from_search=true">Remains of the Day</a> (1989; Booker Prize winner) accompanied me through long insomniac nights. The uncertainty, barely-declared unhappiness and sense of dislocation found in both narrators fitted perfectly with my experience of being a stranger in a strange land. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28923.When_We_Were_Orphans?from_search=true">When We Were Orphans</a> (2000), with its awkward misfit narrator and its haunting/haunted location, might be considered his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/04/kazuoishiguro">least successful book</a>, but I found all that unresolved guilt and unconfirmed identity both compelling and disturbing.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6334.Never_Let_Me_Go?from_search=true">Never Let Me Go</a> was named as Time Magazine’s Book of the Year in 2005. Its exquisite voice, and exquisitely painful dystopia, seemed to fit perfectly the mood of anxiety threading through that decade, one characterised by both late capitalism and the rapidly changing environment associated with the <a href="http://www.anthropocene.info/">Anthropocene</a>. And, most recently, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22522805-the-buried-giant?from_search=true">The Buried Giant</a> (2015) catapulted readers back to post-Arthurian Britain, weaving narrative threads from across history and treating enduring love and failing memory with equal compassion.</p>
<p>Ishiguro is often described as an author who writes across and between genres, moving from speculative fiction, to crime fiction, to social realism and fantasy. However I don’t find it instructive to pigeonhole his books into generic categories.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189126/original/file-20171006-25779-129m8tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189126/original/file-20171006-25779-129m8tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189126/original/file-20171006-25779-129m8tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189126/original/file-20171006-25779-129m8tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189126/original/file-20171006-25779-129m8tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189126/original/file-20171006-25779-129m8tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189126/original/file-20171006-25779-129m8tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102927.Never_Let_Me_Go">Goodreads</a></span>
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<p>If anything, his writing demonstrates the permeability of the rules of genre. His technical and literary capacity, along with his closely observed — and coldly if tenderly rendered portraits - locate his writing outside formulae or conventions. The worlds he creates, and the characters that people them, are startlingly authentic - an <a href="http://turksheadreview.com/wordpress/">empty term</a> that I don’t like to use, but which feels right in this context.</p>
<p>Alfred Nobel established the prize, in <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html">his will</a>, as one that is designed to reward “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. “Ideal” is another of those empty terms, but it seems to me that a writer who has consistently tackled problems of ethical relationships, social responsibility, questions of memory, gaps in meaning and identity, and done it all with a light touch and deep empathy fits that bill.</p>
<p>Ishiguro’s characters are often hard to love, but easy to care for, and their struggles with “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” offer ways of seeing and thinking about what lies beneath our own feet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85329/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>English author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. For some weeks now, the bookies have been offering odds on the likely winner. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was front runner earlier…Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/836352017-09-07T10:01:16Z2017-09-07T10:01:16ZGrief, loss, and a glimmer of hope: Josephine Wilson wins the 2017 Miles Franklin prize for Extinctions<p>Josephine Wilson has won the 2017 Miles Franklin award for her novel Extinctions. Judging panel chair Richard Neville stated Wilson’s novel, “explores ageing, adoption, grief and remorse, empathy and self-centredness”. It takes a skillful and thoughtful novelist to pack so many “big issues” into a single narrative, but Wilson has achieved it, and the novel has won considerable recognition.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185022/original/file-20170907-8393-7pjkxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Josephine Wilson with her novel Extinctions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Marko</span></span>
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<p>The Miles Franklin is, arguably, the apogee of Australian literary prizes, and Extinctions is a worthy addition to the list of earlier winners, among a worthy bunch of <a href="https://theconversation.com/heart-warming-biting-tragic-funny-the-miles-franklin-shortlist-will-move-you-83218">shortlisted entries</a>. </p>
<p>The novel began its successful life when it was just a manuscript, and won the inaugural <a href="https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/pages/the-dorothy-hewett-award-for-an-unpublished-manuscript">Dorothy Hewett Award</a> in 2015. Since then it has been enthusiastically reviewed by critics and peers: in the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/extinction-review-josephine-wilsons-tender-novel-of-ageing-and-facing-death-20161216-gtcqdo.html">Sydney Morning Herald</a> (by Dorothy Johnston), in the <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/extinctions-josephine-wilson-review/">Sydney Review of Books</a> (Roslyn Jolly), in the <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2017/3772-gillian-dooley-reviews-extinctions-by-josephine-wilson?tmpl=component&print=1">Australian Book Review</a> (Gillian Dooley), and in pretty well every other review outlet in Australia. It was featured on the <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/josephine-wilson-novel-extinctions/8246840">ABC Books and Writing show </a> and Wilson has fronted up to a number of literary festivals. I’m confident Extinctions will be set on Australian literature courses across the country.</p>
<p>Wilson has nailed key anxieties and preoccupations that characterise the current moment. Ageing, of course, thanks to the <a href="https://demographics.treasury.gov.au/content/_download/australias_demographic_challenges/html/adc-04.asp">population bulge</a>; <a href="https://www.psychology.org.au/inpsych/2014/august/dudgeon/">cultural loss</a>, especially for members of the Stolen Generations; <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth">environmental crisis</a> associated with the Anthropocene (the age in which human impacts have come to dominate Earth); and the conflicts that are at the heart of storytelling – in this case, within the family, and with the self.</p>
<p>The central character, Fred Lothian, is a retired academic engineer, whose specialisation is concrete and Modernist design. He finds himself widowed, estranged from his daughter, avoiding his seriously brain-injured son. He is a damaged and dissatisfied man, hiding in his retirement villa, where every inch of space is cluttered with the material objects he has not been able to discard.</p>
<p>Wilson observes and records all this with a cool eye, and records too the distress, anxieties and ethical struggles faced by the other characters, particularly Fred’s daughter, Caroline. An adopted child (“of course she wasn’t really stolen”, says Fred. “We adopted at the end of that period”), she doesn’t feel able to name herself as Aboriginal, knows she resembles no one in her circle, and fears she is recognised by no one. Compounding this emotional burden, she is researching species extinction for an exhibition she is preparing. </p>
<p>The redeeming element is Jan, Fred’s neighbour at the retirement village. She is, effectively, the positive side of the coin, the mirror of both Fred and Caroline. Her warmth, her direct engagement with Fred’s obdurate misery, and the clarity of her understanding begin to shake loose some of the accreted history around the other characters.</p>
<p>“In the end”, reads the preface to Extinctions, “all is allegory”. But allegory has material effects, and the stories we tell ourselves, and the connections we draw within those stories, have the capacity to lead us to or away from extinction. For much of the book, and reflected in the drawings and other images scattered through it, extinction seems the inevitable conclusion. </p>
<p>Let me give Jan the last word, because she delivers what seems to me the coda to the narrative. Watching a child playing on a beach, she reflects: “At that moment, anything was possible”. As the novel draws to its conclusion, that more hopeful premise seems true.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83635/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Josephine Wilson has won the 2017 Miles Franklin award for her novel Extinctions. Judging panel chair Richard Neville stated Wilson’s novel, “explores ageing, adoption, grief and remorse, empathy and self-centredness…Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/833052017-09-07T02:19:42Z2017-09-07T02:19:42ZTaking control of who gets to send us news<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184136/original/file-20170831-7632-1uqi7ht.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Google is adept at throwing up news we don't need in our searches. So it's time to fight back.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Recently, I was in hasty need of multiple sources on a breaking news story, so I went to a well-known news aggregation website. </p>
<p>But before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options had been narrowed. The news list that the aggregator threw up was dominated by websites whose idea of what constitutes news is very different to my own. </p>
<p>These kinds of news sites tend to fall into two categories. There are those that impose a lot of political spin on their news, and those that prioritise a personalised, celebrity-oriented approach.</p>
<p>Staring at a screen full of both, I suspected foul play. Had my least favourite news sites outplayed their opposition? Was I doomed to a future in which the much-vaunted contemporary palace of choice had become a prison governed by nefarious gatekeepers?</p>
<p>A cursory search for news about corporate media manoeuvres that might explain the search results yielded nothing. The cause must be something subtle, and perhaps less devious, I concluded, something embedded in the algorithms used by the aggregator to replace editors.</p>
<p>News doesn’t just report on our world. It shapes it, and it shapes us. So the media choices we make matter. Instagram over Twitter, or The Conversation over The Daily Mail - all determine the horizon and characteristics of the known. Like it or not, we need to take control over who gets to send us news.</p>
<p>For digital natives, with their proclivity for tailoring their social media news feeds, this is a no-brainer. When I asked my students recently to find stories on a range of topics, most of their sources were stories on Yahoo7 and News Corporation mastheads delivered via Facebook. This stuck me as odd. Why would 18-year old undergrads with strong views on the need for action against climate change be reading The Australian?</p>
<p>The answer is that as far as they are concerned they’re not reading The Australian. They’re reading Facebook. Yet much of their “news” reflects the attitudes of an aged generation that likes coal mines. Go figure.</p>
<p>This got me thinking. What would I see if I were to block a range of news sites? How different would the world look? What happens if you tell, say, Google News, not to send you any stories from News Corporation websites? Here’s how you can try it for yourself.</p>
<p>To begin with, you can’t set your preferences unless you sign up for a Google Account. It’s easy and free, but be aware it allows them to harvest a great deal of data about your browsing habits. Once you’re in, click on Google News and you will see, in the top left corner of the screen, three parallel lines, stacked vertically.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184137/original/file-20170831-29609-1oq78ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184137/original/file-20170831-29609-1oq78ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=190&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184137/original/file-20170831-29609-1oq78ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=190&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184137/original/file-20170831-29609-1oq78ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=190&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184137/original/file-20170831-29609-1oq78ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=239&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184137/original/file-20170831-29609-1oq78ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=239&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184137/original/file-20170831-29609-1oq78ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=239&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Clicking on those brings up a menu of choices. The bottom option (real choice is always the last option for these guys) is called “Manage Sections”. </p>
<p>Clicking on “Manage Sections” takes you to yet another menu. Again, it’s the lowest and last option, “Sources”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=643&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=643&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184143/original/file-20170831-29609-1iaynlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=643&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>By this stage, you may feel like you are trapped in a Poirot detective hunt, but stick with it. Clicking on “Sources” gets you to the real choice action via two options – “Preferred” or “Block”.</p>
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<h2>Editing out the infotainment</h2>
<p>I started with news.com.au and found I was still getting a lot of content from other publications in the News Corporation stable. Not only that, but I was also still getting lots of unwanted infotainment from 9News and Yahoo7.</p>
<p>One by one, I began blocking offending mastheads, then refreshing the browser to check the progress of my censorship. It takes a while because news websites use multiple addresses to maximise reader access. So with News Corporation, for example, I had to eliminate all their Australian regional mastheads, which provide backdoor access to stories that are often hidden behind the pay walls of their larger publications.</p>
<p>There’s no perfect solution. News Corporation’s Mackay Daily Mercury tried to hide inside a drop down menu called “Other sources”, and try as I might, I could not block another News Corporatiom regional, The Sunshine Coast Daily, which badly needed me to know that Elise was the new favourite to win Matty’s heart on The Bachelor.</p>
<p>I would love to report that ten minutes of effort produced a remarkable change in the news of my world. But it takes more than that to curate news feeds until they perfectly match your worldview.</p>
<p>“News cleansing” made no difference to the top three stories that day which appeared in exactly the same order as before I tweaked my feeds. A collision between a car and cyclists in Brisbane topped both lists, the William Tyrrell missing boy story came second in both, and a story about Australian attitudes to banning the burka came in third in both. The only difference was who reported them. In the case of the burka story, The Australian’s account of it was replaced by a similar story from The New Daily.</p>
<p>The same outcome would most likely arise if instead of eliminating News Corporation websites, you eliminated Fairfax and the ABC. </p>
<p>Another way of curating your news feeds would be to list news and commentary sources you prefer, say for example, The Conversation. However, Google News resists all efforts to enter any major Australian news site in its “Preferred” sources box. Memo to Mountain Parkway, California: this needs to change.</p>
<p>There are, of course, many reasons why we should NOT try to censor out views that challenge our own. I still need, at short notice, to access multiple different perspectives on news stories. </p>
<p>But to do that, I just have to sign out of my Google account and hit refresh. Then I get whatever their algorithms think I need to know. </p>
<p>Controlling your news feeds is not necessarily about narrowing your exposure to diverse perspectives. Practised sensibly, it should be about choosing quality news you can trust over frivolous, unreliable and heavily biased alternatives.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83305/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Recently, I was in hasty need of multiple sources on a breaking news story, so I went to a well-known news aggregation website. But before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options…Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/802732017-07-03T00:55:46Z2017-07-03T00:55:46ZOn poetry and pain<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176341/original/file-20170630-11567-iqqgdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ecowaltz/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There are several ways into the book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34356383-shaping-the-fractured-self">Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain</a>, edited by Heather Taylor Johnson. And there are many uses it might serve in the multiple worlds of poetry and the even wider worlds of medicine, therapy, sociology and life writing, to name just a few. </p>
<p>I picked it up expecting some dour texts about illness, pain, death and how some survivors have managed lives of being half alive, but it turned out to be a book I wanted to share with others. It had parts I found myself underlining, and not only could I not put it down, I kept skipping around in it, eager to read more of the stories, reflections and poems of these 28 poets.</p>
<p>Illness has been a powerful theme and provocation for writers. There have been in my reading, Vincent Buckley’s hard won poem of his father’s illness, <a href="https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/buckley-vincent/stroke-0449001">Stroke</a>, many startling poems by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Hilary Mantel’s memoir of pain, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/490618.Giving_Up_the_Ghost?from_search=true">Giving Up the Ghost</a>, Virginia Woolf’s essay <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18850.On_Being_Ill?from_search=true">On Being Ill</a>, Stefan Zweig’s only novel, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59149.Beware_of_Pity?from_search=true">Beware of Pity</a>, and many, many other works. </p>
<p>This is not the first anthology to pair illness and poetry. Johnson recounts in her introduction that the great American anthology, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3537380-articulations?from_search=true">Articulations: the Body and Illness in Poetry</a>, edited by Jon Mukand, was an inspiration for this Australian project. The connection we make between poetry and illness is an old one too. One of the more recent studies attempting to reinforce this perhaps fundamentally romantic connection was Kay Redfield Jamison’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36434.Touched_with_Fire?from_search=true">Touched with Fire: manic depressive illness and the artistic temperament</a> (1993).</p>
<p>Using textual records, Jamison found a remarkably high number of Irish and British poets between 1705 and 1805 suffered from manic depressive conditions. My thanks go to Melbourne poet and surgeon, David Francis for uncovering this piece of medico-literary research. Johnson’s anthology, however, is not the kind that sets poets apart as differently made, differently brained, or strangely but beautifully ill and tragic. This anthology brings poets back in to the world of ordinary people faced with unexpected, often rare and chronic illnesses.</p>
<p>Each poet in this anthology is given two to four pages to write a small autobiographical piece on their illness, its rarity, its progression and treatment, and some history of their experiences of it. Then each poet is allowed three poems to show the several sides to their experiences and reactions.</p>
<p>The book would, I think, be equally satisfying to read for the small autobiographical essays, with the poems as means of enhancing the personal stories, or for the poems with the essays as enhancing insights into what the poems have been articulating.</p>
<p>It is rare to find poems simply repeating what was in the introductory personal essay. This means that the book can be as exciting to read for its literary, creative and cathartic value as for its value to (for example) medical students curious about how illness shapes the self and how the medical profession is perceived and experienced by the ill.</p>
<p>What are these illnesses then? The much-honoured and deeply accomplished poet, <a href="https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/boyle-peter">Peter Boyle</a>, writes of the onset of polio when he was barely three years old in 1954. After years of paralysis and treatment, by 1968 Peter Boyle was dux of Riverview College in Sydney and he was writing poetry. I have been reading Peter Boyle’s poetry for years, sensing his acquaintance with pain and illness, but not knowing explicitly what his story was.</p>
<p>In two and a half pages, Boyle writes simply and intelligently and bravely of his life and how poetry works in it. Andy Jackson, another poet whose work I have enjoyed and admired for years, writes of inheriting Marfan syndrome from his father. Jessica Cohen writes of her fibromyalgia, a disorder caused by abnormalities in how pain signals are processed. Sophie Finlay suffers from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a mysterious condition that involves a faulty bodily response to gravity. </p>
<p>Others suffer from the invisible but no less real and physical condition of mental illness. Gareth Roi Jones and Meg Dunley write of the more or less constant migraines they have suffered since childhood. Steve Evans and Susan Hawthorne write of their epilepsy. Heather Taylor Johnson has been diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, a condition resulting in severe vertigo. </p>
<p>Other conditions include a bulged disc as a result of rape, anorexia, transient global amnesia, chronic fatigue syndrome, the frightening condition of hyper-flexibility, MS, acromegaly and its complex consequences, temporomandibular joint pain, and Sjörgen’s syndrome. Most conditions are rare, some few of them are becoming more common, all of them require bravery, doggedness, resilience—and beyond all odds these poets expend much of their precious energy on being positive and creative.</p>
<p>Being poets, their illness cannot entirely define them, while at the same time it becomes clear that these illnesses have shaped them powerfully. Some poetry transcends illness:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I was ceramic I’d be kintsukuroi,<br>
Pottery which has been knocked,<br>
Dropped, broken into shards then<br>
Mended with gold or silver lacquer,<br>
A delicate meander of liquid gold<br>
Flowing into the breach …<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from Axiology by Anne M. Carson)</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/176336/original/file-20170630-11661-2w1tw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Pottery mended with ‘a delicate meander of liquid gold’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">By Lia_t/shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sometimes the poetry brings brutally raw despair to the fore:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My brain is broken / that’s how it feels<br>
But there’s no glue to fix it / only time and more time<br>
Piles of pills / popped from their shells<br>
Handfuls thrown down / tired throat accepts.<br>
You better yet? / is the endless question<br>
Yes, is the lie.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from Yes, is the lie by Meg Dunley)</p>
<p>Then there can be dark wit combined with acute perception informing a poem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>on the road into town<br>
our redneck neighbours<br>
have a barren grassless<br>
perennially overstocked<br>
livestock paddock<br>
dad & his mates call<br>
the linger & die paddock<br>
where there’s always<br>
at least half a dozen<br>
extremely unwell sheep<br>
blighting the hillsides<br>
with their lethargic<br>
wanderings before<br>
giving up & becoming<br>
another bloated carcass<br>
sometimes my brain<br>
grazes there too<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(the paddock by Gareth Roi Jones)</p>
<p>David Brooks offers a glimpse of not just the social life of the disabled, but how one feels to be positioned in a certain way in this world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Four friends have called in the last two days<br>
from London, Perth, Canberra, Corowa,<br>
and all quite unexpectedly.<br>
They worry about me, they say, and need to know how I am.<br>
I’ve heard from none of them for months<br>
and am touched, of course,<br>
but the synchronicity unsettles me – some<br>
ghost-in-the-works, maybe, or<br>
mood passing over; not, hopefully, a<br>
portent of imminent disaster. I’m<br>
alright, I say, feeling<br>
fitter every day, ribs<br>
healed at last, no<br>
fall for months, mood<br>
as good as it could be on this bright, high-<br>
winded mountain Tuesday with<br>
Trump and Clinton engaged in their first<br>
Presidential debate ….<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from Disabled Poem by David Brooks)</p>
<p>There is a lot to admire and relish in the poetry on offer in this book. Johnson is to be congratulated for putting together such an intelligent and brave and heartfelt and honest collection of poetry and mini-essays.</p>
<p>Finally, if there is one common theme running through this book, it is one that the book does not make explicit, and does not use as a justification for its existence. This theme is the alienation people regularly feel when subjected to interactions with doctors and subsequent medical treatment. I was shocked by the times that different writers remembered their doctors smiling at them as they delivered catastrophic news or devastating diagnoses.</p>
<p>No doubt these doctors were themselves distressed and confronted by the illnesses they had to discuss with patients, but my wish is that doctors might be trained to bring more awareness, more empathy, more professional self control and more understanding to their important roles. </p>
<p>If every medical student was given a copy of this book to read and discuss and re-read, we might, we just might, have people reporting different stories of their encounters with the medical profession.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain, edited by Heather Taylor Johnson, UWAP (<a href="http://www.uwap.com.au">www.uwap.com.au</a> ), 2017, 227pp, rrp $29.99 AUD isbn 9781742589312</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80273/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Declaration: As a Publisher with Five Islands Press, Brophy has worked as part of a team that published books by the editor of this anthology and a number of poets in it: Heather Taylor Johnson, Kristen Lang and Rob Walker.</span></em></p>There are several ways into the book Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain, edited by Heather Taylor Johnson. And there are many uses it might serve in the multiple worlds of poetry…Kevin John Brophy, Professor of Creative writing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/796692017-06-19T09:20:29Z2017-06-19T09:20:29ZWhat’s in a name? Writing across borders of poetry and music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174397/original/file-20170619-5799-3566ji.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan in 1991.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Xavier Badosa</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bob Dylan’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zf04vnVPfM">recent speech</a> to the Swedish Academy led to a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-rambling-glory-of-bob-dylans-nobel-speech">flurry of commentary</a> about the “smoky, meditative jazz-piano arrangement” of the speech, what Dylan <a href="http://theconversation.com/bob-dylans-nobel-speech-a-splendidly-eccentric-performance-78998">did and didn’t say</a>, and whether he’d <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bob-dylans-nobel-prize-lecture-used-phrasing-similar-sparknotes-1013420">used Sparknotes to quote from Moby Dick</a>. It takes me back to the high feelings and combative discussions that circulated last year, when the Nobel Prize committee announced that it had awarded the <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/">2016 Prize in Literature</a> to Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.</p>
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<p>One side of the debate was occupied by those who deny that a songwriter should be identified as a poet. The Swedish Academy, supported by popular opinion, presented the counter-argument, and Dylan is now listed first among the “<a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/">Most Popular Literature Laureates</a>”, ahead of such luminaries as Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus or Toni Morrison.</p>
<p>This is a surprising spot in literary history for someone who once described himself as <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-gives-press-conference-in-san-francisco-19671214">a song and dance man</a>, but Permanent Secretary of the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=2631">Swedish Academy Sara Danius</a> insists that Dylan “can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition”. Dylan himself <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html">seems to demur</a>: toward the end of his Nobel address he says, “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read”.</p>
<p>The <em>sung-not-read</em> distinction has long been a key issue in this debate. Composer Pierre Boulez argues that specialisation has divided speech from music, so that now each must obey discrete and specific laws of semantics and structure. They are <a href="https://archive.org/details/C_1963_06_08">no longer necessarily in harmony</a>, though they still find points of connection, in song. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/after-dylans-nobel-what-makes-a-poet-a-poet.html?_r=0">poet and critic David Orr notes</a>, “A well-written song isn’t just a poem with a bunch of notes attached; it’s a unity of verbal and musical elements”.</p>
<p>Orr doesn’t offer the Academy’s argument that a songwriter can be a poet, insisting instead that there is a distinction between a poem and a song. He has a lot of support for this, because though there are songs that are remarkably poem-like; and poems that work better in spoken than in written form, there are distinct differences, in terms of genre and of function, between the two forms.</p>
<p>Poems, generally speaking, behave on the page, and operate against silence. Song lyrics, generally speaking, perform in sound, and operate in a relationship with musical apparatus.</p>
<p>The use of language differs too, in the two forms. Both song lyrics and poems exploit and rely on linguistic devices such as imagery, expressiveness, rhythm, cadence, concision, and word association. Poets have at their disposal little more than grammar, syntax and lexical choices. </p>
<p>Musicians have all that, plus a stack of sonic resources. These include melody, harmony and instrumentation; the stressing or slurring, and stretching or truncating of words, as needed to fit the musical shape; as well as meaningless but useful utterances. While rarely found in any but the most experimental of poems, <em>oo-oo-oos</em> and <em>la-la-las</em> can perfectly punctuate a song, enrich its song texture, and capture its listeners.</p>
<p>Songs also make more use of repetition than do poems: in part because the music may demand that a phrase or line be repeated; in part because the conventions of song include the use of a refrain, which is rare in contemporary poetry, largely because it doesn’t suit the poems though it is often vital in a song. Tom Wait’s Time — a very poetic song — includes a chorus that is all repetition: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And it’s time time time / and it’s time time time / and it’s time time time / that you love / and it’s time time time. </p>
</blockquote>
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</figure>
<p>I love this, when Waits sings it, and it provides an important transition between the wild imagery of the verses. But when I read these lines, in the absence of the music and the voice, I feel as though I am in the presence of a mistake.</p>
<p>Does any of this matter — need the boundaries between song and poem be patrolled and policed? Possibly not. After all, as 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico suggests, we humans came to language through song; and song and poetry together built the linguistic domain we now inhabit.</p>
<p>But there’s more to it than theory; there’s also taxonomy, and the distribution of resources that follows cultural classifications. Musicians can become rich and famous from their work; poets rarely do. Musicians can compete for the distinction associated with what is still called “high” culture, but poets rarely get to enjoy the rewards of “popular” culture. </p>
<p>Bob Dylan, for example, has won a shelf full of Grammies for the same body of work that delivered his Nobel Prize in Literature. Oxford Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage has won the <a href="http://www.examiner.co.uk/whats-on/features-simon-armitage-music-lyrics-4992323">Ivor Novello Award</a>, but that was specifically for his song lyrics: his poetry was not eligible. </p>
<p>As long as the river flows in only one direction, it seems likely that poets will continue to resist attempts by songwriters to occupy their patch.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79669/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Bob Dylan said songs are meant to be sung not read, and he has a point. Songs and poems obey different rules.Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/764562017-04-20T06:01:38Z2017-04-20T06:01:38ZFrom the heart: why writers are putting themselves in nonfiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166010/original/file-20170420-2414-13s7n49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Waverley Cemetery in Sydney where Henry and Bertha Lawson rest. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Winston Yang</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>History is a story about the past told by people who didn’t live there. Historical fiction and scholarly histories and biographies dominate the field, but a fresh approach, the literary nonfiction narrative of reflection, is making its presence felt.</p>
<p>As a writing genre, history is no spring chicken. Livy (59 BC – 17 AD) gave us the history of ancient Rome, while Australian histories have an even longer provenance, from the First Peoples’ Dreamtime narratives to Grace Karskens’ excellent scholarly account of European settlement in <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/history/The-Colony-Grace-Karskens-9781741756371">The Colony: A History of Early Sydney</a> (2009). Historical novels are nothing new either, from Walter Scott’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/539025.Waverley">Waverley</a> (1814) to Hilary Mantel’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6101138-wolf-hall">Wolf Hall</a> (2009). </p>
<p>A relative newcomer to the field is the literary nonfiction historical narrative, in which the archive serves as a springboard into a pool of reflection for a contemporary writer. The latest example, published this month, is <a href="http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/Book.aspx/1424/A%20Wife%27s%20Heart">Kerrie Davies’ A Wife’s Heart</a>, published by University of Queensland Press, a book that retells the life of poet and short story writer Henry Lawson, from multiple viewpoints. Central to Davies’ narrative is a sadly damning affidavit filed by Lawson’s wife Bertha when she sued for divorce in 1903 alleging domestic violence. </p>
<p>When journalist and academic Davies emerged blinking from the archives and into the glare of publication and media interviews, she was greeted by <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/henry-lawsons-marriage-a-dark-tale-of-drink-and-domestic-violence/news-story/9231066f3db506de4c230d215fb9038d">headlines</a> like “Henry Lawson, voice of a nation, larrikin, likely wife beater”. </p>
<p>My excitement reading that headline was due not just to the fact that Davies is a colleague and friend. I was simply happy to see that unorthodox approaches to history are welcomed, and can ignite and enrich our readings of our past.
History, as we know, is a political football. We struggle over the meaning of the past in order to control the game of present and future. A marriage like Henry Lawson’s that began in 1896 and ended seven years later can be hijacked by anyone with an agenda. Davies adopts a light touch. She moves among the many contemporaneous perspectives on Henry from friends and foes as a man who struggled with poverty, ambition, deafness, a failed marriage and alcoholism. </p>
<p>Bertha, who struggled to raise two children while coping with Henry’s ups and down, had her critics as well. She ended up doing a long stint in a mental institution for what today might be called bipolar disorder. Their fraught marriage and messy divorce provides Davies with a ball of historical wool to untangle. She chases it through the archives and across the landscapes through which her subjects drifted, including a grinding stint in London. The affective impact of this pursuit turns the pond of reflection into a whirlpool, inexorably drawing the reader in.</p>
<p>Not everyone sees it that way. Though he has not commented on Davies’ book specifically, Sydney journalist and author David Marr recently disclosed his distaste for biographies in which authors share the personal reflections and experiences they have had while researching and writing their books. </p>
<p>For evidence of the correctness of his position, Marr conveniently points to his own writing, quoting from a scene in Patrick White: A Life in which he reports a medical emergency he witnessed at White’s home not long before the Nobel Laureate’s death in 1990. Marr was witnessing what could have been (but wasn’t) his venerable subject’s demise. Yet his own voice is detached. He expresses no personal emotion or reaction, acting instead as a fly on the wall observer. </p>
<p>As he <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/december/1480514400/david-marr/art-biography">wrote recently in The Monthly</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m on the side of invisible biographers. I don’t give a damn about their happy thoughts as they tread in the footsteps of their subjects. Spare me their personal reflections on the Straits of Gibraltar or the old House of Reps. I’m not interested in their research triumphs. I want the life, not the homework.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In A Wife’s Heart, Kerrie Davies transgresses Marr’s “law”, sharing generously of her own life story while telling Henry and Bertha’s. Readers learn that, like Bertha, Davies is a single parent whose marriage has ended in divorce. The pressures are financial as well as emotional, just as they were for the Lawsons.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166011/original/file-20170420-2398-1md7az7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lawson’s grave lies next to his wife’s in Waverley Cemetery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sardaka</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>At first I found these personal references, which begin on page three of the book, jarring. I simply wasn’t ready to have the focus shifted so early in the story. However, as the book progresses the personal reflections merge with her subjects’ narratives. Conflicting accounts by the Lawsons’ friends and colleagues give the book the feel of a detective novel, a texture well suited to a story of marital failure in which there seems plenty of blame to go round. </p>
<p>Some readers no doubt share Marr’s views about biography, but there are good reasons why younger authors working in a less journalistic genre might profitably venture where Marr warns them not to go. </p>
<p>The distant voice of the “invisible” biographer – like the voice of God booming from above Mount Sinai – has a slightly anachronistic feel these days. To depart from this voice challenges readers who like being reassured by an authoritative tone, or perhaps, put less kindly, enjoy being told what to think. But others prefer more open, less conclusive arguments and reflections. </p>
<p>For some, Marr’s preference for invisibility is out of synch in a world in which readers routinely write back at authors, questioning their logic and exposing mistakes in the “comments section” that now follows most online articles. The invisible narrator’s biases are more implicit, or opaque. That may seem subversive in an era when transparency is valued. </p>
<p>Marr’s argument is that the reader is not well served by an introspective or performative narrator, and that is often true. Some of the worst nonfiction I’ve read in recent years was penned by authors who lost focus on their subject by sharing too much of themselves.</p>
<p>The changing economics of publishing are contributing to our evolving literary landscape. The ranks of subeditors patrolling the borders of mainstream media publications, beating the literary crap out of upstarts who dare to use the personal pronoun “I” are being depleted. </p>
<p>On the bright side, literary rules exist to be broken in the more diffuse structure of contemporary publishing. There never was a golden age.</p>
<p>The subjects of Marr’s early biographies, like White and former Attorney General Sir Garfield Barwick, were alive and highly influential when he started writing about them, good reasons for being careful and adopting an orthodox style. But for Davies, archival sources were all she had. No living witnesses of the trouble between Henry and Bertha survive. The author was left to curate documents. Personalising the narrative breathes life into documentary sources.</p>
<p>There are dangers in interpreting the facts of history. Historians grapple constantly with the problem, while historical novelists can choose whether to stick with the facts or alter them, sometimes radically. Literary nonfiction’s third path allows the juxtaposition of an author’s experience and perspective alongside the archival evidence. This might just reduce the temptation to invent or over egg.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in the world outside the book, the world in which we live, marital violence is at epidemic levels, commanding our society and governments’ attentions. In that context, Davies’ personal story as a single parent acts as a footbridge connecting contemporary readers to the world of her subjects. </p>
<p>Beyond questions of literary technique, Davies’ academic writing on the Lawson story reveals that her literary reflection was catalysed by previous accounts by respected historians that favour Henry over Bertha. </p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.aawp.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Davies-1.pdf">conference paper</a> delivered in 2015 she noted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The biographers of the iconic bush poet and writer – most notably Denton Prout (1963) Manning Clark (1978) and Colin Roderick (1982, 1991) – have all constructed a victim as hero narrative around Lawson’s life, blaming Bertha Lawson (nee Bredt) for his personal and creative decline. In their biographies, Lawson’s marriage breakdown and judicial separation from Bertha Lawson is narrated as a destructive turning point, with Bertha portrayed as a callous persecutor who “spun the wheel of retribution” … against her husband. The unanimous interpretation in these works is that Bertha Lawson in her legal claims disregarded Henry’s evident inability to pay child support, resulting in his imprisonment at Darlinghurst Gaol sporadically from 1905 to 1910. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Was Lawson a wife beater? Davies thinks so, but some who knew Bertha believed otherwise. We may never know, but it’s a worthwhile conversation in which all voices and literary styles are welcome.</p>
<p>Marr’s argument for invisibility is undermined somewhat by the fact – which he acknowledges – that he has previously put himself into his stories about others, including the White biography (in a note near the end of the book), and in <a href="http://insidestory.org.au/the-biographer-and-the-biographee">essays on Kevin Rudd</a> and the Bill Henson case. In all of these his narratives were better for it. </p>
<p><em>Kerrie Davies and David Marr will be speaking at separate events at next month’s Sydney Writers Festival.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76456/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Kerrie Davies’ A Wife’s Heart places her own story alongside that of Henry Lawson’s wife.Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/763202017-04-18T10:03:11Z2017-04-18T10:03:11ZExquisite prose, with rare and subtle insight<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165547/original/image-20170418-32723-yvfpxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Heather Rose, the 2017 Stella Prize winner.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Stella Prize</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Heather Rose has won the 2017 Stella Prize for her novel The Museum of Modern Love, a fictional exploration of the power of art to transform individual lives, written in exquisite prose, with rare and subtle insight.</p>
<p>Brenda Walker, Chair of the judging panel, said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is rare to encounter a novel with such powerful characterisation, such a deep understanding of the consequences of personal and national history, such affection for a city and the people who are drawn to it, and such dazzling and subtle explorations of the importance of art in everyday life.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>Rose’s novel centres on Serbian artist Marina Abramović’s <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/964?locale=en">The Artist is Present</a>, a 75-day performance piece that took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Throughout the work, Ambramović sat perfectly still at a table in the museum’s atrium, with bright lights shining down and around her, while spectators took turns to sit opposite. As each visitor sat, Abramović lifted her face and maintained eye contact.</p>
<p>Within days, people began crowding the atrium to watch, the lines frequently spilling out onto the street. Some gathered overnight or in the early hours before the museum opened. Occasionally the sitters cried.</p>
<p>Rose’s novel subtly explores the individual lives of fictional characters in the audience, all of whom are transformed by the strange intimacy of the work. At its centre is Arky Levin, a music composer who is emotionally cut off from life.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He wasn’t sure why he needed to keep returning to the sidelines of this strange performance, but he kept finding himself taking the train, walking in the door, climbing the stairs, taking his place by the white line. The atrium was a magnet, or maybe it was Abramović. Something about this was important, but he couldn’t say why.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Rose’s novel, chance conversations with strangers offer rare and disarming insights not only into the emotional lives of the characters, and their often tragic situations, but also into our own yearning for “some new idea of life” – a more authentic kind of intimacy or connection in our disconnected, media-saturated world.</p>
<p>In a list that included significant and moving books by two writers, Georgia Blain and Cory Taylor, who have both died since the publication of their works, the choice to award Rose’s novel could not have come easily to the <a href="http://thestellaprize.com.au/2016/08/2017-stella-prize-launch-judging-panel-latest-stella-count-revealed/">judging panel</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165550/original/image-20170418-32713-2gx761.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Stella Prize judges, from left to right: Ben Law, Sandra Phillips, Brenda Walker, Di Johnston, Delia Falconer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Connor Tomas O'Brien</span></span>
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<p>Taylor’s book, Dying a memoir, genuinely broke new ground in writing powerfully and with astonishing clarity about a subject that is rarely treated with such effect. Blain’s novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog, is the final achievement of a mature writer whose work spoke clearly and in a quietly profound way to a whole generation – my generation – of women. </p>
<p>But Blain and Taylor would have been the emotional choice. And objectivity is – perhaps – not possible in the face of such calamity. I am uncertain. But I do think there should be a special place in literature for books that do some real work in the world.</p>
<p>The Museum of Modern Love is Heather Rose’s seventh book. Her previous novels include White Heart (1999), The Butterfly Man (2005) and The River Wife (2009). She is co-author (with Danielle Wood) of the Tuesday McGillycuddy series for children, published under the pen name Angelica Banks. She won the Davitt Award in 2006, and her novels have been shortlisted for the Nita B. Kibble Award and the Aurealis Awards, and longlisted for the IMPAC Award.</p>
<p>Rose joins previous Stella winners including Carrie Tiffany, Clare Wright, Emily Bitto and Charlotte Wood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76320/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Heather Rose has won the 2017 Stella Prize for her novel The Museum of Modern Love, a fictional exploration of the power of art to transform individual lives, written in exquisite prose, with rare and…Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor of Writing, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/644812017-03-29T09:48:26Z2017-03-29T09:48:26ZArt for art’s sake<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163214/original/image-20170329-8591-16ju05z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dean Lewins/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Most people who have completed a cultural studies or sociology degree in recent decades will have come across the world of Pierre Bourdieu, one of that army of extraordinary scholars who filled the 20th century with ideas and tools for thought. </p>
<p>Central to Bourdieu’s work on art and literature is the argument that the creative world is bifurcated, between art done “for art’s sake”, and art produced for a market. This logic of production, which Bourdieu named “the economic world reversed”, has long dominated perceptions of what matters as art, and what is just entertainment.</p>
<p>But the practicalities of creative production, regardless of what audience it suits, is that it takes time, skill, and the funds to purchase materials and secure production space. Lucky artists will be independently wealthy or supported by a wealthy parent or spouse, but such individuals are thin on the ground.</p>
<p>The government has recognised the conundrum this poses — a society needs art; art need artists capable of making it; and since art doesn’t (usually) pay, both art and artists need support.</p>
<p>Since before Federation, governments have provided arts funding: according to cultural economist David Throsby, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/the-history-of-arts-funding-in-australia/7550288">the first example</a> was the payment of two cows to poet Michael Massey Robinson in the early 19th century. After this livestock-based economy, the government shifted to a more conventional money-and-infrastructure system, finally establishing the Australia Council for the Arts in 1975.</p>
<p>However, the amount of public money committed to the arts, the areas supported, the make-up of committees tasked to evaluate applications and award funding, and the extent to which government officials are involved in the process have all been debated, sometimes hotly.</p>
<p>In 2015 this came to a head, with then Arts Minister George Brandis raiding the Australia Council, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/may/14/brandis-new-initiative-plus-cuts-to-australia-council-will-end-monopoly">taking control of a large chunk of its budget</a> to establish his own program.
While this has been <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/arts-sector-delighted-as-government-axes-george-brandis-arts-slush-fund-20170317-gv0zup.html">recently reversed</a>, the Council has not yet had funding fully restored; and in any event, the damage has been done: many artists and arts organisations have lost years of funding, and their futures are uncertain.</p>
<p>If the state and territory governments pick up the slack (<a href="http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/victorian-government-announces-113-million-arts-grants">as the Victorian Government has, to some extent</a>), things might look rosier; but, as ACT-based artists recently discovered, nothing is sure.</p>
<p>Funding for arts in the Capital Territory has <a href="http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/canberra-arts-community-shocked-by-unprecedented-arts-funding-drop-20161220-gtf6zy.html">fallen dramatically</a> in recent years. While the ACT government has promised to restore funding, some artists will not be able to wait for the next year’s funding round.</p>
<p>This is a genuine problem for practitioners; money does, after all, make the world go round, and even artists have to eat. In a recent issue of <a href="http://theliftedbrow.com/">The Lifted Brow</a>, subtitled <a href="https://theliftedbrow.myshopify.com/collections/these-old-things/products/the-lifted-brow-32">The Capital Issue</a>, writers tease out the problem of art’s relationship to money. </p>
<p>This begins with the editorial, where Annabel Brady-Brown and Zoe Dzunko discuss “the anxieties produced by the logic of capital” in the context of art, which is produced at “below-minimum-wage-all-the-way-down-to-zilch-payment”, using its own production as an example (Q: how many hours went into making it? A: 2,337. Q: what paid per hour to the production team? A: About zilch).</p>
<p>Across the country creative practitioners provide their inspiration and expertise to little or nothing; meantime the arts sector <a href="http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/news/media-centre/media-releases/the-arts-matter-to-australia-and-the-data-shows-it/">contributes substantially to GDP</a>. </p>
<p>And yet the federal Minister for Education recently named VET-sector creative arts training programs “<a href="http://www.senatorbirmingham.com.au/Latest-News/ID/3238/New-VET-Student-Loans-course-list-focussed-on-employment-outcomes">lifestyle choices</a>”, and removed them from the list of “legitimate courses”.</p>
<p>Writer after writer in The Lifted Brow addresses this conundrum. Ellena Savage produces a portrait of the writer’s life, averring that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>every decision I have made so far in both my writing and love life has, to some extent, been made with day-to-day money and future money in mind. </p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163215/original/image-20170329-8584-1nk69fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Lifted Brow</span></span>
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<p>Others point out that we can’t buy houses, or afford to keep renting in the suburbs we love (Doyle): we measure our lives no longer in coffee spoons but in dollars. And while the culture provides distractions — encouraging obsessions about food (Wright); calming us with mindfulness and colouring in books (Hickey) — many artists dream of being able to have “normal” lives, and being able to make their work (Sakr and Ypil).</p>
<p>The “Capital” of The Lifted Brow incorporates not just capital cities, but also financial capital, symbolic and cultural capital, and the whole strange but comprehensively documented abstraction of material life from public expressions of life lived in relation to the market, rather than in relation to each other. </p>
<p>And we do need each other; Lech Blaine observes in his article about inheritance, “Rome wasn’t built by a single insomniac”. We need community at least as much as we need money; and the effect of an imbalance of modes of capital is graphically represented in McDougall’s contribution.</p>
<p>The writing in this volume is often confronting, sometimes experimental, sometimes sublime; but in each case it adumbrates a contemporary social and economic problem: the role of art in our culture. </p>
<p>There are various arguments in the discourse: that government is already providing significant support, in the form of grants, infrastructural support, tax breaks, and HECS support for art students; that it is up to artists to become better entrepreneurs; that there are plenty of creative careers, and artists should be prepared to take those—to write copy, to edit advertising flyers, et al.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, arts grants are risibly small, and typically support the costs of projects, not of living; moreover, while there are jobs that require creative skills and aptitude, these rarely produce art, but only the stuff of corporate and consumer culture.</p>
<p>The issue is that art is part of the culture, but it is not aligned with the logic of contemporary economics; and this is a wicked problem. Until, as a society, we have found a way to reconceptualise art’s relationship with society, and to account for the true costs of making creative work, this problem will not go away.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64481/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Most people who have completed a cultural studies or sociology degree in recent decades will have come across the world of Pierre Bourdieu, one of that army of extraordinary scholars who filled the 20th…Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.