Pseud's Corner Part 7

For multiple disservices to literature and human dignity, this week's Order of the Brown Nose goes to Jennifer Byrne, host of ABC's First Tuesday Book Club. The list of the pseudy talents on display in her most recent First Tuesday website update really only starts with public brown-nosing of much-loved writers; apart from the general air of unreconstructed self-love and clubbyness, there's the excrutiating pretention ("we laughed like drains" etc), unselfconscious use of cliche's ("that grand old man" etc) and boganic glossy magazine slang (the Book Industry Awards could've been "glammer" etc). Oh, and the generous plug she gives her own interview with Christopher Hitchens in the same breath as announcing that he has cancer.CS

"Another week, another literary prize... last week it was the turn of young Craig Silvey, who took out the industry's Book of the Year with his terrific story of life and a mysterious death in a country town, Jasper Jones. I was sitting at the back of Paddington Town Hall next to that grand old man of letters Tom Keneally, - always blissful company - who scored big applause for his win in the non-fiction category. These Book Industry Awards aren't perhaps as glam as some others but what I like about them is they honour not just writers but the lesser-known people who make the publishing world spin: booksellers, distributors, illustrators, publishers. Though the anxiety in the room about the rise of the e-book was palpable. Lots of passionate speeches in support of the paper-and-ink version - the "heritage delivery system", as the marketers might say. - As for my own reading - well, you can't get much more heritage than Tolstoy's epic Anna Karenina, nominated by many as the greatest novel ever written. . .

Thanks for your reading suggestions last month. I can tell you which clubber suggested Curtis Settlefield's An American Wife, it was Amanda Keller on our Christmas show last year - along with the unforgettable Me Cheeta, a spoof celebrity biography by the world-weary chimp in the Tarzan pictures. We all laughed like drains - assuming she was joking - but had to eat our cackles [eat our own kaka?] when it turned up on the the 2009 Booker Prize longlist!

And even though it is the second Tuesday of the month, a reminder to tune in July 13 for my special half-hour interview with the brilliant, mouthy contrarian Christopher Hitchens. This is a man who could charm birds from the trees. And then roast them for dinner as punishment for being so easily seduced. Funny, pugnacious - and at the moment, I imagine, absolutely devastated. He was out promoting his 11th book and first memoir, Hitch-22, when advised that he'd been diagnosed with cancer; he immediately pulled out of the tour to start chemo treatment. But he's in scintillating form in this interview - and the full hour version will go up on the First Tuesday site." (Jennifer Byrne, "What I'm reading" First Tuesday Book Club online)

***

On Fanoodling

It's been non-stop fanoodling here on The Great Stage since Julian Meyrick fanoodled his way to a really prominent corner of the Corner of Shame in edition no. 6 and revealed to us with the f*ck-you appassionata of a man of true conviction - not only that Beckett's immortal Waiting for Godot is a moral lesson in . . . waiting, but also what Vlad and Estr really get up to in the course of the play. Of course they despair, but, more importantly, they fanoodle. They fanoodle so significantly that the great gullet of Australian cultural unresponsiveness opens wide and emits . . . funny noises. Feeling almost certain that Dr Meyrick wasn't suggesting he'd seen Ian McKellen and co. "messing round on a couch" doing something "like cuddling, only better" - as a quick trip to the Urban Dictionary seemed to indicate - we asked readers to tell us what they thought Meyrick really meant - deep down. Today, the results are in.    

A SHIFTING, shuffling, furrowing, cogitating noise. A cross between a wheeze, a sigh and a snort of determination. This is the sound emitting from the Comedy Theatre at the moment. The sound of Australians facing up to Culture. . . That Waiting for Godot should be presented commercially 50 years after it was damned by New York critic Walter Kerr as "a play in which nothing happens, twice" suggests either the world has lost its mind, or changed it. Beckett's two tramps, fanoodling and despairing their days away waiting for a mysterious Godot who never appears, is stamped on our collective consciousness as the archetypal existential statement. A ditch, a tree, a few guys killing time. That's it, folks. After all the unwanted Christmas presents, great loves, political upheavals, promotions, demotions, technical advances, broken marriages and lost biros, that what we're left with. That's life. - A production of Waiting for Godot is a compelling event because it is still an affront to theatre-going sensibilities. Or once again an affront. Discontinuity is the dominant mode of the modern world, as we frazzle and fragment in unrelenting competitive locomotion. Harried, hurried and chronically overwhelmed, waiting of any kind has been banished, an unmitigated bad. So Beckett's tramps, who literally do nothing for two hours, is a poke in the eye, a ''f**k you'' from beyond the grave. Having to sit in the theatre and think for a prolonged period demands skills all but forgotten, like tuning a crystal set. Something more is required, a quality of attention we reserve only for things that touch us deeply. Things that really matter. (Julian Meyrick, "Beckett can teach us how to wait", The Age)

So, were Vlad and Estr fanoodling, as in:

(a) canoodling in fcuk apparell (Daniel Pilkington)?

(b) "fail-noodling" - i.e. failing to use their noodles - presumably to agree on a departure strategy once it became clear that Godot was putting in a no-show (Sam Waters)?

(c) squeezing the wrong end of the sauce bottle (Kevin Rudd)?

OR

(d) running around with their underpants on their heads being boisterously expressive, i.e. acting (Larissa Harrison)?

The free lunch voucher I think clearly goes to . . . Mr Pilkington.

***

For my part – and in this forum for intimate, writerly expression – I’ve got to openly submit here to conceding that for the longest time I’ve resented the contention that a tactile, geographical environment impacts on the quality of an author’s work. I do, however, freely and cordially embrace the notion that a physical, authorial space administers a significant influence upon a writer’s work ethic. - For wherever I work – be this sprawling over and scrawling onto the leg of an armchair – be this conveniently adopting the Yellow Pages as both a makeshift desk and seer-stone for its infinite supply of barbarous character names – be this scrawling my linguistically anomalous breed of hieroglyph into water-choked moleskines, or onto the backs of lurid junkmail pamphleteering the services of professional suburban podiatrists moonlighting as dental technicians – be this writing with my fingertip into granulated mounds of sugar, or into nuggets of spilled coffee grounds, before palming my idle attempts at kitchen literature into my enamel-ware mug and consuming these same imperfect sentences with soy milk so sweet I can almost mask the bitter taste of haphazard syntax – for wherever my compulsion to write seizes me, my stamina for producing is dependent upon a space where personal comfort reigns supreme. (Kirk Marshall, "Kirk Marshall's Literary Space" LiteraryMinded)

The Advancement Solutions Consultant is responsible for analysing client requirements and providing complex data reports to the advancement community of the University. The position is required to play a pivotal role in the development and documentation of technical procedures for managing information across the Advancement system portfolio. Furthermore, the Advancement Solutions Consultant will develop standard reports that replace ad hoc reports using the business intelligence reporting tool (Microsoft SQL Server BI) by adhering to the report development lifecycle. - The incumbent will also be responsible for providing assistance and making business process improvements across the Advancement system portfolio. - Additionally, the Advancement Solutions Consultant will manage new customizations and configurations to advancement systems and conduct system and user acceptance testing on applicable environments with other team members. (University of Melbourne, "WANTED: Advancement Solutions Consultant - Advancement Office, Deputy Vice Chancellor (University Affairs))

By day three, we were total ratbags. Our American companion had morphed into ‘Dingo Dave’. Ascending a sharp incline, we found Jennifer Byrne [Why, hello again!] rolling on the ground in paroxysms of laughter. Linda Jaivin’s description of the plot twists in her Song dynasty opera scenario grew more baroque with every mile. Raymond, now bereft of any hope that we might be capable of shutting up for even the shortest time, announced that he had decided to let us talk. I pumped him for dirt on Doc Neeson and the Angels. Conversation ranged across topics from Cormac McCarthy to the difference between a cad and a bounder to cheap eats in Istanbul. Only rarely did we encounter other walkers, groups of older folk mostly, with serious expressions and ski-stock walking sticks. They looked scandalised as we trooped past singing selections from The Sound of Music. ("Shane Maloney opens his diary", The Spectator Australia)

[The latest album]'s many false starts and dead ends also place M.I.A. on shaky ground aesthetically, and with no coherent message to fall back on, the album feels alienated and disconnected, perhaps ironic for an album attempting to evoke the hyper-connectedness and sensory overload of culture in the wake of iPhone and Google. A lot of the criticisms of M.I.A. have focused on her lack of a coherent politics, the questionable ethics of her aestheticization of poverty, and the hypocrisies of her privileged lifestyle. With albums as vital and original as Arular and Kala, it was easy to defend her deterritorializations as a valid artistic strategy, a method of salvaging the radical moment and making it resonate with a Western audience weaned on hip-hop's valorization of the outlaw. The Hirschbergs of the world are wrong when they attempt to bring M.I.A. to task for these perceived ethical violations, when her body of work is more productively viewed as a series of politically charged portraits in which that naïveté is essential to the revolutionary urgency she seeks to bring to the dancefloor. Unfortunately, this time out, M.I.A. just hasn't given us enough to work with. (Jonathan Dean reviews MIA, Tiny Mix Tapes. Tip of the hat for a close reading of this spasming hypertext to Matt Wendus)

Hyland’s writing, which has only increased in strangeness with each new book, emerges from a shifting of co-ordinates between cold-eyed clinician and artist’s empathetic heart. Her characters are constructed from the tension between autistic remove and panting proximity; her narratives energised by the insertion of wildly disturbed individuals into drab, constricted worlds. And her style? As Harold Pinter once said of his work, “What goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism.” (Geordie Williamson, The Australian)


[Spotters: ONR, BG, CMcC, ACG]