I’m 46 tomorrow. Perhaps because of that I’ve spent a lot of the past couple of years working my way back through a lot of the books and music I loved as an adolescent. For the most part that’s been a fascinating and often genuinely exciting process: rediscovering The Beatles after 25 years was magical, as was working my way through the backlists of New Wave writers such as Robert Silverberg (if you haven’t read Downward to the Earth, run don’t walk).

But one of the most unexpected – and joyous – moments was watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey again as research for a piece for The Australian.

Like many people I’ve seen 2001 a number of times, and each time it’s been a different film. The first time, as a 13 year-old in Adelaide in 1980, I found it majestic but baffling, the second, in my late teens it seemed dated and odd, the third, about 15 years ago (when I sat next to George Miller at the Cremorne Orpheum) I thought it was a boring and portentous exercise in 1960s faux-profundity.

Yet this time (or times, actually, since I ended up watching it three times) I found myself transfixed and astonished, right from the first moments. As I half-understood 15 years ago what I was seeing was very much an artefact of its times, but it was also much, much more than that. The music, the imagery, the strange plasticity of the environments, Keir Dullea’s brilliantly minimal performance, the wonderful, nested imagery of eyes and observation, Ligeti’s shimmering music, all seemed part of a seamless whole. Even the pacing, which I had mistaken for an exercise in Kubrickian perversity seemed visionary, an attempt to push past everything we know about the rhythms of cinema and demand we see again (to be honest I suspect the pacing is also Kubrickian perversity, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive). And although I’ve mentioned its effect on films like Prometheus before, it was also startling to be reminded how deeply it has influenced science fiction film and television over the past four and a half decades.

All of which is a long-winded way introduction to my piece about the film, which I’ve just posted in the Non-Fiction section. You can read a little bit below, alternatively just hop over and read the whole thing.

And since I’ve completely failed to write the piece I meant to write about David Bowie’s The Next Day I’m going to take a moment and point you to the Bowie2001 project, which mixes footage from the film with remixed version of a series of classic Bowie tracks. You can download the remixed tracks, the mixtape or torrent the movie from the Bowie2001 website. Alternatively I highly recommend Rick Moody’s encyclopaedic article about The Next Day.

And here’s the introduction to the piece itself:

“Even 45 years after its release it is difficult to know what to make of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Is it, as polls such as Sight & Sound’s recent survey of the greatest films of all time declared, one of the most important cinematic works ever created? Or is it, as Pauline Kael, who described it as ‘monumentally unimaginative’, and Rock Hudson – who surely spoke for a great many when he leapt to his feet at one early screening and demanded ‘Will somebody tell me what the hell this is about?’ – believed, a baffling, over-long exercise in directorial hubris?

“The answer, of course, is that it is both. Stretching from the dawn of time to (what was then) the future, from the Earth to the moons of Jupiter and (as the title of its dialogue-free fifth and final section, asserts) ‘Beyond the Infinite’, it is a film that demands the viewer give away many of their assumptions about what they are watching and how to watch it, to surrender themselves to its rhythms and its mysteries. It is a point Kubrick himself made in an interview at the time of the film’s release, when he  ’You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film – and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level – but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.’” Read more …

And finally, here’s the extraordinary scene in which the Monolith on the Moon communicates with its twin in orbit around Jupiter.

Anyway, you can purchase Aurealis from Smashwords for AU$2.99, which seems an absolute bargain for a story that features duelling shapeshifting tiger demons. And which is really a tribute to my many years as a devoted player of role-playing games.

For now at least you can stream the full album on NPR’s First Listen; alternatively you can check out the video for the album’s third track, ‘Joy’, below.

‘West Beach Sandhills’, © 2007, Barry Leadbeater

When I began this site part of my plan was to use it to publish short pieces of fiction, either drawn from works in progress or harvested from other published and unpublished sources. In the end that didn’t happen, mostly because the moment never really seemed right, but just lately I’ve been thinking I might start to post a few things here.

To that end I’ve just uploaded my story, ‘The Flats’, which was published a couple of years ago in the Get Reading! anthology, 10 Short Stories You Must Read in 2011. I’ve chosen it as the first one partly because I like it, and partly because a translation by Jorge Salavert has just been published in the Spanish-language literary magazine, Hermano Cerdo, so it seems sensible to have the English-language version available as well.

You can read ‘The Flats’ online now. If you’d like information about some of the other stories I’ve published recently you can check out my new Short Fiction page, or you can go direct to the source and grab a copy of my Aurealis Award shortlisted story, ‘Visitors’, from the Review of Australian Fiction or read ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ over at Overland or in Best Australian Stories 2012. Australian (and I think, US) readers can also grab copies of my Rapunzel novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’ for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo, while UK readers can download it for Kindle.

Meanwhile I have to get back to my novel …

Obviously being on the shortlist is pretty fabulous in itself, but I’m doubly pleased because it feels like a real vote of confidence in the time and effort the Review’s editor, Matthew Lamb, has invested in the publication. Matthew’s now editing Island (a process he spoke about recently) but in his time at the Review he helped create a space in which both new and established writers could stretch themselves and try new things, a process that’s paid off in spades over the past couple of years.

You can read the full list of finalists over on the Aurealis Awards website, and if you’d like to read the story itself it’s available for $2.99 through the Review of Australian Fiction (or you can get the whole of Volume 2 for $9.99). My congratulations again to all my fellow finalists (and in particular Margo Lanagan, whose novel, Sea Hearts, was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize earlier this week) and my thanks to the judges and organisers for all their hard work.

Oh, and the picture of the pitcher plant? If you read the story you’ll understand.

For more (or to order a poster) check out Grant Snider’s wonderful Incidental Comics.

The first two are on Friday: ‘Critical Thinking’ with Stephen Romei, Geordie Williamson and John Freeman at 12:30pm in the Juliet Tent and ‘The Problem With Beauty’ with Ali Alizadeh and Dennis Haskell at 5:00pm in the Woolnough Lecture Theatre. They’re followed by ‘HBO and the Rise of the TV Novel’ with Sue Masters, David Petrarca and Rosemary Neill on Saturday at 11:00am in the Octagon Theatre, ‘To the Point’, with Susan Midalia, Zane Lovitt and Julienne van Loon at the somewhat brutal hour of 9:30 on Sunday morning, and my final session, ‘Inside the Imagination of China Miéville’ at 12:30pm on Sunday in the Octagon Theatre (although I’m only asking the questions in that one). They all look like fascinating sessions and I’m really excited to be a part of them and the Festival more generally (the line-up this year, which includes Margaret Atwood, David Marr and James Meek is really impressive and the programming is thoughtful and provocative).

You can also catch my partner, Mardi McConnochie at ‘Love Story’ in the Juliet Tent at 11:00 on Friday, ‘Is Happy a Dirty Word?’ in the Dolphin Theatre at 12:30pm on Saturday and ‘Of the Time’ in the Woolnough Lecture Theatre at 11:00am on Sunday. She’s also one of the guests at the Stella Prize Trivia Night in the Sunken Garden on Saturday at 6:30pm.

And while we’re on the subject of the Stellas it was great to see the release of the inaugural longlist for the award. It’s a really interesting and diverse collection of books that span fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Big congratulations both to everybody on the list and to all the people who have worked so hard to make the award happen.

Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties.