Resuming Transmission . . .
Apologies for the resounding silence around these parts in recent weeks: I’ve been completely overwhelmed by work and family and the desperate attempt to get the new draft of my novel locked off by the end of August (a deadline I’m about to miss, but we won’t go there). I’m planning to get some stuff up over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, I thought I might link to a couple of things I’ve had published or broadcast recently.
The first is my review of Kenzaburo Oe’s novel The Changeling, which was published in Saturday’s Weekend Australian. Oe, as some of you would be aware, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, and despite something of a reputation as a public intellectual in his native Japan, is best-known in the English-speaking world for his fiction. I can’t say The Changeling really set my world on fire, but it’s a fascinating work in some respects, not least in the manner in which it explores many of the same issues relating to the relationship between the writer, their writing and the external world that Coetzee explores in Summertime.
The second is an interview with me and Sophie Cunningham about eReaders and eBooks whcih was broadcast on Radio National last week, and grew out of a session at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival which featured Sophie, Jeff Sparrow, Sarah L’Estrange and myself. I’m always a bit appalled by the sound of myself on the radio, but this one isn’t a bad piece IMHO. You can listen to it via the Bookshow’s website.
As I say, I’ll be back around these parts later in the week. In the meantime you might want to check out the greatest pop song about a writer ever. (A word of warning – it’s pretty definitely NSFW).
Break text
city of tongues 
Excellent to see you back, I was starting to wonder if you were okay.
Self-imposed end-of-August deadlines, we has them.
It’s possible it’s a good thing the pressure of work prevented me blogging my way through the election campaign.
You are the only person in the history of recorded time who has used the phrase “pop song about a writer”.
Seriously, google it.
I’m still not top of that Google hit list though!
But you’re right: songs about writing are a dime a dozen, but songs about writers are pretty think on the ground. There’s a great Modest Mouse song about Bukowski on Good News for People Who Love Bad News (a longtime fave album of mine). And, perhaps more pertinently, there’s Augie March’s love song for Germaine Greer, ‘Mother Greer’ (given their name, Augie March are a bit of a double word score on this front):
And there’s always the old Elvis Costello/Charles and Di film clip for ‘Everyday I Write The Book’:
Damn – those links don’t seem to be working.
‘And everyday turns out to be
A little bit more like Bukowski
And yeah, he is a pretty good read
But God who’d want to be
Such an asshole’
Truly, words to live by!
I’m excited somebody else knows it! Great song, great album. The first three or four tracks are just brilliant.
Scritti Politti had a song called Jacques Derrida: