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Jan 27

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2011 and all that

Wayne Levin, 'Circling Akule', © Wayne Levin (click to embiggen)

Despite having given myself an open-ended holiday from the site I think there’s no denying that even in the Antipodes the summer is over once Australia Day has passed. To which end I’m getting back on the blogging horse. I suspect things will stay a little bit slow around here for the next week or so (my daughter doesn’t go back to school for another week and a half) but I’m still aiming to get a few things up in the not too distant future.

That said, 2011 is looking like a big year for me in general. Unfortunately it looks like my new novel, Black Friday, may now not be on shelves until early 2012, but I’m about to launch into editing it, and once that’s done I’ve got two more books I’m hoping to knock over reasonably rapidly, which will make for a busy year.

Elsewhere, The Penguin Book of the Ocean has been going gangbusters, with one reprint already under its belt, and a brace of very, very positive reviews. I’ll pull together some links for those soon, and if I can find it links to the interviews I’ve been doing about it over the break, but in the meantime if you’d like to buy a copy you can check prices on Booko.

Some other bits and pieces that might be of interest. First of all, I’m planning to post something about it soon, but in the meantime you might want to check out Wayne Levin’s stunning new book, Akule. Anyone who’s seen a copy of The Penguin Book of the Ocean, or read some of my previous posts about Wayne and his work will have a sense of how extraordinary his work is, but if not check out the sample pages and if you get a chance, order a copy: it’s wonderful, and like all of Wayne’s books comes with a terrific essay by another of the writers featured in The Penguin Book of the Ocean, Tom Farber.

To continue with The Penguin Book of the Ocean theme, Kevin Hart, whose pulsing, luminous poem, ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ also appears in the collection has a new book, Morning Knowledge on the way as well. It’s not out for another week or so but it’s already possible to pre-order copies.

And finally, since I’m about to go and tidy up a long piece I’ve written about ghosts and ghost stories, you might want to check out my review of Peter Ackroyd’s The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time, which appeared in The Australian a couple of weeks ago.

I hope you’re all well, and have survived the summer, particularly if, like many Australians, you or your family have been caught up in the flooding and fires of recent weeks. And however it began, I hope 2011 is a great year for all of you.

Dec 19

4 Comments

Summer and the myths of Australianness

Narelle Autio, 'The Climb', © Narelle Autio 2001

Some of you may have noticed my piece in The Weekend Australian about summer and the myths of Australianness a couple of weeks back. It was an interesting piece to write, not least because the process of putting it together was, in an odd way, very similar to the processes of remembering and reliving the past that seem to me to so essential to the experience of summer. Certainly while writing it I was reminded very powerfully of my childhood and adolescence in Adelaide, and of the silent, empty streets and wakeful nights.

As a writer you have next to no control over the illustrations that appear with your pieces(I think I’ve been asked for a suggestion once and offered them unsolicited twice in all the years I’ve been writing for newspapers). But in the case of this piece I’m not sure I could have chosen something more appropriate, because Review’s Editor, Deborah Jones, chose to use not just an image by Narelle Autio, but her photo ‘The Climb’, which was taken on Brighton Jetty, only a kilometre or so from where I grew up.

I’ve been an admirer of Autio’s photos for a long time, and my partner and I actually own several of them. While the early black and white images of swimmers and surfers bear a passing resemblance to Wayne Levin’s images of bodysurfers, they have an informality and sense of play that’s very much their own, a celebratory aspect that seems to capture something not just of the joy and spontaneity of their subject, but of the odd way that joy and spontaneity seems to exist suspended on the edge of memory.

But the series ‘The Climb’ is a part of has always been my favourite. Partly that’s because the images that comprise it are so vivid and immediate, in particular photos such as ‘Black Marlin’. But it’s also because they capture that oddly informal and shapeless communality that summer holidays often involve, the groups of people and sudden pleasures of caravan parks and camping grounds.

Part of what makes them so beautiful is the sheer saturation of colour, not just the blues of the water but its greenness, the yellow of the sand, even the brooding, impossible purple of late afternoon cloud. I suspect to many it’s a saturation that will seem immediately tropical, but oddly enough I remember standing in front of these pictures in the gallery and being immediately, unshakeably certain that Autio was from South Australia like me. It wasn’t the subjects of the photos – indeed I’m reasonably certain the photo that made me so sure she and I grew up near each other, ‘Orange Car’, is actually of somewhere in New South Wales – rather it was something about the quality of the light and its intensity, the degraded nature of the yellows.

As it turned out I was right: Autio grew up two beaches away from me in Adelaide. But that certainty was a reminder of somethign I’ve long thought about the nature of the Australian experience fo the beach. I keenly remember reading Robert Drewe’s brilliant memoir, The Shark Net, for the first time and being struck by the way it spoke to the summer landscape I knew as a child. Partly that was about it being set amidst the emptiness of sandhills and marram grass of the west coast rather than the cliffs and broken bays one finds on Australia’s east coast, but it was also about the way it made the landscape so palpable, not just the heat and the wind, but the denuded palette of sand and sea and sky, the intense, almost unbearable light.

One of my enduring regrets about The Penguin Book of the Ocean is the fact I couldn’t find a way to include something of Rob’s, not just because he was one of the first two or three writers I thought of when I was planning the book, but because he’s a writer I’ve admired enormously for many years, and whose writing played an important part in inspiring me to become a writer in the first place. I’ve been meaning for some time to write something about the process of putting the anthology together, and the way my desire for it to work as a whole, rather than as a collection of pieces made a lot the decisions for me. But in the end I just couldn’t find a piece by him that spoke to the ocean in the way I needed it to (for a writer whose public image is so indelibly associated with the beach Drewe’s books are usually only interested in landscape in a fairly passing sense, and tend to focus much more on the illusions and betrayals of middle class life).

But I do wonder whether that sense of the differences between the bays and beaches of the east coast and the more denuded landscapes of the south and west coast isn’t one of the reasons Penguin decided to use Autio’s photos to illustrate their recent rerelease of Tim Winton’s coastal memoir, Land’s Edge.

Originally published in 1993, with photographs by Trish Ainslie and Roger Garwood, Land’s Edge is at one level an account of Winton’s enduring love of the ocean, and of the part it played in shaping him. But it’s also a sort of manifesto, a mapping out of the emotional and philosophical territory Winton’s fiction has explored over the years.

To my mind it’s an interesting, if slightly unsatisfying book. I’ve read it twice now, and both times I kept wanting Winton to go further, push harder, dig deeper. But that’s not to say it’s without its pleasures. Certainly it’s fascinating to see the way Winton’s experiences have been woven into the larger fabric of the work, and to be made aware of echoes and allusions between the books and the life which would not otherwise be apparent. It’s also interesting to be reminded how much deeper and darker Winton’s work has grown in the last two decades, and of the manner in which his command of language has kept pace with that deepening: word by word, sentence by sentence I’m not sure there’s any writer working in Australia  at the moment (except maybe Delia Falconer) who can match the raw power of Winton’s prose. Even its rough-hewn textures are deceptive, intimations of the steel beneath (in this context you might want to check out my review of Breath from a couple of years back) .

But in a way the real pleasure of this new edition is the book itself, and the use it makes of Autio’s photographs. Penguin have clearly gone to considerable expense to use excellent paper, and it shows, lending both the text and the images a richness and a clarity they might otherwise lack. It’s also convinced Winton to speak publicly, something he doesn’t often do (if you’re interested there’s a long interview with him by Stephen Romei in yesterday’s Australian, complemented by an audio recording of Winton reading from Land’s Edge). If you’d like a taste of the book I’ve reproduced several of the images in it below, and there’s an extract available on Penguin’s website. Likewise if you’d like to see more of Autio’s images you should visit Stills Gallery. Otherwise you can read my piece on summer at The Australian.

Narelle Autio, 'Black Marlin', © Narelle Autio 2001

Narelle Autio, 'Before School', © Narelle Autio 2001

Narelle Autio, 'Orange Car', © Narelle Autio 2001

 

Dec 8

22 Comments

Wikileaks

As most of you will be aware, last night Julian Assange surrendered to police in London on sexual assault charges. Like many others I’m deeply perturbed by this development, especially given the pretty clear evidence the charges are weak at best and that the Swedish Government (which has been significantly embarrassed by the revelations in the latest round of document dumps) has interfered with the process underlying them.

For what it’s worth, my views about Wikileaks are complex. I’m not convinced total transparency is either practical or desirable. But by the same token confidentiality and control over the flow of information is one of the tools governments and other interests employ to control the public and manipulate public discourse and opinion.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying Wikileaks is an imperfect creation, but one of immense importance. It heralds a profound rewriting of the relationship between the individual and the state, the governed and the governing. By fatally undermining the capacity of the powerful to mislead the public it embodies precisely the values a free media – and by extension a free society – should aspire to.

This is not to say it’s perfect. Unlike the evidence of malfeasance and illegal action by governments around the world, I’m unconvinced much of the tattle in the diplomatic cables is valuable or newsworthy. But that’s not an argument against Wikileaks more generally: freedom of expression and a free media necessarily assumes ongoing debate about the limits of public interest, and commensurately, errors in judgement about those limits. A free media is by its nature a ragged and disputational creature.

Part of what makes Wikileaks genuinely revolutionary is its refusal to accept that there is a public interest beyond the right to know. By rejecting this notion they also reject the collusive relationship with power that undermines the effectiveness of so much media. This fundamentally alters many aspects of our public discourse, and will, over time, alter the very nature of society, both for the better and, I suspect, the worse. It is also, to my mind, an unsustainable and utopian ideal: the proper functioning of democratic society is incompatible with total transparency. But by redefining the limits of our right to know it creates a new standard to which free societies should aspire, and simultaneously provides a disruptive corollary to that freedom which will help safeguard it.

That our politicians have been slow to grasp the larger implications of Wikileaks is hardly surprising. I think it’s increasingly obvious we’re in a moment of historical transition, a transition which will be shaped both by forces beyond our control, such as climate change, and by the economic and social effects of new technology and global media. Neither our governments nor our political and social institutions are showing much sign of being up to either set of challenges, and our politicians are manifestly inadequate to both.

Here in Australia the response has been slipshod and cynical, demonstrating the worst aspects of the Labor Party’s increasingly reactionary and paternalistic mindset. Prime Minister Julia Gillard looked ridiculous last week parroting the American line that Assange was a criminal, and compounded the blunder yesterday with her assertion that the release of information was illegal because it relied upon an illegal act.

The exact seriousness of the threat to Assange is unclear, and will in the first instance depend upon whether British courts uphold an extradition order to return him to Sweden. What is clear is that a writer and journalist has been imprisoned on charges which are self-evidently connected to his work as a writer and journalist, and to his part in revealing evidence of illegal and unethical behaviour by the powerful. In such a context the obligation upon the Australian government, and indeed all people who claim to support freedom of expression and the free media is to protest as loudly and as vociferously as possible.

Having been involved  off and on with Sydney PEN Centre over the years, I’m painfully aware of the difficulty of embarrassing governments which abuse freedom of expression. But I’m also aware that protesting does help, and that despite its statements to date, the Australian Government and Prime Minister Gillard may yet see their way to do what is right by Assange.

To this end I was one of the more than 200 people who signed the open letter to Prime Minister Gillard by Jeff Sparrow and Lizzie O’Shea that was published on the ABC’s The Drum yesterday.

Open letters of this sort always seem to me to be oddly quixotic creations, more symbolic of the powerlessness of those who sign than any real influence. But this time I’m not so sure. As of a moment ago there were more than 4000 comments, and the response was overwhelmingly supportive. That’s not to say there aren’t detractors, but it’s difficult not to wonder whether Assange’s newfound celebrity will prove a lightning rod for the changes that are clearly beginning to take place. As the events of the last two and a bit years and from the GFC on in particular have demonstrated, the rules that have defined our world for the best part of half a century are breaking down, and the relationship between the public and those in authority is growing increasingly poisonous.

This isn’t always a good thing – certainly the crazed, reactionary convulsions of the Australian and American political landscapes in 2010 have not made our societies happier or suggested our politicians and media have any real idea about how to deal with what’s happening. But it’s also increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that the ground is shifting beneath our feet.

Having said all that I’d like to ask three things. The first is that you visit The Drum and read Jeff and Lizzie’s letter, which makes a series of unexceptional demands relating to Assange’s rights as an Australian citizen, and the obligations of the Australian Government to safeguard his liberty. As it indicates at the beginning, many of the signatories are not uncritical of the larger Wikileaks project, but the principles set out in the letter transcend those differences.

The second is that you take a few minutes to read some of the better commentary about Wiileaks. I’m going to suggest you begin with Assange’s own essays about authoritarianism, conspiracy and transparency. As anyone who reads them will be able to see, Assange is neither a terrorist nor a Cold War villain out of a James Bond movie, but a serious thinker with profound and revolutionary ideas about the relationship between the state and information. If the essays themselves seem too daunting I’d urge you to at the very least skim the analysis of their content on zunguzungu.

I’d also suggest reading three pieces by Guy Rundle, Bernard Keane and Clay Shirky, all of which offer interesting and provocative perspectives on the question (Rundle and Shirky in particular do useful work placing the events of recent weeks in historical context and trying to think through their larger implications).

You should also be sure you read Assange’s op-ed in this morning’s Australian, which was written in the hours before his arrest. Given The Australian’s behaviour and pronouncements during the Groggate and TwitDef scandals of recent weeks it may come as a surprise to many that it’s clearly placing its not inconsiderable weight behind Assange (though perhaps not as big a surprise as it may have been to many of its subscribers, who are no doubt choking on their cereal as I type). But I’m not sure it’s that surprising, not just because it’s a reminder of the The Australian’s more general mercurialness, but because as Assange himself points out, a belief in the importance of a free and unfettered media is one of News Limited’s fundamental principles (even if it’s not always demonstrated by their actions or drive for market dominance).

Finally, the third thing I’d like you to do is suggest things you’ve seen or read that add substantially to this debate. I’m sure the days and weeks to come will produce a torrent of coverage, and it’s be nice to aggregate – or indeed wiki – it here. So if you have links, bring them; I want to see them.

 

 

Dec 7

1 Comment

A blast from the past: me talking about The Resurrectionist

I was chatting about book trailers this morning and it reminded me of the video below, which was produced and directed by Steve Macdonald to coincide with The Resurrectionist’s inclusion as one of Richard and Judy’s Summer Reads in 2008. If you can get past the fact I look even more crumpled and feral than usual, my hair’s about a foot high and my stammer is particularly noticeable, it’s actually not too bad. And of course if you’re so excited after you’ve watched it you want to buy a copy, you can check out Booko for prices on the Australian and UK editions.

 

Dec 5

2 Comments

So you want to write a novel?

I’m still laughing.

 

Dec 2

2 Comments

The Tallest Man in the World

I’ve come a little late to The Tallest Man on Earth, but after being pointed to his second album, The Wild Hunt,  by my friend Hannah (literary agent to the (rock) stars), I’m now totally obsessed. As Tim Dunlop points out, Swedish singer/songwriter Kristian Masson’s vocals are Dylanesque, but hey, that’s not always a bad thing, especially when the songs are so beautifully crafted and full of life. Like the new Justin Townes Earle album, Harlem River Blues, this is music that understands its history but isn’t bound by it, and it’s wonderful.

 

Dec 1

5 Comments

Waves, the ocean and the sublime

Today’s Australian contains the last Australian Literary Review for 2010. A chunk of the issue is given over to a long piece by Michael Costa suggesting some solutions to the problems facing the ALP and a forum of prominent academics such as Glyn Davis, Peter Doherty and Stephen Lincoln exploring the challenges and opportunities facing Australia and the world as we look forward to 2020.

But the issue also features a long piece by me about Susan Casey’s new book, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Ocean’s Greatest Furies. Some of you may know Casey as the author of The Devil’s Teeth, which explored the world of Great White Sharks and the researchers who study them, and while it’s largely shark-free, The Wave often reads like a sequel or counterpart to its predecessor, using the career of big wave surfer Laird Hamilton as the springboard for a much larger study of the science of waves and the gathering storm of climate change.

I won’t rehearse the arguments of the book here, except to say that it’s an intelligent, if sometimes slightly slick piece of work. I’ve subsequently learned there’s been something of a scandal about the fact Casey shared the proceeds from the book with Hamilton, a fact that lends her already over-eroticised and hagiographical descriptions of him a distinctly queasy edge. But as I say in the review, Casey writes brilliantly about the breaks themselves, and the larger picture the book paints of the effects of climate change on ocean turbulence and wave height is likely to be deeply disturbing to anybody who’s not familiar with the facts surrounding the changes taking place beneath the ocean’s surface (if this material is new to you you might want to take a moment to read this story from the ABC, and perhaps this piece by Elizabeth Kolbert as a primer).

Much of what I want to say is in the review itself, but there is one story in Casey’s book I desperately wanted to include but just couldn’t shoehorn in, and that concerns the wave that hit Alaska’s Lituya Bay in 1958. Situated midway between Vancouver and Anchorage, Lituya Bay is one of those rare places where the various factors that generate tsunamis converge, combining a narrow fjord and near vertical cliffs on three sides with a steeply rising bottom, large glaciers and seismic instability. First charted by La Perouse in 1786, it has a long history of sudden and violent wave activity.

But the wave that struck on 9 July 1958 dwarfs all other recorded waves. Triggered by an earthquake, the ocean sent a tsunami which reached 524m in height rolling through the bay and out to sea.

The notion of a wave more than half a kilometre high beggars belief. Yet it is not the most remarkable part of this story. That honour belongs to the fact that at the time of the tsunami several fishing boats were moored in the bay, and one of the captains, Howard Ulrich, survived by steering his boat up the face of the approaching wave.

You can read the review in full here.

Update: I thought these two videos, one of Laird Hamilton in action, the other of an unidentified surfer riding a very big wave might be of interest (thanks to Tim Dunlop for the reminder).

 

 

Nov 30

10 Comments

What is it about men and bad sex?

News this morning that relatively unknown Irish author Rowan Somerville is the winner of this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel, The Shape of Her, beating off stiff opposition (ooh-er) from a shortlist dominated by heavy-hitters like Jonathan Franzen and Christos Tsiolkas.

I’ll let others discuss the merits or otherwise of the various nominees; what interests me is the fact that the winner is a bloke. At one level that’s not a surprise, especially given the shortlist of eight included only one book by a woman, but it starts to look more striking when you glance down the list of writers who have won the award since it was inaugurated in 1993, and absorb the fact that of nineteen winners to date, only two have been women.

So what is it about men and bad sex? I’ve got a few ideas of my own but I’m guessing many of you have thoughts on the subject as well. Is it just the inherent sexism of the literary and cultural world on show in an amusing and ironic way? Or are men predisposed to write awful sex (or to put it more accurately, since most winners of the Bad Sex Award win for descriptions of what they think of as good sex, are men predisposed to write good sex badly?). And if they are, do women write it better? Or do they just avoid writing about it at all?

Thoughts, please . . .

Nov 27

If you didn’t laugh . . .

Nov 26

34 Comments

Best Books 2010

It’s the time of year when people start publishing their best of lists, so I thought it might be fun to kick off a bit of discussion here about what people have (and haven’t!) liked in 2010. Because I review so much this is usually a pretty easy process for me, but in many ways the last twelve months have been a bit of disaster for me reading-wise: as well as all the chaos of a new baby I’ve been trying to get an anthology tied down and finish a novel, both of which have stopped me reading quite as much as I normally would.

It’s also been a bit of an odd year book-wise. If 2009 was dominated by huge, unclassifiable books like 2666 (here, here and here)and The Kindly Ones, and unconventional and brilliant historical works such as The Children’s Book and Wolf Hall, 2010 has been marked by a series of interesting crossover titles like Justin Cronin’s The Passage.

It is however one of those years where I have no trouble picking a favourite, a privilege which goes to Lorrie Moore’s wonderful A Gate at the Stairs, a book which seems to me to cover much of the same territory as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom but with considerably more elegance, wit and brevity (interestingly it’s also playing with some of the same tropes of the nineteenth century social novel Franzen deploys, and perhaps not coincidentally these moments are also the weakest in the book (except for the wonderful final line)). If you haven’t read it all I can say is do, immediately: it’s one of those rare books that left such an impression I found it difficult to read anyting else for weeks afterwards.

Besides A Gate at the Stairs, I loved Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete, a book of deceptive simplicity and considerable emotional impact and Sam Lipsyte’s gloriously scabrous The Ask. I also enjoyed Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness (though I do wonder whether it’s as strong as a collection as Runaway), and was very impressed by Andrew Porter’s The Theory of Light and Matter, Karl Marlantes’ Vietnam epic, Matterhorn, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Graham Robb’s wonderfully chatty and intimate Parisians.

There’s also the elephant in the room of Freedom. I’ve wanted to write something for a while about the slightly hysterical desire to anoint Franzen some sort of literary demigod, a desire which seems to me misplaced: he’s a very good novelist but he’s no better than a number of others (Lorrie Moore, for instance, or Hilary Mantel). I now suspect that piece probably won’t get written, but I also think it’s difficult to talk about the novel without coming up against the sense this desire sets up an implicit demand one’s responses to the novel be strongly positive or strongly negative.

Mine are actually neither. I think parts of it are very good: unlike many people I particularly liked the excerpts from Patty’s memoir, and thought the sequence relating her parents’ response to her rape was a thing of genius: horrible and funny and appalling all at once. But I also felt the novel lost energy badly in the second half, a loss of energy that was reflected in an increasing slackness in the writing.

Part of the problem is that the sort of large social novel Franzen wants to write is very difficult to pull off these days without a pretty high degree of contrivance. But I was also struck by the fact that in many ways the bits of Freedom that don’t work are largely those where Franzen steps away from the sort of domestic comedy he excels at (interestingly I would have said almost the same thing about The Corrections).

Of course none of this is to say I didn’t like it, or that I didn’t think it was good: I did. It’s just that I don’t think it’s the work of luminous genius many others do (if you’d like to see what seems to me to be a very fair take on it I’d point you to Ron Charles’ hilarious video review for The Washington Post).

Closer to home my reading was distinguished more by what I didn’t read than what I did, but I was hugely impressed by both Brenda Walker’s Reading by Moonlight and Delia Falconer’s Sydney (just for the record Delia and Brenda are both friends, but I’d be praising the books whether that were the case or not) and I thought Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game was an impressive debut by a very interesting and highly engaged writer.

I also read a lot of SF, not all of which was new, out of which the real standouts were Paul McAuley’s Gardens of the Sun, his strangely beautiful hymn to the worlds orbiting Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space and Redemption Ark, a pair of books suffused by a sense of the inhuman immensity and hostility of space, and Margo Lanagan’s shimmeringly subversive fairy tale, Tender Morsels. On the graphic novel and comic front I finally got around to reading Warren Ellis’ entirely brilliant Planetary, a series that manages to reimagine the superhero comic from the ground up in much the way Watchmen did two and a half decades ago (though which, interestingly, is still rooted in the comics of yesteryear, suggesting the enervation Moore was responding to in Watchmen is no less real today.

There were also, of course, a number of books I violently didn’t like, or thought were wildly overrated, but rather than carp, I thought I’d throw it over to all of you and ask what your picks were, and why.

Nov 26

The Northern Lights

Some of you may have seen them already, but if not these images of the Aurora Borealis by photographer Tor Even Mathisen are truly magical.

Be sure to embiggen for the full effect (via io9).

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Nov 22

6 Comments

The Uncanny X-book: ebooks, design and digital possibility

Think for a moment about the silly page-turning animations ereaders insist on inserting: aren’t they really the textual equivalent of curtains on a television? Indeed why do we need to retain the notion of the “page” at all? Why can’t text just continue down as we read, like a scroll? And if it did, what would this do to the metaphors and devices we use to shape and organise information, the chapters and sections of the analog world?

Read more

Nov 21

9 Comments

Slipping down into dark water

Last week’s Opinionator in The New York Times featured a fascinating piece by Robert Sapolsky suggesting that at least some of our metaphorical toolbox is biological in origin. I’ll let you read the article in full, but Sapolsky uses several recent studies, including the 2006 Zhong/Liljenquist study demonstrating moral disgust is assuaged by washing, to argue that in these cases the brain is engaged in a sort of neural confusion, and very primitive responses, such as that of physical disgust, are being triggered by social stimuli.

I’m always a little wary of this sort of argument, but in this case Sapolsky (who’s the author of one of the classics of animal writing, the wonderful A Primate’s Memoir) is on pretty solid ground, since there are imaging studies which demonstrate unpleasant moral and unpleasant non-moral stimuli activate the same regions of the brain. But the piece got me wondering about something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is the question of why our thinking about sleep, dreams and the unconscious is so suffused with images of liquidity.

It’s a question I came up against while editing The Penguin Book of the Ocean, and (if you’ll pardon me quoting myself) it’s one I raise in the introduction:

“It is not accidental that when the historian Fernand Braudel sought to describe those cycles of history that exceed the human and stretch downwards, into the environmental, the geological, he reached for the marine metaphor of ‘deep time’, nor that Romain Rolland chose the term ‘oceanic’ feeling to describe the sensations of boundlessness and oneness with nature he believed were the birthplace of religious sentiment. Indeed, so pronounced is our tendency to reach for images of fluidity and submersion to describe our inner lives and the mysterious processes of creativity and creation that it is difficult not to wonder whether the association is somehow natural, less a habit of mind than something innate. But even if it is not, the association between water and dreams, time and the oceanic runs so deep it has become almost impossible to think of one without invoking the other.”

I’m aware, of course that there’s a sizeable body of psychoanalytic thinking touching on this subject, perhaps most notably that of Bachelard (I’d also note in passing the deeply evocative expression “body of water”). I’m also painfully aware of how difficult it is to distinguish the cultural from the “natural” in this context. But after reading Sapolsky I did find myself wondering whether these associations might be at least partly founded in a similar retooling of very primitive parts of the brain.

All of which is an extended way of asking whether anybody knows of any studies suggesting such associations. Or, perhaps just as pertinently, whether anybody has any sense of whether the association exists in other cultures. Do the Chinese, for instance, or Native American cultures make similar associations? Obviously the notion of the unconscious mind is a relatively recent and essentially Western notion but I’d be very interested to know whether other cultures imagine sleep and dreams in terms of drift and immersion, or think of imagination in terms of flow. And, assuming the association is at least partly neurological in nature, are there any studies or theories as to what it’s about?

Nov 19

18 Comments

National Book Award 2010

I’m never sure whether it says more about lingering Australian Anglocentrism or the brilliance of the marketing team behind the Booker, but I’ve always found it odd we get so excited about the Booker Prize yet barely register the major American awards. Either way, yesterday saw the announcement of the National Book Awards in New York, with the Fiction Award going to Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule, the Non-Fiction Award to Patti Smith for her memoir, Just Kids, and the Poetry and Young Adult Fiction Awards going to Terence Hayes for Lighthead and Kathryn Erskine for Mockingbird. Unfortunately I haven’t read any of the winners (though it’s probably worth noting Lord of Misrule pipped Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America to the Fiction Award) but there was a nice overview piece about the Fiction shortlist by Tom LeClair in Salon earlier this week if you’d like to know more.

Nov 17

7 Comments

Harlem River Blues

Longtime readers may remember me waxing lyrical about Justin Townes Earle’s Midnight at the Movies, a disc which was right up there with my favourite albums of 2009. I’m not sure whether I’ll get my act together a list of my favourite albums for 2010 together, but if I do I can promise you Townes’ new album, Harlem River Blues, will be on it.

One of the strengths of Earle’s earlier albums was the way the drew upon the roots and country traditions Earle grew up in (as his name suggests, he’s the son of Steve Earle and was named for Earle Senior’s friend, Townes van Zandt). On Midnight at the Movies that sense of tradition was married to a richer sound that made songs like the title track more radio-friendly than Earle’s first album, The Good Life, but which also meant the album as a whole sometimes seemed a bit over-produced.

That’s not a charge that could be levelled at Harlem River Blues, an album that strips away the slicker studio sound of Midnight at the Movies and lets the energy Earle’s writing and performance come to the fore. Part of it’s about the band, who play like there’s no tomorrow, bringing an infectious, growling immediacy to the material, but it’s also about the songs themselves, which draw on the full spectrum of American music, from bluegrass to country, gospel and blues, a tradition that’s equally apparent in the album’s nods to singers and songwriters from Woody Guthrie to Dylan, and its loving sense of American musical history and iconography.

I’ve pasted in a couple of tracks below. One’s of the the foot-stomping title track, the other’s an interview and live performance of one of the other real stand-outs on the album, the Memphis-influenced ‘Slippin’ and Slidin”, but they’re only two cuts from an album filled with gems like ‘Wanderin”, the aching ‘Christchurch Woman’ and the Springsteenesque ‘Rogers Park’. Despite having to cancel tour dates in the US for personal reasons earlier this year Earle’s now back on the road and will be in Australia next year for Golden Plains (and presumably other dates around it). I reckon that’d be one show worth catching.

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Longtime readers will remember I was a fan of Earle’s last album, Midnight at the Movies, which showed
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