Bookblog #47: Conversations



MoneySexPower (Griffith Review No 22)
American revolution (Kate Jennings, Quarterly essay No 32)
The Library of Fire (Heat No 18)

Until recently, all I knew of the Griffith Review came from hearing Philip Adams interview the writer of its lead essay on Late Night Live in the days when I listened to the afternoon repeat on my drive home from work. These interviews were usually intimidatingly provocative, dealing seriously with something from the serious headlines. (Sure enough, when I went to the LNL link just now, the first item on the page was an interview with Marcia Langton, writer of this issue's lead essay.) Before the contents page of MoneySexPower there's a manifesto of sorts, which includes the boast: 'Griffith REVIEW [it always refers to itself capitalised like this] captures the spirit of the times. ... Personal, political and [un]predictable, it is Australia's best conversation.' Frankly, I found that offputting -- it reminded me of Les Murray's line, in his sonnet spiral about Sydney University, about 'Germaine ... winning a hard conversation'. I read this as a reference to Michael Oakeshott's much quoted (including by me) description of conversation as a metaphor for public life. In Oakeshott's conversation, 'different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another'. The Griffith Review's self introduction echoes this: 'Each issue is devoted to a topical theme and includes essays, reportage, memoir, fiction, poetry, photography and art ... The complexity of contemporary issues cannot adequately be illuminated by one form alone.' It's a challenging agenda. I'm not sure MoneySexPower rises to the challenge, perhaps because the title announces a theme that for one thing is always topical and for another is broad enough to cover the whole of human experience one way or another. Considered as conversation, the contents go something like this:
'Things are rough in Aboriginal politics. Enough is enough.' 'A mediocre English Internet scammer killed his wife and child in the US.' 'The News of the World was a sleazy newspaper in England decades ago.' 'I was there at Tienanmen Square, but I didn't understand as much as I pretended at the time.' 'Me and my friend were on opposite sides in the war in Bosnia, but he was a decent man.' 'I've been to Thailand. You wouldn't believe what Australian men get up to there.' 'A friend of mine has made an excellent documentary about Afghanistan.' 'Women have a hard time in the Queensland coal mining industry.' 'I've got a great book of ekphrastic poems coming out soon.'

That is to say, the individual pieces don't resonate with each other much at all. Nor are they in such a wide range of forms: the contents page divides them into Reportage, Essay, Memoir and Fiction, but the boundaries between those categories are blurry. Why, for instance, is Wayne McLennan's 'My Banker', about his involvement in dubious financial practices in Costa Rica in the 90s, filed as reportage rather than memoir? What makes 'The Heaviness of Keys', Edwina Shaw's sharp and unsettling first-person story about a frisson between a teacher and student in a boys' detention centre, memoir rather than fiction*? And Louis Nowra's 'My Three Beggars', reflecting on his relationship with street people in Kings Cross, is surely too current to be memoir? It's probably true to say that all but two of the pieces are actually personal essays, and of those two, one (Edwina's story) is classed as memoir and the other could well be based in actual experience. Of course, there's plenty of room to manoeuvre in the essay form, and here they range from Marcia Langton's sustained, fierce and unsparing polemic, 'The End of "Big Men" Politics', to Sydney Smith's bitterly personal 'My Mother, My Monster' by way of a photo essay by Roslyn Sharp, consisting of portraits of a homeless man.

Of course it's ridiculous to aspire to be the 'best conversation', and the phrase is probably better read as a self-promoting gesture rather than a statement of intent. As a contribution to ongoing conversations, a much more interesting thing to aspire to, MoneySexPower succeeds admirably. Marcia Langton's attack on 'big bunga' politics (apparently the meaning of this phrase is much ruder than the 'big men' of the essay's title) reads as a major contribution to our understanding of what the hell is going on with the NT Intervention, though I'd like to see Germaine Greer, Larissa Behrendt and Geoff Clak given a right of reply to her savage swipes at them, and it would have been good if her occasional non-sequitur and self-contradiciton had been successfully challenged by the editors. 'Getting to Grips with Naked', Barry Hill's piece on his poems responding to Lucien Freud's paintings, delivers some glancing but telling blows in the debate that recently exploded around Bill Henson's photographs. Mary Rose MacColl's 'The Birth Wars', a promo for her forthcoming book of the same name, reminds us that the fierce conflict about how childbirth should be managed is still raging,and that the casualties are real and very young. Charlie Stansfield tells of taking a severely disabled man, at his request, to see a prostitute -- and I remember attending a conference on Sexuality and the Disabled 20 years ago, another debate that's still raging. When I told a friend about Rachel Robertson's 'Bonus', in which she ponders the effect of being 'interpellated' as a carer for her son with autism rather than as his mother, the friend exploded: apparently this is a frequent whinge among 'carers' and their advocates, one that in my friend's opinion stems from rampant indiviidualism and has a destructively divisive effect, and so on ... the article has brought it into the public arena.

Michael Oakeshott's description of conversation includes this: 'A girl, in order to escape a conclusion, may utter what appears to be an outrageously irrelevant remark, but what in fact she is doing is turning an argument she finds tiresome into a conversation she is more at home in.' MoneySexPower could have done with more of such deflection. There's no stand-alone poetry and not many carefree laughs. But we're living in grim times, and this is a place where a diverse bunch of writers get to look at them squarely.

* Edwina is my niece, and the story is one of the three or four completely satisfying pieces in the journal.

Australian-bred New Yorker Kate Jennings, picked by Black Inc to give us a Quarterly Essay on the recent US election and the global financial crisis, is well past girlhood, and she doesn't try to escape any conclusions, but she leavens her account with plenty of apparent irrelevancies (a bawdy punchline from a Don Rickles show, an excellent anecdote about post 9/11 airport security, delicious bits of lunch-time chat). As Quarterly Essays go, this is one of the least earnest and least controversial. Where Judith Brett's account of the 2007 Australian election was a careful analysis of John w Howard's departure from the Prime Ministry, this is more a celebratory recount of Barack Obama's final sprint to victory, played in counterpoint to the unfolding GFC (as in Global Financial Crisis). Kate may be a stroppy feminist poet and dog lover, but she served time as a speech writer on Wall Street (and wrote abut it in Moral Hazard), so has a sharp insider–outsider perspective that makes for lively reading. I don't know that I understand the economics of it all any better for having read the essay, but I'm grateful for her weighing in with judgement and an un-mealy mouth. I've come away from it with the mental equivalent of a stimulated palate and a pleasantly full stomach.

Only 90 of the book's 132 pages are taken up with the eponymous essay. The rest is correspondence about Tim Flannery's call to action in climate change in the last issue. Interestingly, no space is given to denialists, so the effect is of passionately engaged conversation rather than the lobbing of shonky grenades that sometimes passes for public debate on this subject. In the absence of Andrew B*lt, Al+n Oxl*y and their morally incomprehensible ilk. You have to look fairly hard to discover the name of Quarterly Essay's editor. His name is Chris Feik. He does a bloody good job, at all levels.

Heat eschews self-promotional blurbs and page three mission statements. It rarely features anything from the headlines or rates a mention on Phillip Adams. Accessibility is no higher in its priorities than topicality. It dependably bristles with typos (fewer than usual in this issue, though there is a missing apostrophe in the first paragraph). It's unusual for me read everything in any issue -- I tend to skip erudite discussions of books I haven't read, for instance, especially when they refer heavily to other books I haven't read; I'm reluctant to commit to pantoums of more than about 16 lines; and there are some writers to whom, on the once-bitten-twice-shy principle, I refuse access to my mind. As a literary magazine, Heat takes risks, and I'm a devoted subscriber.

This issue has a short story by Gerard Windsor that is unsettling, given that his fiction is usually transparently close to autobiographical and this one enters some awkward, intimate territory. There's a prose poem by Krisd Hemensley about walking to and from work (the walk takes his mind to unexpected places). Two pieces on aspects of what one of them calls the literary economy: Beth Driscoll on how literary prizes work, striking a fine balance between anecdote and analysis; and Noel King interviewing Brent Cunningham on distributing small press publications in the US and revealing in the process some startling figures on the minuscule sales of most poetry, among other things. Brian Castro has a piece on Boccaccio and melancholy which is characteristically difficult and which, also characteristically, has sudden illuminating paragraphs. Gillian Mears spins a yarn that's even more unsettling than Gerry Windsor's. Saskia Beudel gives us a brief glimpse of cultural and linguistic encounter in Yuendemu.

I left the book, without intent, on a chair in the bathroom and when we were at the supermarket my poetry-avoiding companion said, 'I picked up the Heat that you left in the bathroom and read all the poems. They were totally shit.' I said, 'Ah, you didn't read the one by Jennifer Maiden.' I happened to have it with me, so handed it to her while I took our shopping through the check-out. As I wheeled the trolley away, she gave the book back to me and said, 'That's really lovely.' The poem doesn't start with George Geoffreys watching George W Bush on the television talking about Iraq. (Perhaps she won't need ever to write one of those poems again!) It's a delicate, complex, unresolved poem that includes Henry Handel Richardson, Don Dunstan, Adele Koh and Jennifer Rankin, and touches on literary festivals, cancer, and the mysteries of sexuality. I also found it really lovely.

For my money, Heat embodies a kind of diversity that Griffith Review claims for itself. But I wouldn't call it a conversation -- something more like an ascetic carnival of minds.

Posted: Sun - December 14, 2008 at 10:32 PM           |

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