Hey STELLA!

Last night in Melbourne's Federation Square, the new Stella Prize for the best book of the year by an Australian woman was launched as part of the Melbourne Writers' Festival. I did something uncharacteristically frivolous and flew over for the party.

The only people in this photo I actually recognise are journalist George Megalogenis, the tall dark dude over to the left, and Scribe publisher Aviva Tuffield, who is the smiling woman with darkish shoulder-length hair tucked behind one ear, at far right.

Chris Gordon, the events manager at Readings bookshop and a fellow member of the Stella Prize steering committee (as is Aviva, above), spoke persuasively of the need for sponsors and donations, and then introduced Australian feminist legend Anne Summers, author of Damned Whores and God's Police, which if memory serves was the first, or certainly one of the first, books in Australia to look at Australian history and culture through the lens of a feminist reading.

Anne officially launched the prize, reading the notes for her speech straight off her iPad, the first (though no doubt not the last) time I'd ever seen anybody do that. One of the most arresting things she said was that things were actually better for women in 1994 and we had apparently gone backwards.

But mostly the party was about the prize: what we've done so far, what we have still to do. The large crowd included most of the steering committee, mostly Melbourne writers and publishers: Chris, Aviva, Monica Dux, Jo Case, Rebecca Starford, and Sophie Cunningham who started it all.

Sophie Cunningham (R) with Pip McGuinness from NewSouth Books, the brains behind their Capital Cities series and therefore publisher of Sophie's book Melbourne and, next month, my book Adelaide.

The other Melbourne committee members include Jenny Niven, the MWF programmer, who I don't think was there (if I were the MWF programmer I'd be home in a coma by now) and Louise Swinn, who wasn't well. Susan Johnson from Brisbane also wasn't well enough to come, though she'd planned to. Kirsten Tranter and I flew down from Sydney and Adelaide respectively. See the Stella website at the above link for more detail on all these people.

L to R: Monica Dux, Rebecca Starford, Jo Case

Others spotted in the crowd included Melbourne publishing legend Hilary McPhee; longtime literary editor of The Age Jason Steger; publishers Philippa McGuinness from NewSouth Books and Michael Heyward from Text; Adam Bandt MP, the Federal Member for Melbourne; and Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings bookshop, who has been a quietly effective supporter of the Stella Prize from the beginning.

Sophie Cunningham, Adam Bandt. The person he is talking to is probably Kirsten Tranter -- I think I recognise the outfit.

It was Kirsten who wondered on Facebook the night before the party which members of the steering committee would be out in Flinders Street drunkenly shouting 'Hey STELLA!' before the night was over. The closest I got to that myself was a quiet bottle of Stella Artois back in my hotel room later that night as I read the grisly new Val McDermid. My days for this sort of thing are a very long way behind me.

The Don's legacy: more complex than you thought

The lovely Greta Bradman, granddaughter of Sir Donald.

Why everyone loves Antony Green

Dude knows his stuff, is why.

I was directed to this magnificently clear and thorough explanation of the current and possible future Canberra scenarios by the equally excellent Bernice, who blogs here.

The art of the actor

If you're a Crikey reader you may have seen this already, but if not, have a look.

I love actors, I just love them to death, and most of all I love Robert Carlyle. Their job, done well, is the most seamless imaginable combination of body, mind and soul.

This commercial was shot in one take, as you can see. Watch the way Carlyle paces the walking and talking to coincide perfectly with every prop. Watch the way he keeps it up while negotiating that rocky, rutted path, telling an engaging story, and maintaining a consistent distance from the camera. He'll be 50 next April, but he still moves like a hyperactive 25-year-old.

It's not just him, either. Everything about this ad is lovely.

June 24th, 2010

(Photo: AAP via the ABC website)

In praise of women's tennis

As I type, Elena Dementieva and Justine Henin have been on the court for two hours and they're not even halfway through the second set, which is at deuce, two-all. It's the most beautiful, forceful, elegant match I think I've ever seen: two evenly matched slender blonde stars of the game, both having a good night and whupping each other all over the court except when doing delicate precision work at the net. It's like watching a magic cheetah trying to catch Tinkerbell.

UPDATE: and the unseeded, unranked Henin has just beaten the world no. 5 in straight sets, 7-5 7-6.

Miles Franklin and the Mystery of Talent, or, Don't Mention the War

Because I am supposed to be a grown-up, and because I made a promise, I'm not buying into the question of the literary stag night 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award all-male shortlist beyond offering the odd brief neutral fact in other people's comments threads, and observing here, because I really cannot help myself, that if what spokesjudge Morag Fraser says is true and the judges did not realise what they had done until their shortlist was already set in stone, then the gender-blindness we thought we had diagnosed and exposed by about 1985 is actually still as bad as it ever was, even at these upper levels of cultural and intellectual endeavour.

But otherwise the howling restraint is making my ears bleed, so here by way of self-distraction is a little material on a related question: not what makes a good book, but what makes a good writer, since they are frequently not the same thing. Being a good writer is a non-negotiable condition of producing a good book, but by no means guarantees it.

I've read three books since Tuesday. All of them have been the author's first book of fiction: An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, and John the Revelator by Peter Murphy. Here in that order is a sample from each, demonstrating that when somebody's a good writer it does actually leap off the page at you and grab you round the neck, and that writing talent lies as much in the quality of pre-verbal observation as it does in what ends up on the page.

Jennet loved her husband, she liked and she disliked him, and she hated him as well.

She thinks that merely by being forceful and independent she can make a decent life, but that just isn't true -- life is tended and weeded and watered, is created out of effort, and is made from other materials than oneself.

Rows of stalls and tables laden with cheap jewellery, gimcrack stuff, necklaces and rings and charms and amulets and stones. Caravans with signs in the windows advertising Tarot and palm and crystal-ball readings. I counted my money and went up the steps to one of the caravans and knocked on the open door. A woman in a baggy jumper and a pair of sweatpants was watching a portable television blaring some sort of game show. She turned the sound down and waved a hand at an armchair beside a flimsy table.
'Fiver for your palm, tenner for the cards,' she said.
I gave her a tenner. She donned a pair of glasses and took my hand and pulled my fingers apart and peered at the lines. Her head jerked up. She stared at my face.
'Out,' she said.
'What?'
'Out.' She pushed the tenner across the table. 'And take your money with you.'
I stood and stammered, but she reached for the sweeping brush. I backed out the doorway and stumbled down the steps and into the night. The door slammed and the blinds came down. The funfair whirled around me.

Tribal

Since the bride and Ampersand Duck between them have already provided lovely accounts, in one case lavishly illustrated, of Laura and Dorian's wedding on Saturday, I don't have much to add except to agree about the total gorgeousness of the entire affair. Highlights included a ceremony that combined a substantial amount of traditional wedding text with some carefully-chosen and beautifully-read Australian love poems by, if I remember rightly, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe and Lesbia Harford, plus C.P. Cavafy's classic 'Ithaka', in which a finely judged mixture of feeling, philosophy and Homer goes into the proposition that what matters most is not the arrival but the journey.

Poems were read and vows were taken to the accompaniment of a faint but symphonic soundtrack: the gentle crooning of the chooks, the distant popping of the pre-toast corks, and the occasional sniffling noises of the various female guests. The bride was radiant, the ceremony was a wonderful family affair, the garden looked gorgeous, the weather obliged, and the only real disappointment was the bridesmaids, who apparently spent most of the day underneath the house next door getting their collars, bows and faces covered in cobwebs and dust.

Once I'd decided to go to the wedding and had sent Laura my RSVP, I began to make arrangements to catch up with the various Melbourne friends I've stayed in regular touch with since I moved to Adelaide eleven years ago, and by the time I finally arrived at my Lygon Street hotel, I'd lined up three reunions around the wedding.

After a blindingly stressful day of cat-wrangling and ominous airport delays and announcements and closures and rumours of lightning-struck planes, Friday night once I'd finally arrived was homemade gourmet pizza with P and S and the kids, two of whom are now at high school and none of whom was born yet when, already old friends, their parents and I and two other friends spent a week in a villa in Tuscany in 1993. Now we sat round talking, eating and drinking in much the same spirit, except with P and S now happily surrounded by kids, cats and dogs. (Only one dog, actually, but he is so big he could make eight or nine Maltese terriers.)

Saturday night was dinner out with L, who heroically came to fetch me and then took me out for seriously good Italian food and some in-depth catching-up in matters of love and work. Sunday was lunch with J in an old Carlton haunt, after which we strolled up to Melbourne University's Ian Potter Gallery to see a wonderful exhibition of Louis Kahan's portraits of Australian, and particularly Melbourne, literati ('Let's go and look at the intelligentsia,' said J).

Many of these portraits were drawn to illustrate particular articles, poems and stories in Meanjin over several decades; both of us knew (or had known) a number of the people in the portraits and had read the work of most of the others, and I was reminded again that galleries and museums are a lot like computers in that what you get out of them depends heavily on what you put in; both of us had brought a lot of history with us to the gallery, possibly too much. (What with J a former editor, the exhibition's portraits of the two editors before her, the presence of the current editor at the wedding and a screening at the exhibition of a 1961 episode of Panorama exclusively dedicated to the magazine, it was a fairly Meanjin-themed visit altogether.)

We know ourselves by the tribes to which we belong, and I hadn't properly thought through the fact that on this weekend I would be rejoining several of mine. Still, I knew that the wedding would be a monster blogmeet and that I would catch up with bloggers of all kinds: some I'd known for years pre-blogging but mainly in professional capacities (Elsewhere, Sophie); others I'd met recently as a direct or indirect result of blogging (the Baron, and of course the bride herself); and yet others whom I'd never met at all, including two in particular whom I felt I knew very well but had never actually laid eyes on, namely the lovely Zoe and the equally lovely Ampersand Duck. If I'd been able to summon just a little more energy or will, I would have kicked on to the Standard Hotel after dinner on Friday night in order to experience the blogtribe even more extensively, and with hindsight I wish I had, but alas one is not as young as one was.

Stephanie of Humanities Researcher is the only person who is a member of all my non-Adelaide tribes (blogging, Aust lit, old-friends network), and Stephanie has thoughtlessly naffed off to Philadelphia. But there was still one point of overlap: the other S is one of the still-in-touch old Melbourne mates and, though not a blogger, is now a work colleague of Laura's and was at the wedding with her husband and their kids. They have had an extremely hairy time of it lately and the prospect of seeing them all safe and well was one of the factors that tipped the scales when I was thinking about making the trip. And for this weekend they were the hinge, for me, between one reality and another.

Mooching down Lygon Street late the next morning took me even further back, back to the first time I'd ever been on it, one day in the winter of 1980 -- my first year of living away from Adelaide, and Melbourne still a total mystery to me; Sydney was my 'other city' in early life -- when I'd travelled up from Geelong with a man to whom I was in thrall in every possible way, something that had never happened before and has never, I'm glad to say, happened since. So Melbourne-centric was he, so tightly wound and swaddled in the cocoon of his own reality at the expense of anyone else's, that he'd said to me 'I'll meet you in Tamani's' and I had desperately wandered up and down Lygon Street at least a dozen times before I thought to ask someone, and discovered that Tamani's had changed its name to Ti Amo (!) some time beforehand and he just assumed I'd know. (Nor was he apologetic afterwards. Yes yes, I know.)

And over that, layers and layers of other memories, all variously plotted along that spectrum whose bad end is the one where you want to curl up into a foetal ball in the gutter and die of shame. Ah dear me, almost thirty years of Lygon Street, as bittersweet to me as the best of its own imported gourmet wares, and a great deal older than most of them. It was a relief to spot J's familiar back in Readings, and to wander off with her to find some lunch and get each other back up to date on life's important developments since last we met. Why it should be a surprise to us here in our fifties that fate keeps on happening, and not just to us but to such of our parents as still survive, I really have no idea.

In which ThirdCat's book is launched

Finally at 2 am this yesterday morning I put this book down, about half-finished in one hit, and went to bed, but I didn't want to.




It's the story of two women, loosely and obliquely connected through family ties, and their complicated relationship with the South Australian town -- regional and industrial -- to which they are very attached, but which they fear may be making their children sick. It's a poet's novel, but it's also an activist's one.

Longtime readers of ThirdCat's blogs, especially the unique and wonderful 'blogopera' Adelaide Sprawls, will be familiar with her style and technique: restrained, almost minimalist, but with a turn of phrase and of observation that nails something you sort of already knew but would never have thought of putting quite like that.

They will be familiar, too, with her subject matter: the lives, circumstances and feelings of 'ordinary people' and all the stuff that seethes under the surface of their days and the physical objects and actions of daily life, the tea-making, the hair-washing and the car-fixing; the unresolved tensions, the suppressed exclamations, the half-understood feelings, the quality and complexity of emotional responses and transactions, the tiny fluctuations of feeling between people, the mysteries that reside in what is not said.

... she had not needed a card to know who the roses were from. But she didn't know what they meant.

Even going over the words they had said on the phone she couldn't work it out. They could mean sorry or I miss you or goodbye, because in the end she had pushed him to say, I will get over you, if that's what you make me do.

(Recycling disclosure: I have said some of this about Tracy's writing before, and it will look familiar to her if not to anyone else.) It's all there in Black Dust Dancing, though less concentrated and intense, making more room, as is proper in a novel, for the story and the setting.

So this afternoon at Sturt Street Primary School, icon and symbol of all that is best in the history of South Australian education and school to both of Tracy's boys, an assortment of family, friends and fans assembled to celebrate her achievement, buy her novel, and queue up to get her to sign it,




and then to see it officially launched by Adelaide's Sheridan Stewart, artist, comedian, radio presenter and MC of the comedy show Titters, which featured Tracy in her other life as a standup comedian and which was practically booked out for the duration of the Adelaide Fringe.


(Sheridan Stewart attended by Wakefield Press publisher Michael Bollen, behind whose left hip you can just see a bottle of the fabled Fox Creek Verdelho.)

Sheridan made a funny, warm speech but was upstaged by Tracy's boys, who came purposefully up to the bar behind her and fetched a cup of what was probably apple juice, but looked a lot like white wine, each, and melted back into the crowd, to its general appreciation. Tracy then made an excellent thank-you speech,




dividing the thankees into thoughtful categories instead of naming names, which is always a minefield.

Before and after the ceremonials I had a nice talk with the lovely Deborah from In A Strange Land and met her beautiful daughters.

Tracy and the boys and the mister have to fly back to Abu Dhabi tomorrow morning. I'm guessing she might try to have a bit of a nap on the plane.

Everywhere you turn, there's another dishy man singing

One of the joys of a regular income is that one can afford to toddle along to various beautiful Adelaide venues whenever the mood takes one in order to see and hear quite remarkably lovely men doing what they do best. Last month it was the legendary Leonard and now it's these two. I've seen them both perform on stage before, David Hobson as a hilarious bumbly Nanki-Poo in The Mikado

(Hobson on right)

and Teddy Tahu Rhodes as a chilling Joseph de Rocher in Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking.



But this is a simple, straight-up evening of duets from two beautiful dudes with gorgeous voices.

From the blurb:

Two of Australia’s singing superstars, tenor David Hobson and baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes will be touring Australia in March 2009 for Andrew McKinnon Presentations. These will be the most romantic nights of the year with much loved arias and songs from Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter, even Australian folk songs!

Fresh from recording their first album together for ABC Classics (You’ll Never Walk Alone), these two dazzling singers are set to wow audiences with their beautiful arias and songs including operatic arias, folksongs, show tunes and, of course, the duet from The Pearl Fishers, voted the greatest opera moment of all time by ABC Classic FM listeners, as well as a few surprises thrown in. This exciting once in a lifetime concert features two of the hottest names around will be a highlight on any music lover’s concert schedule. Separately, these two stars have carved themselves indelibly into the echelons of Australian musical history. Together, and with Australia's leading accompanist Sharolyn Kimmorley, they will create a night of pure musical delight.

“What excites me most about this concert is the variety of repertoire. In the first half Teddy and I will be singing some of opera’s greatest moments and in the second half we bring things closer to home with some show tunes, folksongs and more contemporary works,” says David Hobson.

Leonard Cohen in the Southern Vales

Following the lead of Laura from Sills Bend, I am not going to say too much about the content of the concert, in order not to spoil it for people who have yet to see it. But here are some things I learned.

-- Ten musicians who can all hold the stage individually can also merge seamlessly into one breathtaking performance.

-- It is possible to perform for almost three hours, with a lot of physical activity including kneeling and effortlessly getting up again, and for some of which you have been looking straight into the setting sun, even if you are seventy-four years old.

-- It is possible to be seventy-four years old and neither decrepit nor in any other way out of date. Au contraire in spades: Cohen's knees, fingers and memory all seem to be in perfect working order, and his voice is utterly engaging and compelling -- musical and beautiful still, as well as charismatic. The ears are an erogenous zone, what can I say.

-- Rehearsal is a beautiful thing, especially when all ten of you are artists enough to inject passion and spontaneity into music that you have prepared and rehearsed to a hair's breadth.

There's one song I really do want to single out, though. 'The Partisan' was one of my favourites back in 1970. Apart from loving the song for its own virtues, I loved it that a Jewish Canadian from bilingual Montreal who had his fifth birthday a few weeks after World War 2 broke out should write such a song, with so deep a knowledge in it of war, and of western Europe, and of the French language, in which some of this song is sung, and most of all of being hunted and haunted and steadily resisting:

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on

On the original recording, if memory serves, there's just him and his guitar, possibly plus the little chorus of angel voices he has favoured all through his long career. Last night, though, it was ten brilliant musicians whipping up a perfect storm: its dark imagery and driving beat brought to mind the word duende, about which Alison Croggon did so brilliant a post, with reference to Paul Capsis, at Sarsaparilla some time ago [will link to that as soon as Sars is contactable ... No, wait, here it is at Alison's own blog Theatre Notes]. And here's Christopher Maurer, courtesy of Wikipedia:

... at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence ... who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca's lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call 'angel'), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; he or she has to battle it skillfully, 'on the rim of the well,' in 'hand-to-hand combat.' To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, 'a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience...

Landscape and weather, taken as the queue inched forward, glacierlike, at Leconfield Wines as they searched everyone's bags before they let us in. If only it had been glacierlike in other ways. You can see how hot it was from the depth of blue in that sky.



The heroic Glenn Richards from Augie March, on whom some kind punter took pity and bestowed the hat. For reasons best known to themselves, the promoters had set up the stage facing due west, and the sun went down in a white and blinding blaze of heat. 'My hair is melting,' said Richards plaintively, not long before the hat donation. They were great.



Paul Kelly had been warned to wear his cap and sunnies so came prepared. His nephew Dan Kelly did likewise, in a shirt that matched his uncle's hat and Leonard's giant muse backdrop. They were great, too.



First sighting of Leonard.



This guitarist is from Bareclona. He was sitting in a capacious and luxurious fuchsia-coloured chair. I like the way he appears here to be bumping the muse's giant but shapely and diaphanously draped breast with his head. Leonard played to, with and off him all night, often kneeling as he sang to be on eye level.

Leonard's years in a Buddhist monastery showed very clearly, in the spareness of his disciplined frame and the relaxed stillness of his body when standing back and listening to the other musicians. Obviously some of this is pure showmanship but I have never seen the Buddhist notion of 'mindfulness' acted out in such a protracted, exposed and practised way.



After performing for about an hour, Leonard and the band took a break. By now the sun was well down and there was a dishevelled, festive, heat-drunk air about the crowd that made us look like a downmarket Antipodean 21st century version of Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party.



Leonard and his 'angels'.




'Famous Blue Raincoat.'

Blogger gets gong, friend not surprised

And not just any blogger but my dear friend Stephanie of Humanities Researcher, who feels that her blog played no small part in winning one of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council's 2008 Australian Awards for University Teaching, as announced in today's Australian HES.