More thoughts on writing, gender and statistics

Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the Sydney Morning Herald (what I'm writing, this week, I mean -- won't be published till early Feb).

It's something I think to check from time to time and I'm glad to say that even when I'm not doing it consciously I usually manage, over the course of four book reviews, to mix up genre, gender and nationality pretty evenly. The literary editor does the first cull of the books that come in for review and sends me more than I need, and then I choose from them.

(I'm always startled to realise how many people think reviewers choose their own books, at least for hard-copy publications. Books for review, and reviewers for them, are chosen by the literary editor, though reviewers will often make a pitch to review this or that book.)

Mostly when people are counting statistics about whether men or women are getting more coverage, they don't look any further than the numbers. This week's copy features three women writers and one man. With four books to review per week, the most frequent gender ratio in my own columns (as I say, not often deliberately: frankly I'm proud of having internalised this to the point where I usually don't even think about it) is 2:2. Sometimes, as this week, it's 3:1, one way or the other. Very rarely is it 4:0 but when it is, again, the all-male and all-female weeks are pretty equal in terms of numbers.

Recently I compared stats with a fellow writer of multiple short reviews per week, over a period of months, and was astounded to see that of 88 books I'd reviewed in that time, 45 were by women and 43 by men. Not chosen deliberately; the cards just fell that way.

However.

Part of my job is to select a Pick of the Week, which gets twice as long a review as the others. It's usually pretty easy to do, especially in a weak week. Sometimes a book just leaps out at you; other times it's a tossup between two, or even more. Usually I pick the one that has the largest number of positive things to be said about it, which would seem to guarantee that the largest number of people won't feel as though they have been misled if they ever get round to reading the book.

This week, I happened to notice that the Pick of the Week is the only book out of the four that was written by a man. It's a clear winner, though the others are fine and none of them is downright bad -- although this isn't always the case. I have no problems with this choice at all.

But if I looked at my column for, say, four weeks in a row, or over a period of six months, and noticed that I had reviewed more women writers than men but that the men's books were consistently being featured as Pick of the Week, I would. I would have a problem with it, and with myself. There'd be some ferocious self-interrogation going on. But it's not a thing that the raw stats would pick up.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

"If one takes the normal American ambition to be the pursuit of happiness, and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly thwarted, sooner or later one strikes across the wound profiles of Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963. In those 'six point nine seconds of heat and light' or those 'seven seconds that broke the back of the American century', some little hinge gave way in the national psyche. The post-Kennedy period is often written up as a 'loss of innocence', a judgement which admittedly depends for its effect on how innocent you thought America had been until a quarter of a century ago. But, while Presidents had been slain before, they had generally been shot by political opponents of an indefinable if extreme sort, like Lincoln's resentful Confederate or McKinley's inarticulate anarchist. Moreover, the culprits were known, apprehended and questioned. With Kennedy's murder, the Republic doomed itself to the repetitive contemplation of a tormenting mystery. Here is a country where informative technology operates at a historically unsurpassed level; where anything knowable can in principle be known and publicized; where the bias is always in favour of disclosure rather than concealment; where the measure of attainment even in small-change discourse is the moon-shot. And nobody is satisfied that they know for certain what happened in the banal streets of Dealey Plaza."

-- Christopher Hitchens, 'Where Were You Standing?' TLS, November 1988.


I remember exactly where I was standing: in the living room on the farm where I grew up. The news had just come up on the teeve as a 'News Flash' (remember them?). I was ten. I also remember exactly where I was when I read this paragraph. It was the winter of 1992 and I was sitting in the living-room of my friend R's flat in Balmain, overlooking Sydney Harbour, with the sun coming in through the window. R was in the kitchen making coffee, and I had idly picked up the copy of Hitchens' For the Sake of Argument that was lying on the table and opened it on the page where this paragraph appears.

I thought I had been struck by lightning. I really did. This, it seemed, was what writing could do if it tried.

In which a beginner thinks about Twitter

The brevity that is the soul of Twitter is not, I feel, entirely my thing.

It's enough of a struggle writing four short fiction reviews a week, into which one must somehow cram just enough of the plot to make one's subsequent remarks about the book comprehensible and then try to say two or three acceptably useful things about it, in a space the size of a hummingbird. For me, trying to fit pithy observations into 140-character Tweets is a sort of busman's holiday in triplicate.

What I'm enjoying very much about it, however, is following people. There are those who were already bloggy mates, who greeted me so warmly on my arrival in the Twitterverse that it felt like arriving at some gigantic cosmic party and catching sight of a group of one's mates waving to one over by the canapés. And there are those to whom I am unknown but of whom I am a fan at a respectful distance.

People in the latter category who have taken to the form like ducks to the proverbial include Crikey's brilliant First Dog on the Moon ('Poodles! I have seen them!'), ABC political reporter and incidental comedienne Annabel Crabb, the inimitable Stephen Fry, the dazzling Margaret Atwood and the incomparable Alexander McCall Smith, whose specialty seems to be poetically encapsulating complex yet common moral dilemmas in 140 characters or less.

I have discovered from reading his tweets that he is a fan of Auden and Vermeer, which makes me love him even more, and among other things he is the master of the gem-like obituary: 'Alas, alas Patrick Leigh Fermor is dead: a writer who was a master of elegant prose, Latinate in its feel; a beautiful voice is silent now.'

Trusting the girls in the back room

On the grounds that it's never too early to start worrying about something, I have been worrying about a keynote speech that I don't have to give until February. I have to worry about it now, because, come the day, all my worrying capacities may well be used up on the problem of how to get to the venue in 47 degree heat without losing consciousness, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In the meantime, what to say to an academic conference when you haven't been an academic (not a fulltime one anyway) for thirteen and half years? How to approach this topic? What to do?

But a few weeks ago as I headed south down the unlovely Tapley's Hill Road, en route to the marginally less unlovely West Lakes Mall across the road from AAMI Stadium, registering on autopilot the elderly road-crossers, the non-signalling lane-changers, the speed-limit-excessers, the potential drag racers and the current price of petrol and bananas while thinking about my shopping list and its eccentricities, the solution came to me. It just appeared as if by magic, dropping into consciousness like a ripe fruit. There it was.

After I got home, I sat down at the computer and checked the Doonesbury strip for the day, where I found a link to a rare interview with its author (is that the word for a cartoonist?), the incomparable Garry Trudeau:

There must be many days when the ideas don’t come. What does he do then? Walk in the park? Dose himself with double-espressos? “That pretty much describes every day. I spend a lot of time not coming up with ideas, but assuming you’re temperamentally suited for deadline work, you do learn to trust the boys in the back room.

“I know how to prepare myself, but I have no idea how the actual imagining works. I often abandon an idea as hopeless, only to find weeks later that my brain has mysteriously solved the problem without any apparent guidance from its owner.”

My idea for the keynote speech had most certainly come from the girls in the back room. One minute I was floundering, and the next minute I had a phrase that constituted a whole argument, plus a potential framework for a structure. I'd call it a thesis sentence, except that strictly speaking it's not a sentence.

But in my own work, I trust those backroom girls more for the bigger projects than I do for the weekly deadline. Sometimes -- often -- they are napping, and writing four short fiction reviews a week, which is in fact a highly exacting task if you have any ambition at all to do it well, is something they couldn't always be bothered to stir for. They are the Marys to the mind's Marthas -- the Marthas being the girls in the bar, if you will, cheerfully serving the drinks, cleaning the tables and keeping an eye on the till. Those girls are the years of experience and training, and their job is to say to me 'This is your life's work. If you can't sit down and write a workwomanlike piece as part of the day's tasks after all this time, then you can't do anything at all.'

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.

Money talks

There have been some changes to the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, thus:

This year five awards will be presented in the following categories: fiction (the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction); nonfiction (the Nettie Palmer Prize for Nonfiction); poetry (the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry); drama (the Louis Esson Prize for Drama); and young adult (the Prize for Writing for Young Adults). The winner in each category will receive a cash prize of $25,000. In 2010, the fiction and nonfiction awards were each worth $30,000, while the poetry, drama and young adult fiction awards were each worth $15,000.

Sad as it makes me to admit it, if you attach dollar values to different literary genres then you are sending bright red neon signals about the other, less tangible ways in which they're valued. Sort of like paying women a smaller amount of money to do exactly the same job.

So it's excellent to see that poetry, drama and YA writing are now up there alongside the traditional big guns. Monetary value aside, it's an instant game-changer in that literary genres are now no longer being classified here into first-class and second-class citizens.

Bits

are all I'm good for at the moment.

* Am up sharp pointy end of Adelaide book, lurching from one paragraph to the next as deadline looms. One's student days come back to one at times like this: have vivid memory of sitting on my bedroom floor in 1971 crying over Philosophy 1 essay requiring all-nighter (FAIL) and of the four other long-essay all-nighters -- on Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, American Southern Gothic, medieval church music and psycholinguistics (not together, though it's an intriguing interdisciplinary proposition), and all the all-nighters writing lectures over the years, and wondering why the bod won't do that any more, just because it's in its late 50s and I don't feed it properly or give it enough sleep and exercise. Text yesterday from younger sister: 'Don't make yourself sick. Better the wrath of your publisher than the wrath of Mother Nature.'

* Wonderful piece by John Birmingham on what the Brisbane floods are telling us about human nature here.

Delicate, porcelain-skinned little vegan girls in bonnets with flowers muscled their way into the thickest, filthiest torrents of river mud next to bogan footballers, Army engineers, and tough-looking tattooed lesbians. This being West End there were travellers, too. Three French backpackers somehow managing to make their accumulated filth look stylish. A couple of Americans who'd come to Australia to surf and instead found themselves running wheelbarrows of grey, stinking ooze down to the water's edge from where it had come.

Gorgeous.

* New post at Read, Think, Write on second-guessing the publication process if you're interested.

* Garden spider that spins its gorgeous orb directly across path from front gate to verandah every non-wet and non-windy night is twice the size it was on Christmas Day when my friend R came to dinner and as she was leaving I had to take the torch out to show her why she needed to avoid the path and jump off the edge of the verandah in order to get to her car. Goddess knows I too have put on a kilo or so since Christmas but doubling in size in less than a month is awesome. I know for a fact that the insect pickings in that part of the garden are pretty good; the other night the web snared an entire moth. (No doubt the spider equivalent of a tub of Sara Lee Irish Cream and no I can't believe I bought it either. I'm as shocked as you are.) It's all a bit red in tooth and claw out there.

* Speaking of claws, the tortoiseshells are well, as is Papa Cat, who will be 84 on Feb 1. I'm told that for the birthday dinner we're having Chinese, which my adventurous ma taught him to like at the Silver Dragon Restaurant in Rundle St, Adelaide, circa 1955. Sadly she is now long gone, but his pleasure in Chinese food lives on.

Commitment

We're now into September (we're almost a week into September; gah) and that means that I'm getting up towards the pointy end of the deadline for this book about Adelaide. It's time to get serious. Actually I was already pretty serious, but it's time to get more serious.

To that end, I'm hoping that making a public commitment en blog to a daily minimum of work on the book, a commitment that will shame me into actually doing it.

So here it is: starting today, and working around the regular four novels a week reviewing gig, I must also do a minimum of either (a) writing 500 words or (b) two hours of work (writing, researching, self-editing, faffing around with the biliography) per day. Whichever comes first. Or both.

And not just during the working week but every day. 7/7. It works like flexitime: I can save up for a day off, or make up time afterwards. If the latter, it has to be within that working week. I'll use the appropriate blog to report back, and to shame myself publicly if need be. Perhaps the best place for updates is the readin' and writin' blog; with any luck they might spur me on to keep that a bit more alive.

(You thought this post was going to be about Relationships, didn't you. Hah, sucked in. I'm too old for that sort of malarkey. Talking about them publicly, or indeed at all, I mean. Nobody is too old for having them.)

UPDATE, 10.05 pm: three and a half hours' worth of reading/research/restructuring/faffing, which included writing 357 words. The question is, how long can I keep it up?

Writing, technology and memory

Lo these many years ago when I was writing my PhD thesis, I frequently voiced a wish that someone would invent a form of sentences and paragraphs that worked not in two dimensions, but in three: that had the structure, not of a straight line, but of a mirror ball, so that the sentence, the paragraph, the thought, the Thing would be constantly turning, revealing its different facets, and whoever was reading/looking at it could see how those different facets related to each other.

Which is how grammar itself works, really, and why Yoda funny is, but that's for another post.

I wanted this three-dimensional discursive artifact to be invented in order to be able to circumvent the problem of trying to write about something that couldn't really be understood until something else -- something tangential, or something that happened later -- had been explained. God had gone some way towards solving this problem when She invented footnotes, but there was still a long way to go.

Great leaps and bounds in this direction have been made since, of course, in the form of hyperlinks. I remember the moment when I first realised what hyperlinks were and how they worked: my first conscious thought was Damn and blast, if only these things had been invented before I tried to write my thesis.

The problem of linear chronology remains, of course, in that consciousness and its apprehensions are inescapably linear because of the way that time works, or at least time the way we understand it. You can still only read one thing at a time, and decisions must be made about the order in which you will read them. All the same, it would have been an enormous help to have been able to send my examiners (for who else ever reads PhD theses?) off at a hypertangent in order to find out extra things about the topic before proceeding further.

If I had the patience to read (and the brains to follow) Stephen Hawking, I might have a better handle on this, but life is short.

And because I am now trying to write a book, a book about Adelaide, for which I have a magnificently liberating -- and, for that reason, terrifying -- brief from the publisher (although since it's a book in a series and I'm in the fortunate position of having several earlier volumes to supply a context, it's less terrifying than it might have been), I have been thinking about ways in which technology might come to my aid.

What I need is a form of technology that will automatically record everything you're thinking as you're thinking it: some sort of microchip that reads your mind and has an Autosave function.

I'm sure it's possible. In fact someone somewhere has probably already invented it, and is merely having trouble with the patent. If so, I'm guessing the problem won't have been solved before February 1, the date the manuscript is due, which is a shame. And God knows I have wished to have one of these gadgets implanted many times before today.

But how else to record, without having to race to take notes to keep up with the brain when the brain is actually working this fast, which happens so seldom you have to grab it while it's happening, for who knows when it will come again -- how else to record the suddenly obvious solution, which came to me in the middle of dinner, to the structural problem of where to put the story of the sudden closure of Adelaide's Radio 5KA in 1941, when the government thought 5KA was being run by German sympathisers who were broadcasting in code was because said station managers were Jehova's Witnesses? For it belongs, it obviously belongs, in the section on Weird Adelaide.

What's more, as the radio station closure is all about the mood of Adelaide in wartime, I can tuck in, under that story's wing, my dad's recollections of being a 15-year-old ARP bike rider in 1942, pedalling up and down the streets of Adelaide's eastern suburbs knocking on the doors of people whose blackout curtains were not sufficiently closed -- recollections I was determined to shoehorn in somewhere but had not yet found a place for.

But I had to leave my dinner half-eaten and rush to the computer to write all this stuff down, because otherwise it would have whooshed past like a car in the rain and been lost to sight. I just wish inventors would invent things before I need them.

'An astonishing number of prayer groups'

If anyone reading this happens to be teaching creative writing or running workshops or whatever, here's an article you might find useful. Certainly I plan to save it, so it's to hand should I ever find myself teaching anyone the difference between sentimentality and the real thing.

I've been a fan of Christopher Hitchens, even all through his contrarian views on Iraq, ever since the positively Damascene moment in a friend's sunny apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour on Easter Saturday 1994, where I read him for the first time. The moment of revelation was specifically this paragraph from a review in the TLS, first published 1988, which gave me a major new view, as of suddenly opened curtains on a window that turns out to be much larger than one imagined, of what it was possible for a writer to do:

If one takes the normal American ambition to be the pursuit of happiness, and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly thwarted, sooner or later one strikes across the wound profiles of Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963. In those 'six point nine seconds of heat and light' or those 'seven seconds that broke the back of the American century', some little hinge gave way in the national psyche. The post-Kennedy period is often written up as a 'loss of innocence', a judgement which admittedly depends for its effect on how innocent you thought America had been until a quarter of a century ago. ... With Kennedy's murder, the Republic doomed itself to the repetitive contemplation of a tormenting mystery. Here is a country where information technology operates at a historically unsurpassed level; where anything knowable can in principle be known and publicised; where the bias is always in favour of disclosure rather than concealment; where the measure of attainment even in small-change discourse is the moon-shot. And nobody is satisfied that they know for certain what happened in the banal streets of Dealey Plaza.

And now here he is in the current Vanity Fair, almost another quarter of a century later, on what it's like to be diagnosed with cancer at 61.

Check out, in particular, the final paragraph, where one of the world's most famously strident and adamantine atheists and actively anti-Christian crusaders observes, briefly and neutrally, knowing that the irony does not need to be pointed out and will not escape his readers (one of the reasons I love him is his unfailing respect for his readers' intelligence), that he is getting supportive messages from 'an astonishing number of prayer groups'.

Imagine the struggle to process and reconcile this -- to do so at all, much less weakened, as he clearly is and including intellectually (though there's not much evidence of that in the writing) by the brutal treatments that all past and present cancer patients know far too much about.

Uh oh

No doubt every word of this report on David Marr's Quarterly Essay on Kevin Rudd is true; I don't know what the stance of the child in the photograph says to you, but I know what it says to me, and I have in my time known a few chronically angry men very well. But you have to ask yourself whether the kinds of people who read (never mind write) the Quarterly Essay would allow even such a damning portrait to drive them in the direction of a conservative government. (Has anyone read it yet? What did you think?)

David Marr would have thought very carefully through all the possible consequences of this essay. But it's clear from all his work that his first commitment as a journalist is to the truth, based on evidence, as he sees it. So while it might be a matter of knowing that disenchantment with Rudd is far more likely to push his previous supporters further to the left (and into the waiting arms of the Greens; Bob Brown must be starting to think it's Christmas), it could also be a matter of letting the fallout fall where it may.

And it may, of course, fall into that empty fruit bowl.

Another day, another blog

Loth to let the litblog thing go altogether, though one has tried and failed to keep it up at more than one site, one is having yet another go. Now that I've learned to export and import on Blogger, this newish blog incorporates all of Australian Literature Diary (2005-2010 on and off) and all (three whole months but gee it was fun while it lasted) of Ask the Brontë Sisters (May-July, 2007).

I originally called it 'Read, Write, Think' but on reflection decided that sends a terrible message, as one should think before one writes. It might be better entitled 'Read, Think, Write, Draft, Edit, Proof-read, Argue With Editor, Review, Fisk [which we of literary academe used to call 'close reading' before it began to be frowned on as ideologically unsound, and were taught, compulsorily and unrelentingly, to do many years before blogging was born or thought of, harumph, you kids get off my lawn, etc], Rave About Writers You Like and Whinge and Bitch About Other People's Terrible Ideas and Excruciating Spelling, Grammar and Style', but this should do to be going on with.

It's meant to be a sort of journal, in which track is kept of what I read and write from day to day, what I notice in the reviews pages, little magazines, trade journals and lit gossip columns, and what I hear from my mates. Much like this blog, in fact, except without the cooking and cats and gardening and Tony Abbott and so on. Whenever there's a new post over there, I'll put up a link from here.

Language

A paradox: when you're in the grip of literature -- of poetics, rhetoric, narrative, drama, symbolism, metaphor, style, grammar, diction and micro-nuance in all its lovely rise and fall, its innuendos and insinuations, its expeditions into the brain, its commando raids on the heart and its ambushes of the understanding -- when you are in that lifelong grip, it's bloody hard to write a document for legal purposes the way such a document is supposed to be written.

My dear, stern legal friend D took one look at my first draft and clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. Said No no no, the court doesn't want to know How it All Went Wrong. I said But that's the interesting important stuff, and she just looked at me pityingly and clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes some more, and re-wrote the first few paragraphs for me in legalese on a paper napkin, before we turned to the more interesting and pleasant pursuit of doing the Saturday morning Crossquiz, with the help of Google courtesy of the iPhone of Last Resort.

So because she is very very good and experienced at this stuff, and because I am supporting a loved one's application for divorce and want to do it effectively and properly, I've just re-written it the way she told me to re-write it. But I don't think she realised quite how violently the clunky legalistic style would go against my grain.

I've already done my 2008-2009 tax preparations tonight, a mere nine months late, and may have been asking too much of the ageing psyche, trying to do this affidavit as well on the same night. I need another Scotch and I know that's not a good idea; if I keep this up I'll be fronting up to the accountant tomorrow morning with a sickening hangover, not for the first time, but at least my current accountant does not suffer from the BO of the former one so that should help. Yes yes, too much information. Sorry.

(Then of course there's, you know, work. Deadline, book reviews, that kind of thing. None of which I've done today except for the 30 pages of vampire splatterfest over morning coffee. Thank God for Alexander McCall Smith, who has yet another charming title out -- The Dog Who Came In From the Cold -- and can be read with great pleasure and no effort in the blink of an eye.)

What I've just printed out for the court may be the most wooden document I've ever written in my whole life, with the possible exception of my own application for divorce, back in my child-bride days. I can barely bring myself to admit that I wrote it. And all I can see is the pain between the lines.

Notes towards a definition of bad writing

Opening paragraphs, as any Creative Writing teacher will tell you in Week 1, are crucial to any writing venture but most particularly short stories or novels. Here's how not to do it (NB this is a real book):

Rose Season stood at the threshold of her sister's bedroom and silently watched the shadows of an oncoming storm stretch like plum-coloured talons across the empty bed. A great gust of icy wind from Lake Michigan howled at the windows.

Now then:

1) Calling your introductory and therefore likely-to-be-major character Rose Season ensures that the reader will not be able to take her seriously. You might as well have called her Cherry Season, or Rose Blight.

2) By 'at the threshold' do you mean 'in the doorway', which is more concrete (whereas 'at the threshold' is often used figuratively) and therefore easier for the reader to visualise the scene? [Reader thinks: 'Ooh look, a door', but probably not 'Ooh look, a threshold.']

3) 'Silently' is redundant. Presumably if Rose were not silent then she would be talking, and there would be dialogue.

4) Shadows are not plum-coloured, indeed they are not any colour, just a blockage of light. If you mean that the clouds are plum-coloured, say that.

[Here an internal warning is sounded to the reader: this writer apparently cannot think her way out of a paper bag and presumably neither can her editor -- either that, or her editor couldn't persuade her to change it. Either way, the horrible prospect of 445 pages of woolly thinking stands before one.]

5) Talons are not plum-coloured, either. Mixed metaphor.

6) Where there is a talon-shaped shadow, it is almost always the shadow of a talon, or, more usually, several talons, since talons tend to occur in groups. It's very rarely the shadow of a cloud. You are thinking of horror movies, or Foghorn Leghorn cartoons with chicken hawks in them.

7) You need to get rid of at least one of 'great', 'icy' or 'howled'. Three exclamatory adjectives in one short sentence is at least one too many, and in any case all three are clichés.

8) Do gusts howl? Are gusts not, rather, more inclined to bang?

9) And in any case, wind is by definition a thing in motion, but in order to howl at a window, don't you need to stand still at it?

First paragraph FAIL.

Shining your shoes for the Fat Lady

This isn't the first time I've had cause to consider the uses of literature in thinking about how to live one's life and manage one's nasty moments. But when I saw this morning that J.D. Salinger had died, I gave a bit of thought to what I might have learned from him, and this bit from near the end of Franny and Zooey is what came to mind. All my adult life I've been spared the tortures of stage fright, and having read this at sixteen is one of the reasons why.

The voice at the other end came through again. 'I remember about the fifth time I ever went on "Wise Child". I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast -- remember when he was in that cast? -- anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again ...

This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and -- I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddamned clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.'

Franny was standing. She had taken her hand away from her face to hold the phone with two hands. 'He told me, too,' she said into the phone. 'He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once ... I didn't ever picture her on the porch, but with very -- you know -- very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer too, though, and she had the radio going full-blast all day! Mine did, too!'

'Yes ... But I'll tell you a terrible secret -- Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.'

Fiction writing tip of the day

Don't give your main characters names that are too fanciful, pretentious, un-euphonious, unusual or unlikely. Give them names that are at least halfway probable for their time, place, gender, and in some cases, alas, class -- not names that you think might be cool baby names. It's not unreasonable that a child born in the 1970s might be called Layla, that one born in 1812 might be called Jeremiah or that one born in Marseilles might be called Antoine, but in the ordinary run of things (which for the moment let us say means a realist novel set in contemporary Australia) it upsets the delicate balance of that precious commodity, the reader's suspended disbelief, to come across a character called Rufus or Iphigenia. Much less Tristan, Tay-lah or Malachite. Stick with something (though not necessarily white-bread: Australia has a plentiful array of Dmitris and Minh-has and Ahmeds and so on) that by virtue of being mainstream makes your particular Jane or John Doe that much more your own.

A better noun, a better verb: more thoughts on copy-editing

When writing first drafts I will usually bung in instructions to myself as I go along, most often [CHECK] where I have relied on memory for an author's or a character's name, or a fact, or a guess at spelling, or whatever, and [FIX THIS] where the sentence clearly doesn't say what I wanted to mean. The combination of square brackets and caps makes the instructions stand out to an eye that has learned over decades of reading plays to associate caps in square brackets with instructions to act. As it were.

Anyway, there I was a minute ago squinting at a sentence from a book review I started a few days ago, in the middle of which I had written 'The story is marked by [FIND A BETTER NOUN AND A BETTER VERB, THINK WHAT YOU REALLY MEAN] the weird Scottish combination of wry understatement and behavioural excess.'

I like that last bit, but 'story is marked' is all wrong. Both the narrative and its narrator feature this, I think, very Scottish combination, so 'story' isn't really what I mean, and that combination is intrinsic to both the story and the storytelling so 'marked' (which implies something on the surface that was put there later) isn't right either. I have to figure out a way of saying it that is both more accurate and less awkward. Which means that the instruction in the square brackets is a bit misleading. As so often, one can get hopelessly bogged down in trying to come up with a different word when what's really needed is a re-structuring of the entire sentence.

Actually I'm ahead of schedule and the reason I'm working at all is that, on the weekend before Christmas when like everybody else I'm supposed to be running around like a mad rabbit planning this and buying that and nailing down the other, I've been struck down with the most disgusting coldy fluey thing I think I've ever had, with the full range of symptoms and every one of them floridly in evidence, so I'm not fit to do anything requiring physical energy or anything requiring going out. If I get further ahead with the work I'll be freed up to do Christmasy things when I get better, which please Goddess will start happening tomorrow if not sooner. But a head full of glue, cement and cotton wool is maybe not the ideal tool for trying to re-write a recalcitrant sentence, either.

My eye keeps going back to those square brackets, though. If I were allowed to say only one thing to a class full of writing students, it would probably be that. THINK WHAT YOU REALLY MEAN.

Usage FAIL #2

It's a witty, funny, fast-paced book with some grit and some edge and it's the sequel to a best-seller, but I'm only up to page 77 and it has just failed a second basic screening. I've already come across 'hone in on' for 'home in on', and now we've got 'disinterested' for 'uninterested'.

I know there's been a GFC but you'd think the New York stronghold of Simon & Schuster would still be able to pay for the services of a good copy-editor. You really would.

Further thoughts on the Random Academic Sentence Generator

As envisaged, I spent most of yesterday afternoon playing with the toy linked to in the post before last, and from that ludic activity (see what I did there?) a number of things emerged, as is so often the case with play.

You need to have a little play with the Generator in order to understand what it's doing. Stephanie in the comments thread assumed that it was about simple dislike of academic language (and perhaps more specifically the academic language of the humanities, especially of social theory), but really it's far more about making fun of people who over- or mis-use that language, usually out of ineptitude. It's not a mockery of general academic style (if such a thing really exists; more about that later) but a far more specific holding up to ridicule of the automatic resort to the buzzword du jour. It's a resort that characterises many a postgrad conference paper -- often, sadly, a paper full of what might have been good ideas, if only said ideas had been allowed to emerge from the cloud of abstract diction employed not so much as to do full justice to the ideas as to signal (albeit semi-consciously) the paper-giver's cred to her or his peeps and peers.

Most of the people who express general irritation, dislike and scorn of the kind of words involved in this game are people who are unfamiliar with those words and therefore feel confronted and belittled when they see them being used by somebody else. It's a version of something a fellow-student once said to me, while in earnest in pursuit of her Honours degree in literature, about how T.S. Eliot really shouldn't have written bits of 'The Waste Land' in German and Sanskrit and what-all else, because he should have known that lots of people -- like her, for example -- wouldn't understand them.

But it's clear that the Sentence Generator game was invented by someone very familiar with the vocabulary of social theory, the sort of familiarity that is of necessity always the case with good parody. The Portsmouth Sinfonia



(there are at least two, possibly even three, quite good sopranos in there, which, as a discriminating observer points out in the comments thread, kinda ruins it)


or Alexander McCall Smith's Really Terrible Orchestra



(again, it's the sops who are a little bit too good to do this performance justice)


are well aware of the humour intrinsic to their bad playing of music they love (as the conductor of the Portsmouth Sinfonia once remarked, 'Somehow the closer we get, the funnier it is'), and anyone who was ever present at the legendary Parody Nights held at the annual conferences of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature will be likewise aware that effectively making fun of something can only be done out of a deep familiarity with your subject. I think the people who invented the Generator were having the same sort of in-joke as whoever wrote that wonderful faux-glossary that did the rounds some years ago, identifying the 'meaning' of the names of numerous philosophers and theorists. To this day I occasionally find myself thinking 'Ooh yuk, this omelette has gone all Merleau-Ponty.'

What the Random Academic Sentence Generator does (see examples in rainbow colours, in that last post but one) is produce sentences in the form of simple thesis statements or arguable propositions. The syntax of every sentence it produces is the same: 'The A of B Cs the D of E', where everything except C is an abstract noun or noun phrase. It's the kind of thing that Lewis Carroll would have loved, and that his weird creatures would have said all the time and probably have stretched to include direct paradox. The happiness of unhappiness reveals the mundanity of distinction. The profitability of loss resides in the rubberiness of exactitude.

Or you could do it -- with a vengeance -- with managerial language: the rationalisation of the organisation strategises the bendability of key-player identification. Or, to take an example closer to home, the magisteriality of felinitude underlies the performance of cathood.

Etc. Ask me to defend any one of those propositions and I will do so vigorously. It's not about the absence of logic or of truth; the more I played with the Generator the more astonished I became as I realised that almost every sentence it Generates can be defended as a logical proposition and quite possibly actually true as well. Abstract nouns are just like that.

To reiterate: what's being parodied and mocked by this game is not so much either the specific words or the general style, but rather the kind of use to which both are too often put. 'Academic language' is not a separate species; the academics who are also good writers (by which I mean here 'fully aware, thoughtful and discriminating about their word choices and their syntax') freely use the specialist vocabulary of their discipline, whatever that discipline may happen to be, as a way of identifying quite precise and specific things -- theories, concepts, ways of seeing -- but are able to use that vocabulary to clarify rather than to obfuscate, and to do so within a framework of accessible, engaging writing. 'Academic writing' doesn't occur inside a box, but along a spectrum of usage and style.

And I quite like specialist academic vocabularies, not least because I know that the thinkers who come up with them are almost always well-intentioned and benign. In a way it's the opposite effect from the one you get in the broad use of managerial language that Don Watson takes on in Bendable Learnings, and maybe this is partly because the purpose of so much managerial language is -- unlike the language of thinkers and scholars -- deliberate moral obfuscation. If you start out using 'rationalise' to skate over the fact that six hundred people have lost their jobs, or 'incentivise' to mean 'offer an indecent amount of money to one person who doesn't put in anywhere near as many hours as a truckie desperate to keep his job or the working mother of pre-school twins', it's an easy step from there to a whole managerial layer trained to say that the scale of the event potentiality is likely to negatively impact the outcomes, instead of 'Oh my God there's a monstrous unfightable fire headed your way in overdrive, get the hell out of there as fast as you can.'

Like a cat with a wind-up mousie

A person could play with this random academic sentence generator (props to my FBF Deborah Green) all afternoon. The real challenge here is to generate a sentence that actually makes perfect sense: a sentence upon the meaning of which one could elaborate convincingly if challenged. The green one in particular is a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

The fiction of history as such functions as the conceptual frame for the discourse of print culture.

The emergence of civil society invests itself in the systemization of the public sphere.

The illusion of post-capitalist hegemony recapitulates the legitimation of agency.

The linguistic construction of normative value(s) asks to be read as the discourse of linguistic transparency.

The eroticization of the gaze functions as the conceptual frame for the authentication of the gendered body.

The (re)formation of praxis opens a space for the systemization of pedagogical institutions.

The emergence of pop culture recapitulates the fantasy of the specular economy.


Pounce claw toss batbatbat spraggle-upon-waggle pounce. Repeat 9,000 times.