Sunday morning shorts..

On Music 

For those like me who have been missing The Frames, here's a link to their recent set at the Electric Picnic in Ireland.

Belle and Sebestian have a new album out this week - Write about love - have a quick listen here. (Thanks NPR).

I listened to the new album by Hillsong (Beautiful Exchange) this week -- and really love this song "Like Incense/Sometimes by Step". Not just because Brooke Fraser Ligertwood sings on it, but it also features the Rich Mullins song - Sometimes by Step, which is just such a beautiful song.

On writing

I'm sure I've written about this before, but I feel like I need to pick up a pen, and write a letter ... Has anyone seen the collected emails or tweets of Jo or Joanne up for sale?

On "Noise and our communication age"

Here's an article by Kate Crawford (based at UNSW) on "listening to networks". She's part the way through a fascinating project looking at the uses of social media ... (listen to her talk about the project here). 

Newsprint...

So, one of the things I was thinking about over the Christmas break (hard to believe that is now five months ago) was trying to spend time reading more. Recently I've spendind time reading a collection of articles by Matt Price (Top Price). Matt Price's column was one of the highlights of the Australian. Unfortunately not all of them are available online (See here). Sadly he passed away in November 2007, the column covered a range of ground from the fortunes of his beloved AFL team (the Fremantle Dockers), to music and the political life in Canberra. Its a great book, because theres articles about everything...  one which reasonated with me was about Matt Price's love of the physical CDs (as opposed to a small mental device with 10,000 or so songs, and were random means going to the shelf, and picking up 5 CDs). It really would have been interesting hearing Matt's take on Rudd as PM.


A few other Australian columinsts I like. I really enjoy reading is Richard Glover in the SMH. Again, Glover writes about a range of topics, and the one this weekend was about the 'guilt industry'.  Another classic was this one about his listeners who would call back to correct his grammar.


On the sports pages Richard Hinds and Peter Fitzsimons are often great reading, and I enjoyed both on Saturday. Hinds writing about the war of the football codes for love in Western Sydney. Fitzsimons wrote about the ANZAC Day AFL clash between Essendon and Collingwood (thankfully won by the Bombers - there's some of a sports fans apparently irrational hatred).

Lest we forget

While we were watching the Dawn service from Gaollopli a few things struck me. The first was the difference between the Kiwi's and Aussies who attend the service, as the camera panned across the crowd the Australian's were quite easy to pick, and perhaps flowing from that I wondered about the difference in how the ANZAC legacy is seen in New Zealand and Australia. I think if I recall correctly the message when Howard spoke was about patriotism and nationalism while yesterday the theme was more around the links forged between the Turks, Kiwi's and Australians.

I've been working my way through Top Price, which is a collection of articles written by the late Matt Price (a journalist from the The Australian, who passed away in 2007). One of the pieces was a included a story about General Gerard Muirhead-Gould, who ordered that Japanese be creamated with full military honours, and in explaining why he came up with the following:

I have been criticized for having accorded these men military honours at their cremation, such honours as we hope may be accorded to our own comrades who have died in enemy hands; but, I ask you, should we not accord full honours to such brave men as these? It must take courage of the very highest order to go out in a thing like that steel coffin. . . . Theirs was a courage which is not the property or the tradition or the heritage of any one nation. It is the courage shared by the brave men of our own countries as well as of the enemy and, however horrible war and its results may be, it is courage which is recognized and universally admired. These men were patriots of the highest order. How many of us are really prepared to make one thousandth of the sacrifices that these men made?

 This afternoon I enjoyed reading this piece in which Alexander McCall-Smith writes about his characters and books, and readers reactions to the characters lives.

Spring break...

I'm down in Canberra for the weekend, and spending a night keeping in touch with the NSW by-elections (yes, I am a dag).

Have had quite a lazy afternoon reading the papers, and a few articles really caught my eye: the first God, address unknown, escapes on technicality. Apparently, an injunction against God, to stop causing "widespread death, destruction and terrorisation of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants". failed, because God did not have an address. I have to admit that I found this to be quite amusing.  

Secondly, I really enjoyed the excerpt posted of Chris Abani's address 'When we cannot look away' given last month at the Brisbane Writers Festival. The quote below really hit me, as I think about what writers are seeking to do 

This is what the art I make requires of me, that in order to have an honest conversation with a reader, I must reveal myself in all my vulnerability. Reveal myself, not in the sense of my autobiography, but in the sense of the deeper self, the one we keep too often hidden even from ourselves.

 ~~~~

On song writing …

The New York Times recently started this great new blog, Measure for Measure (How to write a song and other mysteries). Today, Darrell Brown wrote a great piece about (song)writers being emotional spies, here’s an excerpt..

While I was finding my way as a songwriter, a colleague of mine, Ed Sanford, told me something I’ve since found to be very true. Songwriters, he said, are “emotional spies” — little creative crazies creeping around, sneaking in and out of our own emotions, watching, listening and remembering every bit of conversation with friends, family and every stranger we meet.

Yes, we are a funny, greedy group of people. If a song is cowering deep inside someone else’s divorce, engagement, seduction, innocence, sickness, recovery, treachery or resurrection, we long to see every crevice of it revealed in the light, all dressed up in grooves, chords and poetry [...]

In general, it doesn’t matter to me if a title is the first thing to come out or the chord progression or any part of the melody or lyrics. I just want anything to come out so I can start writing (or the song can start writing itself). And I don’t judge during the writing. It doesn’t even matter to me if it sounds like a commercial hit song or an art song. I just want the song to be true to itself. As both a songwriter and a human being, I try to keep myself open and give back as much as I take in. After all, I am surrounded by emotional spies of my own day in and day out. I need to be spied on as much as the next songwriter. It’s a win-win situation.

~~~~~~

More Links

Opening Address of the Sydney Writers Festival, by Andrew O'Hagan. Edited Extract, both via SMH.

Another reason to move to NZ. Here’s NZ’s ranking explained. More about the study, including the indicators used are here. It would seem that Australia’s involvement in non-UN missions is the main reason for its position (#25).

Political correctness in fiction

Last weekend I also caught quite an interesting article in The Australian. Lionel Shriver (author of We Need to talk About Kevin) wrote on some of the feedback she had received about the attitudes and behaviour of characters in her novels. Given the social-political climate she wondered if authors would soon be charged because of the views of their characters.

It was quite interesting reading some people’s responses to her characters, asking why the mother in We Need to talk About Kevin was Armenian; and didn’t attend P&C meetings. She was waiting for the day her narrator would be arrested. 

As it seems there is often an enforced silence about issues (note the fuss with Martin Sheen and the Dixie Chicks, when they spoke out about the war with Iraq). It does seem to me that we should fight for the right of novelists (and other artists) to write freely. Shriver commented that writing a novel allowed her more freedom to deal with issues. 

I might leave the last word for Shriver: 

My characters are full of prejudices. My characters may not like Chinese people. My characters may believe that homosexuality is unnatural. My characters may slander Islam, or belief in crystals, or my father's Presbyterianism. My characters murder schoolchildren, plot to massacre two billion people overnight and hit their husbands over the head. My characters are obnoxious, spiteful, seething, difficult, resentful and inconsistent; and no, my characters will not always take their six-year-old kids to therapists to get help. My characters think abominations. In other words, my characters are the closest approximations I can contrive of real people.

On writing

While I was reading through the weekend papers this week, an article in the Sun Herald resonated with me. James Bradley (author of The Resurrectionist), wrote about his reaction to the treatment of books on Oprah.

In many ways I agree with him, that it is good that people are reading, and if anything, Oprah’s show included, encourages people to read that’s a great thing. But for him something about the purpose of writing is being lost as books become solely about moral instruction, and therapy, with prepackaged messages and truths

“Real writing – good writing – does the opposite. It shows us the world as we have not seen it before. It can be frightening or wonderful. Its meanings reveal themselves gradually and often partially. It isn’t always clear but like a painting or photo or a piece of music you cannot put it out of your head, it forces you to try to make sense of what it is saying”

For Bradley, writing is more than about a representation of thought, but a process of thought, ordering ideas that we might have a new way of seeing.

Though that said I suspect we all read for differing purposes, to be entertained, to be challenged, to understand more of our selves, our experiences and our society, and I too find myself wanting to see the complex nature of the world in which live, on the pages I read (and for that matter the cinema screens too).