or You Can’t Polish a Turd

Think that Copyleft sounds like a shitty socialist pun? You’d be dead right. But it’s a socialism of ideas, and isn’t that shitty… kinda. In essence, Copyleft says two heads are better than one, and what’s in my head might do just as well to be in your head, and really we should just work this out together. It’s a movement born, unsurprisingly, from computer programming.

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Copyleft is an idea that makes sense for programming because a computer program is a piece of logic designed to do a certain thing. There are clear objectives, and clear guides built on a pass/fail basis as to what could change to make it easier to use, faster, compatible with different operating systems. Different developers may add certain functionality as a personal flourish, but it is ultimately a utilitarian pursuit. People have made some pretty good open source software, if you’re into that kind of thing (and by that kind of thing, I mean building software, because you should have a decent knowledge of your OS before you delve into using most open source stuff). So, global community of knowledge, some excellent free software. Good times.

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HOWEVER: a computer program is not a novel. There are massive differences that render what is right for one NOT right for all – most strikingly literature’s propensity to often be very personal in creation, use and interpretation. I can’t even imagine what possible application Copyleft would have with literature, other than justifying piracy in a pseudo-intellectual doublespeak. Oh wait…

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ENTER: Doctorow.

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Ryan’s right in that I don’t like Doctorow. I find his ill-conceived metaphors a bit like chewing fat – if there’s substance to the argument he misses it by disguising his meaning under layers of unappetising rhetoric. They’re not usually things that make me go ‘hmmm…’; they’re things that make me go: ‘How can someone get away with talking this much shit and not be pulled up on it?’

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But even I’m not bigoted enough to let just one guy ruin a whole movement for me. Maybe Doctorow is like Mao – complex, misunderstood by those not as brilliant. Certainly his ‘we don’t need copyright’ chant is reminiscent of the ‘kill the sparrows‘ movement. Regardless of this one guy, I have major problems with the idea that Copyleft is applicable to everything covered by copyright, and literature in particular.

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So here we go, an example of a Copyleft ‘contract’ in all its glory. The main crux of this sort of license is ‘to promote and protect these creations of the human mind according to the principles of copyleft: freedom to use, copy, distribute, transform, and prohibition of exclusive appropriation.’

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The bit I’ve highlighted in bold is something I know is a major sticking point for some people largely because they equate the monopolisation of copyright ownership with decreased diversity in content. I’m not sure how this argument works, as a publisher who buys copyright from an author comes in after the content has been written. Maybe there’s a fear that someone may come in and snatch up rights to every book ever from unsuspecting authors and then… I don’t know, keep them all in a vault or something. But there’s another side to this. Wouldn’t Copyleft ideas make it a lot easier for people like Google to come away with a free (and dangerously large) slice of pie? I don’t see anything wrong with a giant digital library – there’s no debate as to whether this would be a valuable resource for readers. I do see a problem with Google appropriating in-copyright work at no cost to themselves, and yet making money from it through selling  advertising space. What this whole Copyleft support thing really boils down to (for most people) is an unwillingness to pay for something.

I own ALL THE COPYRIGHT!

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Doing away with copyright of intellectual property is, essentially, saying either your ideas aren’t worth anything, or they might be worth something if they were appropriated by someone more brilliant than yourself. If you are to deny that an idea  has monetary value, then you’d better also be prepared to tell me why a mechanic should be paid for employing his skills, or why I have to pay rent, or why a loaf of bread costs a certain amount but not less. This is not some exercise in exploitation by publishers so they can line their nests with fat wads of cash or pimp their merc. It’s an established business norm for the simple reason that artists, writers, musicians deserve to be paid for the time and effort they put into their creations.

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We have more to fear from obscurity than piracy? Don’t think so. They both lead to the same thing: an industry that can’t support its producers.

or, Have You Ever Actually Seen an eBook? In Their Current Iteration They’re Fucking Shithouse.
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A halfway whimsical and mostly sarcastic note I posted on Facebook and Twitter recently solicited some unexpected comments that have lead me to think critically about what some people would say is the most important publishing-industry debate raging at the moment: the emerging eBook market and how it will affect the pBook market and its bookstores.

The tweet came to mind after I followed a link of Creative Penn’s to another whitepaper about the emerging eBook market. Among the first pages is this quote: “‘2011 will clearly be the year of the e-book.’ – Bloomsbury’s founder & chief executive Nigel Newton.”

WTF is Nigel Newton, and WTF is ‘Bloomsbury’ emboldened!?

Because Bloomsbury narrowly escaped the doldrums of print publishing by inflicting us with Harry Potter?

I heard this claim last year from B+P’s Digital Publishing Symposium , so I tweeted: ‘[insert date here] will clearly be the year of the e-book. – [insert authority here]

I also posted it on Facebook, and Candace Petrik wrote, “Don’t forget that (insert date here) will be the end of the bookshop industry”. And Felice Howden wrote, “Or the classic: ‘e-books will make up [insert arbitrary percentage here] of all book sales by this time next year.’” After scrounging for something witty to say, I added: “And [insert monopolistic online retailer here]’s e-book sales outstriped p-book sales on [insert gifting holiday here].”

(Then I wrote: “*stripped”.)

On Twitter the post was retweeted a few times and Lyndon Sharp added ‘Journo’s quote template’ before his ‘RT’.

This all sounds pretty funny, but it’s serious. There is a lot of media hype around at the moment about the momentous changes tearing through the industry, and there seem to be a lot of people around who have taken it upon themselves to lie about the speed with which the eBook market is overtaking the pBook market.

What I’m trying to get at here, though, is that people share this sentiment with me; it’s not just me being a dick. When you discover your ideas are shared with others, not because you shared those ideas but because they came to that conclusion themselves, you feel validated, right.

So this is a real thing that’s happening: people are making outlandish claims about the exponential rise of the eBook market, and people aren’t buying it. Nor are these people buying more eBooks than they buy pBooks. Why? Because eBooks, in their current iteration, are fucking shithouse. Why can’t we admit that to ourselves? Because we want to come off as progressive. Show me some progress and I’ll call you progressive.

I don’t know why people seem to enjoy making unfounded claims about things that not even Thorpe/Bowker would be able to make, and I can’t quite be bothered trying to counter the claims with contrary evidence (because we could play this game all day and ultimately the market will determine the conclusion, no matter what we have to say about it), but I think it’s worth noting that banging on about all this for too long might be the reason we’re (allegedly) so far behind in the global eBook market, which is also not true, apparently.

Maybe we should just be making good (read: novel) eBooks and trying to sell them, rather than dragging up half-researched figures and waving them around like we need evidence of the digital revolution we’re storming ourselves with. This topic used to be an elephant in the room: it is now more like an elephant in a china shop; we’re talking about this stuff as though we’re going to break the fucking industry if we don’t revolutionise our business models immediately.

That’s crap: our industry is one of the most curiously robust industries in our mixed economy, and I worry that if we try to force it to operate in a way it is not yet ready to operate, we will begin to lose sight of the point, which is to publish great literature for people to read: how we deliver this literature is just one of many ongoing problems the industry has always suffered, which is the result of literature being a relatively marginalised and misunderstood commodity of more cultural worth than we’ll ever know how to quantify economically.

I, for one, am going to try to shut up about eBooks for a while, at least until I stumble across some evidence that any sort of major shift is actually occurring. I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same, but I understand that conversations between ignorant strangers are difficult and sometimes need to be filled with chatter.

But that’s all this is right now: partially informed chatter between people who want to sound like they know what they’re talking about so they can say in [insert date here] they predicted the demise of the book industry. Well fucking done! What a great claim to fame. Shut up and read a book, and get back to me when you have some actual evidence, because currently, most eBooks are just electronic representations of existing pBooks.

*yawns*

Until someone uses this you-beaut technology to create something that is actually (how do you say?) novel (*coughs*), the eBook market will stay exactly where it is (in the margins of the margins), no matter how many times an industry aficionado says otherwise.

If you want to see the eBook market take over the pBook market, stop talking about it and start making eBooks that are actually better than pBooks.

Like this. Or even this. These are examples of the future of digital storytelling. And until they are made in abundance we will be stuck with this dead-tree industry that you so like to disparage.

Meanwhile, bookstores will be fine. Kapeesh? Orrighty then. Carry on.

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This post was drafted while listening to 65daysofstatic’s We Were Exploding Anyway, because I am a fucking hipster and listening to post-rock while ranting about literature markets makes me simultaneously happy and sad.
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When I was in Melbourne for EWF I stayed with my friend Pat, who makes amazing comics and thinks amazing things, and we had an unexpected formative conversation about copyright when we were eating cheap Japanese under a speaker in the corner that may or may not have been playing Kanye West. Somehow we got to talking about whether we illegally download content for free.

I said I try not to, unless I know the artist isn’t going to miss the proceeds from my purchase, which is dumb reasoning, because I also have this kind-of Buddhist inkling that stealing shit will bring the bad karma, but also I sympathise with artists because I’d be pissed if someone stole my shit, but this kind of of thinking is waning, after this conversation.

(I also download things I’ve paid for in the past and then lost, such as all the AC/DC albums I had as a teenager. I also have less qualms about downloading from multi-national corporations, but I know this is also stupid: yeah, the companies might not miss the proceeds from my purchase, but the bottom-rung artists will certainly miss the royalties.)

This sort of quasi-ethical consumerism leaves me in a shitty position, because I generally can’t afford to buy all the cool literature and art and entertainment I’d like to, because I work in a poorly paid sector of the publishing economy and I live on my own, so a quarter of my salary goes immediately to rent each week, plus I have expensive habits that I still prioritise because I’m still a recovering bogan.

These are lifestyle choices though, right, and I could quit the drugs and alcohol and the takeaways that come with those, to save money and actually be sober for a while, and I could actually start spending my scant disposable income on things that actually enrich my life, not damage my liver, fuck my short-term memory or leave my neural receptors so coated in gunk they no longer emit endorphins.

Another lifestyle choice I’m on the verge of making is whether I want to make money from my art, or whether I just want it to reach and affect people, because Lawd knows I’m never going to make a living out of the esoteric shit that I write, so why not give it away for free so more people can enjoy it. [Insert Cory Doctorow quote about obscurity here.]

So all of this opens up the question for me of whether I believe in copyright or not, because copyrighting something asserts your ownership of it, and asserting your ownership of something implies that if someone wants to have it, they should pay for that privilege.

But: ‘privilege’. Why should I, or anyone, be the keeper of privilege? I’ve got plenty of privilege. More than enough to share around. My salary sucks, but there’s no denying I’m privileged.

This was the thrust of the conversation I had with Pat. A long time ago stories were told orally, so they couldn’t be owned. You’d hear a story and then pass it on. Maybe you would slap a via @ mention on it, maybe not. Since then, capitalism (I guess) has stipulated that sharing things comes with a price tag, which is a principle I wasn’t told about as a kid: sharing is caring, more like it.

When sharing a story requires a financial transaction you enter troubled territory first alluded to by Thomas Carlyle: if any individual accrues enough of that which is to be shared, they can charge a buttload for it and those who can’t afford it have to do without, especially those who wish to share it: ‘it’ being the privilege to share. Howard’s media-ownership laws illustrate this well enough, but imagine if the same concentration ocurred in the literary-arts economy.

Oh, wait, it already has, which is why we can talk of The Big Five (or Six, depending on who you ask), and why we see shit like the REDgroup fail go down: concentration of media ownership is a bane for cultural diversity, no matter which way you splice it, which is why I’m starting to come round to thinking of a new way of thinking about intellectual-property rights.

Actually it’s not new.

ENTER: CC and the Copyleft movement.

The Creative Commons and Copyleft mobs are two groups I’ve never really understood. I’ve always looked at them with the same sort of wariness I have for self-righteous and indignant vegans: their radical egos seem engorged by principle, devoid of reason – like misguided techno-utopians, perhaps, or like those hippies you’ve lived with who want to go set up a commune in the desert and bask in the glory of their own enlightenment without … well, without sharing that with others.

By that I mean they’ve always seemed like a sort-of enlightened crew, with a progressive mindset they wouldn’t deign to share with the ignorant masses, yours truly included, because I guess I never presented to them as being willing to be receptive to their ideas, because I have this engrained belief that copyright is a virtue, and that we should all be paid for our work.

Felice and Connor spat chips when I mentioned this to them on Twitter. They made disparaging comments about my ‘crazyleft’ ways and used ironic hashtags like #copysorightbilloreillywouldapprove. I had to google that hashtag to figure out what he was on about and, shit Connor, I respect you, but don’t throw me this politically dichotomous bullshit like it’s a case in point. Rush Limbaugh’s an arsehole too, and Andrew Bolt’s deluded, but wah wah wah, don’t come at me with this as though it’s a political matter. It’s ideology we’re talking about here, and I know you’re bigger than politics, so quit the bigotry and let’s talk.

You too, Felice. I know you love DRM and everything, but why? Is it possible you’re clinging to a conservative view of publishing and you don’t want to let go of it because you think Cory Doctorow’s a douchbag? That’s a shitty reason to hold onto an opinion.

Keep in mind here, Dear Readers, that one of my biggest beefs is the insufficient remuneration of authors in this economy of ours, which is all we’ve got to work with right now, which is why doing away with copyright is not the immediate answer, but what devealuing copyright affords us is the opportunity to think about distributing content for reasons other than to make money. Who really thinks they’re going to make money out of this game anyway? So there must be another value currency we can think of.

ENTER: the ideas market.

Before ideas were a commodity they existed in the public domain, free to be enjoyed by all. The public domain is being brought back into vogue in the software industry, with your GNU and and your WordPress getting all up in yer  proprietary software and changing the world, and even the Gutenberg name has been reappropriated to give access to (classic) literature to anyone who can afford at least a shitty PC and a free wi-fi connection.

Yeah, most of their authors are dead and their works out of copyright, but why wait until you’re dead seventy years only to find out no one gives a shit anyway? Deal with it, you’re never going to be Shakespeare, because manuscript ideas are like arseholes these days – you’re nothing special, so why not give it away for free and hope that maybe you contribute to the unofficial economy at least, where people might actually just fork out their time to read your shit.

You’re reading this, after all: buy me a beer when we meet IRL if you like, but it’s equally likely I’ll buy you a beer, so really, what are we trying to get out of this if it’s not a royalty cheque or a free beer or maybe a root?

Communion, of course. Secular communion. It should be free, but it’s not, because we’re used to paying for shit, unless it’s on the internet, in which case we jump through all sorts of ethico-logistical steps to justify our stealing from HBO. Well, fuck that. Steal this blog, because it is (un)officially licensed under a [blah blah blah licence] whether Felice or Connor like it or not.

And the reason for that is there seems to be two ways we can set up this economy of ideas: we can allow individuals to accrue buttloads of content and then bundle it with hardware and fuck on the creators; we can do away with the concept of ownership and allow people to share freely and work shitty jobs to fund that activity. Or get grants. Or sugar daddies. Or trust funds. Any sort of benefactor will do.

I happen to have an arts job that pays me a salary, so you’d think I’d be all for the former, but yeah, nah. People will always create, regardless of whether you or I get a salary out of it, and if distribution is unencumbered by capitalist principles then maybe myriad others will share the privilege of consuming that content. Or we can let Walt Disney and the Murdoch/Packer sons control the dissemination. It’s up to us.

We need to think anew about this, because the current system is pissing a lot of people off, even the privileged few. And there’s nothing worse than hearing the privileged few crap on about how fucking hard it is. Why is it hard? Because we want to make a living out of this, which is a stupid idea.

I just got home from a day helping to select successful applicants to the Write in your Face (WIYF) round of grants offered by Australia Council (OzCo) and administered by Express Media (EM). Those links will tell you more about this whole shebang, but I’ll copy/paste the juicy bit for all our Canadian readers:

WIYF grants are offered to young and emerging writers who use language in innovative ways. This may involve writing in the digital space, blogs, graphic novels, comics, multimedia, multi-artform or cross-media works.

Basically it’s a really exciting grant, because all sorts of weird shit gets thrown at it in applications. It’s especially exciting for me at the moment because this is my first opportunity to sit on a selection panel and be directly involved in delivering necessary funding to literary-arts projects that otherwise might never see the light of your computer screens.

I made some notes today, but it’s too late to type them up and I have to work in the morning.

I want to write here soon about: how WIYF has been (de)devolved from EM to one of OzCo’s more general digital funds (that ‘evolved’ is now bearing the suffix ‘ded’ makes my squidgy little progressive heart want to curl up and vomit out my arse); how something Lefa (EM’s Program Manager) said reminded me of the importance of thinking of the literary-arts as contributing in ‘not immeasurable economic value’ to society; and how reacquainting with the dreadful process of ‘scraping the barrel’ made me consider the importance of not awarding grant money, following on from feelings I’ve had for sometime about not awarding prizes to literature that you otherwise wouldn’t publish, just because you said you’d award a prize.

These are all subjects near and dear to my heart, and ones that have been bouncing around for a while, but some other things came up that I’d like to explore some more if I get the time: how to set up systems to allow people to tell stories without telling stories to them; and how to avoid writing to markets by creating markets for your own writing instead, and how to use digital technology to do this.

To cap this off in the spirit of Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I’m going to quote from the editorial of Chalk, one of the magazines I had the fortune to read as part of the WIYF process:

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edition1

a co-composition _ _ a communicating collaboration _ _ these are a series of conversations and interconnecting threads _ _ alive in the informal economy of the culture industry

 

or: The Terrible Writing of Jonathan Coe.

It has been a long time since I read an author I didn’t already know about or have recommended to me by a mate. I actually ended up picking up this book by Jonathan Coe entirely by accident as I thought it was a writer I knew and liked already and it turned out I’d gotten their name wrong. Point being, no-one I know would recommend The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.
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Maxwell Sim is an ageing, lonely salesman whose wife has recently left him and, taking their daughter with her, moved to a town in the north of England – an event that sends him into a spiral of depression. He’s then asked to go on a business trip to the Shetland Islands, which turns into a journey of self-discovery (surprise!) and a painfully literal exposition of the dangers of consumer culture (imagine Max as Patrick Bateman but with poorly represented depression instead of psychosis, or Jack Gladney without any semblance of intelligence). The final chapter mirrors the storytelling of Stranger Than Fiction as Max finds he is in fact a character in someone else’s novel. This desperate bid to imbue what is essentially a fuck shit stack with the importance of postmodernism renders everything preceeding utterly superfluous, and comes three chapters too late, leaving the final impression as that of a turd which simply will not flush.

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Written in ugly first person (awkwardly metafictional with painfully shit banter like: ‘I think I’m finally beginning to get the hang of this writing business’) Max’s narrative voice does more to confuse and repel than a ten hour long Jedward concert. Oscillating between infuriating self-ignorance and dark contemplation beyond the faculty of a man like Max, it is impossible to forget that this book was not in fact written by Maxwell Sim, but by a man whose lack of subtlety sees the introduction of wave after wave of tertiary characters to batter his ill-conceived message of anti-consumerism into the reader’s face. Symbols are described as ’symbolic’; the protagonist monologues about what he has learnt; and the final slap in the face is delivered when Max discovers an uncomfortable truth about his father’s sexuality, and decides (a mere two chapters later and with no warning) that he himself is gay. This is storytelling with all the sensitivity of a serial rapist.

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Keeping this sensitivity in mind, there is one word I would use to describe this novel: redundant. I really wanted to like this book, despite early hiccups in the form of that meaningless description ‘a shock of hair’, but when I got to chapter six, and this, my good will hardened into hatred:

I missed her.

Already I missed her.

Poppy had gone fifteen minutes ago and already I missed her dreadfully.

There is no excuse for this sort of writing. More than this, there is no excuse for any editor having left it in. Throughout, I found myself picking up lazy repetitions that should have been cut at first edit but for some reason were left in to stink up the manuscript like a fish going bad behind the couch. After this, there is a section where he uses simple past tense instead of present perfect for a whole paragraph. I know it’s petty, but ….
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‘That’s not really fair, Felice,’ I hear you protest. ‘Maybe it’s deliberate! He’s a boring guy, and the style develops his character as an uneducated, middle class male.’ This is bullshit. Trainspotting was written from the point of view of a gadgie Scottish junkie, but the readability did not suffer for the narrator’s personality.

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What annoys me most is that this book was a digression from my usual reading habits. Although accidental in this case, I have been trying to find new authors outside the clique I formed in university, and outside the recommendations I get from friends who like pretty much the same stuff I do. I wanted to read a new voice and rejuvenate my faith in mainstream literature. This failure is a groundhog’s shadow to me – I will now retreat back to my cave with the alternative and postmodern lit that I’ve read a million times.

First off: it is impossible to typecast someone entirely accurately, because contradicting character traits and values are inherent in the human condition, as each passing second, each new experience, keeps our minds in a constant state of flux. At least they should, which is an idea I’ll get to by the end of this talk.

I have an aversion to generalisations about demographics or generations because they are, after all, comprised of minds that are in a constant state of flux. There is no way I could make some sort of all encompassing claim about any sort of trait that characterises all young writers.

Nonetheless I’ll get on with the job of talking about the most prevalent and corrosive exercise in typecasting I could think of: the ludicrous claim that a writer needs to have accrued a certain quota of life experience before they can hope to communicate anything of value to a readership. Hands up if you’ve heard this claim before. Leave your hands up if you think it’s bullshit.

Our class was actually told this during the short time I spent at creative-writing school, and was perhaps one of the reasons I dropped out. In the decade since then I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to edit Voiceworks for two years, during which time we published hundreds of writers and artists, and read the work of hundreds and hundreds more. Either side of that experience, at Wakefield Press, I have had the fortune to work with a wide range of older authors.

The resounding impression I can draw from this experience is that it’s much harder to edit older writers than it is to edit young writers. (I think it’s worth mentioning that most of the authors I currently work with don’t find out how young I am until they meet me at the launch, and they are invariably surprised. I guess they don’t know about Facebook stalking.)

The young writers I’ve worked with are generally far more liberal-minded, far more interested in learning new things (including how to behave in an author–editor relationship), perhaps because they’re still painting on a relatively blank slate. We also have an unprecedented level of access to information these days, which helps to combate our inherent tendency to embrace confirmation bias to support our fragile intellectual egos.

Older writers, especially those who have been published a lot before and received any sort of critical acclaim, are generally less open to having their work tampered with.

Of course this is not a one-size-fits-all cast. I’m going to hazard a generalisation for the sake of talking about this, and say about a quarter of the young writers I’ve worked with are as precious as three quarters of the older writers I’ve worked with.

But it’s not a matter of age that I’m talking about here, it’s a matter of attitude, of personality. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are aware of their own limitations as authors – they covet criticism because they still want to learn. The most talented writers I’ve worked with are those who are inherently interested in others, and therefore far more interested in actually communicating with them, rather than talking to them from above. That this inherent interest extends to me, their editor, renders them far more amenable to the idea of actually collaborating on their work.

Invariably it is the oldest, least talented writers who have had to bolster their own egos from within. As far as I can tell, the best way to do this is by sticking your head up your arse and shouting. [This is where the woman guffawed and I looked up, sheepishly, wanting to join in, forgetting I was supposed to presenting a speech, not having a chat at the pub.]

This has all gotten very specific to my exerience as an editor, but my experience as a general reader illuminates something else, I think.

Maybe 95% of the books on my shelves (by young writers, and old) are characterised by pinko-lefty themes. When I realised this I started soliciting recommendations of right-wing authors – novelists, in particular. My inquiries were often met with either the scornful suggestion that, ‘Dude, neo-cons don’t have imaginations, that’s why they’re neo-cons’, or, ‘Just read anything by Ayn Rand.’

The former reminded me of the t-shirt that Quadrant used to sell, which bore the slogan: ‘I’ve never read Quadrant because I don’t like it’. The latter leaves me quite concerned that the only suggestion I could find among my networks was for a novelist who was writing maybe seventy years ago, in America.

Look at me, though: I’m wearing a fucking costume. I wear skinny black jeans, and a self-referential, pop-culture t-shirt. I have a stupid ironic haircut, a question-mark knuckle tattoo, I ride a single-speed roadbike around the city wearing a messenger bag. I’ve become a fucking hipster. I like to think of myself as liberal-minded, but this doesn’t mean I’m a lefty.

[At this point Dan tapped his glass, which was the signal for five minutes: we had seven minutes; I wasn't going to make it. I skipped the italics below and got straight to the point. Meanwhile, consider this picture as an illustration of my last point.]

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But neither am I a righty, because, to bastardise one of my favourite high-school sayings, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than the frontal lobotomy required to hold conservative views.

The friends who know me would consider it laughable to suggest that I make any sort of daily style choices, but I certainly have gathered about me an image based on those who share similar values, and this act of personal typecasting has been necessary for me to escape another image I had created for myself when I was in high school and thought gate crashing parties, listening to heavy metal, getting fuck eyed and ending fights was a cool thing to do.

We need to typecast ourselves in order to feel that we fit in somewhere, and making fashion statements facilitates our movement between social groups. Sometimes we need to do this to operate within and move between schools of thought, if that’s what we want to do. We need labels to understand who we are, and to express ourselves to others.

Young people, I think, are especially susceptible to typecasting because they are still forming their ideas about themselves, mingling with subcultures where their parentals don’t hang out. It is important that we take control of this process though, and as the foothold of mainstream media on public opinion continues to slip, we are increasingly able to grasp the power to do this.

Old people I know – friends and authors alike, as well as authors who have become friends – tend to have ‘grown out’ of subcultures. Perhaps as their sense of individual identity strengthens they feel they can happily exist among mainstream society without compromising their values.

This is doubtful, and as we age and develop as humans and writers and thinkers, I think one of the trickiest balances we need to affect is between how much of this sub-communal identity we should retain, and how much we should forgo in the interests of ‘growing up’, of assimilating with mainstream society.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if we spent our youthful creative years bemoaning that patronising claim that we need to grow up before we can write well, only to finally grow up and write and think just like our forebears?

It’s one thing to challenge our mainstream ancestors. It’s a whole other tricky task to challenge the prevailing mindset among our own subcultures.

I think the reason we don’t already find it easy to do this is that young creative types are usually typecast as lefties, and lefties are generally typecast as adherents of political correctness.

[Okay, the next bit in italics is what I ham-fisted on the day, and the roman text is where I resumed reading.]

Considering how my image reflects the company I keep, it’s not surprising I’ve found it difficult to squeeze right-wing fiction out of my networks, which is frustrating because I like to question beliefs, but it is politically incorrect to question certain beliefs held by the intellectual left: the human causes of climate change and the viability of representative democracy being the two most important that I could think of.

But it is essential that we do, lest we find ourselves cloistered in a niche of unquestioning adherence to political correctness that infuses so much of our stifled debate in this country.

So, if you asked the mirror, “Mirror mirror, on the wall, which is the worst typecast of them all?” it might say it is the self-perpetuating identity of the leftist elite who overpopulate Australia’s literary community. [This was where the silence increased.] By pedalling the same opinions to one another because we’re too timid to question our friends we are actually inhibiting the very progress of human thought we claim to advocate. [This was where I thought I heard the gasp.]

It is the young writers of Australia who are most well equipped to do this, for the same reason their detractors would say their writing has no value: they haven’t been around long enough to have become brow-beaten and bigoted; there is still hope they can turn their critical faculties on themselves and resolve to start thinking anew.

In the interests of publicly demonstrating my commitment to this new liberalism I was going to strip myself of my middle-class pinko-lefty costume and do the rest of this panel in my underwear. Instead I’m going to read this stanza from a Bukowski poem called ‘unemployed’:

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dear reader,
do you know something?
those who keep asking the same question
really don’t want to hear the answer.

Last weekend I attended Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne because: it’s an awesome, craft-based festiva bringing readers, writers and everyone in between together; they invited me to talk on a panel; I jump at any chance to revisit Melbourne.

The difference between EWF and most other writers’ festivals in Australia is that it’s more like a readers’ and writers’ festival, where readers and writers interact, compared to most of the major festivals, which are structured so that readers sit in crowds and stare in awe at writers, as though they are some sort of sacrosanct being.

Speaking of sweeping generalisations, our panel was called Typecast, which was presented in the program with the blurb:

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The gay writer, the Indigenous writer, the young writer… what are the joys and frustrations of being typecast? Does writing for niche audiences create or hinder opportunities to publish in a more mainstream way? And once set is it ever possible to escape your typecasting?

I was the ‘young writer’, but as I said on the day, really I was speaking as a young editor who has worked with both young and old authors. Anita Heiss was the ‘indigenous writer’. Julian Leyre was the ‘gay writer’. Karen Pickering was the ‘feminist writer’. And the panel was hosted by Dan Ducrou, who has been dubbed the ‘young-adult fiction writer’, which he said was odd considering how much explicit sex and drugs are featured in his book, The Byron Journals.

That’s just it, and this was the premise of the talk I presented: these sorts of typecasts (otherwise known by the more discernibly unacceptable term, ’stereotypes’) are inherently flawed, because every writer’s work is characterised by myriad themes, which flutter about and alight in readers’ minds in all sorts of unqualifiable ways.

But we need to apply these labels to start somewhere in talking about these subjects, and a theme of the session was how each of the speakers has had to push against being arbitrarily categorised by others.

The conclusion of the speech I made solicited a sort-of barely audible gasp in the audience, and at one point an audience member laughed with such gusto that I was momentarily distracted. I didn’t read all that I wrote because I tend to pursue tangents with unbridled enthusiasm when I talk, and I can’t refrain from this even when I’m public speaking.

Angela Meyer, of LiteraryMinded, was in the audience, and I was chuffed that she said, in her write up of the session, that my speech “was a nice, challenging thing to hear at a writers’ festival – a place where one can wander in and out of panels in a bubble of ‘confirmation’”.

That was prexactly my intention, so it’s nice to have that … ah … confirmed.

I’m going to publish my speech after this post, because: I wrote it and may as well use it here; I quite like it; you might quite like it too. If you don’t, well, I don’t really mind, but I’d appreciate any critiques.

It may be worth noting, if you read the speech, that Dan introduced each of us before our talks, an exercise designed to establish the authority of the speaker, but the concept of an authority or expert is as dubious to me as the act of typecasting someone. Nonetheless, this is what I wrote for Dan to read out:
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Ryan Paine is an editor at Wakefield Press, where he works with a lot of old writers. Before that he was editor of Voiceworks, where he worked with a lot of young writers. Before that he was a typesetter at Wakefield Press. Before that he was a labourer, before that he was an outer-suburban high-school stoner, before that he was a chubby little mummy’s boy grubbing for friends in primary school, before that he was a grumpy little shit, before that he was an ill-conceived idea.

Now that I’ve finally published the final part of my Wet Ink interview with Ronnie Scott, I’ll be republishing one of his short stories soon. It’s called ‘Together Now, Very Minor’, and is remarkable in the way eating an icecream on a bouncey castle is remarkable.

This idea of the ‘anthology dream’ – of publishing new writers alongside emerging writers in a coherent context – is more what I’m talking about when I ask about the Brow. Wet Ink does it too, and I understand at the Brow you avoid government funding because you want to publish smaller Australian writers alongside bigger international writers. Why do you think such a policy is important for a magazine and its community of contributors and readers?
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No, the reason I’ve never applied to get a grant for the Brow is just that we’re able to do without one. Grants are a great thing for plenty of arts projects that are just starting out, but my fear was that if you start out with that money built into your structure, it’s probably going to be difficult to imagine living without it. Wet Ink, Phillip Edmonds told me, aims to get itself independent of grants at some point, but most magazines that are grant-dependent, which means most magazines could potentially just fall apart if the grants ever went away, and they seem not to have any backups thought through at all.

We are pretty successful for a literary journal, but that’s still not very successful, and I just don’t see how a grant would change that. There’s lots of complex economic theory I don’t understand around protectionism policies, but for me, if I want more people to read the work that I publish, it’s tough to see how pumping money into the form I’ve already established is going to do that. I’m more interested in trialling some substantive changes, which I can do on the money we already make; and if that leads naturally to earning more money for the magazine, then I’ll know that people actually want the product. The Brow is switching to a bimonthly magazine format for 2011, as a six-issue experiment. Since the Brow’s accounts happen in a tiny book on my desk that I make stupid notes in, it’s a very easy decision to make, and just as easy to put into effect. And if it turns out to be less fun to make than a literary journal—which is a form I do love—and doesn’t impact sales, then there isn’t any obstacle to just… switching back.

Lots of very good and interesting literary journals, ones that are under good editorship, are at least partly dependent on grants, and I wonder what would happen if you took the grants away: would you see those magazines disappearing, or would you see them figuring out better ways to get people to read interesting work? It won’t ever happen, and it might be terrible. But nobody knows.
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You’re online presence is not huge: you’re hard to Google. But I’ve heard about your RSS feed. Who’s you’re favourite blogger? Hey, why don’t you blog?
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My favourite blogger is this guy named Sean T Collins, who writes a blog called All Too Flat. It’s hard to recommend to anybody, though, for the exact reason that I love it so much: it seems custom-built to satisfy all my most particular interests, which I never thought a good and regular and thorough writer would ever be around to just indulge. Like, bad 90s superhero comics from the speculator boom, and torture law, and analysis of Stephen King books. And tonnes of really good links to new alternative minicomics; I’d have never found lots of the artists I publish in the Brow without him. I like this guy’s writing, and his tastes, so much that I committed to watching all of Battlestar Galactica—and have now committed to reading all of George R.R. Martin—just so I can skip fewer of his posts. People are really not lying when they say the internet is good for satisfying niches.

I used to blog, when I was about nineteen, and all my friends had Livejournals. A couple of them now have “ransom editions” of my blog saved on their computer, since it was dubbed Honesty Hour, meaning it was a public forum for me to passively shit-talk people who pissed me off when I was nineteen. I am recently having to read over this for a project I’m working on, and it’s totally excruciating and horrible. The friends who have my blog archived on their computers are going to have to be friends for life. I will probably blog one day if it becomes clear that I have to blog to sell more magazines or sell a book.
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What’s the project you’re working on? From what I can deduce from your Facebook profile, you’re answering these questions from a self-made writer’s retreat in the archipelagos somewhere. This must be serious – is there a full-length manuscript in the future?
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Yeah! I’m working on a book of nonfiction that asks the question, ‘How do people learn to be adults?’ It’s equal parts research into serious stuff; research into stupid stuff, like America’s Next Top Model; profiles, sometimes of people who don’t know they’re being profiled; and, since I happen to have done a lot of gross and regrettable things in my life, a pretty exhaustive catalogue of those.

It’s in a weird phase right now because I’m starting to write fewer chapters that can easily be taken as essays by themselves—which is what the book started out as, before I realised I was writing a book—and I’m starting to write more chapters that are kind of unwieldy and only work well as parts of a bigger project. Which is I guess why it’s a book. But I’ve never written a long thing of nonfiction before, so it feels very strange to slowly commit to it.

I know this one amazing writer who has been collected in Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays, and Best Australian Poetry, a trifecta, and I once asked her how she managed to write in all three genres. She looked at me like she was confused by the question, and said, “Well, they all just work from the same muscle, don’t they?” It’s probably true that they do, but I didn’t know I could even write decent nonfiction until a few months ago.

The reporting voice, especially, is fun as hell. Like I’m writing a fucktonne of sentences that start with “Recently,” for example. “Recently, my friends and I were ‘summering’ in Barcelona.” The reporting voice is full of these wonderful tricks that smooth out and make everything feel objective. It’s relaxing.
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And where could readers keep in touch to find out more about your writing and any projects you get involved with?
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www.theliftedbrow.com
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