Posts Tagged ‘ aesthetic judgement ’
A good book editor has to be capable of mentoring a person: after hacking at the fundamental structure of an author’s manuscript, an editor needs to be there to field questions, lend support and generally reassure the author their early work has not been one big, protracted period of self delusion and folly. A good editor [ READ MORE ]
Someone recently asked me to write about my mullet for an independent Adelaide newspaper, and the below ‘column’ is the result. It was accompanied by the terrible Photo Booth job that I’ve pasted in: not sure what’s worse, the ‘haircut’ or the ‘photo’ of the ‘haircut’. Or the ‘column’. Actually I quite like the column [ READ MORE ]
Yesterday afternoon, waiting for an author who was waiting on the other side of the cafe, I had a chance to read ‘Clinching’, a story by Emmett Stinson in the first issue of Kill Your Darlings.1 Emmett, at 30-odd, is on the cusp of SIB’s definition of ‘young writer’, but I’ve been encountering his work since [ READ MORE ]
Over at Virugle there is a mostly-one-way discussion being had about how terrible Australian Book Review is for deciding not to award the inaugural Young Calibre Non-fiction Prize – an essay prize that matches their esteemed Calibre Prize, but for writers under 21. Unfortunately, apart from a questionable call for transparency, I don’t get a [ READ MORE ]
Something else I’ve been doing lately, while not being a high-flying literary judge, is reading Nic Low’s novel manuscript, ‘Tailings’. Because I’m a youth-literature crusader and everything. Nic is not exactly ‘a youth’, but whatever. I’m familiar with some of Nic’s other arts work, so I was delighted when he asked me to read and [ READ MORE ]
In comments on my recent post about claims that YA literature is ‘intrinsically of less cultural value than the real books’, Linnet Hunter raised some interesting questions about the perception of YA literature in Australia I was going to reply with a comment, but I was compelled to delve deeper into the subject. Reviewing Space The first [ READ MORE ]
My friend Felice posted me this link on Facebook: ‘Critical mess: whose ‘must see’ is it anyway?’ The article starts with a guy having a fight with his girlfriend because they have different expectations of art reviewers. She likes to rely on her own curiosity when choosing the film she’d like to see, and her own [ READ MORE ]