Posts Tagged ‘ ignorance ’

In-flight Reading

… Maybe I’m naive, but I was surprised that T C Boyle’s story in this week’s Harper’s was boring. I’ve heard good things about T C Boyle, and about Harper’s. Combine that with a story titled ‘What Separates Us From The Animals’ and I thought I was in for a sure thing. The reason I treat myself to a foreign [ READ MORE ]

Ironic Questioning

The use of ironic questioning in clarifying the meaning of an ambiguous phrase or sentence is often counter productive, as the author will usually read your question literally and begin to doubt your intelligence, undermining the authority on which the uptake of your suggestion depends. [ READ MORE ]

Indepenwah? or, An Open Love Letter to Julia Gillard

I shook hands with Julia Gillard yesterday morning, and then wound up on the telly about it. She made a rousing speech, praising the values of hard work and education, and I came away feeling really inspired by it all. Like me, Julia was raised in a working class family in Adelaide, where she became inspired [ READ MORE ]

Boating! I Mean, Agenting!

In my last post about Nic Low’s manuscript I described ‘Tailings’ as ‘a beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … bobbing up and down on [the sea of mediocrity] … that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia’. I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud [ READ MORE ]

Hearsay Literary Annual

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been co-judging, along with Stefan Laszczuk, a short-story prize run by the editors of Adelaide University’s student magazine, On Dit. Of course I put my hand up, because now I am a fusty old ex-Voiceworks editor, desperate to get my hands on the raw content of young, emerging Australian [ READ MORE ]

Hey There, Blimpy Boy!

Sam Cooney republished an article he wrote for Bookseller+Publisher about, well, the relationship between booksellers and publishers – and how this relationship is changing as publishers embark on direct-sales ventures, which, I guess, have the potential to undermine the traditional business models of booksellers. On the surface it seems like a superfluous debate, when compared [ READ MORE ]

Ethics of Publishing

Something that especially inspires me about the young people I know in publishing is that they are, mostly, and for want of a better word, ’social justice natives’. Perhaps not in the strong sense that today’s teenagers are ‘digital natives’ compared to people my age, who can remember a time before computers could be bought [ READ MORE ]

Have Atchu!

Again with the Monty Python, but this clip illustrates the following post as well as it did the post about my flesh wound: Brian Ward disappeared from Facebook the other day, while we were in the middle of a debate. I was surprised by this, because Brian runs a great-value blog, a lot of which is [ READ MORE ]

Prizes Ain’t Prizes

Sam Cooney has an article about literary awards in the current issue of Voiceworks, and the critical take on such a holy grail inspired me to continue the conversation. I’ve touched on manuscript awards once before, and am regularly vocal, to people who ask, against wholesale acceptance of prizes as a wonderful and highly sought [ READ MORE ]

Sans-Bratwurst Blues

A couple of months ago I was hungover and hungry and I’d just woken up at Ronnie’s place. For ages it’s been something of a personal hangover ritual of mine to make it to the Queen Vic Markets, which are right near his apartment, and get a bratwurst. These are not just any bratwurst – they’re thick, [ READ MORE ]

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