…

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 magazine when I travel any serious distance is that I hope it will broaden my literary … ah, horizons. I guess it still did that this time, just … backward, to the horizon behind me.

I guess I pick up a magazine like Harper’s with the awareness that inside I will encounter a sample of the descendents of tradition, for whom I do have a healthy sense of respect, but so often this tradition strikes a chord so far from my intellectual and emotional interest that I wonder if I’ve stepped into a parallel universe where people find this quaint sort of bullshit actually interesting.

I could tolerate it if the insights into the human condition were powerful and formative, forcing me to reconsider my values or those of others I have encountered. Maybe the insights in this story did that for some readers. I know! Maybe a young, suburban Australian male with progressive, innovative pretensions is not among Harper’s ideal demographic!

But this reminds me of a debate my girlfriend and I have been having about the importance of opera companies and orchestras performing new work. She mentions often that opera companies and orchestras don’t perform a lot of contemporary work because the aged audience simply won’t stand for it – neither literally nor figuratively. The classics need to be represented in each year’s program to garauntee attendance – slipping the ocassional experimental contemporary piece in there is a considerable financial risk for the company.

She’s probably right, and maybe Harper’s is like that: keeping the interest of the older, more conservative demographic who can still justify the expense of a magazine, and might do so long enough to finance the emergence of the new writers.

But a magazine like Harper’s is not going to attract an audience appreciative of these new writers by continuing to publish stories like Boyle’s, about a middle-aged housewife who can’t tolerate the substandard personal hygiene of the doctor her town committee imported from the mainland. (If it weren’t for the reference to the internet in Boyle’s story, I could have assumed it was both written and set in the early twentieth century.) If younger audiences go and read elsewhere, Harper’s won’t have an appreciative audience for any new writing they publish.

If audiences stick with Harper’s, the new writers will descend so directly from the forefathers of tradition that literary progress will be significantly hampered.  Then, what if Harper’s audience dies before it begins publishing the sort of progressive stories a younger demographic might enjoy? Stories that are a bit more fucked up, a bit more contemporary, a bit less quaint and safe.

But, as Lara likes to remind me, if everyone thought like me the world would be in turmoil, so maybe the literary tradition represented by Harper’s constitutes a necessary status quo, an anchor for readers of the conservative left, around which they might hover safely, keeping their head above the water as they brush past more innovative, dangerous creatures under the surface with their legs.

Or maybe it’s me, and one day, when I grow up, I’ll develop an appreciation for Harper’s stories the same way I developed an appreciation for olives, avocado, tomatoes, mushrooms (all of which I hated as a child): by force-feeding them to myself and trying to think about what tasted good about them.

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.

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 to do something good in the world, and then, unlike me, she went and became Prime Minister. All because she shares the belief that each of us has a duty to each other to be our best, and to contribute some improvement to the world before we die.

At least, that’s the reverie I fell into as I swooned and gave her my card, nervously avoiding the bodyguard who had just inspected it with what I later became certain were ASIO-issue x-ray or maybe just photo-recording spectacles, and then I went back to work and came home and saw my mug on the telly and figured I better ride this wave of thought, and pulled out this little doozy that I’ve been nursing for a week or two. It is now a love letter to Julia.

Dear Julia,

.

Independence. Independent publishing house. Indie. Indie rock. Independent record label.

All of these except for the first are relatively easy to identify with, in a cultural sense. It is easier to identify something that has been labelled ‘independent’ than it is to define what independence really means, especially when you say or write independent too many times – like the word ‘spaghetti’, or ‘bowl’, if you look at it for too long you go cross-eyed, and you begin to wonder how these combinations of symbols came to mean something as specific as ‘a kind of pasta of Italian origin, made from wheat flour, in long, thin, solid strips or tubes, and cooked by boiling’ and ‘a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, food, etc’.

Bowls are great for cereal!

Being independent is so hot. Being into independent art, literature and music seems to imply that you know of an alternative source, like a really good drug dealer, who supplies you with gear that common people can’t score. It’s true that a bag of weed still costs twenty-five bucks after all these years, but ‘independent’ art carries the misguided connotation that it also somehow exists outside of market pressures that warp commercial art, literature and music into the generic pop that makes us vomit a bit in our mouths when we like anything that more than five of our friends like.

When I started at Wakefield all those moons ago, their curiously mixed-economy style of publishing was confusing. They get a few government grants, they do a bit of partner publishing, a bit of corporate publishing, they ran a distro for a while, and they trade international rights with publishers of all persuasions and structures. They also publish a variety of mass-market DIY gastronomy slash ‘gastro memoir’ that is remarkably successful in the trade. They do this to support their investment in novels, poetry collections and obscure South Australiana.

At the time I latched onto the idea that independent literature was defined primarily by the absence of financial backing from large conglomerates. Yet, a quick look around at what is generally considered to be ‘indie’ lit reveals that most of these operations are supported by something, other than the market: the good will of a benefactor, government funding, or a university. So as I think it out now I realise true independence is the reliance on consumers making the choice to buy your product.

My misconception has to do with ‘indie’ bastardising the meaning of ‘independence’. ‘Indie’ is a trend – something that people toss around willy nilly, slapping on anything that seems vaguely removed from the mainstream, without due consideration of how it’s actually financed. ‘Independence’ is a timeless value. Lit journals funded at ‘arms length’ by Australia Council are not independent – they are dependent on the government, a dependence we felt was threatened when, under Howard, severe funding cuts swept the sector, leaving Mark Davis to suggest it was a silent campaign to cripple dissenting opinion. Try to not let that happen again, if that’s cool.

A silver lining of that period might be that it seemed to spurn on a bunch of truly independent ventures – Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow, Torpedo, aduki and Vignette Press are examples that come to mind – fiercely anti-welfare and determined to reach audiences through sheer leg work, they inspire me because they’ve chosen to think of innovative ways to get their product out there.

Marketing to general readers, or directly to small, self-sustaining niches, is integral to the business models of these operations, and advances in communication technology are providing the means to answer the question: ‘Where is the market, and how do we get the value of our product in its way?’

But our cultural definition of ‘independence’ continues to inhibit innovation in these important areas of the sector. SPUNC are trying to rejuvenate innovation, and Australia Council are behind them, but the sector needs more. We need to change our definition of ‘independence’. Imagine, say, a parallel universe where the small-press operators put the stipend of a part-time marketing person on their credit card along with their printer bill, which is not uncommon, such is the belief in the value of this work that people go in for personal debt to fund it.

There are other ways to affect this shift in the mindset of the industry, such as a massive injection of capital tied to marketing, publicity and sales campaigns for small presses, and serious audience-development research and training. This would show small-press operators that it’s worth investing in commercial innovation. Split Literature Board funding 50/50 instead of funding the production of more manuscripts than we really don’t know how to sell.

The shift could also be nudged along by facilitating pro bono partnerships between the corporate sector and the independent-publishing sector, such as Australian Business Arts Foundation are doing in the high operatic arts sector.

With enough money, companies like Coca-Cola Amatil can convince people that drinking lots of acidic, sugary water will make them float around in really fun bubbles. Think of the social benefits of merely doubling the scant budget of a small press, so that they might propel their product into a self-sustaining market orbit. Facilitating communication through literature offers people a private communion with ideas that is unsurpassed by any other medium: it affords us the time and space to consider ideas on our own terms, to learn in the comfort of our own headspace.

This is why I’m so passionate about facilitating the written expression of others. Your speech reminded me of that, when you mentioned that hard work and education are the key to a truly progressive and productive society. An ongoing engagement with literature from an early age constitutes the finest education a person could ever hope for or need. Being literate in literature gives us access to a lifelong education, as we seek out the experiences of others to develop love and compassion through understanding our myriad differences.

Facilitating this provides me with hope that shit won’t get worse, at least.

It was a genuine pleasure to meet you briefly. Seriously, hit me up if you need to know anything about semi colons or en rules or ellipses or whatever.

.
Love,
.
Ryan
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PS You might already be familiar with this clip. I was reminded of it today when my friend said she wants to have your babies. Thing is, you’re both woman, which is why I was reminded of this clip. It doesn’t transpose exactly, but I’m sure you’ll catch my gist.
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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 history of publishing amazing literature, and my comment was, perhaps, inadvertently disparaging of Australia’s avid-reader population. It was a holier-than-thou thing to say, the implication being that general readers are less discerning than me, which may or may not be true, but a book editor crapping on about his discerning palate is kind of like a mechanic being righteous about the fact he knows how to tune a car better than his customers – this fact is self-evident, otherwise people would tune their own damn cars.

Anyway.

All I was trying to say is that I am excited about having the ability to get amazing manuscripts to publishers on behalf of authors. This is what I want to be doing for my day job. To prolapse the metaphor further: I want to paddle around in a leaky boat, scooping up princess ducks and bringing them to shore, handing them over to publishers and saying, ‘Feed them well, they will nourish many.’

This felt like a pipe dream until I read Nic’s manuscript. It felt like a pipe dream because I knew that I was missing an important element of the equation that equals successful agenting: quality manuscripts.

Quality manuscripts + diligent, active authors + publishing contacts + editorial savvy + youthful naivety + insanity + the empirically unfounded conviction that communication through literature will make the world a better place = Paine Management, my latent literary agency.

I have all of these now, so it’s only a matter of time, patience and dedication – the three core things that got me as far as working as a book editor by 22, something that I had never imagined possible when I was smoking bongs in the back shed and dropping out of uni and scribbling all over those beautiful Peter Carey paperback reprints that UQP released.

So, yeah, the name of my imaginary literary agency is Paine Management. Get it? I will take the pain out of getting your manuscript published, and the pain out of finding a manuscript to publish. I’m allowed to make bad jokes about my name. You are too. (In fact, Sam Twyford-Moore already did it, in a letter to Voiceworks while I was there.)

I want to bundle together a portfolio of the best unpublished manuscripts of young, emerging Australian writers, fold it under my arm and take it, in my leaky boat, to New York City.

I’m thinking of further honing the subject and theme of this blog to cover this journey as an emerging agent – to cover things like trying to develop an author-agent contract when I know almost nothing about contracts. (I’ve taken on contracts administration at work, but I still feel as though I’m learning a second language.)

So if you’re into that sort of thing, come along. Meanwhile, I have a question for you. It’s pretty broad, but here goes: what are your experiences of trying to find a literary agent in Australia?

If you don’t have any experience with this, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d like to start a dialogue about it, so I can start thinking about how to achieve this ridiculously ambitious dream of facilitating the best emerging Australian writing onto the world stage.

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 writers. Really, reading submissions – at Voiceworks and in the capacity of a judge – is like tapping into a rare natural resource: it makes me all dizzy wondering about the sort of books that will be published in the next 10 to 20 years.

Hearsay is going to be ‘a glossy and professionally printed literary annual featuring the best emerging Adelaide writers’ that will be ‘distributed around the Adelaide CBD in May’.

Here is the introduction I wrote for the collection:

Props to old people and everything, but so much literature produced by adults, for adults, is characterised by a weird sort of fogginess. I put this down to the fact they have to sound like they know what they’re talking about because … well, because adults are supposed to know what they’re talking about, and when they realise they don’t know what they’re talking about at all, the lesser adult authors deal with this by jacking up the profound-sounding words and the awkwardly constructed sentences.

They talk about the same old shit, in language that makes it seem like they’re talking about something new and incredibly meaningful. They beguile their adult readers into reciting passages aloud at their book clubs and saying, ‘Mmm, yes, I see …’

Old people have to maintain this pretension, lest young people run up to them, steal their crown, and wear it to the pub, getting it all scuffed and smudged with garlic sauce.

The best young writers, on the other hand, are confronting their ignorance through writing, so inevitably their stories are explorations of new ideas. Ignorance dissipates pretension, and what we are left with is a distillation of the pure, heartfelt, curious sense of adventure that is consistently absent from so much adult literature.

These young writers have not yet been hypnotised by an engorged need for creative rhetoric: they’re not trying to dupe you into feeling something about something you don’t understand. They tell it how it is. They write about love (awkward, unrequited, shared, illicit), dreams (made, lost, abandoned), obsession, hatred (even murder), ambition and torment. And they don’t fuck around.

Older writers are great – they’re who we learn from – but young writers are who we can draw inspiration from. They’re writing about the present, but they are the future – these stories are the buds of ideas that will blossom in time.

Stefan and I have chosen a ‘winning story’, and two ‘runners up’: ‘Mutual Friends’, then ‘The Four Seasons’ and ‘House Party’. There is no such thing as a ‘winning story’. These just happen to be the ones we most enjoyed. You will feel differently – such is the beauty of literature, and the diversity of this collection.

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 to whether eBookstores will overrun this model, but it remains relevant, and the article got me thinking, which I like, obviously.

I hadn’t quite got to wondering about how booksellers might feel threatened by publishers’ online sales, perhaps because I never really buy from physical bookstores, and because I currently work in production, which often leaves me feeling quite removed from the whole extra set of steps that are involved in getting books to readers.

I’m becoming increasingly interested in sales though, and Sam’s article tapped me on the noggin and said, ‘Dear naive and idealistic editor, booksellers are very important to you and your job, and your interest in disseminating ideas with literature.’ So I started riffing on how this shifting relationship might weather the rapid market changes that are being pushed along by this here internet thing.

Perhaps an organised partnership between booksellers and publishers could be established to develop a website that aggregates all of their separate marketing and direct-sales efforts. For these purposes (compared to blogging, say) one big website is surely better than many small ones. Australia Council should fund something like this – just as they’ve recently funded the establishment of Literary Magazines Australia.

Another idea that sprouted was whether booksellers could borrow from the idea of subscription publishing. McSweeney’s do this at their online store. You can sign up to their Book Release Club and receive every book they publish over a twelve month period. Maybe booksellers could offer something similar: I’d like to sign up for a package of ’seller picks’, a bunch of random books from various publishers, delivered to my letter box once a month.¹

The other thing that struck me in Sam’s article was the comment from Don Grover, CEO of Dymocks and aspiring booktrade despot slash self-described benevolent despot: suggesting that ‘a healthy industry occurs when everyone focuses on their own area, their niche in the market’ seems like a typically neo-con thing to say, but my understanding of economic ideology is pretty patchy. Am I right or wrong?

My idea of a healthy industry is one that is not dominated by small groups of large, domineering companies controlling those niches, but one where individuals determine what is produced and how they get it. From this perspective, the suppliers are the ones who need to adapt, rather than trying to restrict trade to a traditional structure of publisher through bookseller to consumer. I guess that’s an irresolvable ideological difference, though.

Or not.

Because then Sam speculated that ‘the coin can also be flipped, the spotlight shifted. Will booksellers be forced to become publishers?’ This must be happening, somewhere.² Curiously (considering my aversion to Grover’s suggestion), this got my hackles up, with its suggestion that booksellers could just whip up the infrastructure required to produce quality books, as if it’s just a matter of pressing the go button on the the Espresso Book Machine.

Thinking about infrastructure, resources and expertise made me realise a more convincing reason publishers should be wary of ‘wading into booksellers’ waters’ (Don Grover’s defensive phrase), and it’s not because they’re not ‘customer-centric’ (also Don’s words). This suggestion denigrates the motives of publishers: does he think we make these books because they look pretty on our shelves? That’s only a secondary reason.

Okay, back to trying to be objective: I’d say a more convincing reason book publishers should be (and, sometimes, are) wary of prolapsing their resources on marketing and direct sales is that they operate in an ailing sector of the economy (especially small-press, literary publishers), within which they have barely enough resources to get their books to print, let alone invest in a serious marketing, sales and publicity strategy.

It’s also possibly true that such print aficionados feel drastically uncomfortable in the online world, and speaking into what seems like an echo chamber a lot of the time. If anything needs to change, I would suggest that booksellers, who will go down the eBookstore path or perish, are in a much better position to drive the development of a collaborative business model that focuses their own, and book publishers’ marketing, sales and publicity efforts. Booksellers and publishers need to share their resources, infrastructure and expertise, so that each is free to work on what they are proficient at, either bookmaking or bookselling.

It’s not as cut and dry as Dan Grover implies, but then, neither is parallel importation, and that didn’t stop him from pushing that wheelbarrow around in the dark.

The rest of the comments in Sam’s article, from all sorts of industry figures, are spectacularly reasonable, and well presented by Sam. A great spectrum of ideas, and all strung together with such clarity and concision. Check it out!

Meanwhile, do you know of examples of this type of bookseller/publisher collaboration? It would be great to keep this dialogue underway about how this changing relationship might morph into something weird, like an Imprints blimp parachuting books to customers in response to sign language made visible by wearing those massive foam-rubber hands.

1. NB: By googling ‘Book a Month Club’, which I thought was the name of McSweeney’s book-subscription service, I found this, The Book of the Month Club, and then I realised that this idea, which I thought was quite novel, is not novel at all, and then I remembered how much I used to bug Mum to join these, but she was savvy to their swindling ways, with which I now sympathise. And anyway, it’s still a better than Don Grover’s idea, which I’m getting to.
2. *googles ‘booksellers turn to publishing’, finds this, is not surprised*

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 at Coles.

But many young people have come of age to start their publishing endeavours during a time when major world events have occurred (or circumstances have developed) that have changed the way many of us consider our engagement with the world. Not least of these are the issues arising from Western countries’ dubious approach to international economics.

This means that when young publishers learn they can get their books printed bulk-cheap in China, they might wonder about the ethics of exporting work to developing, over-populated economies. One reason the books are so cheap is that labour is inexpensive.

For example, I did some freelance work for aduki independent press while I was in Melbourne, and (then-Publisher) Emily was adamant that her readership wouldn’t buy books that were produced in China – that printing an aduki book in China would go against aduki’s core principles. Granted, aduki have documented their publishing philosophy (which Vignette Press and Ilura Press have signed up to), so they’re kind of an extreme example, but others are conscientious to varying degrees.

Similar questions come up in the location-independence movement. (I’ll call it a movement, cos it’s easier and it fits here.) Location-independent professionals , who move about the world to live and work, must and do consider the ramifications of living cheaply in developing economies while working on projects that channel income elsewhere.

I wonder how much this extends to young people’s consumption of literature. I still boycott Dymocks and the chains that backed the Cheaper Books campaign, and I felt guilty when I thought about buying What is the What direct from McSweeney’s instead of waiting for a paperback Penguin in Australia.

George Dunford, the guy behind Hackpacker (among many other things), coughs up for whatever’s being launched, as a demonstration of solidarity. (So put him on your mailing lists.) And Chris Flynn, the Torpedo guy, told me he considered it his duty to help bailout McSweeney’s when their distro went bankrupt. This was equally opportunistic and charitable, but this sort of thinking happens.

What are some of the ethical considerations that inform your production and consumption of literature?

____________
UPDATE ‘Ethics of Publishing’ was cross-posted at Spike, the Meanjin blog.

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 dedicated to holding other citizen journalists to account. I’m bothering to post about it because I feel like it’s necessary to return the service.

Brian posted a link to an article about the new batch of deadly drugs going around at the moment, accompanied by a comment that people deserved what they got if they took dubious drugs from a dubious dealer. I would post the exact link and comment, but of course I no longer have access to Brian’s Facebook wall.

I said the comment was inordinately harsh, that some people might not be in a position to make a better decision and should not be judged so fiercely for making a bad judgement call. Someone else got involved and the debate quickly swung away from the initial issue to focus on the morality of dealing, something I feel entirely differently about: dealing dubious drugs is morally reprehensible; consuming them is not – and is certainly not deserving of the scorn demonstrated in Brian’s dismissive comment.

It’s exactly this sort of narrow-mindedness that causes problems in drug culture: people who are ignorant of the complexities involved in the decisions surrounding drugs make generalisations that tar the whole community with the wrong brush. Drug users are not all reckless and irresponsible – many use them safely, and I consider it a shame that such users bear the brunt of the stigma that results from those who are irresponsible, and from those who shame them.

Of course, I never got as far as explaining this to Brian. When I came back to the debate and couldn’t access his page, I thought maybe an error had occurred. I added him again, but my advances were rejected. I tried again the next morning. Then and now, when I search for his name he no longer comes up in the results.

At first I thought Brian had a massive dummy spit because I didn’t agree with him¹, but as I’ve gone about drafting the post I’ve realised I should give him the benefit of the doubt, as his Facebook page appears to no longer exist. Maybe something really has gone wrong: I’ve emailed him to find out, but have not heard back.

Of course it’s entirely up to Brian whether he allows me to see his Facebook page, and the truth is that we’re not exactly ‘friends’ – we have met once, through a mutual friend. But I had assumed Brian was reading the Facebook definition of ‘friend’ rather loosely – he did, after all, either extend a friendship request to me, or accept one from me, I can’t remember which now.

Maybe I was wrong in assuming that Brian was using Facebook for reasons other than to keep in touch with friends – I have seen him chime in on debates elsewhere, so I thought it would have extended to Facebook. Plus, that he published such a provocative and opinion-laden link suggests that he uses Facebook for debate and information extending beyond his immediate friend circles.

Brian, if something really has gone wrong with Facebook and you’d like to rejoin the debate here, I would certainly welcome that.

1. from what I’ve read on his blog, he doesn’t take criticism well

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 after accolade – it’s something I’m very much interested in.

Sam reckons that literary prizes pick books and raise them up as symbols of our ‘national consciousness’, which gives them inordinate cultural weight. He uses a lovely Lion King metaphor – think:

I agree, and would go on to say that a culture heavily influenced by such a top-down, arbitrary and selective approach cannot be representative of the broader public’s diverse reading tastes. This is why I’m so interested in literary prizes – they are at odds with my interest in promoting the self-determination of our literary culture.

Chris Flynn made the point once, when I got angry about Tim Winton winning the Miles Franklin again, that prizes don’t have to be relevant to everyone, because a culture of alternatives exists. This would be fine if the general reader had as proactive an approach to reading as Chris, who is so passionate about literature that he publishes his alternative source of literature that he likes.

Maybe we should just leave the award crowd patting each other on the back for sharing the same impeccable sense of taste and go make/find our own literature. The large publishers and other cultural institutions that run these prizes make it difficult to do this by using their considerable market share to drive trends around by putting stickers on adult books, like decals on a racecar. Sam quotes Ann McCulloch on this:

McCulloch herself deems panels and the public as ‘a malleable beast that will generally move towards “winners”, even if non-winners are writing some amazing books’

If people do gravitate toward award-winning literature when deciding what to read, then the determination of what qualifies as award-winning does lend inordinate cultural weight to certain books. If the public’s vision of culture (which, to some extent is derived from the literature they read) contributes to the way culture is actually realised in Australia, then if we change the literature they read (by awarding different literature with relevant accolades) we alter the nature of the culture that is realised and we all have to endure. As in, cultural agency needs to be distributed more equally among the reading public. Surely someone with a serious name has written about this.

When we charge judging panels with this responsibility of concentrated cultural agency, it becomes especially concerning to read that ‘ideological soundness’ has so much as been uttered in the same room as a judging panel – Sam quotes Michael Meehan, novelist and judging panelist:

at the outset we all agreed to put forward the books we liked best – to put forward his or her own personal preferences on quite a subjective basis. Otherwise … you can get into some pretty sterile formulas – which novel best embodies national themes and current issues, or worse, which novels are ethically and ideologically the most ’sound’.

If this culture permeates our cultural agencies, and if enough readers base their bookstore decisions on gold stickers, literary prizes become ideological mechanisms of the institutions that run them. A government institution, whose independence is constantly in question, should not wield this sort of control over the marketplace.

Their power undermines individuals’ power to determine the good books and places this power with a handful of individuals. Of course, if individuals were left alone in the market to ‘vote with their wallet’, a lot of worthwhile literature would remain unpublished. A model for subsidising and awarding quality literature needs to be designed and implemented by interested planners – government as well as private funders and lobbyists – with a view to generating greater diversity when determining who receives the funding, who receives the awards, and what constitutes both.

Unfortunately Sam pulls his punches in the conclusion of his column, but if prizes are dodgy, we need to continue to question their virtue, and amend the way they are delivered: have more readers’ choice awards, such as the Inky Awards; reconsider the dividends – get the right mixture of publication contract and prize money and maybe a prize that encourages audience engagement with the text, especially the more obscure awards and the manuscript awards; use the prize money to financing marketing, advertising and publicity campaigns.

If these books are being awarded such accolades as being in possession of ‘the Australian voice’, as many Australians as possible should know about who is speaking on their behalf, and what they’re saying. Meanwhile, the longer literature represents and appeals to an elite, privileged sector of the community, the longer people go wanting for good literature, and the more likely it is that people will move away from literature altogether – if it is neither entertaining nor insightful in a way that is meaningful to you, why would you bother?

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, tasty and juicy, lathered in however many types of mustard you like, maybe a bit of cheese and then a field of sauerkraut balancing on top. These are a two-hand job. Nothing like this – way better:

Bratwurst!

I was dazed and it was Sunday – typically a day of decadence to make up for the previous night’s decadence. I figured I’d grab a bratwurst and then drink my hangover away.

I was ambling along, halfway to the market, content that I had planned my day, when I remembered that I was vegetarian – had been for all of about two weeks. The decision was made not in haste, but without any real preparation for the required lifestyle adjustments. Such as knowing where to get delicious comfort food off the cusp.

I wondered if it would really matter if I contradicted my recently developed consumption principles just this once – how much could my abstinence from meat really contribute positively to the welfare of the world’s animals and our environment?

I knew I could get some sushi to tide me over, but sushi isn’t bratwurst, and the main reason for my decision to give up meat was environmental concern. I couldn’t be sure that consuming rice grown in Australia was any better than eating the meat of flatulent, hoofed animals farmed on our arid land¹ . As with cotton, the water requirements are far greater than our arid lands can support, something something … rising freshwater salinity.

By the time I found two soggy sticks of blandness, I was feeling guilty. For potentially contributing to salinity, and for being ignorant. Because my choice to abstain from meat is informed by a broad interest in ethical consumerism and environmental conservation, rather than specifically animal rights, the requisite decisions are not as simple as trading animal rights for a diet of mung beans and tempeh.

In this series of sporadic articles, called Sans-bratwurst Blues, I will chronicle my research and decisions about ethical consumerism – lest I begin to alienate my friends with my self-righteous indignation. I will try to be equally sceptical of the CSIRO as I am of dubiously anonymous, blingin websites like The Main Meal.

This post is part of Blog Action Day.

Blog Action Day | 2009 | Climate Change

1. I have since figured out that rice might even be as flatulent as all those cows!