So bad it's a winner

The winner of the annual Bad Sex in Literature Award has been named......and it stays in the UK this year. London-born writer Rowan Somerville has taken the honours for his very bad sex in The Shape Of Her. The judges cited Somerville saying they hoped to 'shame' him, particularly for a single sentence: 
'Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too-blunt pin he...her.'
Enough said.
'There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you.' Somerville told the media.You can read a review here.
Others on the shortlist vying for the dubious honour were:
A Life Apart, Neel Mukherjee
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen 
The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon
Heartbreak, Craig Raine
Maya, Alastair Campbell
Mr Peanut, Adam Ross 
The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas  
'Nobody wants to win that Award', said Margaret Atwood in 2009. Nobody that is, except Alastair Campbell, who must be feeling rather deflated... 
In the Guardian he said: 'Given that sex is an important part of a relationship and that most people are involved in some sort of a relationship at some time, it seems a pity not to write about it just because we are a bit squeamish.'
It's not sex that makes people squeamish Mr Campbell it's what you do to it with your pen...!

Pick a peck of poetry

Some cool pieces on poetry I've come across lately on the web:
Big Other celebrated its very own Wallace Stevens week, publishing a series of posts from the author of the wonderful Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird. There's about 20 posts dated 15-19 November 2010, well worth a look.
Travel writer Jeffrey Taylor ponders life and travel and the meaning of existence as seen through the mind of the Greek poet Cavafy (pictured above)in his Journey to Ithaca.
For a cerebral workout take a look at Joseph Epstein on TS Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture. (Eliot pictured with his second wife Valerie at the theatre in Chicago, 1959.)
And if you have any brain space left after all that, if you haven't already met him, let me introduce you to Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze (as described by his relatives). He was something of a literary revolutionary with a talent for upsetting the establishment which led to his eventual execution during the purge of Georgian intellectuals in 1937. A bit of history and intrigue for a Monday night in. Enjoy.

The poet and the prisoner

The last word, for now, on The Paris Review. Check out this issue - No 182 Fall 2007 - with an interview on The Art of Poetry with American poet August Kleinzahler (who appeared at the Melbourne Writers Festival this year) and an eye-popping exposé of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar (pictured above with his wife Victoria Henao in the 1980s). 
The Kleinzahler piece - besides being a fascinating insight into the razor sharp mind of a successful contemporary poet and writer of prose, essays, short stories - is pretty funny. He doesn't hold back, to the point where the interviewer comments on his 'gift for vitriol'. Check out this manuscript page from his poem Retard Spoilage (above). Incidentally, he notes Australian short story writer Helen Garner as one of his favourite writers.
You can read the Kleinzahler article here. Escobar, as with his trade, comes at a price...

More from The Paris Review...

Another gem from The Paris Review, this time from No 116, Fall 1990: an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa shortly after he bowed out of the Peruvian election race that same year. You can read a transcript online here. In 2010 he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
So who does a Nobel Prize winner read?
He reads William Faulkner: 
'Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand, because his technique stunned me. He was the first novelist whose work I consciously tried to reconstruct by attempting to trace, for example, the organization of time, the intersection of time and place, the breaks in the narrative, and that ability he has of telling a story from different points of view in order to create a certain ambiguity, to give it added depth.'
Jorge Luis Borges:
'Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one.... He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.'
Pablo Neruda:
'Pablo Neruda is an extraordinary poet. ...Neruda adored life. He was wild about everything—painting, art in general, books, rare editions, food, drink. Eating and drinking were almost a mystical experience for him. A wonderfully likable man, full of vitality — if you forget his poems in praise of Stalin, of course. 
'Neruda comes out of the Jorge Amado and Rafael Alberti tradition that says literature is generated by a sensual experience of life.'
And Octavio Paz: 
'Not only a great poet, but a great essayist, a man who is articulate about politics, art, and literature. His curiosity is universal.'
Llosa goes on to talk at length about his inspiration, process and technique, his language, his politics and his success...
'I think my greatest quality is my perseverance: I’m capable of working extremely hard and getting more out of myself than I thought was possible. My greatest fault, I think, is my lack of confidence, which torments me enormously. It takes me three or four years to write a novel — and I spend a good part of that time doubting myself. It doesn’t get any better with time; on the contrary, I think I’m getting more self-critical and less confident.' 
The interview was recorded 20 years ago, one hopes the Nobel has settled his self-doubt once and for all...
Check out the manuscript page from Llosa's 1988 novel In Praise of the Stepmother (above, click on image to enlarge).

Archived treasures

Love this 1966 edition of The Paris Review (No 39) I found in a secondhand book stall in New York a couple of years ago. 
Great cover art and scratchy thick textured pages. And look how fantastic the line-up is on the contents page! The letters of ee.cummings to Ezra Pound, an interview with Harold Pinter and poetry by Pablo Neruda - all published while they were not only alive and kicking but still writing new material. 
The magazine is still going strong today but it's fascinating to see who has contributed to past editions. Back issues, from as early as No 7 published in 1954, are still available via the website. I'd love to get my hands on that one - with illustrations by Picasso and Warhol - going for US$100, or No 28 1962 featuring an interview with Pound and fiction by Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges for US$80...
For now I'll content myself with reading the magazine's regular Art of Fiction series online via the Archive section (1953 onwards) which includes such contributors as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster and a myriad of other greats.

Libraries New York-style

Apparently in New York having bookshelves in an apartment constitutes a 'library'. At least according to real estate agents anyway. Check out these home libraries in the Big Apple, yours for the bargain price of a few million bucks... I'll take the bottom one thanks.

Hope...!

For all frustrated writers out there....a breath of hope from author Roger McDonald: 'Roger McDonald started the book he has just published more than 30 years ago.' - SMH, 13-14 November.

When Colts Ran started out as a long story and over the years he developed it into a novel. McDonald won the 2006 Miles Franklin Award for The Ballad of Desmond Kale. 

I haven't read any of his books but I like him already. Keep writing keep writing keep writing!

Go the Quiet Achievers...

I like the sound of this accolade. David Foster has won the 2010 Patrick White Literary Award, an annual prize currently valued at $18,000, set up by White using his Nobel winnings to honour writers who have made a significant, but inadequately recognised, contribution to Australian literature.
Over the past 30 years Foster has published 15 novels along with poetry, essays, non-fiction, scientific papers and radio plays. Now 66, he has 17 grandchildren, a doctorate in inorganic chemistry, is a drummer, motorbiker and a blackbelt in tae-kwondo. Until he earned a $60,000 grant from the Australian Council for the Arts Literature Board this year, he was delivering post in the Southern Highlands to support his current writing projects.
The SMH on Saturday said: 'Foster, who can be almost as grouchy as his late patron....said White intended it "as a kind of literary loser's compo"'.
No doubt White would have been pleased at Foster's win. In 1973 he wrote a line for the cover of Foster's debut work of fiction, North South West, and remarked of it 'One reason why I like Foster's novels is that he isn't afraid of sour milk and what's repulsive in life.'
Previous winners are John Romeril in 2008 and Gerald Murnane in 1999. Neither rings a bell? Exactly.

Industry top tens

American trade mag Publishers Weekly has produced lists of its top 10 books of 2010 in the categories of fiction, poetry, romance, sci-fi, non-fiction, religion, lifestyle and children's books. 
PW's overall Top Ten Books of the Year contains a mix of genres, some of which might be worth a read:
1. A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
2. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
3. Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand
4. The Surrendered, Chang-rae Lee
5. The Big Short, Michael Lewis
6. The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
7. Just Kids, Patti Smith
8. Man In The Woods, Scott Spencer
9. The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall
10. The Warmth Of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
Jennifer Egan's first-placed novel is about an ageing music producer and is described as 'unpredictable' and 'brilliant'. It's also earned some notoriety for containing a chapter written completely in PowerPoint.

Sculpture by the Sea

Inspired by some brilliant visual storytellers after a morning at Sydney's fabulous Sculpture by the Sea exhibition at Bondi and Tamarama... 

From top: splash, Tomas Misura. Misura says 'it explores the dynamics of a moment in time'; garden mandala, Ian Swift. Swift says 'mulch!'; what have they ever done for us, Sasha Reid. Reid says 'a portrait? Whoever made them important?'

So worth a look. Hurry! It ends on Sunday.

Not tonight Josephine

Flipping through a copy of Nigel Cawthorne's Sex Lives of the Great Dictators over the weekend, I came across a creepy piece of Napoleonic trivia... 
It's widely known that Napoleon Bonaparte was rumoured to have an astonishingly small appendage. Some say it was just a vicious story invented by the British, but no matter how sizeable - or not - it was in his heyday, 160 years after he died on St Helena it wasn't looking too good. Apparently Napoleon's penis was sliced off his corpse by the Abbot Vignali, preserved in a bottle, stored along with a small collection of his personal (material, not physical) belongings and served up for auction through Christie's in 1969. 
No, I didn't believe it either, but a little internet research says it is indeed so. Not surprisingly, the item was passed in and is last thought to have been seen in the hands of a leading New York urologist.
Google 'Napoleon's penis auction' and you'll find stories in which the specimen is variously described as resembling a 'shrivelled eel', a 'small dried-up object' and a 'tiny seahorse'. 
Gross huh? But it was worth a few minutes' investigation just to find this headline:
Napoleon's Boner-part.
Ding ding. I wish I'd said that.

Philosophers on film...

'Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigour and yet is unable to establish any results; it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life and yet is almost completely ignored. But perhaps what is strangest of all is the passion and intensity with which it is pursued by those who have fallen in its grip.' - Kit Fine, American philosopher.
Photographer Steve Pyke has spent the past 25 years capturing philosophers on film, resulting in his collection of 200 portraits of philosophers which will be published in book form in 2011. 
'Our museums are filled with busts and paintings of long forgotten wealth and beauty instead of the philosophers who have so influenced contemporary politics and society,' says Pyke. 
'My aim in this project has been the modest one of making sure, for this era at least, there is some record of the philosophers.'
In compiling the book Philosophy, Pyke asked his subjects why they had devoted their lives to philosophy.... check out an excerpt, it's an interesting read.

Cool bookmarks

Found these in the city at Card and Paper House. I have a rule....you can fold down the pages to mark your spot on a second hand book that's been pre-loved and already bares the scars... But new books, classic favourites and books borrowed from others are not to be messed with. That's why you can never have too many bookmarks...

Slow burning poetry...

How exciting! Picked up a copy of the latest issue of Heat magazine in the bookstore at the Museum of Contemporary Art today and found within it a poem written by the very talented husband of the very talented Birdie who created the new artwork for Rubyfire Writes (click here for a sneak preview - of the artwork, not the poem). 
Craig Billingham has already published one volume of poetry - his 2007 debut collection Storytelling - and is working on his second. 
Heat 23 features one of his new works, Poem With Ocean Views.
Craig is in esteemed company here, sharing mag space with the indescribably wonderful Anthony Lawrence. No, I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful Lawrence is.
Get your copy of Heat here. Do it, do it!