Hope 2011

Expanding on a snippet from the Sydney Festival event tonight, Festival Keynote: Hope 2011 - Stories That Must Be Told. MC Wendy Harmer quoted a line from Emily Dickinson's poem 254, oft referred to as Hope is the thing with feathers. 

Dickinson is a RubyfireWrites favourite, so here it is for you...

'Hope' is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me. 

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...

Talk fest

Two renowned writers televised from the Sydney Opera House in two days. A veritable feast of erudition. Stephen Fry and Tariq Ali. 
Stephen Fry. Polymath, writer, TV host, blogger, Twitterer and progenitor of a million other projects, was in Sydney to talk about language and his five Ws: Waugh, Wodehouse, Wilde, words and writing. 
Best bits:
His ability to not only quote ad nauseum from the three of his Ws who wrote before him, but also to continually demonstrate their relevance.
His quips. Peppering his conversation with admissions such as having three attributes which would render him infallible in Hollywood: gay, Jewish and bi-polar.
And his ENORMOUS brain. 
Just a pity he didn't bring along that Alan bloke from QI, he's a crackup.
Tariq Ali, who was a guest of the Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and whose latest tome is The Obama Syndrome, is a serious brainiac. I haven't read any of his books but I have read some of his editorials and opinion pieces - enough to know that I'm not qualified to comment on his commentary... Instead a couple of observations from tonight's show where he was the stand out panelist:
Ali knows more about Australia's foreign policy than KRudd.
He has a great voice and an impeccable turn of phrase - especially for an academic, eg - 'he made a nutty speech'. ...that comment was funny at the time. Maybe it was the accent.
Best call of the night goes to his opinion on the euthanasia bill debate: 
'In the short term we should have an experimental phase whereby we restrict euthanasia to politicians.'
QandA watchers now all aTwitter debating who should kickstart said trial...

Telling tales...

Saw this article about DBC Pierre at the Melbourne Writers Festival on lit blog The Outlet. In it they call him a wonderful lunatic. He of the 2003 Booker Prize winning Vernon God Little, which I haven't read, is pounding the pavement with his new novel called Lights Out In Wonderland which I'm thinking I might. Partly because he seems so nuts - in a crazy irreverent creative kind of way.
On Enough Rope in 2006 Andrew Denton described him as 'living proof that truth is stranger than fiction'. The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed him via telephone when he was in Scotland recently and said he sounded 'so sober he could only be very drunk'. In his defence, it was 3am by his clock. What else would one be doing up at that hour, in a bar, in Edinburgh?
DBC Pierre (aka Peter Finlay from South Australia - via Mexico, Spain, England, the West Indies and now Ireland) was born in a winery, raised in a mansion in Mexico City, had a ten-year-long house party to cope with his father's death, did loads of drugs, lived the life of the jet-set, fraudulently sold a friend's apartment and lived as a recluse for a time listening to Russian and German orchestral music. Among other things. 
And he's written four novels. If Hank from TV's Californication was a real living person I reckon they'd hang out. 
Can anyone out there recommend any of his books?

Newsflash

The program for the Sydney Writers' Festival was released today and tickets go on sale tomorrow. I plan to catch Alex Miller talking about his latest novel, Lovesong, and former broadcast journalist, Jana Wendt at the Opera House on her new book Nice Work. US writer Lionel Shriver, author of the harrowing We Need to Talk About Kevin, turns her hand to homeland affairs in a discussion session tagged We Need to Talk About America, which is bound to be lively (and hopefully less depressing than the book). Also keen to get along to one or two of the Reading Musters which have a line-up of local novelists.
Check out the program here.