WEDNESDAY 30 JUNE

FRIDAY 18 JUNE

SATURDAY 19 & SUNDAY 20 JUNE

TUESDAY 22 JUNE

Carey gave the closing speech at Sydney Writers’ Festival this year and expressed one of his major fears regarding the future prospects of reading: as a nation, we are dumbing down. According to Carey, the more we seek out easily-entertaining, commercial books – or as Carey puts it, ‘cultural junk’ – over those classed as Literary or noteworthy, we are ‘literally forgetting how to read.’

After reading this, and as a bookseller, I admit nodding at the screen with immediate acknowledgement – I certainly sell my fair share of Stephenie Meyer each week. (Where’s my commission? Eh? Eh?) But a quick scan of the Top 10 this week from Bookseller & Publisher magazine showed similar evidence. It included: Spirit Bound: Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead; the entire Stieg Larsson Millennium crime trilogy, the first of which is currently showing at your local cinema; Our Family Table by Julie Goodwin – MasterChef winner of Season 1; and The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell, best-selling author of the Sex and the City series. Got it. We are sponging up the latest and greatest, and perhaps Carey would say, somewhat ‘philistine’ culture. But damn it’s popular.

While it warms my heart that there are people who care so passionately about the ultimate improvement of society, and not just any but our future generations of literary Australia, he takes it much further. Carey dreams of an almost Utopian realm where teachers are paid the big bucks merely for ‘loving Charles Dickens and passing that on to children.’ Again, sweet dreams they would be and a lot more teachers we would see! But to also hope that by next year, all children past the age of fourteen would be able to ‘understand and adore Shakespeare’, is a little rich. Pick the next fourteen-year-old you see and ask them to recite their favourite sonnet. Yeah right.

Opposing this argument, mass-selling popular fiction author Bryce Courtenay was asked to respond to Carey’s comments: ‘It’s absolute crap. A book has to stand between its own covers and you put it on your lap and if it doesn’t engage with you then it’s dead in the water. Now that goes for a classic as much as it goes for anything else.’ Again, I found myself nodding at this undoubtable fact. When we’re spending the dollars we’re spending these days on books, and given the little time many have to sit down and relax – we want to be guaranteed a good read. If I had a penny for every time someone asked for a book that would catch them with the first page or they’re gone… well, ask the publishers. They’re still looking. But really, if we look at recent figures, book sales, both online and in store, have definitely increased a considerable amount, with young adult novels topping the bestsellers. Harry Potter or not, our kids are definitely reading, and that’s a plus.

But hang on, what then is Courtenay saying about the canon, and I mean The Canon? All those books we were raised to believe we had to read? Some we got to, but the rest (James Joyce and Cervantes for me) that we haven’t gotten around to yet, is he saying – surely not – they’re not that important after all? We don’t have to blush each time we bump into some part of a conversation we just know we’d be much better at had we read that damn classic already?

Don’t worry, Courtenay elaborates, but it brings a whole new debate into question, and one that has done the laps on several occasions elsewhere already. He states: ‘There’s no such thing as popular writing versus literary writing. If I’m a popular writer then Peter Carey is an unpopular writer. If I’m a best-selling writer then he’s a worst-selling writer.’ Ouch.

I think we all know there’s a lot more to good writing than just measuring sales and this is the notion Carey wishes to preserve. Let’s hope future generations will be able to distinguish between the ‘cultural junk’ and the good stuff, or we’ll really begin to lose our culture of classics. They are canonised for a reason, will stand to be remembered for their brilliance and questioning their importance will cost you grief. And anyway, in case you disagree, without our historical gems, we’d have nothing to stray from in order to create something infinitely new.

On the other hand, as Courtenay says, who gives? At least we’re reading, and no, and not forgetting how at all. Merely choosing the stuff we know we will enjoy instantaneously. And hey, it’s a fast paced world and we need entertainment now.

If only we could merge these two great minds… I call it a tie.

What do you think?

Want more? Follow these links below.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/dumb-and-dumber-says-carey-20100523-w42v.html

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/alr/index.php/theaustralian/comments/a1

My father expected my mother to do all the cooking, but wanted to ensure meal times were not the dreaded taste bud stifling tribulations of his youth. Perhaps this explains his rather unromantic wedding gift to my mother of the entire set of Time-Life Foods of the World cook book series. The Time-Life books are a series of dual cook books, each set of two covering either a different region or country in the world. They are amazingly comprehensive for the era, in which they were published (the late ’60s), detailing food from regions ranging from Caribbean to Middle Eastern to Austrian cooking. The main book in each set discusses the food culture of the assigned country or region, colourfully illustrated with vibrant pictures; the second, smaller book, is a straightforward recipe book.

By the time I was born my father had dragged my unsuspecting mother and two sisters to the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) where my mother had cooked her way through the entire Time-Life series and become a talented and prolific cook. She employed a house girl to do the house work and clean up after her cooking and we kids – Jackie, Jo and I spent our time racing around outside working up the ravenous appetites only fresh air and nature can induce.

Each day Mum would cook us breakfast then would spend the day baking bread, making cheese, icecream, yoghurt, boiled sweets, doughnuts and an assortment of cakes and biscuits – all dictated by we three overindulged children. We would bring friends home from school for afternoon tea each day expecting her to produce a feast of at least three different kinds of Time-Life inspired goodies –American brownies and cheesecake, Viennese pastries and strudels and French éclairs – something she did time and time again without showing the slightest sign of ill humour, except once when one forthright guest requested a doggy bag. It was only at the age of 8 did it dawn on me that my popularity at school had more to do with mother’s culinary abilities than my sparkling personality.

After gorging ourselves on this afternoon tea one of us would be allowed to chose a three course dinner from a Time-Life cook book. I was banned from this privilege after once selecting fondue three times in a row – the combination of the oil, cheese and chocolate courses proving too much for everyone except me.

Often we children collaborated, depending on which phase we were going through. When Jo made friends with a Russian girl at school, we ate a lot of borscht, stroganoff and spiced honey cake. When we found out our favourite comic book hero Asterix the Gaul was actually French our mother was persuaded to cook complicated sauces we liked the look of in the Cooking of Provincial France edition. Sometimes, if we felt mother might be homesick, based on the fact there was a photograph of a woman who looked vaguely like our mother in the Cooking of China edition, we would choose dishes from this book; although its lack of suitable cakes and puddings was a great mark against it. The Cooking of the Middle East was popular as we got to eat with our hands as the sheikhs in the photos did, and we loved the colour of The Cooking of the Caribbean Islands. On weekends there were always cocktail parties and dinners at ours, our neighbours who traveled being the most popular guests as they would be able to import ingredients unheard of in our remote part of the world.

My father’s contract in PNG finished when I was eight and we moved to Australia where there was no hired help. Even worse my mother started to work a 9-5 job. It was a nasty shock for us kids. No more afternoon tea parties, three course meals were relegated to weekends and Mum decided what the family would eat each night, depending on what she’d managed to grab from the local supermarket that day. The Time-Life cook books were stored away in the garage, a sad reminder of the glory days when our senses of smell, taste and sight were constantly stimulated by our mother’s remarkable concoctions.

My sisters and I soon became accustomed to the bland flavours of Australian suburban fare. Breakfast was cereal or toast, lunch was Vegemite sandwiches made with shop-bought white bread, afternoon tea was rubbery pikelets scavenged at a friend’s place. Our family dinner was usually something a little more interesting than the meat and three vege eaten by our average neighbour. We’d get curry, stir fried vegies, Spanish pork chops or Irish stew, recipes mum remembered from her cook books. But we always looked forward to the weekends when the good old days would return – although sometimes instead of getting mum’s old cooking back, we’d have to go to neighbourhood barbeques where we would eat the traditional Australian burnt lamb chops and steak accompanied by lettuce and tomato salads.

Despite the lack of stimulating cuisine we three girls settled into our schools and the neighbourhood and the ways of suburban Australia, which is why when our parents announced my father had won a contract to work in Pakistan and we would all be moving there soon, we were less than thrilled. Leaving our friends and worse, the hard fought acceptance we had finally gained in this place seemed most unfair and we cried, whinged, sulked and argued with our parents, begging to stay and using every form of emotional blackmail our devious little minds could summon. My parents were taken aback by our reaction, very nearly relenting, until our mother came back with her own secret weapon. The Cooking of India (which included Pakistan) was rescued from the garage and for a few weeks she seduced us all with almond and sultana jeweled pilaf, fragrant curries, succulent tandoori chicken, soft chewy chapati and puree breads and sickly sweet milk and nut desserts. By the end of her campaign, the three of us decided that Pakistan wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Today my sisters and I are grown up, we finally understand our mother has a personality and is not just a walking larder, and we laugh about our childhood eccentricities – but swear we want to indulge our own children in a similar way. What we don’t laugh about is who will get our mother’s Time-Life cook book collection. Mum brought up her will one day and asked if there was anything special any of us wanted, a fracas ensued when we realised we all wanted the same thing – her Time-Life cook book series. Negotiations are still continuing but right now it looks like I’m getting the European countries and may yet have rights to the Middle East. I’m planning an offensive next week when I see Mum. If I play my cards right I may be able to get Russia too.

This article has been reposted.

THURSDAY 10 JUNE

SATURDAY 12 JUNE

TUESDAY 15 JUNE

WEDNESDAY 16 JUNE

If you went to one of these events, tell us about it! Or let us know in advance
about any event in the city or your neighbourhood.
Comment on this post or email openbookmelbourne@gmail.com. 

Being kept in the dark about Penguin’s latest typo scandal = big, big low.

In brief, a Penguin cookbook, The Pasta Bible, has been caught up in a whole lot of controversy since a mortified customer notified the publishers, and the media, about an interesting typo. In a recipe for Tagliatelle pasta, the ingredient list called for “salt and freshly ground black people,” as opposed to just plain pepper. Given the awful connotations – racism, cannibalism, need I continue – Penguin was forced to pulp all 7 000 copies of the book.

Bob Sessions, head of Penguin Australia, looked upon the issue with a bold amount of rationality and some straightforward sense for what it was – a “silly mistake,” and truly “quite forgivable.” He also stated that those personally offended by the typo were “small-minded.”

Interesting then, that after he made it clear there would be no recalling of books from stores, that the pulping of the existing copies had already cost a mere $20 000, that my co-workers and I were immediately ordered to remove all copies of the book from the shelves. Unaware of the reasoning at the time, we sadly discovered the reasons for the book’s sudden haul from Channel Ten’s Good News Week, and not from our own employers.

So what’s the big deal? Sessions wanted it swept under the rug quickly and discreetly, as any other one-word typo in a c-grade cookbook should be. Yet at floor-level, booksellers Australia-wide were left embarrassingly ill informed and curious about this apparently taboo typo.

Had the error been with any other word, in any other sentence, would any of this have come to attention?

A signature I made with a digital pen

Just imagine we can purchase a book instantly online and send it to friends with a digital signature (or anything you want to write), isn’t it much more convenient, and time/money saving than before? Not to mention we don’t have to rely on the lousy job that the post offices are doing (considering Australia Post either sent my parcels to the wrong post office or kept my parcels without telling me, I think I’m entitled to criticise).

There’s another article from New York Times saying with the arrival of ebooks and ebook readers, people can’t judge a book by its cover anymore. I actually feel happy about this. Isn’t it great to read any book anywhere we want without worrying that other people may see the cover? Not that I always read embarrassing books on public transport, but I do feel uneasy when I’m reading books with weird titles like “Where Underpants Come From” or “How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends”. The former one is actually a travel journalism but the cover features a pair of red underpants with the pattern of  the national flag of China. Well, as a Chinese person, it’s certainly not a book that I feel proud to be reading. The title of the latter is pretty self-explanatory and reading it equals to admitting to everyone around you that you are socially awkward (although in my defence, I was reading it to learn how to talk to lawyers in a function). Oh, not to mention the blush on my face when I took comic books out from my bag in a crowded train.

What I’m trying to say is that when you are reading some seriously profound book written by a philosopher, then good for you — everyone will secretly look at you with admiring eyes. But many ordinary people are just like me — reading books to indulge in our own obsessions. And we would really love to enjoy our own reading and stay away from the prying eyes.

However, I think it is natural that people feel confused and somehow begin to doubt the merits of digitalisation. The truth is that it won’t be a life-or-death situation for traditional books, which are going to be around for a long, long time in the future. Ebooks are simply an option. People may love to carry an iPad on public transport but rather not use it when drinking coffee. In the end, it all comes down to personal choices.

Speaking of iPad, it is finally available in Australia, why not walk into an Apple store and try it?

FRIDAY 4 JUNE

SATURDAY 5 JUNE

SUNDAY 6 JUNE
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MONDAY 7 JUNE

WEDNESDAY 9 JUNE

If you went to one of these events, tell us about it! Or let us know in advance
about any event in the city or your neighbourhood.
Comment on this post or email openbookmelbourne@gmail.com.
 

  

It is located near the corner of Elizabeth and Little Collins Street, but the basement store will be easily missed if you don’t pay attention to the shop signs hanging above.

Walking down the stairs past the display windows that ignite your evil desire to break the glass and take everything inside, you will see a huge Minotaur statue standing at the entrance and guarding the shop (hence no such evil desire in the shop).

Display window at the entrance of Minotaur

It is relatively easy to find what you are looking for because products are logically categorised and displayed in different sections. Staff there are very helpful and knowledgeable as well.

What impresses me the most is the product range Minotaur has for each fandom. For example, a Doctor Who fan usually can find books and DVDs in average stores; but in Minotaur, there are posters, real-person-size character displays, fictions (Doctor Who and Torchwood), audio books, DVDs, calendars, character toys, Tarids (with sounds), screwdrivers (with lights and sounds), and even David Tennant’s biography! (Have I mentioned I have got all those?)

The other thing that’s worth mentioning about the store is that Minotaur is definitely not exclusively for geeks. If looking at their anime range, there are large amount of books for girls as well, not to mention their shounen-ai manga selections.

No matter what you are into, Minotaur is the kind of shop in which you wish you have endless amount of cash (or credit cards with no limits).

Natalie Merchant's 'Leave Your Sleep'

Natalie Merchant (lead ingénue from 10, 000 Maniacs) has just released a new double album Leave Your Sleep (or it comes as a single abbreviated version – don’t buy it, do yourself a favour, and savour the real deal) last month from Nonesuch Records. This is a brilliant musical evocation of diverse poems by famous, not-so-famous, and downright obscure poets across the English-speaking world: including from, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Graves, Edward Lear, e e cummings, Ogden Nash, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to Arthur Macy, Charles Carryl, Lydia Huntley Sigourney.

You may rightly be wondering why I’m reviewing a CD in a book blog. The straight up answer is that Merchant has undoubtedly produced the standout CD (both literary and musical) so far of the year, by a long shot. It’s not only beautifully packaged with an 80 page booklet detailing poet biographies and lyrics, but your ear alone can instantly inform you of the sheer quality, thought and infectious creativity that Merchant poured into this project that lasted over five years of research and writing, kept afloat by her own funds.

The music itself spans many different genres befitting the diverse lyric material (dancing bears, witches, children-devouring Giants, loss of childhood innocence), with guest performers and star-studded musicians; each song specifically crafted to evoke the lyrics and reflect its author. It seems to me that the poems were just itching to be released into their new forms, as if slyly waiting at the back of the dusty library stack for Ms Merchant to unleash their potential.

The songs and their arrangements sound as if they’ve been around forever and a day, so instantly comfortable and memorable are they. ‘The Janitor’s Boy’ written by a precocious young American poetess Nathalia Crane—whose own Mother was often misguidedly mistaken as the poet in question—is brilliantly arranged into a classic Jazz age number, with trumpeter extraordinaire Wynton Marsalis at the sonic forefront.

The project began as a way for Merchant to continue her poetic conversations with her own daughter, filled with their selection of eccentric poems and characters, and now it’s allowing us to eavesdrop surreptitiously on their private fount of creativity. The title of the project itself —and the resulting division of the two CDs—comes from a poem by Mother Goose:

‘Girls and boys, come out to play,

The moon doth shine as bright as day;

Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,

And come with your playfellow into the street.’

While the project was inspired by childhood, darker themes of innocence lost and the ever-present reality of death are explored alongside those childish themes that are quirky, querulous and downright fun.

Highly recommended: infectious, plus it will reach out to the very young in all of us. Five stars plus!

Listen to the interview (click on the Natalie Merchant link below) with British literary magazine Granta that Merchant recorded; fascinating stuff.

Natalie Merchant from Granta magazine on Vimeo.