 |  |  |  |  |
current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Cry Bloxsome, www.crybloxsome.com
An Angry Australian Writer Asks: Why Does Australian
Lit Make Me Want to Hurt Myself? [Part One]
It is probably worth saying straight out that if Australian literature was a
car it wouldn’t do more than 20 km/h, would carry you only to useless
places, and the dials would give you totally irrelevant information—like,
say, your altitude.
Contemporary Australian literature is depressingly conservative,
excessively high-brow, and ridiculously out of touch with the political
realities of everyday living. And then it has the added problem of trying to
suck up to the American market, because even a poor following in
America would add up to about ten times the sales from success here in
Oz (we have a population of 20 million, and it doesn’t read literature). So
basically as an Australian if I pick up an Australian book I have to read all
this shit about the outback and aboriginal tribes and the fucking wheat
fields and convicts and Captain Cook and kangaroos and whatever.
Anything that Australian authors and publishers think an American reader
might find charming or exotic.
Here’s quick review of the latest hot Aussie lit number, a novel called
“Rhubarb” (see if you can spot why I’m going out to the carport when I’m
done here to put nine inch nails through my eyeballs):
“Craig Silvey’s debut novel is set in Fremantle and has a cast of unusual
characters; Eleanor Rigby, a blind midget with a neurotic mother, the
musically gifted but agoraphobic Euan who obsesses over the perfect
cello, the shady deli owner who gets his just desserts, and the loveable
dog called Warren.”
(this is off the Australian Broadcasting Commission website, our ABC)
Essentially I’m saying that us poor Australians are trapped in the cage of
late capitalism with nothing to hold up our human spirits but the props of
narrative, and what kind of metal are our props made off: well, blind
midgets, cello obsessors, and loveable dogs. And then, as one laments
the state of a population that’s getting served blind midgets, cello
obsessors and loveable dogs, you realise that these books are also
winning huge literary prizes for revealing and promoting Australian
culture. Who’s culture, I ask? Not my friggen culture.
Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world (80% percent
of our population lives in cities, which are all on the coast [more or less]).
Sydney, our largest city, is apparently about the same size as Detroit. The
other Australian capitals (in order of size) are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth,
Adelaide, Darwin, Hobart, and Canberra. I live in Perth, it’s the only city on
the west coast.
It’s an urban life in a very clean and sunny setting, and I admit we do have
a relatively high standard of living, as long as you close your eyes to
certain things: TV, fast-food, welfare, shit jobs, heroine deaths, racism,
alcoholism, freeways, suburbs, lots of cops, corporate control, and of
course U.S. chain stores of every kind and for every aspect of your life.
So there is a double push for Australian novels to talk about life not in the
cities, and especially not in the suburbs, because there’s plenty of
nationalist academic encouragement for Australian writers to write about
things distinctly Australian (this is usually interpreted as meaning
kangaroo shooting and going fishing and riding a horse through a wheat
paddock while talking a whole lot of slang that no one actually speaks) and
then the other push, is the corporate push to write for the American
market. The two forces merge almost seamlessly into one big push, the
pushing of writers heads up their own arses.
It shits me to tears. It’s conservative and it’s high brow and it’s all false
Australian, all rural and pastoral or so fucking esoteric and metaphorical
that the novels say nothing about the issues that they supposedly deal
with. It’s imitating the worst aspects of American lit and then throwing on
an extra pile of false Aussie shit as well.
There’s not much point going to bookstores anymore, because no matter
where the writing is coming from geographically it is just too obviously
coming from the same place culturally; from the obedient mind of some
well-mannered market-tuned kisser of the conservative middle-class
ring.
If by some freakish chance you do find a book about urban Australian life
it is usually some excruciatingly fashionable café-set thing, politically
correct and neatly trimmed to fit over the heart of a middle class lady. Or
worse, a “post-modern tour de force” (which I think is actually academic
code language for: it bored me and I don’t know what it is or why the
author wrote it so lets give it a French sounding name and suggest, in a
non-committal way, that we loved it).
As far as I can tell, American literature has a big advantage over ours in
that it has a longer tradition which developed before the centralised
corporate ownership of the media and the ivy league control over taste,
which gives you guys something to fall back on as a point of reference to
what good writing is, you’ve got a long list of good names. There have
definitely been good Australian novelists too, but none that have really
made any waves in contemporary culture as a whole.
……………………………………………………………………………………….
Check out www.crybloxsome.com for some of the best Australian writing
happening today—actually, just some of the best writing
GO HERE TO ENTER THE MONDAY REPORT BOX.
