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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 Two]
To finish up, I can give you a quick, cynical, run down
of the big names in established Australian lit:
Patrick White: won the Nobel prize for literature (back whenever), fuck
knows why. He may be good I wouldn’t know. I have had a good willed run
at his books several times, and never got past the first 10 pages. I think he’s
like a boring and irrelevant version of DH Lawrence (DH Lawrence was
surely one of the best boat-rockers ever).
Miles Franklin: was a woman, and used a male sounding pseudonym for
mostly the same reasons as George Elliot did. Best known for her novel “My
Brilliant Career” (1901). In my heavily biased opinion this novel kicks arse
and is everything a novel from that era should have been. She tears down
the bullshit, she lets her anger show. It’s set in rural Australia, which is a
drag, but of course a lot of Australians lived in rural areas back then.
Ironically the Miles Franklin Award has become Australia’s richest literary
prize ($42,000AUD/$32,000USD) and is usually awarded to the kind of books
that Miles Franklin wouldn’t have even bothered to piss on.
Peter Carey: extracted Kryptonite from my brain with the novel “Bliss” (I
highly recommended it). He’s won all the awards, the Booker twice. And,
last I read, he teaches writing at one of the big Universities in the U.S., NYU I
think. Unfortunately he doesn’t write about contemporary life anymore, he
only writes about it metaphorically, via tales from Australian history. I can’t
read him no more, it’s just too high brow, but I have no doubt that he’s the
real thing. Sad to see him writing for the global network of fossilised
academic/literary boneheads.
Tim Winton: writes about fishing and surfing and whales and aborigines and
fishing and god and wheat paddocks and fishing and wind and utes and
kangaroos (mostly dead ones) and old pieces of wood and fishing, and does
it pretty damn well. In fact his novel “Cloudstreet” moved me, I’m not too
proud to say it. “Cloudstreet” is genius, I suspect. And I’d kill to have the
flow that Winton has. However, he is riding on his name now, most of the
time. His recent books (all best sellers and Booker prize shortlisters) just
don’t cut it. His novel “The Riders” was shithouse and his new big hit “Dirt
Music” is only good here and there. He tries to write tough contemporary
stories now, but the most out of control thing I’ve see a Winton character do
is get drunk on box wine in a public toilet with some young Aboriginal
dudes. It’s not exactly injecting meth into your eyeball and raping your
sister, but I suspect it only means Winton is a very big-hearted and caring
person who avoids life’s trouble and dirt. The fact that this suits the flower
pressing literary elite is undoubtedly only coincidental (no sarcasm
intended, honestly).
Frank Moorhouse: writes a pretty good short story, for an established dude.
Kate Grenville: has written novels that suffer from the literary pox. But I
know she’s good. Some of her short stories really kick it, as do,
occasionally, sections in her novel “Lillian’s Story”.
Christopher J. Koch: wrote a novel called “The Year of Living Dangerously”
set in South-East Asia. Good book, but can’t say it changed my life. It got
made into a film starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. The film left out
most of the novel’s subversive aspects, replaced them with car chases.
Robert Drew: doesn’t suck. His novel “Fortune” was fairly good. His short
stories are a bit, I don’t know, you can read them, you can even like them. I
recommend the short story collection “The Bodysurfers”. But I don’t
recommend it like recommend it recommend it.
Andrew McGahan: bangs the drums. I was stoked by his first novel “Praise”.
Definitely worth checking out. His third novel “Last Drinks” looks at a very
corrupt period in recent Australian political history, and it’s not too bad at all.
He’s from Brisbane and writes about Brisbane. He gets a bit fixated on
governmental politics, but I like that about him, I could think of worse
fixations, like, say, the riding-a-horse-though-a-paddock-with-a-bag-full-of-
dead-fish-talking-to-the-cockatoos-in-some-weird-slang-that-nobody-speaks-
any-more-cobber fixation.
Australian academics and lit critics aren’t deaf to these criticisms and, as I
attempt to wrap it up here, I can point you to a good article on the topic,
called ‘How to Fuck a Tuscan Garden’ from one of the established Australian
cultural journals “Overland” at: http://www.overlandexpress.org/mccann.htm
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