National student prize show 2012

The Wagga Wagga gallery housing the national glass collection filled by excellent student work from around Australia. Into The Woods by Spike looked very good among very good other pieces.  Good show

The road less travelled

Even it needs fuel. Twit!

Student day

Too many ideas compete for space within this adled, ageing brain of mine.  I'm waiting for a ten o'clock tutorial to start; sitting in the lae-summer sun on the balcony of the (allegedly notorious) Manning Building of Sydney University.  It's early (for a university) on a Friday morning.  Whatever it is that gives this place its reputation is, I imagine, still tucked up in bed - oblivious to the hangover waiting in the corners of conscousness to testify to excesses of an undergraduate's Thursday night.

I've read and re-read my tutorial presentation on Thomas Pynchon's The crying of Lot 49.  It's as ready as it's ever going to be; too long but ready.  I killed some time between my student union's breakfast of fried egg, tomato, hash brown (insipid yellow is closer to the mark) and toast and now by reading articles on The Guardian web site; a piece on the short stories of William Trevor, another on The Dead by James Joyce and a review by Peter Bradshaw (a man not easy to satisfy) of the new teen fiction move, The Hunger Games (to which he gave four stars out of five).

These different stimuli fought for territory within me.  Two thoughts emerge or stick.  One is an interest in the idea of paralysis in the short stories of James Joyce.  Critics don't mean spinal cord injury or any othe physiological phenomenon.  And linked to that I suppose was an observation in te Trevor article about the creative paralysis arising from the lack or absence of moral conviction.  Does that ring a bell for me?

I should reflect less perhaps.  It's a warm, sunny morning on my day as a student.  I have a tutorial to lead.  THere are harder ways to go through life.  Pynchon calls ...

Make it Real: How to video

The novel in the age of the Internet

One of the reasons I've been reading The Guardian for nearly 40 years is that I can read articles like Ewan Morrison's which make me re-consider my own understanding / position. One of the beauties of The Guardian in the age of the Internet is that I can sit here in Sydney reading a response from someone going by the name of BookAvatar that makes me re-consider my re-considering.

Read the article here: Factual fiction: writing in an information age

So, like many in the modern world, I'm not quite sure where the novel form now sits or where it may end up (not that I mean to suggest there is a final destination). There's merit in both cases (by which I don't mean to sit on a fence but to allow the possibility that seemingly contradictory conditions can apply at the same time).

There is one point in BookAvatar's critique I'd want to question or have clarified. BookAvatar wrote:

Nothing has profoundly changed us as human beings which is why the same stories played out in Greek theatres 2500 years ago still ring true to us.

I probably agree but I didn't read into Ewan Morrison's article a contrary assertion. I read him as saying that how (possibly timeless) human stories are told may need to / must change in the post-internet age if the story-telling is to ring true. Good writers (apologies for the un-defined values-laden term there) may succeed in doing so in a way that proves not to become dated, fashionable or merely stylistic. We read Dickens today. No one will read Jeffrey Archer in 20 years time. Both were best-selling sensations in their times (bizarrely in the latter case).

I'm half way through reading Roxana by Daniel Defoe (1724), one of the modern novel form's early practitioners. I know this will sound a bit daft but it brought to mind James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) because of the ways in which it mixes forms and methods of telling (there are several narrators, sometimes on the same page; at one point it adopts the form of a play; past, present and future tenses can exist in just one paragraph; the principal narrator often breaks the 'fourth wall' to speak directly to the reader). It's not too fanciful to imagine both novels imprinted with hypertext links to people, places and background that could, if done well, enhance the reading experience. I know that when I was re-reading Ulysses last year I went to Google maps at one point to retrace the steps taken by Leopold Bloom. I think that added something. I'd also add that Faber's wonderful iPad app for The Wasteland adds to one's reading of the work in a fragmented, imagiste, symboliste manner that is entirely and brilliantly consistent with the poem.

My point? I guess it is that we do indeed read in new ways and that all literary forms simultaneously reflect their origins / traditions but also anticipate new ways of telling stories. Oedipus the king will be told and re-told as long as we're story-telling but it's entirely reasonable and rather exciting to imagine that it can be done via a hypertext link to a youtube video of a re-creation using vegetables as well as in the original by Sophocles. I prefer the latter and get more from it but there's a place for Oedipus the potato.