Finger-wagging judgment, literary genius, and cuntry music
The giveaway is a copy of 'The Extinction of Irena Rey' by Jennifer Croft
It’s Sydney Writers Festival week! I just raced back to my desk after seeing Lauren Groff (again, because she was so good in Melbourne) and my own panel is tomorrow. A bunch of Certified Legends (people who I’ve met on my trips and at my workshops) are meeting up on Friday afternoon and that’s going to be swell.
I also want to share the links to two interviews I did over the last six weeks that I particularly enjoyed. This one with Steven Lang in Maleny was great. Steven’s questions about The Work were insightful and thoughtful and meaningful and I was sometimes challenged—in the best way—answering them. This conversation is about the novel and art and the craft of writing.
And this chat for the new What the ELLE? podcast run by Grace O’Neill, which is more about my career and freelancing and the piece I wrote for the relaunch edition of ELLE Australia about influencers and public intellectuals. Grace is such a brain and a lot of fun.
Thank you to all the News & Reviews readers who pitched to me for next week’s CuskRama special edition. It was a real delight to read your ideas and select two. If you missed out this time, turn your minds to the amazing works of Caoilinn Hughes, because that special edition will come around in August in time for her trip to Australia and appearance at Byron Writers Festival.
Out from Behind the Paywall
I’m sitting on a goldmine of beautiful work from past editions of News & Reviews Magazine so I’ve decided in each week’s regular edition I’ll bring something out from behind the paywall for you to read for free.
This week it’s one of my travel ‘dispatches’, because they’re some of the most popular paywalled content, and I’m resuming work on my Antarctica novel so I’m thinking a lot about that time last year. (The dispatch from Antarctica itself is a bit special and personal though, so that’s here and still paywalled.) Enjoy these amazing pictures of penguins and elephant seals!
Good News
I know it happened last week, but I’m covering this glorious story again here so that the word continues to spread, and the Barbara Streisand Effect continues to grow: Award-winning artist Vincent Namatjira painted a portrait of Gina Rinehart that she didn’t appreciate, and because she’s grossly rich she figured she could ‘demand’ the National Gallery of Australia take it down. Here’s the Guardian explainer of how it all backfired and went deliciously, internationally viral. My friend Kieran Pender wrote a piece about the strange pressure some Olympians have been under to advocate for Rinehart because she has given them so much money: ‘Two years ago Rinehart’s mining company, Hancock Prospecting, became a major partner of the Australian Olympic Committee in a deal that runs until 2026.’ Let’s use this as an opportunity not just to mock a 1% mining magnate, but also to celebrate Namatjira. He was the first Aboriginal artist to win the Archibald prize and his paintings often use ‘satirical humour as a commentary on power’. Very nice.
The new fifteenth Dr Who is Black and gay. Rwandan-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa is the first in both categories and I think the ‘both’—the and—is key here. So often when we see progress (with regards to diversity, in any profession) people are only allowed to be one type of ‘other’. You might have one curvy model, or one older-than-40 model on a runway, but she’s never curvy and 50. A CEO can sometimes be a woman but usually only a tall, thin, white woman. A superhero or villain might be a person of colour, but still tick every single other traditionally straight-and-masculine box. We love an and! Go Gatwa!
I stumbled across this graph and wanted to share it because it is nice and good sometimes to look at how far we’ve come. According to Our World in Data, ‘The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. Since then, more than 30 other countries have followed suit.’ Look at that beautiful, beautiful trajectory.
Bad News
The International Criminal Court (‘ICC’) prosecutor has requested arrest warrants for Israel’s PM Netanyahu and their defence minister, and three Hamas leaders, because there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that these men were responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The judges who decide such things took a few weeks to grant a warrant for Putin, for example, so we are now waiting for their ruling. According to the New York Times, ‘If they are issued, the warrants would put both the Israeli officials and Hamas leaders at risk of being arrested and sent to The Hague for trial if they travel to one of the court’s 124 member nations, which include most European countries.’ Australia is a signatory too, but Albanese side-stepped questions about the news. And in the meantime? As the prosecutor says, Israel is still ‘intentionally targeting civilians and using starvation as a weapon’. People are trapped. Aid isn’t being distributed properly. Devastation continues.
New Caledonia has been in a state of deadly violent protests for over a week now. The country is the world’s third largest producer of nickel and is one of five island territories in the Indo-Pacific ‘held’ by France since colonisation in the 1940s. ‘The territory has a population of almost 300,000 people, of whom the Indigenous Kanak make up about 40% and those of European origin 24%.’ The French Government approved a constitutional amendment that would allow residents of 10 years to vote in provincial elections. As the ABC summarise, ‘The amendment, which some local leaders fear will dilute the vote of the Indigenous Kanak, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long tussle over France’s role in the territory.’ The nickel boom in the 70s brought long-standing tensions to the surface. A state of emergency has been declared.
In further news that BigTechBros don’t respect us, this just in: Last year, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Her was his favourite movie. It’s the one where Scarlett Johansson played an AI voice assistant that a man falls in love with. OpenAI asked Johansson if they could use her voice for one of their new products. She said ‘no’. They charged ahead and did what they wanted anyway. According to the New York Times, ‘The company approached her again two days before the debut of Sky, but this time… didn’t even wait for her official “no” before releasing a voice that sounds so similar to hers that it even fooled her friends and family.’ And according to the ABC, Johansson said ‘OpenAI “reluctantly” agreed to take down the Sky voice after she hired lawyers who wrote to Mr Altman asking about the process by which the company came up with the voice.’ Stop being creepy assholes!
Bad Review
This is a small, perhaps odd thing for me to be annoyed by, but there was a finger-wagging tone to Sheila Heti’s piece about Alice Munro in the New York Times last week that got under my skin in a bad way.
This next part made me feel ~personally attacked~ for obvious reasons (lol):
A fiction writer isn’t someone who can write anything—movies, articles, obits! She isn’t a person in service to the magazines, to the newspapers, to the publishers or even to her audience. She doesn’t have to speak on the political issues of the day or on matters of importance to the culture right now but ought first and most to attend seriously to her task, which is her only task, writing the particular thing she was most suited to write.
I think there is a fetishisation of the writing life going on here, and it’s only a slight variation on the ‘starving artist’ theme. It’s only a slight variation on ‘stay in your lane’. None of us can fully know each others’ financial situations, but I can say for sure that if an Australian Alice Munro was alive and working right now there is no fucking way she’d be able to afford to only and exclusively ‘write the particular thing she was most suited to write’. The writing life for most of us is hard enough as it is, without successful people telling us from on high that we’re sell-outs!
And besides, the world is full of amazing authors doing ‘service to the magazines’. Hanya Yanagihara’s work as the editor of T Magazine so clearly steeps her in creativity and culture in a way that comes through brilliantly in her ambitious fictional worlds and characters. Maggie Shipstead freelances as a travel writer, then releases Great Circle, in which an Aviatrix goes compellingly all around the world. These are just two I’ve plucked from the top of my head! There are countless others whose ‘newspaper’ work informs their ‘particular thing’.
This is Heti’s position on the job of a fiction writer:
Fiction writers are people, supposedly, who have things to say; they must, because they are so good with words. So people are always asking them: Can you say something about this or about this? But the art of hearing the voice of a fictional person or sensing a fictional world or working for years on some unfathomable creation is, in fact, the opposite of saying something with the opinionated and knowledgeable part of one’s mind. It is rather the humble craft of putting your opinions and ego aside and letting something be said through you. Ms. Munro held to this division and never let the vanity that can come with being good with words persuade her to put her words just everywhere, in every possible way.
Remember when we were all miserable in lockdown and Zadie Smith released Intimations, and for a fortnight we were all held by that together? I remember Smith was talking about how suffering couldn’t be counted or compared. I remember that there were both interesting things and limitations to the virus analogies she deployed. I remember comparisons to other times humanity had been so challenged in history. It was excellent that she shared her opinions at that time.
Today Lauren Groff remarked that ‘all fiction is historical fiction’ because all stories are created from ‘the urgencies of the present’. A great novelist is an historian and I, for one, am grateful and grounded when historians help me understand the precedent for the present.
Heti admires Munro because ‘she still shines as a symbol of artistic purity and care’. I think this particular word—purity—is dangerous. I would love to live in a country (or a world) in which someone who was exceptionally great at writing short stories could feed a family of five on their artistic care alone. Until then, I’m certainly not going to shame creatives who have a varied appetite for writing work—either chosen or forced by circumstance. When any of us try to particularise what a ‘real’ or ‘pure’ artist is or isn’t, we betray the great spirit of creativity that ought to unite us.
Good Reviews
Holy smokes this book is so totally fresh and wild and unpredictable! I only started reading The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft on Monday, and I’m going to be on a panel with her tomorrow and I can’t wait to meet her and hear her talk. The premise of the novel is wild—a group of translators go to this author’s house every year, which is in a forest on the border of Belarus, and they all sort of worship this author and are in love with her, and it’s a bit freaky with mushrooms and the natural world, and something mysterious and bad happens. It takes ‘literary thriller’ to a whole new level. On top of this brilliant-but-odd premise is a genius-idiosyncratic use of English. I had to look up three new words in the first three chapters alone. Croft is the award-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk, so you know your in the hands of a sort of meta master right from the start. It isn’t an ‘easy’ read, because it’s so unpredictable and special and unusual, but I promise you it’s worth the reward. Oh—and it’s funny, too. You’re welcome.
For all the fantasy and historical fiction readers among us, I think you’ll get a lot out of listening to this interview with Leigh Bardugo on The Book Review podcast. I dropped out of regular listenership of this show since the host and format changeover so was glad I checked back in for this interview episode. (As much as Pamela Paul is problematic-as-fuck, the old format and production was excellent and I miss it.) Bardugo gives generous, insightful, and sometimes rightly-righteous answers to the host’s slightly underbaked questions. It made me really want to read The Familiar. Please let me know in the comments if you have!
With the exception of discovering Chappell Roan last year, I’m pretty behind-the-times with music releases. Imagine my delight when late last week I stumbled upon a sub-genre of country music (which I don’t even listen to) aptly called CUNTry music. Interest—piqued. So what if Dasha has over 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify? She’s news to me! I’m interested in hearing about girls in small towns with big dreams leaving their deadshit boyfriends in the dust. I’m interested in what Abby Anderson has to say about hot women in Mexico! This is the entry-point playlist I recommend. Hi everyone, my name is Bri, and actually, I’m a cowgirl. :)
Upcoming Special Edition and Giveaways
The winner of last week’s giveaway, a copy of Appreciation by Liam Pieper, is #80 out of 150. I’ve emailed you, Colleen Heaney!
This week’s giveaway is a copy of The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft. Enter with your name and email address here and I’ll draw a winner at random next week.
Heti's comments are so baffling to me. I am in AWE of writers who can write across multiple genres, media, etc. The talent that takes is massive! I can barely write a coherent work email most days, let alone write an email, and an editorial and maybe a novel!
Also, I am immediately drawn to something written by someone I've read before and enjoyed, because to me it's almost a guarantee I'm going to enjoy whatever x is. I don't think I've ever sat down and picked up a piece of content and gone 'oh I can't believe they'd debase themselves by writing a screenplay when clearly they're a biographer!'. What utter crock!
And rant continuing, but the idea that you can't do anything but that one thing you're "good at" - well we'd just be bereft of any sort of events that support the industry - who does she think are the driving forces behind the arts industry? Ergh - I could keep going but I won't!
There is something about new/ diverse country that is so cool and compelling. Orville Peck was my most listened to last year so I can’t wait to dive into this playlist.
And this book sounds FANTASTIC! Right when I had to find something meaty to choose for book club- we’ve been agreeing too much lately (including on The Work- 100% loved)!