It has to be said that of all the nonsense written by various parties in the course of this debate - not just during the current Productivity Commission enquiry, but over the last 20 years - it would be hard to beat the exquisite madness being served up by the Australian Publishers Association (though I have to admit Peter Carey is probably still in the lead - see my blog entry of Jan 28.)
APA executive Jose Borghino issued the following statement this week in response to the Commission's draft report. Just about every phrase, every clause, every sentence is wrong. Not just wrong in understanding, in judgement, in rhetoric, but factually wrong.
My comments are in italics throughout:
‘How can the Government take seriously a ‘Discussion Draft' that is so ideologically pre-determined (no it isn't, it's just Economics 101) that it says, words to the effect that: We really don't know what the industry looks like or how big it is (the commission outlines how it went to great pains to estimate the size of the industry from a variety of sources), but let's destroy the back list (introducing competition is not destroying anything), make copyright worthless after a year (removing the PIRs after 12 months has nothing to do with removing 'copyright'), discourage exports and overseas rights sales (the commission, naively, suggests delaying, if publishers wanted to do that) boost Asian printers and American book-packers (even if this were true - which it isn't - is it necessary to go there?), exacerbate the leakage of books through Amazon (er...how exactly?), ensure Rudd and Gillard's education revolution is based on Third World materials that have been stripped of any high-quality online teaching aids (colorful but wrong, and yet another unjustified slur not just on Asians but on Australia's teachers and academics), make the whole system more complicated rather than more streamlined (in fact no more complicated than the current one) , and export skilled jobs in printing and publishing to our major competitors in Asia? (there it is again!)'--
(Borghino also claims that the commission's estimate of the size of the industry at $2.5 billion is way overstated. He claims it is only $1.7 to $2.0 billion. How way out of touch the PC is! The commission is clearly measuring retail and end-consumer revenues which Borghino confuses with publishers' net receipts - a common error.)
The APA should do a lot better than this. It's really not helping, and it's greatly lowering the quality and tone of the debate.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Productivity Commission's Discussion Draft, March 2009
The Productivity Commission deserves to be congratulated for a generally calm, measured and robust draft report on the Parallel Importation Restrictions (PIRs).
There are some real weaknesses and confusions however. Allow me to address them in turn:
THE BACK LIST RECOMMENDATION
Publishers will not be happy about the removal of PIRs from the back list, and I can appreciate why. Many back list titles sell in very large volumes, frequently propelled as they are by new titles from popular authors. Publishers won't appreciate being told by the Commission, on no evidence, that back list titles generally sell in 'small volumes'. Many key titles, in Australia's trade paperback format, will suddenly get keen competition from far cheaper US paperbacks. The disruption here will quite possibly be much more serious than from any removal of the PIRs from the front list. Yet the Commission claims to be concerned about disruption.
ASIA
The Commission makes far too much of Asia as a potential source of cheaper textbooks if the PIRs are abolished. The fact is that educational publishers have NEVER relied on the 30/90 day provisions since their establishment in 1991. They've never needed to. New texts published in the US or the UK are published at an optimal time for the northern hemisphere academic year. They are not flown into Australia in 'commercial' quantities for sale within 30 days, as the comparable Australian academic year starts six months later. If any copies are flown in and sold to customers they would be the exception, usually because the US or UK text is published later or earlier than normal, so catching a semester just starting in Australia. Usually a small number of copies are imported for distributing complimentary copies to academics to promote sales in six to eight months' time.
So supply from Asia could technically happen now, but it doesn't. Campus booksellers rely on the fine metrics of supply efficiencies for profitability. They are not going to throw these away for a possible few extra dollars of margin which may look tempting on paper but would be soon eaten up by supply realities. Secondly, if it did start to happen, global educational publishers would inhibit it very effectively by simply refusing to supply Asian-based wholesalers out of their Asian subsidiary companies (the only possible source of the lower-priced editions) any quantities in excess of identified Asian course needs. This happened very effectively a few years ago when certain Asian wholesalers began supplying texts online to individual students based in the US. The supply was effectively strangled, as it also was to supply out of the UK and Europe. Tertiary publishers are in the unique position of knowing precisely the ultimate customer destination of every text. They know each adoption everywhere, and the enrollments. That's the precision of the business.
Supply from Asia is a myth. Theoretically possible, but highly improbable.
REMAINDERS.
The Commission misunderstands the effect of allowing remainders in, and it simply subverts its genuine desire to enhance competition when it argues that remainders are a legitimate source of it. Sure, authors don't get a royalty on remainder sales, but imported remainders could seriously undercut the normal royalty flow from continuing sales of the regular-priced Australian edition. This is the issue, not whether the author's royalty has encompassed the remainder end of a particular edition's journey. The critical point for Australia, without the PIRs, is the frequency, size and effect of the issue and whether it could it be mitigated by contractual , 'naming and shaming', or other ways. (By the way the draft misquoted my submission on this point. I was referring to possible non-remainder or buy-back clauses in rights contracts to inhibit any sale to a remainder dealer in the first place).
THE 12 MONTH FRONT LIST RECOMMENDATION
In arguing for 'prudence' on more thorough reform, the PC accepts too many assertions by the industry at face value, without subjecting them to rigorous analysis. As a result it puts far too much credence on disaster scenarios if the PIRs were abolished, and too readily accepts claims that significant local publishing activity, and thus cultural externalities, would be undermined.
It hides behind 'lack of up-to-date data' on the industry, when more data is not what is needed, rather clearer thinking. 'Better information' won't remove the claimed 'uncertainty about the significance of the impacts of the PIRs, how the industry would respond to their abolition, and how large the accompanying adjustment costs would therefore be'. There needed to be a recognition by the Commission that key players in the industry, as seen in the vast majority of the submissions, are conceptually confused on the fundamental issue of territorial copyright, how it is established, and the part played by the PIRs. As the Draft says at one point, in Section 3.2, 'by adding to what the holder of the publication and reproduction rights can control, the PIRs thus potentially add to the value that those rights might have in the marketplace'. Unfortunately most submissions are arguing for the retention of territorial copyright rather than the PIRs, as if they were one and the same. I would have liked to see the Commission address this confusion rigorously and analytically, much as it admirably did on many other issues, such as on the value and methodology of international pricing comparisons. In failing to do so I fear it has given too much weight to the possible 'disruption' that may be caused by the 'total abolition' option.
Fundamentally, there is a mismatch between the Commission's constantly repeated views of the negativities and costs of the PIRs and the timidity of their final recommendations. This is disappointing. They are confident and on firm ground in their economic analysis, but go to water in the face of specific publishing industry claims from participants that are allowed to stand without question.
There are some real weaknesses and confusions however. Allow me to address them in turn:
THE BACK LIST RECOMMENDATION
Publishers will not be happy about the removal of PIRs from the back list, and I can appreciate why. Many back list titles sell in very large volumes, frequently propelled as they are by new titles from popular authors. Publishers won't appreciate being told by the Commission, on no evidence, that back list titles generally sell in 'small volumes'. Many key titles, in Australia's trade paperback format, will suddenly get keen competition from far cheaper US paperbacks. The disruption here will quite possibly be much more serious than from any removal of the PIRs from the front list. Yet the Commission claims to be concerned about disruption.
ASIA
The Commission makes far too much of Asia as a potential source of cheaper textbooks if the PIRs are abolished. The fact is that educational publishers have NEVER relied on the 30/90 day provisions since their establishment in 1991. They've never needed to. New texts published in the US or the UK are published at an optimal time for the northern hemisphere academic year. They are not flown into Australia in 'commercial' quantities for sale within 30 days, as the comparable Australian academic year starts six months later. If any copies are flown in and sold to customers they would be the exception, usually because the US or UK text is published later or earlier than normal, so catching a semester just starting in Australia. Usually a small number of copies are imported for distributing complimentary copies to academics to promote sales in six to eight months' time.
So supply from Asia could technically happen now, but it doesn't. Campus booksellers rely on the fine metrics of supply efficiencies for profitability. They are not going to throw these away for a possible few extra dollars of margin which may look tempting on paper but would be soon eaten up by supply realities. Secondly, if it did start to happen, global educational publishers would inhibit it very effectively by simply refusing to supply Asian-based wholesalers out of their Asian subsidiary companies (the only possible source of the lower-priced editions) any quantities in excess of identified Asian course needs. This happened very effectively a few years ago when certain Asian wholesalers began supplying texts online to individual students based in the US. The supply was effectively strangled, as it also was to supply out of the UK and Europe. Tertiary publishers are in the unique position of knowing precisely the ultimate customer destination of every text. They know each adoption everywhere, and the enrollments. That's the precision of the business.
Supply from Asia is a myth. Theoretically possible, but highly improbable.
REMAINDERS.
The Commission misunderstands the effect of allowing remainders in, and it simply subverts its genuine desire to enhance competition when it argues that remainders are a legitimate source of it. Sure, authors don't get a royalty on remainder sales, but imported remainders could seriously undercut the normal royalty flow from continuing sales of the regular-priced Australian edition. This is the issue, not whether the author's royalty has encompassed the remainder end of a particular edition's journey. The critical point for Australia, without the PIRs, is the frequency, size and effect of the issue and whether it could it be mitigated by contractual , 'naming and shaming', or other ways. (By the way the draft misquoted my submission on this point. I was referring to possible non-remainder or buy-back clauses in rights contracts to inhibit any sale to a remainder dealer in the first place).
THE 12 MONTH FRONT LIST RECOMMENDATION
In arguing for 'prudence' on more thorough reform, the PC accepts too many assertions by the industry at face value, without subjecting them to rigorous analysis. As a result it puts far too much credence on disaster scenarios if the PIRs were abolished, and too readily accepts claims that significant local publishing activity, and thus cultural externalities, would be undermined.
It hides behind 'lack of up-to-date data' on the industry, when more data is not what is needed, rather clearer thinking. 'Better information' won't remove the claimed 'uncertainty about the significance of the impacts of the PIRs, how the industry would respond to their abolition, and how large the accompanying adjustment costs would therefore be'. There needed to be a recognition by the Commission that key players in the industry, as seen in the vast majority of the submissions, are conceptually confused on the fundamental issue of territorial copyright, how it is established, and the part played by the PIRs. As the Draft says at one point, in Section 3.2, 'by adding to what the holder of the publication and reproduction rights can control, the PIRs thus potentially add to the value that those rights might have in the marketplace'. Unfortunately most submissions are arguing for the retention of territorial copyright rather than the PIRs, as if they were one and the same. I would have liked to see the Commission address this confusion rigorously and analytically, much as it admirably did on many other issues, such as on the value and methodology of international pricing comparisons. In failing to do so I fear it has given too much weight to the possible 'disruption' that may be caused by the 'total abolition' option.
Fundamentally, there is a mismatch between the Commission's constantly repeated views of the negativities and costs of the PIRs and the timidity of their final recommendations. This is disappointing. They are confident and on firm ground in their economic analysis, but go to water in the face of specific publishing industry claims from participants that are allowed to stand without question.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
The Carbon Capture of Kevin Rudd
On some issues you can just read and hear too much. You get to an overload stage, where your brain feels like a dull fudge of half digested ideas, facts, statistics and opinions, and you yearn for some cut-through enlightenment and vision.Then you read something that blazes with such clarity and light that it's as thrilling and cleansing a sensation as your first love. The two books pictured here gave me that in spades. If you read nothing else about climate change then read these two wonderful contributions to the debate.
I first read Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason nearly 12 months ago when it first came out. Lawson was a cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher's conservative government in the UK in the 80's. He held two portfolios that gave him the credentials to write about climate change - Energy and Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury). He takes a conservative line of course, bordering on denialism, but he does it with such fierce intellectual clarity and logic that he exposes, persuasively in my view, much of the cant, overstatement and sheer bluster that dogs this debate on all sides. He takes particular aim at Sir Nicholas Stern's very influential report to the Blair government on the economic effects of unmitigated climate change. He virtually demolishes it. Sure, Lawson has been attacked by economists supportive of Stern, and I've read them, but they're lame and they don't have the power, the zing.
The just published, latest Quarterly Essay by Guy Pearse, Quarry Vision, is a similarly invigorating read, and of course focused on Australia. Pearse used to work in Canberra as a Liberal Party minion with a particular interest in the environment. In sheer frustration he left the party, but not before dumping all over the Howard government's denialism in his 2007 book High and Dry and on a subsequent Four Corners program.
Quarry Vision takes aim at the fossil fuel industry, especially coal, and Rudd's truly miserable Emissions Trading Scheme. I can't recommend this little book (120 pages) highly enough. It's powerful, provocative and exceptionally well written, and full of the sort of clarifying information that's revelatory, shocking and persuasive. It's not about the science. Like Lawson, it's about the politics and economics, and it's all you need to read to get a full picture of our pathetic political response to the greatest crisis of our time.
Buy these two and read them.
Friday, March 6, 2009
The Great Fire
Well Shirl, I've done it...I've finished your book!With only 30 pages to go, I was barely hooked, but right at the end it clicked for me, and I saw clearly why most people love it. It's a powerfully romantic novel.
The sadness and melancholy are overwhelming. War and disease take the young, beautiful and good. Oafs and fools remain. Isolation and alienation eat away at the sensitive and intelligent.
However, Hazzard is a snooty Australian ex-pat and it shows. The cultural sneer is not far from the surface, mainly directed at vulgar Australians.
The language also remains bad all the way though! Here are some more jarring 'examples:
'..Leith was driving with Talbot into green hills: discarding the exploded dockland..' (she means 'deserting').
''There might be other incidents, recorded or obscured, beside which the present outbreak would not look well' (she means 'good').
'Impetus was irreducible' (She means 'momentum was unstoppable' - two clangers in the space of three words!)
'Looking across the straight, you now saw...the interior life of the mainland: grouped habitations, laborious paddies, serpentine paths...' ('laborious' is so wrong. We know what she means but in trying too hard to achieve some adjective/noun rhythm in the sentence she buggers it).
'He was fretted by his own assertion that he would soon be gone.' (She means he was made 'anxious').
'I say your name in this flimsy room so strangely become immemorial' (she means 'memorable').
I could go on and on with these examples but you get the point. To be fair however, there are some potent, quotable lines and passages. Take this: 'As Gardiner had said, the Driscolls were disquieting as a symptom of new power: that Melba and Barry should be in the ascendant was not what one had hoped from peace. It did not even seem a cessation of hostilities.' [Melba and Barry, you probably guessed, are ugly Australians!]
So in summary The Great Fire is both very good and very bad. It's like wading through a long stretch of mud to get a decent meal. Is it worth it? No. It's far too exhausting. Read something else.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
What the hell's going on here, Shirl?
Ex-pat Australian author Shirley Hazzard won the Miles Franklin literary award in 2004 for The Great Fire, which I've tried valiantly to read twice over the last few years but it has defeated me! I couldn't get beyond the first 50 pages.
But I'm determined to have another go and wrestle this beast to the ground!
What's the problem? Here is a writer heralded by the world's literary greats as one of the best of the best:
'Purely and simply, she is one of the greatest writers working in the English language' (Michael Cunningham).
'I wish there were a set of words like "brilliant" and "dazzling" that we saved for only the rarest occasions, so that when I tell you The Great Fire is brilliant and dazzling you would know it is the absolute truth. This is a book that is worth a twenty-year wait.' (Ann Patchett).
'An hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone and at the centre of it all, a love story'. (Joan Didion).
'A brilliant, brave and sublimely written novel...among the most transcendent works I've ever had the pleasure of reading'. (Anita Shreve).
My problem, put simply, is that I think all the above comments are absolute baloney!
I just don't think Hazzard can write. In fact I'd say she is barely literate. She writes English as if it were her second language and she's translating from some impossible dialect spoken only by Mongolian mountain men.
Here are some examples from just the first dozen or so pages. My comments are in italics:
'Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train (how can 'finality' run through a bloody train? It's a wrong use of the word. She means 'a sense of finality')
'Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain' (things recede into the distance, not into a bloody expression! She means 'transformed').
'Aldred Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way' ('submissively' is simply ungrammatical. 'Submitting to chugging' she means).
(By the way we're still on the first page!)
On page three there is this absolute gem: 'Leith's father had himself flourished the trick of mobility, fretting himself into receptivity and fresh impression'. (What on God's earth does this bilge mean? It means nothing. It's purely affectation, a pretentious author simply choosing to ignore accepted word usage and meaning.)
'The little room had an unconvinced Westernism' (she means 'unconvincing')
On page 73 I came across this gem: '...learning dead inimical languages like Italian and Japanese'. ('inimical' is so wrong. She means 'enemy' languages. Things are always inimical TO something else)
Despite all this, I'm going to grit my teeth and finish this book. So many people have said to give it time - the style grows on you! But it's not the style I have a problem with - very clipped, choppy, frequently potent - it's the annoying way it constantly misses the mark.
I'll let you know how I go!
But I'm determined to have another go and wrestle this beast to the ground!
What's the problem? Here is a writer heralded by the world's literary greats as one of the best of the best:
'Purely and simply, she is one of the greatest writers working in the English language' (Michael Cunningham).
'I wish there were a set of words like "brilliant" and "dazzling" that we saved for only the rarest occasions, so that when I tell you The Great Fire is brilliant and dazzling you would know it is the absolute truth. This is a book that is worth a twenty-year wait.' (Ann Patchett).
'An hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone and at the centre of it all, a love story'. (Joan Didion).
'A brilliant, brave and sublimely written novel...among the most transcendent works I've ever had the pleasure of reading'. (Anita Shreve).
My problem, put simply, is that I think all the above comments are absolute baloney!
I just don't think Hazzard can write. In fact I'd say she is barely literate. She writes English as if it were her second language and she's translating from some impossible dialect spoken only by Mongolian mountain men.
Here are some examples from just the first dozen or so pages. My comments are in italics:
'Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train (how can 'finality' run through a bloody train? It's a wrong use of the word. She means 'a sense of finality')
'Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain' (things recede into the distance, not into a bloody expression! She means 'transformed').
'Aldred Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way' ('submissively' is simply ungrammatical. 'Submitting to chugging' she means).
(By the way we're still on the first page!)
On page three there is this absolute gem: 'Leith's father had himself flourished the trick of mobility, fretting himself into receptivity and fresh impression'. (What on God's earth does this bilge mean? It means nothing. It's purely affectation, a pretentious author simply choosing to ignore accepted word usage and meaning.)
'The little room had an unconvinced Westernism' (she means 'unconvincing')
On page 73 I came across this gem: '...learning dead inimical languages like Italian and Japanese'. ('inimical' is so wrong. She means 'enemy' languages. Things are always inimical TO something else)
Despite all this, I'm going to grit my teeth and finish this book. So many people have said to give it time - the style grows on you! But it's not the style I have a problem with - very clipped, choppy, frequently potent - it's the annoying way it constantly misses the mark.
I'll let you know how I go!
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Books I've read recently
I tried to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz when it came out last year but got so damned annoyed by the lousy printing of the British edition (I bought it in the UK) I gave up after 50 pages. The only way you could get the thing to stay open was by applying massive amounts of force using both hands and occasionally your freekin feet! Not really practical on public transport or on a plane. It was a disgrace.
Recently, however, I ordered the cheap US paperback edition from Amazon and it was a sheer joy to handle as well as read. A quality production.
If you like lively, wild, scorching, invigorating prose; wonderfully rich, larger than life, immensely likable characters; a savage political critique of a rotten state; and a heartbreaking family story, then you'll absolutely love this book. It's superb. It won the Pulitzer prize last year and no wonder. Do yourself a favor you young people and read it.
Albert Camus' The Outsider was featured on the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club late last year and received a rave review from Brendan Cowell, the young and immensely talented Australian actor, playwright and director ('it changed my life') so I decided to re-read it. Like Cowell I first read it when a mere callow youth. It didn't do much for me then and, re-reading it forty years later, it doesn't do much for me again.
A.A.Gill has just released Paper View, a collection of his TV criticism from his columns in Britain's Sunday Times. Perhaps not quite as good as last year's superb food book, nevertheless if you like Gill's writing - who the hell doesn't? - you'll enjoy this outing. No-one in Australia comes anywhere near close to Gill's talent and ferocity. Here's an excerpt:
'It must be said of Rolf Harris that he's a difficult man to hate, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. He was born nerdily embarrassing. Time and exposure have not awarded him a scintilla of gravitas, sagacity or dress sense. All his long life, Rolf has walked into rooms in the sure and certain knowledge that, on every level, he will be the least fashionable person there. His great and unnerving quality is the reverse Midas effect: everything he touches turns to dross. Aim his panting enthusiasm at a subject, however culturally impregnable, and his grunting, mewing excitement will reduce it to a car-boot sale. Harris is the neutron bomb of kitsch.'
Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat, by Australian, and ex-obese person, David Gillespie, is the only diet/health book you need to read - ever! It is so good. It's not your normal fad diet book, as it goes into a huge amount of detail about your body's biochemistry and how, basically, the whole food thing works. It is also an exceptionally well researched history of food and diet trends and movements, written in a very lucid prose style.
I was waiting for the clincher, the death rattle: what you shouldn't be eating or drinking...you know the list: no alcohol, no pasta, no cheese, nothing enjoyable, nothing civilised...live like a bloody monk, etc etc. BUT IT NEVER CAME! It turns out that eating healthily is pretty darned easy. Just give up fruit juices, sweet wines/liqueurs and sugar! Easy as! I'm onto it.
I'd never read any of Dennis Lehane's stuff. He wrote Gone, Baby, Gone, and Mystic River, among others. So I picked up his latest The Given Day and was absolutely blown away by it. It is set in Boston around 1918 when the Irish and the Italians dominated American life, Bolshevik sympathisers had a taste for unionisation and revolution, terrorism was pretty rampart, and niggers were niggers and well and truly kept in their place.
It's a solid read - 700 pages long - but I guarantee you'll be hooked and miss dinner, lectures, dates and all your appointments.
Recently, however, I ordered the cheap US paperback edition from Amazon and it was a sheer joy to handle as well as read. A quality production.
If you like lively, wild, scorching, invigorating prose; wonderfully rich, larger than life, immensely likable characters; a savage political critique of a rotten state; and a heartbreaking family story, then you'll absolutely love this book. It's superb. It won the Pulitzer prize last year and no wonder. Do yourself a favor you young people and read it.
Albert Camus' The Outsider was featured on the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club late last year and received a rave review from Brendan Cowell, the young and immensely talented Australian actor, playwright and director ('it changed my life') so I decided to re-read it. Like Cowell I first read it when a mere callow youth. It didn't do much for me then and, re-reading it forty years later, it doesn't do much for me again.
A.A.Gill has just released Paper View, a collection of his TV criticism from his columns in Britain's Sunday Times. Perhaps not quite as good as last year's superb food book, nevertheless if you like Gill's writing - who the hell doesn't? - you'll enjoy this outing. No-one in Australia comes anywhere near close to Gill's talent and ferocity. Here's an excerpt:
'It must be said of Rolf Harris that he's a difficult man to hate, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. He was born nerdily embarrassing. Time and exposure have not awarded him a scintilla of gravitas, sagacity or dress sense. All his long life, Rolf has walked into rooms in the sure and certain knowledge that, on every level, he will be the least fashionable person there. His great and unnerving quality is the reverse Midas effect: everything he touches turns to dross. Aim his panting enthusiasm at a subject, however culturally impregnable, and his grunting, mewing excitement will reduce it to a car-boot sale. Harris is the neutron bomb of kitsch.'
Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat, by Australian, and ex-obese person, David Gillespie, is the only diet/health book you need to read - ever! It is so good. It's not your normal fad diet book, as it goes into a huge amount of detail about your body's biochemistry and how, basically, the whole food thing works. It is also an exceptionally well researched history of food and diet trends and movements, written in a very lucid prose style.
I was waiting for the clincher, the death rattle: what you shouldn't be eating or drinking...you know the list: no alcohol, no pasta, no cheese, nothing enjoyable, nothing civilised...live like a bloody monk, etc etc. BUT IT NEVER CAME! It turns out that eating healthily is pretty darned easy. Just give up fruit juices, sweet wines/liqueurs and sugar! Easy as! I'm onto it.
I'd never read any of Dennis Lehane's stuff. He wrote Gone, Baby, Gone, and Mystic River, among others. So I picked up his latest The Given Day and was absolutely blown away by it. It is set in Boston around 1918 when the Irish and the Italians dominated American life, Bolshevik sympathisers had a taste for unionisation and revolution, terrorism was pretty rampart, and niggers were niggers and well and truly kept in their place.
It's a solid read - 700 pages long - but I guarantee you'll be hooked and miss dinner, lectures, dates and all your appointments.
Peter Carey goes troppo!
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/silencing-australian-voices-20090128-7ryu.html
One thing that's been quite embarrassing about the whole feverish debate on parallel importation currently consuming the Australian book industry has been the performance from many of our well known authors. Individual authors seem to have fallen over themselves in some absurd contest to contribute the most appalling drivel to the opinion pages of the nation's press.
It's been a race to the bottom.
Today, however, we must surely acknowledge the winner - Peter Carey. His article in today's Age is a gem. As an exercise in fantasy and farce it is without peer! It's good because it is sooo bad.
Seriously, in my twenty years of following and contributing to this never-ending debate I have never read anything as brilliantly comic.
However, the good side is probably this: Carey's descent into farce has surely pulled the debate back from the brink. We probably won't get any more of these frequent, drunken, fantastical meanderings from any other authors. Intelligence and good old-fashioned common sense might start to re-emerge as debate touchstones.
Boy, how refreshing would that be!
One thing that's been quite embarrassing about the whole feverish debate on parallel importation currently consuming the Australian book industry has been the performance from many of our well known authors. Individual authors seem to have fallen over themselves in some absurd contest to contribute the most appalling drivel to the opinion pages of the nation's press.
It's been a race to the bottom.
Today, however, we must surely acknowledge the winner - Peter Carey. His article in today's Age is a gem. As an exercise in fantasy and farce it is without peer! It's good because it is sooo bad.
Seriously, in my twenty years of following and contributing to this never-ending debate I have never read anything as brilliantly comic.
However, the good side is probably this: Carey's descent into farce has surely pulled the debate back from the brink. We probably won't get any more of these frequent, drunken, fantastical meanderings from any other authors. Intelligence and good old-fashioned common sense might start to re-emerge as debate touchstones.
Boy, how refreshing would that be!
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