Archive

Scheherazade, you have much to answer for! 1001 nights were fine for you, but by now there might well be that number of volumes offering that much advice about books, films and paintings, not to mention screen savers and blogs. So this bulky new book should be seen first, even primarily, as a marketing opportunity.

Literature aspires to be read twice; journalism demands to be read once, Cyril Connolly declared. Between the book and the newspaper lies the journal, juggler of both, simply wanting to be read. In its quest for a readership over the past three hundred years – diligent or dilettantish, it hasn’t been fussy – the journal has banked on the perenniality of the literary and the urgency of the journalistic, according to fashion. The best measure of a journal’s contemporary allegiance is the type of essay it prints. The essay is the journal’s raison d’être, a chameleon form that can turn its attention to everything from the sorrows of war to the pleasures of whist. The latest issues of Griffith Review, Overland and Island make one thing clear – this is no time for fun and games. When even the newspapers are easing us into supine postures with their summer supplements, these journals have chosen to shake us from our slumber. Roused by the banning of two books – Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan – last July, Julianne Schultz’s Griffith Review sets itself the task of interrogating the West’s easy claims to freedom. The issue’s theme is ‘The Trouble with Paradise’, and three of the issue’s eight essays – by Allan Gyngell, John Kane and Chalmers Johnson – attempt to make sense of America’s paradoxical status as ‘New World’ and ‘New World Empire.’ There are also essays on failed Edens: Paul Hetherington looks at Donald Friend’s pursuit of sensual and sexual satisfaction in Bali, and Will Robb offers us a rare photo-essay from the streets of the world’s newest democracy, Iraq. But the emphasis is clearly on the two lead essays by Frank Moorhouse and Martin Amis, which, together, take up more than a third of the issue.

Australian expatriate artist Bessie Davidson was a woman who ripened with age. After decades of living in Paris and dressing somewhat dowdily ‘à l’anglaise’, she gained confidence with the liberation of France towards the end of World War II. In her sixties, she adopted a long black cape, a wide-brimmed fedora and a slender black cigarette-holder. Penelope Little’s A Studio in Montparnasse: Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist in Paris similarly improves as it goes along, becoming increasingly engaging as the artist is brought to life and found to be in the midst not only of two world wars but also of bohemian interwar Paris.

Katherine Brisbane’s Currency Press is the major play-publishing house in the country and no stranger to the snap-freeze process of producing program play texts by women as well as men. The women have a fair representation in Currency’s general range, but they proliferate in the Current Theatre Series, those pre-first production texts so impossible to follow up with the writer’s post-natal reconsiderations.

Writers for children have always known this: from the Puritans who thinly disguised their religious teachings under stories of children who lived a pure life and went to heaven, and those who didn’t and went to hell; to modem writers who tell stories to help children cope with difficult aspects of modem life.

Bates and Middleton are certainly valiant in their attempts to make a giant hollow rampaging male ego appear cute in Big Bad Bruce. Just look at it go! Indiscriminately swallowing everything in sight, making its way through the world astride a giant throbbing machine. But don’t toss this big glossy number aside – it can serve an excellent purpose. Treat it, allow me to suggest, thus.

One of the most interesting developments in recent Australian historiography has been a pushing back of the frontiers, a recovery of times or phases which seemed quite beyond recall, even when remembered. Such history-writing bears something of the character of sounding in archaeology.