review | Tali Lavi
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Tali Lavi reviews a recent selection
Griffith Review is a serious heavyweight. This quarter’s theme is ‘Money Sex Power’ and, although editor Julianne Schultz addresses society’s preoccupation with materialism and the financial crisis, most of the stories are about misuse of power in other ways. Marcia Langton’s gravitas is reinforced by her essay ‘The end of “big men” politics’, in which she speaks truth to power. This is essential reading for anyone who has glibly condemned the Northern Territory National Emergency Response. Langton has little patience for critics like Larissa Behrendt and Germaine Greer who have categorically dismissed the intervention as racist, terming their views ‘simplistic’. Langton does discuss vertical and lateral violence and their origins but there is an immediacy in her call for the end of patriarchal bullying. This normalisation of intimidation, which she traces to the passing of the original guardians of law and tradition, has led to a failure of Aboriginal leadership. She explores the historical and cultural contexts, and demands a stop to the processes in ‘which the traditions of the warrior were perverted into those of the bully from which neither men nor women were safe – and sometimes, as we now know, and to the horror of most Aboriginal people, nor were children’. Both Langton and Noel Pearson are formidable logicians and Griffith Review has done well to publish some of their finest work, in this and previous issues. The journal engages with a considerable range of issues: the Thai sex industry, local beggars, surveillance in Tito’s Yugoslavia, relationships with mothers and the surprising therapy that might be had from a reality television show, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and sex and disability. The intelligence is always keen; the perspective original. • The multisensory Going Down Swinging (GDS) invites readers to enter a world of words. There are variations within this universe: fragments of poetry, chains of sentences, visual images, graphic stories and aural pleasures. The latter appears in the form of a CD, which turns readers into listeners of spoken word recordings. The poetry, of which there is a lot, surpasses the prose in this collection for its subtlety and mastery. Lorin Ford’s ‘editorial panel to author re: “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”‘ is an irreverent imagining of a modern editorial team dismembering Sylvia Plath’s poem, whereas Ella Holcombe’s poetry is visceral, imbued with tones of myth and magic realism. The poetry of Ivy Alvarez, Fiona Wright, Andy Jackson and Sean M Whelan all sing with moments of beauty and fragility. While the bushfires raged, reading ‘When Ash and Bone Speaks’, Angela Costi’s attempt to give voice to a victim of Vesuvius’ wrath, and SJ Finn’s story, ‘Flame Game’, seemed both confronting and oddly prescient. Finn does for an arsonist what Patrick Süskind did for a deranged obsessive ‘nose’ in Perfume, entering into his world and his sensations, and leaving the reader seared. But there were other pieces, especially Ben Schroeder’s ‘Half Day’ with its lovely surprises like ‘I would like to dip myself into a vat of wine, pickle myself until my skin is stained purple like a blueberry’, that left me feeling empty with incomprehension, yearning for meaning. More visually literate readers would probably find a delight that eluded me in picnick’s graphic tale ‘Melodious-ness’. GDS is playful, mischievous and courageous. • Published by the University of Western Australia, Westerly provides acute dissections of the writings of ecological writer Barbara York Main and poet Francis Webb, alongside Lee Kofman’s amusing experiences of bilingual writing. Kim Scott delves into historical records and more recent theory on his search for an accurate portrayal of Noongar voices from the ‘friendly frontier’. His engagement, particularly with the PhD thesis of Tiffany Shellam, asks questions of responsibility in the pursuit of truth. There are also detailed reviews of the year in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. In the latter, Meriel Griffiths’ celebration of poets (Kathryn Lomer, Tracy Ryan and Judy Johnson) impels the reader to rush out and buy their books. At one point, Griffiths refers to Jennifer Kornberger’s ‘delight in the felicity of language and image’, and this praise might very well be extended to the reviewer herself. Nestled in between these more serious essays is accomplished fiction and poetry that is never staid. Mark O’Flynn’s ‘Red Shoes’ is a rambunctious, downright wicked resurrection • Sophie Cunningham, editor of Meanjin, claims that there’s ‘all kinds of warfare’ in the recent issue, but it would be better viewed through the lens of creation and destruction. There is Paul Kelly’s consideration of the iconic and eclectic muses of his song ‘Forty-Eight Angels’. In his wanderings through artistic inspiration, an unlikely encounter takes place between Thomas the Dominican and Serge Gainsbourg. Elsewhere, Jane Gleeson-White offers insights into the wondrous performance artist Barbara Campbell, and how the story might outlive its destruction, while David Astle electrifies our synapses by uncovering anarchy in cryptic crosswords. The presence of organic physical destruction lurks in both Anne Elvey’s ‘a finite catalogue of self’ and Damon Young’s intersection between philosophy and fiction, ‘The Lesson’. In Jessica Au’s forceful ‘Bargains’, there is a dead limb connected to a girl with a vehement lust for life and a cynical resignation to her status. The edition is propelled by the stories we tell ourselves; in Jim Davidson’s ‘Sport with Guns’, that means a militaristic narrative. But sometimes individuals find the power to overturn these myths, as Eleanor Hogan does when she unmakes stereotypes of Aboriginals in time to give help to a man who has stumbled onto the road, filled with grief rather than alcohol. Anthony Burke, an associate professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy, attempts to position the looking glass for Westerners to see ourselves through the prism of Islamic fundamentalism; he describes his essay as ‘about life’. Lynden Barber’s piece is the most underwhelming of the volume. It lacks urgency in the ideas and the writing, and we end up with what we already knew: that film festivals act as antidotes to the Hollywoodisation of the film world. Meanjin is a lively, energetic, considered journal that is lovely to read but the attractiveness of its format smacks of ageism. I could read it all but I squinted at Cunningham’s questions for Morris Gleitzman and am mindful of how difficult to decipher some of the coloured or miniscule text might be for older or weaker eyes. I am, however, grateful for Cunningham’s bold move serialising Caroline Lee’s novel Stripped, because Lee is a prodigiously talented writer whose work – up till now I’ve only been familiar with her theatrical oeuvre – is a much anticipated event. If you’re as obsessive as me, you’ll be locating previous copies of the journal to read the story of lives stripped back in full. There is a parallel to be made between Sophie, an erotic dancer who is one of the story’s multiple narrators, and the process of serialisation itself. With its tantalising wait between instalments and slow disclosure, this form of publishing constitutes a kind of narrative striptease. • A consciousness of mortality seeps through Southerly, which is only fitting for an issue dedicated to the late Pat Skinner, the journal’s editorial assistant. The first story is hers and the inclusion of this piece is appropriate as ‘Buffer Zone’ is about, among other things, a young girl’s anguish for the death of trees, and the ability of art to restore a second life to them. Jeanne finds comfort in the tree paintings of Emily Carr, which ‘almost [have] more treeness about them than the real trees did’. In a similar way, the stories of Skinner will now represent her in the world. ‘Buffer Zone’ delineates the ways children understand and question their surroundings, with all their attendant absurdity and profundity, and how difficult it sometimes is for adults to engage with this. Southerly is one of the easiest journals to read, if only for the ingenuity of its writers. Perhaps because this issue consists only of short stories and essays, the reader is not confronted with continual shifts of modes between prose and poetry, which makes for a different, but not less pleasurable, reading experience. The stories resonate with feeling and intelligence. Suburban realism and the environment feature strongly in ‘The Drought’, Sunil Badami’s powerful exploration of a woman and her environment in acute distress: ‘it’s not yet noon, and already the day has started to yellow and curl at the edges: every day gets hotter and hotter, close as a clenched fist’. There is loss too in Jeremy Fisher’s exquisitely structured ‘How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead’. The tone might start out flippant but it deepens until the reader is moved from a position of mild dislike for the narrator, to sobbing alongside him as he listens to Joni Mitchell. Framed by a tale of the haka, Fisher’s deft portrait is of humanity’s bind, its duality of life and death. Southerly contains humour and literary high jinks but it mostly captivates in its darkness, its highly charged dance with death. Both Kirstyn McDermott’s ‘Indigo in Absentia’ and Michelle Sim’s ‘Winter’ display a ferocity of language: veritable kaleidoscopes of emotion. • Offset emerges from Victoria University. It does contain some admirable pieces but they sit awkwardly alongside others in a way that reminds me of why I don’t like Nicole Kidman as an actor. I can always detect Kidman’s acting and with many of these writers, I can detect their writing – not in the virtuoso style of an Italo Calvino but in a rudimentary, ‘I’m still working myself out’ kind of way. The editors might also consider identifying which pieces are fiction and non-fiction so that readers might approach them accordingly. There is a belief among gardeners that fellow horticulturalists are essentially good people and Delia Allen’s story ‘The Park’ attests to this with a grieving mother who cares not only for her soil but for other people. In this tale, Allen shies away from the clichés of women who shut themselves off from society after experiencing tragedy, and it is this subtlety in her story, this extension of caritas, that sets her apart from some of the other writers. The loathing of Katherine McGowan’s narrator for particular women of a certain age is unsettling; her employment of phrases of corporeal distaste like ‘goodie bags’ and ‘tuck shop arms’ seems strange considering she refers to her setting as an ‘over-twenty-fives pick-up-joint’. Bill Marshall’s story is even more disconcertingly contemptuous. His descriptions of ‘migrants from the former Yugoslavia’ include a woman who is ‘a beak-nosed, pinched-faced Slav’ and who sports a set of ‘fluorescent pink talon[s]‘. No caritas from these two writers. Highlights in this publication include Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘The Bean Episode’, which both delights and confronts with its childhood acts of rebellion – and transforms ‘waiting until you finish what’s on your plate’ to a whole other level – and Michael Crane’s bizarre ‘Lipstick’. Tali Lavi is a writer who lives in Melbourne and finds herself never very far from the academic world. Like this piece? Subscribe! |
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