I wish I could tell you the Sydney harvest launch at Berkelouw’s Newtown was a fantastic affair. All I can tell you is that the last five minutes of Ryan O’Neill’s reading from his fiction piece “The Eunuch in the Harem” was pretty damn funny. Which I already knew, because I scored my copy of Issue Five earlier in the week (seriously, my nostrils, meaning the inside of my nose, were stained with coffee as a result of reading O’Neill’s story). All I can tell you is that people were lining up to have editor Davina Bell sign their pretty-like-a-patchwork-quilt copy of harvest after the formalities had come to a close. All I can tell you is that, arriving late due to an unprecedented gridlock that gripped the CBD and an ignorant decision to choose bus as my mode of transport, I stood out in the freezing doorway, looking in on toasty warm launch-groupies and literary enthusiasts as they enjoyed frivolous festivities.

So that was Sydney launch.

harvest issue five opens with an article by Davina Bell urging her “precious snowflakes” (baby writers) to disregard Ted Genoway’s article in Mother Jones, which instructs said baby writers to “swear off navel-gazing”. Davina’s article essentially defends the younger generation of writers, who have not experienced world-shaking events to shake up their/(our?*) lives and world views.

Curiously, about halfway through, we come to Dan Bigna’s reader’s guide to writing like Charles Bukowski, who happens to be an author I quite admire. I say curiously, because Bigna’s piece points out Bukowski’s remarkable similarity to his Post Office protagonist Henry Chinaski, on account of Bukowski’s soul destroying stint as a mailroom clerk. “Bukowski shows us that artistic expression can transcend the dullness of a constricted life, and give hope to the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same kinds of situation as the embattled Henry Chinaski.” Navel-gazing much? Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Genoway!

These two pieces in particular, along with Anthony Levin’s deconstruction of a poem, form the corner posts of this issue which suggest to me that harvest is no longer just a hip literary magazine with freshly plucked talent and pretty pages and fun household games such as “Literopoly”, but is growing into a medium through which relevant discussion about the culture of the written wor(l)d. In this case, the inward-gazing, self-reflective prose of young writers that seems to have formed generational gaps in the writing community, if Genoway’s article is to be taken as absolute truth.

Chris Flynn closes issue five with “Rethinking the Australian Literary Identity”. While it’s a highly topical subject (i.e. writing locally for a global readership and diminishing significance of determining a national literary identity), I found nothing groundbreaking in Flynn’s commentary and will say no more on the matter (because harvest have encouraged responses to this piece, and I’ma save a more articulate version of my thoughts for that).

(*I don’t know if I count as a baby writer. Embryonic, more like.)

So, ahh, this September is Book Blogger Appreciation Week. The third one, in fact. And it’s getting bigger and stronger and they changed a whole lot of rules this year.

Namely, bloggers need to self-nominate for categories. Head to www.bookbloggerappreciationweek.com for more information. Publishers in particular, note that your blogs are now a nominate-able category. I’d be interested to see which blogs emerge from this section.

So, uh, my five posts that represent me best as a Niche Blog:

Known Unknowns by Emmett Stinson (Review)

Trio by Dorothy Baker (Review)

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (Review)

An Affair to Remember – Writing the Past (event: NSW Writers’ Centre History Festival)

‘Sif You’d Get Paid for Blogging

And, on a whim, I’ve nominated myself for the Best Written Book Blog category. Just to see what happens, really. The five posts for these are:

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (Review)

Snowed Under by Antje Ravic Strubel (Review)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Review)

On Writing Reviews

How to Read While Walking (and not hit things)

Off I go to wash the stench of shameless self-promotion off my skin.

The jaded, unnamed narrator, dumped by his beautiful, Japanese lover, screws up his story about an ice-cold sombrero into a ball of paper and throws it in the bin at the beginning of Richard Brautigan’s 1976 novel, “Sombrero Fallout”. While he pines pathetically over a single lost strand of her hair, we, the readers, travel through the room and towards the wastepaper basket, over to the printed, screwed up ball, where we learn that this mysterious sombrero has fallen from the sky, at minus 24 degrees, and somehow results in a town going mad. I mean really mad. The townspeople start wailing on each other. First with fists, then with knives, then with live ammunition. They eventually overrun the town police. And the sombrero sits innocently on the pavement, ignored by all.

Meanwhile, the narrator, evidently a writer (so of course emotionally unstable and quite insecure), reminisces the history of what he deems his great love affair. He recalls their first act of love, the stunning first impression she made on him, disclosing that she’d read all his books but (kindly) refusing to ever speak to him about them, and of course, her curtain of straight black hair. He trawls through his phonebook and imagines imperfect scenarios, and doesn’t give the sombrero, or the angry mob, a second thought.

And while he does all this, his Japanese lover sleeps. She sleeps because it’s the only place she can see her suicidal father’s grave again, and the only place where everything is right in her world.

And while she sleeps, and he pines, and the townspeople riot, I feel my heart, piece by piece, giving itself wholly and unreservedly to Brautigan’s strange and alluring prose. Its effortless comedy, as displayed through the town librarian whose ears are shot off, and its careful melancholy tone, as the Japanese woman remembers the suicide of her father when she was still a girl, are woven together impeccably.

But the narrator and protagonist, our dumped writer (ironically a famous American humourist), is pathetic. Enigmatic, complex, but ultimately, pathetic. His mind wanders often and he processes his thoughts obtusely.

Sometimes he talked to himself a lot and he was talking to himself about the absence of eggs in his apartment.

“Where are those eggs?” he said to himself. “They must be here somewhere,” and all the time knowing that there were no eggs in the kitchen.

He was just starting to think about looking for them in other rooms, perhaps the bedroom, when a lightning bolt of despair suddenly fried his brain into thousands of pieces of dancing bacon. He remembered his love for the Japanese woman.” p95

Well, I guess he had only been dumped that very evening. So perhaps I’m being a hardarse.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but of all the awesome reasons I love my blog, one of the top three has to be the opportunity it gives me to show off all the amazingly talented and artistic friends I have.

Lingsi is one such friend. She can paint and draw and takes amazing photos, and with her Diana F+ too!

A couple of weekends ago Lingsi, Pam (another rad photochick) and myself (Diana mini noob) hit up the Sydney Biennale at Cockatoo Island. Some of the shots below are from that trip, but Lingsi’s one hepcat Lomo-er so some are from her other lomo day excursions.

from Vivid Sydney

Cue show off fanfare.

Lingsi also wrote an interesting post over at her blog comparing digital and film photography. She says: “in this digital era where people have no idea to function their cameras and put everything on ‘auto’, it can get a bit impersonal and brainless, whereas lomography is more of an artistic and creative process of capturing moments.”

I think this could also apply to my recent typewriter adventures. The way one writes on a manual, sometimes sticky-keyed old typewriters is so much more careful and deliberate. At first it’s frustrating that

my fingers cannot keep up with my brain, and I realised how much I take the ‘delete’ key for granted. But there’s something soothing in the hard punching motion of the keys, and something a little more rewarding when the end result is a hard copy piece of text.

Lingsi doesn’t discount digital photography, which I think is quite thoughtful (and lucky for us, given that she’s also a gifted digital photographer!); rather, she compares the two types of photography: the widened artistic scope that is made possible by the digital medium, as well asthe accidental beauty that can stem from mistakes in lomography. You can see more of her photos at Lingsi’s Flickr site.

Have you ever finished reading a book and immediately felt the bottom of your stomach drop upon turning the final page? It’s not simply a case of being sad from reaching the end of a story, but more of a need to dive back into that world, and to make sure everything will still be alright.

I blame Charley. Charley Thompson did this to me. He’s fifteen, alone, and has taken a job helping the grumpyfuck Del look after his racehorses down at the track. If a person could read this book without their heart breaking for Charley, I would be surprised. And slightly suspicious. Charley and one of Del’s horses, Lean on Pete, form a beautiful friendship that results in a trans-American escape. You know how I said Charley was alone? There’s one exception, his aunty, who was told to piss off by Charley’s father. And she’s the only person in the world that Charley’s placed hope in. So Charley and Lean on Pete are off to find her.

Sometimes when you’ve been reading too much Bronte or Proust, you can sort of get caught up in the literary fanciful goodies that great writing can contain. Vlautin’s writing sort of brings you crashing back to reality. There’s something incredibly raw about his writing, completely devoid of bullshit. Charley narrates honestly. He finds himself in all sorts of scrapes, forced to shoplift band-aids for his injury, siphoning petrol from other cars with his mouth, to fuel his stolen truck, you get the idea.

Charley runs. He hides. He cries. He’s the most real fifteen-year-old boy I’ve known, and through the hopeless situations he finds himself in, he never gives up.

Vlautin’s no-bullshit, straight, clean prose echoes Charley’s loneliness. The one-sided conversations Charley has with Pete leave him exposed and vulnerable, and well, they made me want to reach into the pages and grab him and hug him and tell him everything was going to be alright.

As Richard Fidler brought up in an interview with Vlautin at the Sydney Writers’ Fest, there is something very Huckleberry Finn about “Lean On Pete”, and to me, something wholly American about it. When I say American, I refer to the themes I’ve commonly found in American contemporary fiction: the rough journey, that physical and emotional rollercoaster that sees the protagonist fall, and then rise, and then fall again, where the reward at the end is comfort, or security, or family. It’s impossibly sad, yet at his lowest moments, Charley continues his narration in a matter-of-fact voice. His drive, and ability to retain an essence of childhood despite the trials of his journey, keep a sense of hope alive throughout the book.

There are times when it’s difficult to fathom the absence of any caring adult in Charley’s life. And he has a tendency to make the frustratingly wrong choice. But this is, again, the raw human element that Charley possesses (as does Vlautin’s writing).

I’m almost afraid to read his other novels. What if they’re not nearly as involving and hugable as this one?

A girl who has lost control of her tear ducts. A young boy driven to canicide by his mother. A suspect teacher-student friendship. Post-September 11, Washington DC. Off-colour Holocaust jokes and Asshole (the game) and Russian scientists. I could just keep on naming all these random elements of Emmett Stinson’s short stories but, well, that would be a pretty shit way to review such a short story collection. Amusing, perhaps, but shit.

[Also, just an aside, I did a very broad sweep of Googledom to gauge other people's reactions and possibly respond to. What I found was Stinson's own blog post, where he read and reviewed Irma Gold's review of his book for Overland's blog. That's confusing right? Authors reviewing reviews of their book? One sec, I'm dizzy.

But really, this should be done more. It might put us reviewers on their toes a bit more if we were faced with the undeniable fact that authors do actually read reviews of their books (especially the ones who vehemently deny that they do).]

I’m not particularly well read in Stinson’s writing, apart from having come across one of the “Known Unknowns” short stories (Clinching) previously in Issue 1 of “Kill Your Darlings”, and just yesterday reading his impressively numerical dissection of the digital book piracy market in the latest Overland journal. So for the most part I went into this without knowing what to expect.

To simply sweep over these stories as “Washington circa post-September 11″ stories would not be sufficient. Stinston’s stories are filled with dark humour and odd characters, some of whom reappear throughout. And a dead dog. Fourteen short stories make up “Known Unknowns”. The uncertainty of the people of America, and larger global shift that occurred in September 11’s aftermath, provide only a faint backdrop to the stories in here. Stories which stand independently and become almost beacons of the short story genre, a genre that is never appreciated enough in the reading community.

In one of the longer stories, Local Knowledge, a history teacher attempts to make sense of the moment his life broke into pieces. He reflects on the nobility he sees in teaching high schoolers American history, and has been injected with just the right balance of clever hindsight and denial to make him a breeze to sympathise with. Dry, written in the second person, was surprisingly not a pain in the arse to read. Every creative writing class tutor I’ve had has sternly informed us that stories in the second person are a crime against nature: It forces the circle reader into a square cutout of a character. It manipulates the reading experience. So what is it about Dry that makes it not suck? I have a theory, and it’s the details. You, the reader, find yourself in a bar, where “you open the door and feel briefly the chill of the air conditioning, which is good compared to the swampy humidity outside that makes your entire body feel clammy.” You had your first drink in five months because “you needed a beer. It was no question.” The incredible detail of your Mt Pleasant apartment, thumping ceilings (landlord’s kids) and all, shifts the focus. You’re no longer feeling like you’ve been sucked into the permanent, printed world (word) of the author, because you’re distracted by the detail.

My two standouts were The Sound of Fury and Visions.

Sound of Fury examines the somewhat disastrous combination of single parenthood and pop psychology. A mother who frets that her son never does anything naughty, unwittingly provides an army of inappropriate substitute role models for him.

Deprived of my father, my surrogates were Oprah, Maya Angelou, DeepaK Chopra, M Scott Peck and Della Reese — whatever faceless daytime-television authority the masses absorbed between ritual offerings of One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives. I was raised in an Orwellian nightmare of gooey self-esteem-boosting doublespeak. (p132)

In Visions, Celia’s childhood talent for turning her tears on and off on demand backfires later in life. She cries all the time. Tears run “down her cheeks in a faucet’s steady grip.” This story contains some of the best phrases, and contains a James Dean love affair. My prehistoric early readers and those who know me best may recall that I, too, suffer from a debilitating obsession with the man with the fast cars and the red leather jacket. And the connection of Jimmy Dean combined with the fantasy love affair is a PERFECTLY VALID reason to cite for loving Visions.

But seriously, hot dead actors aside, Visions had me from its first page:

At five, though, she learned how to open her tear ducts and coat her face in a red flush. Eyes blossomed into open sores. The lips unfurled in a perfect pantomime of spasm. (p155)

I mean, how many of us dreamed of being able to “extort our family with weeping”? Well, not me. *cough*

Okay I’m going off on tangent after tangent. One last thing. Each story has its own particular voice: almost alternating between sombre and irreverent, dark and just plain funny. Stinson writes as a history teacher who smells of failure, and then turns around and writes as a hyperchondriac brother about to do the unthinkable. And that’s a rare thing for a short story collection, I think.

I only speak English.

I have no interest in books written by Indians, or set in India, or about travelling in India.

I still refer to its cities by their imperialistic, Anglo-names (Bombay, Calcutta) without a second thought.

I have never seen the movie Gandhi.

I have never read Q&A or seen Slumdog Millionaire.

When people ask me where I’m from, I get a little offended, but mostly answer them in a confused and confuddled manner, seeings as I’m still not one hundred per cent sure of the answer myself. And how dare they ask me a question I don’t even know how to answer?

I assume all Indians are the same, whether or not they’re from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Fiji, or South Africa.

I’m what kids these days call an Oreo.

My infatuation with the cool shit, like Bollywood dancing, henna and those Sikh warrior bracelets, was short lived.

But I do not find Indian men attractive. ESPECIALLY not Shah Rukh Kanh.

But I still get annoyed if a white person knows more about those things than I do.

Sometimes I just say I’m Malaysian without explaining anything. (Does it still count if you were there for less than a year of your life?)

I think Russell Peters is hilarious, but if he didn’t have a Canadian accent I probably would’ve dismissed him as an unfunny loser.

I freak out when I meet other Indians because I feel like I have to act a certain way, that I end up saying stupid things like “so what part of India are you from?” (The dreaded question.)

I’ve only watched a handful of episodes of The Big Bang Theory and would sincerely like the Indian on that show, who insists on saying ‘dude’, to be shot.

As soon as I realised wearing henna and having a nose piercing and wearing a Bollywood dress to your school formal doesn’t make you any cooler, I stopped doing it.

As soon as I realised embracing the interesting cultural aspects of my heritage didn’t make me any cooler, I stopped doing it.

I’m probably never going to learn any of the languages.

I will never read a dramatic Indian-tear-jerker-Oprah’s-Book-Club novel.

I get insanely jealous when people tell me how gorgeous Aishwarya Raya is (as if I hadn’t noticed), because I start to worry that they are using her as a benchmark for Indian feminine beauty.

Having not read a YA book since I was about 13, I’m not exactly an expert in the genre. So it’s with complete lack of authority that I tell you Richard Van Camp’s first novel is unlike any book I have ever read in the genre of young adult fiction.

Teenager Larry, like the author, comes for a tiny town in the northwest of Canada, and is a member of the indigenous Dogrib people. Larry’s a strange little kid. A mixture of teenage no-goodnick boy troublemaking, and ancient Dogrib wisdom passed on through the generations to him, through his own mother’s teachings.

“I stopped in the porch and took off my shoes. ‘Pussy,’ Johnny scoffed, ‘taking off your shoes at a house party. What a putz.’ He dropped his jacket on the floor on top of a small shelf that held books. I hissed and hung it up. My mom never allowed anyone in our house to drop a jacket or hat. If you do and a woman steps over your clothes, that’s it. You’re done for: bad luck and you’ll never catch a moose. I hung it up for him and carefully hung mine up too. Like I said, I’m Dogrib, I gotta watch it.” (p32)

Larry befriends Johnny, a classmate with a useless mother and a younger brother who Johnny pretty much parents. Their friendship introduces Larry to that dark, hidden world of teenagers, the one nobody ever seems to want to write about. The one where it’s not just the baddies, but also our protagonist that takes drugs, gets into punch-ups (or worse), ends up sleeping with the knocked up girlfriend of their best friend, and well, pushing the boundaries that need to be pushed. Despite it all, though, Larry maintains a sort of innocence. With an absent father, he attaches his love, and a desperate-ish hope to Jed, his mother’s off-again-on-again boyfriend which is completely sweet and pathetic (though, for once, the stepdad character is a genuine good guy).

Larry is a perfectly biased, yet completely truthful narrator. Truthful to his situation, upbringing and personality. Given that he’s not a boy of many words, it’s the reader’s privilege to share in the inner workings of Larry’s mind. And it works, even when he does something stupid, with no plausible rationale.

At a panel session at Sydney Writers’ Festival, Richard Van Camp told the audience about his hometown, Fort Smith: a somewhat obscure town where gossip is the main currency. A town where he had to actually reinforce the fiction aspect of his book to fellow Fort Smithians, lest they mistake characters from the story for real life people. (You’re probably thinking…’surreeee, fiction…. but the guy said this with authority. I believed him, in any case). But the heavy gossiping is something that plays a pivotal role in “The Lesser Blessed”, and without giving too much away, is a reminder of the cruelty of small town life rules.

The Lesser Blessed is full of stories within stories, and is a vigourous head-nod to Van Camp’s own upbringing. The creation story of the Dogrib people is gorgeously sad, which I will roughly paraphrase. There was this woman, who gave birth to six puppies. She kept them in a sack when they slept, and would go away to find food, and all that. She started to notice footprints in the ground near them when she got back. One day she left them, and hid in the trees. She could hear them yapping. And then suddenly she could hear whispers, and human noises. They broke free, and were humans. She saw her six babies break out and start running around, playing with each other. This is what they had been doing whenever she left. She ran towards them, bursting with love, but they saw her and freaked out, mistaking her excitement for anger. She reached out to grab them as they began to change back into their dog forms, but only managed to hold on to three. The other three turned back into dogs. The three that remained human were the first of the Dogrib people.

The book is incredibly short, at 120 pages, and only simple to digest if you read without thinking. But to do that would be to miss the subtle humour and cleverness that is somewhat hidden beneath the story of Larry and his friend Johnny. Richard Van Camp is a brilliant storyteller in person, and his book loses out some of his enthusiastic delivery. It’s understated. But, it turns out, “The Lesser Blessed” isn’t so bad after all, for a YA.

Nearly everyone I spoke to at SWF told me all the good shit happens AFTER the sessions have finished. When the volunteers and festival staff have packed up the chairs and wrapped up the mikes, throngs of literary types shuffle to the conveniently located bar for a piss up and wind down.

This is partly true. And while I’ve been blogging over at the ABC Book Show blog about festivaly goodness, I feel like I’ve been self-censoring. Guess what? I DON’T DO THAT HERE!!!!*

So I can shamelessly name-drop, and tell you how freaking awesome it is to be given a media pass lanyard. The golden ticket. The little piece of plastic that makes people hate you when they’re standing outside a venue in the rain, being refused entry, and watching you get waved in like you’re someone important. (The illusion that I’m important, just to clarify.)

And I can tell you about catching up for drinks with Willy Vlautin and his Richmond Fontaine bandmate Dan Eccles, their Australian distributor Nick, and Granta editor John Freeman. We sat on the pier down in Walsh Bay with a bit of rain and a gorgeous sunset, and debated whether or not Rocky III was the one with Mr T or the one with Apollo Creed. So my, “interview” was in fact me just sitting back and listening to the conversations around me. (A completely different story 5 hours and many alcoholic beverages later, but we won’t talk about that.)

And I can tell you about Tom Cho’s fbi session today, where we listened to a handful of songs that have impacted his life, or writing, or both. Tom talked about pop culture, and the heavy references to various films, bands and music in his short story collection Look Who’s Morphing; the impossible task of having a short story collection published. Because everyone knows they’re unsellable. (Tell that to my bookshelf- there are two whole rows dedicated to short story collections I’ve read over the years); and he read from a few stories. Everything was working against Tom and his interviewer: People were walking in and out throughout the event, and because of the entirely rude and inconvenient rain, the footsteps were very sqwidgy sounding There was a woman right outside the MCA building shouting incoherent words of, I’m guessing, a motivational nature, and so the final two back rows were getting very distracted. And we were on the very top floor. Floor six + Two very slow elevators = impossible to leave. But we did get to listen to songs from Dirty Dancing and Fame, as well as the Itchy & Scratchy theme song.

And I could tell you about a certain author I met very briefly, who borrowed my lighter. I never got it back, but in this author’s defence I ended up making a hasty exit so I guess I won’t hold it against him.

And I could tell you that book publicists are bloody troopers. Sure it looks and seems all glamorous but these people are working non-stop. Troopers.

I could tell you all the books I’m currently reading:

The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp (just finished). I dropped my signed copy on a soggy floor, but the cover is still perfect looking, and discovered evidence of food that passed (or missed) my lips on one page. If enough people are still interested, I will happily host a giveaway.

Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin (only a few pages in, and my bookmark is doing a terrible job so I’ve read the first 30 pages about three times now)

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic. (<< fantastic speaker and hilarious woman, just so you know :))

A million and one zines from the MCA Zine Fair.

Just quickly, I have to say to the zinesters I met today, many of you were lovely and friendly and a real pleasure to talk to. But some of you weren’t. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I was grumpy and hungover, but as a punter and not a current zine-maker, I still love talking to you all, and don’t like being made to feel like I’m wasting your time by saying hello.

Richmond Fontaine are playing at Notes in Newtown this Friday 28th May and at The Troubadour in Brisbane on Saturday 29th May.

Wow, I typed those last two paragraphs with my eyes closed. I’m going to sleep and dream about authors, piers, Russian fairytales, canapes, words, and the Itchy & Scratchy theme song.

*To my own demise