Black Out At Random House

UPDATE: As noted below, some Random House nerd has been obliged to visit the office on this holiday-weekend morning and take down the critical comments beneath Anita Heiss' publicly funded memoir of her crusade against free speech. Let us oblige that techie to make a return trip. Another of the publisher's pages devoted to Heiss' achievements is here and comments are open.

Make use of that forum until it, too, is silenced. They don't like the cold steel of honest words up 'em, that's for sure.

And here is an extra thought: The next time you buy a book, check the publisher. It is a work from Random House or one of its imprints, put the book back on the shelf! And if you are feeling particularly energetic, contact the author and tell him or her why a sale and a royalty have been lost.


For your guidance, the full list of Random House imprints: Ballantine Books, Bantam Dell, Delacorte Press, Del Rey/Spectra, The Dial Press, ESPN Books, The Modern Library, One World, Presidio Press, Random House, Spiegel & Grau, and Villard.

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WELL that didn't last long. Those champions of free speech at Random House have now taken down the comments thread beneath the promo for Anita Heiss' new book.

Did somebody copy them before they vanished? Let us hope so. They deserve a website of their own.

Ms Heiss' next book: Am I Blacking Out Enough Free Speech For You?

For the curious, and the moment, the comments are still available here in the cached version of the page.

Tribal Loyalties At Their ABC

WAN BLACKTIVIST and Mordy-Litijus elder Anita Heiss asked ABC visitors if they thought her black enough and received a series of rather astringent responses. Free speech being a relative thing at the national broadcaster, the comments thread was soon suspended, with talking head Carol Duncan explaining via Twitter:
 
The comments that made it onto the site before the gag was imposed were pointed, critical and, in one or two cases, mocking -- all of which meant no more could be permitted at the Appropriate Broadcasting Commission.

Now isn't that peculiar. ABC comments are moderated, which means any racist ones -- if there were any racist ones, that is -- could have been picked out and the rest displayed on the public forum which those now-silenced visitors help to fund and support. But that didn't happen and, for the second time in a year, professional victim Heiss has found herself a beneficiary of officialdom's eager willingness to spare her feelings.

There is another outlet however, at least for the moment, at the site of Heiss' publisher, Random House, where the string of unmoderated comments grows by the hour. We can take them to be representative of the criticisms the ABC refuses to air, and they say as much of the ABC as they do of Heiss.

You can pop on over and add your thoughts to the chain. Just tell them the ABC sent you.

And if anyone has the energy, why not copy and save the comments for the web's future reference? Chances are they will not survive too much longer on the Random House page, which is a commercial entity and could not appreciate so many adverse remarks about the author of a book it is trying to flog.

There is no need to register at Random Online, as the site suggests. Just pick a name nobody else has used, provide an email address and speak your mind.

(H/T: Andrew Bolt)

UPDATE: In 2010, Heiss was gifted by the Australia Council with a $90,000 fellowship to produce "two non fiction literary works: a collection of essays and personal memoirs."

One of those, presumably, is her current effort with Random House. So, a question: Will Random House or Heiss pledge royalties and profits from Am I Black Enough to repaying taxpayers' generosity? Or is it that, while unsupported Australian authors fend for themselves, a select few who know how to play the system have their careers and lifestyles supported without condition or qualification?

Sometimes it really does pay to be oppressed.

UPDATE II: Something very peculiar is going on the ABC in regard to its Heiss interview. Yesterday a click on the audio panel allowed the interview to be played or downloaded. Today that function no longer works. Has it been disabled, possibly because Heiss' self-promotion has become an embarrassment? Keep an eye on the page. If the audio link is not restored, or if the page vanishes altogether, you will know the Appropriate Broadcasting Commission is at it yet again.

Those who wish to hear Heiss skite and preen are not without succour, however:

Heiss details her reasons for gagging debate in general and Andrew Bolt in particular at the 2:45 minute mark. Andrew insulted her whole family, apparently, not just one-sixteenth of it.

Luvvies In The Lucre

TODAY is a holiday and meant to be taken, at least by non-believers, as an exercise in ease and indolence. That fact is worth noting because the Professor could not be bothered doing a proper job and hunting up a list of judges for the Victorian Premier’s 2012 literary awards. The great minds who distributed artsy cash in 2011 came more readily to the top of Goggle’s search results so, for an exercise in determing what sort of people get these gigs, it will have to do. Let us start with the Drama award, whose three judges are listed as Richard Watts (convenor), Wendy Lasica and Jason Whittaker. Let us see if they have anything in common, shall we?

According to his blog, Richard Watts is “a 44 year-old gay man living in Melbourne, Australia: a writer, broadcaster, arts worker, arts lover, and Collingwood supporter.”

So does Dramatic Dick have any, you know, firmly held political views? Turns out he does, as he explained in a November, 2007 blog post devoted equally to the left’s election-night triumph and that nasty piece of work, John Howard (the bowdlerising asterisks were added at the Billabong):

Woke late. The fear and doubt that had built in me throughout Friday was gone, replaced by a 'nothing else to do but wait' mood.

Voted - no sausage sizzle, damn it. Went to Richmond, took over from KP handing out how-to-vote Green flyers at a polling booth for two and a half hours. Still no sausage sizzle. Bantered with a Liberal, kinda ignored Family First, chatted happily with Labor volunteers.

Polling booth closed; walked over to KP's house for election night party, ended up staying considerably longer than intended because bloody Howard wouldn't do the honourable thing and admit defeat early. It wasn't until 10:30pm that he appeared to tell us what we'd know for hours; that his government had been swept dramatically from power. Elation, and yet...

Last night it all felt unreal, even with Rudd claiming victory on the TV before us. Thence to Trades Hall, and a huge f**k-off-Howard party; a sweaty, drunken, happy mess of a night packed with friends and strangers and delighted, disbelieving faces.

Today, it feels even stranger. After waiting and hoping so long for a change of government, now there's a sense of - waiting? sameness? A pregnant pause? Time to see what happens next; to see what Rudd will act on in his first 100 days of power. Indigenous reconciliation? Ratifying Kyoto? Dismantling WorkChoices? Will he govern well? Radically? Badly?

The sense of joy which filled me last night has been replaced by a sense of calm anticipation, and something else; something I can't quite put my finger on.

Don't f**k it up, Kevin.

So much for the panel’s chairman. What of his associates? 

Wendy Lasica is an arts bureaucrat with the good sense to send her child to a private school, which might be taken as speaking of a solid, bourgeois sensibility. Then you read one of her reviews and come across this:

…in Guerin’s Incarnadine, a tension is set up between the performers and the audience. At times, it was as if one was watching this work through a transparent barrier. Guerin sets up a scenario that demands our empathy, but denies us the emotional access to it. Guerin and Rebecca Hilton perform a tireless unison boundary-marking pattern on matching white spirals painted onto the floor. The sound by James Lo crashes and crackles around the dancers, while the stark white light dramatically changes direction, striking the dancers at odd angles. They are exposed by the light. They rarely leave their spirals, perhaps only to extend a movement onto the floor; but they retreat, eager it seems, to maintain their space.

By Lasica’s reckoning, this is bonza stuff. And the third member of the Drama panel?

Why, Jason Whittaker, who is the deputy editor of Crikey! Need any more be said? Actually, yes. Whittaker displays at least one of the traits that so often mark members of the New Establishment. He doesn't much like the working class or approve of its interests:

Just so you will know, the $25,000 Premier's prize went to Patricia Cornelius for Do Not Go Gentle, a production whose journey to the stage was long and very nicely funded:

… Patricia Cornelius took out the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Drama worth $25,000 for her play Do Not Go Gentle, which premiered last year at fortyfive downstairs in Melbourne. She adds the prize to the shelf along with the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards - Play Award ($30,000) that she won earlier this year for the same play. It also scored the R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Award in 2006 and the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award in 2007. She’ll have to wait a little longer to see if she can score a State Premier trifecta with the West Australian Premier’s Book Award for Scripts ($10,000).

So it must be a great play, right, what with all those awards and prizes? Here is how lady of letters Alison Croggon describes what audiences can expect:

The opening scene is spine-tingling: Maria (Jan Friedl) shuffles onstage in dressing gown and slippers, opens her mouth and sings a glorious aria, while behind her six anonymous figures, dressed in thick arctic gear, march onto the stage, each leading the other like the figures in Breughel's painting The Parable of the Blind. It recalls Walter Pater’s insistence that all art aspires to the condition of music, yearning towards the mysteries of what can’t be expressed in words, and is as moving an image of mortality as I have seen in the theatre.

Ms Croggon, who served with Cornelius as a judge on the Ross Trust Drama Awards -- which Wendy Lasica now administers, just coincidentally – is baffled that mainstream audiences have been denied the opportunity to witness her associate’s genius, observing, “…this is another play that has struggled to find mainstage production.”

But seriously, who needs a paying audience when a play so long in development and for years unseen can generate such a nice revenue stream?

Victoria Premier and arty dilettante Ted Baillieu will host the upcoming annual literary handouts, every bit as unaware this year as last that those artistic sorts with whom he breaks bread at the bang-up celebrity dinner cannot stand his foul black guts.

That would be because they mistake the Liberal leader for a conservative, which is perhaps the ultimate demonstration that luvvies really are an extraordinarily thick and unobservant lot.  

Lost In The Woods

VICTORIANS keen to get away for Easter may well face difficulties if their destinations are state parks, which rangers are declining to unlock as part of ongoing industrial action. Earlier, they declined to take part in preventive burns intended to reduce combustible material in our forests, a policy advocated by the recent Royal Commission examing the Black Saturday fires. Give the rangers credit for thoroughness. Having compromised the state's safety, they are now doing their bloody minded best to ruin its residents' recreation.

While that attitude is shocking in its selfishness, its meek acceptance by the Baillieu government is even more distressing.

Parks are sealed with a simple gate and padlock, which would be the matter of a few moments to snip open with a pair of bolt cutters. Ideally, this should be done for the TV cameras by Minister Ryan Smith, who could then announce that the parks are open to all, as they should be on the Easter long weekend. To further alert the rangers that they have a fight on their hands, he might also have added that anyone caught breaking locks would not be to subject prosecution.


But that would require a spine.

Bound For Too Much Glory

QUITE APART from its literary merit, That Deadman Dance is a remarkable book for a number of reasons, the first being that it is likely to remain the last winner of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award ($75,000) for quite some years to come. The second is the sheer number of awards it took in other states. Western Australia ($75,000), New South Wales ($75,000) and Victoria ($75,000), all bestowed their highest and richest honours for fiction on Kim Scott’s tale of white settlement and black eviction in, around and off Albany. In addition, it also bagged the Miles Franklin ($50,000), the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Vance Palmer ($30,000), the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and a swag minor laurels.Tot them all up and Scott has done very nicely for himself.

None of this is to impugn Scott’s book. Taste is a subjective thing, and while some might recoil at yet another tale of black meets white on the frontier and everyone goes home dead or guilty, there is no doubt the man can write. If you have not read the book, here is a little excerpt to get an idea of his skill at turning a sentence and working an image, in this case the bristling, serrated strangeness of native flora to European eyes:

They found a path, rocky and scattered with fine pebbles that at one point wound through dense, low vegetation but mostly led them through what, Chaine said, seemed a gnarled and spiky forest. Leaves were like needles, or small saws. Candlestick-shaped flowers blossomed, or were dry and wooden. Tiny flowers clung to trees by thin tendrils, and wound their way through the shrubbery, along clefts in rock. Bark hung in long strips. Flowering spears thrust upward from the centre of shimmering fountains of green which, on closer inspection, bristled with spikes.

It is a lovely piece of writing, at least by one Bunyip’s reckoning, and if some of Deadman’s characters and dialogue seem sometimes to have been ordered from the literary subsidiary of Central Casting, well put that down to taste and tolerance on the part of the awards’ judges.

But here’s the thing. These literary awards, they are supposed to help, encourage and support Australia’s struggling writers. Can it be said they achieve that purpose when one book corners so much of the spoils?

More to the point, Scott is a West Australian, where it is perfectly understandable that an appreciative Premier would wish to reward a local talent who has produced a local story. What of the other states? In bestowing their taxpayers’ largesse on a writer from elsewhere, what does their prize money do to encourage and support local writers?

Queensland’s Campbell Newman has answered this question by the simple expedient of doing away with his state’s awards altogether. But perhaps, if tempted to follow suite, the other premiers might want to consider keeping their prizes closer to home. Across Australia there might have been six authors encouraged to produce better work and pay their electricity bills while doing so.

It is just a thought and no slight to Kim Scott. But those prizes do represent a considerable piece of change and the competitions’ judges, luvvies almost every one, generally adhere to to the creed that allows for each according to his needs. Scott’s have been well met. Some other scribblers might enjoy a little piece too.

UPDATE: Mark Fletcher expands on a theme -- and makes some sort of history at the same time. Is his article the very first sensible thing to be published at New Matilda? Perhaps he deserves an award!