Today’s post isn’t

contest related, so feel free to tune out if you’re only here for the cash dollaz (although if you are a writer, perhaps you should be at the submission page rather than reading my ramblings). As those who follow my Twitter-self may know, I’ve been applying for jobs over on the East coast of Australia for around six months now, with not so much as an interview to reward my persistence so far. It’s been affecting my ability to do the casual research work I’m currently being paid for a little bit, but thankfully I have people like Lucy to cheer me up when I vent my frustrations into the thrumming social media void:

@toothsoup Looking for work is like having the entire world tell you you’re not good enough. Keep at it, there is an ideal job waiting!

— Lucy (@findmeastorm) May 3, 2012

My problem is, of course, experience. In that I apparently have none, despite my four years of near-constant scientific analysis performed during my Ph.D. project. The attitude of industrial and, to a certain extent, university research positions is that you must have some degree of experience in a laboratory when applying for their positions.  Oh, but the huge number of hours you spent performing and demonstrating laboratories, preparing samples for experiments at national and international facilities, or stuck in front of a computer analysing ream after ream of barely-parsed machine code? They don’t count. No, you need to have at least a year or two up your sleeve doing the kind of laboratory work that would be made redundant by robots in a second if those lab monkeys decided to union up and protest the ridiculously low wages they are paid on graduation from some of the hardest bachelor degrees available.

Ahem. Sorry about that; getting a little ranty. Anyway, my point is that I’m getting nowhere fast, and it’s a bit of a downer. I have occasionally received good feedback from HR departments stating that I was within the top 10%, had a good resume, etc. but apparently I need to spend a couple of years deadening my (already dangerously low) passion for science doing the scientific equivalent of a brickie’s labourer*.

Oh goodness, there I go again.

Okay, staying on topic this time. The point of this post was to talk about goals, and how I don’t generally make them and how I’m trying to make them now. The source of this sudden focus is (like many good things) the bro-tastic Laurie Steed, in the form of a book called ‘Where Will You Be 5 Years From Today?’. It’s one of those dream-big-make-progress-not-quite-self-improvement kind of books, where by you fill in a bunch of fields and end up coming up with a set of goals to work towards. It’s a bit twee, with quotes from everyone who’s ever said something about life flitting about on each page, and cute little graphics emphasising points in bold duo- or tri-colour. But despite this, it’s possible to use it for good rather than mockery. Which is what Louise and I did one night last week. Just sat down and went through the first half of the book, answering as honestly as we could.

The results were surprising, but also not. Both of us obviously have a passion for creative endeavours, and that showed through in our top long-term goals (her: art exhibition, me: novel/collection). But what was surprising was that neither of us really had any real desire to pursue our chosen careers with any kind of vigour. Nor did our long-term goals involve any kind of material gain. In fact, both of us were pretty thoroughly sick of the idea of careers and 9-5 jobs and managers and bosses and climbing the ladder. And we are both rational enough to know that these kinds of feelings are to be expected: no-one actually likes working for the man.

But what was interesting was that, for the first time ever, we actually sat down and thought through what the alternatives might be. Things like starting a small business, or working part-time. Business proposals, grant funding, freelance writing, selling art online, and so on and so forth. And what was even more interesting was that, keeping a rational head on our shoulders, some of these options started to seem feasible. I’m not talking big money feasible, but keeping-your-head-above-water feasible. Which is not to say we’re rushing into anything crazy with idealistic stars in our eyes, but it certainly has given us both something to think about. I guess the take home message is that goal-setting is something that not a lot of us really do in a meaningful way, and it can really help focus you towards pathways that you didn’t think were possible.

And now I think I’d better go before I start raving on about personal journeys and asking the universe to give me a sports car.

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*Not that I mind labouring. I quite enjoyed my time in Kalgoorlie and would likely do it again if the chance arose.

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photo credit: estherase

The tumbleweeds crossing

the broad, white space of this blog are, I assure you, temporary installations. I’m entering a three week crunch time, die-or-do (the former preferable) period in my thesis’ existence. Couple that with the insistent pull of the page in order to fulfil my obligations to the Subdate Challenge and it’s clear why I don’t have a huge amount of time to blog. Except of course, to mention two news items, both  related to competitions and women.

The first is the announcement of a new competition rising over the Australian literary landscape. The Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award has been announced over at Spineless Wonders, accompanied by an interview with the namesake of the competition herself, Carmel Bird. The competition will be judged by the inestimable Sophie Cunningham, most recently the former editor of Meanjin but also the editor/publisher of approximately three-point-six billion other things.  Submission details can be found here, but the main features are a tidy $500 for the winner, and $100 each for two runners-up, a piddling entry fee of $7, a maximum word count of 3,000 words, and a closing date of the 31st of July. Fairly standard rules apply, but be sure to check the submissions guide before sending in your piece!

Related to the competition by way of Ms. Cunningham is this piece in the New Yorker, regarding the formation of a new women-only prize in Australia in response to the under-representation of women in the Miles Franklin award. I’m all for more prizes, just as I’m all for anything that give more exposure to great writing, but I also think that Sarah Holland-Batt makes a good point when she says that:

“Really, these are two separate issues: whether there should be a new prize, which there probably should, and whether there is a problem with the Miles Franklin—and there is.”

To have no women on a short list that could quite easily have accommodated them has meant that this year, the implied gap between male and female writing of and in Australia has become glaringly obvious. And while I support the ‘positive discrimination’ that such a new prize would enforce, I would much rather see a concerted effort made to fix the underlying issues in the reluctance to hold up our female writers as being of literary merit. Obviously that’s much easier said than done; as with anything subjective and related to taste there are a million different tacks one can take to defend a selection that happens to favour male writers. But surely, with the quality of writing that we have coming from female writers in Australia there must be some basic selection bias that prevents them from being picked? In any case, I say bring on the ‘Australian Orange Prize’, I can’t wait to see the short list.

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photo credit: maistora

You may have

heard the news that REDGroup Australia, owners of Borders and Angus&Robertson bookstores has gone into voluntary administration. That is, they’re broke. There are quite a few angles to view this development from, but the one most seem to have taken is that of the book store as a physical place no longer being valid in the modern market. Borders’ capitulation is the first, bass note struck in the death knell of all book stores everywhere.

I respectfully disagree.

The book store as a physical place to make reams and reams of money from is, for sure, almost certainly dying. There’s no way that places such as Borders can continue to make the kind of profits that they built their empires on while online marketplaces such as Amazon, Book Depository, etc. are busy refining how close to the bone they can cut their profit margins and maximise selling volume. The average age of consumers in Australia is lowering, and with it (no offence, Mum) technological proficiency is rising. We know how to order books online. We know how to scout out good deals, and the idea of brand loyalty to a big chain book store is a concept so foreign as to have been conceived in the Amazonian (hah) wilderness.

However, brand loyalty to an independently-owned, locally-staffed, lovingly-curated book store with far more modest expectations of profit is not unknown to us tech-savvy youngsters*. I’ve commented about this previously over at Spike, the Meanjin blog (read the article and then scroll to the comments), and I believe the same thing now as I did then: if independent book stores continue to focus on providing a service that big chain book stores cannot — i.e. the addition of value through the experience of having your tastes known and catered to** — then they will be fine. Hell, they may even find space to flourish after the big chain companies have all bitten the dust or moved online. And almost certainly they’ll have to do something extra to make themselves attractive. Cafe book stores, or pub book stores, or music venue book stores, or creative writing class book stores, or community improvement book stores. Who knows? It’s exciting to think of the opportunities.

Guy Rundle over at Crikey has taken the long view, questioning what the shift to online options means for the future of society. Will we eventually approach some pseudo-dystopian future where physical store fronts are a thing of the past, and the seduction of the window shopper can no longer be relied on to generate revenue? Well, no. Will big chains continue to find it difficult to maintain a physical presence in the fact of online pressures? Almost certainly. But that’s because the solid ground that they have been built on is shifting, and cracks are appearing through which the weedy growth of independent booksellers can sprout. As John Birmingham states in his round-up of the issue, e-books will destroy the large chains. But there’s an opportunity over the next 5-10 years for communities –real, honest-to-goodness communities, not forced bullshit — to be built around a shared, art-gallery-esque experience. Think of a library crossed with your favourite literary journal. That’s basically what I’m getting at here.

Maybe I’m being optimistic. Probably. What do you think?

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*Man, that was a lot of adverbs and hyphens. Are all of those correctly used? I can never tell.

**That’s a horrible way of saying ‘Knowing the owner and being able to talk shop and he/she knowing your tastes well enough that they have a list in their head of all the latest books that you will enjoy.’

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photo credit: futureatlas.com

Meanjin has a stellar essay up at their online editions section by Kate Crawford on the pervasiveness of noise in our society. I had a couple of thoughts regarding it that I thought I’d jot down quickly on my lunchbreak. No guarantees that they are at all coherent:

• The dismissal of Clay Shirky’s quote ‘There is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure’ as a ‘merely prosthetic’ one is interesting. It’s true that this is an individualistic view–an end-user way of dealing with the problem. But the alternative suggested, that a dialogue be opened up between users and producers of technology such that some modicum of silence, some distance can be maintained from the torrent of digital stimuli that assault us daily, seems naive to the extreme. Especially given my experience that most of the people that use these services such as 4square, facebook, and Twitter like using them. They like seeing their friends mundane status updates. They like finding out if they have visited a place often enough to become its virtual mayor. They like playing Farm owner on a digital piece of real estate. Fucked if I know why, but they enjoy the noise. To say that they will ‘grow out’ of this stage and need some societal code of conduct in place to live by when that happens seems a bit presumptuous.

• On the other hand, I agree with Kate that the conversation needs to be had. While the only active proponents might be a small subset of those using the technologies, historically it has never been a good idea to ignore minorities. However, at this point in time, translating conversation into societal action will be one hell of a tough gig while everyone is still so enamoured with the technology. It seems like a case of laying the groundwork now and waiting for the right time to spring it.

• As such, it does seem, presently, to fall to the individual user to set up his or her defences against the noise. As someone who uses their computer to write, I used to use a methods such as Leechblock and other Firefox plugins. I’ve since come to the conclusion that the best option is just to have a laptop that hasn’t got a network card, and lie in bed away from any other distractions. It’s a simple hack, but it works.

• On the other hand, if the responsibility of artists is to provide new insight into the world around them, then isn’t it their responsibility to be ‘plugged in’ to some extent? Writing about being in a society that is connected requires that we be connected ourselves. Of course, Kate doesn’t suggest we unplug entirely so the consideration of spaces of disconnect wouldn’t be mutually exclusive to the plugging in of artists to the zeitgeist. On that note, what is the best analogue to the Fermi cage cafe mentioned, do you think? I’d hazard a guess at libraries, as long as you left your phone at home and ripped out your network card.

Anyway, like I said, absolutely stellar stuff from Kate Crawford. And if you like that, be sure to subscribe to Meanjin, it’s worth it.

I would also like to add that the delayed release of these essays and articles that Meanjin practises is a really great way to get people to engage with them. While I am sitting on my couch reading my hard copy of each edition, I’m not likely to jump up and run to my computer to respond to the articles. But by re-releasing them online and linking them from their blog, they remind me of what I was thinking about while I am in front of a computer screen and therefore in a state that is apt for reply.

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photo credit: James Jordan

Hi all and

welcome to yet another edition of Untangling the Web. In this post I’ll be discussing the mammoth Google Books deal, followed by a rant encompassing many people’s opinion on literary prizes, and finally some useful links for the literature-inclined. As always, thanks go to my main sources of links: @AustLiterature, @Meanjin, and @OverlandJournal.

News:

A Short History of Google Books (and if they have their way, Nearly Everything):

Google. You love them, I love them. And even if you don’t love them, you’ve almost certainly used their home page quite a few times in your life, and you know about their rapidly expanding range of web-based products. Right now you can sign up and get access to Google Documents, Google Reader, Google Scholar, Google Photo (Picasa), Google Video (YouTube), Google Maps, and Google Books. Today it’s that last item on the list that I’d like to talk about. Google Books is a huge project undertaken by Google to provide an online, searchable database of books. That sounds good, right? A massive digital archive of books that may include those that are out of print and therefore unobtainable, being made available for free online for all to access. As always, there a little more to it than that.

When it comes to scanning things and putting them online, it’s not long before the issue of copyright creeps in. Google has begun scanning millions–literally millions, they’re up to around 12 million at time of writing–of books through their Library and Partner projects. While they do have safeguards in place that result in only public-domain works being fully searchable, and measures in place to prevent the copying of text and downloading of copyrighted material, publishers argue that the act of scanning, saving, and storing copyrighted works in their databases is a violation of copyright. This argument was embodied in a lawsuit against Google undertaken by the Author’s Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers. While this lawsuit did not go to court, Google did enter into a settlement agreement with the parties involved. This settlement agreement has gone back and forth between parties and the latest news on it is that the U.S. Justice Department has stated that the settlement is inadequate due to a failure to address copyright and antitrust concerns.

And let’s not pull any punches here, the concerns are very real. While Google has a ‘don’t be evil’ policy, they still have to justify their actions as not being so. At the moment the spin is the preservation of the written word. After all, they say, the great library of Alexendria burned down three times. And the preservation of the ancient tomes that are in libraries is a great use for the scanning technology. But we’re not just talking about libraries here. Google wants to scan and store every book. And it’s the way they are going about this that is drawing criticism. If you have ever installed software that comes bundled with other software (usually called ‘crapware’–things like internet toolbars and the like) you’ll have noticed that the box that says ‘Yes! Count me in! Install this ridiculously useless toolbar on my computer!’ comes pre-ticked. This is known as an ‘opt out’ way of doing things, and it’s exactly how Google is treating the Google Books deal. Authors are assumed to be complying with the Google Books settlement unless they go to a website and opt out. And approximately 6,500 authors did exactly that, lead by such names as Quentin Blake, Zadie Smith and Ursula Le Guinn. Reasons cited for doing so include not having anything to lose by opting out, but potentially everything to lose by remaining in and the effect the deal might have on the copyright of their books. It’s a very tricky situation, as the ownership of copyrighted works would essentially be transferred to Google.

Under the terms of the agreement, ‘…[authors] will receive $60 per full book, or $5 to $15 for partial works. In return, Google will be able to index the books and display snippets in search results, as well as up to 20% of each book in preview mode. Google will also be able to show ads on these pages and make available for sale digital versions of each book. Authors and copyright holders will receive 63 percent of all advertising and e-commerce revenues associated with their works.’ (summation from here). Essentially, Google is gaining permission to put together a huge digital library from which they can make ad revenue and sell e-books. This is big business, make no mistake.

So what happens now? If the settlement goes through and Google gains permission to place public domain works in full, and copyrighted works partially on the net, we’ll all gain access to a huge and informative resource. But what about the rights of copyright holders? And what happens to fair use? Google has decided it wants to do something and has set about doing it, and it seems that while the litigation world has scrambled to try and place terms and boundaries on what the Google machine can and can’t do, it has done so in a much more patchwork fashion than might have occured if Google had asked questions first and acted later.

Further reading:
Google has aggregated all the positive feedback on their project at this page.
The details of the settlement agreement, if you’re a lawyer and into that kind of thing.

Rant:

Arbiters and the arbitrary: the literary prize

Ever since I was just a wee lad in primary school (well, relatively wee–I’ve been one of those beanpole kids right from the word go) I’ve loved getting awards. Who doesn’t? Whether they were the gaudy plastic statues with a gold metallic finish that our teeball teams handed out at the end of the season, or the coveted book prizes for dux of each year, the feeling of recognition and the thrill of being The One for that fifteen minutes has always excited me. Of course, the kinds of awards you get in primary school are pretty easy to justify: you got the most answers right on your addition and subtraction test, or you hit the most home runs around the park. But what happens when the conditions for awards are subjective? Enter the world of awards for creativity and, more specifically, the elusive literary prize.

The issue of the legitimacy of literary prizes has been around for as long as there have been folks to disagree with the chosen winners. By saying that I’m not trying to be antagonistic towards those who critique the receivers of prizes. After all, if there were no dissenters there would be no issue to talk about and everybody would be unanimous in their praise for the winner of each and every literary prize. But it is a rare, if not extinct, piece of writing that unites all its readers, and this is exactly what makes creative arts so exciting and interesting and downright confusing. Lately, partly as a result of the cancellation of the Australia-Asia Literary Award, and partly because the issue is practically seasonal in its discussion, there has been a lot of talk about what attitude, if any, Australian writers should take to literary prizes. Where do they fit in? How can we guarantee that our best writing is winning them? What are they really rewarding?

Over at his blog, Samuel Cooney found himself pondering a contentious question, ‘Why do we insist on placing quantitative value — first, second, third — on creative works that so obviously work in a qualitative fashion?’ It’s a damn good one, too. See, along with my fondness for writing I have a fondness for mathematics and all the ‘hard’ sciences that are derived from it. Throughout my university career I have been graded according to whether I have written an answer that is right or wrong. There’s nothing more to it than that. I cannot fathom how you can assign a grade to a piece of art. What possible scale exists to compare it to? In a learning environment, a good teacher might compare a student’s attempts and grade according to growth, but I doubt there are many good teachers out there. And once you take the writer and the grade/prize out of a learning environment and remove familiarity between author and piece and judge, there is no yardstick beyond that of personal taste. This may seem like a cynical view, but you will find it backed up time and time again if you have a wander through the 40 years of judging piece that the Booker prize ran on its 40th anniversary. Once you see how arbitrary and subject to personalities one of the supposedly most prestigious writing awards is, it almost makes you want to give up and never submit a piece of writing again. For if it can happen to those giants of judging, it can certainly happen to even the most eager of fledgling editors. Geordie Williamson sums up an excellent article (and you really must read the entire thing because it’s brilliant) with the provocative statement that:

‘Prize culture, like aristocratic patronage, makes a lottery of literature, in which one, sometimes unworthy, winner obliterates the hopes of a thousand others.’

If you were to peruse a short list, or even a long list, of books for a national prize, this sense of lottery is obvious. How can you even begin to judge Tim Winton against Richard Flanagan against Murray Bail against Louis Nowra against Christos Tsiolkas? They each write beautifully in their own individual style, as far removed from each other as they are from you and I. (For yet more insight into the judging procedure, listen to the review with Geordie on ABC’s The Book Show.)

But that isn’t the main thrust of Sam’s blog post. Of more concern is the example that such lauded books have on the community they are awarded in. Multiple Miles Franklin Award winner Tim Winton has often been referred to as possessing the voice of Australia. Similarly, Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel The Slap garnered many awards and had critics nodding over how accurately it portrayed Australian life. But whose Australia are we talking about here? By holding these books up as unique examples of what we perceive as being ‘Australian’ are we not precluding any other interpretation? If I wrote a story located in coastal Australia that featured no daredevil surfers, or a suburban tale of family relationships that contained no power-hungry alpha males, would that now be considered innaccurate? By holding a book as being worthy of merit, we are enforcing the ideal present in that book. We are saying ‘Yes, this is correct, this is good, this is the best.’ But what can we, the reader do if we find that such an assertion contradicts our own feelings towards the prize winner? Write a letter? Bitch about it on our blogs?

Ryan Paine has something to say about this at his blog. He points to alternative sources of literature such as Chris Flynn’s Torpedo mag, which could easily be compared to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern for its attitude towards a definition of literature. But as Ryan points out, while we can’t do much about the big-name critical prizes, there are readers’ choice awards such as the Inky Awards or the micro-fiction competition 12words that directly poll readers. Is this method of crowd aggregation the answer? Probably not, since at the moment gaming the system is quite an easy thing to accomplish. But it shows that there are different models out there besides the big-name prize, big-name judges method.

However, sticking our head in the alternative sand isn’t going to make these prizes go away. Remember, these are worth big cash money. An emphasis of late in both the wider Australian workplace and the literary scene has been on the ageing population of Australia, and the subsequent ‘emerging writers’ that this phenomenon has produced. I use emerging somewhat ironically, since a lot of those writers classified as such have been around for quite a some time, but have been obscured by the names that are repeatedly awarded prizes. Rather than effectively pumping up the salaries of these big names, shouldn’t the government and other prize-keepers be spreading the love around to try and foster the kind of broad growth that results in more dynamic long lists? Okay, sure, authors need to eat and winning the big lump sum prizes can help with that, but the encouragement that an emerging or fledgling writer would feel on receiving a nomination for a government-funded prize would be immense. I would rather see 20 emerging or partly established authors receive a $1,000 prize than one author receive a $20,000 prize (though I can most certainly be considered biased in this situation, given my hobby/fledgling writer status).

Literary prize culture isn’t going to change any time soon. The media still needs their stars to invite to Sunrise, and publishers still need stickers to pin to the front of books to boost sales. But if we can start generating discussion for alternative means of awarding great writers now, then who knows? One of the people joining in the chatter could be a future dispenser of a grant, and we may begin to see real shift in attitude in the way prizes are awarded.

Other links of interest:

Long live fiction: A guide to fiction online.

Helen Garner in conversation with Jennifer Byrne.

Ten rules for writing fiction, parts one and two.

MJ Hyland on writing fiction being really tricky shit.

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