It is true that things have gone very quiet again lately. I may be able to explain the total scenario shortly, in the meantime I offer a photo of my right foot for your delectation.
Day 19 Wed 10 December
It is now twenty days since I went under the knife (and the Fentanyl) and I think my brain is working again though in a somewhat disorderly manner. I am instructed to keep my foot extended above the level of my heart. It turns out to be almost impossible to write while doing this except on the IPhone using Notes. I know some people write whole novels on their IPhones but this will never be me. I am now propped up with the foot more or less level with the heart, trusting that is adequate for an hour or three. Afterwards it’s back onto the foam support cushion and a dose of Netflix.
Turns out that while being unable to write actual books a lot of other stuff has been stirring around in the Para-conscious, that limbo just above the Unconscious which Freud et al pointed out is the real sporting field.
For so long now the question has been “Who are you?” or in my case “Who is the author”. As I commented to O this morning, I have probably written a novella’s worth of words just on this topic, instead of writing the books for whose benefit the purported author exists. Because I write across several genres I need to distinguish the authorial identity so people who are looking for deep and meaningful memoirs won’t be confronted by dystopian young adult post-apocalyptic fiction, or vice versa. Not to mention all the rest of the unfinished business, the cookbook, the poems, the realist novels now long out-of-date. As a sidebar, it is now impossible to imagine writing a novel without mobile phones and Internet connections. Turns out it is also impossible to update former novels to include the tech-shit. My old novels are so twentieth century. Their characters send letters and make phone calls and have long conversations in person with each other using big words and long sentences. Moreover they are serious about their relationships.
Somewhere in the recent delirium I think the identities have resolved themselves. Possibly due to the shocks to brain function I know who is writing what. Other things also seem to be clarifying themselves, like ghee emerging from butter, but we’ll see more about that when I get back to Chapter Six of Whatever-it-is-called and confront the final edit of Regret Horizon which are the two cabs currently on the rank.
Merry seasonal greetings to all! And to my fellow writers, may every day be filled with deleted adverbs and serendipitous turns of phrase.
I have struggled so much this year just to keep going that I haven’t really been following the AI horrorshow and the latest madness of late modernity, or whatever/wherever this is. But now I am paying attention.
I subscribe to The Atlantic magazine because very little published in Australia can now be regarded as well-informed or useful. The Atlantic has just published an accessible search engine for the new generative AI programs being developed by Apple and Anthropic, listing all the published works currently being “scraped”. So simple. I put my name in and in seconds up came the answer. Thirty six of my published academic articles and reviews, and two other fictional works, were already in the data-base. This led me to check the work of a couple of others close to me. My daughter Obelia Modjeska had been scraped for her main true crime series and one other book. I checked other writers I knew – Australian authors, with no US registered copyright, unless the publishers had filed for copyright on behalf of the authors. Had they? Did it matter? How would you know? And what about everyone who had published in journals or magazines or even online on their own websites?
I have used Chat-GPT several times, mostly about factual things, because its information is more comprehensive than what comes from a Google search. The personalised aspect of it is intriguing, and its responses to weird queries are pretty amazing. In less than a minute I learned all about the history of commercial rolled oats in Australia. It told me things in greater detail than I could have found out by myself without wasting many hours. The information seemed to be coming from other sources on line, including Wikipedia, company statements, newspaper articles and ephemeral sources. Fair enough. Seems helpful.
On the other hand I knew AI had been exploiting the work of creative writers. I had heard about the class action suit in the US to gain compensation for the thousands of writers whose works had already been used by LIBGEN. People in the class action suit were only eligible to participate if their works had been formally recognsed by the US Copyright Office. Australian writers are not eligible to register.
Some comments I have read by disgruntled authors suggest they think it means the companies can publish their books without attribution or payment. No, that is just piracy, which is prevalent and bad enough. It is not the books/stories as such but the actual inner structures of them, sequences of words and phrases for instance, which are fed into some kind of mish-mash machine and then used to generate something “else”, some other written piece.
I began to realise what this means when I asked Chat-GPT if it could write a fictional text for me. Sure, it said, and gave me a few suggestions for guidelines. It could even write a novel. I recollected the many howls of protest from self-published authors on various Facebook chat groups who noted some authors were publishing three books a day or something like that. I didn’t take it any further, obviously, but I am trying to understand what this means for writers currently trying to publish their works, whether fiction or non-fiction. Will everything immediately be fed back into the AI interface/program/platform? Has copyright now disappeared? The Australian Society of Authors is making submissions on this at present and has published Guidelines with clauses to use in publishing contracts. This covers AI licensing and use as well as advice for web content and self-published work. But it seems from some recent decisions or assertions that powerful companies are arguing against the imposition of any such controls. Is there any point in writing anything any more?
I ‘m only writing this to register the existential shock I felt when I realised that so much of the work which I and others close to me have been doing for years and years as writers and researchers and creators and knowledge synthesisers now has no actual protection. But it goes far beyond that. Generative AI is now transforming the idea of “writing” and “creation” and “authorship”. Everything is available for access in an automated mashup bucket which anyone at all can use to produce something else under their own name. Although, ironically, if you get ChatGPT to write your novel for you, it does not have any copyright protection because ChatGPT is not a person. Go figure.
A PERSONAL NOTE FROM ME WHO IS A REAL PERSON AND IS ACTUALLY WRITING THIS:
The Generative AI program now attached to WordPress asked me if I’d like it to create an image for me to use in this post. I said yes. I didn’t tell it what to create, it read my post and then described what it thought I wanted it to do.
Create a highly detailed, sharp-focused image illustrating the theme of “Understanding Generative AI’s Effects on Writers.” Feature a distressed writer surrounded by stacks of books and a glowing laptop displaying generative AI text. The setting should be a dimly lit, cluttered home office with a window showing a blurry modern cityscape outside, symbolizing the clash between traditional writing and technological advancements. Use soft, dramatic lighting to highlight the writer’s expressions of concern and contemplation. Ensure the image is high resolution and captures the intricate details of the environment and the emotional weight of the subject.
Writer in Pain: captured by AI
So AI now understands what kind of image I might like to use to illustrate my thoughts on this topic, complete with setting, environment, gender of writer, and even “his” emotional weight. Had I asked AI to write the piece in the first place it would have been able to construct the illustration at the same time. I might try to do my own description and have the image created by Canva, which also has a visual generative AI program.
The Register of the Real seems to have evaporated almost entirely.
BOOK REVIEW: Here One Moment: Pan Macmillan Australia 2024. 528 pages.
(This review is 2300 words long. An edited version is available on my Substack, go to:Substack.com@annettehamilton “Dissatsfied Insects”)
A few years ago, before Covid, maybe it was 2018, my partner and I sat in the modestly sized ballroom at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, a picturesque mountain town not far from Sydney, to hear Liane Moriarty being interviewed at the Blue Mountains Writer’s Festival. She was posed on the stage in the glary lights, neat, well-groomed, pleasant looking; and when she spoke she was articulate, thoughtful, kind and agreeable. No OTT farrago of carefully curated authorial persona here. She seemed like any attractive middle-aged well-educated woman from a middle-class Sydney suburb. White, heterosexual, “normal”.
Liane Moriarty Author
Liking Liane Moriarty’s books was, at that time, not acceptable in prevailing literary circles. A convenient statement appeared in a 2016 online review of Truly Madly Guilty by “Wadholloway”
“I shouldn’t have undertaken to review another Liane Moriarty. She’s Sydney, I’m Melbourne. She’s popular, I prefer literary. She’s plain vanilla whitebread middle class bleeding heart first world problems, and I like my reading just a little bit grittier.”
The fact that even then she was probably the best-selling and most successful recent Australian woman writer was not of interest to legit literati.
Her latest book, Here One Moment, is an international hit, pleasing most of her readers, or those who leave reviews on Amazon at least. Ranked #23 in all Books, and #4 in Family Life Fiction (Books) it is #1 in the Amazon “Most Gifted” category.
Her readership has rocketed and she has a huge transnational presence. There are translations in over forty languages. Three of her ten novels have hit the New York Times best seller list (Big Little Lies, NinePerfect Strangers, and Apples Never Fall) and these, as well as most of her other books, have been re-imagined for movies and/or television serialisation. Liane Moriarty is credited as producer.
Her profile in the US has been vastly enhanced by the enthusiasm of Reece Witherspoon and the appearance of Nicole Kidman in a key role in the screen adaptation of Big Little Lies.
I picked up the “buzz” around Liane’s early books. I read most of them with a certain baffled admiration. She wrote well. Her books were all set in Australia, many in suburban Sydney, and described places which I, as a mother of three children living in various suburbs at an earlier time of my life, immediately recognised. She wrote real narratives about familiar people. Her stories and the moral dilemmas behind them were complex and puzzling. She delicately peeled away the appearance of placid stability and determined respectability which so characterise the Australian urban middle class, uncertain about its own security, uneasy about its core values, stitched up around family life, unsure of the best way to negotiate the brutal competition for status and influence. Moriarty gets right inside the churning dissatisfaction which characterises the female experience of wifedom and maternity, developed in the 1950s and preserved well into the 2000s. She takes the reader into the silent region of hopes and fears beating away in the hearts of the guests at the Sunday barbecue or the cheery-if-hungover Dads sizzling sausages on the soccer field. Not really “vanilla” at all, more a chili, smoked kipper and pepperoni flavouring hidden inside what looks like cheesecake.
Just along from us sat an older couple and a younger woman. While waiting for the session to begin, we got to chatting, expressing appreciation of Liane’s work and admiration for her ability to go so carefully into such deep waters. I expressed regret that she didn’t seem to have the impact in literary circles that one might have expected. We laughed together and got on famously. I thought they would make excellent friends with common interests. When I asked hopefully if they lived in the mountains they laughed and said, no, they were Liane’s parents, and this was her very talented sister Jaclyn.
Liane appeared again at the Blue Mountains Writer’s Festival in November 2024. This time, she was a rock star. She spoke in the community hall, the largest space available to the Festival in Katoomba, on the same program as a very different Australian author-heroine with a newly published book, Gina Chick. More on her in another post. There was an air of adoration in that room. These were not middle class white bread etc etc readers, these were women and men from all kinds of backgrounds and demographics, engaged with Australia’s current literary culture. Liane spoke about her new book. Many had already purchased copies which no doubt they hoped she would later sign.
At that point I hadn’t read it. I wasn’t even sure I was going to. I have been so deep in struggle with my own memoir which seems to exist near Moriarty’s terrain, since it is about families and Sydney and women and ambition and sadness and grief. I didn’t want to feel derailed by her ability to say things clearly, I couldn’t emulate her grip on a complex narrative. I thought it might make my own book even harder to finish than it already was, so thought it might be better not to read her latest.
But after that Writer’s Festival appearance I couldn’t avoid it. I downloaded here one moment* onto my Kindle. It turns out to be a long book – in the softcover print version 528 pages. I began reading it and felt baffled again, but differently baffled. This story was even more complex than usual. Unlike most of her books, it was all over the place, and the time, literally. A welter of explanatory philosophical positions are followed by a mathematical function called Kronecker’s Delta. It’s impossible to explain just how this works but it suddenly jolted what had seemed a disjointed and often bizarrely disconnected set of characters and events into a different mind-space where she seemed to be saying something incredibly important even though I still felt I didn’t understand it.
There is some strange typographic font thing going on with her book cover. On the Australian edition the title appears without capital letters. All the reviews and listings for the book use upper case for first letters, as is usual with novels. But I think the book is good in lower case, so to speak. Without a serious and imposing font, it emphasises the qualities of the butterfly wings changing the course of history, even though it was a seagull’s wings in Lorenz’s original formulation, as Moriarty’s main character explains.
SPOILER ALERT:
Cherry, the supposed psychic who sets the events of the tale in motion, wears a particular piece of jewellery which leads to her identity being discovered by the many people affected by her predictions of the timing and reason for their deaths. These predictions are uttered seemingly for no reason on a plane bound from Hobart to Sydney. Her beautiful gold brooch is inscribed with the Kronecker Delta symbol and Cherry has worn it every day since her late husband Ned gave it to her on their first wedding anniversary. Naturally I wanted to find out more about the Kronecker Delta symbol and how this related to the theoretical and spiritual elements of the book and this took me into the realms of algebraic theory, far beyond my comfort zone. One of the characters was called Leopold, and the original Kronecker who developed the Delta symbol was also called Leopold, but I wasn’t sure how important this was.
The Kronecker Delta symbol is concerned with the way one small event can have vast consequences in its ultimate effects. ‘Could the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’ asked the bearded man with a beatific smile …’
(p. 162 in Chapter 38). Later, Cherry tells us that she was the butterfly, although it should have been a seagull. ‘I walked through that plane squawking my predictions, flapping my wings, and my actions had consequences which had consequences which had consequences’ (Chapter 40).
It turns out that Cherry is an actuary, and hence an expert on mathematical measurement of life expectancy, as well as being the daughter of a fortune teller. Whether or not Kronecker’s symbol really has anything to do with what the book is saying, the eventual supposition or interpretation seemed to me to be: basically everything is chance. There is no meaning to it. Nobody can know how one event will lead to another. But nothing is unchangeable. People can interfere based on incorrect assumptions and things may still turn out very well. The type example of this is Timmy, who Cherry predicts will drown at the age of 7. His mother, terrified the prediction will come true, enrols him for baby swimming lessons and devotes incalculable time to making sure he is an excellent swimmer. The prediction does not come true, but instead he, his family and indeed the entire country benefit from these events and he becomes an Olympic swimmer and doubtless gold medallist. This is such a deeply Australian conclusion.
I am not quite sure but am beginning to think that Liane’s latest book is traversing some kind of meta-philosophy of Australian existence. The recent death of her much loved father seems to infuse the book from start to finish, even though she never says anything to indicate this. I could only read it as a deep engagement with life, death and meaning, common but profound existential questions which arise when a loved parent dies while the child is in middle age.
The emergent philosophy seems to be something like: efforts to understand life as the result of fate or destiny or as arising from some supernatural significance are wholly misguided. Whatever happens, happens. You can change it or not, depending on the circumstances, and you never really know how things will turn out even if you apply the best possible methods. You can calculate and have expectations, based on mathematically validated predictions: cohorts of certain kinds of people who do certain kinds of things are likely to die of heart attacks, for instance, but in any given case there is no way of knowing who will defy the expectations and who will succumb. Psychics and others can indicate possible outcomes and sometimes they might be right but if so that is an unpredictable accident. Things do often look bad, you have to be afraid, you can’t control any of it, maybe it’s dumb luck and maybe that is a mistaken concept anyway because what we think of as luck is the outcome of some Brazilian butterfly’s flapping (and I don’t mean a butt-lift, but even that could cause all kinds of outcomes).
This feels like a very Australian philosophy. It’s the kind of thing my old father would have said, in different words, before he died in 1983. It’s a stoic frame of mind, the kind of world view that accompanied the Australian experience before twentieth century late modernity took hold. It was the view that took people took through the Depression and two World Wars and long before that, in the grinding rural struggle against floods and fire and poverty, untreatable illnesses, the painful unmedicated births and cruel deaths of babies and children. This perspective survives to a degree in the literary legacy, although any contemporary recognition of the harsh settler life is muted by the awareness of what was happening on the indigenous frontier. A term for it might be Ozstoic.
Stoic philosophy has resurfaced lately in Australia. It fits the land, the place, the feelings, the increasingly unpredictable conditions, the endless circuits of wild bushfires and devastating floods that mark everyday life in most parts of Australia, urban and rural. The power goes out for days on end. People have to work out how to exist without the appliances that we have come to take for granted. Having grown up without any of them, since our family house on the Hawkesbury was not connected to electricity until the late 1960s, it’s no shock to me, but for younger people who have experienced the secure abundance of the last few decades it’s a big shock, and worse to come.
Bust of Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (Wikimedia Commons)
We don’t need psychics on planes to tell us to take another look at how we live our lives, at what we can expect, at what we must adjust to, take into account – and to realise the extent to which it is not in our control. It feels like Liane Moriarty’s latest book is holding these realities up to our faces, and we can’t help but see them, even if we try to keep our eyes shut. Yes, anything can happen.
I couldn’t resist using the cover of Australian writer OJ Modjeska’s Gone: Catastrophe in Paradise here. The flight from Hobart to Sydney which is central to Moriarty’s book does not go down: but it could have. That would have been a very different way to end the story. Modjeska’s limpidly acute account of an actual air disaster in Tenerife in 1977 is powerfully imbued with the same awareness as appears in Moriarty’s book. A series of seemingly random events and unpredictable errors results in a horrendous outcome with hundreds of deaths, mostly of people going on holidays. Read it.
On various writers’ sites it is suggested that one should self-tether to a regular writing schedule to produce, let’s say, a thousand words a day. This routine is recommended so that the current work might be finished some time before the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (I think at least one of them is here already, but I diverge). As it is, I write at least a thousand words a day before breakfast in diaries, notebooks and Word files and on Evernote, generally in response to my reading during the 3.00 am Insomnia Shift. Or to incessant Nietzschian nightmares of the Eternal Return (the ghost of some book I tried to write years ago but abandoned). These words don’t count though.
Just once did I try this recommendation. It was late 2023 and early 2024. I wrote one thousand words first thing each day for Book One of a new series. I couldn’t believe how effective this strategy was. The words piled up quickly and a complete manuscript appeared. The author didn’t seem to be the same “me” as the previous incarnation and undoubtedly needed a new name. What would it be? Before that could be decided I had to pause because I had neglected so much else (having pressed the “hold” button so firmly) and then I was sucked into the usual vortex. The book, and the series, have languished since.
In fact none of my grand projects is ever really finished. Some almost achieve line honours but fall because I can’t stand doing yet more edits or I have found a new angle I want to put into Chapter X or something requiring extensive research has inserted itself into my consciousness at the very moment I was opening the edits file.
I am sick of my own unfinished books, and this means I am sick of their author as well, I want to shut her up and move forward into new scenarios which I can feel shaping themselves through various still incoherent images. They suggest to me a space far more appropriate than this merry-go-round posthuman nightmare dominated by nostalgic and anemoiac hangovers. (This observation led me to consider the appropriate cocktails for this condition, leading to the development of the FORLORN NOSTALGIA and the RAISETHE ALARM – see forthcoming Cocktail Post).
In the meantime I decided to bring these almost-finished projects to an end and gave myself a deadline of the end of summer (this is Australia, so that is around February) after which I would totally devote myself to my my futuristic post-apocalyptic picaresque adventure/thriller/romance series.
But the effort of finishing old stuff feels insuperable and pointless. It is like trying to complete a very complex piece of embroidery on a linen tablecloth you inherited from your grandmother. You promised you would do it, but now your grandmother is dead and so is your mother and nobody is even vaguely interested in embroidery and who uses linen tablecloths anyway they would only get filthy from the takeaway juices dripping through the cardboard box you now eat from after the food is delivered in a paper bag by some anonymous person who leaves it at the front door. You don’t even need to pay by credit card anymore.
So you won’t need a ladies’ reticule to keep your credit cards in.
Lady’s Embroidered Reticule: English Public Domain Media Search
I guess my question is: is it a waste of time to keep going on the old stuff? Or should it be put aside somewhere on a USB stick in a plastic box where it will be forgotten and ultimately sent to the tip leaving no trace anywhere in the sentient universe? At least if these various blocks of narrative turn into “books” they might live on for a while in a library – maybe. Thus do I console myself for all these years of wasted effort.
In my previous post I raised the question of the apparently miserable visages of great German writers/thinkers/philosophers. When is a writer a philosopher, and vice-versa? I think of both Hermann Hesse and G. W. Sebald as philosophers. They are more often described as “novelists”. There’s something so wrong with these genre-based descriptions.
In any case, thinking of philosopher’s faces reminded me of the question of Wittgenstein, more particularly his eyes. I hasten to add that Wittgenstein is Austrian, not German, by birth but whether that makes a difference or not is too much to consider here. My fascination with Wittgenstein’s eyes arose originally from those mystifying photographs in G. W. Sebald’s book Austerlitz.
Sebald’s book resurfaced throughout my writing Regret Horizon, which is now finished but not really ready – like so many of my books. One of its main chapters is titled “Austerlitz”, where I try to connect the dots of history, memory, family, loss, fiction, past and present.
I need to go back to Wittgenstein’s eyes before finalising my chapter.
Was I looking at Wittgenstein, or was he looking at me? And what to make of the non-human eyes in that sequence of images? Is that a key to the relationship between writer and reader? I am trying to traverse these ideas in my memoir, clumsily and faintly. That’s why the book probably needs to be rewritten again, and again.
If you fancy dense academic critical commentary, there’s a great paper published a while ago about aspects of this topic.
Nina Pelikan Strauss. “Sebald, Wittgenstein and the Ethics of Memory.” Comparative Literature, vol 61, No 1, Winter 2009.
“Austerlitz’s narrator insists on his hero’s ‘personal similarity to Ludwig Wittgenstein,’ noting the ‘horror-stricken expressions on both their faces'”.
Remember back in digital prehistory when Facebook was first a Good Thing? You had “friends” and you could post stuff and they could see it and vice-versa, and as I recall it lasted on your feed for longer than five minutes. It was great for groups interested in the same subject, yes, but it was also great for whatever circles of people you were connected to or inserted in. I don’t know exactly when that changed but now, apart from a couple of still-effective writers groups and one or two painting sites, most of the time all I seem to get is ads for bunion treatments and dodgy looking products introduced by persons in white coats who drone on at length about one of the many infirmities you share. Of all my “friends”, most of whom were actual real people who I knew, and/or relatives, I hear little or nothing. Maybe they have defriended me. I know some of the relatives did. Or maybe they just don’t use Facebook any more.
So when I began to hear about Substack I thought well maybe this was a good way to keep in touch with people you knew, or would like to know, or who knew you, and I imagined lively discussion groups focussing on the usual weird stuff I enjoy thinking about but find it hard to share in the normal run of things lined up at the supermarket or chatting to some bored relative, if you can still find one willing to talk on the phone (therefore must be over 60). So I joined up and only later realised that the primary intention is to get people to pay money to read whatever the writer is wittering on about. Perhaps I haven’t gone into it enough, and perhaps I am not sufficiently committed to supporting the writing of others, but I really can’t see paying regular monthly subscriptions for the privilege. I know this shouldn’t have anything to do with television or streaming services but I can’t help reflecting that I already have to pay dollars and dollars to access Netflix, Stan, Binge etc. and they are seemingly limitless. And the Substack feeds seem limitless but all the same somehow. While I sympathise with the writers for wanting to be paid, I can’t help thinking there is a more important need for places to talk to each other. Sadly, Substack is not it.
Although I mistakenly signed up for two different Substacks with two different email addresses, I am now trying to cancel them. I didn’t sign up to any paid subscriptions so that’s good. But I did want to write things people might read, outside the strict limits of what this blog and site are about, so I thought I would make up my own little Substack thingie and call it a FEUILLETON and put it in my regular POSTS every once in a while. And it will of course be absolutely free to anyone who goes to this website. I haven’t set up a Newsletter so maybe this will do.
The next post will give more on the history and context of the FEUILLETON. Introduced into popular cultural circuits via Herman Hesse’s book The Glass Bead Game, very influential among proto-intellos in the 1950s and 60s, it turns out to be a very powerful way to think about the effects of contemporary information circuits. More soon.
He’s a miserable looking fellow, unfortunately. Likewise so many of those serious Germanic thinkers. But they do seem to dominate the philosophy of the last century.
Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962
I like to think of that Monty Python sketch where they are all playing football.
Planned for publication in November 2023, this is a project I have been working on for several years. It has changed over the time of writing, and I have changed along with it.
REGRET HORIZON
BOOK ONE IN THE SERIES “OUTSIDE THE FRAME”.
It is a true story of a single year, 2008, when both my mother and my ex-husband died within two weeks of each other. It is a meditation on contemporary rituals of death and its aftermath and the inability of our narratives to prepare us for the impossible dilemmas of mortality.
The narrator, who is and is not “me”, is caught by the desire to be objective and tell the truth, to admit her failings and obsessions, but also to acknowledge the social and medical issues around very old age in our society. It is an exploration of the complicated nature of family loyalties, a book about failure and delusion, inter-generational conflict, and the cruelty of old age.
After some glitches the print (paperback) version of Revolutionary Baby is now available. You can purchase from Amazon.com.au or place an order online with Booktopia. Or go to your local bookstore and order a copy to pick up in person, to save postage.
Revolutionary Baby is a collection of fictional stories about the revolutionary changes people experienced from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Women and men, younger and older, richer and poorer, are caught at moments of decision, unexpectedly resulting in the transformation of their lives. They must confront their past expectations and change the way they look at options in the present and the future. All the stories and characters are entirely fictional. This is not a book of hidden autobiography or memoir in disguise. Nevertheless the stories reflect my own experiences from the 1960s into the 2000s, as a student, an activist, a mother, an academic, a traveller, an onlooker and participant in many elements of those transformative times. These stories reflect an Australian history, culture and awareness, although they are not all set in Australia.
As a preliminary quote for these stories, I was drawn to the words of Gil Scott-Heron, now an almost forgotten figure of Black American consciousness in the sixties and seventies.
“The first revolution is when you change your mindabout how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.”
Listen to his achingly powerful poem/song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, from 1971, readily available on Youtube.
After some glitches the print (paperback) version of Revolutionary Baby is now available. You can purchase from Amazon.com.au or place an order online with Booktopia. Or go to your local bookstore and order a copy to pick up in person, to save postage.
What is it about? Revolutionary Baby is a collection of fictional stories about the changes people had to make to their thoughts, beliefs and expectations from the mid-twentieth century onwards. It takes a collection of different characters, women and men, younger and older, and explores aspects or ordinary lives in the moments of transformation, when people had to confront their expectations from the past and change the way they looked at their options in the present and the future. All the stories and the characters in them are entirely fictional, but many aspects reflect my own experiences growing up in the 1960s, being a student, a mother, an academic, a traveller, an onlooker and participant in the many transformations swirling about us. The stories reflect an Australian history, culture and awareness, although they are not all set in Australia and the presence of “overseas” looms large.
As a preliminary quote for these stories, I was drawn to the words of Gil Scott-Heron, now an almost forgotten figure of Black American consciousness in the sixties and seventies.
“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.”
Listen to his achingly powerful poem/song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, from 1971, readily available on Youtube.
The new technologies of communication were supposed to open the literary landscape to everything and make all things possible, but instead the world of writing/reading has been sinking ever deeper into a bog or maybe it’s a quicksand. There needs to be a new way of reading and writing, assuming there is still time in this bizarre and quite possibly doomed century.
Not so long ago I assumed that soon writers and readers would be able to meet each other wherever they chose, around whatever books they preferred. Independent publishing seemed to open up the possibility that everyone could be an author and every reader could find a book (and author) they liked and could afford. Books would become easy and fast to produce. Gatekeepers and cultural brokers from identical backgrounds would no longer determine what was published. To some extent a bit of this vision has come true, but far less than what might have been. The infinite potential of the new technologies has been squandered and a new two-tier publishing world has emerged.
The two publishing worlds have accommodated one another. The Trad Pubs have happily regrouped and concentrated themselves into mega-corporate enterprises, swallowing up small publishers like sardines, cramming writing once again into little boxes marked by gatekeepers ever more vigilant and responsive to the needs of their local ecosystem with its critics, fashions and fame. The so-called “Indies” are dominated by rules and expectations in part set by the publishing industry itself, requiring ever-greater expenditure on processes which independent authors once expected to do themselves.
Many books are no longer even written by their authors. Professional writers do what used to be called “the writing”. Editors do the rest. The degree of uniformity is astonishing. Sentences have shrunk to the minimum. Subordinate clauses have gone to the woodshed. The semi-colon and colon have largely been outlawed. Nobody would ever publish footnotes in a fictional book, or include photos unrelated to the text. In most cases there are hardly any photos at all, even in autobiographies and biographies. Copyright law makes sure song lyrics or poems by someone else cannot be included in a book. Content editors make sure the text conforms to specific “arcs”. Everyone expects three acts and a “hero” protagonist. Writers who still want to author their own books are enjoined to go to courses and learn to write so every book in each genre is as far as possible the same as every other one, apart from title and author name. Cover art, even font-styles, converge around genre expectations.
In Trad Pub the global space is once again divided up into “territories” defined by nation-states. What should have been a free flow of ideas and exchanges across an open planet has fallen into a morass of dot com suffixes with financial consequences attached. Trad Pub still pretends to be terrified of Indie, but it shouldn’t be, because Indie has been more and more mimicking Trad Pub and Trad Pub is making good profits from selling in the online market. Court cases secured publishers’ rights to set absurdly high prices for ebooks while Indie writers continue to destroy their own viability by setting lower and lower prices and indeed give a lot of their writing away for free.
Trad Pub retains the aura of superiority in cultural value. Literary writing conforms to certain expectations about ideology and positioning. Certain themes are “big”, especially if they are to do with those who are ‘Other’ to the publishing enterprise itself. It is sustained by hordes of English majors and over-educated humanities people willing to work for miniscule wages for the privilege of serving the interests of these grossly inflated transnational companies. Some books are mired in complex moral issues, most recently the question of cultural appropriation, when mostly white members of the cultural majority try to write about the experiences of the “less fortunate”. But in truth most of these books, whether worthy or unworthy, are being supported by the publication of one or two or three blockbusters every year from famous authors. If the books can be sold into movie markets or developed for long-form TV series then their success is assured via the feedback loop between viewing and reading.
In the Indie world, genre is King, Queen, Bishop, Knight and Deity. Editors, cover-designers, blurbists and the rest ensure that writers conform to the genre. If you write one book in that genre then woe betide you it you don’t write a series of others, with matching title livery and often the same characters. This is popular mass-market writing, everyone agrees, and there is no room for literary fancies or trans-genre mucking around. In Trad Pub they only want one book a year from their writers, if that, but in Indieland they want two, three, four or more one after the other. Mass production for a mass readership. Now readers don’t even want to read. The big thing is audiobooks so readers become listeners, mainly because the level of literacy in the general population has fallen so low.
Where is writing outside the norm? The most encouraging signs come from small local independent publishers who find all kinds of new (and old) writing worthy of publishing. It is fortunate that many writers can get back their rights to their own works from publishers who have gone out of business, or whose contracts were limited. The new publishing technologies mean these books, long unheard of and forgotten, can be republished and brought to new readers. But what about the countless writers who want to do something different but are being railroaded into the latest trends via K-Lytics and feel obliged to write shape-shifter romances featuring panthers, lions and mongoose (mongeese?) There needs to be a space where they can be published even if they aren’t going to score on the peculiar algorithms used by Amazon and the rest. Books used to appeal to small groups of readers. People didn’t expect to make $50,000 a year or more by writing pot-boilers, although now it seems to be a career path. But it’s all about money and ranking these days, whether Trad or Indie.
Meanwhile I am pushing onwards trying to find some path between the two even though I increasingly think it’s a truly thankless venture.
Annette Hamilton - Writer 