Digital Publishing in Brisbane
This is great. The Queensland Writers Centre has launched a centre for digital publishing based in Brisbane. It’s called if: book Australia.
It’s important that the QWC is driving this and encouraging authors to become digitally literate. Like it or not, the future of reading will be both on screen and on paper. Actually, no, forget the like or not. If you don’t like the idea of digital books, get over it.
People really need to stop listening to the wider media when it comes to digital publishing. Journalists and their ilk are incapable of perceiving the advent of digital publishing as anything other than combative terms: books versus screens, the death of books, impassioned pleas on behalf of books, arrogant dismissals of books.
Ink on paper is a very old technology and is not about to be ‘improved’ any time soon. This is not a format war. Books are not Beta and screens are not VHS.
Having said that, digital technology promises to bring some flexibility to the reading experience and it’s likely, even with fiction, that we will read more and more digital texts over time. The future of reading fiction is more likely to combine screen and paper technologies. You might read that trashy airport novel or a new writer you’re unfamiliar with on a reading device. But a treasured text from a favourite writer will most likely remain something to keep on a bookshelf.
Or maybe not. Either way, writers will still be in demand.
In any case, this is an incredible opportunity for writers to stand up and take more control of the business side of writing. The rules of this new medium are yet to be written and we need to take the initiative to ensure the future meets the needs of the two most important people in fiction: writers and readers.
Read MoreTwelves Part Five – Films
An obvious one and done not too difficult to compile, though I suspect I’ll soon be horrified at what I’ve left out.
Obvious directorial must haves: Cohen Brothers, Woody Allen, Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Hitchcock. So Lebowski beats Fargo, Zelig beats Love and Death (only just), Ed Wood beats Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice, Godfather beats its sequel and Apocalypse (again only just), and Rear Window beats North By Northwest.
Most of the others I consider brilliant pieces of writing over and above any other film making craft.
The most recent entry is WALL-E, although, thanks to my four-year-old, is probably the one I have seen most frequently of all of them. Despite this, the story never gets old or rusty. I don’t use the word masterpiece lightly, but it pops up regularly when I think of that film. Not one single frame is out of place.
I’ve seen a lot of Peter Greenaway’s short films (they used to play them a lot on Eat Carpet, remember that show?) and a few of his features. Most of them are deathly dull, laboured, and kind of pointlessly esoteric. You might say the same for The Cook, but I won’t have a word of it. Sex in toilets, bakeries, libraries, Tim Roth vomiting at the dinner table, cannibalism. What doesn’t it have? Michael Nyman’s awesome score helps too.
- The Big Lebowski
- The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
- Zelig
- The Godfather
- Memento
- Bliss
- Being John Malkovich
- Ed Wood
- WALL-E
- Fight Club
- The Rear Window
- Joyeux Noël
A good list? I wouldn’t mind seeing every one of them in a DVD film festival. Actually that would be kind of cool.
No, no distractions. Must write.
Read MoreShortlisted for the Text Prize
Concentrate, the first novel for younger readers co-written with my brother Darren has been shortlisted for the 2009 Text Prize. You can check out a short blurb and strange bio for the Brothers Groth at the Text web site.
Read MoreTwelves Part Four – Short Stories
Short stories for me are a lot like songs. They’re arranged into ‘albums’, sometimes shithouse compilations, but sometimes wonderful works by single artists. The best collections transcend their individual stories to form something greater, but even in the best collections there are standouts. Sometimes the standouts lend their title to the collection as happens in a few of the list below.
But the real reason I think of shorts like songs is because my most intense exposure to shorts tories happened in that same critical adolescent stage where I was listening to all those records. When I wasn’t doing that I was reading shorts.
This list was much harder than any of the previous three because there’s no iTunes for short stories (much to my disgust) and because most of the works I read back in that formative stage came from a library. As such, I have vivid memories of particular works, but I have rarely, if ever, returned to them in the intervening years.
So this was a list I had to think hard about, really reach back in the memory banks and revisit a few of the big anthologies still on my bookshelf.
There is the odd curve ball in there. I’m sure Veny Armanno is mortified I would place one of his early stories in a list with Marquez, Vonnegut, et al. Or maybe not. I really like a story where the main character is shot in the back of the head and falls nose first on the exclamation key of a keyboard. That’s just too cool to leave out.
I could have included the whole collection of Carey’s, Ballard’s, and Vonnegut’s. Those three books lit my short story fuse that’s been smoldering ever since.
The list is not in any discernible order, though I thought of the first few immediately. The rest have been pieced together. I notice this one is far more varied than my novels list, both in nationality and vintage. I guess that’s another advantage of the form: you wind up reading much more widely in the time available.
So, here it is:
- The Fat Man in History — Peter Carey
- War Fever — JG Ballard
- Welcome to the Monkeyhouse — Kurt Vonnegut
- And the Exclamation Marks Hit the Page!!!!!!!!!! — Venero Armanno
- 55 Miles to the Gas Pump — Annie Proulx
- Mushrooms in the City (from Marcovaldo) — Italo Calvino
- Are These Actual Miles? — Raymond Carver
- The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII — Victor Pelevin
- The Union Buries its Dead — Henry Lawson
- The Langoliers — Stephen King
- The Prowler — David Malouf
- A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings — Gabriel García Márquez
Probably a very individual list and probably not representative of the kind of stuff I write. Or maybe it is. Hell, I’m no judge. I’ll let you make of it what you will.
Read MoreOne hundred and forty-four
Over dinner with a friend last week, I was casually asked, ‘So what’s the next twelve?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What is part four?’
‘I haven’t got one.’
‘But you’re doing twelve lists, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s the impression you gave.’
‘Really? Oh crap.’
So, I’ve spent some time since that night wondering exactly what I can now include in more meaningless lists. Exactly how specialised can I get? Can I reduce the Beatles list down to just White Album songs? The next couple seem pretty obvious: short stories and films. After that it gets a little hazy. If I am to meet the expectations of one person whom I happened to meet last week, I’m going to have to seriously scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Hold onto your hat.
Read MoreThe Books
