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Happy to be back: Angela Meyer blogging MWF 2012
@ Armadale Castle, Isle of Skye
Let me (re)introduce myself. My name is Angela Meyer, aka Ms LiteraryMinded, and I’ve been invited to blog for the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2012, joining Steph Convery and Mark Welker. I last blogged for the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2010. I’m also participating in the MWF program, but more on that soon…
A few random facts about me:
I am an experienced literary festival-goer, I’ve chaired and appeared on panels at Sydney Writers’ Festival, Ubud Readers and Writers Festival (in Bali), Perth Writers Festival, Byron Bay Writers Festival and many more.
I’m currently passionate about actor Anthony Perkins and spiral staircases. There is a scene in the film Goodbye Again (1961) where these are combined.
I write book reviews for various publications including the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald and have been blogging about literature for more than five years.
I have big plans to attend the Edinburgh Book Festival next year, and to live in Scotland for a spell, drinking whisky, eating porridge and writing up a storm.
I’m at the awwwwwwwwww freak out! stage of a doctorate.
I eat a lot of hommus.
The most recent piece I had accepted for publication was an essay on Ghostbusters.
Pretty Perkins + spiral
You can read some of my short fiction in e-form.
I mainly read print books, even heavy ones that make my wrists ache like The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson (just finished).
I am the co-producer and presenter of an online literary show.I have a bit of a reputation for being the last person at the party (particularly at festivals) but the event I’m running at MWF this year may prevent me from living up to that…
Seeing David Bowie in 2004 was one of the best nights of my life.
I just started learning German (to read Kafka in the original) and then found out from a distant Dutch cousin that some of my ancestors lived, in the 1700s, in a tiny German village called Stapelmoor.
Space, brands and brains (some things I’m looking forward to)
So today I’ve put together my little schedule for the festival, and I thought I’d share with you just a few of the sessions I’m looking forward to this first weekend coming up. Sometimes I pick sessions just on who sounds the most interesting – someone I’m curious about and might be able to learn from in session, or later on, reading their book.
One such person is Marcelo Gleiser, an American professor of physics, astronomy and natural philosophy. Apparently his lectures are as popular with literature students as they are with science students. (Well, he’s pretty good lookin’ too, hey?) This Saturday, the 28th of August, I’ll be seeing him In Conversation with Editor-in-Chief of Cosmos, Wilson da Silva.
Neuropsychiatrist-authors Norman Doidge and Perminder Sachdev are going to tell me all about these heavy, complex things in our heads (and their changeability) on the same day, in their session The Amazing Brain.
That brain of mine had a part to play in this personal ‘brand’ I partly by accident constructed – Ms LiteraryMinded. I’m very curious to hear Kathy Charles, James P Othmer and Karen Andrews talk about The Author as Brand – the professional self as commodity, the online persona and so on. This panel really could take many different directions.
And on Sunday afternoon Sandy Jeffs offer us A Privileged Insight into writing with, and through, mental illness.
What are you guys looking forward to this weekend?
Oh, and, of course, do come along to the sessions I’m chairing! A Q&A on Friday with global nomad and self-confessed chameleon Mohezin Tejani. Mo’s life story is fascinating, and the event is totally free. And on Sunday I’m chairing ‘A Wordsmith’s Dream’ with word-nerds Ursula Dubosarsky, Davis Astle and Kate Burridge.
MWF 2010 authors on… listening
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
The film Morvern Callar by Lynne Ramsay is based on a book by Alan Warner (although the film has a completely different tone and aesthetic). The title character is a young woman whose boyfriend has committed suicide as the film opens, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel, which Morvern then submits to publishers under her own name, successfully, as it eventually turns out.
This is the final scene. It may not be apparent that Morvern is actually wearing earphones connected to a Walkman (this is pre-iPod), which provides an implied diegetic source for the soundtrack, even if the version we hear is obviously overdubbed. This theory is subsequently confirmed by the final few seconds of the clip, in which the sound is ‘overheard’ through earphones turned up too loud, although by that point there is no accompanying image, so that the sound only becomes literally diegetic after it has ceased to make sense in diegetic terms.
Clearly there is something else at stake besides narrative logic by the time we get to the black screen.
I remember going to a concert with friends when I was a teenager, when one of our group also insisted on wearing a Walkman, through which he listened to heavy metal, to register his disgust at the sappy Christian folk being performed on stage. This has always struck me as a peculiarly eloquent and perverse gesture, which expresses both the need to belong to a group and the inability to reconcile oneself to that need. I think that this same gesture, whose perversity goes unremarked in the clip, except insofar as its eloquence is amplified by the sound design, means something more in Morvern Callar.
The sequence also works visually of course. It is not merely moving bodies filmed under a strobe. Rather, it is a tour-de-force of choreography and editing, in which a series of jump cuts disguise abrupt focal shifts as well as changes in the lighting.
DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE.
David Bowie. Preferably Hunky Dory, Pin Ups or The Man Who Sold the World.
We talk a great deal in Australia about the ‘right’ to free speech. Much less is said about the right to be heard, to be listened to. Susan Bickford has interesting things to say about this in The dissonance of democracy: listening, conflict and citizenship (Cornell University Press 1996). In my own work (with Joan Eveline) I’ve been exploring the concept of ‘deep listening’, developed among transcultural mental health practitioners (Gabb and McDermott 2007: 5), who describe deep listening as entailing ‘an obligation to contemplate in real time, everything that you hear – to self-reflect as you listen, and then, tellingly, to act on what you’ve registered’. These ideas and references can be pursued in Mainstreaming Politics (Bacchi and Eveline, University of Adelaide Press, 2010), available as a free download at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press.
Angela says…
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… Franz Kafka
I actually had Franz Kafka round to dinner just a few weeks ago and, let me tell you, it was a bloody disaster. First, he showed up late, citing some sort of problem with his carriage. He had a wild look about him and smelled a bit funny, too. I thought he was supposed to be a mild sort of fellow but, in fact, the opposite was true. He leered at my wife, told filthy stories and generally carried on like a pork chop. Late in the evening, when we were all heartily sick of him, he went to the bathroom and, when he hadn’t returned for quite a while, I went to investigate and found him slumped in the hallway snoring like an old dog. By this time we had had enough and bundled him away in a taxi. The next day we discovered that he had, in fact, stolen some of my cufflinks and a handkerchief … My wife wanted him charged but I thought a trial would be a fruitless exercise.
Angela says…
Read my post on my favourite Kafka story ‘In the Penal Colony’ over at The Gum Wall. Also, I have this photo, framed, near my bed:
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… the last movie they saw
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
My love for British film director Alan Parker was reawakened when I rewatched Shoot the Moon, a devastating story about the breakdown of a marriage that makes Kramer vs Kramer look like You’ve Got Mail. The main protagonist of the film is a writer (Albert Finney) who in his wild success experiences a midlife crisis that leads him to leave his wife (Diane Keaton) and four unruly yet charming daughters. It is a decidedly uncomfortable and confronting viewing experience, and one of the most unfliching portraits of a narcissistic writer ever presented on screen, yet strangely remains one of Parker’s most overlooked films.
Alan Parker was once accused in a review of Mississippi Burning of being a ‘manipulative’ filmmaker, with a directorial style equivalent to a ‘cinematic bludgeoning’. Parker’s response to this was that it was a ridiculous accusation because the very role of director is that of manipulator. Parker comes from an advertising background and knows exactly how to get his audience right where he wants them: how to elicit need, emotion and desire. Most of what I have learnt about writing has come from filmmakers rather than other authors. Those who write with light have just as much to teach us as those who use a pen.
The ending of Shoot the Moon is so sharp and tragic it reminds me of how I like my fiction: short, punchy and leaving me in a state of despair and wonderment, a changed person from the experience. I like my stories to shoot from the hip, and Parker doesn’t pull his punches. He hasn’t made a film since the very bizarre The Life of David Gale in 2003, and I hope he returns to deliver a cinematic one-two punch to confirm his status as one of Britain’s greatest auteurs, or at least erase the memory of The Road to Wellville.
I borrowed Women in Love from the library thinking I would be swooning over Oliver Reed, when in fact my eye was on Alan Bates.
I usually go to the cinema relentlessly, but it’s been a while now as cinemas in Helsinki really slow down in the summer. Choices are also restricted by my not speaking Finnish or Swedish. The former is a deliriously difficult language and I have no excuse for not speaking the latter. Most things slow down in Helsinki during the summertime, with the exodus towards The Summer Cottage (On the Island / By the Lake)… The capital, which is usually lovely and mellow, becomes something of a ghost town, pleasantly drowsy.
Mother and Child: A rather disturbing endorsement of the current paradigm that blood/genes prevail over human relationships.
I don’t know what the last movie I saw was for the reason that, simply put, I don’t really like movies. This isn’t some highbrow pretentious thing (I love television and don’t trust anyone who doesn’t own a TV set), but I hate movie theatres, for the reason that there’s nothing more alienating then going to see a movie which you find unfunny/didactic/obvious/ham-handed/emotionally manipulative etc., only to find that everyone around you seems to be laughing and having a good time (this may sound inherently misanthropic, which, of course, it is). It’s to the point where my wife won’t even go to the movies with me, because I inevitably end up sitting there huffing and fidgeting and basically making the movie-watching experience uncomfortable for everyone around me despite my best attempts to remain still and quiet. If I were to try to justify this intellectually – and I am always happy to attempt to justify everything intellectually – I might argue that television has clearly surpassed the film as a storytelling medium and that it’s difficult to think of any movies from the last decade that match the power of the best television from the same period (like The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, or Arrested Development), and at times when I’m feeling particularly emphatic, I might even suggest that all government funding for film should be reallocated to novelists – but that would be absurd, wouldn’t it? Clearly, I’m just not that fond of movies…
Angela says…
My man and I have been on a bit of a vampire bender. The classic Dracula, then Nosferatu (superior – wonderful) and the other day The Hunger, a very sexy film that I can’t believe I haven’t seen before. It has everything: Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve getting it on; David Bowie in an old-man suit; ’80s decadence; monkeys; an original kind of undead; and so much more. Delicious fun.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments. What was the last movie you saw?
Who in the Sam heck are you?
You may have noticed there’s one new blogger in the ‘hood for the 2010 festival. Well, hello! The folks at MWF have asked me to join Estelle and Simon (who will be re-introducing themselves soon) to blog the bejesus out of this year’s festival. I’m Angela Meyer – a writer, reviewer, editor, blogger, and (importantly) reader from Melbourne. You might already have heard of me via the LiteraryMinded blog…?
You can learn all about my work on the ‘About Me’ page over there. Or, you can analyse me through a short, random mash-up of some of my favourite things (the first ones that pop into my head):
David Bowie Albert Camus strawberry jam Australian literature memes Richard Yates writers’ festivals my boyfriend Ghostbusters writing fiction Twitter Marilyn Monroe Midnight Cowboy the word ‘facetious’ cartoons sad endings Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Shakespeare’s Hamlet Prague The Electric Literature iPhone app Kafka Sir Ian McKellan retro-future making lists Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac’s live acoustic version of ‘Big Love’ Wes Anderson Nabokov’s Lolita The Simpsons Edvard Munch the fact I was born in 1984 Frankenstein (book & film versions – even the bad ones) absurd theatre Punch Trunk
That’ll do. Hope you enjoy my take on things.
Blogs about the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival
It has been wonderful to see the flurry of online activity that this year’s festival has generated on this blog, on Facebook and on Twitter. However, there has also been an extraordinary amount of blogging done elsewhere by both MWF guests and visitors.
Here is a list of all the bloggers we could find who wrote about MWF during the festival. The writing collected here is diverse and ranges from event reviews, interviews, personal reflections, festival wrap-ups and humorous takes on the festival. There’s a lot of content here but we certainly had a great time pouring over it all (and noting the feedback!) so we’re sure you’ll enjoy it too.
Finally, we did our best to make contact with everybody who blogged about MWF this year but if we did miss you then apologies and please feel free to submit links to your blog in the comments.
Blogging from within:
Official MWF bloggers Estelle Tang and Frenchelbow (Simon Keck) here at mwfblog.com.au
Philip Hensher, whose novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, wrote about his visit to Melbourne for MWF here for the UK newspaper The Independent.
Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah wrote this post on her personal blog about her visit to Melbourne as a MWF guest.
Festival guest Angela Meyer is the author of the LiteraryMinded blog and she kept an incredibly comprehensive online diary during the festival:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
Festival guests Jessica Au and Sophie Cunningham from Meanjin Quarterly wrote this piece about The Future of the Book session on Spike (Meanjin‘s blog).
Young adult and children’s fiction writer Julia Lawrinson blogs here on her Writing in the margins blog.
Artist Chay-Ya Clancy created the Federation Square word board installation, which so many of you had fun with. Chay-Ya did some behind the scenes blogging on her Stillness in flight blog.
MWF Copywriting intern Megan Burke covered MWF extensively throughout these posts on her Literary Life blog.
MWF related content from Readings, the festival’s official bookseller.
Blogging from without:
Freelance writer George Dunford covered the festival on his blog Hackpacker in the posts collected here.
On ANZ LitLovers LitBlog, the blog for the online reading group, Lisa Hill covered the festival on the posts collected here.
Perry Middlemiss, who has written online about Australian literature since 1996, filed these four reports on his Matilda blog.
Ghostlines author Nick Gadd wrote about MWF in these three pieces from his blog The writer in disguise.
Joyce Kwok, the author of the decisive guide to Melbourne Mel: Hot or Not, covered MWF in these posts.
Benjamin Solah, Marxist Horror Writer, covered MWF on these posts and a summary of those posts appears at The Specusphere.
Writer, reader and teacher Sherryl Clark filed these four reports on her Books and Writing blog.
Thuy Linh Nguyen wrote about MWF across these posts.
Kathryn Daley covered MWF in these posts on her A little bit of life blog.
Also check out:
Author Jon Bauer’s festival wrap-up
Planning With Kids on the Schools Program
Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum on the MJ Hyland masterclass
Emancipation of Eve on Marketing in the Info Age
eleventyone on Digital Publishing and McSweeney’s (Futuristic) Antipodean Adventure!
Words in progress on Award Winning Australian Fiction launch and Liner Notes: Michael Jackson’s Thriller
Ambrosia : A Memoir on Krissy Kneen (interview)
Just for fun
The satirical news blog The Late Breaker did a series of literary theme posts to celebrate MWF and they can be found here.
Idiot’s View on Writers Festivals
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 
