Censor and Sensibility

I pulled the program guide out of my bag and checked the time. I had arrived on schedule, just not at the right place. I had forgotten that while Federation Dodecahedron is the headquarters of the Writers Fest, not all the events are held there. I shook my cuff back and looked at my watch. It looked remarkably like a hairy wrist. That’s right, I’m a child of the eighties, and as such, my timepiece is found on my emailing pocket clock that doubles as a phone. I had ten minutes to make it up to the Wheeler Centre.

Fortunately for me there was a bank of share bikes ready for rental. I paid the fee and unclipped the bike from its holder. I adjusted the seat to ‘lanky’ and swung my leg over the frame and started to pedal. A police officer curtly stepped in front of my velocipede, halting my momentum with a bulky frame of his own. I assumed he was going to ask about my helmet. Instead his gloved hands began to fondle my curly hair, which he referred to as nature’s helmet. Once satisfied with the density of my ringlets, the officer slapped an approval sticker on to the side of my head and ushered me into the traffic.

I slotted my bike into another bank of bicycle holders and jogged the rest of the way to the Wheeler Centre. I had a whole minute to spare and dedicated it to not passing out from my recent exertion. I was sitting in on a forum called Cheek: The Getting and Losing Of Jobs Online. I was interested in the first half of the title. The latter part was something I already have down pat.

While the audience waited for the guest speakers, we were treated to a quartet of people singing the news stories of the day. I was amazed at how bad news doesn’t sound as harsh when sung in a falsetto. If I ever experience an ugly break up, I think a song might be a lot nicer than the SMS my last girlfriend deemed fit to send me – twice.

The singers lapped up the applause and placed themselves in the front row of the room. The other members of the audience indulged in nervous small talk while we waited for the session to begin. The conversations were interrupted by a loud beeping noise and someone called out asking for all mobile emailing pocket clock phones to be switched off. The beeping continued. Every head in the crowd swiveled to see the source of the incessant beeping. It wasn’t a phone, but a truck reversing up to the stage. A volunteer asked if we could step back a bit to allow Catherine Deveny’s ego to make it through.

After several sweaty minutes, a group of volunteers managed to push her ego on stage and prop it up with some wooden buttresses. Everyone settled back down to enjoy the talk and the speaker rattled off the credentials of the panel. There was one guy whose only reason for being there was he had actually found an online job. This did not bode well for the rest of us hopeful job seekers.

Jonathan Green talked about his experiences moving from a quite papery medium like The Age to digital media like Crikey and The Drum. Although the conversation continued to be hijacked by Deveny, who insisted her now famous tweets weren’t the reason she was fired, rather, it was the fact that she was a woman who fought the good fight against the dead old white men that run mainstream newspapers.

Towards the end of the talk the audience was invited to ask questions. I wanted to ask if it might be a good idea to put a breathalyser on mobile emailing pocket clock camera phones that won’t allow us to activate our twitter accounts if we’re over the .05 alcohol limit at any awards nights. I decided it was best not to, after all, I don’t want the dead old white men to fire me from my job as well.

Bret Easton Ellis: more tickets available at 11 am

Our allocation of Bret Easton Ellis tickets has completely sold out. However, don’t fret: The Wheeler Centre has more tickets, which go on sale at 11 am today. Visit The Wheeler Centre website to purchase tickets.

Bret Easton Ellis tickets on sale tomorrow

In November of last year, Bret Easton Ellis tweeted the first sentence of Imperial Bedrooms: “They had made a movie about us.”

It’s many months down the track, but Imperial Bedrooms is on bookshop shelves all over Australia. Melbourne Writers Festival and The Wheeler Centre are proud to present a special pre-Festival event with Bret Easton Ellis.

Twenty-five years ago, Ellis defined a generation with his acclaimed debut Less Than Zero. Since then he’s gone on to write another four cult classics, shocking, stunning and disturbing readers around the world with his tales of the depravity and inhumanity of modern life. In The Rules of Attraction, Glamorama, Lunar Park and, unforgettably, American Psycho, he introduced us to the world of Bret Easton Ellis: mixing absurd comedy with a bleak vision and postmodern flair.

In his new book, Imperial Bedrooms, he returns to those characters who populated his debut. Where in Less than Zero they were disaffected teenagers, now a quarter of a century on, they face an even more fraught situation: middle age.

Ellis will appear at the Athanaeum Theatre on Friday August 13; he’ll be interviewed by Alan Brough. Tickets for this event go on sale at our ticketing page tomorrow at 11am.

Also, check out “The Devil in You“, the webgame designed to help you understand what it’s like to be an Ellisian Hollywood executive. (This link only for readers aged 18+.)