Les Liens du... Jeudi!

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes: -

• Emmet Stinson (Overland), And the winner isn't: on the inherent stupidity of literary prizes. I am... skeptical of this. It's just a leeetle on the nose to run a piece on how literary prizes don't exhibit merit the week an Indigenous woman wins the country's biggest literary prize. It has a nod to Lukashenko (and, before her, Wright) and to the Stella Prize as well, but... at best it was written beforehand and had the acknowledgement of Lukashenko's merit wedged in at the last minute: at worst, it was written *after* she won, and Isn't Racist, But...
  
• Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing), Data mining reveals 80% of (American) books published 1924-1963 never had their copyright renewed and are now in the public domain.
  
• LaTrobe University's 'Private Lives' survey (large-scale health and wellbeing survey of LGBTIQ Australians) is up and running for the third time. If you fit the alphabet soup (or 'other related identities) and are resident in Australia, I recommend it. (I will be returning, I think, when I actually AM legally resident in Australia again)
  
• Haaretz, Israel, Saudi forces rapped for killing children by UN report. Israel for deaths of Palestinian children, Saudi for Yemeni children's deaths. This is particularly fascinating if you go look at a range of headlines from the same day: half of them complain that Israel *wasn't* listed, while others complain that the listing is unfair. Haaretz is about the closest to balanced, although the headline misleadingly implies that Israel is being blacklisted alongside Saudi. Both states feature in a report to the Security Council, but only Saudi and its military coalition states appear in the blacklist. No sanctions are attached to either appearing in the report or in the blacklist: the blacklist is intended as the 'shame' part of 'name and shame'. So Israel gets named, but not shamed.
  
• ABC radio: sculpture with 'subtle nipples' censored in Melbourne. Apparently Tumblr are running Melbourne art competitions now (in addition to nipples being present there was issues of 'clarity' re gender of the nipples in question.
  

Good News:

• Equality Australia (The entity formerly known as Australian Marriage Equality) report that in response to petitions, major retailers have withdrawn conversation therapy related books.
  
• Guardian reports Italy grants asylum to eritrean man mistaken for years for trafficker. Only good news in that Italy ponied up and granted him asylum in the end: their police force's stubborn insistence *in the face of all evidence* that they had arrested A Famous Trafficker sure is... something.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Katharine Murphy (Guardian AU), How Facebook's hall of mirrors lead to the prime ministership of 'Go Sharks'.
  

  I suspect Fletcher and I would agree that the only thing worse than the status quo is Facebook – already too dominant and too insufficiently regulated – appointing a truth commissar and setting itself up as the arbiter of reality. Also not desirable: a government appointed truth commission.
  Solutions are going to be hard to find. But the fact is we have a serious problem when the primary place where citizens congregate can be a hub for misinformation, which is corrosive for the body politic, and nobody is ultimately responsible for making the environment better.
  In the bear pit, the government hovered on the brink of braggadocio.
  While I was wrestling with these conundrums – the truth and how to safeguard it – Labor trialled a question time session where it sought to hold various government figures, from the prime minister down, responsible for statements they had made previously that turned out to be ... how can I put this politely ... less than accurate.

  
  
• R.O. Kwan (Oprah Mag 'Coming Out' series), Why Incendiaries author R.O. Kwan came out as bisexual on Twitter.
  
• Jia Tolento (Guardian), The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman. This is an exerpt from 'Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion', which I may or may not read. Parts of this I was like 'hah, yeah" ("She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached."), but... it's not actually analysis, at least not this excerpt. It's polemic, with few cited sources. The best historicised part is the section on Barre classes.
  
• Carrie V. Mullins (Electric Lit), Supper Club (Lara Williams) imagines what could happen if women unleased their hunger.
  
• Motoko Rich (NYT), Craving freedom, Japan's women opt out of marriage. Covers a bunch of stuff, from the rise of single-woman-wedding-parties (ie, you rent a dress and get photos and have a wedding reception for Just You) to the declining birth rate. *Doesn't* address the economic status of the women interviewed - it's dropped in a caption that one of them works in a florist one day a week, so... I'm guessing she has family resources to draw on that means she doesn't *need* to marry.
  
• Samuel Leighton-Dore (SBS news), I was never the right kind of boy and I was bullied because of it:
  

  Looking back on the difficult years I spent at school — something I’ve made a habit of doing with various psychologists — it’s often tempting to conclude that the cruel and sustained bullying I experienced was because of my being gay. But for all those years before I was sexually active, I think it had more to do with the fact that I didn’t fit society’s idea of how a boy or man should be and act: masculine, rough, stoic and strong.

  
  
• Rebecca Hausler (The Conversation), The Cowra Breakout: Remembering and reflecting on Australia's biggest prison escape. I think this *might* have warranted a few sentences in my y 10 history textbook (I have a hazy sense it might have shown up as evidence of the suicidality of Japanese POWs), but WOW there is SO MUCH GOING ON HERE, and I had no idea about the literary footprint. I need to read Anita Heiss' novel, I think.
  
• Maddison Griffiths (Archer Magazine), Being bisexual and mixed: preserving culture through a queer lens.
  
• Carla Bruce-Eddings (Guernica Magazine), Blood Oranges. Creative non-fiction / personal essay / thing. Cannot summarise, cannot pull-quote, can only recommend.
  
• Rachel Klein (Bitch Media), The booming baby-shower industry empowers anti-choicers. Written from the specific perspective of an Orthodox Jewish family from a speficic sect who, by tradition, make no preparations in advance of the arrival of a child.
  

This has been Liens du Jeudi. You may or may not get more links on the weekend, or possibly even on Monday as per schedule, depending on how The Tourism is treating me.

Comments

[lilysea]

Emmet Stinson (Overland), And the winner isn't: on the inherent stupidity of literary prizes.

I had only read these words and no further when I thought

"but wait, that Aboriginal writer just won $60,000, which will help support her while she writes more books, and the prize news also got a lot more eyes on her important new book"

So, yes.

Also: Jeanette Winterson winning a prize for Oranges are not the only fruit got a lot more people reading a book about lesbians and Evangelical christians than might otherwise have read it.

[highlyeccentric]

Well, as to the first thing - this article is very much rooted in the Australian literary context, and none of our major awards are done by open or society membership vote (I think the Ditmars might be, following the example of the Hugos, but the Ditmars are tiny beans, with none of the recognition outside of their target genre that the Hugos or RITAs have). We don’t have an equivalent of the UK’s Guardian-run Not The Booker, for instance, because we have no publication with a sufficiently large and engaged readership to actually produce interesting nominations. The Stella Prize is crowdfunded, out of a lot of righteous resentment at the Miles Franklin for its failure to recognize any women for years at a time, but it too is awarded by a board. As are the Vogels (I’ve been linking a series of articles on the Vogels lately - I think this article is very much in that vein).

Having infodumped that context, I don’t actually understand your opening sentence: when you say ‘this critique’ do you mean Lilysea’s comment, or the linked piece, and if the linked piece, what is ‘the article’ it isn’t sufficiently critiquing?

[meneltarma]

Sorry, am about to go back and edit my comment for clarity; I wasn't trying to reply to lilysea, but post an original reply and the beginning got eaten, and I felt the three-prong critiques in the article weren't well addressed, as well as point out pitfalls of attempts to make a different awarding system I AM intimately familiar with.

I am a little aware of Australian awards specifically from being in an Australian anthology that was put up for a couple, but given the majority of the readers of that anthology were global, I'm not sure why the presumption is Aus Lit is not read by the wider world unless Award Winning, as seems to be an underlying presumption in the article. This may have to do with how Print on Demand/e-books available worldwide are changing publishing, global English rights, and Commonwealth publishing rights get negotiated, though. I've talked to Australian authors in multiple genres about how they do more global than local sales.

Attempt 2.0

[meneltarma]

I found it odd that the article critiquing literary prizes does not in any way comparatively examine one of the fundamental suggestions of said article: that literary prizes transparently be the Will Of The Reader, like a Hugo Award in Speculative Literature. I find that process as deeply problematic as an opaque board giving out money-- since "will of the people" awards tend to be popularity contests, and there've been back-to-back years where the slate is entirely dominated by the same 2-3 publishers, editors, and even novel/novella authors because the format functionally serves as a contest of "most read work is most nominated, ergo the shortlist, ergo, the award winners".

Most speclit awards work this way whether they are for novels or short stories or poetry, and I don't know that a popularity contest of Most Read X Of The Year Achieved The Most Nominations So Is Our Award Nominee is actually more egalitarian or fair or unbiased, as I have never seen a self-published work or a book without major publishing promotion hit nomination slate by will of the readers.

This is not to say awards in literature are useless, but if we take at face value that what awards "really do" is getting more people to pick up and read a book (ie: selling copies), it seems the main complaint is the wrong books (books that do not need it?) get to sell more copies? It becomes absurd quickly and obviously to say if a book sold, say, more than a thousand copies, it should be ineligible for awards, especially with what that presumes about the diversity of the reading community & reflects poorly on how the digital marketplace and global rights have changed book publishing. And yet books that don't move popularly among whomever is making up a voting slate (whether that is a mysterious panel of judges or attendees of a con) it will probably never be given an award, which is, I think, the author's ultimate complaint. Yet as Lilysea points out, award boards are more likely to pluck obscure books that didn't have huge initial readership and draw attention to them in a beneficial way -- much more likely than a "year's best by reader choice".

I find the complaint "if you give a book an award people stop critiquing it" too absurd to engage with realistically; people critique award-winning books all the time, but that critique has moved online and isn't gatekept the same way an award is.

edited: I posted this comment in the wrong thread initially and some of the wording got eaten so it's been reposted separately for posterity.