Moers on Dreiser

By Tracy

Ellen Moers in 1970 describes Dreiser as

a writer of massive stature, fierce, unpredictable, eccentric, with the disagreeable habits that have always afflicted major novelists... He was a great novelist, perhaps the greatest of the Americans, and left a reputation for not knowing how to use words... Unusually cerebral in his approach to fiction, he spent most of his time informing himself about everything that science and philosophy could teach the novelist about the act and the will; but he left a reputation for being stupid, unlettered, a 'primitive'.

Of course he's not stupid or any of that -- and Moers is on his side, having "discovered" his fiction "with astonishment" not long before she began writing her very solid book, Two Dreisers, from which this description is taken.

It's the self-taught, wide-ranging aspect of Dreiser I most admire: there are some great advantages to a writer in not being thoroughly steeped in institutional education. Dreiser had limited schooling and in his early days it was in a German-language Catholic school (he had the strange circumstances of being born into mixed Catholic and Mennonite parentage); later he did one year of college paid for by one of his teachers. The rest, he did himself, through library access and building up his own collection of books. You can read about his personal library -- and check out a list of titles -- here.

Activist Poetics

By Tracy

John's got a new book out: Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley.

It's a collection of his essays edited and with an introduction by Niall Lucy.

John Kerrigan on the back cover describes it as an "exhilarating constellation of interview, essay, polemic, lecture, memoir, apologia and verse".

The book is published by Liverpool University Press and you can read more about it here.

Fairly obsessive #2 ?

By Tracy

Tim (5) has been off school with tonsillitis this week, but it hasn't stopped him singing around the house (hoarsely at times) all day long (and pretty well into the evening until bedtime too).

He's more Brel-addicted than I am now, and the acquisition of a Brassens CD was not so much a question of passion as of trying to "diversify" -- not to wean him off Brel exactly, but to get some relief from repetition... he has been in the habit of doing full-on Brel tribute performances (complete with gestures and facial expressions) for months now, and we need a little variety.

He did this with Syd Barrett for a long time too -- Syd is his earliest hero. While still a baby who couldn't talk sentences, Tim would chime in with the end-words of every line of every Barrett song. All of us in the family love Syd Barrett -- but you can have too much of a good thing...

Anyway, he likes the Brassens -- especially "Chanson Pour L'Auvergnat" and "Je Me Suis Fait Tout Petit" -- and is quite smitten with a short DVD of old Edith Piaf performances too, even to the point of incorporating one or two of her numbers into "his" routine.

But he still maintains (and I have to agree) that Brel is superior to both.

Already with Brel I have to watch some of the lyrics (for a 5-year-old!) as he can be quite risqué -- but Brassens goes even further, to the point of satirical obscenity (in order to condemn other kinds of obscenity, for example in "Le Gorille", which was banned in France for some time). They are, nonetheless, very clever.

We've also spent time making little books which I stitch together, Tim illustrates, and I fill with the words he tells me to put in. (He can write, but only slowly, so that's expedient.) He is very smitten with this process and told me yesterday, "I am a real illustrator" as he went to put his book alongside all the "real" books in his room.

Speaking of the written word, I've been enjoying -- insofar as you can enjoy anything when your child is sick -- the new issue of Meanjin, especially some of the prose, which includes a striking story by Robert Drewe, a bizarre piece of memoir from Pip Proud (disappointingly disparaging and brief in its mention of Dransfield) and an article on matters Austenesque by Laura Carroll.

There's also a snappy piece of memoir -- "Full Immersion" by Vanessa Russell ("on growing up with the Christadelphians"), which particularly drew my attention because my own novel about evangelical Christians, not Christadelphians but Baptists (Sweet), has gone off to the printers and is due out in September -- to be launched at the Big Sky Festival in Geraldton. So my thoughts have been "immersed" in that sort of material for a while now.