Michelle de Kretser wins the NSW Prems lit prize
Debra Adelaide in the SMH: 'I've heard publishers say that in Australia we cannot produce a book that captures the literary and the commercial reader and as a reader I find that profoundly insulting. Why can't something be beautifully written and a bestseller? It should happen more often.'
From Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends: 'Lunch counters, muffler shops, dinner theaters, they aim to please; but writers? No self-respecting literary genius, even an occasional maker of avowed entertainments like Graham Greene, would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an "entertainer." An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing "She's a lady" to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underpants up onto the stage.
Yet entertainment – as I define it, pleasure and all – remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.'
2 comments:
What, I wonder, is a muffler shop? is he talking scarves or exhaust pipes??
I do love a good entertainment, though.
Ha! I know! I sort of have in mind a shop that sells warm mufflers every morning - "get your hot mufflers here!" - this short man, one leg slightly longer than the other, from the turn of last century, wearing a white apron with bags of flour poured all over it. You drive round the back, they install the warm muffler while you eat something soft and warm and incredible that it doesn't matter how many times you have it (every morning) you still can't work out what they put in it, you bumble through the first pages of the tabloid, while listening to the couple argue over whether he should join the army/agree to work for ASIO/ask her father for a position as clerk in his accountancy firm. And your day is always that bit better for the knowledge of the warm muffler, which gets you out of bed to pace the stone floor to crank the water heater for that sponge bath. Aaaah...
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