The Gospel of the Eels, by Patrik Svensson

28 March 2022

 The Gospel of the Eels, by Patrik Svensson, book cover

Eels are fascinating creatures, and after centuries — make that millennia — of study, they continue to puzzle scientists. In the past, they’ve piqued the curiosity of Greek philosopher Aristotle, over two thousand years ago, and more recently, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud.

Visitors to Sydney’s Centennial Park, may have spotted the long-finned eels who reside in some of the park’s ponds. But they are not Sydneysiders by birth, they were spawned in waters some two-thousand kilometres away, near New Caledonia. Seeking out fresh water, they make the perilous journey to the park, by way of canals, stormwater systems, and even briefly slithering over land from one waterway to another. Once in the park’s ponds, they remain there for decades before returning to the ocean waters they were born in.

The European eel is the subject of Swedish arts and culture journalist Patrik Svensson’s book, The Gospel of the Eels (published by Pan Macmillan, May 2020). These eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, a sprawling area of ocean within the Atlantic Ocean, approximately off the east coast of Central America. They then gradually migrate towards Europe, a journey of over six thousand kilometres, taking about two years. Like the long-finned eels of Centennial Park, the European eels also eventually return to the waters of their birth to reproduce.

Svensson recently spoke to Sarah Kanowski, host of ABC podcast series Conversations, about his book and lifelong fascination with the European eels.

Lockdown, an introvert’s paradise, now sadly missed

28 March 2022

Almost two-thirds of readers surveyed by London based magazine The Face reported missing pandemic imposed lockdowns, with many reporting “significant improvements in day-to-day-life.”

You might be surprised to learn that an overwhelming majority of respondents reported that, yeah, actually, they did miss lockdown life – 66.9 per cent of them, to be exact. For all the sadness and boredom born out of the pandemic, many of you experienced significant improvements in day-to-day-life.

As an introvert who enjoyed lockdowns, I couldn’t go passed this thought:

“[Lockdown] was an introvert’s paradise. I miss it immensely,” says 23-year-old Sarah, who also described the most challenging thing about the pandemic was “it ending”.

Melbourne Writers Festival slims down to four days for 2022

28 March 2022

The Melbourne Writers Festival runs this year from Thursday 8 to Sunday 11 September 2022. This represents a change in format for the festival which has in the past run for at least ten days. The 2021 event for instance ran from Friday 3 September to Wednesday 15 September 2021.

This year’s event will see “a concentrated program that would feature about 250 Australian and international writers in 120 events“, says artistic director Michaela McGuire.

Diana the Musical wins worst film Razzies gong

28 March 2022

Before the Oscars serve up the best films of the last year (as voted by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at least) this morning Sydney, East Coast of Australia time, over the weekend parody award show the Razzies, announced the worst films of 2021 (in their opinion) for us.

Diana the Musical, directed by Christopher Ashley, was adjudged Worst Picture. With a lowly Metacritic score of twenty-nine though, I guess that wasn’t hard to see coming.

LeBron James was named Worst Actor for his part in Space Jam: A New Legacy, with Jeanna de Waal collecting Worst Actress for her part in the aforementioned Diana the Musical. Meanwhile Jared Leto picked up Worst Supporting Actor for his role in House of Gucci, a film that had been the talk of the town prior to its release.

American actor Bruce Willis won the Golden Raspberry in Worst Performance By Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie, a special category this year, for his work in Cosmic Sin. Willis received eight nominations in this category and must’ve surely been sweating on the outcome.

Update: The Razzies have withdrawn their award for Bruce Willis in their special category “Worst Performance By Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie”, following news of his aphasia diagnosis. Quite right. As a humourous dig, it seemed like a little light-hearted fun, but not anymore.

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The Australian Feature Film Summit 2022

28 March 2022

The Australian Feature Film Summit (AFFS) takes place in Sydney on Thursday 12 May 2022, with the goal of bringing all involved in the feature film production process, including exhibitors, distributors, producers, and investors together for the first time.

The mission of the AFFS is to harness the current success of the Australian feature film sector and strategise how to make more commercially successful and culturally relevant films going forward.

Sydney Writers Festival program 2022

26 March 2022

The program for the 2022 Sydney Writers’ Festival was unveiled on Thursday, and refreshingly for the lockdown-fatigued is choke full of face-to-face, in person events. Spread across venues including Sydney Town Hall, City Recital Hall, and Carriageworks, the festival opens on Monday 16 May, and concludes on Sunday 22 May 2022.

In addition, numerous other “neighbourhood” events, will be held in other areas, both in and out of Sydney, hosted at places including the State Library of NSW, WestWords Parramatta, Ashfield Town Hall, Chatswood Library on The Concourse, Penrith City Library, and Wollongong Art Gallery. Top up your Opal card, you could be covering a bit of ground.

The opening night address takes place at Sydney Town Hall on the evening of Tuesday 17 May, and features Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins, and Nardi Simpson.

Nearly four hundred Australian and international authors and writers, along with actors, sports people, academics, and many others, are scheduled to participate in proceedings, including Emily Bitto, winner of the 2015 Stella Prize, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Mick Elliott, former Australian footballer Adam Goodes, Muireann Irish, Bri Lee, Charlotte McConaghy, J.P. Pomare, Teela Reid, Yumi Stynes, and Murong Xuecun, also known as Hao Qun.

The theme of this year’s festival, explains artistic director Michael Williams is change my mind. How perfectly apt, because what is writing, if not transformative?

Change my mind with a stanza or a couplet, a jarring dissonance, a beautiful echo or a rhyme. Change it with a flight of fancy, an intricate, imagined world, a compelling character I’ll never meet but never forget. Turn it upside down with searing rhetoric, impeccable research, the knock-out argument that has me questioning everything I know and all that I believe.

Lauren Hough on novel plots free of conflict

24 March 2022

Writing in response to being removed from the nominations for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards, for her collection of essays, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, Berlin based author Lauren Hough highlights something I’ve been noticing a little recently: bizarrely, a dislike of conflicts in novel plots.

My book won’t win a prize because my friend Sandra Newman wrote a book. The premise of her book is “what if all the men disappeared.” When she announced the book on twitter, YA twitter saw it. This is the single most terrifying thing that can happen to a writer on twitter. YA twitter, presumably fans of young adult fiction, are somehow unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. YA twitter doesn’t do nuance. They don’t understand metaphor or thought experiment. They expect fictional characters to be good and moral and just, whether antagonist or protagonist. They expect characters and plot to be free of conflict. They require fiction to portray a world without racism, bigotry, and bullies. And when YA twitter gets wind of a book that doesn’t meet their demands, they respond with a beatdown so unrelenting and vicious it would shock William Golding. They call it “call-out culture” because bullying is wrong, unless your target is someone you don’t like, for social justice reasons, of course.

The problem of plots free of conflict isn’t restricted to “YA Twitter” though. Scanning through a range of book reviews on aggregator websites reveals a similar pattern. Readers will fault a novel if they find a character “unlikable”. Never mind said character’s unpleasantness is a crucial plot device, creating a challenge of some sort for a protagonist to overcome.

Others have stopped reading a book after learning a character is, say, engaged in an extra-marital affair. Sure, it’s behaviour not to be condoned, but it still happens, every day, all over the world, no doubt since people first walked the planet. Refusing to read a book where such an activity is occurring is surely akin to burying one’s head in the sand.

The most prolific book reader and reviewer in the world

24 March 2022

From a Reddit post I stumbled upon this week, written in October 2018, by Scott Alexander. Read this, your eyes will water:

I don’t know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years. I thought it might be some bot account writing fake reviews in exchange for money, but if it is then it’s a really good bot because Grady Harp is a real person whose job matches that account’s description. And my skimming of some reviews looked like they were all relevant to the book, and he has the “verified purchase” tag on all of them, which also means he’s probably actually reading them.

I like to think I’m a somewhat avid book reader, but I could not — in a million years — come close to matching this sort of… output. Grady Harp, the subject of Alexander’s post, must read in a week what I do in a year. But we’re talking about reading and reviewing eight books daily. I know of some fast readers who can tackle a novel in a day, but this feat is truly incredible.

New normal has become a longer term vibe shift

24 March 2022

Elamin Abdelmahmoud writing for BuzzFeed News, about what he refers to as “that funny feeling.” New normal was a term bandied about at the beginning of the COVID pandemic two years ago. At that point many of us took “new normal” to be a temporary state of affairs. But in light of other recent events, the Russian invasion of Ukraine for one, new normal is going to be ever changing, and far more permanent than some of us thought.

We are undergoing a colossal vibe shift that extends beyond taste, aesthetics, politics, fashion, or policy. The world as we knew it is not coming back, and it’s entirely reasonable that we may find ourselves plagued with a general restlessness, a vague notion of disorder. It’s that funny feeling.

How the rings of Saturn were formed

23 March 2022

From BBC Earth Lab. Many millions of years ago, one of Saturn’s erstwhile moons, strayed a little too close, crossed a line, the Roche Limit, and shattered into billions of pieces, having been torn apart by the immense gravity of the Solar System’s second largest planet.

Saturn’s incredible ring system was the result of this cataclysmic event, once the remnants of the moon, some seventeen trillion tons of icy material, spread out in orbit around the planet. It would have been an incredible spectacle to witness, had anyone been around to see it all happen.