Award in Environmental Journalism for Ilya Gridneff

Ilya has just received an award in environmental journalism for his reporting on the carbon trading market, story here.

Our Man in Port Moresby

Ilya Gridneff, who is now working as Papua New Guinea correspondent for the Australian Associated Press, has started a blog, Papua News Guinea. Like all his friends and well-wishers I have told him, 'No! No! No! Not Blogger! Don't do it! You want Wordpress!' but for the moment he is giving Blogger a try.

50 50

Mr Fabulous in PNG


the full baby-named-after-Kevin-Rudd/hermaphroditic goat/carjacking story here

McCarthyism de nos jours

Great interview of Tom McCarthy in the Believer.

That said, McCarthy sometimes seems not to see his hand in front of his face. He says:

TM: I mean, in the current climate in the UK, publishing is a very, very conservative field. Editorial decisions are taken by marketing boards. There isn’t really much room for something that isn’t middle-of-the-road. On the other hand, in the art world—you can’t help noticing if you mix, as I do, with one foot or one toe in the publishing world and nine toes in the art world—it’s the artists who are extremely literate. In the current climate, art has become the place where literary ideas are received, debated, and creatively transformed. You mentioned Robbe-Grillet—I know several artists that are doing works based on his novels. Most artists I know have read Beckett, have read Burroughs, have read Faulkner. For example, one of the real structural understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event. It’s not something that you can contain and narrate, but it’s like this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward. Contemporary novelists don’t really understand that, but contemporary artists do.

Now honestly. If you think editorial decisions are taken by marketing boards, and that marketing boards prefer middle-of-the-road fiction, this amounts to saying that the sample on which you base your assessment of contemporary novelists is based on what marketing boards were willing to publish. You can safely say that certain contemporary novelists were able to write fiction that could get past a marketing board. Unless you have done an enormous amount of research, you have no way of knowing whether A) some of the writers who got work published ALSO wrote books they could not get past the marketing board, B) some of the writers who got work published ALSO wrote books their agent didn't bother to try to get past the marketing board, C) some of the writers who got work published WANTED to write other books they knew they couldn't get past the marketing board, or, of course, D) writers who haven't managed to get ANYTHING published have written the sort of fiction he considers interesting but couldn't get an agent or couldn't get it past the marketing board.

I can't help but think that someone who had done substantial background research, and who had ascertained, on the basis of this research, that the middle-of-the-road fiction being published was NOT an unrepresentative sample of what was being written, would have, um, said so.

Ilya Gridneff got a job in London covering the Coroners' Court. He later got assignments covering Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie. John Pilger is one of his heroes; while travelling round the Middle East he wrote Pilgeresque pieces which he sent to various London papers and could not get published. He reads Bataille, Burroughs, Miller; he hasn't found a publisher for his novel, either. It would be silly to draw any conclusions from his portfolio except the unsurprising one that it is often necessary to eat.

(Still a very interesting interview.)

pin factories and such

Via Marginal Revolution, came to a post by Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics on specialisation -- linked, on the one hand, to our failure to see a connection between our patterns of behaviour and (say) global warming, and, on the other hand, to the system which enables one to fritter away hours, days, weeks, months at the keyboard snacking on food produced by the sweat of someone else's brow.

Dubner quotes the Babylonian Talmud:

Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on one of the steps of the Temple Mount. He said, Blessed is He that discerneth secrets, and blessed is He who has created all these to serve me. [For] he used to say: What labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves], he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground [them], and sifted [the flour], he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate; whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me.

And how many labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained a garment to wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb it, spin it, and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find all these before me.

I come across this while trying to sort out logistics for bringing things out of storage in the UK and transporting them to Berlin; have been putting this off for 4 years, because the piano needs a Luton van with a tail lift. A Luton van is the smallest available size of box van, a size just manageable for someone who has never driven anything larger than a car; I have driven one before (this was how I got the piano from London to the North in the first place), but that did not involve taking it on a ferry and driving a vehicle from drive-on-the-left Britain across drive-on-the-right Europe and back again.

The things in London went into storage when I went to NY in 2003; my editor had said I could work directly with the designer on my poker book, but he wanted to use his own designer. So I went to NY, and we negotiated a contract, and I could not get my publishers to provide the designer. The things in Leeds went into storage in 2000; my second agent, Andrew Wylie, had made tough noises when we met, claiming that the agency would bring ruthless efficiency to bear on -- this is the kind of thing that makes that book by Graham Greene look so good. Don't tell me about the past, tell me about the future.

It's a glorious day.

I had been thinking a while back that I would like to do an intensive course on driving an HGV, which can be done in Britain in a month for about £800, thinking how exceptionally helpful it would have been if I had been able to learn this at school. Thinking how much better off just about everyone would be if they were taught how to drive large vehicles with manual transmission at school. Asking myself: who expects to get through a lifetime without transporting stuff?

I've been spending a lot of time on Powerpoint, which the sort of job I might apply for tends to require. It makes driving an HGV look good, but the kind of job that calls for Powerpoint pays better. Have also been spending a lot of time on Excel pivot tables. These are moderately entertaining, especially when combined with MicroCharts, but I then get distracted and start playing around with Hadley Wickham's ggplot2. Had faintly hoped Powerpoint would look less deeply silly if I got to grips with it but it doesn't. Spent a long time working with hangul in Adobe Illustrator. Any wp program will let you select text and format it (Mellel will let you do more than most), but you can't select one element of a syllable in hangul, which the program perceives as a single unit: you must go into Illustrator, create a text box, type hangul, select with the Select tool, convert to outlines, select the element using the Direct Select tool, create a new layer, move the element to the new layer, and hey presto! format it. Question not the need.

This is what the hangul looked like when I was cutting and pasting and colouring in by hand back in 2005, pre-Illustrator:



There is one slight problem, which is that the font directly above (Seoul) is on my old Mac but not the new one and allegedly cannot be installed there. In a separate but related incident InDesign crashes when I try to open it in Leopard, but can't be installed on the old Mac (still on Tiger) because it does not have enough RAM. It will be obvious to the meanest intelligence that the author of this blog is precisely the sort of person who should leave design to the sweat of someone else's brow.

It's a glorious day.

You can type Chinese, Japanese and Korean in vanilla Illustrator, but it can't handle Greek, Russian, Arabic or Hebrew: you need the Eastern European version for the first two, the Middle Eastern version for the second. Same for InDesign. Poor head.

I read an agent's blog a while back (never a good idea); he thought query letters should not pose a problem for writers, because the query letter should simply express the writer's passion for the book. This is always hard to deal with. Quite a lot of working on a book feels pointless and stupid. Why am I sitting inside on a glorious day working on the deeply silly Powerpoint, mildly amusing pivot tables, delectable ggplot2 or possibly useful Illustrator? It's a glorious day. And even if (as I think) all these socially embedded means of presenting information show something interesting, and even if something even more interesting were to emerge if I dug deeper, how exactly is all this supposed to work in a book? This is the question I should be thinking about, no doubt, but instead I am wondering how long it will take to get Leopard on speaking terms with InDesign and whether it is worth adding more RAM to the old Mac.

So time goes by, and perhaps, in the end, there is a book for which hundreds of practical problems have been resolved - a feature that took hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to fix, maybe, turns up on two or three pages. And other features that took hundreds of hours to get right turn out to be wrong for the book, but there was no way of knowing that ahead of time. The author is about as likely to be enthusiastic as a marathon runner who has just collapsed at the finish line. And the author is likelier, unfortunately, to like dealing with technicians - people with some kind of expertise, people obsessed with details, people who can reduce the amount of time it takes to get something right, freeing up time to go outside on glorious days.

Too much shadowboxing. Mr Ilya is seeing the world.

Our Man in Port Moresby

My co-author Ilya Gridneff is now in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, having taken up the position of correspondent for the Australian Associated Press on Jan 14. A piece on a fence-mending mission by the PM of the Solomon Islands in AdelaideNow, here.

Our Man in Port Moresby

IG is about to head off for Papua New Guinea, having been made AAP correspondent in Port Moresby.

Being Ilya Gridneff

It's just under 4 years since I met Ilya Gridneff in an East End pub by Victoria Park. The pub was aggressively organic; two large blackboards above the bar carried chalked disclaimers.

THE GAME WE SERVE IS NOT FARMED, IT IS KILLED IN THE WILD, THEREFORE IT CANNOT BE CERTIFIED ORGANIC.

THE FISH WE SERVE IS NOT FARMED, THEREFORE IT CANNOT BE CERTIFIED ORGANIC.

Had the game been factory-farmed the Crown could have testified to its diet of tofu and bean sprouts; since the animals had been living in the wild, the Crown could not lay hand on heart and swear that they had not been nipping into the nearest KFC. This was the gist. Only in Britain.

I was about to go to New York as a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. I gave Ilya my e-mail address on a receipt. A couple of weeks later I got an e-mail, or rather a copy of an e-mail he had sent to a friend in Canada, something he'd written in 22 minutes at 3am, the most exciting piece of writing I'd seen in years. Should have written back, but things were not going well in New York.

I write, delete, write, delete, write, delete a long wearisome account of all the things that went wrong. Long story short, I ended up in Berlin where more things went wrong. More crazy movie people. Yet another book in ruins. I kept reading the e-mail from IG, still in my inbox, sure the old e-mail address was dead.

The Internet has thrown up a strange fetishism of writing as commodity. As we hear all too often, anyone can post anything online -- it's not edited, there's no filter, no quality control. A published book goes through a selection process, the lucky few are then edited to perfection and sold to the discriminating public. Anyone can write a blog. Hence the striking gap between The Da Vinci Code and the sort of mindless drivel on offer in the pp sidebar. And anyone can write an e-mail.

There's something odd about this.

Byron's letters were not written for publication. Kilvert's diary was not written for publication. The text published as Naked Lunch was originally a series of letters from Burroughs to Ginsberg. Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was not the piece of journalism he had been commissioned to write for Esquire, a properly-crafted report on the cult of customized cars. He missed one deadline after another, unable to fit the material to the form; his editor told him to write everything down and send it in, Wolfe wrote Dear Byron followed by an outpouring written at a single sitting followed by Tom, the editor removed Dear Byron and Tom and sent it to print and that, oh Best Beloved, was how Journalism got New. Hunter S. Thompson said he did his best work when he just sat down and wrote, and it was Thompson's pharmaceutically-enhanced failure to report on the Mint that gave us Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

All of these texts have been published, but all were not written for publication. There is, in fact, no hard and fast line separating the public and private. Molly Bloom's soliloquy draws extensively on Nora's letters to James Joyce -- letters whose style entranced one of the greatest languagemakers the world has ever known. There's really something odd going on, then: we now have a convention, it seems, such that the letters of a dead poet can be published, but all sorts of other texts in unapproved forms must be hauled into publishable legitimacy by appropriation into journalism or the novel.

I don't especially want to label IG as a Thompson or a Burroughs, because his style is his own, but the e-mail in my Inbox was like those mythical texts -- the difference being that I had not picked it up in a bookstore under the auspices of Faber or Picador or Serpent's Tail, it had just turned up out of the ether. I wrote him an e-mail, and an e-mail came back: he had been travelling around the Middle East, was now on the border of Kurdistan, was thinking of coming to Berlin. 2 years ago now. Long time ago.

When I was 9 I was given The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for Christmas. I think I read it 100 times. I didn't know there were others in the series. I discovered the rest when we moved to Rio; the school library had the rest of the series, but they would not lend them to children under 12. I still remember the disbelief, the joy, on discovering there were more; the misery on being refused permission to read them; the long wait. This was like that. Getting a second e-mail to add to the one I'd had for so long, and then a third, and then a fourth -- but it was not really like that, because books are in the public domain. Years later I read a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters, including his letters to his agent Lynne Nesbit: the rest of us, of course, could always buy Fear and Loathing, but here were people who had writing no one else could see. So this was like that.

I think Mithridates hates new historicism, but I thought there was something interesting about this. IG has a degree in journalism from the University of Technology Sydney; in London he covered deaths at the Coroner's Court for an agency, got shifts with various papers, got contacts who would pay for celebrity stories. So there were stories he had trained to write and stories that could be sold. The stories that could be sold were what made it possible to travel around the Middle East and dodge bullets in Baghdad. If we think of the work of Burroughs or Wolfe or Thompson, the fact that we can read these texts tells us nothing about what it is possible to publish: each time there is a story behind the appearance in print.

I sent copies of three e-mails to my former editor, who used the phrase 'crackling with energy' and begged to see more -- but the idea of publishing a collection of e-mails was too alien. I then had an idea that looked very clever: IG and I could collaborate on a novel, incorporate some of these texts, the public would see them in a context that is generally recognized as a literary form.

This looked like a good idea because it drew on some films that we both liked. La Dolce Vita, that's obvious. Fellini's 8 1/2 and Kaufman's Adaptation both tackle the dilemma of the artist trying to live up to an earlier work, solving the problem by an exercise in narcissism. Being John Malkovich, Kaufman's first film, was edgy, manipulative, why not have a work of fiction that used a real person as an ostentatiously manipulated character the way Kaufman had used JM? And so on.

It's hard to collaborate with someone on a book. Perhaps there was too much going on in Your Name Here. My editor was not the only reader to be dazzled by the IG correspondence. Some readers said they were dazzled by YNH, but if everyone wasn't it must have been doing something wrong. I now have a stash of a few hundred e-mails from IG, which is sort of like having my own personal stash of letters of Byron or Thompson -- it's good for me, yes, but the possessor of this voice should have cashed in on it by now, and all I've managed to do is drag him into the publishing machine.

So this is not such a good anniversary, no, but it does make all the arguments about Webworld and the quality control of publication look very strange. People tell me: The way to find an agent is to think of writers you like and find out who represents them. I think: Yes, but I read the most interesting writer I know in a couple of hundred e-mails on my hard drive. There are writers who are certified organic, I know, I know, but show me your Whopper-fed venison, I want wild deer that's been scarfing Chicken McNuggets on the sly.

moments before the midnight to dawn

Many bad developments. E-mails the only good thing. Here's one from IG, who always makes me laugh.

May 25 2007

On the way back from an interview with Australian Associated Press a junkie in navy shirt and army grey, white and black camouflage pants got on at Strathfield station then in a laconic nasal drawl started telling the whole train carriage 'never buy New Balance shoes'.
As the only one who paid attention to his podiatric outburst I stoically suggested his crisp white pair were still too new for such assertions and to give his New Balance some time before such harsh brand judgements. But he disagreed and said: 'Nah, I had a fucking pair of Asics before and they were fucking much better.'
We began chatting across the carriage and he told me the NSW Department of Community Services had recently taken away his three young girls cause his girlfriend had mental problems and he had been in jail for six months after being caught carrying a screw driver police believed he intended to use for breaking in to cars.
‘I’m not into break and enter or thieving from cars,’ he said.
I asked if he had 'previous' criminal convictions and he said only for alcohol related stuff when he was young and I told him I noticed the 'O U T L A W' poorly tattooed into his form arm in faded ink dots. It was also here where I noticed bruises and scabs around veins in the inside of his elbow.
'Yeah, fucking drunk mate, fucking drink.’
'Life's demon,' I said.
'I can lose my place so fucking easily. Things just seem to get fucking worse for me.'
I asked if he had dependencies and he knew what I meant and said: ‘Yeah but it’s under control, what’s harder is leaving my girlfriend. I moved from the country, up near the Queensland border, came to Sydney five years ago because of her and it’s been trouble ever since. Fucking relationships.’
He said his dependencies were more so for the women in his life and how he couldn't walk away from his girlfriend and how it was a rocky road and his Dad never told him he could do anything and family weren’t interested when his kids were in trouble and how he wanted to work but was unemployed and even when he asked some late night road workers how to get a job controlling traffic the foreman told him to piss off cause he was a ‘little guy that couldn’t do much work’. He would love to get a job but never found what it was he wanted to do.
'What you do?' he asked.
'I am a journalist' I said in a charcoal suit and thin black white dotted tie.
'You need a degree for that?'
'You didn't use to, was like a trade in the old days, all in with the printers in the same building, apprentices started when they were 15, maybe begin as copy boy then become a cadet then one day a journalist, but these days yeap, you need a degree. Sometimes two.'
He continued to chat ambivalently as the rest of the carriage recoiled in fear that they may be addressed and suddenly an old man reading in the corner, who I spied had cyrillic text down his book's spine began blurting out something aloud in Russian.
'What mate?' the junkie asked earnestly.
The confused man, shook his head and apologised and said ‘nothing, no no’ and it took an uncomfortable moment for us three to regain the composure of before reforming from this slippage that rocked with the carriages jolting along the rail track rattle.
Bemused by this irruption, in Russian I asked if the man was Russian and he greedily said ‘Da’ and I told him I could speak a little Russian and my father was Russian born in China... This older man put down his book in an animated scree of excitement and ruffled through his bag. I noticed it was Redfern station and my Junkie friend got off and said 'see you later', I told him 'good luck' and he disappeared onto the platform.
This was actually my stop to get back to Newtown but I decided to stay one more with my new Russian friend going to the next stop: Central station.
There was something about this Slavic train encounter because earlier in the morning when buying newspapers to read and study for my job interview I noticed the man behind me was buying a Russian newspaper and it reminded me of where I want to be one day and what I want to be doing regardless of how tragic a task it was to have these impulses- difficult too for this glacier would come after traversing first two books I'd embarked on and the other Your Name Here book project with DeWitt that the had re-emerged as a possibility with a recent telephone conversation from NY from a literary agent who used a lot of sea storm metaphors regarding what needed to be done.
The train headed towards Central and the older man invited me over to sit next to him and his woolly beard. On the seat his travel luggage case that had seen a lot of travel but not necessarily through airports separated us but seemed full of sorts of papers and surprises. He ruffled through it for a pen and we did chat away in bad patois English Russian and from the tiny vocabulary I had had of Russian words, a month learning in Bishkek Kyrgyzstan, every word I once knew seemed replaced with German and this pidgin ridiculous speak warmed my knew friend who admitted his English was a good as my Russian.
He introduced himself and gave me his thin card that displayed: Valentin Shkolny
Professional photographer and Artist.

I pulled out from my pocket the recent find of Yevgenny Yevtushenko's epic Soviet poem 'Bratsk Station' , Perhaps this bok was part of my recent Russian arousals and he smiled with one eye shut the other peering at the cover and said: 'Bratsk Station. Horosho, horosho, good good.'
I told him I was a journalist and opened up my portfolio case and showed him my name and some stories I'd done and he told me he was a Ukrainan Moscovite who moved to Australia ten years ago. He was a photographer and artist and has work in the Australian National Gallery and had taken portraits of first man in space, Uri Gagarin, at home. As well he said books of photos on Sydney.
We got off at Central and he is excitedly speaking in Russian way too fast and I feel a cruel dupe for I only know a little Russian but he invited me to his home and studio.
'Interesno?' he asked on the platform
'ochen intersno,' I said eagerly.
’Tonight?’
'Neit, ya, rabotiu gazetta,'
'OK'
'I telephone' I said making a 'telephone shape' with my hand while showing him my mobile phone.
'Ok,' he smiled again.
I told him in Russian I worked at the Gazetta this weekend but would call him and would love to visit his studio and we would help each other with language.
I was excited and felt the interviews all went well, both for the job and with these strangers, so I decided to treat myself to sushi at an empty sushi train restaurant in Newtown.
When I got home I rang the Managing Editor at the Daily Telegraph, were I work on the weekends , thinking the AAP interview would give me leverage for a proper job but he told me despite being a top consideration for a recent job at his paper (as a gossip columnist) and doing extremely well and impressing everyone with a good reputation, if I was offered the AAP job I should take it, there was nothing for me at the Telegraph, oh and the AAP editor had rung for a chat and he had told him good things, so good luck.
I hung up and I thought of moving to Siberia.