I almost forgot to follow up on this post.
I -- and Little Sister -- did indeed go along to see Peter Carey introduce his latest book to the literary folk of The Vegas, but it was not, as I reported, in the big auditorium with the diverting dome. That's the Main Auditorium. Forgive me.
The evening's proceedings gave me a good deal to reflect on. It's not enough to just write. The term 'writer' is a tad misleading in this way. In contrast to the solitary, bookish pursuit I consider writing to be, a published author must be able to get up on stage and entertain an audience as well. Not the theoretical audience, the potential audience you're vaguely aware of as you sit late at night scratching your pen across the paper, but a vast, fidgeting carpet of expectant and responsive faces. An actual audience. The likelihood of their wallets opening at the end of the show is dependant on the pizzazz with which you sell them the idea. It's not enough to have excellent prose; your pose has to have sparkle as well.
If this busking routine seems less than appealing to the writers out there -- and I know there's a few of you -- the dilemma is one that none of us here are likely to confront. While listening to first-time author, Nicholas Kyriacos, speak on Radio National last night, I learned that publishers only print one out of every thousand manuscripts of fiction they receive. For those who didn't quite catch that: one out of every thousand. So statistically, you only have a 0.1% of having the opportunity to gag with stage fright, trip over the microphone cable or have a joke fall flat at a reading of your own book. Quite comforting, in a way.
But let's return from that frankly disheartening digression to the reading of Theft - A Love Story. Peter Carey is hilarious. His reading of excerpts was so entertaining that it made me wonder why he's never recorded the audio versions himself. He seems to be that engaging mix of intelligent, well read, and down-to-earth. But of course he is. You can see it in his writing. Everyone else there could see it too -- the queue to purchase books snaked right down the aisle.
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On to other matters. I've missed a few worthwhile photo opportunities of late, one of the more gripping ones yesterday. The image might have given valuable service as a caution to the fertile and libidinous among us. You see, I've always imagined that when someone starts to think that parenthood might be a good thing; this is the type of image that drifts, in soft focus, in their mind. The picture that I was too shocked/enraged/filled with dread to capture for eternity and beyond was that of two children frolicking merrily in the contents of an entire beanbag. In my lounge room. They'd ripped the bag open and had poured it all out, then set about kicking it into every cranny of the house. I defy anyone to come in after a day's work to find that and still think that a batch of cherry-cheeked cherubs could be in anyway a good thing.
2 comments:
1. I felt the same way about Neil Gaiman when we went to his reading. In fact, since seeing him, I have read about half his works (prior to seeing him, I'd read two books).
2. Mike used to threaten to film his neice and nephew for 30 seconds and follow that with a shot of a condom package. No voiceover, just chaos followed by prevention.
Re: point 2. Someone emailed me a priceless ad very much in that vein; unfortunately, I don't know how to place films on the web. You'll just have to imagine it.
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