I just turned 41. To celebrate I’m having a CRAZY 41-hour sale whereby you can buy either of my lovely ebooks for the half-price price of just $2.50 between now and 2pm, Friday 17 May (Australian Eastern Standard Time).

Yes, that’s right. A Leunig-endorsed poetry collection AND a Nick-Earls-lauded novel for $5 bucks total.

What a bargain. That is a bargain for YOU.

You can sample the wares or buy sight-unseen over in my Bcklb store. You’re welcome.

So CRAZY!

Here we are in ought-thirteen and I’m exactly one and a half books into that list, or two (where two equals one plus a half plus a half) if you count the slight detour I took after Gilgamesh to have a go at the Rig Veda.

I don’t imagine there’s much shame in admitting that the cornerstone of proto-Hindu mythology proved a bit too strange and dense for me to absorb and understand properly, but I am a little chagrined.

Even so, defeated as I think I probably was, I did read through it once. It was the second, closer read and interpretation that beat me in the end. After a month had gone by between putting the book down and picking it up again, and I realised that I was actually avoiding doing so because of the distinct homeworky taste it left in my mouth, I decided that what Anna had been saying about the limited value of the Rig Veda to a better understanding of the Western poetry canon might bear more serious consideration.

And so I bade farewell to the Veda of Rig, wishing it and its sons who gave birth to their fathers all the best and thanking it for a unique experience, setting sail instead for the more familiar waters of The Iliad, which at the time of writing I’m about halfway through the first read of, and am anticipating that I will be through the second read of sometime this year.

But before I truly leave such a mind-bending and freakycool book behind it behooves to take a moment to share some of the more amazing moments with you, dear readers.

To which end, in preparation for this post, I’ve been reading over my notebook so as to refresh my mid-Iliad memory as to what dat ol’ Rig Veda is about and what some of my fave lines were. But rather than tippy-type my notes out I’ve opted for a more authentic, in situ approach, to wit:

Um, yeah. So I may not have got it exactly, and it might have been a bit of a wrong turn with respect to this project, but no regrets from me – sometimes the long cut gives much better views than the direct route.

Hot off the blog is ANOTHER reply to my curly question about why poets poetecise, this time a very thoughtful and honest reply about struggling to find new things to say, by one of my longtime favourite poets, joanne burns, author of so much that is goodness in poetry form.

It’s over on The Blue Corner, as per usual. So go read it, why don’tcha?

Having become slightly more circumspect with age, these days if I’m unsure – and also if I am quite sure – I know the meaning of a word, I make an effort to double-check that I am, indeed, actually right. With this in mind I popped open my handy dictionary app and searched for “adenosine”. No result. Okay – what about “adenine”? Yep:

Oh holy fuck. That would bring the total of scientific errors in Not Quite the Man for the Job to three. Fuckity. Add that to my recent blue-shift/red-shift gaffe and you can colour me quadruply shamefaced and fool me four times, &c, &c.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise profusely to anyone who’s ever read Not Quite the Man for the Job, and to any biologists or biochemists out there for my completely egregious lack of even the simplest amount of research when penning the poems in that collection. Rest assured that I will correct this error in the ebook version of NQTMFTJ, and I am happy to offer a free copy of the revised volume to anyone who may have a copy of the “adenosine” version of the book in their posession. Just email me or leave a comment at the end of this post and I’ll send you one post haste (or perhaps that should be “email haste”).

I am now going to go back over every poem I’ve ever written with even the slightest scientific reference and double check everything. If I find any other errors I will be sure to let you know. And maybe I’ll also put one of those punitive placards on and stand in the market square at Wesley Hill on a Saturday to expose my scientific shame to the world. “I GOT THE NAME OF ONE OF THE NUCLEOTIDES WRONG IN A POEM. I AM SORRY. I WILL DO MY RESEARCH PROPERLY IN FUTURE” As is only right.

Sigh.

Her answer went up on The Blue Corner a while back. Here ’tis.

Meantime if’n you want to have a crack at answering the same Q, please leave a comment or get in touch via email like the older folks do.

So I’ve started reviewing poetry for Bookslut. Which is a bit squee.

It’s been interesting flipping through the lists of new poetry books coming out of the US to see how their stuff compares to contemporary Aussie poetry – not that I’d claim to have my finger of that pulse, but whatever – and discovering that it’s not as dissimilar as I had expected it to be.

Anyway I reviewed Song & Error by Averil Curdy.

Short version: it was kinda wordy and a little baroque, but there were some glorious lines and images in there.

Long version: read the review for yourself over at Bookslut.

One of my resolutions for 2013 was to get kickin’ with a bit more friction on my twitter novel, Aramis Fox, which will turn four years old (!) come June. Posting frequency had downturned a little bit in 2012 because of stuff and that, but I got a little more enthused about things toward the end of ought-twelve and came up with a plan whereby any time I find myself fucking around on my phone, particularly when on or waiting for public transport, I commit to posting at least once to Aramis Fox before settling down to a game or seven of Jetpack Joyride, to pluck an example out of nowhere. As such it feels like this story is making better progress than it ever has before, which is nice.

For those who came in late, Aramis Fox is an ongoing story told via installments on twitter, about a guy who gets super powers and has to work out what to do next. You can find out a bit more about it on the Aramis Fox page.

Anyway, because sharing = caring, here’s a bit of an update on what’s been happening with our hero in the last couple of months.

I guess the two main things that have been going on lately are that Aramis, our hero, had telekinetic sex with his girlfriend Jenny, the first time that they’d used his new powers in that way. Also Aramis did a bit more research into the training courses available for learning how to use super-powers, and met up again with “Mr. Friendly”, a guy he’s met before a couple of times: once at a cafe near his work and once at a superfight that got started at a bookstore in the middle of the launch of a retired hero’s memoir.

The story archives are all updated in their sequential, reverse sequential and prose formats and you can read them over at aramisfox.wordpress.com or head over and follow Aramis at www.twitter.com/arfox to get new instalments fresh as they happen.

He makes a Rube Goldberg reference. This pleases me no end.

Happy to say that I actually managed to review 9 of the books that I read, the only unreviewed book being Man Wolf Man by LK Holt, which I’d borrowed from a friend and had to give back before I could finish my second read-through, which I like to do when reviewing poetry especially. In place of a finished review of Ms. Holt’s book in the list below, allow me to say that I did like it quite a lot, and that I fully intend to review the bugger properly when I get my hands on a copy once again.

Anyway, here are links to the 9 that I DID review:

EDIT: Whoops. After it was announced that Amazon had bought Goodreads I deleted my GR account in a fit of moral righteousness so none of the below links work right now. I have a plan though – stay tuned.

• Dymphna Cusack, A Bough In Hell (4 stars)
• Lisa Gorton, Press Release (3 stars)
• Anita Heiss, Am I Black Enough For You? (3 stars)
• Linda Jaivan, The Infernal Optimist (2 stars)
• Elmo Keep, It’s Good Stuff, Read All About It! (4 stars)
• Dolores san Miguel, The Ballroom: The Melbourne Punk And Post Punk Scene: A Tell All Memoir (2 stars)
• Maria Takolander, Ghostly Subjects (2 stars)
• Anne Whitehead – Bluestocking in Patagonia: Mary Gilmore’s Quest for Love and Utopia at the World’s End (1 star)
• Fiona Wright, Knuckled (no ratings over at cordite, but let’s say 3 stars)

There’s only one author in that list who got a mention when I posted at the end of 2011 about taking up the 2012 challenge, and that’s LK Holt, who I haven’t actually reviewed. No Gwen Harwood, no Joanne Burns, no Tracy Ryan (though I did start Scar Revision toward the end of the year, but I had to return it to the library before I’d finished it and I haven’t re-borrowed it yet)… I’m not sure a biography of Mary Gilmore counts, though some of her poems were quoted in that book…

As an experiment in expanding my experience of the words of Australian women poets, then, I guess I kind of failed, but as an experience in reading authors who were new to me, I did pretty well – prior to 2012 I’d only read Linda Jaivan’s work before.

Looking back on that list and my reviews, though, it strikes me that there aren’t many books on it that I really really enjoyed. Elmo Keep’s little freebie ebook collection of articles and essays was a cracker, and Dymphna Cusack (excellent name btw) hits it for six and a half with A Bough In Hell – so much so that I pretty much went straight out and bought a whole bunch more of her novels – and Fiona Wright’s Knuckled is a damn fine debut collection that any poet could be proud of, but the overweening emotion that I got from most of these books was disappointment, if not active dislike.

I guess that’s not the point though – you can’t expect to finish up an exercise like this all “all Australian women writers are fabulous“. That would be disingenuous. And even if you don’t like a book there are some good things to be taken from the experience.

I found the finer details of Anita Heiss’s family life and career dull, but the important argument her book makes is well serviced by that fact. I thought Anne Whitehead’s book exemplified the worst of memoir and travel writing, but it did give me an overview of Mary Gilmore’s character and point me in the direction of some other books to read about both Gilmore and the New Australia colony. I didn’t think Linda Jaivan’s novel quite held together under the competing tensions of humour and political allegory, but it was moving and thought-provoking nonetheless.

It may not have been as happy clappy a year of reading as I subconsciously expected, but the challenge was a good thing to do all the same, and I recommend that anyone who’s interested or even intrigued consider taking the 2013 challenge for themselves.

I won’t be joining you this year – I need to hold off on taking on another annual reading plan for now because I already have one reading project underway at the moment: Anna and I have signed up for The Year of Reading Proust and to be honest I’m about 80-120 pages behind where I need to be in order to get the entirety of In Search of Lost Time read by the end of the year. But more on that at a later date.

“We appreciate the chance to read it,” they said. “Unfortunately, the piece is not for us,” they said. Four times they said it.

I’ve noticed that there seem to be two tiers of rejection at Overland, the aforementioned “not for us” bit, and the less-all-encompassing “While we can’t use this particular piece at the moment, we like the writing, and hope you will continue to send us your work,” with which they greeted the earlier submission of my odd little Run-DMC-inspired biopoem of William Strunk Jr., leading me to conclude either that a) they liked the Strunk thing better than the other things and it might be a good idea to revise it and resubmit or b) they’re just tired of my writing altogether and are now resigned to sending me the less encouraging form rejection so that I’ll stop wasting their time. I think I’ll go with a) for now.

A single day later I had my hopes mildly dashed by the genial folks at Poetry when they passed on “8-Bit Rainbows”, which I have to say I would have just kittened to have had published on their pages, but there you go. Their rejection was as prompt and nice as ever, so there’s that. I’ve been listening to their podcasts of late, which I cannot too-highly recommend, so it was difficult not to hear the rejection being read out in the dulcet tones of either Christian Wiman or Don Share (or both).

A few weeks later Slate didn’t so much as reject “8-Bit Rainbows” themselves as much as they rejected ALL poetry – apparently they’re not accepting poetry submissions any more. No idea why. Maybe I should ask them? Just out of curiosity? There’s no way that could be misinterpreted as a passive-aggressive way to get them to publish me, right?

After I got the sincere and apologetic email informing me of their poetry moratorium, I went and had a look on their website, but I couldn’t find any mention of this closure on their site. I also couldn’t find any mention of the submission guidelines that were up on the site a while back, though a Google search for the poetry editors’ email address did reveal a few poems in their poetry archive that had a kind of garbled version of the guidelines as a greyed-out footer in italics. Make of that what you will. They seem to still be publishing poems, though – their poem archive had a poem dated Feb 5 last I looked, so maybe they’ve just got a massive backlog to work through. It happens.

I got a nice bit of closure from Islet, whom regular readers will remember as considering “Lord Melbourne’s Triumph”, a flash fiction joint from my suite of false histories about Melbourne and football. Despite my chagrin at the entire process taking eleven months and essentially coming to nothing, the email I got from Island Editorial Assistant Lesley Halm was very well written and very kind. She apologised for the delay and thanked me for my patience and then went on to explain in some detail the possible reasons for rejection. I liked this bit of the email particularly, so I’ll reproduce it here:

There is a range of reasons for not accepting a submission. Many factors inform the selection of material — often it isn’t simply the work itself. Decisions are influenced by the context of other works already accepted and submitted. We also try to ensure a range and balance ( between content, genre and style). Decisions are also influenced by the tone of the publication, and, inevitably, by the personal biases and aesthetics of the editorial team and ultimately the editor — be these fair or unfair!

I think that sums up the journal selection process really, really well, in a fair and honest way. I may even nick parts of this paragraph for my own future rejection letters.

Ms. Halm’s sign-off was also considered and kind:

Sorry it is not better news for you this time; we hope you are not discouraged and will continue to re/write and send your work out for publication. I wish you well in all your creative ventures in the future.

Though I’d rather be published, if I’ve got to be rejected, this is the way I prefer to be rejected. Kudos to Island for ending this saga on a positive note. I particularly like the reference to rewriting work as part of the writing/submission process.

Finally, I didn’t get the Varuna Publishers Fellowship I applied for, which means I won’t be going to their gorgeous house in the Blue Mountains to be mentored and fed and looked after and pampered while I absorb the tranquility and inspiration of the surroundings and channel it into the completion of my 12-years-and-counting neopulp time travel new romantic spy thriller. To which I can only say Boo and Fuck.