Jay,
I don't deny your right to write, I just don't have a lot of time for the literary love-inns promoted in the commercial media, whose critics gush immoderately over pop culture and churn out petty celebrities as easily as they fabricate their CV's (when are you appearing on "Spicks and Specks"?). But this is an assumption; can you point me towards one of your finer pieces? I'd be happy to read it and eat crow...
And I didn't take you for an academic; you say yourself you're a student. Good academics are rare birds, but the only feeling Howard incited in me was loathing for his superficial understanding of their legitimate critical topics. If you make it to the ivory tower, I hope you have something to say.
Glorfindel,
I'm looking forward to your response.
Nick, I grew up in Brisbane but sorry to say I haven't read any of your books. Can you recommend one I might approve of?

" I just don't have a lot of time for the literary love-ins promoted in the commercial media, whose critics gush immoderately over pop culture and churn out petty celebrities as easily as they fabricate their CV's (when are you appearing on "Spicks and Specks"?)"

I cannot recall when exactly I've gushed immoderately over popular culture, at least in my prose.

The 'commercial media' in Australia has had a very mixed relationship with literature: when its not promoting the latest Peter Carey novel, it's attacking the latest literary fraudster (I apparently fall into the latter category with my fabricated CV).

I'm unsure of what a "literary love in" is, though it sounds enticing - and terrifying. Ken Russell's 1980s film 'Gothic' comes to mind here.

Now excuse me while I prepare for my 'Spicks and Specks' appearance ...

SQUEERS:

I can be judgmental, but also amenable to persuasion :-)

Sure of myself? Sceptical, but consternated at where postmodernism and permissiveness have led our society. "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." Defining elements of society now are boredom at limitless freedom ("is that all there is?") and widespread desensitization to antisocial behaviour because virtual reality (TV, games, computers, mobile phones) has blurred the distinction between make-believe and real. I can't believe how MASSES of people will read or watch as "entertainment" things that are sadistic, cruel, depraved and vile.

On Kant and morality, I recall he said something like this: "There can be no proof of the existence of God, but it is in all our interests to behave as if he exists". He sees the need for a discipline emanating from outside of ourselves - counteracting the view put by Dostoyevsky's characters Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov that "if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted".

Can't prove the existence of the soul. I choose to behave as if it does exist, and is accountable.

Your quote from Eagleton about the cultural elite living on the labour of the uncultured is well made, though that’s less imperatively true now in developed countries. Not sure what to make of "There is no document of culture which is not also a record of barbarism".

If you think "the condition humaine demands engagement beyond privileged self-indulgence", what are you advocating - polemics in the arts, or political activism? There’s plenty of precedent for the former, with uneven results (including the execrable socialist realism experiment).

NICK EARLS:

Actually I wasn’t aiming at you personally. I’m in Brisbane too; I’ve heard you on the radio and you’re an engaging personality. I AM hard on the values and attitudes of the slice of society you depict. I’m 63, maybe “crabbed age and youth cannot live together”, but it’s more than just that. I have a Gen-X daughter in Melbourne who loves your books – she inveigled me to read Bachelor Kisses, which I so did NOT like ….

Glorfindel,
all eminently reasonable points. I have six kids and can certainly relate.
Issues of free will and the make-up of the self are of particular interest to me as I'm researching in the area, like Eagleton through a Marxist lens, because I'm concerned about the ravages of capitalism, within and without.
"If you think "the condition humaine demands engagement beyond privileged self-indulgence", what are you advocating - polemics in the arts, or political activism?"
Both really, I'm in English Lit., but I'm not sure how to go about either--culturalism is at an impasse with its identity politics, and actually exacerbates the hegemonic hold of the markets.
"There’s plenty of precedent for the former, with uneven results (including the execrable socialist realism experiment)."
I agree with you about Russian realism, headed by the well-intentioned Lukacs; but the whole thing degenerated the way it did under Stalin. Russian realism the obverse of Russian nihilism!

It's a crazy world! But 'tis's'tis. :-)

Jay,
no offence and good luck with the reviewing! Criticism has to have a conscience, I believe.

SQUEERS

To say I can't imagine you approving of anything I've written would be to treat you unfairly, as if you're someone who can only find worth in dead Russians. So I won't say that.

I will say that, years ago, when I pre-occupied myself too much with impressing very clever people who could speak cogently about dead Russians, it all went rather badly wrong. And then I tried to be Peter Carey - the Peter Carey of the early short stories - and made it worse. I turned out fairly turgid pseudo-intellectual prose that about six people liked and most hated.

So I decided to stop trying to prove I was clever, and to try to tell stories instead. I wanted to connect with my characters, and to try to bring them forward in a way that felt true to them, and that didn't look clever or have my fingerprints all over it. That's an approach that works for some readers, and that gives me a job.

But that doesn't mean it works for everybody. Where I probably fare least well is in the places universities used to call Arts faculties. A few years ago, an edition of the University of Queensland student mag Semper had an article introducing newly-elected student union reps to readers using their responses to a short list of questions. Question number five was simply ‘Nick Earls: yes or no?’. The answers ranged from ‘Hell yes’ (I think from the GLBTI rep) to the Arts faculty rep’s succinct ‘He is inconsequential’.

When Perfect Skin was published, The Australian's Review of Books said 'more pretentious claims to literary worth look shallow by comparison', and I'm told Louis Nowra called it banal in the SMH. Two weeks ago, a reader told me reading it was the thing that most helped her through the death of her husband.

TBC ...

... cont'd

When we think of reviews, I wonder if we too often discount the work done to make the book in the head of the reviewer, and everything already in that head that we bring to bear when we read. The same words can elicit radically different responses in different heads.

If you take the template of the dead Russians to anything I've done, I can't say that I'll fit, but I can say that I wasn't trying to. Perhaps my new novel, The True Story of Butterfish, is as good an example as any. At a guess I'd say that Louis Nowra would find it banal, but there are others who haven't. Maybe I'm writing more for them.

GLORFINDEL
You did well to be so vitriolic and yet so impersonal, though your comment did read - to me at least - as if it was based on more than one book. My central character in Bachelor Kisses is, to my mind, someone wrestling with a lot of flaws and there's a lot about him and his perspectives that I don't like or endorse. I think he's real enough though, and I hope he's interesting. I was actually surprised by the number of people who read it just as a comedy, and didn't have issues with him, but I don't think I should go telling them how to read my books either.