From genre to v. good

WHENEVER you feel you might be writing something hardly worth reading, you can always quote American author Gore Vidal.

Vidal said: 'American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.'

I wonder whether Vidal was commenting also on American foreign policy since that country long ago dumped the philosophy of isolationism into history's dustbin. A monstrous heroic adventure is easy to justify in terms of greatness, while finding the goodness in doing the right thing can be a pains-taking task.

Thankfully, I am not pursuing such weighty moral questions here, but glancing at what makes good writing.

My novel Iraqi Icicle is from the detective thriller genre which began with the works of Raymond Chandler last century after World War I. I have tried to transcend the genre to make my novel good, or, I hope, verging on the very good.

Genres rarely rate much above a pass mark from critical judges. In many cases, you can see why. Thriller writers, even the best of them, tend to attain their loyal following by repeating a winning formula. We have the hugely ironic situation that most of the world's leading novelists achieve fame and fotune by producing books which are not novel; which are, in fact, the antithesis of newness. Their successful novels should be called repetitives. Don't miss Dan B. Rowling's latest blockbuster repetitive.

I believe this phenomenon of successful writing is tied to readers' comfort in the known rather than being a shortcoming of genres.

My favourite analogy on this topic is the career of British rock group The Beatles who started as imitators of the American genre, rhythm&blues. That was 1950s R&B, not the modern one where young Black, and sometimes, White women sing out loud on a beach or on the street where they just happen to have 33 people dancing sexily behind them.

The Beatles transcended their choice of genre to produce greatness. I would like to do that with the detective thriller genre. Only, remembering Vidal's warning, I am only after very goodness.
Irai Icicle is available in Europe and the Americas from www.Amazon.com www.Abebooks.com www.Alibris.com and www.Borders.com and www.lulu.com and www.lulu.com/uk and in Autralia and Asia from www.digitalprintaustralia.com
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Bernie

Drugs 'n' sex `n' rock `n' roll

BLUES-rock diva Janis Joplin liked to shout at her concerts that drugs 'n' sex `n' rock `n' roll would get us well; would get the whole world well.
Joplin died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27.
Janis was not around Brisbane between 1986 and 1992, the setting and time frame of Queensland journalist Bernie Dowling's first novel Iraqi Icicle. But drugs `n' sex `n' rock roll certainly were. In spades. Along with war.
In October 1970, when Janis died, heroin was an international scourge and America and its allies were prosecuting the Vietnam War.
In January 1991, heroin was an internatonal scourge and America and its allies were prosecuting the first Iraq War, also called the Persian Gulf War.
Janis Joplin rates a passing reference in Iraqi Icicle, a private detective thriller with an unlikely sleuth, Steele Hill, an orphan who claims to be John Lennon's love child and lives for gambling and altrnative rock music.
``I am interested in how popular culture, such as music, film, television, theatre, the internet, gambling and even drug use, intersects with mega social events,'' Dowling says.
Brisbane rock band the Go-Betweens is a symbolic character with the novel asking why the Aussie alternative guitar popsters never gained the success of their American contemporaries R.E.M. or even Britband The Smiths.
A Go-Betweens gig at the University of Queensland is in the mix as well as the destruction of Brisbane's hilltop rock concert venue Cloudland where the Go-Betweens supported Brit ska band Madness in the early 1980s.
The novel questions whether rock music lived up to Joplin's boast of it changing the world.
Whenever he drives by, Steele Hill shakes his fist at the yuppie white apartments which replaced Cloudland and he says the Go-Betweens wrote a song about the ballroom's demolition.
He is referring to a few lines from the band's most successful single The Streets of Your Town.
Dowling's novel never leaves Greater Brisbane but it includes Steele Hill's take on the rock music mythology of the 1989 American invasion of Panama.
The pretext for the action was to bring Panamanian president Manuel Noriega to justice for drugs and arms trading.
The international media reported, with varying degrees of accuracy, how American troops blasted rock music at the Vatican embassy where Noriega had refuge before he surrendered.
Steele Hill calls it ``rock's part in Manny's downfall'' and suggests Noriega begged the invaders to stop the music. ``No more Twisted Sister; no more We're Not Gonna Take It,'' Steele Hill imagines Noriega pleading.
Iraqi Icicle is a darkly humorous novel of a period which saw the explosion of personal computers and mobile phones in Australia, and, in Queensland, the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption which toppled the long-serving Joh Bjelke-Petersen government.
Iraqi Icicle is available from www.digitalprintaustralia.com www.amazon.com www.abebooks.com www.alibris.com www.lulu.com/uk and www.borders.com

Self publishing

THE put-down merchants call self-publishing vanity press, but maybe that should be insanity press, because it is damned hard work.

I grew up in a sub-culture which praised self-production by indie musicians, but the same generosity of spirit was not extended to self-publishers of literature where the general feeling was the product was not good enough to be bought by a mainstream publisher.

Without boring you with all the details, the economics of music production and book publishing are similar. The physical reproduction of a CD or a book is only a minor part of the cost for a big record company or book publisher with economies of scale. For the music company, recording and promotion are big ticket items, while for the book publisher, editing and distribution are costly.

Another common feature is music and book publishers having a poor history of predicting a hit, so they tend to try to reproduce past hits with a twist rather than take a chance on the new.

The muso or writer can do recording or editing a lot cheaper, if often less effectively, than the corporates. But of course, indie artists could never hope for economies of scale in production which also allows multiple distribution of review copies. But the production-cost gap has narrowed with greater economy in short-run CD pressings and the development of printing on demand.

Enter Bent Banana Books and its publication of my novel Iraqi Icicle, a detective thriller with a difference, or quite a few differences, really.

Don't tell anyone, but I am Bent Banana Books.

I am producing my novel Iraqi Icicle through printing on demand and the production cost per unit is only four times or so that of the big publishers. This might not sound good but it is. Before POD, it was seven or so times the cost.
Now, I can see how I go against the majors in marketing my novel in a crowded marketplace. Which is what I am doing with you, right now.

You can buy Iraqi Icicle in soft cover from www.lulu.com or www.lulu.com.uk
If you like the sound of it, buy it or if you would like to have a nibble first, buy Iraqi Icicle Book One At Play as an e-book from www.lulu.com It's inexpensive and the first of a four-part series.

Tell all your friends and make up for those misguided hip people who have been deriding self-publishing for years while they have supported independent record production.
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Bernie

Write on!

I've got writer's blog. Sorry about that punishment; I couldn't resist.

I have recently self-published a novel Iraqi Icicle, set in and around Brisbane, Australia, from 1986 to 1992. Like my play, Tosh: the Musical (visit www.toshthemusical.com ) it has popular music history central to the fiction.

In the play Tosh: the Musical, I look at Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and the Jamaican reggae scene from its beginnings with ska in the 1960s until Tosh's murder in the 1980s.

In Iraqi Icicle, I am, in part, into the history of Brisbane alternative guitar pop rockers The Go-Betweens which formed in 1977 and broke up in 1990.
The band reformed a few years back with its songwriting nucleus of bassist/lyricist Grant McLennan and guitarist/music writer Robert Forster.

McLennan was born in 1958 and died in autumn, 2006. If you do the maths, he did fulfil the hope of dying before he got old, as the Who's Pete Townshend wrote in My Generation.

I am a few years older than McLennan but the novel is not about my generation. It might strike a chord with any fans of indie rock music between the 70s and 90s. Or those interested in the place of popular culture in the world. Or anybody who has ever pondered the relativity of good and evil. Or someone chasing a bit of black humour to light up our dark times.

I am a journalist by profession or trade or job or whatever. As well as doing general reporting, I write a couple of columns a week and they usually have a bit of a giggle in them. I find it hard to resist and both Tosh the Musical and Iraqi Icicle have humour.

I've an idea the novel Iraqi Icicle might appeal to the present generation of alternative music lovers throughout the world. I wrote both Tosh the Musical and Iraqi Icicle, in part, to give hope to (or at least entertain) teenagers and 20-somethings of today. They have got the rough end of the pineapple, as we like to say in Australia, living in the most despicable of times.

That's probably enough of an introduction, except to say you can buy Iragi Icicle in soft cover from from www.lulu.com or www.lulu.com.uk or, as an ebook, it is serialised in four parts at www.lulu.com

It is published by Bent Banana Books which is my own publishing house, but do not tell anyone that, as they might think Iraqi Icicle is less than a professional publication.


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Bernie

Voters might mention the war

WITHIN the next 12 months or so, voters elect governments in the US, Britain and Australia.

The three incumbent governments are in (Basil) faulty towers and are exhorting people not to mention the war.In the instance of the comic John Cleese creation, Basil Fawlty, the conflict not to mention was the World War of the II persuasion.

For President George W. Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister John Howard it is the Iraqi War MkII.

It seems the world's people are in a mood to change governments at the moment.A few years back, Spain elected a left-wing government because its citizens did not like the consequences of the Iraqi invasion. Just recently, France elected a right-wing President, despite its citizens not liking the consequences of the Iraqi Invasion.

All this must put Bush, Blair and Howard on edge.

Bush should be the calmest because he is going anyway and he can take solace he is not the Republican who will be whipped at the polls. It is the first time, in my memory, that the next US President will be voted in through the Democratic Primaries, because after that it is a formality.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also will not lead his (New Labor) Party at the next polls, but he will likely be upset if the voters mention the war and savage Gordon Brown led Labor. Blair strikes me as someone who wants everyone to like him, a supremely difficult task, if you have had a hand in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In my country, Australia, the Labor Opposition clearly leads the opinion polls over the Government of John Howard, a few months out from an election. Labor has not mentioned the war much yet and may never mention it very loudly, seeing they brought up little opposition to Australia being part of the coalition of the swilling which invaded Iraq.

The voters, on the other hand, may mention the war. Before the unmentionable, Australians were opposed to an invasion without US sanction, though some swung around when they realised the invasion was inevitable. Some of these people might be angry at being duped.

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Bernie

Laughing at the Disabled

AN academic squabble from Brisbane, Australia, is entertaining consumers of popular media.
Former journalist and current doctorate film student at Queensland University of Technology, Michael Noonan, is making a film called Laughing at the Disabled as a large chunk of his thesis.
Cultural Industries academics Dr Gary MacLennan and Dr John Hookham have been suspended without pay for six months for criticising the film and its auteur in the national newspaper The Australian.
I have connections with some threads of the drama.
As a journalist, I worked for the same newspaper chain as Noonan and I worked alongside the sports reporter on occasion though we were never based at the same office.
Gary MacLennan I knew from the civil liberties campaigns in Brisbane during the 1970s.
Like MacLennan, I have a disabled family member, in my case, a 10-year-old son with an intellectual disability.
Unlike MacLennan, I have not seen the early rushes of Noonan's film, so I cannot pass judgement on its content.
The film's title Laughing at the Disabled does not offend me because I believe it needs to be judged in the context of the film.
Champions of the rights of the disabled cannot have it both ways. You cannot say they are marginalised and made invisible and then condemn a film title which places them front and centre.
Maybe the title is only undergraduate attention-seeking. Maybe its confrontation has a more positive aim.
While I cannot, through lack of evidence, support MacLennan and Hookham in their condemnation of the film, the university's penalty seems outrageous.
The gist of their crime seems to be expressed in similar terms by QUT Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake and Noonan who was quoted as saying ``criticism..... should be channelled through the appropriate academic forums''.
Ah, what goes on at uni stays at uni and violators of this principle will have the book thrown at them.
In my novel Iraqi Icicle (available at www.lulu.com/uk ) I have my street-wise protagonist Steele Hill invited as a guest speaker at a university lecture in cultural studies.
A student asks Hill a question about sociologist Erving Goffman's study of total institutions, such as prisons, the armed forces and mental hospitals.
Of course, Hill has never heard of Goffman and asks what he was in prison for, but the astute reader might suspect I am raising questions about whether universities have elements of total institutions about them.
As a great academic institution should, QUT, its staff and students appear to be contributing to that debate.

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Bernie

10 best books ever written

IN Australia, our national TV and radio broadcaster asked viewers and/or listeners to name their favourite book.

I am sure many of you would have been invited to frolic in a similar exercise in your own countries.

It is chewing on a piece of gum for the mind, because

a. popular books will fare better than the classics and
b. more recent books will fare better than the classics and
c. most viewers have not read the classics or, if they have, it was long ago.

Academics like to make lists and they love to be considered smart so, they too, are sometimes invited to compile their 10 best books ever written.

It takes the fun out of it, if you cite criteria for what is a great book, but it would be interesting to see what the general public would nominate as their favourite 10 books if they could not list a book written in the last 50 years.

Of course, your 10 favourite books are not necessarily the 10 books you consider the best ever written. Sherlock Holmes books are fun but not fantastic as imaginative fiction

Go to it. Name the 10 best books ever, not including any of the past 50 years.

The real buzz about a compilation like this is reading someone else's might prompt you to discover a gem or re-evaluate something you have read.

The downside is you cannot imediately remember all the books you loved.
I will start the list with this proviso, if you asked me next week, it might be different.

1. The Adventures of Don Quixote by Cervantes
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
3. The Nigger of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad
4. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (Could be just my associating because Lawrence and Huxley were mates.)
7. The Trial by Franz Kafka
8. A James Joyce novel though I have never got past the first five pages of any.
9. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos because Joyce preferred to have that read to him, when he was near blind in his old age.
10. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett because a book can be play.

Won't you return the ball: what's your 10 best?

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Bernie