Melbourne: City of Literature

I was planning to write about this several days ago, but this is the first alone time I've had with my computer since being away on my inaugural corporate junket (which was totes awesome btw). Melbourne has been awarded 'cultural city' status by UNESCO, named as the world's second City of Literature (Edinburgh being the first).

So, you know, this is good for our collective ego and all, but I failed to get particularly excited about the announcement. The best thing about it is that it triggered the Government into putting some money where its mouth was, by developing the centre for books and ideas at the State Library. The State Library has already been drastically improved and is now beautiful, peaceful and extremely useful, and this should be a great new initiative within it. It will certainly be hella helpful to the small and underfunded organisations that slave away facilitating the culture that has induced this recognition.

I just hope it doesn't cause the literati to be self-congratulatory. The publishing industry in Melbourne is largish to be sure, but the foundation for it is laid by the countless underfunded and poorly paid individuals who write because they love it, not to mention all those good people who will happily drop a wad in their local bookstore (which hopefully isn't Borders). And when you do something because you love it, you do it regardless of a UNESCO title. It saddens me to imagine that this City of Literature business will be seen as a victory for Penguin and Readings and MWF and lord knows Sleepers (who are just so hip they even have tattoos!) whilst overlooking the really important initiatives of Express Media, and all the zines in Sticky, and the websites and blogs and streetpress where so many local writers are broken in, and the wave upon wave of ever-shifting underground movements that are the true source of Melbourne's creativity.

I was mildly bemused by the request that was made of Is Not a while back that we provide some hi res images of our magazine and a bit of copy from our website to be incorporated into the campaign. Of course we consented and gave the committee making the bid the materials they requested from us, but I couldn't help feel a bit like we were the Little Red Hen who had laboured hard for our freshly baked loaf and suddenly people were happy to help us eat it. Of course, our magazine hasn't survived into the heady days of City of Literature status (although I'm sure this info didn't make it into the official bid). Nor were we informed of or consulted on any other aspect of the bid, nor notified of its success: I read it in The Age. Which doesn't particularly bother me, and while it's nice to have one's publication acknowledged, it sure as hell doesn't feel inclusive.

It's just that literary recognition is so top-down. I'm sure there's much good reason behind this, and not least because a lot of the manuscripts and other writing people produce are somewhere between mediocre and plain awful. But I would like to see the effort rewarded. I also have a massive gripe with massively-successful first-time author Carrie Tiffany's comment in the same Age article that writing is "..one of the rare things left in the world that isn't about money". Well not if you want to get published, Carrie. Publishing endeavours that aren't about money go broke. I'm aware that there are grants to allow artistic freedom from corporate bottom lines. But show me one grant that doesn't stipulate that your content be about Melbourne, or having a mixed-ethnic background, or the outback, and so on and so on. It's a politically correct artistic freedom that they provide. So that's sweet if you were planning to do that anyway, but if you were planning to write about your love for David Bowie or your collection of shopping lists, or something far more subversive, you better hope it's damned marketable, or have an in with an editor who isn't afraid to take risks.

My spirits were bouyed on Saturday reading the interview with Sophie Cunningham in the A2. The changes Sophie is bringing to Meanjin are truly exciting to me, and represent a new publishing outlet for the kind of work I find intellectually and culturally relevant and entertaining, and far too little of which is locally produced. It was also lovely to see the September issue cover displayed in the article, the artwork for which I'd seen only two days before in the Stuart and Jeremy's office on their new ridiculously fandangled soy-based printer thingy. I am greatly looking forward to getting my mitts on the first edition.