Australian writers' stamps send the wrong message

Spot the difference ... Australian Legends of the Written Word stamps

The all-white, overwhelmingly male selection of authors chosen by Australia Post delivers a very distorted picture of our literature.

I see that Australia Post has issued a new set of themed stamps honouring some of the nation's most popular and celebrated writers.

The "Australian Legends of the Written Word" series from Australia Post features Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Tim Winton, Bryce Courtenay and David Malouf. I don't have a problem with any of the authors listed: they certainly are popular and celebrated. But doesn't it seem just a little bit myopic in a white-male-Anglo-Saxonish manner? Only Malouf and McCullough would fall anywhere outside the net.

Who set the tone and selected the authors honoured here? It would be mealy-mouthed to criticise anyone included on that list; they're all writers worthy of the honour. But, at the start of the night, a few more authors should have been added to give the stamp collection a more comprehensive and realistic vision of the current Australian literary landscape. Where are Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolly, Helen Garner? These women are popular, award-winning authors whose work has been published and praised overseas. Grenville, for example, has been translated into 13 languages and is a winner of the Orange prize. Why doesn't she get a stamp? It's not about political correctness at all, it's about getting it right.

As well as the gender disparity, the list does nothing to indicate the cultural depth of Australian writing today. Christos Tsiolkas, a Greek-Australian author, might feel hard done by not to be included, but I guess he is not safe enough as an author. His writing is controversial, his characters often unpleasant, and his stories reveal the materialistic ennui of contemporary urban life and the social dislocation experienced by many minority groups. But here's the thing: his recent novel The Slap has probably been the most talked about book published in Australia in the past year.

And are there no indigenous authors worthy of a literary guernsey either? Alexis Wright? Sally Morgan? What, exactly, was the criteria for eligibility? I have these horrific images of a group of white men sitting around like Bruces in the philosophy department, going through the names of contemporary authors.

I then wondered if the criteria for eligibility was related to film adaptations. Did each author need to have at least one feature film (or mini-series) adaptation to their name? Actually, no, that can't be right, because Grenville, Garner and Tsiolkas have had their fiction turned to film.

What sort of message does this send out to the young kids of Australia? That almost all of Australia's great writers are white men? That is demonstrably wrong and decidedly insulting. Whoever commissioned these stamps and selected the authors should be given a short lecture in contemporary Australian literary history instead of logging on to IMDB to get their facts.

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Evan Maloney, The Guardian, Friday 22 January 2010

"Sex" definition prompts dictionary ban in US schools

A parent's complaint over a 'sexually graphic' definition has seen dictionaries removed from southern Californian schools.

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for "oral sex".

Merriam Webster's 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the "sexually graphic" entry is "just not age appropriate", according to the area's local paper.

The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

While some parents have praised the move – "[it's] a prestigious dictionary that's used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern," said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. "It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground," father Jason Rogers told local press. "You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?"

A panel is now reviewing whether the Menifee ban will be made permanent. The Merriam Webster dictionary joins an illustrious set of books that have been banned or challenged in the US, including Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which last year was suspended from and then reinstated to the curriculum at a Michigan school after complaints from parents about its coverage of graphic sex and violence, and titles by Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman, included in the American Library Association's list of books that inspired most complaints last year.

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Alison Flood, The Guardian, Monday 25 January

Tired and Tested - My New Novel Begins

A L Kennedy on Writing:

OK, I concede that it's not mountaineering, but even in good health starting a new book consumes an awful lot of energy.

So, Best Beloveds, the New Novel. I'm calling it that in the frail hope that it will hear me and turn into one – at the moment it is, of course, the New Notebook Full Of Stuff and A Smattering of Early Paragraphs. A long project is, as you will realise, a massive and potentially ludicrous commitment of time and enthusiasm which could come apart in your hands at any moment, could promise wonders, cough twice and then turn into ashes and sand at the end of three years' preparation and one year's labour.

Its customary horrors have been enhanced this time around by my continuing flu. Many commiserations to those of you who are also still staggering along in the grip of the season's available viruses – you will be well able to imagine how much serious work I've actually managed to get done whilst feeling that I am trapped on a ship in high seas with someone who is trying to insert a migraine into my face using a dulled Black and Decker router. Round and round the fretting runs - I should be further ahead. I should get better more quickly. I should have a nice little bundle of pages to ponder and hit with a stick by now. I should…

Well, frankly, I pretty much always should be somewhere and someone other than I am at this point. The initial stages of all my novels have always been sabotaged by (in order) my day job, my part-time job, the other writing I was doing while I was writing them, the work I was meant to have finished long before I got to this point and – naturally – the hideous diseases which flesh is heir to, if you persist in making it work and sit on trains and never give it days off and trips to the zoo with balloons. Or even without balloons. And if you have, in general, been unable to continue your programme of inspirational and nourishing treats as you would have wished.

I am more worried than usual, but then again I am always more worried than usual – so that must be usual, right?

A greater part of writing than you might suppose relies upon the writer ignoring or temporarily setting aside a whole circus troupe of ugly fears and just typing in spite of them. Once I've dodged my own novel-related anxieties I can get used to the familiar cycle of enthusiasms and despairs – I wake up in the middle of the night having finally found out the male protagonist's proper name: he promptly stops speaking to me and I lie in the dark wondering what he's up to, if he's found someone else to let him be expressed ... I suddenly feel I have exactly the emotional tone and progression for the opening section, it is exciting, clear and inviting: I reach the page and it all veers off somewhere horrible and leaden while I get overly concerned about a tiny and possibly irrelevant description ... I think I know the title of the book, I seem to have known it for quite a while and to be happy with it: but is it a good title, will it work?

Beyond this there is the sense – even if you're entirely well – that putting one word after another is impossibly tiring. Although that's quite likely to be a good sign. Falling asleep in my special typing chair after a couple of pages at the start of a book is, in fact, often an excellent sign. This is because writing prose is exhausting. Not in the way that coal mining is exhausting, or dragging the body of your frozen companion over an icy Alpine pass is exhausting, but it's demanding, nonetheless. By the end of the novel, things will be easier. Months of concentrating as hard as you are able and then a little bit harder still, of trying to think about sense and musicality and scansion and psychology and tone and metaphor and energy and pace and a number of additional technical doodads will have beaten what's left of your mind into shape and the novel itself will be helping – the characters will be happy to dictate what they will and will not stand for and prior events will be contributing their consequences.

But I find that, once a book is finished. when I return to it for the first set of overall rewrites after a couple of weeks' break, all of my hard-won stamina has melted away and I am, once again, pathetically feeble. Which is why I'm always happy when a new writer comes to see me and says, in a puzzled and down-hearted manner, something along the lines of, "It's hard." This quite often tends to mean that they have started putting in the amount of effort their work (and the kind lady and gentleman readers) deserve.

There are exceptions to this Rule of Tiredness – there are always exceptions in writing. Except when there aren't, which would be the exception to that. I'm never in any way dismayed when something is so anxious to be written that it rips into the page as soon as I give it the chance and won't let me be until it's done – and if I have to load up on Kopi Luwak and Red Bull and hold on tight for a few days to keep up, then so be it. But I've never known that to happen with the start of a novel. In my experience, that tends to be much more like being naked and maliciously observed, spirit voices gathering on all sides to mutter things like, "You're shit." And "This is a bad idea." And "You really have no arse to speak of at all, do you?"

Meanwhile, I look forward to being no longer poorly and therefore able to avoid the whole novel-writing issue in a more traditional manner - by dusting, making soup, staring, pacing, repainting the stairwell, dozing, crying, fainting ... Even so, I'll always eventually end up battering away at the thing until it batters back. It's lovely and it's mind-bending and I wouldn't be without it. Onwards.

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A L Kennedy, The Guardian, Friday 22 January 2010

J D Salinger dies, aged 91

Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger has died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire.

JD Salinger, who shocked one generation and inspired another with a classic novel of teenage rebellion, has died in New Hampshire at the age of 91.

Salinger, who shied away from publicity and did not publish an original work during the last 45 years of his life, was the creator of Holden Caulfield, the delinquent, alienated anti-hero of The Catcher in the Rye, which became required reading for generations of teenagers after its publication in 1951.

But in recent years its relevance to modern youth came into question and his reputation was tarnished by two accounts, one by a former lover and the other by one of Salinger's daughters, who painted him as a controlling and unpleasant eccentric.

The Catcher in the Rye was praised by the New York Times on publication as "an unusually brilliant first novel". But while an instant hit with many teenagers who related to its tale of adolescent angst and adult hypocrisy, it was met with alarm in other quarters. Some school boards made it required reading. Others banned it amid protests from parents over swearing – including the frequent use of "goddam" and, more rarely, "fuck" – as well as the bad example they believed Holden set.

Four years after its publication Salinger expressed disappointment that the book, which he acknowledged was based on his own upbringing, had met with some hostility.

"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact all of my best friends are children," he wrote in 20th Century Authors. "It's almost unbearable to me to realise that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach."

John Lennon's murderer, Mark Chapman, cited The Catcher in the Rye as an inspiration for the killing in 1980.

Salinger published other books, including the well received Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, before he became an almost total recluse. His last published work – Hapworth 16, 1928 – was printed in The New Yorker in 1965.

Ten years ago it was revealed that Salinger had a secret cache of about 15 novels that had never been published. In his last interview, in 1980, he said that he only wrote for himself.

In 1986 Salinger won an injunction against the publication of a collection of his letters. During the case, which went all the way to the US supreme court, he was asked what he had been working on for the previous 20 years.

"Just a work of fiction," Salinger said in a deposition. "That's all. That's the only description I can really give it ... It's almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop I just go on from there."

Salinger was born in New York City on New Year's Day 1919. His father, of Polish Jewish origin, became wealthy importing cheese and meat. His mother posed as Jewish and he did not find out that she was not until after his bar mitzvah.

Salinger had his own troubled history in various schools until he was dispatched to Valley Forge military academy at the age of 15. There he began writing at night using a torch under his bed covers and published his first story in a fiction magazine in 1940.

He submitted a number of stories to the New Yorker that were rejected, including one called I Went to School with Adolf Hitler. But the magazine did accept a later story about a disaffected teenager called Holden Caulfield, the first time the character appeared.

In 1942 Salinger was conscripted to fight in the second world war where he took part in the Normandy landings. He married a German woman while serving with the occupation forces after the defeat of Hitler. The couple moved to America but the marriage soon fell apart. Salinger took up Zen Buddhism.

He found fame disagreeable and the year after the publication of his most famous novel he left New York city for the town of Cornish, New Hampshire. There he remarried, to Claire Douglas, had two children, and then divorced in 1967.

Periodically the spotlight shone on Salinger again.

In 1998 the writer Joyce Maynard published a memoir in which she wrote unflatteringly about an eight-month affair with Salinger in which she described his controlling personality. Two years later one of Salinger's daughters, Margaret, wrote of her father as a recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.

Salinger was thrust into public view one last time a year ago when he sued to block the publication of an unauthorised sequel to The Catcher in the Rye called 60 Years Later. The writer, John David California, imagined Holden in his 70s.

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Chris McGreal in Washington, The Guardian, Thursday 28 January

Martin Amis in new row over 'euthanasia booths'

Martin Amis has never fought shy of an argument, whether it be with the critic Terry Eagleton (over Islamist extremism), his pal Christopher Hitchens (over Stalin) or fellow novelist Julian Barnes (over Amis leaving his agent – Barnes's wife).

But none of those opponents were as tough as his new target promises to be. Now 60, Amis has picked a fight with the grey power of Britain's ageing population, calling for euthanasia "booths" on street corners where they can terminate their lives with "a martini and a medal".

The author of Time's Arrow and London Fields said in an interview at the weekend that he believes Britain faces a "civil war" between young and old, as a "silver ­tsunami" of increasingly ageing people puts pressure on society.

"They'll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops," he said. "I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years' time.

"There should be a booth on every ­corner where you could get a martini and a medal," he added.

His comments were immediately condemned as "glib" and "offensive" by anti-euthanasia groups and those caring for the elderly and infirm. Supporters of assisted suicide, meanwhile, insisted that a dignified and compassionate end should be on offer to those who are dying.

Alistair Thompson, from the Care Not Killing Alliance, said Amis's views were "very worrying". "We are extremely disappointed that people are advocating death booths for the elderly and the disabled. How on earth can we pretend to be a civilised society if people are giving the oxygen of publicity to such proposals?

"What are these death booths? Are they going to be a kind of superloo where you put in a couple of quid and get a lethal cocktail?"

The Alzheimer's Society said there were 700,000 people with dementia in the UK and the figures were set to rise. "It is understandable that people in the early stages of dementia may reflect on the subject of euthanasia," said Andrew Ketteringham, of the Alzheimer's Society. "However, glib and offensive comments about 'euthanasia booths' and 'demented old people' only serve to alienate those dealing with this devastating condition and sidestep the hugely important question of how we can best support those affected to live well and maintain their dignity."

Amis, whose forthcoming novel, The Pregnant Widow, is due to be released shortly, stood by his comments, made in an interview in the Sunday Times.

He told the Guardian: "What we need to recognise is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction." He said his comments were meant to be "satirical", rather than "glib".

His stance on euthanasia had hardened since the deaths of his stepfather, Lord Kilmarnock, the former SDP peer and writer, in March aged 81, and his friend Dame Iris Murdoch, the novelist, in 1999, aged 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer's.

"I increasingly feel that religion is so deep in our constitution and in our minds and that is something we should just peel off," he said. "Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they'll say 'he asked me to do it', or 'he wanted to die', Amis said. "That's what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on."

Answering critics who said his comments were "offensive' to older people, Amis, a grandfather, said: "Well, I'm not a million miles away from that myself."

He added: "I had a friend who was desperately ill and she wanted to go to Switzerland, to Dignitas, but she was defeated by bureaucracy at this end. And, I think it is existentially more terrifying to feel that life is something you can't get out of.

"Frankly, I can't think of any reason for prolonging life once the mind goes. You are without dignity then."

In his interview, Amis said his step­father had died "very horribly". "He always thought he was going to get better. But he didn't get better and I think the denial of death is a great curse."

He said Iris Murdoch, whom he had known for a very long time , was "a friend, I loved her. She was wonderful. I remember talking to her just as it started happening, and she said, 'I've entered a dark place'. That famous quote. Awareness of loss is gone, the track is gone. You don't know the day you've spent watching Teletubbies; it just vanished."

The pro-euthanasia pressure group Dignity in Dying said: "Like all too many people in the UK, Martin Amis has witnessed the bad death of a loved one." But, it added: "Dignity in Dying's campaign for a change in the law is not about the introduction of 'euthanasia booths', nor is it in anticipation of a 'silver tsunami'. Our campaign is about allowing dying adults who have mental capacity a compassionate choice to end their suffering, subject to strict legal safeguards."

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Caroline Davies, Sunday 24 January 2010