Short takes XXII

20/5/06 The very joy

I’ve now appraised nearly all the dossiers I must read for our June Literature Board session. This will be my seventeenth meeting and penultimate appearance for the appointment which I reckon to have been a fair call on my time, where I have been able to give back to my patrons some public service for the enabling they have provided for my own compositions over the years.

There are 105 applications, fewer than sometimes, and I have read these over four days at the rate of twenty-five per eight-hour day. They leave me with these reactions.

1. Most contemporary Australian literature gives me complex displeasure. Why so much urgency to prove and so little wish to please?

2. Acquaintance with the diverse wiles by which authors try to establish salient presence around the Lit-Board honey pot has taken me too far into a view of the beggarliness of this, my writer’s profession, with the result that I could easily lose interest in it. Why must the opportunity…