"I counted the tits, and there's fourteen"

Back in Melbourne, having just repaid my first instalment of the gigantic sleep debt incurred at the Brisbane Writers Festival. And what a festival it was! Beautifully organised (by possibly the friendliest staff and volunteers in the world), packed with enthusiastic festival-goers, drenched in sunshine and perfectly located at the new, super-cool State Library complex at Southbank by day, and at the Powerhouse by night. I had a ball.

But in my rush to pack and get on the plane up to Brissie at some hideously early hour of Thursday morning, I managed to forget my camera. So I can't post any photos of the raucous evening with the other words-and-pictures merchants at the Powerhouse, nor of my various panels - including those with Eddie Campbell, Leigh Rigozzi and Baba Brinkman.

Presenting with Baba was a brand new experience for me. In stark contrast to us practitioners of the silent art of little pictures (how's that, Eddie?), Baba's work is BIG, and it's LOUD. He's a rap artist and performer, and he's written an extraordinary rap adaptation of the Canterbury Tales. Our session was titled "What a Classic", and we'd been asked to talk to an audience of high school students, about adapting classic works of literature into new forms.

Baba performed an absolutely mesmerising - and hilarious - rap of the tale of the Wife of Bath, and the kids were clearly captivated. The story was well-spiced with clever innuendo and naughty asides, and you could see the ripples of smirks and giggles and nudges-in-the-ribs going through the audience when he gave them lines like "[her] eyes kept climbing his thighs in a slimy way" or described the hero as "stiff as a wooden lance".

So you can imagine that Baba was a pretty hard act to follow - especially since this was the only session where I didn't have access to a data projector, so couldn't show any cool pictures to accompany my talk. But it actually worked out fabulously. I talked about Gatsby and passed around a copy, and the audience seemed really interested and engaged, with plenty of questions. The description of Myrtle Wilson got a particularly good response - nothing like the words "she's got these huge boobs, with twelve nipples" to get a marquee full of kids laughing. Not having any visuals available, I had to demonsrate like so:

But the funniest response happened during my solo talk about Gatsby in another session earlier that day. The auditorium was quite full, and included several school groups of much younger kids (grades five and six by my reckoning) who were not actually meant to be attending this session about a decidedly grown-up book. Realising that the audience contained some very tender young minds, I adjusted the tone of my talk so that (a) they'd understand it, and (b) there wouldn't be too much talk about sex and death. Myrtle's twelve nipples, however, got their usual airing.

Anyway, after the talk was finished, one cute little boy about eleven years old put his hand up with a question. He pointed to the montage of characters projected on the screen and informed me of my crucial mistake. "I counted the tits," he said, "and there's fourteen"!


Go Brisbane!