The inexhaustible variety of life

I'm taking a break from writing an article which is really giving my brain a good wringing. See, I've been invited by a magazine - whose main audience is journalists - to write a piece about, you guessed it: Graphic Novels. This is a task that I approach with extreme caution, and, I must admit, with a slight sinking sensation. That said, I also don't want to miss an opportunity to show "our thing" in the best way I possibly can, especially when the audience comprises the very people we hope will embrace, understand and write insightfully about it.

As a regular reader of Mr Campbell's blog, I know that this topic is a minefield. But the Bug is (relatively) unafraid! Let's see what I come up with... and whether my mate Campbell tears me into small strips afterwards, and then "does what he can to make the strips miserable" (with apologies to Raymond Chandler - see here for more quotes). I'm optimistically hoping that we'll all be happy with the result.

So I'm taking a breather from this arduous task, and thinking about another adaptation of The Great Gatsby which came to my attention recently, and which I would dearly love to see. It's a theatre production by a New York company called Elevator Repair Service, titled "Gatz" (which is of course Jay Gatsby's "real" surname). This is what their website says about it:

James Gatz - that was really, or at least legally, his name.

One morning in the low-rent office of a mysterious small business, one employee finds a ragged old copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter of his desk and starts to read it out loud. And doesn't stop.

At first his coworkers hardly seem to notice, but then weird coincidences start happening in the office, one after another, until it's no longer clear whether he's reading the book or the book is doing something to him. . . .

6 hours long and with a cast of 13, Gatz is by far ERS's most ambitious endeavor yet — not a stage adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel but a verbatim reading of the entire book [my emphasis], accomplished by the staff of a small office in the midst of their increasingly bewildering business operations.

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A verbatim reading of the entire book! In this mysterious office context! Extraordinary! The actor who plays the protagonist of the play actually knows the entire novel by heart. This fact alone thrills and amazes me - partly because it evinces a truly Gatsby-esque level of passion that I wholeheartedly admire, and can certainly relate to. But on top of this, the play sounds really fabulous - and it's certainly snared excellent reviews.

I've had a lovely exchange of emails with a member of Elevator Repair Service, John Collins, who is (of course) a huge Gatsby fan. And I'm delighted to report that he gave my adaptation of Gatsby an absolutely glowingly huge rap, and said that it moved him to tears. Beam!

Of course I am thrilled that the book resonated with someone as passionate and knowledgeable about The Great Gatsby as John. John has travelled far deeper into Gatsby geekdom than I have, and knows not only one version of the book but various drafts and edits inside out (whereas I was content to stick with my Penguin edition with the great intro by Tony Tanner, and certainly couldn't recite even that). One interesting snippet that he shared with me was this one:

Towards the end of chapter 2, when Nick is looking out of the window at the close of the tawdry drunken party with Tom and Myrtle and their friends, he imagines another observer looking up at them from the street. He says "And I saw him too, looking up and wondering". Apparently in one version of the text this reads "And I was him, too..." - and this was later corrected by the publisher. But in the context of the next sentence, I can't help but wonder which is the right word:

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

Oh, the gorgeousness of it!!

A Handbag??

Last night I did a talk about Gatsby at the Avid Reader bookshop in West End, Brisbane. It's a gorgeous shop, run by the equally gorgeous Fiona and her lovely crew (special thanks to Anna Krien and Ben), and I had a wonderful time.

The experience was all the sweeter for the fact that it came after an extremely stressful day. I am usually a very organised person. I am also not generally much interested in handbags (unlike my buddy Scootergrrl). But in a brief lapse of judgement when packing on Wednesday night, I decided to transfer all my girly junk from one handbag to the other. All dandy... until two hours into my (delayed) flight, I realised with a sensation not unlike unexpected turbulence that I'd left my data stick - with my Gatsby presenation on it - in the Other Handbag. Cue Lady Bracknell. It didn't just look like carelessness - it looked like a fkn disaster!

There ensued a epic scramble to convey this enormous file (100mb) from a handbag in Fairfield, Melbourne, to a data stick in Brisbane. This involved getting my neighbour to break-and-enter (well, sort of), after which our internet, then hers, failed. She took the stick to her husband's work (is this going beyond the call or what?) where he managed to upload the file to the publisher's ftp site (which took 2 hours) after which the wonderful people in the IT department of my work very, very kindly downloaded it for me and sent it to Brisbane. This entire process took almost seven hours. During which time I also had to do a full day's work at the office. At 5pm on the dot I had my presentation on a borrowed data stick, and I needed a drink.

I left the office, still a bit goggle-eyed and quavery, and who do you think was standing just outside the building? In a beautiful bit of Brisbane serendipity, I almost fell over my favourite cranky bastard, Eddie "thanks for roning" Campbell, patron saint of forgetting stuff when you catch a plane, along with his lovely wife Anne.

Eddie and I then walked to the Avid Reader, where the wonderfully calm and friendly atmosphere of the shop instantly smoothed the day away. I was really tickled that Eddie wanted to attend this talk. We've presented together a few times and both enjoyed it very much, but I've never done a solo presentation with my sometime sparring partner in the audience. Anne had previously said that if she were doing the talk, she'd have him removed from the room before it began, so I have to admit to some trepidation. One mention of the words "graphic novel", I feared, might send him into a frenzy of objection and correction - or worse, he might just look at me from the back row with that pained rictus of horror on his face.

But no. I was very happy to note Eddie nodding in agreement and smiling throughout the talk. Afterwards, over a much-desired glass of pinot gris at a lovely West End bar, he said "That was great. You talked about your book without saying 'graphic novel' once, or getting into the whole business about what these things are called". Well, of course! It's not a topic that I tend to talk about anyway (!), but with Eddie in the audience, well, I'd have to be completely stupid to venture into those waters!

A particularly delightful aspect of this event for me was that it was held outside on the back porch of the shop, in the balmy Brisbane evening. The audience was friendly and enthusiastic and gave some great feedback. I was especially touched by the super-excited reaction of the charmingly-named Lucia Bee of the Somerville School, who asked me if I'd like to be their writer/artist in residence for a few days next year. You bet I would. I love Brisbane.

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PS - also received this lovely review recently. Beam!

We're gonna be on telly!

Shaun Tan, Eddie Campbell and me - on the ABC! Yippee! This Sunday at 5pm. Here's a link to the program.

PS... Just found out that the program will not be broadcast in Victoria, because of the Grand Final. Damn footy! Never mind. Interested Victorians will be able to download it from the ABC website next week.

Sydney Morning Herald article

Here's a link to an article in the SMH on the rising excitement about graphic novels in Australia. It features Eddie Campbell, Shaun Tan, Bernard Caleo and me - and includes a couple of pictures from Gatsby (beam!).

It is a slightly altered version of the piece that appeared in The Sunday Age "M" section a couple of weeks ago, as featured here on Mr Campbell's blog.

Smackdown!! Campbell vs Greenberg Title Fight

I've only had the pleasure of making Eddie Campbell's acquaintance quite recently, but in the short time we've known one another, we've already managed to have one gloves-off smackdown barney.

As readers of his blog will be well aware, Australia's most famous graphic novelist is a man of eloquently expressed - and very strong - opinions. And had she done her homework, this little Bug would have known that there is one "piranha pond" of which young players are advised to steer well clear: the topic of What We Call Our Work.

Of course we've kissed-and-made-up, so I'm afraid I can't promise a WWE-style wrestling match when we appear together at the Melbourne or Brisbane writers festivals... but I can offer this little cartoon version of events, in which we all get a good walloping.

Special thanks to the lovely Jason Conlan, cartoonist extraordinaire and wrestling announcer, who kindly allowed me to borrow his "mister J" character as the guest commentator for...

The Title Fight!!

(I haven't yet learned how to make these pics bigger, so you'll need to click on each page to enlarge)

On famous editors, and editors-to-be

Today I gave a couple of talks at Chisholm Institute of TAFE, on the subject of making and reading graphic narratives, with reference to Gatsby.

The audiences were all students of professional writing and editing, and it was an absolute pleasure to talk with them. They all seemed so engaged with things like graphic narrative devices and the process of adaptation, which are topics dear to my heart, of course. And because they were also studying editing, it was the perfect opportunity to mention one of the best books I've read in a while: a biography of Fitzgerald's editor, the extraordinary Max Perkins (Max Perkins - Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg). This book actually gave me more of an insight into the creative processes behind The Great Gatsby than anything else I've read. And more importantly, it was a wonderful, fascinating look at a very private, very understated man who had the subtle-but-great talent of nurturing and shaping the talents of others.

More recently I've been reading some other graphic narratives (comics, graphic novels, whatever - I am way too tired today to buy into the "what do we call them" debate!): Eddie Campbell's beautifully painted, super-suspenseful and texture-filled detective story, The Black Diamond Detective Agency and French-Canadian Guy Delisle's Pyongyang, which was fabulous, funny /sad and a truly eye-popping peep at the weirdness of life in North Korea. Guy, Eddie and I will all be on a panel together at the Brisbane Writers Festival... I am pretty thrilled to be in such illustrious company.

One of the things that really grabbed me about Pyongyang was that Mr Delisle must surely take the prize for using the fewest possible lines to create incredibly relateable (and funny) facial expressions. I laughed out loud quite a few times, and was irresistibly carried along on the character's strange travels.

Mr Campbell has very kindly written a piece about Gatsby on his blog today, and it seems that he shares my passion for bizarre-looking monsters. But then - what's not to love about monsters?