Author Archives: Sophie Masson

They could do with some of these in Iraq..

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An amazing story was reported today, about another kidnapping crisis ending happily, and a captive rescued from cruel kidnappers: you can find it at the Guardian site

At first I thought there’d maybe been a bit of a linguistic or cultural misunderstanding, and that maybe ‘lions’ was really a metaphor for ‘lion-hearted warriors’ or whatever, but it seems it’s the genuine thing. Reminded me of reading in a medieval bestiary how lions would rescue people, and feeling rather superior as I read it. Seems I owe those medieval writers an apology!

Pictologs, BD blogs, and so on..

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It looks like French bloggers are really blazing a trail as far as the latest blogging craze is concerned–pictologs, or BD blogs as they’re also called, which are like a kind of blend of webcomics and traditional (!!) blogging. France is of course right up there in the graphic novels/comic books top three–the other two being the US and Japan, of course–and BD (bande dessinee, or comics) have had a long and semi-respectable life in French culture from the early twentieth century. Bookshops are full of BD titles–featuring everything from violent, erotic fantasies to adventure stories to history very digestibly told for kids to political satire to surreal philosophical explorations, and the genre is very lively and active (though French filmic animation is, sadly, rather thin on the ground, unlike the US and Japan). Though the country has taken a while to really embrace the internet–it’s still damn difficult to find internet cafes, even in Paris–that’s changing rapidly. And certainly the French have taken to the BD blog like ducks to water.
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The Asterix complex..

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That’s what a rather good piece in this week’s TIME magazine, on the French campaign re the EU constitutional vote this Sunday, called that aspect of French psychology which projects a self-image of a small, proud, gallant, quarrelsome and , besieged people fighting with their wits against a big, sophisticated but trickable enemy. (Piece not available online) That deft little bon mot very much resonated with me, as someone who is both an insider–from origin–and outsider–because I live in Australia now–to France. It expresses very well the often frustrating–to foreigners–contradictions in the French character, as well as chiming with French self-image. What to foreigners often looks like rudeness, arrogance, self-centredness and grandiloquence, is, in France, regarded as ‘l’esprit gaulois’, going right back to those actual (not cartoon!) Gauls whom every French child, regardless of ethnic origin, is taught to regard as their direct ancestors. France, a highly self-confident nation sure of its civilising mission in the world (no prizes for guessing who, despite appearances, it closely ressembles in this) is, however, at the moment not at all a happy nation, and in fact could be in a state of what you might call national depression, popularised in the press as ‘la Sinistrose’. There’s many reasons for the attack of sinistrose, chief among them the leaden weight of the Government, led by the discredited Chirac, who is perceived as hanging grimly on to power because he doesn’t want to be indicted for corruption(you can’t impeach a serving President, in France). Then there’s high unemployment, a sense that creativity and dynamism are lacking in French business, science and culture, fury about rising prices, blamed by many on the euro, and general anger about a great many social problems. Now there’s yet another thing to stress about–or rather, the return of a traditional stress factor: and that’s Britain.
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A little game..

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..to cheer us all up–or not, as the case may be! There’s this game doing the rounds in the blogosphere, which goes under the unofficial moniker of ‘Ten things I’ve never done.’ The whole point is they’re supposed to be reasonably ordinary things–no point writing you’ve never committed murder, for instance! I thought I’d get the ball rolling here at TA by writing down ten things I’ve never done, in no particular order. Then it’s on to you..

I’ve never..
–liked the taste of Coca-Cola(even as a kid, I thought it tasted just like cough medicine)
–completed a cryptic crossword(come to think of it, hardly ever completed an ‘easy’ crossword!)
–owned a video player(that technology bypassed me entirely–but I now own a DVD player)
—bought a mobile phone(but had one given to me)
–owned a microwave oven
—won in a game of chess
–watched The Exorcist (much too chicken to do so!)
—read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull(despite everyone else in my fourth form class having done so, it seemed)
–been a member of any political party;
–been to the Northern Territory, Tasmania, or WA

The only ones I hope to change are winning at chess(highly unlikely) and visiting NT, WA and Tassie (quite likely). The rest–well, I don’t think I’m missing anything.

Family squabbles about to end?

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Something relevant to today’s announcement of a rapprochement betwen the Catholic and Anglican Churches on the subject of Mary, and the impression, in much of Britain, that the Anglican Church is all but dead..
An interesting Times Online article by journalist Ruth Gledhill, confirmed Anglican, who argues the opposite line

The search for the Aussie ‘New Yorker’ or ‘Atlantic Monthly’..

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There’s a real feeling in Australian media/literary/intellectual circles that we are somehow lacking in something because we don’t have a magazine of the venerable calibre of the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. That’s why every so often there’s an attempt to remedy the situation by a brave new enterprise–starting up a new monthly magazine. It’s not only independent publishers who have valiantly tried to nail their colours to the mast; a few years back, such an attempt was even bankrolled by none other than the redoubtable Rupert himself, in the shape of The Australian’s Review of Books. Today, we have The Monthly, published by Black Ink, the publishers of ‘Quarterly Essay.’
Sadly, though, I think this latest effort fails in its efforts to replicate the magic of those old American magazines.
Partly, that’s because something funny happens to many Australian writers when they self-consciously try to replicate the kind of writing found in those magazines. People can become over-solemn, measured, grave, often worrying at tiny little points in the mistaken belief that tedious focus somehow equals gravity and thought a la Atlantic or what have you. That was certainly the case with the hideously long, hideously tedious Margaret Simons piece on the internecine warfare at the ABC, a piece whose readership seemed to me to be miniscule (and at $1 a word for 11 pages, a severe dent in the magazine’s budget!) Then there’s John Birmingham’s patronising, consciously gonzo piece on Ipswich, Don Watson’s grouch about how country towns have changed (sorry, Don, about the sad fact we country hicks can’t dwell in aspic for you–and let’s forget about the fact you wrote speeches for one of the people responsible for the ‘economic rationalist’ devastation of the country)..and so it goes.
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Walking in the garden of the mind..

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That’s the title of my newest book, which is a collection of my shorter pieces–essays, short stories and a few papers I gave at conferences–which has just been released by the small Australian publisher, Altair Australia Books. Nearly all of the pieces have been published before, in magazines, newspapers, anthologies and online, and as Altair specialises in ‘speculative’ literature–ie science fiction, fantasy and its many and diverse related cousins–the pieces all have a mythological/folklorical/fantastical bent, though some are straight-out imaginative works, others non-fiction explorations of things that have haunted and intrigued me over the years. Those who are interested can look further, and order the book, at Altair

It’s been an exciting and interesting venture for me. It’s exciting to have this collection published, and I’m really grateful to Robert Stephenson, the brave and dogged publisher at Altair, for believing in it. All my other books have been published by big publishers, like Random House, Hodder, Harper Collins, and so on. The experiences there have mostly been pretty good, and continue to be so–but though I’ve had no trouble getting novels accepted, the idea of having a collection like this was an impossible dream until Robert’s proposal. You see, the publishing ‘wisdom’ is that collections of short pieces, like collections of poetry, don’t sell. And that means a great deal of literary diversity is lost, at least by the big publishers–which is where small publishers can take up the slack. That’s especially so now, that new technologies have come to the rescue of literary diversity. My book’s a part of that, because it’s been published as a POD–print on demand.
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