Axel With Pike
Writers can’t just be writers nowadays, says author Robert Dessaix. They also need to be figure skaters.
Stage hounds. Hucksters. Acrobats. A presence in the limelight to help move so many units per festival. When Clive James wows his throng with fluent Auden quotes and a tango twirl beside the lectern, he’s bound to enter the retail black.
And you can add to the list of writerly tasks, a diplomat. How else to cope with the offbeat questions that any festival Q&A session may throw the author’s way? As New York wiseacre, David Rakoff, described, some of the Qs aren’t even Qs.
Speaking to Farah Farouque of The Age this week, Rakoff observed that “there’s always going to be someone who gets up and says, ‘I have a three-part comment: I am an anthropologist, a locksmith, and a pastry chef…’ There’s always going to be that person.”
Going one better in a recent session in Melbourne, a Karl Marx doppelganger on Friday afternoon didn’t have a question, but an observation.
“I liken authors to strains of bacteria,” I’m paraphrasing, “and publishers to a certain degree are the carriers of such germs…”
Another audience member quizzed literary agent Jenny Darling about her readiness to accept non-book clients. “Say I’m wanting to write a film treatment,” asked the punter, “or a rock opera – ”
But my favourite question of the Whole Shebang, an all-day symposium for new writers to plug into the literary grid, went to a young mum of Port Melbourne. When learning that a freelance journalist is generally paid per word, she took on a pensive expression. “So is ‘a’ a word?” she asked.
If you happen by the Melbourne Festival this week or next, tell us your bell-ringers from the floor. I’m sure each session has a candidate for the kookiest or quirkiest. Or maybe you heard a jaw-dropper from another such powwow of minds. Share it with the foyer.