fat duck squashing
This is my kind of joke. So much so, I broke most of my picture-posting rules to put it up. The image comes from a grab-bag site with dozens of ludicrous accidents on it, many of which involve vehicles poking out of or into buildings through a hole in the wall. But all information about the origin of the picture is lost.
Another moment that provoked my wheezy, rusty, early morning giggle: someone in Japan is promoting a very exclusive range of clothing. It is called “Not Found.”
““Imagine trying to find the words ‘Not Found’ on Google,” Ms. Fall said. “There’s about a million entries. It’s brilliant camouflage.”
On a completely different topic – the Meanjin saga covered in detail in Crikey took a nasty turn on the weekend, when Melbourne University responded to the publicity by sacking the Board of the magazine.
“Last month, The Sunday Age revealed a plan to hand control of the journal to the larger Melbourne University Press. The board of the small but influential quarterly had been at loggerheads for a year over the issue.
Both Meanjin and MUP are wholly owned subsidiaries of the university, with the magazine also supported by the Literature Fund of the Australia Council and Arts Victoria.
In opposing corners throughout the dispute were MUP boss and Meanjin board member Louise Adler, and the journal’s editor Ian Britain. A four-three decision supporting the takeover last month saw a recommendation go to the university’s subsidiaries committee for consideration, but it also sparked a public slanging match.
Opponents claimed that the magazine’s independence would be jeopardised and accused Ms Adler of empire building, while supporters of the proposal said Meanjin’s future depended on modernisation under the wing of MUP.
In the end, the committee and Professor Davis had enough. On June 9, three days after the subsidiaries committee met to consider the board’s advice, he sent his email.
“The subsidiaries committee recognised that Meanjin is a journal of significance to the University of Melbourne, but judged the conduct of the parties being played out in the press and radio to be unsatisfactory,” Professor Davis wrote.
“Consequently the vice-chancellor is instructed to implement the following: Until further consideration Meanjin will continue to be managed through the current corporate vehicle.
“Kate Darian-Smith is to continue as chair of the board. All other positions on the board are to be spilled. “A new board is to include more external representatives.
“The Meanjin editor will no longer be a member of the board. An editor is to be appointed for a period of one year. The new board should consider Ian Britain for this to provide continuity.
“The future of Meanjin will be reviewed in June 2008.”
So the warring parties have been dumped. The issue has been frozen for a year, to be revisited by another board with more “external representatives”.
The fight over the magazine has been very public. On June 6th, for instance, critical heavyweight Peter Craven came out in support of the editor, Ian Brittain. The accusations relate closely to personal experience-
“The University of Melbourne has decided to apply financial tests to a non-profit-making publication that is in practice subsidised by generations of editors who have edited it.
Meanjin sales are doing well. It sells the couple of thousand copies it produces, in a way that remains formidable by the standards of literary publishing. If the university wants it to do better, it should give Ian Britain advertising assistants, not turn it into a footnote to Adler’s MUP imperium. With her background in literature, Adler should have a heightened, not a diminished, sense of Meanjin as a cultural institution that requires independence.
In any case the plan, ratified by a board chaired by Kate Darian-Smith, is for the editor to work in an open-plan office with Adler’s publishing assistants. The suggestion, which remains unconfirmed, is that MUP would actually appoint future editors of the magazine.”
Craven is worried about the fact that MUP has a conflict of interest.
“Bear in mind that in recent months Melbourne University and MUP have put a considerable amount of money — reports suggest hundreds of thousands of dollars — into The Australian’s monthly Australian Literary Review supplement.
Adler no doubt sees this as a legitimate enterprise for MUP and as a superb conduit for MUP writers and, indeed, for all Australian writers.
The publication is looking good under editor Stephen Romei and no one regrets the arrival of a new and sizeable highbrow publication.
But it was an audacious endeavour for Melbourne University and MUP to be involved in, and in the small world of Australian cultural life all publications of this kind compete for prestige if not for readers (who tend to double up).”
Now we know where the power lies. And just how much importance the editor doesn’t have.
More here, fleshing out Britain’s objections and the support from MUP.
The open plan issue, by the way, may seem petty, but I have seen what happens when creative people are scrunched together. They leave the building at every opportunity.
Maybe that photo is not so irrelevant after all. MUP has just delivered a Fat Duck Surprise to a national literary institution.
June 19th, 2007 at 11:33 am
In a creative writing class I’m in, we debated this issue in but specifically around the concerns expressed by opponents of the ‘merger’ – especially Craven in the article you mention – over fears that MUP would turn Meanjin into a purely online journal. We had a good old debate over the benefits and otherwise of online magazines, reader behaviour, esp print vs screen reading, the different challenges of writing for the screen, and all that ‘accepted truth’ stuff about the joys of reading a magazine/book/newspaper on a tram, train, street, bus stop, in bed etc, and the issue of passing on production costs to the reader – who may wish to download and print off an online story for closer reading later on.
Interestingly, Craven’s very public claim that Eureka Street magazine has been a ‘ghost’ of its former self since going exclusively online has set the cat amongst the pigeons at that publications as well, and was central to our debates over the impact of going online to a publication’s reputation.
Thinking about it again now, I would love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of of going online too.
On the open plan office concerns, I don’t think it is petty at all. I work in one now, and I don’t have to tell you how annoying it is overhearing (no way around it in this place) other people’s conversations all the bloody time! Imagine the scenario where one of Adler’s ‘publishing assistants’, as it was put, overheard Meanjin’s editor rejecting a story or essay by one of MUP’s stable of writers – especially if it weren’t good enough!
I’d hate to be in those staff meetings or arguing over who ate the last biscuit.
BTW, on a nit-picking point, the Meanjin board was sacked by the Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis, not MUP.
June 19th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Film funding agencies have that open plan issue in spades. Not only is it hard to concentrate on scripts and projects in the middle of hubbub, but people are entitled to think their phone calls are private. And where are you expected to have a meeting?
Oh yes, a cafe. Six bucks worth of coffee later and you, the project manager, start to wonder why going to work is more expensive than you calculated.
We run a completely online publication in Screen Hub. I miss the print; the online bit just feels ephemeral.
But then, a lot of published stuff should be ephemeral, like ours. It is just that we sometimes have more lasting material which we want to signal should be kept and referred to again. The ability to search really helps, but it requires a trigger to look it up.
There are solutions, of course – extra buttons to key features and so on.
But I presume the mags like Meanjin are on the way to being artisanal, hand made and treasured like poetry books. Which would be great.
So it is mix and match, for me. Put a mag up online in association with specially printed extras.
In restricted communities, new mags will inevitably be online. Costs are so much lower, so capital is unnecessary. You don’t need advertising. You just have to cut through the overcrowding, and that is done by knowing the community and appealing to it well.
There is a long discussion in there, which I can’t be bothered doing casually on a blog. With the right resources and utter simplicity, a new mag can be done for the price of tea and biscuits; go any further and you run into a software and hosting wall where costs can be commercially challenging.
And interesting things happen when you go from a merry band of friends to a group in a paid venture.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
And I fixed the MUP mistake which Mark mentioned above.
June 19th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
There is indeed a very long discussion to be had. Two very long discussions, in fact. To my mind there are two quite separate strands to this kerfuffle: one is about going online, and the other is about the accusations that Adler is empire-building.
I’ve had dealings with all these people on and off for a very long time, in some cases 25 years, because we all keep professionally bumping into each other. I don’t want to talk about them en blog though I admit the temptations are very great.
If I were in charge (hah) here is what I would do:
(1) The ‘online’ question: Follow the model set up by Australian Book Review as it’s being very successfully run by the canny and experienced Peter Rose (disclosure: he is a mate), and have both an online presence, including some of the articles, and a valued material product and full hard-copy record.
(NB — Craven has in the past made no secret of his latter-day Luddism, which I doubt he would deny unless he has had some sort of Pauline conversion recently and I haven’t caught up, but it doesn’t sound like it. Craven may also be confusing his causes and his effects: Eureka Street, if I remember rightly, started to go online around the time the redoubtable Morag Fraser vacated the editor’s chair.)
(2) Re the issue of empire building, and I need to tread carefully here, let’s just say I would have voted in the camp to keep Meanjin at arm’s length, for all the reasons expressed above and then some. One example: the publishing history of Azhar Abidi’s novel Passarola Rising in 2006. Abidi had had the manuscript turned down by several Australian agents and publishers, so when Ian Britain saw and liked the stories Abidi had submitted to Meanjin and asked whether he had an unpublished novel lying about, Abidi gave Britain the manuscript, and Britain passed it on to a visiting American talent-spotting agent who ended up getting Abidi a 14,000-copies-in-hardback deal with Penguin in America, and subsequently publication in three more countries plus a translation.
And that’s one reason why the Meanjin editor ought ideally to be independent. If said editor had at the time been a subordinate at MUP, MUP would immediately have snaffled up the Abidi book and a really interesting new Australian writer would never have got anything like that international launch.
This might be part of MUP’s reasoning: grab new writers as they come, all unawares, through the Meanjin door. And most of the best of them do.
June 19th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I agree, PC, there are a at least two different issues here, and more that haven’t been covered.
I think the issue of the online publishing is a compelling one, and I have no problems with a journal or magazine such as Meanjin going online – in tandem with its existing print publication (or putting content from past editions online, the way The Monthly does, or extra bits it couldn’t fit in the print edition, the way Overland does). For one, I find the ease and accessibility very appealing (especially when I want to link to something online that has struck me or got me thinking in my blog!) A number of people have pointed out to me how well the New Yorker straddles both media.
In the best examples, online and print versions of a publication compliment and extend each other – the avenue for comments and discussion that the online medium offers commentary and opinion pieces is huge, for example. On the flip side, when an online buzz builds over a particular issue or article in print, this can help boost sales of print editions or boost recognition of the publication.
For all his self-processed Luddism, Craven’s stated concern was that “there is every indication that it may well end up as merely an online publication”. I read that ‘merely’ as exclusively and diminished. Even if Craven has muddled his timelines over when Eureka Street began its online presence, and hence alleged decline, the issue for many, and implied by Craven, is that going exclusively online is not good for literary magazines.
It shouldn’t be any issue of either-or. As David said, mix and match. Still, it is hard to imagine having this discussion, which is part of the great tradition of online forums and blog comments and has wonderful immediacy, in the letters section of a quarterly literary magazine.
All the same, if it were so cheap to publish an online literary magazine, David, why aren’t we having this very conversation in such a one? (I know you have Screen Hub, for the screen industry, but what about the rest of us?)
Ah, maybe it’s because of what you say: “interesting things happen when you go from a merry band of friends to a group in a paid venture.”
June 19th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
And from what we’ve been seeing reported lately, Meanjin and its Board of Management could hardly be defined as a ‘merry band of friends’. That said, retaining Kate Darian-Smith as chair was a good move — whichever side she’s on (and I don’t know), Kate is a wonderfully sane and rational grown-up and can only be an asset to the mending process, if there is one.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I have hopes for Sarsaparilla in the longer term. I reckon bloggers can kind of coalesce into a literary magazine.