It includes an article by Fiona M. Collins on young readers and the golden age of historical fiction – the years of Sutcliff and Trease and Garfield.

If you’re keen on historical fiction, you can read it online here or on Issuu.

Every weekend they watched World of Sport, which went on for hours and hours, and included a panel of old players arguing about the week’s footy games, the famous handball competition, and ‘Uncle’ Doug Elliott expounding the virtues of different brands of ham or beer. Nana couldn’t stand Doug and she didn’t much like former Geelong great Bob Davis either. Whenever either of them went on too long she’d shout “Shut up, you piker!” at the top of her voice.

It was just like being at the footy, I used to think, with people shouting at the telly just like they’d shout if they were at the ground. They abuse the umpires, the opposition supporters, and their own players almost as much as the other side. They wouldn’t do it anywhere else, especially in those days: it wouldn’t be polite. But somehow being at the game provided a licence for shouting, as did the amazing innovation of being able to watch sport in your own home.

(Pop wasn’t much of a shouter, although in a close finish he’d often yell, “Just kick it down the middle, son!”)

But I’ve been thinking about my Nana lately, and the act of shouting at the telly in private. I don’t shout at the screen much, except in cases of extreme historical anachronism or Tony Abbott.

I use Twitter – a lot. I think it’s one of the very best available sources of information and contacts in many of the fields I follow: history, writing, books, education, research.

But there are many times I simply can’t look at it, because it’s becoming more and more like being stuck in a room with two hundred people all shouting at the telly.

Sometimes, this isn’t even a metaphor. I have to turn Twitter off when Q&A is on, for example, because so many people I follow turn into telly-shouting ever-so-clever would-be TV panel participants.

The upside of this is when there’s a piece of ground-breaking journalism, such as 4Corners’ story on animal cruelty in abattoirs. The outcry on Twitter was immediate and rolled over into action over the ensuing hours and days.

If you follow good people, you’ll see politicians statements contradicted and questioned, research reports disseminated instead of buried, great articles posted, and people cracking hilarious jokes about current affairs. At its best Twitter (and other popular media) calls people to account and provides information critical to any society.

Campaigns such as #YAsaves show the medium at its finest, spreading the love, acting up and offering immediate support to vulnerable people or groups.

But I worry Twitter is eating itself.

Some symptoms:

• Some idiot somewhere says something insulting (about women, about the PM, whatever). Everyone insults them back. Fine, except some of those responding seem to have no self-awareness that they too are being insulting – sometimes really, horribly, personally, libellously, insulting. They are too busy being self-righteous. 
• Certain people are becoming famous for shouting very obvious things.  They aren’t clever. They aren’t funny. They aren’t saying anything new, or even saying the same thing in new ways. (Misogyny exists! WHO KNEW?) They are, however, positioning themselves as “commentators”.  Just like my Nana was a commentator on World of Sport, but with more followers. And not nearly as entertaining.
• Streams of posts from conferences focus on the morning tea and people behaving like it’s a school excursion. Are you getting paid to be there? Act like it. 
• Many people automate not just their tweets but also their associated curation tools, like paper.li. So you see this stream of soulless announcement that the Joe Blogs Daily is out.
• “Curation” apparently also extends to taking people’s links and sticking them on your own blog, or using some kind of scooping service, so you get the  extra click through – even though you’ve done nothing really to earn it, besides annoying people.
• People appear to have forgotten that Twitter has a direct message function and do self-satisfied group hug streams that can last for hours. A little friendly chatter is lovely – acting like Mean Girls is alienating and tedious.

I could go on. And on. Instead, I’ve been giving the Unfollow button a good workout.

But the point is really that Twitter can and should be a force for goodness and niceness – and anger and righteousness, like all media.

Just don’t be so boring. Or I may start shouting. (Blame Nan. It’s genetic.)

But the inestimable Alison Croggan has not only got there first, but done a much better job of it, too – so go read her article in Overland:

… for all their stereotypical romance structure – girl and boy meet, strike impediments, overcome them, and at last are united in matrimony – I’ve never been able to quite understand why Austen is considered the presiding muse of romance. No-one is more hostile to the idea that ‘love conquers all’ than Miss Austen.

Her books are, from beginning to end, all about money: the economic status of her characters frames and governs every aspect of their lives.

Quite. But why the romance obsession?

It is, needless to say, a fine romance, and clearly very engaging. I’ve posted before about Mr Bloody Darcy and his apparent impact on the readers of every novel with a female protagonist since 1813.

But I’ve been thinking lately more about Elizabeth Bennet and her impact on us. Of course, there are shelves full of PhD theses on the topic, but the most obvious point to make is that Lizzie is also the progenitor of countless fictional heroines – including my own.

That’s not surprising: she was one of the first popular heroines in literature, and remains one of the most finely drawn (like Jane Eyre). But while Emma Woodhouse is articulate but oblivious, Elinor Dashwood keeps her emotions to herself, Fanny Price is too timid to speak out, and Catherine Morland is fabulously naive (“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible”), it’s Elizabeth –  and to a lesser extent Jane Bennet – who reappear most often in later novels.

Perhaps more importantly, to the reader, she is a reflection of our best selves. Although she too wishes she had said something different, something less cutting or more brilliant, in some circumstances, the Lizzie we adore always has the perfect comeback. No matter how muddy her hem, how embarrassing her mother, how undistinguished her family, how snivelling her admirers, she says the sorts of things we wish we could say. The things we imagine ourselves saying, in the bleak dark hours after being slighted or insulted or jilted.

That’s also why we love Bridget Jones, of course, because she is the brilliantly conceived flipside of Lizzie, always saying the worst possible thing – or utterly tongue-tied – in every situation.

Lizzie is who we wish we were. Jones is who we really are.

And her Darcy loves her anyway.

Meanwhile, I’m on holidays by the beach in New Zealand, trying not to work on the other books in the series. But I can’t help it.

For my next trick, I’ll be doing edits on the sequel over the next few weeks, but we’ll have to wait a while to see it in print. Should be out around August.

In the meantime, have a great summer holiday (or winter reading spell, if you’re in the northern hemisphere) and I look forward to another busy year ahead.

2013. Already? Didn’t see that coming.

Cheers,

K

That’s because I’ve being going through the living hell that is moving house.

But now we’re in, if not unpacked, and still edging our way through rooms crowded with boxes – mostly containing books (I don’t know where they all came from and I still don’t understand how they’re all going to fit in the new house).

I’m in Sydney this morning, having come up for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, in which Act of Faith was shortlisted for the aptly named Ethel Turner prize for young adult fiction.

And what a shortlist. The other books on it were:

• Bill Condon, A Straight Line to My Heart (Allen & Unwin)
• Ursula Dubosarsky, The Golden Day (Allen & Unwin)
• Scot Gardner, The Dead I Know (Allen & Unwin)
• Penni Russon, Only Ever Always (Allen & Unwin)
• Vikki Wakefield, All I Ever Wanted (Text).

I was thrilled and a little amazed to see my book listed alongside those titles. The beautiful Only Ever Always won the Award, and we all dined and felt terribly glamorous in the beautiful Mitchell Reading Room at the State Library of NSW.

Editing has begun on The Sultan’s Eyes, work on the cover design is quite advanced, and I should have the manuscript back to look over the edits in a couple of weeks. What happens then is that I check and recheck, then the changes are made and the editors check it all again, it gets typeset, then we all check it again. And possibly again. By which point we’re all thoroughly sick of the thing and don’t want to see it until it arrives in a box with a picture on the front.

In the meantime, it’s back to focusing on La Maupin and academic conference papers, and a hectic time at work, before taking a summer break in which I intend to read a whole lot of books that have nothing to do with the seventeenth century.

Except I can’t help wondering what would happen if Isabella Hawkins returned to Cromwell’s London…

I’ll read a couple of chapters from Tragédie. Tom Cho and Daniel G Taylor are also reading from their work. Should be a great night.

More info and bookings  here.

After that I’m laying low for a few weeks so I can move house and recover from all this month’s major deadlines and get ready for next month’s deadlines.

I’ve finished writing the sequel to Act of Faith – it’s called The Sultan’s Eyes and it’s with the publisher. I’ve even seen a few rough designs for covers, so things are rocketing along.

Rather quickly.

There’s nothing new about this, of course, and the idea of a different class as a foreign country filled with entertaining specimens of The Other is not confined to the downtrodden. You could argue that The Great Gatsby does exactly the same thing, casting an essentially middle-class gaze on the upper echelon, while Captains Courageous teaches a pampered boy rude lessons of life and death through friendship with a poor fisherman. On the long march through the snow Pierre finds the answers to the questions of life, the universe and everything in the form of an old Russian soldier and a little white dog. The Dorrit family and Arthur Clennam switch roles in life (at least economically) with comic and tragic consequences, and the face of conspicuous consumption, Mrs Merdle, learns to live with less (or perhaps not).

Little Dorrit at the gate of the Marshalsea

In all of those examples class conflict or difference is intrinsic to the story and its characters. You’d think we might be over that whole storyline by now, but no.

In Call the Midwife, a British TV series set in the East End in the 1950s,  we see the world through the eyes of the middle-class Jenny Lee. There is great poverty, cockroaches and preventable illness in the tenements (unchanged from Dickens’ day), prostitution and violence, huge families living on nothing but love, washing lines everywhere, screaming babies, lessons for young Jenny at every turn. The show (and presumably the memoir by Jennifer Worth on which it is based, which I haven’t read) has an equal amount of fun at the expense of Chummy, the plummy hyphenated do-gooder who grew up in India and can ride a horse to hounds but not a bicycle. Jenny Lee learns about friendship, love, hardship, courage and loss from people she would normally never meet. She comes to see the women as “heroines” not “slatterns”. But she is essentially on a visit to another world.

Jenny Lee confronted with family life in the East End

Then there’s Downton Abbey, which I love, but which on one hand paints a world where immense privilege is only sustained by the hard work and moral fibre of those who pour the claret and polish the silver; and on the other hand tries to blur those class lines through dialogue and plot points which any real earl’s family would never have considered. Involve the housemaid in your affairs? Only as an accessory. Vice versa? Don’t be absurd.

In the revisionist world of Downton, we want to believe that the upstairs family members are so fundamentally good that they care deeply about the lives of those downstairs, that the household is enmeshed in one narrative, not two. Not even Tolstoy would have argued such a thing. Sure, no earl wants his daughter becoming a suffragette and running off with the chauffeur. But no earl would involve himself in the affairs of those below stairs, and nor would his family. They’d hardly have noticed the servants at all. Still, we can’t have that in Downton, can we?

Her Ladyship dancing with Carson the butler

Closer to home, in every way, is Kath and Kim, the comedy series now become a movie. This focuses on the lives of the second- and third-generation post-war working class: as if the babies born in Call the Midwife and their kids all migrated to suburban Melbourne and got a perm. Which is not unlikely.

I never laugh at Kath and Kim. I tried to watch it in the early days, because I enjoy the work of the three comediennes behind it. But many of the jokes at the expense of the characters simply aren’t funny to me: when I was growing up everyone pronounced film as fillum, after all, so what’s hilarious about that? I just don’t get the jokes because they are about my generation, the people who migrated from Port Melbourne (our local equivalent of the East End) to Springvale or Mitcham or Sunshine, and from there to Berwick or Deer Park or – yes, Fountain Gate.

This has been playing on my mind over the last few weeks, and this morning I read this from Nigel Bowen in The Age:

Over the last decade and a half, the educated have had to make the painful adjustment to living in a society where aspirationals often out-earn them and largely determine the political agenda. Like galled aristocrats confronted by a rising merchant class, their typical response has been to snigger at the tastelessness of the newly affluent. Kath & Kim does this more gently than much of the “cashed-up bogan” comedy but it still does it. The malapropisms, mispronunciations and mixed metaphors of the characters allow the university-educated to chuckle at those who don’t understand the hilarious implications of wanting to be effluent rather than affluent. Many of them would see Kim – bloated by junk food, addicted to tabloid media, bedazzled by hyper-consumerism, utterly self-absorbed – as a portrayal rather than a grotesque caricature.

Bowen divides us between educated and aspirational, and it makes sense now our class sensibilities are less finely-tuned than they were a generation ago. But the cultural division runs deeper than that, and many of the university-educated people of my age are only able to be so due to that one brief shining moment of free tertiary education that jump-started a generation of kids (like me and our Prime Minister) into the professional class. Those who went before us never had the chance to finish school. Those who came after are still paying off their HECS debts. (God knows what will happen to those wanting a TAFE or university education in the next few years.)

There is inherent goodwill in Little Dorrit and in Call the Midwife. The reader or viewer in a comfortable armchair can engage at a safe distance with the lives of such exotic creatures as East End warfies or the inmates of the Marshalsea Prison, just as you might watch Michael Palin visiting the Bedouin or a David Attenborough doco. There is warmth, understanding, respect and as much likelihood of tragedy as comedy. Even in the long-running British series Keeping Up Appearances, one character’s snobbery was comic but everyone else was relatively normal.

Is one of the issues with Kath and Kim that aspiration isn’t a joke unless you are looking down on it from above?

Remember that Pulp song?

Sing along with the common people,
sing along and it might just get you thru’
Laugh along with the common people
Laugh along even though they’re laughing at you
and the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.

Kath and Kim and conspicuous consumption

I see it through a slightly different lens. It’s a grand thing that my generation can watch Kath and Kim on their enormous plasma TVs in their McMansions in Cranbourne or Templestowe. Our grandparents would be so proud that all those hours in factories and on the wharf or on dusty Greek farms have meant that later generations can buy a house, have a car or two or three, a lawn to mow.

The conspicuous consumption lampooned in Kath and Kim is, in part, a way of staving off future fear, of saying “Look how far we’ve come – we made it into the lower-middle class!”, of celebrating the fruits of the labours of many generations. But clearly being lower-middle class isn’t good enough. It’s almost white trash, but with al fresco dining.

In a very silly book called How to be Inimitable, George Mikes wrote (in 1960):

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class. Working class, yes; upper-middle class: most certainly; lower-middle class: never! Lower-middle class is, indeed, per definitionem, the class to which the majority of the population belongs with the exception of the few thousand people you know.

(As an aside, lower-middle class is probably what the ALP means when it bangs on about working families. But the global financial crisis has meant that plenty of people who thought they had “risen” to be middle-class have found that their footing there is tenuous. That’s why Obama is readjusting the American Dream so that people aspire not to be Donald Trump but to be, more realistically, middle-class, as it was after the Depression and as it is now in countries such as India and China. That’s partly why the Republicans can’t quite figure out how to respond – they’re still stuck on the Trump narrative. And it’s unsettling for those of us whose youth was spent resisting becoming bourgeois.)

The characters in Kath and Kim aren’t on the bread line: they go to the mall and buy dreadful clothes and drink middling wine. Kath doesn’t have to take her father’s good pair of trousers down to the pawnbroker every second Friday to get a couple of shillings to see the family through to pay day. The telly can be bought from a store, rather than the local fence. Nobody need be in jail for running a bookie outfit on the side, or run from the coppers down the back lanes, or do a midnight flit because the rent’s due. That wasn’t true for their parents and grandparents.

The real Kaths of this world know what it was like, even if their kids don’t: they’ve been told the stories, perhaps lived the reality and they never want to be in that situation again. They don’t need to watch Call the Midwife to know how poverty looks. Many people in Australian suburbs know exactly how it feels – if only poverty had vanished along with the perm.

Sure, I’m as ridiculously susceptible to unrealistic nostalgia about the East End or Station Pier as the next person. One day I might even write about it. I loved the vaudeville singalongs of my childhood, and all the stories about uncles fighting bare knuckle bouts in someone’s front parlour, about the brawls at the cinema on Saturday nights, the black market deals, the SP bookies and two-up games in the alley behind our house. I love how my grandmother made everyone’s wedding dresses by hand and the women always tried to look like fillum stars when they were going out on the town.

But I also know that Uncle Phil lived on rabbits and little else up country in the Depression, that our family’s name was written in the pawn shop register every fortnight (‘one good tablecloth – linen’), that my grandfather had no proper boots until he went to work at 13.

I bet that was just hilarious.

• Shift by Em Bailey
• Night Beach by Kirsty Eagar
• Queen of the Night by Leanne Hall
• The Reluctant Hallelujah by Gabrielle Williams.

More information – and voting form – on insideadog. I should tell you to vote for me but really, with that list, vote for whoever you like.

I can also announce that the Swashbuckler books are now available as ebooks from all the major retailers, which is great news because copies can be hard to find in print nowadays. More information on sources from HarperCollins.

The topic?  The Journey of the Book – From Inspiration To Publication. A writer (that’d be me), editor and publisher discuss the stages of creating a book.

It’s at 7pm on Thursday, August 30. Cost: $25. Bookings: 9876 4381. More information in this article in the local paper (with a marvellous typo in the final line).

On 15 September, I’m at Fitzroy Library introducing people to Twitter. We’ll talk about how it works, what on earth it’s for, and how to use it for good not evil.

That’s on Saturday 15 September from 1 – 3.30pm at Fitzroy Library. Bookings are essential, apparently (certainly the last workshops I did there booked out quickly). Call 1300 695 427 or email yarralibraries@yarracity.vic.gov.au. More information on the library website.