Jonathan Walker

San Rocco, Venice, 2008; Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, 2008

2010-09-07T09:02:00.000+10:00

Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, 2008; Accademia, Venice, 2008

2010-09-01T10:48:00.000+10:00

Melbourne Writers Festival Authors on ...

2010-08-31T07:58:00.001+10:00

Apathy

Air Travel

Melbourne Writers Festival: Modern Dystopia (Reminder)

2010-08-29T08:34:00.000+10:00

Just a quick reminder about today's panel at the Melbourne Writers Festival, on Modern Dystopia, at 4 p.m. at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, featuring DBC Pierre and I. See you there!

Five Wounds: Review at 'Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus'

2010-08-28T09:23:00.001+10:00

Reviewer Ross Murray, at 'Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus', is impressed with the illustrations and design of Five Wounds, but has some reservations about the story. An extract below:

Dan Hallett’s illustrations are varied, stylistically distinctive, and suit the story down to the ground, adding further elements and meaning to Walker’s elegant prose. You’ll find yourself scanning the eighteen plates in the middle of the book for every intricate detail, and there is detail to be found. These are almost worth the price of admission alone.

My Worldcon Schedule

2010-08-25T11:25:00.001+10:00

From 2-6 September, I shall be attending, and participating in, the annual Worldcon meeting of the World Science Fiction Society, which this year takes place in Melbourne. There are some big names in the field taking part: the guests of honour include Kim Stanley Robinson and my fellow Allen & Unwin author Shaun Tan.

The full programme is here. I am appearing on several panels, and will also be doing an individual reading and signing, and a 'kaffeeklatsch' (an informal meeting between an author and a small group of interested persons). My panels include the following:

Thursday 2 Sept., 1600, Room 204: Steal the Past, Build the Future: New Histories for Fantasy Fiction

Many fantasy novels and stories base themselves around a medieval European setting. Others tread a little further from such comfortable territory, presenting worlds inspired by 18th century Paris, or 11th century Viking sagas, or Ancient Rome and Egypt. What’s left? What are the creative opportunities and historical settings lying in wait from which authors might draw inspiration?

Amanda Pillar, Catherynne M. Valente, Jonathan Walker, Kate Elliott

Thursday 2 Sept., 1700, Room 219: If you wrote it, they wouldn’t believe it

Maintaining realism and ensuring readers believe what is happening are all-important considerations when writing fiction - but when did real life ever consider its readers? A look at the significant moments in history so unlikely that, despite having actually happened, nobody would believe them in a fictional story.

Tansy Rayner Roberts, Jennifer Fallon, Gail Carriger, Jonathan Walker

Monday 6 September, 1000, Room 204: From ideas to images: Illustrating SF

When creating illustrations to accompany prose fiction, the artist is given a balancing act between finding a way to accurately express the author’s prose in visual terms and expressing his or her own creativity and artistic style in the
same way. How do different artists approach the art of illustrating fiction, and what are the benefits and drawbacks of that collaborative process?

Andrew McKiernan, Nick Stathopoulos, Shaun Tan, Bob Eggleton, Jonathan Walker

Monday 6 September, 1400, Room P1: Counterfactuals: Science fiction vs historical analysis

What role can alternate history fiction play in historical analysis? By examining the potential after-effects of a fictionalised course of events, do we gain a fresh and valuable perspective on what actually happened? If so, what requirements exist for alternate history fiction to achieve this aim? A look at alternate history fiction from two perspectives: as science fiction readers, and as historians.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Gillian Polack, Dena Taylor, Jonathan Walker

My individual events are as follows:

Friday 3 September, 1200, Rm 201: Kaffeeklatsch

Numbers are limited to nine, and you will need to sign up in advance, either at the Con, or by e-mail at kaffee@aussiecon4.org.au. More details here. The format of this meeting will be decided by whoever turns up for it.

Monday 6 September, 1100, Rm 219: Reading.

Mainly from Five Wounds, but I might throw in a little from Pistols! Treason! Murder! for contrast.

Monday 6 September, 1300, Rm 201: Signing.

At the same time as Charles Stross, Robert Hood and Helen Lowe.

I am a long-time reader of all things science-fiction and fantasy and comics-related, but this is my first ever Worldcon, and I am probably an unknown quantity to most of the attendees, so I am a bit worried that no-one will turn up for these latter events. If you are attending, and you enjoyed Five Wounds - or you are just curious to find out about local authors - please come along and say hello, even if you haven't read the book. Overseas visitors might want to note that Five Wounds is currently only available in Australia, so this is your chance to get an advance look at it before it's published in the US and UK next year.

For more information on Five Wounds, see my site, where you will find a free chapter and some introductory videos (the videos can also be found here).

Melbourne Writers Festival Authors on ...

2010-08-25T08:56:00.001+10:00

Franz Kafka

Melbourne

Dinosaurs

Their First Computer

Listening (including my comments on the ending of Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar)

'Gouge Away' by the Pixies and the Alternative Endings to 'Five Wounds'

2010-08-13T09:26:00.017+10:00

[Continues from the previous post:]

To be chosen, to be condemned: two possible outcomes of the same process. .... The Trial and The Castle share a premise: that election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable. .... The main difference is this: condemnation is always certain, election always uncertain.
Roberto Calasso, K.

In the last post, we moved rather abruptly from Blade Runner to Robert Bresson. Here we make another abrupt cut to the song Gouge Away (jumping over Franz Kafka as we go), from which we shall return to the multiple endings of Five Wounds.

Gouge Away is the final song on Doolittle, the breakthrough 1989 album by the Pixies, which Ben Sisario describes as:

among the most violent pop albums ever recorded, if not in body count then in the starkness of its calamities. It features rape, mutilation of the eyes, vampirism, suffocation, smothering by tons of garbage, and the chaos of blind gunfire; for the punchline, everybody gets crushed to death. When not killing or maiming, the album turns to depraved sexual loathing and visions of apocalypse. ....

Sisario describes Gouge Away’s subject in the following terms (I quote his discussion at length because there is little I can add to it):

The song is another bloody biblical adaptation, this one the story of Samson and Delilah from Judges 16. .... The story mingles sex and politics on a small scale with gigantic divine retribution, as Samson the seduced and ruined becomes Samson the instrument of God’s fury. [Songwriter Charles] Thompson’s 100-words-or-less summary: “Big strong Samson, toughest guy in town, partying with the Philistines – he’s got this Achilles’ heel thing, you know, with his hair. Somehow he lets some girl [the prostitute Delilah] know what’s up. That’s how the Philistines capture him. She goes in and cuts his hair. He becomes weak. God takes his strength away from him. There he is, chained, his eyes gouged out. Made a mockery by the pagans, you know. Chained there to the pillars. He asks God for strength one more time, to avenge these sinners. Pulls the columns in, causes the building to collapse on everybody. Pretty great story.”

As in Dead [another song on Doolittle], Thompson interprets the story of a biblical hero as a compressed drama of self-destructive psychology. Like David, Samson gives in to temptation ... and soon pays for it. In Debaser, eyeball damage is the pleasure of the singer / protagonist, inflicted on another, but here he becomes the victim, crying out over his “spooned” eyes. Still he tells shapely Delilah to bring it on. ... [G]ouge away. The recurring chorus suggests that all along Samson knows what’s coming to him. It’s no surprise. .... ‘It’s a taunt,” Thompson says. “Go ahead, have your fun. Gouge away, because something’s going to happen. No one here gets out alive.” Retribution rocks:

Chained to the pillars
A three-day party
I break the walls
And kill us all
With holy fingers

In the Bible, of course, Samson really does mean “kill us all” – he knows that he only has one chance to get back at those nasty Dagon-worshippers, and offers God the kind of prayer that might come from John J. Rambo. “And Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’ And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life” (Judges 16: 30).

.... Thompson never forgot his Bible stories, and as a good Sunday school boy, he knew how his vision had to end. Just as in a great tragedy, the hero must get his terrible vengeance, the walls have to come down, and everybody dies. [Quotations from Doolittle by Ben Sisario.]

The world conjured by the lyrics and the sound of Doolittle is one familiar to me (I also listened to albums by Larry Norman, the Christian songwriter whose slogan ‘Come on pilgrim’ was used as the title for the Pixies’ first release). Here I want to draw out the relevance of the Samson story for the two alternative ending(s) of Five Wounds, and to relate this story back to the concept of the deus ex machina.

Election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable. Samson invokes both: his divine revelation is an act of destruction. This story reveals (or perhaps hides) an essential truth: Forgiveness, like judgement, is always violent. It destroys the coherence and autonomy of everything it touches. I conceived the two endings of Five Wounds in these terms. The 'happy ending' is only possible because of an act of narrative violence comparable to that invoked by Samson, an arbitary event that brings the fictional world crashing down around the ears of the protagonists because its occurrence violates a fundamental rule, a rule that - so we have been led to believe - is necessary for this fictional world to make sense at all. In Five Wounds, this event is not obviously catastrophic (unlike the mass murders that occur just before the book's climax, which are perhaps a more obvious comparison for Samson's apotheosis). Indeed, the final event hardly happens at all, the narrative barely acknowledges it. It is described only by the last sentence in the book, because nothing can continue to exist after it has taken place.

Are you willing to pay Samson's price for a happy ending? Are you willing to bring the temple down around yourself by invoking the deus ex machina? Are you willing to be judged, or to be forgiven? You have to make a choice.

Five Wounds: Interview in 'The View From Here'

2010-06-01T11:24:00.002+10:00

An indepth interview with Dan and I has now been posted at The View From Here online literary magazine to accompany their review of Five Wounds. An excerpt is below.

Q. Was the collaboration on Five Wounds a more straightforward process for having previously worked together on Pistols! Treason! Murder!?

A. The illustrations for Pistols! Treason! Murder! were completed in a rush on a very tight deadline. That had its advantages: it means they have a certain crude aggressive energy to them. It’s punk history, after all. For Five Wounds, I had the chance to think things through, and to theorise it more. And there are several different kinds of illustration, several different layers, which involved different methods of working. So Pistols! was more like the first rush of discovery, live on stage, and Five Wounds is more like tinkering around in the studio for months overdubbing. Pistols! is an amphetamine book; Five Wounds is a morphine book.

Thanks to Paul Burman, who conducted the interview and wrote the review.

Also out is an interview I did for The Cairns Review.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Monologue on Radio National's Perspective

2010-06-07T10:06:00.000+10:00

Another one from the archives: This short monologue was originally broadcast on Radio National's Perspective slot, in February 2007, for the Australian release of Pistols! Treason! Murder! It remains the most succinct summary of what I was trying to achieve with the book.

Thanks to Sue Clark, the presenter of Perspective.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Interview on Radio National's Late Night Live

2010-07-04T09:24:00.000+10:00

Another one from the archives: This interview was originally broadcast on Radio National's Late Night Live, in February 2007, for the Australian release of Pistols! Treason! Murder!

The interview refers to my facetious manifesto on 'punk history', as discussed here.

Interview on 'The Comic Spot'

2010-07-14T14:55:00.001+10:00

I will be a guest on 'The Comic Spot' radio show on 3CR in Melbourne this Thursday afternoon (15 July) at about 5.30 p.m. You can listen in Sydney via streaming (as I do!).

Open Day at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts

2010-07-17T14:29:00.003+10:00

This coming Tuesday, 20 July, I am one of the guests at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts Open Day. Their current theme is Mystery and Crime Stories, and I shall be talking about my book Pistols! Treason! Murder! in that light, and reading some extracts. Also appearing are Gabrielle Lord, Michael Duffy and Sulari Gentill. The Open Day is on from 11.00-1.30. Admission is free, and all are welcome. See here for how to get there.

Melbourne Writers Festival: Modern Dystopia

2010-07-20T14:59:00.003+10:00

I shall be appearing at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, on a panel with Booker-Prize winning author DBC Pierre, whose new novel Lights Out in Wonderland is about to be published. The panel is on Modern Dystopia, and it takes place at 4 p.m. on Sunday 29 August at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Tickets are on sale now.

Appearance at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival

2010-04-18T17:17:00.003+10:00

This year I shall be appearing at the Sydney Writers' Festival on a panel with visiting writer / artist Josh Neufeld (who was the subject of an article in this weekend's Herald). The panel is on 'Graphic Novels vs Illustrated Texts', and the chair is Zoe Sadokierski, who designed my novel, Five Wounds.

The event takes place on Sunday May 23, 1-2 p.m., at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where there is a Zine fair taking place at the same time, so there should be a well-informed audience. Entrance is free.

Drawing In, Drawing Out: Spotlight on Graphic Novels

2010-04-22T14:00:00.002+10:00

This event is on at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne this weekend, 23-25 April. The designer of Five Wounds, Zoe Sadokierski, is appearing on several panels, and my publisher at Allen & Unwin, Erica Wagner, is also on a panel on Saturday.

See you there!

Appearance during Free Comic Book Day at Kinokuniya, Sydney

2010-04-27T13:34:00.006+10:00

This Saturday, 1 May, is the official release date for Five Wounds, and in the afternoon I shall be appearing as part of the Zine / Craft fair in the Sydney branch of Kinokuniya book shop, directly above Town Hall train station. See here for more details.

I'll be there to sign copies from about 1-4 p.m. I'll be the one not dressed as a Star Wars character.

There will also be a Dalek in attendance (no relation).

There will be a discount on the cover price of Five Wounds for anyone buying on Saturday.

Five Wounds is Released!

2010-05-01T10:39:00.008+10:00

Five Wounds is released today!

Come and say hello at Kinokuniya in Sydney, above Town Hall station, from about 1-4 p.m. There are copies of the book for sale, and I have free postcards and stickers to give away.

There are also definitely copies available at my local book store, Better Read Than Dead, in Newtown, Sydney (thanks Karen!). Check in the window. Postcards there too.

Also available in all good book stores throughout Australia, probably from Monday-ish.

Also available direct from the publisher, Allen & Unwin, here.

Interview on Canvas on FBi Radio, 94.5FM, Sydney, etc.

2010-05-07T13:49:00.005+10:00

This Sunday, 9 May, I shall be one of the guests on Canvas, the arts show on FBi Radio, 94.5FM, Sydney, after 10.30 a.m. Canvas also has an archive of podcasts, so the show may be available for streaming for those outside Sydney, probably a few days after broadcast.

I also did an interview recently for the Faster Than Light show, which is broadcast first in Perth, and then syndicated to community radio stations all across Australia. Not sure when that will be available, but I'll let you know.

My apologies for all the short, bitty entries. I shall shortly be posting some substantive discussion of Five Wounds, via guest posts at Spike, the Meanjin blog (on collaboration).

Guest Posts at Spike, the Meanjin Blog

2010-05-14T12:28:00.010+10:00

Two guest posts I wrote on the making of Five Wounds for Spike, the Meanjin blog, are now up. The first post is about my collaboration with Dan Hallett; below is a short extract.

It was important that Dan was trained as an illustrator – that is, in a discipline that accepts collaboration as a sine qua non of its existence – because the goal for any collaborator should not be to protect the integrity of their individual contribution; rather, it should be to serve the story and the book as a whole. For me, faced with the task of writing a script for Dan to work from, the central question was, how do you describe a picture that doesn’t exist yet? And how do you relate that description meaningfully to other descriptions of other pictures that also don’t exist yet?

The second post is about the process of creating the finished manuscript; again, an extract is below.

There is a myth that novelists enjoy complete creative autonomy, in contrast to, say, filmmakers. But it is a myth, because a book is not, in the end, a collection of immaterial words. It is not a Platonic idea in the mind of the writer. It is rather an object, which is created via a complicated process involving many people. Right from the beginning, then, even as we begin the first phase of this process, the writing, our entire conception of the work has to be informed by what material form it might eventually take.

If anyone wants to comment, please do so over at Spike.

Thanks to Jessica Au of Spike for her editorial suggestions.

See here for a previous appearance of Five Wounds on Spike.

Graphic Novels vs. Illustrated Texts at the Sydney Writers' Festival

2010-05-20T10:52:00.001+10:00

Just a quick reminder that this Sunday, 23 May, I am appearing on a panel at the Sydney Writers' Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art, from 1-2 p.m., in the midst of the Zine Fair, with Josh Neufeld and Zoë Sadokierski. The panel is on 'Graphic Novels vs. Illustrated Texts', and there will be a signing afterwards. See you there!

Five Wounds: Interview on FBi Radio

2010-05-22T20:38:00.009+10:00

Below is my interview on Canvas, the arts programme on FBi Radio, 94.5FM in Sydney, which was originally broadcast earlier this month. I sound reasonably coherent for a Sunday morning, although I am obviously trying to set a record for how many times I can use the words 'weird' and 'garbled' over the course of twenty minutes. Thanks to host Anna Burns.

Auckland Symposium on 'Character, Author, Person'

2009-12-09T10:26:00.005+11:00

On Thursday, 17 December 2009, I shall be giving a paper as part of a symposium at the University of Auckland on 'Character, Author, Person'. Below are the symposium details (the same information can be found here on the Auckland English department page):

Character, Author, Person: The Problem of People in Texts
Thursday, 17 Dec 2009

Presenter: Department of English

Department: English

Venue: Room 426 Arts 1 Building

Time: 2pm

Our symposium will examine and theorize the place of people in and out of texts, and the roles conventionally assigned to authors, characters, and persons. All those interested in the history of the novel, in questions of autobiography and pseudo-autobiography, in how represented persons affect real audiences, or in unusual modes of authorship are most welcome to attend.

With Special Guests
Jonathan Lamb, Bridget Orr and Jonathan Walker

This is the abstract for my paper, ‘Gerolamo Vano as Character, Author, Person’:

My recent book, Pistols! Treason! Murder! is an illustrated biography of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622. It is not, however, a conventional biography retelling the events of an entire life in chronological order. Rather, it is an explication of the various senses in which Vano might (legitimately or otherwise) be described as a character, an author and / or a person on the basis of his various appearances in documents in the Venetian state archive, notably the collection of surveillance reports he submitted to his nominal employers, the Venetian Inquisitors of State. In what sense does a loose-leaf collection of unedited papers, originally intended for a handful of select readers, who, moreover, retrospectively judged their contents to be sufficiently damning as to warrant the author’s execution, and which have lain unread for hundreds of years since 1622, constitute a ‘body of work’ or evidence of a distinctive literary sensibility? In this presentation, I’ll outline some possible answers to this question.

For more information on Vano, see www.pistolstreasonmurder.com

The Hanged Man: The Life, Death and Afterlife of Antonio Foscarini

2009-09-08T12:39:00.007+10:00

I am one of the speakers in a symposium on 'Scandals, Crime and Corruption', which takes place at the State Library in Sydney tomorrow, 9 September 2009, 9.30-5.00, as part of NSW History Week. Admission is free. Speakers include my colleagues from the University of Sydney, Penny Russell and Kirsten McKenzie, among many others. My talk is about Antonio Foscarini, who appears as the victim in Pistols! Treason! Murder!, and who is also the subject of my next collaboration with Dan Hallett. The following is from the press release for the event (my apologies for the surfeit of rhetorical questions):

Dr Jonathan Walker is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of a biography, Pistols! Treason! Murder!: The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy (MUP, 2007) and an illustrated novel, Five Wounds (Allen & Unwin, forthcoming, 2010). His website is www.jonathanwalkervenice.com.

Antonio Foscarini was executed for treason in Venice in 1622. A year later he was exonerated posthumously. The original sentence was scandalous enough; its subsequent reversal even more so. Everyone had an opinion on the matter; all of them were self-confessedly ill-informed. Several years earlier, Foscarini had been Venetian ambassador to the court of James I in London, in which capacity he was also no stranger to scandal. At the end of his embassy, he had been prosecuted for bringing the Venetian state into disrepute. The list of accusations from the first trial ran into the hundreds. Was he embroiled in a poisonous feud with his own secretary? Did he pester a group of English noblewomen with a glass dildo? Did he fart ostentatiously during mass? Or was he actually guilty of nothing more than tactlessness? The truth of the matter is obscure, even occult, buried deliberately by the investigating magistrates, who wished to hide their own uncertainties and errors. Perhaps we might try to interpret this occult story using an occult device? This talk will therefore retell the story of Foscarini's fall from grace and eventual rehabilitation using a series of images from seventeenth-century Tarot cards.

Interview on 'The Comic Spot'

2010-08-04T14:18:00.006+10:00

Above is the audio file of my recent interview on 'The Comic Spot', with John Retallick and Jo Waite, broadcast on 15 July 2010, on 3CR Radio in Melbourne. I have edited the clip, but the full show will no doubt be available in due course on John's podcast archive.