No Clunes For Me

It's Clunes Booktown weekend, but I didn't get to go this year. *sob* Slicing and dicing and the attendant aftereffects always seem to overlap with something I want to do. It's very annoying :)

And the worst of it is that Clunes is so close, a mere skip and a jump and a bit of a drive from where I live, and it's become something of an annual habit to pop across to this event, which might explain why this whole weekend I've been constantly hearing the cries of thousands upon thousands of books wafting across the landscape on fresh country breezes saying, Gitte, Giiiiiitte, come hither, come hither at once and buy us. Unfortunately, the crowds there are quite thick, and increasingly so every year, and no matter how politely these bookish folk push and shove, they still push and shove, the mere thought of which gives me the heebiejeebies in my present state. Now, if I could have devised a fetching, zone-protecting cage of some sort, possibly a steampunkishy creation with extending mechanical arms that could seize books from the highest shelves, I'd have been good to go, but alas...

Ah well, one must be realistic. Besides, I haven't even read all the books I purchased last year. I'll look on this as an opportunity to reduce the respective heights of my 5 TBR stacks a little. That's always something.

The Book Game

To make popping into op shops and the like a little more exciting, I like to set a couple of concurrently running challenges for myself. No rush, no sweat, just a goal that allows random fate to reward one with a little, but cheap, hurrah! every now and then. At the moment, one of my self-imposed contests is to collect hardback versions of The Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough. I found The First Man in Rome ($10) at Clunes Booktown last year, and The Grass Crown (down from $8 to $3 - what a bargain) at the R.S.P.C.A. shop in Bendigo.  An op shop I often pop into whilst walking of a morning from the train station to the the Arvo Job when I have early starts has yielded two volumes - Anthony and Cleopatra ($5) and...

... today, The October Horse ($5). I'm especially pleased about this hefty acquisition because there was a softback copy in the same shop about five months ago, which I almost buckled and bought. But no! Rule number two is that they must all be hardbacks! So I waited. And so I triumphed. Caesar himself would have been proud of my will power and patience.

Ah, the little things. Enjoy them.

Congrats, Clunes

During my Sunday morning leisurely read a few hours ago, I came across a piece about Clunes Booktown, which since April has actually been an accredited international booktown, one of only 15 such towns in the world. Ever since I moved from St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne, and had to give up my easy access to all the festivals that go hand in hand with living in a capital city much enamoured with artistic exhibitions, the closeness of Clunes, and the many other regional Victorian festivals that are springing up all around me, have gone a long way towards fulfilling my cultural needs. Yes, I know Melbourne is just a train trip away, but after a week of commuting, the thought of popping down for a film festival tends to make me groan. And besides, my focus has shifted to the place where I now live, as it should.

Anyway, what caught my eye about this piece was how the three organisers emphasised their determination to maintain the Clunes event as a "festival of books" as opposed to a writer's festival. That made me smile. I could almost read into the line - and I'd like to point out that this is an entirely subjective interpretation of their remark - a gritty resolve to not let the purity of the Clunes event  "degenerate" into a writer's festival, which would inevitably be about egos, personalities jostling for the biggest marquee spaces and the grubby art of promoting products. You have to admit, they have a point. Impoverished writers desperately scrabbling for attention so they can make a living doing what they love can tend towards dominating proceedings.

 As it is, Clunes is about the finished work, the book that leaves its author's brain and goes on out into the world to take on a life of its own. No matter how much writers might loudly claim otherwise, the popular perception is that once it's published, a book becomes the property of all its readers. It goes through a myriad of reinterpretations as it filters though the minds and experiences of countless individuals, some of whom, if the writer is very very lucky, think the book was actually written just for them. That said, those same readers can become quite upset if the writer, who has no clue about their own creation obviously, dares to contradict readers' cherished preconceptions about the book.

Clunes Booktown is more about the cult of collecting rather than the cult of celebrity, hence the joy of stashing countless shopping bags on the backseat of the car before you set off in an optimistic anticipation of a gigantic book haul. Who cares about the bleeding writers? It's all about finding that out-of-print book you've been searching for for years. It's about finding old magazines and obscure texts that make you quiver with excitement. It's about coming home with a stack of treasured tomes higher than yourself and the joyous anticipation of leafing through all those many many pages.

So back off, writers! Clunes Booktown is not all about you.