I am taking part in an event at 2pm on Sunday afternoon at the Reading Room, a fabulous exhibit at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

A bunch of local writers will each be reading very short (a couple of minute) excerpts from their books.

I’ve been wanting to attend this exhibit since I first heard about it, and this is pretty much my last chance as it is ending on the 16th October.

Oh, and I’ll be reading the bit from Power & Majesty where the naked men fall out of the sky.

THE READING ROOM is an immersive, interactive environment about the magic world of books and reading. The gallery walls are painted red and are lined with thousands and thousands of books. There are comfy chairs and couches so you can sit back and listen to over 60 people from all walks of life in Tasmania reading a passage from one of their favourite books, or you can pick up a book and start reading yourself! There is also an ancient, Hermetic phrase on the walls of the gallery, hovering above the books. It is spelled out with convex mirrors and says ‘AS IT IS BELOW, SO IT IS ABOVE’.

I challenged the very talented Kathleen Jennings to add some 1920′s fashion to her ongoing Dalek Game series of exquisite line drawings. She responded, of course, with great style, first with a hilarious Roxie Dalek straight out of Chicago (slightly more charismatic than Renee Zellweger?)

And then she surpassed herself with this lovely coloured fashion plate of Daleks doing what Daleks do best: being artfully sophisticated and beautifully dressed!

This is a book I should have read fifteen years ago. This is a book someone should have put in my hands the week before I started university, and locked me in a room until I had read it. I should have read it again before I started my Honours degree, and every year I worked on my PhD. When I walked out of my head of school’s office, numbed by his awful pronouncement that the work I had done over 5 years was not enough, that the thesis was simply not worthy of a doctorate because of its scope and subject matter, I should have gone home again and read this book from cover to cover before I began my campaign to prove him wrong.

(he was, as it turned out, wrong, but that is a story for another day)

I don’t believe in ‘should’ when it comes to books. Who are you to decide how I should spend my limited reading time? But yeah. Someone should have told me about this book.

(except, of course, they did)

(more…)

Mari Ness posts about gendered gaze, artistic assumptions and the way that women’s participation in the arts becomes so quickly forgotten, and made invisible. (via @Krasnostein on Twitter)

This is a great post, and raises one of the issues that I know I need to keep in mind – when complaining about the imbalance of women in the arts, it’s very easy to render invisible those who are and always have been a part of the scene. That’s one of the reasons that I like to review books that I read, even though it adds extra pressure to the whole reading-as-a-hobby thing (ha!).

The most memorable and important class I took at college (grades 11 & 12, not university) was Art Appreciation, which I chose purely because I had already signed up for the maximum number of history and english classes that could count towards university, and this was an essay-based subject. I had a great teacher, Wayne, who introduced us to a whirlwind of art history, and had a particular interest in pointing out female artists, and the use of women as subjects of art. His passion that year was artistic depictions of Judith slaying Holophernes, and this led me to Artemisia Gentileschi, still my favourite artist and the one who is most important to me. I chose female artists as my year-long project and wrote about Artemisia, and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and Judy Chicago, and Georgia O’Keeffe. My eyes were well and truly opened to women in the world of fine arts, and the way they are so often overlooked, and that has always stayed with me.

Anyway, read Mari’s post, it’s awesome and layered with all sorts of things that I know I should think about more – like the way that people assume that any artwork that is anonymous is male, and that if it wasn’t made by women, it’s not art but ‘craft’.

And since apparently this is the day of awesome posts about gender, Overland have one over at their blog, too. (via @TalieHelene on Twitter, I love that people send me this stuff directly now!) This post picks up on a few other discussions about invisible sexism in literature and asks some important questions:

• Is there a difference between what women and men write?
• What do we judge as good writing?
• Where do we get these ideas about good writing from?
• How important is voice and experience to good writing?

All good stuff, and that distracted me nicely from my appalling strep throat and paranoia that the antibiotics aren’t kicking in for at least twenty minutes. Thank you, internet!