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I haven’t seen Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, not yet. I probably will, though I’m in no rush � I don’t mind Trier’s films, though they’re a bit hit or miss for me, but the interviews and pieces about it have kind of turned me off it.

Nymphomaniac is, if you’ve not heard it, is a two part, five hour film that follows a self confessed sex addict who, after being found by a man on the street beaten, recounts her life to him. As you might imagine, such a film features heavy and graphic sex scenes, the most intimate of them filmed with body doubles, who are also porn actors. These scenes have been digitally overlaid on the non-porn actors, so that we could all watch a movie where we pretend that they are having real sex, when in fact, we all know that famous men and women don’t.

It’s weird and odd, when you consider it. Puritanical, in a fashion. Since i’ve been reading abotu the film, I’ve been bothered by a way that people have talked about it, and it wasn’t until I read Charlotte Gainbourg, who plays the central character of the film for a large portion of it, that I understood just what it was that was giving me a weird vibe.

Here is what she said:

So they [the porn actors] would have sex—they would do their job, basically, because I think they’re porn actors in Germany—and then we would come on and do exactly the same thing, but with pants on, basically. And then it’s all [edited in] post. [Then, when asked if she talked to the woman who was her porn double, she said:] No. I mean, I met her, but we didn’t have tea or anything. It’s strange just to see how quickly a set can change. Like, the atmosphere really changed when they did those scenes, and I did stay a bit too long at one point. When they started filming, I was like, “Actually, this is a bit too weird—I’m gonna go.� It was like they were doing a porn movie, and everything they do, they do [for real].

For a moment, my mind kind of held itself still, as if it had been suspended above something awful and ugly, as if a light had been shined into the pure awfulness of how we treat sex as a culture, and I couldn’t quite understand it � but then I realised the porn actors and the actual, real life sex that was happening on a film called Nymphomaniac was considered to be degrading, fit only for nameless men and women who don’t have mainstream careers that could be hurt by the fact that they have, y’know, genitals.

After I read this line � and there is another, where Gainsbourg says, “I can actually do this film without breaking my own integrity,� because of the porn actors � I realised that the treatment of the unnamed porn actors in much of the press for the film has been awful, reducing them to nothing but men and women who did dirty, awful things for this film we’re going to sit through and be stimulated, one way or another. On the surface, it is similar to how actors talk of stunt doubles, except that it is not uncommon for actors to mention them by name, or praise them, and that is where it really differs because it’s as if the very fact that these men and women are having sex is so morally wrong, so fucked up, that we have to criticise not their involvement in the film, but the morals that allowed them to fuck in front of others.

It has, I must admit, turned me a little off the film. It is not new, nor surprising, to learn that society has a very real and very damaging hang up towards sex, or that it shames those who make a career out of it, but at the very least, a film such as Nymphomaniac should offer a counter view to that.

If for no other reason than those men and women also worked hard to create the end product, which, like it or hate it, is presented as a work of art.

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Dead Americans and Other Stories is not officially released until March 18th, but copies are appearing already.

Also, one of the first ‘advance� reviews has appeared, and it’s pretty nice:

In some respects though, reading , which collects some of his best work over the last decade, is the best way to discover him.Ìý You get to see a good range of work and you get to see a consistent facility with words and style.Ìý I have no reservation in saying that he’d be one of Australia’s best writers.Ìý He demonstrates in , the ability to play inside the science fiction genre, riffing off it’s history or building dark futures so real that you shake the ash from your coat after reading. Then with seeming ease he will walk you into some fractured liminal zone between genres where you don’t quite know where you stand or what the rules are.

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Issue 18 of Shimmer is .

It features my story, ‘In the Broken City,� which is a brand new Red Sun story, if you are a fan of such things. It is about a man, the woman he meets, and a hospital beneath the ruins of a city run by doctors.

Four of the previous Red Sun stories have been reprinted in my collection, . The Red Sun stories � which have been reprinted here and there over the years � are the ‘other stories� of the collection. So if you like ‘In the Broken City� and haven’t read any of the others, they’re in a nice, easy place for you. For those of you who have been looking for a new one, well, here you go.

I should write more of them, really.

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Dead Americans has been released in Canada. You can buy it both in bookstores and online at the Canadian Amazon, where it will be sent to you by polite Canadians. It has reportedly gotten a ‘very good review� from Publishers Weekly, and when more is said about it, I will obviously link it here for you.

It is released everywhere else March 18th, so if you want it before then, to Canada with you.

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Yesterday was my grandmother’s funeral.

I spoke at it, for my family, and for a while, I thought about posting up the speech I wrote, but I’ve decided against it. A lot is public in this world nowadays, but some of it can remain private. I spoke of the things I loved and the things that would have embarressed her terribly, and I got a few laughs, and more tears, which seemed about right for everything on the day.

My grandmother was ninety-three when she died.

I had known her all my life, and for that, I am grateful.

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Final cover for .

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According to the Book Depository, there’s only 197 days to go until it is released. It’s a good thing that they’re counting, and not me, because my girlfriend would likely have to murder me if I woke up every day and said, ‘Only 197 days to go.� A court of law would find it an acceptable reason, no doubt.

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Yesterday, I reached 95k on the second book of the Children Trilogy, and I began writing a chapter entitled ‘An Innocent Man�.

At this point in time, it will have little meaning to most of you, perhaps all, but it is a reasonably important chapter. I have been building to it for a while now and once it is finished, I will be into the final parts of the book, where enemies meet enemies, betrayals meet betrayals, and so on and so forth until enough bad things have happened to justify exhaustion in terms of narrative conclusion. Or something like that. Either way, I will probably end up somewhere between 140 to 150k, a length that I originally thought would be about right, back in May of last year. Of course, last year, once I mapped out the chapters, the general plot, and such, I thought I could condense some elements and bring it to 120k, which was a much more comfortable length for me to hit in the deadline. Like most things in life, your original thought returns to haunt you, but baring anything unforseen, the deadline will be hit.

I roughly write about a thousand new words a day, when I am writing new things, and while the simple math of that argues that I should be further and written perhaps two books of equal length, I don’t write new words every day. I revise a fair bit, and occasionally I sit around and think about how something should happen, and I teach so that the rent is paid without hassle. Occasionally I spent time in an ER (last Friday I took my friend, and he’s fine, thank you for asking) and once and a while, the power supply on my laptop dies, and my girlfriend and I might have had new bookshelves arrive and they might have needed to be arranged. I also like to spent time with my girlfriend when not arranging bookshelves, although, if I were honest with you, I do enjoy that time a little more than is perhaps healthy. To a less extend, I like to spend time with my friends, as well. But you know how your friends are: they’re all Fleetwood Mac on their Spotify, reminding you you need a new phone because your drug dealer nokia phone is too small and cheap to take their smartphone images, and asking for rides to the ER. You have to measure it out.

But there’s also other things, like other books, and edits on the previous book. After Julie Crisp had finished with The Godless I added about 20k to the book, which sharpened and defined the worldbuilding quite well, I thought (in the debate of self published vs traditional published books, I rarely hear people talk about editors, and the work they do, which is a shame, but that is perhaps a different post altogether). It also meant that, for the second book, I had to go through all that I’d written and make sure it was all up to date. I didn’t put as many new words into Dead Americans, but I didn’t expect to do so in a collection of largely already published work, but Stephen Michell and I changed the running order around, and dropped out two small stories to add a middle sized one.

So, a thousand new words a day I figure isn’t too bad, and a book between 140 and 150k will have been done in a fairly full and consuming year. Of course, other writers will move quicker, others slower, but that’s the nature of it.

Originally, I had planned to write a bit on narrative fat, and the crowth and shrinkage of plots and such in fantasy, but I totally went somewhere else. Oh well. Perhaps next time � first, back to writing the book.

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(With one possible exception, before I go: will be released in a month and a half, and I want to help make some noise about it, so if you’re a reviewer, blogger, podcaster, and you’d like to review and talk about the book, drop me a note, please.)

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My friend and fine writer, , has a new short story up on Tor.com entitled .

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It’s a pretty cool story, one set in the world of his upcoming novel, , which is also excellent. I should know, because I read it last year, long before any of you (it will be released in April this year). It’s a novel that bleeds together the edges of the ‘new weird�, the old weird, the pulps, and fantasy, and fuses it together into its own vision of a city on the brink of unrest and civil war. It is pretty cool, totally worth your time and money, but if you’re not entirely convined, you can click on the link that goes to ‘Nighttime in Caeli-Amur�, and have a taste of it, before you order the book.

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Dear Christopher Bantick,

Today, I came across an article in where you lamented the current state of the English curriculum because you believed that it would lead to a world where “ignorance will be seen as preferable, even desirable, while serious theatre is unviable, serious literature is not published, concert programs are reduced and other forms of cultural elevation are lost.� To address this terrible state, you believed that “Schools need to do more about bringing a little elitism back into the awareness of culture. High culture: fine art, opera, serious drama and music that requires patience and understanding needs to be embedded into the curriculum.� I felt a little cheapened that you didn’t list more guidelines on what was high culture since, in late 2012, Love in a Time of Cholera as “a voyeuristic engagement where a palpably prurient interest in child sex is primary,� and I was curious to see who else you’d put here.

You may never read this blog, or this open letter to you, but in case you do, a little about me. Firstly, I am an author who lives in Sydney. In 2014, I will have two books published, my and One is a collection of short fiction, one is a novel, but both are speculative fiction, a term I am sure you are intimately familiar with. I also hold a doctorate in literature. For some reason I’ve never quite figured out, the combination of the two has let me lecturer and teach, though I do the former less now with the deadlines I have, and the latter I do privately.

Still, for a long time now I have run into people like you at various schools. Thankfully, you’re not very common. After all, High School teachers have a rough job, one based on the repetitiveness of basic information, often for what I consider little money and little respect. But every now and then, I run into someone like you, someone who believes that culture is in a dive, that it has been caused by artists who are, somehow, hollow and without artistic creativity, and that they must cure it. They believe that they should “teach serious, classically demanding literature.� That they should be elitist in their choices, that they should go for the highest forms of artistic ability � so long, I guess, as it isn’t a Nobel Award Winning author like Gabriel Garcia Marquez � and that this should be a deliberate choice to save society. As you said, “Yes, it is elite, consciously so, but anything is elite if it is not pandering to the lowest common denominator. How can a book about a vacuous Sydney teenager reflecting on school, like Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi, be compared with Jane Eyre?�

Well, the two books are compared because they address the needs of two different students. It is a simple response: I assume no one told you before you started working at your expensive private school in Melbourne?

At any rate, I assume that, like most of the teachers I have met who talk like you, that deep down, your desire to teach the classic literature is based on your own desire to explore it. Understandably, you personally find little worth or intellectual engagement with young adult novels, and prefer things that speak to you as, in this case, a male in his late fifties and perhaps early sixties (I’ve based this on your photo � apologies if it is wrong, but maybe shave the beard, if it is). In other words, the same shallow motivation that you criticise Ang Lee � surely on every student’s hero list � and Josh Pyke for when they discuss why they make their work. I assume this, by the way, because of your insistence that it the classics are elite � that the work of Charlotte Bronte, Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are challenging and confounding, and require a deep, life long dedication to? Maybe that is not why you want to teach it, but I am going to assume that you have struggled with the canon of Western literature longer than I have because you arguing that studying it is somehow an act of the elite.

Which, of course, brings us back to my point about different students. Just like you and I are different teachers, there are different students, with different levels of ability with the written word, and it is the job of people like you and I to help them reach a greater understanding of it, so that they can finish their exams and move out of High School with the greatest options available to them. I’m going to do you the favour of pretending that I think you’d like them to appreciate the written word after � as I do � so they can contribute to the giant conversation that society and art is engaged in. Still, you and I might differ on that, because I’ve always thought at the deep heart of the elitist argument you are making is an idea that education should only be for those who can properly appreciate it, rather than for everyone. You know who I mean: those with the right money, the right background, the right skin colour.

Still, I feel uncomfortable noting that there are differences between Looking for Ali Brandi and Jane Eyre.ÌýI feel that by acknowledging that Marchetta’s Looking for Ali BrandiÌýis written in a more modern, accessible hand to the youth of today than Bronte’s Jane Eyre, that it somehow pays into your argument, and makes one seem more ‘worthyâ€� than the other, despite the criticism that Bronte’s novel recieved at publication for culturally hollow and damning (as I am sure you know, it was not a book that recieved good attention from religious quarters at the time). Still, the truth is, the part that I found most damning about your article was that you could not acknowledge that the difference was important for your students. The mark of a good teacher, after all, is his/her ability to adjust for their students, to see what they need, what speaks to them most, and to give them work that best reaches them. In a perfect world, I often imagine that there are no curriculums at all at schools, and that students get one on one attention, and have an education tailored to them â€� one that drifts in and out of canon, from classics to moderns, to experimental, to cutting edgeâ€� but for the teacher at the head of five classes of between twenty and thirty students over a year, the simple math doesn’t work out. But still, you, just as I, must be aware that you can teach literature with any book, and that what matters is not our opinion of what is ‘literatureâ€�, but rather, how the student responds to it?

It was because of your failure to acknowledge that that I wrote this. The easy insults against you, such as teh fact that you are clearly a limited reader with a shallow appreciation of good writing is fun, but really just a way to pass the time.

In truth, if I were a student in your class, or a parent with a child in your care, I’d be concerned with the fact that you were using your position not to educate me (or my child) but rather to push what is essentially cultural propaganda onto me. That you were, in short, just a bad teacher.

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Yours,

Ben Peek.

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2013 is nearly done.

It has been, I can safetly say, an odd, surprising year.

I sold and two other books for what is easily more money than I have made in twenty years of writing (I sold my first short story to a fantasy magazine called Australian Realms when I was seventeen; the magazine folded before it was published and I was never paid, which in hindsight, was perhaps the best lesson for the following two decades). It will be out in August 2014, and until then, I have completely enjoyed having sold a book very few have read with a contract for two more that I am currenly writing. It’s long days, but it’s nice days, and that’s certainly worth noting.

probably spent what felt like a lot of time filling in paperwork for the Australian Government, saving trees, and generally ensuring I kept myself together. Living with me is just that exciting. She has a project she’s working on that mixes photography and prose together (the latter is mine) which moves along pretty well and should be, at the end, this huge, sprawling text of Sydney that mixes the insider and outsider’s gaze together. But before that, we’ll hear back about our relationship visa from the Government, and that will, likely, be 2014 in two big things.

Oh, and we’ll build a better darkroom next year. If I suceed in doing one thing in my life, it will be turning the garage into a stylish darkroom. I bought my first drill this year, so that ought to tell you what stands between me and that.

At any rate, I long ago stopped making resolutions, unless they were kind of stupid, like the year my friend and I gave up fastfood � easy until two am in the morning � and I long ago gave up trying to figure out what a year will be like, but 2014 is upon us all soon.

But there’ll be more books that I read, books that I publish, and all the things that life brings you before and after, with friends and enemies and so on and so forth.

Here’s hoping it’ll be fine.