Critic watch : summer review

Signing off for the holidays at the State Library of New South Wales, Critic Watch stopped by the library’s charming little bookstore to pick up the year-ending and summer editions of the literary magazines for holiday reading. On the shelf were Meanjin, Australian Book Review, Griffith Review and Overland; even the scene’s new ‘little guy’, Kill Your Darlings, was there. This was probably to be expected: each receives state subsidy – the established titles through triennial grants as ‘key organisations’ determined by the Literature Board of the Australia Council – and this is the State Library. Making my way to the counter, the pile started to totter to the left, and I realised I was missing something: Keith Windschuttle’s Quadrant, another periodical that receives subsidy for its literary content through the Literature Board. I went back to the shelves but couldn’t see it. Must be sold out. I checked with the saleswoman: ‘sorry, we don’t stock that title’. Really? I thought I’d seen it there before. ‘No I don’t think we’ve ever stocked it.’ On the way home, I stopped by my local newsagent and was lucky to pick up the last copy. This seemed more appropriate: a cultural magazine that can hold its own in the jungle of the open market. Flipping to Windschuttle’s editorial I was surprised to find a diatribe against the Literature Board for cutting Quadrant’s subsidy from $40 000 to $20 000. Why would he care? Shouldn’t this be a badge of honour for a magazine committed to combatting state cronyism? Critic Watch wonders what Quadrant’s figures would be if its content were predominantly literary? Rather than intimidate literary specialists with circulation figures attending its status as the nation’s prominent forum for conservative comment, Windschuttle might look at the figures of Quadrant’s rival in progressive commentary, the Monthly: a behemoth by comparison, with nearly five times Quadrant’s sales. Although Quadrant’s editorial practice has recently been in question following its publication of a hoax science essay, it can more confidently boast of its literary filter. As Senator Abetz gleefully points out, the aforementioned elephant is nicely eclipsed by the magnificent reputation of Quadrant’s literary editor, Les Murray. Does his eminence ensure good content, though? The question is whether the nature of Quadrant’s literary offering calls for government subsidy. We will leave to the side the question of the value of poetic scansion when analysing song, and accept McCooey’s invitation to scan it off the page. Not only does he find a third stress in the first two lines (in his delivery, Cohen’s stresses four syllables in the second and final line), a ‘hypnotic tension’ where most would scan a variation in stress not untypical in ballads, but has inverted conventional histories of verse which have it that for most its history the ballad has been a form par excellence of accentual metre.