Adventures in Pop Culture By Adam Carey Simmone Howell And Sharon Shelley Eds, Melbourne: Vandal Press, 2002, 154 pages, paperback, . Reviewed by Dean Durber in the March 2003 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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The term 'Australian Literature' makes my skin grow cold. Whenever I hear the term my head fills up with painful images of dusty homesteads, dusty men on horses and dusty dust beneath the harsh summer sun. It is this kind of (outback?) out-land-ish setting that seems to get all the attention in the most prestigious reviews and awards for fiction in this country. It's the type of image you can see on the front cover of all the Australian 'best-sellers'. It connotes a world not quite relevant to the present; some ideal place of never-never.
Perhaps that is the reason, then, why this recent collection of short stories by writers -- né, let's call them 'artists, rather than performing seals' -- is such an incredible joy to read, and reread. Adventures in Pop Culture offers an eclectic mixture of short narratives looking at subjects such as death, drugs, sex, infidelity and passion gone astray. There's a relationship that ends because Kylie is not a goddess. A girl who decides that she cannot call Australia home. A daughter who has died along with her Tamagochi. And some backstreet sex rebellion going on in Tehran of all 'chaste' places. These tales either reveal a more earthy Australia, or they depict characters more grounded in this culture than those we seem to idealise as the 'true' Aussies. In this nation of increasing conservatism, Adventures in Pop Culture offers the kind of real-life, welfare-class grit that it is becoming increasingly hard to keep hold of.
It is perhaps a bit unfair of me to highlight any of the stories in particular, because, to be honest, most really are exceptional in humour, style and/or storyline. But a few do stand out. Sharon Shelley's 'diary of Conny' disrupts the dream of a return home. 'Have you ever been home and you wrestled with this sense of restriction?' the story asks. 'You constantly think that you couldn't possibly be all that you could be living here in this town'. It's a tale that will appeal to all who hate Kansas, or at least hate the person they are when trapped within its smallness.
Next, Alicia Sometimes' story of her parents' death through an overdose on chilli is hilariously bitter. Natasha Cho's 'two new godzilla stories' is bizarrely surreal with its attention to the protection of the small things while a large, roaming, trampling lizard brings widespread havoc and destruction. And then, in a story that provokes, P A White's 'Jam' offers a rapid and clever post-abortion journey in which the protagonist shamelessly notices 'red syrup dribbling along her left leg'. Adventures in Pop Culture contains stories that are not afraid to cut right through to the flesh of life.
Australia is a world where shitty things do happen. But this doesn't mean we have to write about them or relive them as if they have destroyed some eternally happy way of life. It doesn't mean we have to try to erase them beneath an ideology of a much greener, luckier landscape. These stories of the dirty and the sometimes dismal are what make this culture so exciting. They give hope to 'Australian Literature'. Adventures in Pop Culture exposes worlds that might not be so 'nice' and 'cosy'. They might not even be adequately 'moral'. But who cares? If it's the choice between the ideal of a quintessential, calm, compassionate country -- in your lucky dreams! -- and this mixture of misshapen mayhem, I would much rather be living in the latter. At least there we can find a great deal to laugh about. Citation - Dean Durber. 'Review: Adventures in Pop Culture by Adam Carey Simmone Howell and Sharon Shelley eds' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), March 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].
Back Cover Blurb - Renegade small press assembles crack team of writers to make some sense of the modern world.
Where Godzilla goes gardening and Pamela Anderson gets something major off her chest. Discover celebrity shag-offs, blood sucking truckers, displaced travellers, secret gigs, air guitar antics, game show luurve and so much more ...
'Fresh, punchy and sometimes disturbingly irreverent ... We need the promise of more Vandalism.' Jane Sullivan
Fiction by Drew Arthurson, Lauren Barrow, Kane Barwick, Adam Carey, Natasha Sho, Michael Crane, George Dunford, Robbie Egan, Lisa Greenaway, Simmone Howell, Michael Kitson, Karen McKnight, Megg Minos, Andrew Morgan, Andrew Preston, Tim Richards, Sharon Shelley, alicia sometimes, Jon Southurst, Richard Watts, P A White, Sean M Whelan and Patrick Witton.
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Popular Music: Practices, Formations and Change - Australian Perspectives
