Texting in the City

Most peo­ple are pretty happy to fin­ish up with high school. No more exams, assign­ments or using school toi­lets (which are a pub­lic toilet’s poor man’s toi­let). Of course, there are some things to be missed. Like the daily, after-school con­sump­tion of chicken-salted chips. My body still hasn’t adjusted to the lack of chicken salt that came in the years after high school. I am con­stantly lick­ing the sweat off my own fore­arms in an attempt to relive the salty, hal­cyon days of my youth.

There are plenty of good books on Eng­lish syl­labi that should be missed upon leav­ing high school too. And yet they are not for the sim­ple fact that dur­ing school they are end­lessly dis­cussed, dissected, analysed, read, reread, never-read, dic­tated, per­formed and ulti­mately used as a mea­sur­ing stick of lan­guage and lit­er­acy skills. Doesn’t that sound like fun? No, maybe it doesn’t. It’s cer­tainly not the way I enjoy books these days.

There’s no get­ting around the fact that to study a text you need to know it inside out and do all the dis­sect­ing, etc well. And occa­sion­ally you’ll find a book that is so good it out­weighs the amount of in-class scrutiny. But there is now another way to study books on the Eng­lish syl­labus, which is fun and insight­ful. I’m speak­ing [shame­less self-promotion alert, eek!] about the Wheeler Centre’s Texts in the City series, which this year I am co-hosting.

Every week at Texts in the City a dif­fer­ent book from the VCE Eng­lish syl­labus is selected and an expert is invited along to talk about it. Every week either myself or the delight­ful Ruby J Mur­ray host the con­ver­sa­tion with that guest. One week Ruby hosts, the next week I do and so on. The Wheeler Cen­tre is like a shared beach house that we take turns at vis­it­ing on Tues­day afternoons.

We’re only a few weeks into this year’s pro­gram but I’ve already been wowed by the weekly turnouts (mostly VCE stu­dents, but some other inter­ested folk too) and the thought­ful ques­tions that have come so far in the Q&As fol­low­ing the ses­sions. It’s amaz­ing how good the audi­ence ques­tions are when they really want an inci­sive answer. Each ses­sion is free but they book out quickly so get thee to the Wheeler Cen­tre and book your­self — or your class — in now.

Next week author Ben­jamin Law joins me to dis­cuss Grow­ing Up Asian In Aus­tralia, the anthol­ogy edited by Alice Pung a cou­ple of years back. Mr Law, of course, has a cou­ple of pieces in the book and will no doubt be talk­ing about them, while simul­ta­ne­ously being funny/charming/rude/etc. More info and book­ing deets here. 

In the com­ing weeks we’re look­ing at a range of texts includ­ing Ran­som by David Mal­ouf, The Quiet Amer­i­can by Gra­ham Green, A Street­car Named Desire by Ten­nessee Williams, The Rug­maker of Mazar-e-Sharif by Robert Hill­man and Najaf Mazari and Cosi by Louis Nowra.

Hope­fully these ses­sions will help make the texts last beyond high school for the attend­ing stu­dents. To the point that they read in the future, the same way I lick my arms for salt now.