First up, a photo (click the image to get a better view):

I took this photo a few weeks ago at Borobudur, a Buddhist monument in Central Java, Indonesia. It was about 5am and the sun was starting to rise. After I arrived at Borobudur, I took a fair few photos. After a while, though, I put my camera aside so I could simply have my experience there, without any desire to capture anything.

That night, I took part in a performance that was staged nearby. The gig was organised by the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and it was my favourite part of my participation for the festival (it was actually a post-festival satellite event).

I wish I’d blogged during the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival itself but, as was the case at Borobudur, I put aside my desire to document so that I could simply experience everything as it was happening. Now, weeks later, I feel a strange resistance to the idea of writing a follow-up post about “My experience at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival” (maybe because it has the sense of an enforced “What I did on my holidays” school essay). What I must say, though, is that there truly is no other writers festival like this one – there is certainly nothing comparable on the Australian writers festival circuit anyway. This festival is only six years old, too, and it’s exciting to imagine what it might become as it matures.

Happily for me, it was a chaotic kind of festival – and I mean that in a complimentary sense because I can enjoy a chaotic festival experience (which is helped by the fact that I’ve coordinated a pretty chaotic writers festival myself). Yes, there were plenty of smoothly-run events (not to mention the luxurious accommodation for writers). But there’s something to be said for a festival that isn’t too slick. Due partly to a lack of funding, this festival is not overly slick and it is certainly not sterile. Furthermore, every day, I wandered around a humid streetscape of footpaths-under-construction, traffic dominated by motor scooters (scooters with anything up to 4 people on board), and locals going about their business (and trying to get you into their business). That streetscape reminded me of the unique conditions under which this festival operates – conditions that will probably prevent it from ever becoming too slick or sterile. I guess I like a bit of grit and sweat and spontaneity-by-accident-rather-than-design at my writers festivals. One festival I was at earlier this year organised a flashmob and that flashmob was certainly a fun idea. But, via their religious processions and other rituals, I have to say that the Balinese do the best flashmobs ever. With that in mind, I hope that the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival stays a bit rough around the edges.

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As I mentioned at a guest talk recently, I think it’s debatable about whether appearances at writers festivals translate into significant direct sales for most authors. That’s not a criticism of writers festivals, by the way – in fact, I think it encourages a more nuanced consideration of the benefits of writers festivals, especially for cynics like me. One of the great things about my own experience at Ubud Writers and Readers Festival was how many other benefits it created for me – conversations and hopefully ongoing connections with writers and publishers, possible book distribution in Bali, a university link, etc.

Here’s another great outcome from the festival – this review of my book from Stephen Atkinson in the December issue of the magazine Hello Bali. As it turns out, after so many reviews of Look Who’s Morphing, this short review is now one of my favourite reviews of the book. The review captures the energy of the book quite well – the book’s excesses, its play around the distinction between author and narrator, the subversive pleasure of the book’s imaginings. I enjoyed the energy of the review itself – every sentence has this compressed energy… the sign of a reviewer trying to make each word count in the face of a strictly imposed word count. Anyway, here it is:

Nothing exceeds like excess. A whacked-out set of tales on identity and transformation, short-form fictions and mash-ups of scenarios mined from the rich vein of metamorphosis in popular culture: from The Sound of Music – in which sister Maria the self-doubting nun morphs into a confused imitation of Captain von Trapp – to the more obvious nightmare-fantasies of The Incredible Hulk, The Exorcist, I, Robot and Dr Phil. Popular culture – film, TV, advertising, fashion, pop music – as Cho makes abundantly clear, feeds almost entirely on our rampant desire for personal transformation: to be different, better looking, more powerful, sexier, more loved. Yet, despite the familiarity of his sources, it’s hard to compare this appropriation of them with anything else: perhaps with a Chimera comprising a film-and-television-addicted Burroughs, early Lynch and Cronenberg, the surrealist-erotica of Georges Bataille, and an ADHD-afflicted Kafka. Because, like some of them, Cho’s diaristic first-person narration (that’s him as the day-glo Fonz on the front cover), complicates the distinction between authors’ selves and their inventions; and because each interlocking story is bound so playfully by the giddy joy of writing and the subversive potential of making things up, of letting the imagination run riot. The final entry, ‘Cock Rock’, is both an astonishing climax to the collection and a fantastic contribution to the literature of excess.

(And coming up in a future blog entry, I’ll feature another review of the book – this one from a university student who studied the book.)

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I spent some time in Bali after the event at Borobudur. Among other activities, I took some time to write some notes about a book I’d like to write. So, to finish, a photo of the view as I added to my notes one afternoon (click the image to get a better view):