Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Adelaide as Literary City: Introduction
- 1 Acts of Writing
- 2 A Colonial Wordsmith: George Isaacs in Adelaide, 1860–1870
- 3 Scots and Scottish Literature in Literary Adelaide
- 4 ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and Adelaide
- 5 Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young
- 6 Adelaide and the Country: the Literary Dimension
- 7 ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism
- 8 The Athens of the South
- 9 Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure
- 10 Geoffrey Dutton: Little Adelaide and New York Nowhere
- 11 A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton's Adelaide
- 12 ‘A Dozy City’: Adelaide in J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man and Amy T. Matthews's End of the Night Girl
11 - A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton's Adelaide
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Adelaide as Literary City: Introduction
- 1 Acts of Writing
- 2 A Colonial Wordsmith: George Isaacs in Adelaide, 1860–1870
- 3 Scots and Scottish Literature in Literary Adelaide
- 4 ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and Adelaide
- 5 Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young
- 6 Adelaide and the Country: the Literary Dimension
- 7 ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism
- 8 The Athens of the South
- 9 Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure
- 10 Geoffrey Dutton: Little Adelaide and New York Nowhere
- 11 A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton's Adelaide
- 12 ‘A Dozy City’: Adelaide in J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man and Amy T. Matthews's End of the Night Girl
Summary
In a recent review of one of Ken Bolton's latest books, Sly Mongoose, his friend, the poet Pam Brown, writes:
Ken can often be seen walking down a city street in Adelaide, frowning slightly, (possibly from the glare of a bright sunny day, possibly with the frightful weight of thought) whistling fragments of tunes to himself, heading from his job at the Experimental Art Foundation to a favourite, or rather, familiar, yet never cool nor trendy, café for lunch. There he might jot down some notes while waiting for his plate of mezes. Those notes, in spidery indecipherable-to-anyone-else handwriting, will end up as poems …
(Brown)The title of one of Bolton's more recent works, At The Flash and At The Baci, name checks two, now apparently defunct, Hindley Street cafés where this note jotting often occurred. Although Bolton's work features many references to specific acts of Adelaide city living, a sense of a ‘literary Adelaide’ is largely absent, though a visual art scene is central. As Bolton himself has said about his move from Sydney to Adelaide in the 1980s: ‘Adelaide is an easily negotiated town & I liked it. I took almost no part in its literary life, but the art scene was genuinely interesting. What Adelaide offered me as a writer was anonymity’ (Cook 53).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- AdelaideA Literary City, pp. 239 - 252Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2013