A Handwritten Modern Classic
SPINIFEX FEMINIST CLASSIC COLLECTOR'S EDITION
The first observation is that the imagination is how you do what you know. A person who says he is a writer and uses many words to say that imagination beats experience has no imagination, especially if he cannot toss a sald, lets his wife buy his clothes.
Gertrude Stein in her 1926 lecture on ‘Composition as Explanation’ wrote: 'the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw, until [s]he is a classic ...
In the tradition of Gertrude Stein, Finola Moorhead set about writing A Handwritten Modern Classic in 1977. The result is musings and criticisms on protestors clashing with police over freeways, political change, conservatism, Malcolm Fraser, what love can do for you, and whether the old hate the young. With discussions on the politics of suicide and unshaven armpits, one of Australia’s most intriguing experimental writers has set her thoughts to writing, with mention of such famed writers as Socrates and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Tolstoy, as well as the battles between romanticism and jingoism in Australian writing. Written—by hand—in the tradition of European and American manifestos, this document challenges readers and writers alike not to fall for a romantic view of the world.
2013 | ISBN 9781742197999 | Paperback | 203 x 148 mm | 75 pp
Reviews
Finola Moorhead's tour-de-force from 35 years ago is a delight to read again today.
—Kris Hemensley
I first read the Handwritten Modern Classic in the eighties, and was delighted and my delight has been re-ignited... The Handwritten makes us laugh, sigh, groan, roar in protest, escape into, deeply, deeply into, the thinking and the imagining and the writing. As Finola says ‘imagination is best employed on what is’.
— m janssen, Rochford Street Review
A Handwritten Modern Classic is a manifesto, it is (at times) handwritten poetry disguised as prose. Interestingly it still seems contemporary – Malcolm Fraser may not be PM but the issues remain the same. Above all it asks questions about writing and literature that we still need to ask today... It is exciting that Spinifex has republished this small press classic – and brought it to the attention of a new generation, a new group of readers and writers.
—Mark Roberts, Rochford Street Review
Moorhead dips her courageous, argumentative stances in the acid of impending postmodernity’s wrestling with what can be said to be real, true. In that, the book’s double-act constant of porousness and intellectual wilfulness keeps it and its questioning lines alive.
—Jacinta Le Plastrier, Cordite
A writer's manifesto or action plan, it has lists that echo down the page in a way type couldn't convey...The calligraphy binds you more closely with the author...its stimulating ideas about writing...are maintained from the first page to the last.
—Paul Little, New Zealand Books
Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic first appeared on bookshelves in 1982. The book’s recent republication by Spinifex Press will doubtless mean that it is introduced to a new readership. ...A Handwritten Modern Classic remains a wonderfully lively and eccentric read.
—Jay Daniel Thompson, Text