Little Alison's Great Diary Disaster

Ms TN set some kind of record this week - I inadvertently managed to book myself into three separate shows on a single night. (Apologies to the patient people who have rebooked my tickets). Together with my desk, which looks like a hurricane has hit it, it reflects my state of mind, which this week is very post-everything. It was symptomatic of how the past month has been that I returned home last Friday to find my publisher had sent me the proofs of my next book of poems, with a request that I reorder it for a shorter but hardback edition (good news, since being a poet between hard covers will make me feel really grown up but, ah, dammit, more work).

But my lack of posts this week doesn't mean the blog has been quiet. Oh no. The Serpent's Teeth has been prompting lively discussion (and very lively difference) in the blogosphere: not just here, where the discussion has ranged all around theatre and back again, but also at Australian Stage Online and over at Arts Journalist, where Nicholas Pickard has posted a kind of pre-review.

Meanwhile, speaking of Nicholas: he has also posted his Crikey story on the Creative stream's dissatisfactions at the 2020 Summit, which has prompted a couple of other bits of commentary. From the bunker, the plaint of misrepresentation is a big one - and not just from the creatives, but from other streams. (See Marcus Westbury's useful wrap-up too). Artists - perhaps predictably, and to my mind unjustly - seem to have copped most of the crap flying around. But it seems that a lot of 2020 participants are taking the idea that this is only the beginning of the conversation very seriously. This is certainly true of the creative stream. Also, the complaints about the lack of practitioners among the delegates puzzled me, so I went and counted: out of 102 people, there were at a rough estimate 33 practising artists. More than on your usual committee, I would venture...