‘Do you want to feel how it feels?’ Watching Stranger Things
In the trailer for the new volume of Stranger Things, the eighties-homage paranormal series from Netflix created by self-identified nerds the Duffer Brothers, Max, a young girl, stands alone, gazing at a ruined version of her own world. Cut to all the kids sitting in grim silence together in a speeding van while an adult voiceover says ‘I know you’re frightened,’ and acknowledges that they are not prepared for the fight to come. ‘You’re not ready.’ There could be no better allegory for the hell that kids all over the world have survived these past couple of years, and their […]
Scott Free But Still In Chains
The unbridled joy that comes with knowing we will never again have to deal with the entity formerly known as Prime Minister Scott Morrison is leavened by the fact that we had to put up with him in the first place. Not just put up with him but act as if the destruction he was wreaking was somehow invisible.
This Week: Poets Respond to Dante Poetry Event
Join us on Thursday 23 June in the Baillieu Library for an evening of poetry inspired the exhibition, Epic and Divine: Dante’s World. The University of Melbourne’s Archives and Special Collections have collaborated with Meanjin to commission some of Australia’s finest emerging young poets to create pieces in response to the work of Dante. You’ll hear Wen-Juenn Lee, George Cox and Nandini Shah read their original works, plus special guest Jessica L. Wilkinson performing a poem written in collaboration with award-winning Singaporean poet Alvin Pang. Come along for a drink and to immerse yourself in the splendour of the Epic and Divine: […]
Magpies and Memory
Plagiarism has been in the news lately. On May 9, Jumi Bello’s personal essay explaining why she plagiarised parts of her debut novel The Leaving the novel was pulled from the website Literary Hub because the essay itself included plagiarised material. The Leaving had been scheduled to come out in July but was cancelled in February by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, after Bello herself disclosed her plagiarism to the publisher. Although the Literary Hub did not mention who Bello had plagiarised, it turned out to be Jonathan Bailey, the author of the website Plagiarism Today. He writes […]
Essays
Vierge Ouvrante, Opening Virgin
We were up around five thousand metres when I started to vomit. Not the kind I was good at. The violent kind. The kind that left me hanging over the bowl, all strings of bitter yellow. That’s how you found me. On my hands and knees with my hair across my face.
Fiction
Soroche
We were up around five thousand metres when I started to vomit. Not the kind I was good at. The violent kind. The kind that left me hanging over the bowl, all strings of bitter yellow. That’s how you found me. On my hands and knees with my hair across my face.
Memoir
This Must Be Very Strange
One of the things about having synaesthesia that I’ve only become aware of in the past few years is that I smell certain music. There is a scene in Robert Guédiguian’s film L’Armée du crime (2009) that suddenly and loudly inserts klezmer music as it shows the actors throwing down a bright-red poster from a bridge.
Poetry
Makeshift Drinks in a Celebratory Garden
verses of conversation
the ease of company
writers sculpting novels on the fly
linearity of noise
a climate of clanking liqueurs
