For a long time now I’ve felt judged by the stacks of books that have sat on my desk and bedside table, expectant; unread; gathering allergy-inducing dust. A once Matilda-like appetite for literature was quashed, I think, by a decades-worth of university and the directed/instrumentalised kind of reading it requires, as well as by the mushrooming of my interest in cinema—which gradually became the default story-telling medium I turned to for comfort and edification, even as I continued to accrue books (many cast-off or foolishly ‘loaned’ to me by friends), ever optimistic, or maybe just in denial, as to their… [Read more]
Time In A Life Of Virus
Late one night I read the announcement on the parish Facebook page that there would be no Easter services this year. The moment had the acute precision of a pin meeting a balloon. I wonder if I had been holding myself together all along. I am far from pious though my faith (bewilderingly) remains impervious to neglect, inquiry and disillusionment. I have let go of things. But I hold on to Easter as the keystone, the thing that makes sense of Christmas. Both are times for sitting in the dark, safely. Over the past couple months I have taken in… [Read more]
The Rhythms of These Numberless Days
It’s hard to remember the moment when we first began to worry. My partner was recovering from surgery as the first case surfaced in Codogno, so we were in the midst of our own medical drama as Italy’s began to unfold. It wasn’t a pandemic yet, just one case. The next day, it was thirty-six. We live in Turin, in the country’s north. Lombardy, the next province over, felt far away. We still thought they would contain it. We were dutiful in our use of the hand sanitiser dispensers as we paced the ward, but she’s on immune-suppressing medication, so… [Read more]
Pandemic Panic and the Illusion of Togetherness
The panic on social media is strangely palpable: breathless calls to stay calm, to finally get to that stack of books you’ve been meaning to get to, to learn that language(!), to stay active and hopeful even as we are, 24/7, drenched in the collective alarm that arrives with a pandemic. There are ample amounts of confusion, too, given the initial wobbly messaging from government as the Coronavirus began snaking its way around the globe. We take these things personally, you see. While #weareallinthistogether, we’re not really, because no one else feels your distinctive, nuanced sense of fear; your loss… [Read more]
Coronavirus and Bare Life
Karl Marx is said to have remarked of a French socialist that if he is a Marxist, then I’m certainly not. In a similar vein, it would appear that Giorgio Agamben is no longer an Agambian—or perhaps he’s been misreading him(self) lately. The Italian philosopher’s recent article about the coronavirus repeats the absurd, conspiratorial claim that it’s no different from a ‘normal flu’. The seriousness of the pandemic has been, in his telling, exaggerated as a pretext for limiting freedoms and implementing increasingly authoritarian rule: First and foremost, what is once again manifest here is the growing tendency to use… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Quote-unquote reading I was asked to contribute to this column in late 2019, and like many writers and editors who’ve contributed before me, my first thought was about how little I’ve read recently, and how I’d get around that problem. I’m pretty sure I only finished one book published in 2019 during that year, and that was only out of necessity—my postgraduate study is partly on the American poet and novelist Ben Lerner, and his new book The Topeka School came out. (I liked it.) Feeling inadequate about reading is, of course, not actually about volume. I am reading all… [Read more]
Cities In The Time Of Coronavirus
People think me foolish when I tell them I caught public transport to Melbourne to get a flushot at my central city workplace. The partial, confusing lockdown had just been instated, whereby everyone was encouraged to stay at home, leaving only for the essentials. My regional service, a three carriage VLocity train, had a maximum of seven passengers for the duration of the one and a half hour trip. It was a midday, midweek service, running with 215 empty seats. The conductors had stopped checking tickets two weeks prior, to prevent unnecessary handling and so help slow the spread of… [Read more]
A Daily Gift From the Meanjin Archive
We’re locked down, little by little losing touch with familiar, comforting elements of the greater world. Social distancing is one thing, but we can still join, shoulder to shoulder, in the life of the mind. Here at Meanjin we’d like to make a small contribution, dipping into our 80-year archive to offer a daily piece of reading … some words to fill the growing quiet moments of our days. It’s an odd reflection, but when Meanjin as established, back in December 1940, the intention of its founding editor Clem Christesen was to offer a literary buffer to hard times. Back… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I join Co-Star and click I don’t know my birth time. I click Text My Mom, just to see what will happen, and the app generates a text message addressed to the sort of mother assumed by a tech company. I look at the cursor, blinking, in the empty field for recipients. ‘Don’t worry,’ a classmate told me, before my mother died. ‘That only happens in books.’ Cancer, writes Anne Boyer, in The Undying, feels quaintly catastrophic in the manner of the previous century. I am always thinking of my mother’s death but rarely of her illness. I remember only incidental details: the pool… [Read more]
Today, This Is Who We Are
Is this what we are? Are we what we do, what we say, what we show when everything goes wrong? Are we fights in the supermarket aisle over toilet paper, or are we nurses slumped at the desk because we can work no more? We’re finding out. It’s Day Three of the state of emergency. This afternoon my phone pinged with a warning from an app that’s supposed to warn me about bushfires. This time, the alert read ‘communicable disease’. Wash your hands, it told me. Don’t visit old people. No gatherings of more than 100 people. But of course… [Read more]
