I’m always a little hesitant to speak about the books I’ve read. And that’s because there are so many books I haven’t read. Compared to a lot of authors I know, I get through an embarrassingly small number of books. The reason is that I read painfully slowly. Sentence by sentence, word by word. And I go back and re-read sentences just to make sure I’ve really understood and appreciated them. When I’m sure there’s no one listening, I like to read out loud, rolling each word around my mouth. And when I can’t read out loud, I read just… [Read more]
Dear Melbourne …
I love my city. I was born in this city. One day I’ll die here. I learned to love it by leaving it and now I grieve and sulk and rage with it. My vibrant, posturing, mercurial city. Flawed and cracked and verdant and roaring, now silent and sullen. Stupefied by yet another lockdown when we know we’ve already done enough. Done too much. The novelty wore off long ago. Bread makers and baking tins gather dust at the back of cupboards not cleaned out since the frenetic activity of Lockdown One. Yesterday I sidled past the long irritable queues… [Read more]
Gaza and the 20-year War on Terror
Last week’s Q&A farce did not surprise me in the way it could have. I was not surprised by the difficulty of Palestinians to get one voice on the panel, or that the two handpicked questions were by from Zionists.
Lockdown 4.0: A Conversation With Myself, Because That’s Where It’s At
Here we are once more, friends. We welcomed you back, neighbours beyond the ring of steel, now we say hooroo again. We haven’t used those words, this time, have we? There’s something less fortress-like, now, in the ambience. I don’t feel like being a warrior battling through, do you? There’s not much to write, this time. This is writing about nothing, because there is nothing to write, smothered in The Nothing. Our Neverending Story. Wish I had a Falcor to wrap me in shiny pink scales and give me hope as luckdragons are meant to do. My head is one… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Last month, for the first time in more than a year, I slept in a bed that was not my own. At the foot of a ravine, on the bend of a river, I fed logs into flames and drank red wine. I poked coals and consumed Sarah Sentilles’ Draw Your Weapons until the evening turned charcoal. Then I settled under the star-shot sky to think about the connections she had drawn between art and philosophy, trauma and morality. Later I lay in bed and, through the bleed of rain down the wall-length window, read the constellations. To the sound of… [Read more]
Mare of Easttown Brings A Genre Back From the Dead
Easttown is a weathered Pennsylvanian nook, the kind of place that presses its community together without much room for trees. It has sturdy houses built by great-grandfathers that people in the 90s would’ve said will last forever, but are just now falling apart. Crime dramas often rely on the claustrophobia of tight-knit neighbourhoods to force interaction between suspects, but even so, the people of Easttown are unusually close. This is just one of the many ways Mare of Easttown over-feeds our gluttonous expectations, only to poke at our bellies when we’re full. In the first episode we are taken to… [Read more]
Do We Still Fear the Reaper?
Australian public health campaigns are rarely discussed without reference to the Grim Reaper commercial. In the late 80s, the National Advisory Committee on AIDS released a series of shock ads: one with a baby-faced Russell Crowe playing Russian roulette in a drug den, another with some amusingly awkward condom conversations. The most memorable one had the Reaper ten-pin-bowling over people and dire data delivered in a doomsday register. Like the torrent of Transport Accident Commission ads that followed, the Grim Reaper ad presented a ‘scared straight’ message: AIDS or drink-driving or speeding are all gonna kill ya so we need… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I am drinking tea, made in a blue enamel teapot. It is lukewarm. I need to either finish or reheat it. I live on Wurundjeri country. Today, this week, I am on Darug and Gundungurra country. I am mindful of having a safe place to read and write while devastation racks India, and Palestine. Because I’m doing a PhD, I am reading a lot of different things all at once, greedy for the thoughts of others. I was drawn to study because I’d entered a cycle of disaffection with my writing that felt untenable. I needed a breath. I wondered… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Arab-Australian Literature is having a moment. A few months ago, the poet Omar Sakr walked away with a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his stunning collection, The Lost Arabs (UQP, $24.95), and Randa Abdel-Fattah launched her Coming of Age in The War On Terror (New South Books, $34.95). A few weeks ago, writer and activist Sara Saleh won the prestigious Peter Porter poetry prize for her poem A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting. A few days ago, I launched Sara Haghdoosti’s debut novel, Sunburnt Veils (Wakefield Press, $24.95) at an in-conversation event at Readings. In a few months’ time, I will be… [Read more]
Meat Alternatives for the Motherland: A Review
ARTICHOKE ‘FISH’: You meet again at a restaurant which serves artichoke broiled and seasoned to taste, feel, smell, exactly like fish. She will not be intimate with a meat eater she says, leaving the impression of her lips in orange on the rim of her wine glass. Outside: the sound of car tires slicing through water; the glint of light rearranging itself on the asphalt as the puddles settle. Your salvia glands are in overdrive. She looks, in some green wrap-around complexly secured, her hair piled upward, black eyes without apparent irises, beautiful. Starting this story is simple. JIM’S… [Read more]
