One of my greatest joys whenever I finish writing a book is re-entering the zone of whimsical, spontaneous reading. While I am at work on a long manuscript, I am always careful about what I read, particularly during the first draft. I think of this as going on a reading diet—mainly to prevent harm coming my way, to protect my budding voice. For instance, although I love Jonathan Franzen’s fiction, reading his novels when I write is dangerous for me, because they are thick on dialogue and thin on mood, whereas my ratio is the reverse. Franzen’s powerful voice can… [Read more]
They’re Not Staying Down There, Anymore!
To be conservative is to be nothing. It’s a philosophy founded on negation: the negation of progress, the negation of movement, the negation of art. To enact conservatism is to attempt the realisation of myth, and in so doing conservatism creates nothing but a patchwork void held together by a vast and churning nihilism. Tickets to this void ran between $149 (‘The Menzies Three Day Pass’) and $599 (‘The Reagan Pass’) at CPAC Sydney last week. There you could see the greatest conservative minds of this generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical nakedly off-chops. A Ringling’s of gormless geeks: come… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
There’s a moment in Patrick White’s Voss when Tom Radclyffe remarks that he would be ‘curious to read little Laura’s thoughts’. Little Laura responds, mischievously, if not maliciously, that she has been thinking ‘of nothing in particular. Which is another way of saying: almost everything.’ This is almost certainly the recognisable condition of those currently in possession of an internet password and the hardware to put it to work. We are mushroom people now, our mycelium constantly interacting with countless threads that have been sent out by others to find, lose, or avoid us. We are novelists now, too, digging… [Read more]
A Certain Light
Some records become indelibly associated in our minds with a particular time or place or moment, even if we haven’t listened to them for years. For me Darren Hanlon’s Little Chills will always be the sound of moving to Melbourne, when I lived for a year in the middle of Fitzroy and spent every dollar I could spare in Polyester Records; similarly Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled album is the sound of moving out of that Fitzroy house and getting the hell away from its dodgy landlord: relief and freedom and joy. Some records, though, have no such concrete… [Read more]
On Royal Commissions
Rather than speak about the work of the Financial Services Royal Commission, I want to say something about what seems to be the place Royal Commissions are now being given in our democracy and what that may say about the structures of government.
What I’m Reading
I guess since I heard Sheila Heti ask, How Should a Person Be? in 2012, the question has been on my mind. I read it when I was depressed and living through a Canadian winter a long way from home. I was 20. The book changed the nature of my self-awareness. The ache inside myself was no longer an immovable weight but was something to be interrogated. How did I want to be? How did I want to function in the world? What did I need to do? I’ve looked at my time since then as a project of efficiency…. [Read more]
The Horrendous Timing of the deGrasse Tyson ‘Hot Take’
Americans have massacres down to a fine art now. Round the clock coverage with brutal back to back eyewitness testimonies. Rapid-fire branding of perpetrators with throwaway insults like ‘coward’. Hollow promises made by local authorities that they absolutely positively won’t let this atrocity change us. Ask anyone who’s felt anxious in the middle of a packed cinema, been in the vicinity of a backfiring car, or—in my case this afternoon —within earshot of a dropped chess set on a tiled bar floor, everybody in America is already well and truly changed. For writers, it’s hard to find new ways to… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
It is mid-morning on a blue-bird day and I am coughing my way up the side of a mountain, suffering from what I will later decide must be bronchitis—constant coughing, weariness, shortness of breath. I’m on the west coast of Tasmania for a writing job, and there’s just enough time to hit the hills on the way home. I don’t have proper boots or gaiters here, so my feet are covered in mud; after pushing through the early patches of overhanging bush, the pad opens up and I scoot up the track as quickly as I can. I feel pretty… [Read more]
The Cure for Everything
Try to slow those pin-balling thoughts down, while shovelling cereal down your throat. Read the news and depress yourself early. Feel guilty about not ringing your mum back. Google every single thought. Today your left armpit is sore. It’s cancer. It’s the end of the world. It’s 7 a.m. Thoughts and anxieties move under your skin like tiny electric currents. It’s like when you were a child lying on the trampoline and rubbing your arms along the black fabric making your arm hair stand on its end. Ripples of static, waiting to burst through your fingertips at any moment. … [Read more]
Why We’re Fascinated With Putting Things Into Our Vaginas
I’m pretty consistent about not consuming pop culture that I consider politically dodgy. Despite a cover photo of a very mystical-looking John Travolta—captioned with a promised revelation about how he’s raising his son from the dead—I resisted buying this week’s National Enquirer. Equally, I don’t watch reality television because I think, to put it mildly, it maligns all participants. For the same reason I give commercial breakfast TV the widest of berths. That, and it’s largely trash. My righteousness however, completely falls apart when it comes to stories about random objects inserted into vaginas; about medical professionals painstakingly explaining why… [Read more]
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