The very last thing I read was a US magazine piece online about 9-11, because I was chasing a curious and allegedly true fact circulating the internet that ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ by the Bee Gees was playing in a Twin Towers foyer when the planes hit. It turned out to be half-true—it was a muzak version. But still. ‘…and you come to me on a summer breeze, keep me warm in your love then you softly leave…’ The song is now rendered differently, as if it’s gone through some sort of machine that has made it more haunting than… [Read more]
Twiction2: The Return Of #meanjin280
For 80 years Meanjin has been a home for the best in Australian long writing, in essays, short fiction, memoir … plus poetry of course. Which is not to say that brevity doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. So here’s a challenge: write an exquisite piece of super-short fiction in 280 characters or less and post it to Twitter with the hashtag #meanjin280 … and yes, we know that leaves you with 269 characters, but these are the constraints of the medium. We did this back in 2017, and now, as then, we’ll be publishing the pick of the… [Read more]
Extinction Rebellion and the Politics of Creative Tension
Are Extinction Rebellion protesters shooting themselves in the foot? Commentators have been quick to accuse them of doing no more than annoying motorists and alienating the public from their cause. That argument assumes that all protests are aimed at winning over the public to one’s point of view. Put another way, protests are effective only when they operate within the boundaries of the accepted norms of the political system. But that completely misconstrues the strategy of XR’s campaign of civil disobedience. The point is to break out of the boundaries imposed by normal politics and challenging the system, the system… [Read more]
The Paradox of Dependence
In her recent essay about learning to pry herself away from love that drained her, from a man who emptied her, CJ Hauser offers the fable of the crane wife. In the story, she writes, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Reading Susan Howe On the large table that used to be a tree I’ve set out the Susan Howe books I’ve been most thrilled by over the last four years. My engagement with her work came late. It began in 2015 when I read her essay Vagrancy In The Park during my lunch hour at the legendary and now defunct Barwon Booksellers in Geelong. Those lunch hours were not so much breaks from work as augmentations of what we in the bookshop were already immersed in: words, lines, sentences, paper, bindings, endpapers, boards and covers, the way the polytemporal community… [Read more]
The Majesty of Cousin Greg
In season two, episode four of HBO’s Succession, two members of the show’s ensemble, Tom Wamsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) and Greg Hirsch (Nicholas Braun), are confined to a designated ‘safe room’ that looks to be a repurposed supply closet. They are in the headquarters of ATN News (a conservative network targeting the fearful elderly, their universe’s equivalent of Fox), an organisation of which the ambitious and cowardly Tom has recently been placed in charge, appointed by his father-in-law, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the CEO of the multi-billion dollar media conglomerate Waystar-Royco. The building has been locked down; a gun was fired… [Read more]
Melbourne’s Renewal and Homelessness: Urban Space, Erasure and Redemption
Earlier this year I was asked to speak at an Architects for Peace event in Melbourne, where they screened Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Tasķafa: Stories of the Street (2013). This film, or ‘documentary essay’ as Zimmerman calls it, is loosely based on John Berger’s novel King: A Street Story. Zimmerman herself describes this book as ‘a story of hope, dreams, love and resistance, told from the perspective of a dog belonging to a community facing disappearance, even erasure’. In contrast, in Taşkafa, she writes, ‘this voice is gifted to a wider network and range of perspectives: to dogs, a city and,… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I never read on trips, though I bring books and buy books. We had SRS by Earl Sweatshirt playing, which had just come out overnight, sitting on a train from Akihabara to Shinjuku. During the mornings in Japan I was overly concerned with my skin. It was still recovering from the acne I was hit with after my trip to California at the start of the year. On that first trip I brought home two books: from Amoeba, the first edition of Slaughterhouse Five for my brother, and then a poetry project called Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno… [Read more]
The World According To Batman
Aristotle said that death was the most frightening thing. Aristotle had not met Batman. But how does a grown man in flying fox costume come to terrify felons? Yes, he can fight—sometimes he can even turn his head. He has trained in over a hundred martial arts. He is a world class swordsman, archer, knife fighter, grappler. There is only one martial art he will not do: tai chi. (Too calming.) Yes, Batman is a also master of disguise—no one can tell that the six-feet-two, square-jawed billionaire with the bodybuilder’s physique is actually the muscly six-feet-two square-jawed superhero. He wears… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Last year I had the happy experience of going under general anaesthetic and coming out of it again. ‘Won’t be long,’ the orderly said, wheeling me into a dimly lit space resembling a basement, ‘they’re just finishing up on the patient before you.’ Left alone in the sterile gloom, I hauled myself onto my elbows to take note of my surroundings. The room seemed of perfectly square dimensions and covered wall-to-wall with large pale tiles, bare but for a few sinks, trolleys and storage shelves. Concluding that there was nothing interesting enough to justify the exertion of propping myself up,… [Read more]
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