Archetypes: A Reading Guide Books are full of words that are ingested like medicine. Their benefits, largely intangible, linger long after the book is closed. Books are powerful with the capacity to change lives and alter how we relate to the world. As Mrs Constance Winterson liked to say, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in them until it’s too late’. A book is a presence conjured by a being that speaks to us of other realms. The creator embodies an archetype to shape a work with a life of its own. The Magician …works… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Reading sometimes feels like learning to dance by shadowing someone who already can. The first steps are without swagger, composure or balance. It’s a little too close to madness—and if not that, then childhood—to always be comfortable. I’ve never been much of a reader. I remember the force of will it took in primary school to tick off completed titles for the MS Readathon. Each book provoked in me a kind of agony, and I found myself selecting the least taxing titles to nudge my accomplishments beyond a humiliating single digit. It wasn’t until I developed a love of words… [Read more]
Discontented By Content
[Adam Curtis voice][i] Did we already see this coming? This is the story of neofeudalism, a plot that was laid out before the narrative even began. When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, Inc. in 2003, he meant it to be a website named ‘Facemash’, where a user could rate fellow Ivy League students based on their looks. But the joke slowly grew, building on a lie where the corporation saw in it a chance to create a new world, one that saw the nodes of human interconnectivity taken to their furthest limits. We saw greed, desire, apathy and outrage; suddenly we… [Read more]
The Deplatforming Of Australia
Can a whole country be deplatformed? That question confronts all of Australia today, as Facebook (for Facebook, read Mark Zuckerberg, who autocratically controls the social media giant) suddenly went nuclear, blocking all postings from news sites by its Australian users, and blocking those same users from seeing news postings from any source, anywhere in the world. All of this seemingly in response to a law that hasn’t even passed through Parliament. It feels like a dummy spit for the ages, the kind of moment that historians will simply chuckle over—and it is. But there’s much more here: never before in… [Read more]
What Is News, and Who Decides?
This morning, the world’s biggest media-sharing platform decided to ban all Australian news publishers, without any notice—and without applying any degree of sophistication to how a news publisher is defined. On a day where regions in Australia are experiencing flooding or extreme fire danger, Facebook has disappeared the Bureau of Meteorology—but not the climate change deniers whose evidence-ignorant actions prevent meaningful, long-term policy commitments in this area. In the middle of a pandemic, they’ve axed departments of health, and non-government community health and social services organisations, but not the anti-vaxxers whose wilful misinformation is costing lives all over the world…. [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Making sense of pain and chaos My children were returned to me when schools closed last year. At five and seven, their lives had just been uprooted in the wake of family separation, shunting them from a big block in the country with a trampoline and a treehouse, to two tiny apartments in Melbourne’s inner north. It’s fair to say that things felt uncertain, precarious and hard. At that point, I read Deborah Levy’s memoir again. The Cost of Living reflects on remaking a life in the wake of divorce. ‘The writing you are reading now is made from… [Read more]
We Got This Lockdown, Mofo
Announcement. ‘It’s only five days!’ ‘WE GOT THIS!’ Victorious Victorians! And then we go to get silly drunk, while we can, at the pub, to temper the setback, before curfew. ‘It’s only five days!’ Our mantra rings out, ‘We got THIS! Let’s bake!’ Get your shoes on, kids! It’s our family walk! With masks, around the zone, we’re permitted. We slip back in, our routine, we know it. ‘Just four more.’ We shout loud, and send out, virtual high-fives, to whoever will listen, ‘We GOT this!’ ‘NO MORE WALKING’, kids proclaim. It’s boring. How quickly, they remembered. ‘You OK?’ come… [Read more]
80 Years of Cover Art: A Meanjin Zoom Event
Join us via Zoom on Wednesday 24 February from 12pm AEDT for a one-hour panel discussion about the art of Meanjin covers from 1940 to present. Book designer and artist WH Chong, art historian Christopher Marshall, author and editor Sophie Cunningham and design expert Daniel Huppatz will talk us through the changing styles of the covers of one of Australia’s oldest literary journals, examining how they reflect the forming Australian national and artistic identity over time. The discussion is the first in a series of events commemorating Meanjin’s 80th anniversary, in conjunction with the University of Melbourne’s Archives and Special… [Read more]
Mank: The Kane Duplicity
At the beginning of F For for Fake, Orson Welles’ 1973 essay film about forgery, deception and lies, the filmmaker addresses the audience directly and sets out a thesis for what is to follow. ‘Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie,’ he says, ‘almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.’ He promises that, over the course of the next hour, he’s going to give them the unvarnished truth. David Fincher’s Mank is based on one Hollywood’s most discredited fictions: the idea that screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz was the real genius behind Citizen Kane and that Welles’… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Lately, people in my life keep asking me: ‘Do you read fiction at all? Or do you just read memoir?’ The first time I’m asked the question, I smile. ‘Of course I read fiction,’ I reply. ‘Don’t you remember me posting Instagram stories about being obsessed with Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach and Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children during lockdown?’ When I am asked the question again by someone else, at a post-lockdown brunch, I give a vague response but am disquieted by it. Later, I check my book-tracking app. Sure enough, I haven’t been reading many novels. I add about… [Read more]
