We need to pay our artists, and for the most part we do, but there is a blind spot when it comes to radio. I was contacted by an ABC radio books show to see if I would review a new novel on air. After inquiry it was clear that this work would be unpaid. When I expressed that this was problematic, one of the show’s hosts explained that she agreed it was not ideal but that there was nothing she could do: ABC funding has been cut, and the ABC has a policy of not paying anyone who comes […]
What I’m Reading
Grammar and temporality. That’s what comes to mind when I consider this blogpost’s brief. The present continuous—the am-reading—implies some kind of vague but unspecified reach. If we’re being pedantic about things, right now, as I write this, I’m only reading my own words as they begin to accumulate on a screen. This very curtailed present, if it amounted to the extent of my graspable stretch, would be too short to make this blogpost interesting. It wouldn’t—come to think of it—be enough to make a person, or a life, interesting. Curtailed presents are political, as I see it. For a while […]
It Is Difficult To See How Our Society Could Survive …
There is a conversation I do not know how to have, a conversation about what happens if we are heading for disaster. It is not a theoretical question for me. I have two daughters. The older has just turned 13, the younger is nine. On current projections we will pass the point at which it is possible to hold warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels before the younger has finished school. By the time she is at university the coral reefs will be gone. By the time they are in their early thirties we will be committed to two […]
What I’m Reading
The city is shrinking now. Gaining some fiction of cohesion as it recedes into contours and right-angles, pastel-washed slopes, a matrix of shipyards. The brutalist clock tower on the port strikes the hour with an unexpected ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ jingle. I am leaving Piraeus harbour on a ferry at sunset, staking out a seat by the window, attempting to wedge my overstuffed cabin-sized suitcase somewhere out of the path of the (apparently all) more compact and more composed passengers onboard. This is typically how I travel—outsized and overburdened, with books and clothes and vitamins, whatever the mode of transport. […]
A Kombi Van Full of Koalas
Peter Steele once wrote: I do not apologise for mingling one kind of preoccupation with another, since I am myself quickly bored with any writing which does not attempt something of the sort. With that in mind, I’m going to practice a variation of what Steele called ‘mixed farming’—speaking of the world in general by speaking of poetry in particular, and vice versa—because, for me, poetry has always been my way into (and more importantly out of) the extreme sport that is life. In other words, consider this more a confession than a lecture: a personal, political, poetical confession. Like […]
What I’m Reading
Two things have happened to me in the last six months that have affected my reading: I finished a novel that was acquired by a publisher, and my mother died. I am now working on edits of the novel and so, at the moment, ‘what I’m reading’ seems even more pointedly about my own work than usual. At the same time, and while I come to terms with doing everything for the first time in a world that no longer contains my mother, ‘what I’m reading’ feels even more pointedly about her too. The first people to read my manuscript […]
Hey, Brother
It’s so hot—could you please reduce the heat from the fire a little? I would do it myself, but I see you are good with the logs and the twigs. I believe that a person’s soul is revealed in their hands. Do you agree? I think so when I see your hands touching the bark, rolling it so that the logs collapse just right, as though you know the grooves of each piece and how they should fit together. Look at your hands, pulling out that log now as it spits glowing coals, flipping it onto the sand. What a lovely way to spend a night in the […]
A Kinder, Tenderer Father’s Day
Like some sort of seasonal infection, the Man Cave signs and car-branded stubbie holders have popped up on store shelves again, promoting a brand of hyper-masculinity that hasn’t changed since the Hawke government. When I wrote [this piece] last year about how strange Father’s Day advertising felt as a non-binary Dad, I thought the gap was between my gender and the assumptions made of me as a Dad. But as I see the same slogans pop up all over again, it feels like the problem lies in the way we talk about fatherhood. Father’s Day has always been built on […]
What I’m Reading
Like many, most, who contribute to this blog, I read professionally, which is to say, I read a lot of emails. Things I’m not reading: political coverage (just for a bit longer, please, a bit longer). Twitter, when I can possibly avoid it (I could certainly avoid it more). Traffic signs (I cross where I please). My open tabs (to be closed en masse, unread, in a cleansing end-of-year ritual). Downloaded early-childhood-development PDFs (kids grow quick; who can keep up?). Not as many books as you might think. More, things on the way to being books: manuscripts, proposals, inchoate musings. […]
The Old Lie
The city of Melbourne was sweltering under a damp, oppressive forty-six degrees centigrade, the sweat-enveloped citizens cocooned in air-conditioned rooms, escaping to others when the air-con in their offices failed. The streets were mostly empty of pedestrians; even the homeless were indoors, hiding in the shopping centres which were showing unexpected mercy and letting them stay. Drivers stared out at a white-hot world from their climate-controlled cars. The ‘whoomph’ could be heard in every corner of the city—in the forest of grey stone they called the central business district it blew out windows letting in the heat, and popped eardrums, protecting those victims from the sound of screaming, even their own. […]
What I’m Reading
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 […]
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 […]
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