In the denouement of 2006 film It’s a Boy Girl Thing, bookworm Nell (inhabited by the consciousness of jock Woody as the result of a body-swapping Aztec curse) is in the midst of her entrance interview for Yale. When asked her opinion on contemporary poets, she fumbles, saying that they ‘suck’, then backpedals by waxing lyrical about rappers: ‘It’s urban poetry, sir. They talk about their lives … They can be very brutal, but often undercut with a dark humour.’ The trope of rap—and of other artforms tied to marginalised communities, like jazz and street dance—acting as a leveller is […]
What I’m Reading
Occasionally, too rarely, a book falls into your hands that sets you back on your heels, and suddenly in your mind lights are flashing and bells are ringing. Alarm bells and hallelujah bells. The voice is not strident, but a lyrical, humble and learned tone, and, as I discovered, a voice with an unmistakable Aussie twang and slow drawl of a thoughtful farmer. Charles (Charlie) Massy is a fifth-generation farmer from the Monaro. He is also an academic attached to the ANU, having returned to university in his late fifties a few years back, to pursue a PhD in Human […]
A Fading Timbre
There was only one thing on Janet’s shopping list, but she still tore the strip of paper from the sticky-pad on the fridge and tucked it into her purse. It was a frog-shaped pad which Marcus had begged her to buy when she was picking up extra Christmas decorations at the pound store last November. She was brushing the dusty strings of tinsel, watching lines of foil float to the ground at the lightest touch, when he had spotted the frog pad. He had loved how its round cheeks suggested it had just finished a delicious meal. She was not […]
The Three Laws of Zuckotics
As Mark Zuckerberg testifies to the US Senate, and grimly accepts the inevitability of regulations on the social media giant, we now have an excellent opportunity to define the bounds of that regulation, to ensure the kinds of malfeasance that Facebook has been repeatedly caught out for never happens again. Everything centers on transparency. Transparency shines the light onto internal processes intentionally kept opaque in the name of ‘trade secrets’ and ‘competitive advantage’. Code for ‘maximum extractive capacity’. However, as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg effectively admitted last week, its users are the product. Those same users can demand rights—privacy rights, […]
What I’m Reading
J.G. Ballard (2009) The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, 1st American Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, New York. 978 0 393 07262 4 (hardback). I went on a road trip through country Victoria last month. In the hamlet of Yarck in the Goulburn Valley, I happened upon a wonderful cottage bookstore called Books at Yarck. It is pretty much every booklover’s wet dream. There is a fine section of literature, an excellent choice of Australiana and some very tasty non-fiction. There is also a wood stove (not in use in February), and a couch. Oh dear. I promised Pip […]
There Can Be Life After 30
In these past days two significant, but very different, milestones have been marked. The first was the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination on a nondescript motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee on 5 April, 1968. The other was the confirmation of Malcolm Turnbull’s political mortality against his own benchmark, the loss of 30 consecutive Newspolls. Like Claudius in Hamlet, Turnbull was hoist with his own petard. By nominating Newspoll as proof positive of the necessity of his usurping Tony Abbott—and with him the prime minister’s prime minister, Peta Credlin—Turnbull sowed the seed of a noxious political vine that now […]
I’m Rethinking My Heroes: Australian Nonfiction and Reading Loudly
The tendency to look overseas for great literary works is hardly new. The notion of ‘cultural cringe’ (coined by AA Phillips in 1950) describes an Australian assumption that ‘the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article’. We suppose it’s being done better internationally, and look to international markets as arbiters of taste. We measure our own successes against international works—both in terms of sales and reception—and maintain the baseline assumption that international work represents the highest level of achievement. Emmett Stinson charts the evolution of the cultural cringe in a more recent context, describing it as a […]
What I’m Reading
I wish I was reading something fancier right now. Something more ‘high’ culture. Something with literary cred and novelistic hoity-toit. Something that would make you—my curious analytical reader—raise your eyebrows, whistle discretely under your breath and exclaim, somewhat dramatically, ‘my stars, she is but an enlightened dame!’ I could lie. I could pretend I am reading one of the many tomes on the ‘to read’ pile that literally constitutes my bedside table. Something like The Power by Naomi Alderman or Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey or the new Zadie Smith or the old Hilary Mantel. Or something I’ve read […]
The Exclusivity of International Women’s Day
While International Women’s Day has been busy pressing for progress, various organisations who run IWD events have yet again pushed women of colour into a corner: a corner of non-existence. The UN’s Women Facebook page applauded the support from several organisations for their International Women’s Day Campaign. Nonetheless, many events and panels failed to include any women of colour. The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), for example, gave a fine example exclusionary feminism with its IWD event: its ‘Women in Leadership’ discussion did not feature even one woman of colour. Diana Sayed, a human rights lawyer, currently based in Melbourne, […]
Running and Plotting: Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin
The international release of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin was attended by two fitting ironies. The first was that Vladimir Putin’s Russia—after this month’s election result, it remains undoubtedly his—banned it outright on the grounds of its ‘extremism’. (Yelena Drapeko of the Duma’s culture committee said she had ‘never seen anything so disgusting in my life.’) The second was that one its stars, Jeffrey Tambor, then the award-winning star of Amazon’s Transparent, was swept up by the #MeToo movement after being accused of inappropriate conduct by members of show’s production staff. He was quietly ‘disappeared’ from the poster for […]
When Abuse Tops the Charts: On Female Agency and Storytelling Through Pop Music
When Ke$ha’s iconic debut single ‘TiK ToK’ was released in 2010, I was 15 years old and a walking prototype of teen angst. I was trying desperately to find myself in the mawkish ballads of indie rock bands, cutting a makeshift fringe into my hair as the syrupy quivers of Conor Oberst serenaded me through headphones. The men that lived in my iPod shuffle were the sort who listened to alternative music on vinyl and had rolled cigarettes stuffed into their jean pockets. The sort of men who had a drawer full of old cassettes and polaroids. No autotune, baby; […]
What I’m Reading
When I pick up a fairy tale, I feel like a child again. Reading about mythical creatures, about the dangers of the woods, and the needle-sharp motives of villains, I can almost hear the classic warnings; don’t talk to strangers, never trust a faerie. But no one mentions: beware of the power of women. Immersed in these tales, I would speak to faeries sitting on the leaves of the strawberry patches outside my window. I was the wolf that stalked the woods, the witch who stole children from their cribs. I smiled at the moon and thanked her for her light, […]
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