Category: Blog

The Curse

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Fiona Wright I was introduced over the weekend to The Curse of Mary Kielly. Mary Kielly’s curse, I was told, plagues the women of my paternal grandmother’s line, the Lightfoots, a name I’ve always loved because of another story, one that my grandmother has told since I was young. My grandmother married a Wright when she was sixteen, and for months afterwards would accidentally sign her name as Wrightfoot, the muscle-memory of her hand taking over halfway through. I was at a family wedding in Belmore, in Sydney’s Western Suburbs, in one of those specialty function centres with cubic chandeliers…

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Re-reading

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Fiona Wright It’s only in this last year that I’ve started re-reading. I’ve always kept and collected my books; not all of them, there are many I’ve been content to trade in at the overstuffed and slightly mouldy Elizabeth’s Bookshop on King St that I use too often almost as a more expensive lending library, especially as I’ve moved and shifted through various sharehouses at the whims of landlords and the shifting allegiances of housemates. I’ve always held on to far too many books: almost all of the poetry, all the books I’ve worked on or written for, but especially…

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July monthly blogger – Fiona Wright!

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Many thanks to Ali Alizadeh for his excellent, thought-provoking posts. This month, our blogger will be Fiona Wright. Fiona is a doctoral candidate with the University of Western Sydney Writing & Society Research Centre. Her poetry collection Knuckled (2011) won the Dame Mary Gilmore Award for a first collection in 2012.

‘Success’: desire, prohibition and resentment

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Ali Alizadeh My previous blogs questioned the goodness of such supposedly good things as ‘community’, ‘nature’ and ‘Australia’ as used in contemporary literary discourses. I believe the magical aura of these terms is most commonly activated to empower their ab/users. But if cherishing a community, singing the praises of Mother Nature, and paying homage to the Fatherland are symbolic means contrived for obscuring the Real – of careerist manoeuvres, economic transactions, strategic alliances and so on – in the sorts of text which, in the classic Foucauldian sense, constitute discourse (judge’s reports, book reviews, interviews, literary articles and cultural policy…

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‘Community’: networks, nepotism and exclusion

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Ali Alizadeh In my previous two posts I attempted to develop a theory of literary ideology in contemporary Australian writing. According to my formulation, such an ideology does two seemingly contradictory yet complimentary things simultaneously: it conceals the signified of socio-economic exchange-value production by displacing it with a Master Signifier (‘our nation’, ‘our physical environment’) to ensure that the prerogatives and decisions of those who absorb the surplus-value of production are naturalised; and, at the same time, it ensures that this state has a metaphysical, indeterminable quality (‘cultural heritage’, ‘ethics of land care’) which transforms the initial concealment into a…

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‘Progress’: ethics, awards and the environment

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Ali Alizadeh My last post took aim at a rather obvious ideological edifice, the new literary patriotism in Australia and its mostly transparent role in the generation of cultural and literary surplus-value for publishers, cultural organisations and affiliated individuals. But this phenomenon is a rather rare instance of an openly conservative, proudly old-fashioned bourgeois ideology at the service of the ruling classes–patriotism has been the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson would have it, for well over two hundred years. Today’s capitalist superstructure is often far more innovative and deceptive. It is an ideology that bears the aura…

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‘Australia’: literature, ideology and fetishism

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Ali Alizadeh I am delighted to be this month’s Southerly blogger, and would like to use this opportunity to explore the crucial rapport between literature and ideology. In this and my forthcoming blogs for Southerly, I’ll be reflecting on how, in my opinion, the production and reception of contemporary Australian writing is informed and in many cases formed by what Karl Marx has termed, in The German Ideology, as an epoch’s “ruling ideas”: The class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material…

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June Monthly Blogger – Ali Alizadeh!

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An enormous thank you to Maria Takolander for her excellent posts. This month, our blogger is Ali Alizadeh. His bio is below: Ali Alizadeh’s forthcoming book Transactions has been described as “beautifully twisted” by Marina White in Colosoul; “funny, angry and immensely moving” by Jeff Sparrow; and “a powerful work of prose fiction” and “truly global and uncompromisingly frank” by Portia Lindsay in Books+Publishing. “Welcome to the dark side of global village” has been Caroline Baum’s comment on the book. It is a tale of political violence, prostitution, love, a charming serial killer, mysterious refugees and radical universalism. Among Ali’s previous books are…

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On not being born to write

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by Maria Takolander Despite a lifetime of being exposed to American culture, the US remains resiliently strange to me. There are its female child beauty pageants and self-heroising gun culture, its confessional TV and fenceless houses, its rhetoric of moral superiority and the unambiguous immorality of many of its actions. Perhaps my response is related to my Finnish background. The US is, in some ways, the antithesis of introspective, socially responsible Finland—although Finland certainly possesses its own quantum of strangeness. However, being descended from Finns is hardly necessary to an appreciation of the bizarre spectacle of itself that the US…

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The problem of privacy

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by Maria Takolander, We have a strange and contradictory fascination when it comes to other people’s lives. We care too much—as in the case of celebrities, those holographs (projected by the machine of capitalism) which we obsessively flesh out so that they resemble human beings. Our imaginations are tirelessly attentive to them. Alternatively, we care too little—as in the case of asylum seekers, whose lives we don’t want to imagine at all. Since the so-called ethical turn in literary studies, the skill of imagining another, of invading another’s privacy—which literature allegedly hones—has been regularly valorised by critics (Martha Nussbaum, for…

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666: The mark of the writer

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by Maria Takolander, When I was a child I feared that I was the antichrist. I used to check for the mark of the devil on my scalp. I would stand up close to the bathroom mirror, with a smaller mirror in my hand to facilitate inspection of the back of my head, searching my scalp for a tattoo of the number of the beast. To explain: I watched horror films from an early age. We got our first video recorder when I was in primary school, and visits to the video rental store saw my father choose video cassettes…

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Better Homes and Gardens and the role of impropriety

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by Maria Takolander The older I get the more I realise that I don’t know anything, and yet I know that I am supposed to pretend that I know a lot. My role as an academic, and as a writer, requires of me that I generate knowledge and insights. This new role as a blogger for Southerly probably requires likewise. I have to confess, though, that I find meeting such expectations difficult, as I seem to have inherited from my father something of a puerile—and, of course, unladylike—attitude towards authority and propriety. In response to viewing a pristine white-sheeted bed…

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