Tag: blog

Agreeable book reviewing is a dangerous, vapid “epidemic of niceness”

SoutherlyBlog

Words || Jack Cameron Stanton  Over the weekend I visited my parent’s house for brunch with the Lebanese side of the family, and in order to cater for political differences I strolled to the service station and purchased The Weekend Australian and Sydney Morning Herald. Over a breakfast of fresh manoush and lahembajin, the Lebs scoffed at two wildly different headlines—‘SCOMO LEADS A NEW GENERATION’ vs ‘MORRISON SNATCHES TOP JOB’ (I’m sure you can guess which is which)—while I slid out the review sections of each paper to examine them. The Weekend Australian offered six pages of substantial book reviews,…

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A world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning: the seduction of augmented reality

SoutherlyBlog

Words || Jack Cameron Stanton “It’s possible that our further abandonment of reality for simulation is creating a new degree of integration in which the realness of reality is not only elusive but altogether unattainable.” Already we live in a digital age where competing versions of reality are trying to seduce us. The time for apocalyptic fires to rain from the sky has come and gone, and our world has fused ineluctably with simulations of reality. To write this blog post I interviewed a friend of mine who works at an augmented reality firm in Silicon Valley, who didn’t want…

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May Monthly Blogger – Moreno Giovannoni

SoutherlyNews

Moreno Giovannoni emigrated from Italy at the age of two. He grew up in north-east Victoria but left his heart in San Ginese where he was born. A translator and writer who has been published in The Age, Island and Southerly, he was the 2015 inaugural winner of the Deborah Cass Prize and is currently writing The Sweet Life set among the Italian Community in North-East Victoria in the 1960s. Black Inc will publish his Tales from San Ginese in 2018.

Contemporary Experimental Poetry in Australia: Tendencies and Directions

SoutherlyBlog

by A.J. Carruthers In building an argument for the second half of the project The Languages of Invention: Australian Experimental Poetry and Literary History, 1973-2014, I’ve drawn closer to what has been happening around me, yet tried to maintain some perspectival distance. What can prepare a critic for the onslaught of the contemporary? The kinds of critical armature one builds over time are an enormous tangle of accidental dalliances, wise guidance, aesthetic bonds and associations, extraordinary friends with astonishing minds, and erratic critical swerves. So what I have found is very much dependent on my own reading history, some sense…

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March Monthly Blogger – AJ Carruthers

SoutherlyNews

Many thanks to Allison Whittaker for an excellent series of blogs. This month our blogger is A.J. Carruthers. A.J. Carruthers is a critic and experimental poet, author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and a lifelong long poem, the first book of which is AXIS Book 1: Areal (Sydney: Vagabond, 2014). Other titles include The Tulip Beds: Toneme Suite (Vagabond, 2011), Ode to On Kawara (Buffalo: Hysterically Real, 2016) and Opus 16 on Tehching Hsieh (Oakland: GaussPDF, 2016). He works as an editor for Rabbit Poetry Journal and founded SOd press in 2011. From…

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Pocket thanks

SoutherlyBlog

by Alison Whittaker     Dunno if you remember me, tid. You and me went to school together in 2005.   I’ve got these vignettes of you in my head. First we walked together on a tour of the school grounds like fluffy juvenile magpies – except it was so hot we were slick, drippy and dragging. Then, we sat at the front of English class together and didn’t speak. I remember you doodled in your corners and I anxiously marked out a margin (three centimetres; parallel to the page edge; red pen).   Year 7 is hard enough. We…

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Talking about: talking about

SoutherlyBlog

by Alison Whittaker   ‘In conversation’ is the lie I tell myself to get to a venue where I’ll talk about writing.   Harmless little chat. It’s a harmless little chat.   Here’s the real harmless little chat, twenty minutes before: From there, a writerly discussion event is just projecting some tight-packed, thought-out writerly version of myself at someone else and a smattering of people who watch on.   I think: ‘Don’t look at them. Probably shouldn’t look at them.’ I also think: ‘Chin up, gut in. Surely you know what you’re talking about.’ I think: ‘On brand.’ When was…

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Writing and

SoutherlyBlog

by Alison Whittaker   The writer and the writing life, two off-cut conversations that have planted themselves anew in 2017.   On the Southerly blog last month, Roanna Gonsalves breathed The Double Lives of Writers, a sobering bulletin that etched out the invisible financial and labour roots that give water to even prolific writers. Katerina Bryant in Overland wrote Have You Thought About Law?, on the tensions between practice and prestige and the ‘day job’ in writing. Both are relatable; I bring in most of my money through working in law and legal research. While this continent descends into another…

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December Monthly Blogger – Best Southerly Blogs of 2016

SoutherlyBlog, News

Many thanks to Nic Low for a fantastic month of blogging. To see out 2016, this month we’re featuring some of our most visited blogs posts of the year. We’ll be back in January 2017 with more great blogs and bloggers, beginning with Roanna Gonsalves author of The Permanent Resident.    2016 in review: Luke Beesley, ‘Poets in Cars, An Interview with Nicholas Powell‘ Eileen Chong, ‘Eileen Chong Interviews Eileen Chong‘ Kate Fagan, ‘Into the Interior‘ Liam Ferney, ‘10 outrageous things that happened in poetry in 2015. You won’t believe what number 6 is!‘ Nic Low, ‘The secret history of Australia’s…

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‘Into the Interior’

SoutherlyBlog

Kate Fagan Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon. – Denise Levertov, from ‘Into the Interior’ in O Taste and See[i] It takes a long time to write precise things. Mountain, mountain, mountain. This is the only way Levertov can describe what her speaker is thinking and feeling in the poem ‘Into the Interior’. Which interior? And is the observer a guest or stranger there? Each mountain is a marker of time and place. But ‘mountain’ is also an average, a changeable outline imposed on a living system. For a second Levertov’s poem…

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September Monthly Blogger – Bruce Pascoe!

SoutherlyBlog, News

Many thanks to Tara June Winch for her excellent posts. This month our blogger is Bruce Pascoe. Bruce, a Bunurong man, is a member of the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative of southern Victoria, and an awarding winning Australian writer, editor, and anthologist. Bruce published and edited Australian Short Stories magazine 1982-1999, was the winner of the Prime Minister’s Literature Award for Young Adult fiction (Fog, a dox) 2013, recipient of the Australian Literature Award 1999, the Radio National Short Story 1998, and the FAW Short Story 2010. Bruce’s publications include: Night Animals, Shark, Ocean, Bloke, Cape Otway, Convincing Ground, Little Red Yellow and…

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