Tag: literature

My Spine, Your Pillow

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Daniel John Pilkington When the sun sets and everything is cellophane Exquisite adjectives Velleity Thoughts that make us feel younger Names for stray cats Dumplings Psilocybin The significance of hair The heating should be more than quiet A hierarchy of self-contradictions When a man lives alone The most common dreams Humidities Theories of why we laugh Artifacts we dare to call natural My favourite apocalypse Plums Things once thought to be aphrodisiacs Things that suggest hidden worlds Possible bookmarks Hypocrisies Numbing things Once when I understood my anger When I was the first to leave and the last to arrive…

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John Watson: “David Brooks in Slovenia”

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Words || John Watson  ‘Swimming when the bell strikes five’: The bell shakes drops into the sea, The fifth finds me, as ever, there. Swallows like jets on swooping raids Sky-larking in the pulsing air “Make my head their conning tower.’ Then wasps in summer heat drop in To sip sweet wine lees from the glass ‘And dip their feet in cooling waves.’ Dusk comes at last. The swallows nest. The wasps have gone. The night still warm ‘I write until the bell strikes ten.’ He swan-dives round and through the page; Wasp-like he harvests subtle lees. He writes and writes…

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Podcast: has sci-fi had its day . . . or is it just on life-support?

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Surveillance . . . paranoia . . . telekinesis . . . and an eight-year-old psionic messiah who will either save or destroy humanity.  [podbean resource=”episode=n839f-9ada39″ type=”audio-rectangle” height=”100″ skin=”1″ btn-skin=”103″ share=”1″ fonts=”Helvetica” auto=”1″ download=”0″ rtl=”0″] When readers are asked what they love to read, science-fiction comes up second place, with crime being the number one choice. But as a writer, to get your book into the bookstore doesn’t seem to reflect this preference. Sales do not reflect it. And now, arguably more than ever, Hollywood loves the blockbuster sci-fi for its visual spectacularity. Writer David M Henley discusses this predicament…

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‘Written to Music’

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Kate Fagan Leave the long fall between us (peak after peak) Here were my paints and there were my powders And then I was drunk and we lost each other My shadow tumbled after Soaking cinnamon leaves in the lake of the moon The roll of the damned drum calls me to duty The dice in the light of the lamp I hear a stone gong I lean full weight on my slender staff Yellow leaves shaken and petals confused to my garden The hard road is written to music – Cedar Sigo, from ‘Panels for the Walls’ in Language     …

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Just Make it Electric

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by Felicity Castagna A lot of space in literary circles has been given of late to trying to define what is highbrow and what is middlebrow and why those distinctions matter. I think we would be better off having a debate about literature that is ‘technically good’ but boring and literature that is ‘electric.’ That, to me, is a distinction that matters. It is a distinction that makes a text both engaging and enduring. In my mind, the electricity of literature lies in the voice of the text: it’s the hardest thing to get right and it’s also the hardest…

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Revelators, Visionaries, Poets and Fools: the palimpsest of Sydney’s western suburbia

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by Luke Carman The suggestion that Australia’s literary ‘centre’ appears to be shifting – or leaning, at the least – towards Sydney’s ‘suburban frontier’ is becoming commonplace. Perhaps the first (certainly the most emphatic) recognition of this decentring to find its way into print was provided by Sam Twyford-Moore, director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, who stated in an interview last year that ‘Western Sydney is the capital of Australian literature… if not already, then certainly it’s the future’. As someone with a sensitive ear for the minor tremors of our most aspirant and incubational writers, Twyford-Moore can reasonably be…

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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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Icarus Downstage, Right: Writing Art

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Kate Middleton This past week I gave a talk on ekphrasis and the ways in which pictures in themselves may tell stories. In part I wanted to give a little history, and so looked back to Homer’s description of Achille’s Shield, as well as to consider the ways in which, despite being saturated with images, we are less skilled in reading them now—simply because we are no longer accustomed to spending a lot of time with a single image.  The other aim of the talk was to discuss my own practice and think about the different ways I have approached…

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Guilty Pleasures (Lights Out! Meet in the kitchen in one hour for a Midnight Feast!)

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Kate Middleton While I often deny the word “guilty” in relation to pleasures, I admit the phrase has its attractions and, yes, usefulness. A guilty pleasure has a little subversive thrill embedded, and is often something enjoyed when we feel we “should” be doing something else. That feeling of “should” could come from an awareness that we are procrastinating, but just as often I’m sure it comes from the idea that we could be spending our time on something with greater seriousness. One of my teachers and friends, the wonderful fiction and non-fiction writer Sugi Ganeshananthan, once said, “Guilt is…

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The Lives of Other Writers

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Kate Middleton While our literary commentators are often pronouncing the forthcoming obsolescence of the novel or poetry (Can Poetry Matter? Dana Gioia asks and everyone wrings their hands again…), one form that seems to be in no danger is the biography. We never get tired of talking about the way we live, and wondering if it’s the right way. Many of us turn to biographies for examples of right and wrong turns, as well as for a particularized vision of an era or a milieu that interests us: they make very palatable history lessons. The genres of biography and memoir…

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