Tag: Maria Takolander

What’s my name?

SoutherlyBlog

by Sunil Badami When I was younger, I was so thrilled by the idea of seeing my by-line in print, nothing else mattered. As I’ve gotten older, how I wish I’d had the foresight, like my idol, Eric Blair, to get a pen name! Why, especially in this age of celebrity, where children’s greatest ambition now seems not to be a doctor or even an actor, but just to be, like the Kardashians, simply famous, would I want a pen name? Not even actors bother with stage names now. Pseudonyms have existed as long as literature has: what other vocation…

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Are we there yet?

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau About six weeks ago, I was tagged in a Facebook post by Australian author Shady Cosgrove asking various folk for ‘recommendations for essays that dissect what, exactly, constitutes Australian literature’. She was asking fellow academics and writers, yet other than some suggestions about what we don’t think Australian literature is, or should be, or what it used to be, the response, on the whole, was a fairly solid ‘dunno’.* As a sometime reviewer of Australian short stories, more so than novels, I could name a handful of stylistic devices that seem to crop up in volumes…

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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

SoutherlyBlog

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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May monthly blogger – Maria Takolander!

SoutherlyBlog

A huge thanks to John Kinsella for his excellent posts last month. This month, our fabulous blogger is Maria Takolander. Her bio is below: Maria Takolander is the author of two books of poems, Ghostly Subjects, published by Salt in 2009, and The End of the World, forthcoming with Giramondo in 2013. She is also an award-winning fiction writer and the author of the forthcoming short-story collection, The Double, which will be published by Text in September. Her book of literary criticism, Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground, was published by Peter Lang in 2007. Maria is this year’s judge of theAustralian Book…

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