Tag: reading

A Short History Of Reading

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by Moreno Giovannoni   John Clarke, who died a month ago, said it:   Our minds were on fire at that age.   He was talking about the creativity he discovered in himself when he went to university. In my late teens and early twenties which is more or less the age he was referring to, my mind was “on fire” too, except that I became hungry to absorb knowledge and ideas and if anything create a world view for myself.   When it came to reading fiction (and non) for me it had an unusual beginning and then continued…

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Reading Secondhand: Graham Greene in The Foundery

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by Ali Jane Smith The orange spine of a Penguin showed through a grotty plastic cover. The title, partly obscured by a piece of masking tape with the call number ‘824.91 G83’ written in biro, turned out to be The Lost Childhood and Other Essays by Graham Greene. The book is well on the way to falling apart, its pages as brown and crisp as scorched toast. I buy it anyway – none of the books here are more than two dollars – and settle down to read just as my pot of tea and sausage roll arrive. The Foundery…

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The Simple Act of Reading

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by Fiona McFarlane It’s been a pleasure to blog for Southerly, and now I’m going to end my month with a shameless plug. On Redfern Street in Redfern, Sydney, there’s an extraordinary place called the Sydney Story Factory. I was invited to give a reading there one night. I was given the address and I knew to look out for ‘Sydney Story Factory’, but when I arrived in Redfern I couldn’t find it; I found, instead, a place calling itself the Martian Embassy. If the residents of Mars were to establish a diplomatic outpost on Earth it might look something…

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Chrubblsum Fonetics

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by Marie Munkara   To learn to read must be one of the most exciting and useful things we can do in our lives and maybe for some the hardest as well. Although I had a basic idea of what reading was about before I went to school, I was taught the fundamentals of reading and writing at a Catholic Primary school in the mid nineteen sixties. And there was no shirking in Sister Damien’s class; we studied our nouns and verbs as rigorously as if we were studying Latin declensions at Oxford. If our brains struggled to retain her…

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‘Apologia’ with Rave

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by Nicolette Stasko Writing A blog (short for weblog)[i] is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries or ‘posts’. It’s interesting that Blog is also be used as a verb, meaning ‘to maintain or add content to a blog’. ‘The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users’ (Wikipedia). I hope I’m not stating the obvious. I’m not normally a blogger nor a bloggee. (BLOG is such an ugly word!) This is a…

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Writing isn’t like breathing. Writing is grace.

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Kate Holden, My fourth post – I had intended to write twice as many, in an inspired burst of blogging hyperactivity, but after peaking early in the early 2000s with a regular blog (back in the frowsty old dear days when people said, ‘A what?’) I have never again recovered the focus and the steam and the dedication, and alas, this month of February hecticness and an especial dose of personal frenetics too fell victim to lack of puff and excess of distraction. So, many thanks to Southerly and its people for inviting me to burble away here, and thanks…

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Readers block

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Kate Holden Ironically it was tonight, a hot, smothering, still Melbourne summer’s night when it’s all I can do to keep my dull eyes fixed on the telly, never mind think about great literature, that I had one of those moments when something true about my life with books hit me. I was trapped on the couch under the warm, soft weight of my little cat Boo, who was giving me a very rare and precious honour by taking her siesta on my hot lap, and thinking idly of how great it would be to get into bed later, and…

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