Tag: Tom Lee

The Gerald M. School for The Improved Reliving of Personal Memories

A fictional interview, by Tom Lee It was in August this year that I first heard about the Gerald M. School for The Improved Reliving of Personal Memories. M. had been a favourite author of mine for a number of years, so when I discovered the school on an Internet search I was intrigued. The ‘About’ section on the school’s website discusses the genesis of the idea. Apparently M. learnt of a design project (http://www.materialisingmemories.com/) aiming to create strategies to assist in the navigation of the vast amount of digital images that people take in order to capture a moment,…

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The architecture of grass

by Tom Lee In Bill Gammage’s remarkable book on the land care practices of the first Australians, The Biggest Estate on Earth,‘grass’ is among the most frequently indexed words. It’s up there with ‘Europeans’, ‘animals’, and ‘forest’. In the ‘grass’ entry in the index the reader is told to see also “clearings; fire; grass names; plains”, and the subcategories include: introduced, native, beside water, corridors (see also belts, paths), and on good soil. The word’s semantic reach includes more than half the book. Why is this word so central to Gammage’s thesis? Because the first Australians were experts at caring…

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“A solitary game without opponent”: mitigating the anxiety of Judge Holden

by Tom Lee In the previous post I quoted from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I suggested that the logic of Judge Holden and his war games was perhaps nothing other than maladapted techniques to mitigate bad affects associated with solitude. War doesn’t predict truth, in the sense that it decides the winners of history, as the Judge would have us believe. War is a romantic quest that protects one from loneliness and boredom. In this post I will consider some ideas for an alternate way to think about solitude. In his recently translated You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk…

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The Lonely and Homeless Judge

by Tom Lee Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one of the most memorable characters I’ve encountered in a work of fiction. The Judge is the brains and the brawn of a group of scalp hunters who navigate the hellish terrain of the American South West in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Holden has been convincingly compared to a devilish manifestation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (La Shot, 2009); a god of war, trained equally in martial arts and in the sophistry required to make a case for the inherent truthfulness of the outcomes decided in combat. Holden is a fascinating character, at…

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May Southerly blogger – Tom Lee

Many thanks to Aashish Kaul for his excellent posts. This month, our blogger is Tom Lee. His bio is below. Tom Lee is a writer, researcher and teacher who works at universities in Sydney. He wrote his PhD thesis on the work of W.G. Sebald. Tom has recently developed an interest in cemetery architecture and the relationship between landscape design and human practices. He is a 2014 recipient of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for the category of prose. 

Long Paddock for Southerly 71.3: A Nest of Bunyips

Southerly 71.3 is available to purchase here. This link will take you to our old GumRoad storefront (an external site). Remaining issues will be moved to our own site, here, soon. POETRY Rae Desmond Jones, Ash Wednesday Stuart Barnes, Cocoon Andrew Burke, “The birds are still in flight . . . ” Liam Byrne, soviet kitsch Peter Dawncy, ruins Michael Farrell, Telephone Liam Ferney, NC-17 Ian Gibbins, Dr Korsakoff and Colleagues Report Philip Hammial, Dear Sisters and Brothers D.J. Huppatz, Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels Greg McLaren, The rusting land . . . , from Broken Ng Mei-kwan, Rainstorm (trans. Bonnie S. McDougall)…

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