Tag: Walter Benjamin

Superb Mornings, Drunken Swallows.

by Christopher Cyrill I despise the word blog. I mean no offence to bloggers anywhere and mean no criticism of the concept. I just don’t like the word. I don’t like the word frangipani either. After keeping a writer’s journal for many years I found rereading them a kind of torture that I expect to be reserved for my postdays. (My purgatory, my perdition – read what you wrote down about fiction and process at the age of twenty-nine…now push this rock up that hill, forever.) I view all of my work to this point as juvenilia. And I can’t…

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Dies Festus

by Justin Clemens   Although the academic conferences dry up like a desert pool, the literary festivals never end. From Adelaide and Alice Springs to Woollahra and the Whitsundays, it’s a perpetually-effervescing celebration of writing of all kinds. Whether you’re into poetry or prose, digital writing or graphic novels, romance, sci-fi, horror, crime, comic extravaganzas, theatricals, screen-writing, non-fiction, creative non-fiction, uncreative writing, business-writing, medical-writing, science-writing, adult or children’s literature, emerging, aging, dead or unborn writers, art books, rare books, common books, no books, Indigenous or Jewish writers, the country, the coast, or the city — there’s a festival for you.…

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The Future Freeze

Lisa Gorton Cryogenics is probably the weirdest version of ambition. It proves how hard it is to think about the future: its images have no intimacy. This difficulty is probably identical to the difficulty of imagining the past not as it appears in retrospect, but as it was when its future was undecided, alive with possibilities. Nothing shows how habit has consumed strangeness so much as reading an out-of-date book of prophecies. Take Archibald Williams’ book, The Romance of Modern Invention. You can read it here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41160. It covers the telephone, ‘mechanical flight’ and ‘horseless carriages’.  Here is its prediction…

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On realism, Walter Benjamin and cricket commentary

Lisa Gorton Lately, driving here and there, I have been listening to cricket on the radio. In truth, I take no interest in the game; but talk has its genres, too, and I have been amusing myself by trying to classify cricket commentary. It seems to offer the comfort of realism. Here are men talking together, looking over the same field: a green field of shared experience.  Listening to the men talk, it seems as though this pitch, this green field, has been fenced off from all that Walter Benjamin notices in his sad and brilliant essay, ‘The Storyteller’. In…

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