Non Fiction
To estimate the amount of waffle in a cultural policy document, try this patented test: (i) identify a given sentence or section; (ii) highlight the key terms; (iii) swap the key terms around. If it still makes as much sense, it’s waffle. Another way of saying this is that there are always two people responsible for cultural policy. The first is reasonable, knowledgeable, historically aware. The second is a nutbag, droning on about specious targets and unprovable effects. The first writes things like ‘government’s role in supporting culture is most visible in the major cultural organisations it funds’ (Creative Australia, p. 32) and ‘there is a need to nurture the most gifted and talented while providing for those who want to take pleasure from arts and culture’ (CA, 69). The second writes baloney like ‘the benefits of our cultural and creative assets must be maximised. Innovation across all industry sectors is essential to driving productivity growth, maintaining high standards of living and growing competitiveness in the global economy’ (CA, 92). Why can’t we just have the first person? Why does someone who sounds as if he has swallowed a Treasury manual with the words in the wrong order thwart the sense of all government intervention in the cultural sector?
... (read more)Boomer & Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s by Jo Case
Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-left Future (Quarterly Essay 49) by Mark Latham
A human body exposed to summer heat can be reduced to bones in nine days. First the flies and maggots feast on the body’s fluids. As the tissues decay, they feed on the whole body through orifices and wounds. Next the insects and predators gorge on the juicy maggots. Once the body has begun to decompose, in come the beetles that tuck in to the tougher flesh, skin, and ligaments. In Australia the intestines of herbivores are a delicacy for the dung beetle. Then moths and mites feed on fly eggs and hair. Meantime, the bacteria are busy, helping the body to decompose and recycling the nutrients. Is that, I wonder, what happened to our Brahman bull Angel?
... (read more)‘We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1846. His title was ‘The Literati of New York City’; his topic was the discrepancy, as he saw it, between the critics’ private opinions of books and the polite reviews of them that appeared in print. Literary criticism in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, Poe argued, was essentially corrupt: a matter of back-scratching, currying favour, and chasing after influence, power, and money.
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