Archive
Why do we read what we read? Bookshelves groan with biography, travel, social theory far left corner, cultural studies creeping up the front, Baudrillard in the back door and out the front. Some people’s books get featured in the weekend papers, others go straight into the back of the car and the second-hand shops. Love, sweat and tears … what’s it all for?
... (read more)Suffrage to Sufferance: 100 years of women in politics by Janine Haines
Boundary Conditions: The poetry of Gwen Harwood by Jennifer Strauss
What is the relationship between our literary culture and the academy? Moreover, should there be any relationship between the two, or is it healthier if each remains separate, largely isolated from the other? These-questions were brought into focus for me by ‘Word Games’, a provocative essay in the Spring issue of Island, that lively Tasmanian literary magazine.
... (read more)Because it’s the end of the year, every Tom, Dick and Harry is trotting out the Top Books of the Year, My Favourite Summer Reading, What Book I’d Like for Christmas – good old standbys. ABR, however, is looking soberly (for the most part) at the current state of critical writing. Critics and scholars and researchers talking about theory and analysis. People engaged in the processes that help us sort through why we respond to writing in the ways we do, with joy or horror, enthusiasm or indifference.
... (read more)This was an extraordinary task you set yourself. How did you decide to do it in the first place?
I was actually asked to do it. Lesley Mackay, who has a bookshop in Double Bay that I go to, was doing a bit of publishing and packaging, and it suddenly occurred to her that while there was a Writer’s France and a Writer’s Britain there hadn’t been a Writer’s Australia, so she came to me with the idea. She thought she could package the idea to a publisher and would I write it? I thought, what a wonderful idea and signed the contract, and then realised that what I was going to do was write an entire literary history of Australia, and every chapter could have been a book on its own, and probably should have been.
... (read more)While most people were looking forward to the Mid-autumn Festival, she was hoping it wouldn’t come quite so quickly. However, it didn’t really matter what anybody thought, mid-autumn gradually loomed closer and closer.
... (read more)On hearing Samuel Beckett refute his birth date my mother, who was pregnant with me, was thrown into a whirl.
‘He cannot’, she said to a gathering of friends who shared her view that he would praise their new club motto which, they had just decided, would be:
... (read more)Seek disorder, Live for enigma. Beware of fools and false causes.
Book reviewing. I’ve done quite a lot of it. I regard it as my trade and a profession, one to be proud of, with principles and rules and responsibilities, to be practised ethically and with generosity. And not gloomily, nor theoretically, for I write for readers, not scholars.
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