Essays

A world literature conceived as a negative ideal cannot pretend to be purely descriptive by restricting itself to mapping existing transnational literary networks. Instead, its task becomes to attend to the stubborn persistence of local literary ecologies in spite of globalisation

Richard tells me I should meet this old guy he knows, Jimmy Somerville, a strong union man, living legend — he remembers everything, Richard says — including that famous night during the war when tenor player Merv Acheson shot a bloke on stage at the 2KY Radiotorium over a missing shipment of illegal whisky.

There’s been a lot written already about the work of the late English writer, blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017. Last year, a substantial anthology of Mark’s blog writing — together with interviews, reviews, and an unfinished manuscript fragment — was published as k-punk (Repeater Books), which was also the name of his highly influential blog.

It is easy to think of writers pursuing their aims with a noble persistence, despite the fact that they will only have a few readers, and little support along the way – but it would be truer to see the experience of isolation as constitutive of their writing, as a formative influence, rather than as an impediment to it.

The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives. The fires are writing new stories into the very rocks and soil of our land, this land that has always had stories engraved in rocks and soil, this always-was-always-will-be Aboriginal land. Our newest story is pyrogenic. Born of fire, it will throw green shoots out from blackness. It must.

If “we” are to decolonise, then that requires de-structuring, dismantling, breaking, and disrupting what is constructed to maintain colonisation.

The gym is seen as antithetical to writing and intellect. The body doesn’t write, or if it does, it does so in another language. I don’t relate. I do most of my good writing at the gym, feeding off the extremities and horniness that gym contains.

Keep working! At all cost keep on working! — the mantra of the modern university, the ethic under-writing all folkloric myths of progressivism.

The birds fell silent this summer. For three days we didn’t hear or see them. Every morning and evening we stepped into the heat and smoke haze to place containers of water wherever shade could be found. The closest fire is 15 kilometres away and out of control. We are not in immediate threat from the fires here, but the smoke is thick. I am worried about the wildlife and our elderly neighbours.

Often against my will, but in my imagination, I would force myself to drive into that river, out of it and alongside it.