Essays

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but the rooms of the house become a labyrinth, a game of snakes and ladders, a ten thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in which I am apt to forget my task or purpose.

The world lives with its distinct categorisations. Literature is placed to the left and the fantastical is to the right, but Borges made unique combinations of the two.

Naming is a political act as it ascribes a category to a nine-year-old, gives him a role pre-defined for him and accepted by the majority of the population, and anything outside of it, any difference to the norm as seen by society, including my insistence that my son be called by his name, is seen as an anomaly. A child’s foreignness isn’t affirmed by the politics that ascribe him other names; the politics of naming a child by other than his real name creates his foreignness in the first place.

As with many others, I have been thinking about questions of value in relation to Australian books and writing for some years. I have often pondered how to articulate such value, and also where, when, and to whom we might make an argument for it. Does it even make sense for Australian writers, readers, book industry spokespeople and educators to invest our limited time in making carefully calibrated arguments?

If the photograph, as Susan Sontag claims, is a note-taking form, then these images are notes on suburbia. Suburbia not just as a place but as a way of thinking and living, a lens through which we can see the world and understand our place within it; suburbia as a possibility.

Someone posted a recording from one of these events, and once again I was horrified; this time by the sound of my voice. It sounded so foreign to me. So Anglo-Australian. I had dropped my guard somewhere along the way and my Broken English had given way to an Art School Anglo-Aussie English with hints of Westie.

It might strike today’s readers as curious that for a period in the twenty-first century some people could work on their computers in any location they happened to choose, using a global computer network called ‘the internet’.

Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow is an imploration for the importance of affect and emotional immediacy in the wake of the collapse of the information age.

Later this trip will take on a mythical quality. It will become a reference point. Her birth country and her mythical country will be available to her as landmarks for her to understand her life. She will mention this trip when she identifies as a writer. She is selective with her words. She chooses the term formative.