Essays
Universities and the Block
Pyne is attempting to divert the function and aims of knowledge in our society. His policy clinches and fully institutionalises the worldview that understands education entirely as a private good. The public benefits of major scientific discovery, rigorous social diagnosis, and cultural imagination will henceforth be the generous efflorescence of private ambition.
‘I have had my vision’
The more I go on, the more I am convinced that a great book is one which leads its readers away from the worn path of what they already know, to a wild and unfamiliar place where new logics and understandings can take hold. But of course there is nothing new in this – it is what any gifted editor has always known: that each book is its own wild creature, and that sometimes it is in disorder and inconsistency and ambiguity where the greatest art lies.
Uncut blancmange
This year’s Biennale is all very anodyne and, ironically enough, apolitical. It is rather over representative of Scandinavia and the Anglosphere for some reason, and there does not appear to have been much of an effort to put the Australian artists in any sort of international context.
Nimble innovators
The recent sprouting of literary journals in Australia is proof of the scene’s fecundity. The past five years have witnessed the birth of Kill Your Darlings, Archer, Contrappasso, Higher Arc, Cuttings, Tincture, The Canary Press, Stilts, The Review of Australian Fiction, Ampersand and Seizure. There are others – this is not an exhaustive list.
Libraries under threat
The destruction of the libraries of the English speaking world has been underway for a quarter of a century. It dates from the Reagan-Thatcher regime of the 1980s, the introduction of economic rationalism and the payback for the student activism of the 1960s and 1970s.
So many paths that wind and wind
And so it is that every book and every writer needs their own story of how they came to be: some reason that their book was written, some reason it was published, some reason it should be picked up in a bookstore. This is particularly so for debut writers, who must try their luck in, as William Blake put it, a desolate market where none come to buy.