Essays
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.
The Curse of Formalism
One of the explanations for minimalism’s success in challenging formalism in the 1960s is that it wasn’t really a challenge at all. Minimalism may well have functioned as a clean critique of abstract expressionism’s perceived excesses, but it wasn’t a great rupture with formalism.
The most important question
The most important question was posed by Marguerite of Navarre, in the 1540s. She posed it, perhaps, at her favorite thermal spa, Cauterets, in the Pyrenees south of Lourdes. It was, ‘Can a woman know true love and retain her virtue?’ Marguerite was a the sister of François I of France, and the wife of the King of Navarre, a much younger man. She was a poet, a reformist and an intellectual.
Signs for the Soul
The reading Coetzee offers of Gerald Murnane is interesting in a number of ways: it not only tells us things that Coetzee sees in Murnane, it tells us that Coetzee considers Murnane’s work to be important, and worthy of wider attention. It also tells us that Coetzee sees things in Murnane that concern him, in every sense of the word concern.