Correspondence
The week in review 12 September 2014: Martin Harrison
This morning as the bus passed the Tower Building I felt so pained by the loss. Martin Harrison was one of those unforgettable teachers who (like Glenda Adams another wonderful UTS luminary) gave so much to his students. His ability to speak to you as a poet and writer, even when you were just starting out, made poetry seem a legitimate vocation and part of a deep conversation that continued long after you had left university.
Dancing and Prancing
In introducing the worthy Sydney Review of Books, James Ley writes that it has been established on ‘the belief that in-depth analysis and robust critical discussion are crucial to the development of Australia’s literary culture’. I am not so sure. The sceptic might feel that it is more crucial to building careers in literature…
Week in review 15 August 2014: political memoirs
Rachel Morley writes ‘2014 has been something of a watershed year for books on Australian politics’. I am interested to see the word ‘watershed’ used in a vague sense such as Meg Greenfield noted in US political usage 40 or 45 years ago. Even there, though, the Americans preserved a sense of crossing a divide, and passing from one watershed to another.
Listen
I want to thank Sydney Review of Books for commissioning a review of Foreign Soil. It is by far the most comprehensive and articulate review of the book I have come across – and the book had been very widely reviewed. I also wanted to respond some of Fiona Wright’s comments about my research for the story ‘The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa’.
A sentence is a half-formed thing
Thanks to Kerryn Goldsworthy for her review of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride. My correspondence comes at a tangent to the substance of the review. I was brought up short in the course of reading the review by the statement ‘This may or may not be technically incest’, which follows a description of the rape of a niece by an uncle.
A perfect pyre
I have just read Kristin Otto’s review of Gardens of Fire by Robert Kenny. I much enjoyed it and am keen now to read Dr Kenny’s book, which sounds fascinating. I found myself pulled up, however, by something Ms Otto said near the beginning of the piece: ‘… multiple strands of narrative are expertly woven, with no more than the currently expected amount of editing shortfall’.
In the ruins of the future
Well done James Gourley, for taking a look at Thomas Pynchon’s astonishingly good Bleeding Edge, including the curmudgeonly critical reception, but finding a way to move beyond that. It is extraordinary how many of the reviews of Bleeding Edge got bogged down in what Gourley calls the ‘interpretive assumptions that have come to surround Pynchon’s work’.
The last shot in the war
Guy Rundle’s wise and witty review of Richard King’s On Offence: The Politics of Indignation raises the question: who uses terms like ‘political correctness’ or ‘cultural relativism’ anyway, and to what end? My impression is that they are largely straw men or stalking horses for reactionary commentators, who claim to have been oppressed (or dare I say offended?) by these doctrines in a way that is somehow comparable to the victims of totalitarian regimes – let alone the victims of sexism, racism or exploitation.
‘All he is at this point is brains and sex’
Justin Clemens’s review of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life indirectly confirms his own contention that Benjamin continues to have ‘a bad time in and with universities’. After some apparently thoughtful opening paragraphs on the perils of biography, Clemens proceeds to enact his own thesis in a glib assessment of Benjamin’s character that reveals more about himself than his subject…