Updates
The Harper Lee controversy
Last week, I was given a copy of Marja Mills’ memoir The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee (2014). So far I haven’t been able to read it. The problem is not the quality of the prose – I haven’t ventured into that yet – it is connected to the controversy surrounding the book. Mills has become embroiled in a serious dispute with Harper Lee.
Nussbaum’s Political Emotions
In a week that saw the kinds of destructive political emotions that Nussbaum identifies – fear, disgust, contempt – reclaim their place at the centre of the national conversation (they never seem to be too far away), a week in which all the talk was suddenly about limiting freedoms and enhancing powers and increasing surveillance, it certainly didn’t seem to be the case that anyone’s right to be a bigot was being unduly curtailled. Quite the contrary, it was being enthusiastically exercised by a number of our elected representatives.
Render it barely
When a reviewer praises a book as ‘a major achievement’ and then devotes a further 4000 words to finding fault with its rationale, you can be pretty sure that the fault-finding and the so-called ‘major achievement’ are connected, otherwise why would you bother?
Primavera and university deregulation
Next week, on Tuesday 23 September, Stefan Collini will be giving a public lecture at Sydney University entitled ‘What’s Happening to Universities? Historical and Comparative Perspectives’. Collini has been an outspoken and trenchant critic of the deregulation of the university system in the United Kingdom, and his lecture is sure to be relevant to the present situation in Australia.
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.
Arts in Alice Springs, Nobel Prize odds
At the Araluen Arts Centre, Aboriginal artists are now converging (at the time of publication) for the twenty-fifth Desert Mob Symposium to discuss arts practices, projects and the experience of working within Aboriginal-owned arts centres. The symposium, which is driven by Desart, is one of the vital arts initiatives for Aboriginal artists in this country. Artists speak directly about their work, practices and cultural practices, as well as the joys and challenges that come with being an arts practitioner in remote Australia. This year, the theme of the symposium is ‘reflection and projection’ and it will be worth following the conversations that emerge.
29 August 2014: libraries doing it tough
Libraries are doing it tough. Never have they been so popular (see the American-based but locally relevant PEW study, ‘The library in the city’), and yet so under-funded. The sector continues to grapple with cuts, often leading to reductions in staff, services, book access, and occasionally branch closures. The statistics behind some of the cuts are revealing. In 1939 when the NSW Library Act was first introduced, the state contributed 50 percent of the funding. By 1980 that contribution had fallen to 23 percent. Today, the state contributes just seven percent, leaving local councils to carry 93 percent of the load.
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.