Updates
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…
Libraries under threat
What a pity Michael Wilding’s excellent piece Libraries under threat did not pick up on the demise of the National Drug Sector Information Service (NDSIS), a subsidiary of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, which the Abbott Government defunded in November 2013.
The Australian Face
Julieanne Lamond’s illuminating review of Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda is a fine illustration of the importance of long reviews. I have been watching the ‘oh gosh, this is fab’ short reviews, and wondering why no one has been able to talk about the faultlines in this ambitious book.
The Curse of Formalism
There are a number of aspects of Ben Denham’s article ‘The Curse of Formalism’ that trouble me. The most significant one is that he never actually tells us what he means by a formalist-minimalist alliance, nor does he attempt to describe how this alliance came about.
Brittle and brilliant
In his thoughtful and largely generous review of Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, Paul Stanhope states of my revelation that syphilis was the cause of Britten’s heart disease, ‘It is a shame that Kildea ran with this theory (which has long been rumoured) without testing the evidence more thoroughly’. I think it equally a shame that Paul Stanhope has not read the article ‘Body of Evidence’ in the New Statesman (7–13 June 2013) by cardiologist Hywel Davies, my source for the diagnosis of syphilis.
Road to Omission
It is bracing, to say the least, to see one’s review being itself reviewed by such an erudite meta-critic as Dr Ben Etherington. No writer – certainly no book reviewer – can complain if a reader finds his or her work to be lacking in insight, deficient in sensibility or stylistically irksome…