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Your mileage may vary

Graphophone1901I made my first foray to the Oxford Art Factory this week to see a gig by Jenny Lewis’ new band, Jenny and Johnny, who were quite decent. They were supported by a band I’d never heard of called the Laurels, so, in preparation, my companions and I looked them up online to learn a bit about them. I shall now quote from the Triple J website to make sure I get the phrasing of this description exactly correct.

The Laurels are a shoegaze band from Sydney whose psychedelic juggernaut has accumulated accolades, guitar pedals and fans in approximately equal proportion.

... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 11-02-2011, 15 user comments

This writing life

Varuna, Image 2 -- Irma Gold

I have recently returned from a blissful week at Varuna Writers’ Centre. For the uninitiated Varuna is writers’ heaven. Housed in author Eleanor Dark’s former Blue Mountains residency, it is the only place of its kind in Australia where writers can stay and focus solely on writing. With four other writers living in the house, evening conversations often turned to the writing process. We talked about how, when and where we write. About the perfect space in which to create. Varuna aside (for surely there is nowhere more perfect than this place), I confessed to a love of cafes. There you can write in a bubble but are surrounded by life that feeds you. The novel I went to Varuna to work on has mostly been written in this way, fuelled by many a cup of coffee. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 10-02-2011, 13 user comments

173 lives

St.Andrews_Kinglake Road – by Nick CarsonAs I begin to write this blog I am sitting in the stairwell of my building because it is two degrees cooler than in my apartment. The touch-pad thingy on my laptop isn’t really working because of the sweat on my hands and I swear the walls are beginning to bend in the heat. Or maybe I just need another drink of water. The heat is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t make me nervous anymore – I no longer live near the bush. Even so, when I go outside, the hot westerly wind automatically sets of a checklist in my mind: ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 9-02-2011, 1 user comment

The paddocks of amnesia

3772-84mcnaught_druckmullerOn Australia Day night the moon rose very late. On nights like that the sky is revealed as an event that the word ‘spectacular’ doesn’t do justice. The Milky Way with the Magellanic Clouds hanging off it gives the sky a profound depth. In daylight the farthest you can see is three-and-a-half minutes no matter where you are. At night, the farthest object you can see with the naked eye – Galaxy M31 in Andromeda – is about 2.5 million light years away. Light that set out toward us, as Carl Sagan once memorably put it to his presumably astounded American television audience, long before there were hamburgers or television. It’s the strangest thing looking at the revealed night sky. There’s a kind of ‘Oh, that’s the sky’ moment of understanding. That blue stuff we usually think of as sky, isn’t. We’ve just got the light shining in our eyes and can’t see anything. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 8-02-2011, 6 user comments

Re Readings, Bookish and other people who love ebooks

9781863954877Without a doubt, the greatest thing about ebooks is their convenience. If it’s 2am and you must read Anna Krien’s Into the Woods because an unexpected need to understand Tasmania’s environmental politics arises, in this day and age, you should be able to buy that book (in much the same way as you could find articles relating to the subject on the internet at 2am).

About a fortnight ago, the much-anticipated Readings ebook store was launched in Australia. A collaboration with SPUNC (the Small Press Network), the ebooks store aims to make electronically available independent Australian books, many for the first time. With 120 titles so far, authors such as Tom Cho and his short story collection Look Who’s Morphing or anthologies like Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2 are finding new electronic audiences. For books that are often swallowed by the sea of titles in a bookstore, this is fantastic news. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 7-02-2011, 23 user comments

The proof is in the chalk

There’s this:

And then there’s this:

Spot the difference.

I’m not saying Glenn Beck’s finally taken the irreversible plunge from histrionic travesty and crocodile tears into an oubliette of his own consciousness, but I suspect we’re all kind of thinking it.

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Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 4-02-2011, 8 user comments

Who’s afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood?

They are:

mubarak-obama

The tyrant’s strategy seems clear. After 30 years of brutality, repression and feathering the nest of his globetrotting fellow elites, at the moment his regime is in peril he will act as the reasonable one. He will act to reverse the ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’ in the streets as gangs of violent thugs attack and murder anti-government protesters.

In an interview with American ABC’s Christiane Amanpour:

He said he's fed up with being president and would like to leave office now, but cannot, he says, for fear that the country would sink into chaos.

I asked President Mubarak about the violence that his supporters launched against the anti-government protestors in Liberation Square.

He told me, ‘I was very unhappy about yesterday. I do not want to see Egyptians fighting each other.’

... read more

Written by Tad Tietze on 4-02-2011, 1 user comment

Egypt: Revolution, counter-revolution and Islamism

Game over

Great to wake up this morning to see that the Egyptian army is publicly stating it won’t use force against the protesters. Of course this could just be part of buying time for the regime, but it goes to the scale of the crisis facing Mubarak and his allies:

‘The presence of the army in the streets is for your sake and to ensure your safety and wellbeing. The armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people,’ the army statement said.

‘Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands and are keen to assume their responsibility in protecting the nation and the citizens, affirms that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody.’

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Written by Tad Tietze on 2-02-2011, No comments

Do you want myself or do you want my song? Poetry & truth

While I was pregnant with my (now four-month-old) daughter, I was performing a feature poetry set in Melbourne and during the break a woman came up to me and said: Congratulations! I’m so glad to see you’re expecting. That poem about your son dying is so sad, it makes my heart break.

gilscotth-677x1024My response was to stare at her blankly. I thought she’d probably confused me with someone else, and asked whether she had. She looked a little confused. You just performed that poem – the one about your son being shot. I looked at her again, blankly. The poem you JUST read, she insisted, it’s in your book! I wracked my brain and realised she meant the poem ‘mali’, which appears in my book Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (Picaro Press, 2010). The poem is about the anxiety of carrying a black child in the womb, with the mother (myself) imagining all of the things that could go wrong: ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 2-02-2011, 9 user comments

Some dreadful Australian commentary on Egypt

egypt_protest_First, take David Burchell:

There have been only two popular ideologies of consequence in the Middle East since colonialism’s squalid death in the 1950s: Soviet-style authoritarianism, with its specious liturgy of anti-colonialism, and the grand, exultant nihilism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow extremists.

Now let’s think about a few popular ideologies since the 1950s. First would be the two most popular leaders from the 50s: Mossadeq in Iran, and Nasser in Egypt. Mossadeq was a secular nationalist, and so was Nasser (Nasser was a dictator, unlike Mossadeq). Nasser was wildly popular throughout the Middle East, and harshly repressed communists and the Muslim Brotherhood. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 1-02-2011, 2 user comments