Progressive culture since 1954
What marks great cinema – and great novels, and great novel-to-film adaptations, and great art in general – is a fire in the belly. Adapting a so-called unfilmable novel requires much more than just carefully cherry-picking key plot and location points but demands an unhesitating willingness to roll around in the amorphous muck of abstraction that is so often a defining feature of books of this kind.
It was going to happen sooner or later. The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has thrown into relief fears that were tentatively voiced in 2014, when, in the name of globalism, the competition was first opened to American authors: that a US-UK hegemony would cast its shadow over the literary world, sidelining smaller Commonwealth voices and severely curtailing any purchase on diversity.
Processing the media and political response to this week’s Extinction Rebellion protests, you could be forgiven for concluding that many of our journalists and politicians have never heard of the American civil rights movement or Gandhi’s satyagraha, which inspired its methods of non-violent resistance.
Minimising the victimisation or abuse of women is hardly something new or groundbreaking – in society or on a comedy stage. If you genuinely want to be edgy and challenge the ‘PC brigade’, go on stage and eat your own shit in protest of society’s pressure to recycle.
As industrial organiser Jerome Small once said: ‘I’m not a robot and I’m not a donkey, so I should be able to stop working when I choose to’. Sadly, going out on strike is all but outlawed in Australia, thanks to some of the most restrictive laws surrounding workplace action in any OECD nation.
We live in a time in which the gulf between the powerful and the powerless has widened immensely, both because of the ongoing transfer of wealth to the political class and because of the general collapse of the organisations of the Left.
When looking through Liu’s lens, it’s not hard to start searching for the spectral absences that haunt this country. His work urges us to be diligent in seeing, in cautiously determining what and who deserve our ethical concern in the affronting yet normalised landscapes we occupy in an urbanising world.
Island has a distinct focus arising from where it is published, and it continues to publish, champion and develop Tasmanian writing and ideas. But the magazine has been defunded by Arts Tasmania, and it will suspend publishing if extra support isn’t forthcoming.
Climate change presents a unique opportunity to remake society to be more just, more caring and less exploitative and greed-driven. It is in Indigenous knowledge systems that we will find the blueprint for building that society, and it is in the Indigenous struggle that we find the blueprint for dismantling the failing system imposed on us.
New work by Franny Choi, essa may ranapiri, Tricia Dearborn, Zenobia Frost, Caitlin Maling and aj carruthers reviewed by Rae White.
I see Nigella as a sort of role model for all those women for whom eating is a hard-won skill. For me, her real talent lies not in cooking or even her recipes per se, but in her confidently taking a creamy, loaded forkful of carbonara as joyfully as she wields the tools of language.
This is my home but not my country. When I visited Sicily for the first time as an adult, in the 1990s, I understood that maybe it was my country but it could never be my home. The fig tree is oblivious to its origins, to its alien status but for me, this belonging and not belonging is the source of all my questions, all my writing.
Ramsay is long gone, but through the medium of his money he still bends the world to his will, brushing aside the concerns of perennially underpaid and overworked researchers in blind, vindictive pursuit of his foundation’s obsolete agenda, wrapping his rotting hands around the neck of modern thought and trying to drag it down with him into the stinking grave of a past that never was.
Just a few months ago, it looked extremely unlikely that Jock Palfreeman, the Australian serving a twenty-year sentence for murder in Bulgaria, would ever be paroled. Originally convicted in December 2009 of the murder of law student Andrei Monov (and of the attempted murder of his friend Antoan Zahariev) during a street fight in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in December 2007, Jock lost appeals against his conviction and sentence in 2010 and again in 2011. Now, in 2019, he’s won his parole.
What does this new Joker tell us about the twenty-first century? He says we’re lost, and we’re angry, and we’re entitled to more. But most of all, this Joker is just another man who feels like he doesn’t exist until he picks up a gun.
Thinking about books, reading, and publishing as post-digital helps to contextualise the growing popularity of audiobooks, while avoiding narratives that emphasise the ‘death’ of the book.
Being sexually propositioned on Tinder is akin to being asked for sex at a singles party. The same situation on LinkedIn reads like a colleague approaching you in the mail room and asking to fuck you on the copier. By turning LinkedIn into a tool for sex, men have invaded yet another online space, one where women were just going about their business.