Progressive culture since 1954
Navid is chasing his dreams. Dreams that as a stateless Feyli Kurd he cannot achieve where he is, a Feyli Kurd who cannot acquire a National ID card, who cannot participate in sporting competitions. Living here is difficult for someone like Navid who has given his blood, sweat and tears to wrestling. He is a stateless person whose life changed suddenly, who can now no longer remain living where he is.
The mother and her two girls were naked in the members’ change room of the gymnasium. They had just taken a shower and their three blue towels were hanging on the hooks. The mother was brushing her hair. Evie was sitting on the wooden bench getting herself dressed. She pulled on a pair of pyjama pants, which were decorated with a single repeated print of a purple unicorn.
What is the colour of the world? The bush flame? And how should I begin? With phantoms like portents a blowtorch on the roadhouse the pity blues dogs don’t let up bragging. In the aftertaste of mourning are bankrupt sermons ‘twit twit twit’
Shows like Parks and Rec and Schitt’s Creek (or Rosehaven) represent the continuation of the pastoral fantasy in the context of social and political upheaval. The pastoral endures in the English imagination, the context where Williams excavated its grip, but the category is just as applicable elsewhere in an age of environmental catastrophe, political upheaval and economic immiseration.
As sabre-rattling escalates and increasingly hysterical claims of foreign influence are used as pretexts for military build-up – in Australia and elsewhere – John le Carré’s novels will not stay in the last century. They will remain as prescient and timely as ever, and only become more essential to our understanding of how secret power is wielded against the forces seeking a more just world.