Witnessing, reading through this absorbing, elegant, careful example of the art, is always a kind of mourning, and Conrad, an author for whom writing was “the conversion of nervous force into phrases,” is the perfect figure to focus Edmond’s ongoing work of mourning.

Those gifts were other writers, thinkers, concepts, moments. Jameson served as an expansive mediator, setting up texts that promised to be an encounter between a moment or text and a diverse set of thinkers. One would learn plenty along the way in the encounter, certainly, but, as time went on, what was there to return was his style itself.

Literature’s magical power has always been in its ability to name. This power – from Les Murray’s ‘This country is my mind’ all the way through to critiques of stereotyping – is a common ground over which conservatives and radicals quarrel, and it’s what has been done with these shared assumptions that I want to explore below.

Denis Rodman’s visit to the north of Korea, for all its particular oddities, and for all the awkward sadness such a sudden and public disclosure of alcoholism brings, fitted neatly into a comfortable, familiar pattern. North of the 38th parallel is, in the Western imagination, the realm of Great Men and the theory of history named in their honour.

Can Australian politics get any ghastlier? Even from a country away the stench from Rudd and Abbott appalls. So much for boundless plains to share. Racism, so much a part of the practice of the elites in Australia and elsewhere, can seem so pervasive we miss its everyday reinforcements and constructions. There’s institutional racism aplenty, to be sure, but identifying it forces us to another question: how did institutions get that way?

All media is social media. That’s the first point I think needs emphasised. We have had this term ‘media’ since the mid-twentieth century, and the term ‘medium’, in the sense of ‘an intervening or intermediate agency or substance’, since the sixteenth century.

I spent a morning at the former ‘comfort women’s’ weekly demonstration outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul one Wednesday during the northern summer of 2008, and have never been sure how to write about the experience.

Uman ribu was an explosively radical, restless, artfully angry constellation of women’s liberation groups and collective thinkers who emerged out of Japan’s New Left in the 1970s. Ribu aimed, in its fusing of life experiences, activist intervention and theoretical reflection, to offer ways out of some familiar Left impasses.

At the centre of resistance is a tent outside the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, a reclaiming of public space that has been defying official warnings, police threat, attacks from rightists and the weather for well over a year. It’s quite a sight in Tokyo, where busking, political leafleting or postering are almost impossible.

Pop Idol Minami Minegishi of AKB48, begging forgiveness of her fans and managers, her long hair shaved, her face contorted by grief and shame. The YouTube video of her confession and recantation - viewed more than 3 million times on AKB48’s official channel, but currently private at the time of writing this - makes for horrible viewing. She begs, cries, bows before the camera, distraught and obviously emotionally damaged.

Literary criticism discusses its objects always in the present tense, I tell my students when correcting their attempts to follow the discipline’s odder habits, because literature is always happening.

In 2009, the last year I lived in Japan, it was 新 – the new – that became word of the year: a new government, with the Liberal Democrats defeated and in disarray, and new hopes.

The term ‘terrorist,’ Alain Badiou argues in ‘On September 11: Philosophy and the ‘War Against Terrorism’ has become ‘an essentially empty term,’ a ‘non-existent substance, an empty name,’ a void which is ‘precious because it can be filled’. The predicate ‘Islamic’ (or, in the past week ‘Palestinian’) has, for Badiou, no ‘other function than to give ostensible content to that form’.

Is the internet making us all stupider? Are we cursed to a lifetime of intellectual paddling in the shallows? Are young people now culturally bereft and cursed with short attention spans? Is this the age of cultural amnesia? Is the book dead? Is everyone forgetting everything? Are we going to be cursed with total recall? Does no-one out there on the internet realise I’m a dog?

i.m. Alison Stoddart (1980–2012) It’s a sign of the full force and audacity of the Modernists (I’m using this term, slackly perhaps, both for the writers themselves and for their institutionalisation via Kenner and the rest) that, even now, and after all of what’s been, theirs are the lines I reach for in self-justification.

[W]hat travels under the sign of defeat and demoralisation turns out, more often than not, to reveal itself on closer inspection to be an assumed relationship between realism and the notion of the inspirational text.

Two events from the past fortnight have stuck firm in my memory. A few Fridays ago I heard Rjurik Davidson talk about ‘Political writers in the Neoliberal Era’ at Historical Materialism Australasia, and then the next evening I saw Bell Shakespeare’s production of The Duchess of Malfi at the Sydney Opera House.

For leftists in this region, there’s good reason to pay closer attention to what’s happening in Japan.

I love teaching first-year classes. There’s an expectation sometimes that this won’t be the case, or that more advanced courses offer more exciting situations, which they can do, of course, but the way in which the adjective ‘undergraduate’ can be used as an insult seems to me not so much snobbish as silly. Undergraduate teaching makes you work.

No knocking about with uncertainties here: holes are a good, demanding term with which to visualise emptiness, loss, and lack, suggesting both a certain misogynist way of accounting for women’s bodies (‘getting your hole’, in certain parts of Edinburgh, being a way of describing having sex) and naming what’s left after conflict and destruction.

New Year’s Day this year marked fifty years of Samoan independence. It’s an important anniversary in any setting, but marking this victory feels especially important at this site. Overland, with its ‘temper democratic’ and ‘bias Australian’, draws on, and aims to contribute to, the anti-imperialist traditions of this part of the world, and contemporary Australia is unthinkable without the vibrant Samoan contributions to the multiculture of Sydney, Brisbane and the GC.

The narrator of Bob Dylan’s ‘Highlands’, the rambling, meandering conclusion to his Time Out of Mind, 1996), faces this question during a strangely distracted encounter he’s having with a waitress. For all that her line of enquiry is unexpected – they’ve been discussing his order and sketches until then – the narrator’s response fits a standard, familiar pattern: How would you know, he asks, and what would it matter anyway?