Progressive culture since 1954
Archiving and sustaining history is an impossible challenge for every art form. Old paintings fade, books go mouldy, original copies of films are lost in warehouse fires. The perceived immateriality of digital forms such as videogames is often seen as a miracle solution, not susceptible to the degradation of mere material artefacts. But the truth is far more dire: digital artefacts are no less dependent on their material grounding than non-digital artefacts.
In the acknowledgements of Foreign Soil, I credit Francesca Rendle-Short, Sam Twyford-Moore and Paddy O’Reilly, the judges of the Victorian Premiers Award for an unpublished manuscript: who in selecting Foreign Soil, made the bravest of decisions where others may well not have. This acknowledgement was carefully and painstakingly worded: what Indyk said recently in his Sydney Review of Books article about the commercial element of literary prizes is true, at least in part. Nobody wants a book or manuscript to win a prize and not be published or sell well.
Like heads of business, Australian vice-chancellors are raking in pretty big salary packages, making the notion of asking for handouts a bit odd. They earn an average of $800,000 a year – twice what the prime minister does, at least ten times more than academic staff, and, we can assume, a hell of a lot more than administration staff (and yet, an acquaintance I spoke to recalls being regularly hit up for donations when working in university admin).
So the Abbott government completes the full Hobbesian trifecta, proving itself short as well as nasty and brutish. If you want some extra schaden with your freude, note that the New Yorker’s currently illustrating its story about the PM’s early demise with a picture captioned: ‘The newly ousted Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, samples a raw onion during a visit to Tasmania.’ Such gravitas! Much dignity! Wow!
The Australian colony was established on the dispossession of its Indigenous inhabitants. The sole moral principle applied was that the strong shall do as they will and the weak suffer as they must. Failing to replace this founding principle with any sturdier narrative of national legitimacy, Australia has since lived in a perpetual state of fear that the dispossessors would inevitably become the dispossessed – and a pathological obsession with controlling our borders has flourished ever since.
I’m worried I’m an over-writer. Look, I just really like adjectives, okay? My worst stylistic habit is stringing them onto my sentences two at a time, like perfect glossy beads. I can see myself doing it, but can’t stop. Adverbs, too. And when I write descriptively, allusively, using grammar rhythmically, I sense my meaning sharpening a little more with each detail.
What if our most closely held ideas about nature are reactionary? What if the project of restoring wildernesses that we (humans or moderns) have defiled – is misconceived and counterproductive? What if the deeply inscribed understanding of prelapsarian nature, as McKenzie Wark proposes, ‘an ecology that was self-correcting, self-balancing and self-healing’, is a way of surreptitiously reviving a God who might regulate and constrain human appetites? How would abandoning such ideas help us to address the interlocking emergencies – climatic, economic, humanitarian – that are already underway?
Instead of the generic factoids-plus-publication-list anthologised writers might use, Yi-Fen Chou’s revealed that Chou was in fact Michael Derrick Hudson, a white man from Indiana. According to his bio, Hudson becomes Chou only when his poems are rejected several times, because apparently his poems get noticed that way. That’s cool – because as we know, Asian writers definitely get noticed and published all the time! (No, they don’t.) As blogger Angry Asian Man quipped about this ‘yellowface’: ‘The fuck?’
Interactivity is considered one of the defining features of the online experience, yet the reality of most media consumers today is one defined by interpassivity. And it presents a serious challenge for those of us engaged in online journalism.
But simply stating an event is inclusive does not automatically make it so. The phrase ‘pussy power’ promotes the idea that having a vagina is synonymous with being a woman. This is problematic on two levels: it excludes those women who do not have a vagina from the category of women; it also erases the gender identity of trans men and non-binary people who have vaginas by insisting that they are women. This is cis-sexism. Apart from the important reality that associating vaginas with womanhood can trigger dysphoria for some trans people, trans women, like other trans people, face the constant negation of their gender identities.
Sure, everyone says children’s books are benign, but make no mistake: reading is a gateway drug. I was doing poems by the age of five. At ten I had read every book in the house. Every cent of my pocket money went to support my habit. I fooled around with writing a novel, but back then I still had some sense of self-preservation. I threw it out and stuck with poems. Everyone said poems did no harm.
Indyk seems to think that the marketplace is a swelling crowd of populist barbarians – possibly an image that would be appreciated by Pratchett – but not (to his mind) comprised of the ‘true’ readers of literature. Quality and appeal are not mutually exclusive. In attempting to distinguish the ‘marketplace’ from cultural appreciation, Indyk wrests from the readers of books the power to be considered and conscious of what they read. He seems to think that the people who read Pratchett are different from the people who read Marquez, but he has no evidence of this.
Corbyn’s election sets up a real-world challenge to a central belief of Australian Labor’s political class – that shifting to the left will not win elections. This betrays a two-dimensional sort of thinking that belongs to the analogue age: we only have to move the marker rightwards until we reach the magical point of electability. The social base, which made this sort of strategy a viable way of winning in the 1980s and 1990s, has changed. Trying to win more elections on this basis is most certainly madness.
Today, stories of violence against women – particularly those who self-identify as feminists – appear in what feels like a ceaseless onslaught. Recent examples range from the harassment of Melbourne writer Clementine Ford and the Gamergate scandal, to the brutal murder of American university student Grace Mann. The velocity with which these stories spread across social media suggests that the phenomenon is relatively contemporary and gaining momentum, but one does not need to search hard for earlier examples.
This paragraph raises a lot of questions. The most straightforward is the one that might seem the hardest to define: what should the science fiction community stand for? In so far as science fiction is a community – a term that could encompass much, from informal gatherings to the industrial empires of media franchises – it should stand for the levels of good practice you would expect in a well-managed and well-organised workplace or public event in an advanced capitalist country. Don’t stand for bullying, harassment, insults, assaults.