The artlessness of politics

Type
Polemic
Category
Art
Capitalism in decline

The proposal and ensuing conversation show how the languages of government and art are incompatible. They are incompatible because art cannot be described in the vocabulary of the state without invoking purpose and commerce. Moreover, ministerial jargon does not admit moral ambiguity: those who govern traffic only in moral conviction. Embedded in any political polemic is the aspirational and patronising assertion that ‘We can all agree on x’, where x is to do with hospitals, education, terrorism etc. How could you disagree with this obvious good? Do you hate children? Do you love bombs?

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Type
Reflection
Category
Reading
The Body
Writing

Writers need literary theory

It is – or should be – the role of creative writing programs to challenge students’ ideas, to confront and reconsider every assumption a student might hold. Craft matters, but so too does originality of thought, of building on knowledge to produce something genuinely new. Removing literary theory from writing courses is an anti-intellectual move that is ultimately self-defeating, and it is one that de-politicises creative work.

clown
Type
Reflection
Category
Culture
History

Down with the clown

Today, with an orange-skinned buffoon with weird hair running for president, we’re plagued by evil clowns. Should we be surprised?

If the anti-corporate slogan ‘another world is possible’ gave rise to radical pie throwing, today’s clowns belong to a period in which political hopes have been so entirely crushed that carnival becomes less utopian and more nihilistic.

Freud-crop
Type
Reflection
Category
Feminism
The university
Violence

Trigger warnings: a feminist theory of trauma versus the neoliberal university

The narrative that trigger warnings pose a threat to freedom of speech, driven by a rabid identity politics, a resurgence of ‘political correctness’, or simply infatalised, maladjusted students is not just banal and intellectually lazy, but positions students themselves as the antagonists who pose a threat to education.

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Type
Article
Category
History
Refugees

Slow violence of incarceration

In 1991, Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, suggested that the bank develop a scheme to export garbage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries of rich nations to Africa. ‘Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction,’ Nixon writes in Slow Violence, ‘his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion.’

Homophobia-campaign
Type
Polemic
Category
LGBTQI
The plebiscite

The undead past

It sounds like science fiction, but there’s no question it works. Late last year, I wrote about the ‘debate’ over PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, which allows people who are HIV-negative to take a daily pill to prevent getting infected. It works whether or not condoms are used, and therein lies the rub: people who are opposed to gay men and transgender people getting it on freely tend to oppose PrEP as well. This, along with the fight for same-sex marriage, has reheated an older debate about gay ‘promiscuity’.

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Type
Reflection
Category
Writing

How not to kill your darlings

I felt like I’d been handed a creative and self-identity death sentence. I must finish before the child comes. But life ignores timelines. The pregnancy progressed. I struggled with character development and scenes, struggled to find narrative movement, struggled to recall words, struggled to sit still. I despised my former self for being a lazy writer, for not being prolific, for not being good enough at the craft.

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Type
Article
Category
Culture
imperialism
Reading

Do we really need the Booker?

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.

Slutwalk
Type
Article
Category
The law
Violence

Still not my fault

Comedian Louis CK has a piece of standup where he says, for women, the greatest risk to their health and safety is men. He likens going home with a man as potentially dangerous as going home with a wild bear: ‘I hope this one’s nice,’ he says wryly, as he mimes hopping into a cab.

It remains a wearing truth that women are expected to exercise constant vigilance against the potential threat some men pose. It is almost laughable how ridiculous the vigilance required is. Almost.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Reading
Sexism
Writing

Her real name: on the unmasking of Elena Ferrante

The lives of many women I have known in my own life and countless others would have been greatly improved if real Italian men with real names had behaved in more satisfyingly nuanced ways, making the work of authors like Ferrante (and Morante) truly seem like lazy social satires. Now, I find myself despairing at the plausibility of Claudio Gatti and Roberto Napoletano, and how well they could fit within Ferrante’s cycle, with their needy, greedy, narrow worldview, and their belief that they are naturally entitled to a woman’s life.

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Type
Article
Category
Reading
Sexism

Frustrations of a bookseller

This year’s Stella Count is bleak. The statistics from The Monthly are broadly representative of the count’s wider findings: 65 per cent of authors reviewed were male, and just 5 per cent of published book reviews were men reviewing women authors (whereas 30 per cent were women reviewers covering male authors). The magazine published six times as many long reviews of books by men as it did books by women.

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Type
Reflection
Category
Culture
History
The future

An Australia ...

An Australia where everyone in public speaks and writes in rhyming poetry with the cadences of Henry Lawson. This is the most prized ability in the whole land. School children are prepped for gruelling contests of rhyme and wit, often with improvisations on a wide range of topics. All debates in parliament are rhymed, as is the evening news. The news takes on somewhat anecdotal quality, favoring a good yarn over factual accuracy. A whole country of Lawsonian Homers sings itself into legend by sheer metrical virtuosity.

Revisionist-History
Type
Polemic
Category
Culture
Technology

Revisionist History in need of some revisions

Malcolm Gladwell has been subjected to significant amounts of criticism over the years, which are to varying degrees compelling and valid. His approach to storytelling is both overly simplistic and engaging. He reproduces what others have researched in accessible ways, but makes mistakes and misrepresentations. He is entertaining but, given his reach and looseness with the truth, arguably dangerous.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Racism
Reading
Writing

A short history of the dangers of travel writing

A travelogue tells you about a person, and a place, and, sometimes, a travelogue tells the reader something about herself. I love travelogues. I love travelogues of Australians in Australia, non-Australians in Australia, Australians not in Australia. I also love travel tales of people in China and Malaysia and Singapore, the other places of my heart and my ancestors. Whether these are accounts of people in their homes or on the road, these stories are always new to me, and there’s always the joy of exploration and unfamiliarity.

Members of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, from 'The Poison Leave It' campaign.
Type
Column

On coalitions for hopeful futures

I have spent many hours in outpatient triage-madness, where so many of our elders die way too young from the heaviest of loads, and my heart still lurches when I drive past this hospital. Being anywhere near it triggers ‘re-memory’: the feeling of an uncanny repetition, an encounter with something deeply social and collective. Toni Morrison speaks of re-memories being ‘out there in the world’, waiting for us to bump into them so we can read the signs and know ‘the things behind the things’. Re-memories help us know the whole story.

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Type
Essay
Category
Labour rights
Racism
Refugees

The limits of compassion

This is not the first time a refugee crisis has washed up on the country’s shores: older Malaysians still recall the arrival of tens of thousands of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s. The boats were initially pushed back out to sea, until, after increasing pressure from the international community, the Malaysian government established a refugee camp on the tiny island of Pulau Bidong. Less than one square mile in size, the island was deemed to have a capacity of 4500 – at its peak, it housed over 40,000 refugees.