Author Archives: A. B. Smith

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Peter Temple’s Truth

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TRUTH

Temple, Peter (Text publishing: Australia, 2009, ISBN 9781921520716)

Peter Temple’s Truth reads like an Australian television miniseries. You can even see where they would show the tits.

The novel’s beauty comes from the vividness of its writing. We leave it with afterimages of “sharp-toothed skulls” and “beer cartons blown flat against the fences” still glowing behind our mind’s I. We can still hear the footsteps on the “gap-planked verandah” and the “rip and flap of a loose truck tarp in the nearest yard”. Continue reading

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Painting

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PAINTINGthree

This shows the trails of some minuscule specks of colour as they emerge from three moving bodies. Each body and all the specks of colour that emerge from it accelerate towards one of the other bodies with a constant magnitude of acceleration: the yellow specks and the body that emits them accelerate towards the body that emits green specks, the indigo specks and the body that emits them accelerate towards the body that emits yellow specks and the green specks and the body that emits them accelerate towards the body that emits indigo specks. Each speck fades as it moves. Continue reading

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Valley of Segola

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BOOK OF NUMBERS

Chapters 13-14 (quotes taken from the Lamsa version, Holy Bible, ISBN for example 9780060649234)

As he nears the land of Canaan, Moses sends ahead scouts to reconnoitre the terrain. He directs them to ascertain both the enemy’s strength and the fertility of their land.

To their delight, the land appears fertile, Continue reading

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Three Tone Tan

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THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER

Chandler, Raymond (Houghton Mifflin, 1950, ISBN 0394757653)

In his remarkable essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler points out that, in the real world, using elaborate means to commit a murder, disguise one or to fabricate an alibi will only serve to incriminate the perpetrator. It gives a methodical police force too much to work with. Instead (if I comprehend Chandler’s meaning), just bludgeon the victim with some commonplace object found near the scene of the crime and when the police ask for your alibi, tell them to go fuck themselves. Continue reading

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The Military Experience in the Age of Reason

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THE MILITARY EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF REASON
Duffy, Christopher (Wordsworth Editions Limited: Hertfordshire, 1998, ISBN 0710210248)

I find I have a copy of The Military Experience in the Age of Reason on my bookshelf. I assume I must’ve purchased it for its cover art. Could I ever, in sincerity, have doubted the general tenor of that ‘experience’? Could I have imagined that soldiers woke up in the morning and thought, “My do I enjoy catching diseases out here in the mud. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank providence for the string of circumstances that led to my becoming an artillery target in the Austrian Plumed-Hat Corps.”?

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Decades Of The 20th Century

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DECADES OF THE 20th CENTURY

Yapp, Nick (c. 1986 onwards) several volumes inc. ISBN 3829005229

Getty Images publish a remarkable series of photobooks called Decades of the 20th Century. Besides the usual shots of counterrevolutionaries storming Cuban beaches, the Beatles and parading Nazis, we see Castro batting a baseball out of the ballpark and Emperor Hirohito meeting Mickey Mouse. Continue reading

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      OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO Dr Seuss ISBN 978-0-00-790680-2 I first encountered Oh The Places You’ll Go only recently – this year in fact – and it struck me at once as very distinctly different from all the other Dr Seuss that I was familiar with. What was Dr Seuss … Continue reading