Category Archives: Everything

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Boosterism [pt.2]

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babbittBABBITT

Sinclair Lewis (Bantam Classics, ISBN 978-0553214864)

Clayton’s households divide into two genera: proletarian families (and students) who accept Clayton’s wonderful seediness and property-amassing twenty-first-century Babbitts who resent it.

Amongst the latter, Bill Pontikis stands out for his efforts to assemble Clayton’s residents and businesses into a community. As one who has experienced Mr. Pontikis in person – sometimes at distances as little as five feet, I must conclude that rather than acting from any humanitarian motive, he simply wishes to enlarge the opportunities for commercial rapine. Nonetheless, the fact remains that unlike the majority of Clayton’s other petty napoleons, Pontikis has shown himself willing to take a hand in civic life. Continue reading

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Poor Pluto

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of_mice_and_menOF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck, John (Covici Friede, 1937, ISBN (reprint) 9780749717100)

The educational films they showed us in middle school seemed all at least twenty-years old. On flickering projector film, scientists in brown suits took us on a tour of the body’s respiratory system while sanitised hipsters with pompadours showed us how to resist peer pressure. Crew-cutted schoolboys discovered the power of lunchroom manners while other sons and daughters of white hegemony learned how quiet helps at school. Deep-voiced fabulists sold us a version of the American legislative process with no pharmaceutical or energy lobbyists. Other narrators, whose measured delivery somehow conveyed the vastness of space, described the then nine planets of the solar system as the viewpoint swept out towards poor Pluto (of late expelled from the League of Planets for conduct unbefitting a solar planet). Continue reading

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A Bleak Tale of Existential Horror

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oh_the_places_youll_goOH 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 attempting with this slim volume? It cannot have been to provide education or encouragement for children, except perhaps for the preternaturally precocious savant. This is a dark, twisting story about ambition, creative endeavour, failure and depression. It is a tale of an adult life full of adult worries and it is frequently deeply cutting. Continue reading

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The State Of The MRB #1

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logo_post_smallBecause we’re setting up a new online (and eventually print) magazine here, I thought some people might be interested in some stats on how things are going. Our first post was on Feb 5 2014. We currently have seven reviewers and essayists contributing pieces and so far at least, we’ve managed to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday as per the initial plan. The posts gradually increase to daily and eventually maybe even two or three posts on some or all days (very far down the track).

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Organisms

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ORGANISMSorganisms

This shows the trails of some dwindling specks of colour as they radiate from several energetic organisms. Each organism belongs to one of two contrasted species: those that give off green specks and those that give off yellowish ones. Each organism accelerates with a constant magnitude of acceleration towards the closest organism of the opposite species. Meanwhile, each organism expels a stream of specks of the appropriate colour in the direction opposite to its acceleration. All the specks of colour move at the same speed and fade as they move. Continue reading

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Phantom der Nacht

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heart_of_darkness

HEART OF DARKNESS, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP

Joseph Conrad (Dover Publications, 1990, ISBN 978-0486264646), Philip K. Dick (Doubleday, 1968, ISBN (reprint) 0-345-40447-5)

By law, every commercial street in Australia must contain either a fish and chip shop, a laundromat or a milk bar with a sandwich board showing pictures of the ice creams. Streets, like mine, that have all three can apply for a government grant to construct a newsagents next door, which thereafter will support itself, in the main, by peddling lottery tickets. For lunch today, I ordered a vegetarian burger from a Chinese restaurant between the laundromat and the fish and chip shop. I believe the restaurateur must once have seen a hamburger at some distance and then deduced its contents. It had its points, but no person who’d seen a burger at close range could’ve classed it as one. In place of the bun, it had two chive pancakes with soy sauce. For the patty it substituted a loose shred of cabbage, slivered black mushrooms and bean shoots. Not one to skimp on the essentials, the restaurateur served it with chopsticks and a selection of dipping sauces.

I ate it with the chopsticks while watching Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. Even Herzog’s monster film somehow reminds me of Joseph Conrad; more human than human but unafraid of the truth about the world. I watched it on a television projector plugged into tiny, quiet speakers, but the source volume set to maximum. Every time the music swelled the speakers rattled and distorted like Hendrix wailing the seventh sharp nine in Heart of Darkness.

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Becoming A Writer Reread #1

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becoming_a_writer

BECOMING A WRITER

Dorothea Brande

I first read Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer after looking through a set of short writing advice pieces and noticing that at least three well-known authors advised it was essential reading, while no other book even got a mention. I remember one of those authors was Susanna Clarke, though I do not recall the other writer names. It doesn’t matter a great deal who they were – what matters is that they were right. I read Becoming a Writer and I felt immediately as if I were reading about all the secrets of writing that somehow I’d never noticed or heard mentioned. I’ve been intending to reread it for a couple years and this is as good a time as any. Continue reading

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Desire In A Time Of Moral Purity

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mateship_with_birdsMATESHIP WITH BIRDS

Carrie Tiffany ISBN: 9781742610764

In 2005, debut author Carrie Tiffany wowed fans of historical fiction with her award-winning novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. Set in 1934, an era of small-town Australia was brought grimly to life as narrator Jean Finnegan sought to bring science to the wheat fields of the land.

Fast-forward to 2012, and Carrie’s anticipated follow-up novel, Mateship with Birds, captures a revealing snapshot of 1950s rural Victoria in all its sexually repressed glory. Continue reading

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South Central Idaho

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gods_smuggler

GOD’S SMUGGLER, THE LAND OF THE KANGAROO, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1990s, others

Brother Andrew, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill and Pope John XXIII (Chosen Books, 2001, ISBN 9780800793012), Thomas Knox (W. A. Wilde & Company: Boston, 1896, ISBN (reprint) 9781409970385), Peter Townrow and Ron Martin (editors) (Routledge, 2002, ISBN 9780117023659)

A wearisome ancient practice requires the journalist to begin his description of any country or region by describing it as “a land of contradictions”.

The charitable view sees this as the journalist’s admission that he hasn’t comprehended his subject. That he views the disparate facets he’ll go on to describe as contradictions, comprehending too little about the country or region to harmonise them. Continue reading

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Becoming A Writer Reread

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BECOMING A WRITER

Dorothea Brande (1934) ISBN 978-0-87477-164-0

Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer is one of the earliest and one of the best books published on how to approach life as a writer. It is not so much a book on style or craft or writerly technique, but rather a book about finding your way around the problems of writing as a lifestyle. It is one of the few books that is regularly cited by published writers as something that all aspiring writers should go read.

In weekly instalments we will be rereading Becoming a Writer and summarising and discussing one chapter at a time. The first instalment will be along later this week in which we will reread In Introduction and Chapter One: The Four Difficulties.

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Is Wartime A Genre Now?

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the_book_thief

I came to this topic listening to an interview with Markus Zusak. Now what follows is not a review of The Book Thief. I have not read The Book Thief, but I understand from others who have read it that it is a very good book and I don’t mean to cast any shadows on it. But, it was the spark of this essay and I think I need to start with honesty of thought.

What started me thinking about this was this: as Markus described his novel I found myself thinking: oh no, not another literary novel set against a world war out of desperation for tension. That thought made me immediately reflect. There has now been a very long trail of literary fiction set during one or the other of the world wars. I suppose I would trace it to The English Patient, and then draw a thread through Captain Corelli’s Mondolin, and onto more recent examples: Warhorse, Atonement, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Book Thief and maybe even at a stretch Kavalier and Clay. I began to wonder, have literary stories set in the world wars transcended mere setting or the generalised area of historical fiction and become a genre unto themselves? Continue reading

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A Suitable Boy

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a_suitable_boy

A SUITABLE BOY
Vikram Seth (Phoenix Fiction: UK, ISBN 978-1-8579-9088-1)

Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, famously one of the longest novels written in English, is a sprawling and eloquent tale of love, family, politics and any number of other themes, set around a fictional Indian city in the mid-1950s.  Evoking Middlemarch with its breadth of characters, its thematic investigation of momentous political events and human relationships, and its realism, A Suitable Boy is, as its blurb alleges, a love story—but as with Middlemarch this love story does not emerge as expected.  The novel, focusing on the Mehra, Kapoor, Khan and Chatterji families, contains many interlinking plot threads which draw slowly together and apart to form a magnificent story.

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