Category Archives: Essays

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Royal Park Reds

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das_kapitalDAS KAPITAL

Marx, Karl  (Penguin Classics; Reprint edition, 1992, ISBN 978-0140445688)

In all probability, Marxist sport associations have existed for as long as universities have funded student clubs. After nine meetings over boiled lentils, a few may even have contrived to play their first games. However one communist cricket club in Melbourne, called ‘The Royal Park Reds’, has fielded teams for more than thirty years.

Amateur cricket clubs in Australia play on two types of pitches: turf and matting. The former refers to the type of pitch professionals use: prepared strips of grass cared for by groundskeepers (often at copious expense); the latter to a concrete pitch dressed on the day with Astroturf mats brought by the teams. Continue reading

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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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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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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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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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Denominations

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DENOMINATIONSdenominations

This shows the trajectories of particles emanating from several moving bodies. Each body belongs to one of five denominations: those that expel dark blue particles, those that expel light blue particles, those that expel gold particles, those that expel scarlet particles or those that expel white particles. Each body and all the particles that emanate from it accelerate with a constant magnitude of acceleration towards the closest other body of the same denomination. Each particle fades as it moves. Continue reading

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Clearwater Primeval

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A Clockwork Orange
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Burgess, Anthony (William Heinemann: UK, ISBN 0434098000)

 

The Monash Transfer and Recycling Station on Ferntree Gully Road gives you the best chance you’ll ever get to tolchock your property without bothering your conscience.

After paying their veck on the way in, you back your automobile up to the edge of a concrete pit three-feet deep. For as long as you want, they let you throw your stuff down there, watching it fly apart as it hits the ground. Boxes tear apart and CDs fly out through the holes. Electric kettles bounce like skipping stones, trailing their electrical cords. You pitch your microwave up into the air as hard as you can, grunting. For one crystalline moment it hangs in the air, rotating with the door open, before it explodes against the concrete. Continue reading

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Alien Women

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Holy Bible

BOOK OF LEVITICUS

Lamsa Bible (Chapter 20, Holy Bible, ISBN for example 9780060649234)
Amplified Bible (Chapter 20, Zondervan Publishing House, 1995, ISBN 0310951852)
Paradise Lost (The Portable Milton; Paradise Lost, John Milton, Penguin Books, 1976, ISBN 0140150447)

In the book of Leviticus, God reveals further commandments conceived in the all-encompassing fire of limitless intellect. For example, from Lamsa’s translation, Continue reading

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Arrakis [pt.2]

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dune

DUNE

Herbert, Frank (New English Library, ISBN 978-0450011849)

For Sophie, physical necessity, by itself, didn’t fix the moment when the future must arrive. Time marched rubato, stretching and bending to the individual rhythms of the players. As long as you stuck to the spirit of the arrangement, Time would turn a blind eye to a few extra minutes here or there.

To those with a pragmatic turn of mind, the view must’ve seemed an unmitigated failure. You found Sophie forever running late, out of petrol and waiting on her next paycheque to make the phone work again. Repossession agents chivvied her in flocks while friends she’d failed to meet crammed her answering machine with irate messages. Continue reading

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Arrakis [pt.1]

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dune

DUNE

Herbert, Frank (New English Library, ISBN 978-0450011849)

Sophie kept a boyfriend named Alan – the same way that one might keep a housecat or a gerbil. Alan belonged to that shadowy class of persons who somehow leave no discernable impression in your thoughts. You would’ve found him listed in the credits as ‘fireman #3’ or ‘guest at party’.

 

 

He had a genial temperament; he’d amble out to see you when you arrived and make small talk. He just appeared underwritten. When you looked up from a conversation, you’d find him standing in the background fiddling with something, as if his actor didn’t have any lines and needed to full up the time pretending to do something. His presence left so scant an impression that to this day I can remember only two facts about him: he owned a video camera and slept heavily. Continue reading

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