May 2012
10 posts
April 2012
6 posts
“And this, above all, is the provocative element of “Girls”: the show really is...”
– Richard Brody at The New Yorker (via emissions).
3 tags
“Late in the 18th century, men’s fashion took a turn for the worse. The prudish,...”
– From Alex Jung’s wonderful essay on masculinity and menswear, “Come As You Are” (via TMN)
4 tags
Marginalia, by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” - that...
2 tags
4 tags
“In an article first published in 1986, Susan Sheridan puts forward an account of...”
– Julieanne Lamon, “Stella vs Miles: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia,” (via Meanjin).
3 tags
“Without any landmarks to orientate them people could not find their way to where...”
– From Sophie Cunningham’s essay “Disappeared,” on the effects of Cyclone Tracy (via Griffith REVIEW 35: Surviving).
March 2012
8 posts
4 tags
“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes....”
– From Adrienne Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
4 tags
Of note
“Other beings”: Anna Krien’s Quarterly Essay on the relationships between humans and animals (specifically, the uses of animals by humans for food, research, and environmental control) is not only rigorous and thoughtful, it also voices those strange, unlikely, empathetic and emotional bonds we form with animals, which are often dismissed as anthropomorphism or uncritical...
“Tomorrowland,” like the entire fourth season, confounds expectations...”
– Mad Men: Season 4, Episode 13, “Tomorrowland” | The House Next Door
3 tags
Cyclone Plotting, by Felicity Plunkett
The danger is that we’ll drink this one quick drink too fast. The danger is that one vodka beckons, flirting, to the next. The danger is that, catching vodka’s white wave, I could spill, purple. The danger is that I will become a nest of Matryoshka dolls, falling out of myself. The danger is that your umbrella, stripping its black veils one by one, will spoke my eye. The danger...
4 tags
2 tags
WatchCathy Horyn’s Runway Report | Paris Fashion Week Fall 2012 (via New York Times)
2 tags
Of note
“The caging of America”: “The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life…. Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in...
3 tags
February 2012
5 posts
3 tags
3 tags
“[C]an a crocodile really weep? The experts say yes: they have tear glands just...”
– An extract from What Made the Crocodile Cry? by Susie Dent (via OxfordWords blog)
2 tags
I have been asked four questions by four passing...
"Do you know where the Pancake Parlour is?"
"Excuse me, can you tell me how to find the Ian Potter Centre?"
"Do you know what 'drypoint' means? A 'drypoint' print. What is that? It can't be a lithograph, I know what that is."
"Um, hi. Sorry. Um, I'm not from around here. I'm looking for the VCA Art School, do you where that is?"
3 tags
“It’s easy to see … why cyberflânerie seemed such an appealing notion in...”
– Evgeny Morozov on “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” New York Times
2 tags
“Paper books may be the only media remaining that don’t report your behavior back...”
– W. W. Norton on Tumblr
January 2012
6 posts
5 tags
“[The] notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think...”
– Malcolm Gladwell, “True Colors: Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America,” The New Yorker, 1999.
2 tags
Joan Didion's Packing List
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts 2 jerseys or leotards 1 pullover sweater 2 pair shoes stockings bra nightgown, robe slippers cigarettes bourbon bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil
To Carry:
mohair throw typewriter 2 legal pads and pens files house key
This is a list which was taped...
Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight, by Jane...
I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.
Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.
I heard myself thinking, It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.
Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.
Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.
2 tags
Worst suburb names in Brisbane
Beenleigh
Bald Hills
Browns Plains
Cornubia
Boondal
Runcorn
Deception Bay
Geebung
Shailer Park
Burpengary
December 2011
10 posts
NYE
Polka dots, polenta chips and fish cakes, Absinthe, friendly taxi drivers, primary school alumni all grown up (but still playing in schoolyards), a paper folding fan, secret passwords, positive/negative body language, three graces lovely from afar and obnoxious up close, “78% NARCISSIST!”, romance in the veggie patch.
2 tags
Home for Christmas
My elderly black cat is turning red.
Solstice
It is possible to walk around in the sunshine well into the evening. A man seated on the tram catches me looking at his cone of ice-cream. He has been holding it aloft and ignoring the vanilla drips as if to convey it was somehow accidental that he bought a soft serve and then boarded a tram.
Strolling up Brunswick Street is a mature Christmas elf dressed in a green dress with a full skirt. She...
2 tags
“[Christopher Hitchens] became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in...”
– From the New York Times obituary for writer Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).
2 tags
3 tags
“It came to me when I was reporting the mad uproar over Bill Henson’s photographs...”
– David Marr, Panic, 2011
November 2011
7 posts
4 tags
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond,...
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your...
2 tags
2 tags
“Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The...”
– From Ann Beattie’s “Seven Truths About Writers, Rarely Discussed”, via the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog.
1 tag
3 tags
“Sonnet” literally means “little song.” The sonnet is a heile Welt, an intact...”
– Rita Dove, from the foreword to Mother Love (via W. W. Norton: An Intact World)