Jaac

LATEST ARTICLES ( 103 )

• The Souls of the Damned Falling Upwards

  A year — actually, much more than that — passing. Do I read? Yes, but not always fiction. Why is it, when reading fiction, that I am so prone to that overly... Read more

  Posted on 27 May 2019 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Desire Corresponds to the Condition of Water

  I finished Maureen O'Shaughnessy's The Truth about A faster than I thought I would, reading through her bright red-bound collection of poems as I would a... Read more

  Posted on 15 December 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Cowardly Temptation of Rereading

  As it has been well over a year since I last posted here, it's probably not surprising that I feel the weight of it immediately at my neck as I dare, now, to... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Of a Strained and Outer Edge of Turkey

  I haven't been to Ani for more than twenty five years now, but when I did it had only recently been opened to visitors with cameras. Read more

  Posted on 24 August 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• This Might Be How Writing Fulfils Itself

  

  I first came across Stephen Mitchelmore's blog This Space on one of those long, anxious evenings, when the only thing that was going to settle me was to read... Read more

  Posted on 22 January 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• In Lakeland

  I'd started Maureen O'Shaughnessy's Lakeland the night after my father died -- when I didn't know what else to do with myself. Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Trailing Panthers

  Jon Steiner's video rings with a perfect threading of detail (I don't know how he managed to plunge through the layers of years to find this footage of a sign... Read more

  Posted on 10 September 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Whether the Book is a Lion Or an Elephant

  Recently, the Chinese writer Sheng Keyi told us, through her translator-interpreter Isabelle Li, that:Before I came to Australia, the organiser of my tour told... Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Ad Infinitum

  It has taken me until now to realise that all the objects that we imagine ourselves to be surrounded by in Ulvi Haagensen's latest solo exhibition, Ad infinitum... Read more

  Posted on 24 July 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Flying Away in Peter

  FridayLike Gerald Murnane, David Malouf has always been fascinated by a landscape that stretches out on all sides so that it takes over the mind -- the sheer... Read more

  Posted on 06 May 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Which They Believe to Be a Revival of the Old Manner

  After reading Flowerville's cutting of Hans Blumenberg I couldn't rest until I found this journeying piece from Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve (in the chapter on... Read more

  Posted on 10 March 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• There's No More to It Than That

  On Friday we went to the funeral of a family member who had died, finally, after many years of crises that had come about through his apparent determination to... Read more

  Posted on 01 March 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• There Are Optical Errors in Time as There Are in Space

  It's been half a week now since I saw Jim Sharman's 1978 film of Patrick White's screenplay, The Night the Prowler, and I have to say that the film works best a... Read more

  Posted on 07 January 2015 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Things Don’t Go Away Just Because You Choose to Forget Them

  ‘I read Freud,’ declares Julius, the young psychiatrist narrator in Teju Cole’s Open City, ‘only for literary truths.’ Here, I was thinking, his invocation of... Read more

  Posted on 31 December 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Fiction is a Kind of Magic Or Alchemy

  In this interview with Ivor Indyk, Gerald Murnane speaks, it seems, as he writes -- from the room he has written about so often -- the one from which he reports... Read more

  Posted on 06 September 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• In Which the Whole World Might Be Invoked from a Remote Or Neglected Standpoint

  Dr Ivor Indyk is perhaps the best person to discuss the writings of Gerald Murnane, not only because he is Murnane's publisher or because of his rather... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• We Have Art in Order Not to Die from the Truth

  It is a nicely sobering epigraph, this one that Donna Tartt inserts at the beginning of the fifth and final section of her novel The Goldfinch: 'We have art in... Read more

  Posted on 12 May 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Last Fumblings and Betrayals

  It is fitting that the softly abrasive voice of François Mauriac both begins and ends this surprisingly sepulchral tele-movie about Proust that, while made in... Read more

  Posted on 27 April 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Satanic Provocation Yields Before an Angelic One

  Winfried Menninghaus's 2003 study, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, includes a chapter on Kafka where he argues that 'Kafka's art... Read more

  Posted on 27 March 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Merely by Dining out Often in the Company of a Physician

  They are almost hidden in the vast work of Proust, these few short words that, together, suggest the dogged but also quietly enterprising nature of what he call... Read more

  Posted on 05 March 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE