Jaac

LATEST ARTICLES ( 103 )

• Reports on Intimate Human Experience

  In Summertime, part three of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalised memoir Scenes from Provincial Life, when a one time lover reflects on Coetzee the protagonist's... Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Anxieties of the Writing Life

  The blurb on the back of Brian Castro's novella, Street to Street, claims that it is a 'comic-tragic enactment of the anxieties of the writing life' -- an... Read more

  Posted on 21 January 2014 BOOKS, CULTURE

• To Be Contemporary is to Rise Through the Stack of the Past, Like the Fire...

  Although, as Mary Oliver observes in her nearly twenty-year-old guide to writing, A Poetry Handbook, 'in the world of writing it is originality that is sought... Read more

  Posted on 31 December 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Their Diurnal Stars Are All the Shining Holies

  I've had Lars Iyer's Exodus lying part read (differently part read) at various times beside my bed for the past year. This is not because his novel, as people... Read more

  Posted on 19 December 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Frown in Beckett's What Where

  Today, at the Australian premiere of the new English language film production of Beckett's What Where, which is yet to be released, the actor who played V and... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Substance of All Writing Lives

  To read Brian Castro's piece in the Sydney Review of Books on W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country is to be filled with a rapt anxiety, as if you've just been... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Within the Narrow Range of These Two Eyes

  Some years ago, when J. M. Coetzee's book Slow Man first came out, I took a Murrays coach down to Canberra for the day -- I only intended to stay the day, such... Read more

  Posted on 12 July 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Its Tumescence in the Throats of Serpents

  Near the end of Maud Ellmann's The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment, her own writing moves so sinuously -- indeed so beautifully -- through th... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Photo of a Facsimile of a Drawing

  

  And, to complete this uncharacteristic run of images: a photo of a facsimile of a drawing done, as the Franz Kafka Museum tells us, while the artist was... Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• This Head Waiter, Who Stands Like a Dog in Front of Every Guest

  

  There's a Café Savoy in Prague, but it is not where Kafka once got to see performances in Yiddish by the Jewish theatre company from Lemberg in Galicia. Read more

  Posted on 21 June 2013 BOOKS, DESTINATIONS

• Cut Me to the Ever-more Prominent Bone

  Right from the start, in Fiona Wright's remarkable piece on Christina Stead's For Love Alone, illness, literature and the hunger for a disembodied notion of lov... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• How Many Bloggers Are Really Doing Anything More?

  At a symposium on e-literature that I went to earlier this week, Professor Joseph Tabbi, an expert on 'the effects of new technologies on contemporary... Read more

  Posted on 12 June 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Without Being Able to Say Precisely What Theatre is

  Last night: the first of four previews of Sydney Theatre Company's The Maids by Jean Genet, with the director and co-translator, Benedict Andrews, climbing... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Series of Increasingly Brutal Events Unfold

  How is it that some blurb writers can get a book so wrong? Whoever was asked to describe László Kransznahorkai's Satantango for the Tuskar Rock Book edition,... Read more

  Posted on 24 April 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Chair Threatened, Bougainvillea Clawed

  How is it that great, wide books like this one exhaust me? I spend all day, all night, running just ahead of the converging tides. Read more

  Posted on 02 April 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Prodigiously Alive

  When Michel Leiris encountered the work of Alberto Giacometti -- and wrote the first ever piece about this then still relatively unknown sculptor in the... Read more

  Posted on 17 March 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Sentences Frighten Us

  When we have sentences in our heads we still can't be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea... Read more

  Posted on 06 March 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• An Ever-ready Faculty of Enthusiasm

  To George Sand who, in her letter to Flaubert, had predicted that Sainte-Beuve would be 'the last of the critics' -- the 'others' being 'either artists or... Read more

  Posted on 15 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Something of a Throwback to the Eighteenth Century Literary Salon

  I move now from the very tangible livre de poche of the wonderfully weird to a soon-to-be expansive virtual literary salon for all minds that have grown... Read more

  Posted on 05 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Read Slowly to Avoid Complications

  As publishers keep pressing on us taller, fatter and wider editions of books that might once have fit in our bookcases but now have to be shoved in side-on so... Read more

  Posted on 04 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE