Deep dive into the Merri and Yarra. Boys I would have worked to befriend and river I would have swum in. Emotive writing, water under change. Swirling flow of an ancestral serpent spitting out the chest-puffing of capital and welcoming the good-hearted.
Traipsing through this museum a hard slog. The narrator’s obsessive love makes the theory of mimetic desire real. A dizzying doubling reflexivity. Read compulsively and reluctantly in patches, taking a breather with other less needy works. Journey done. Cup of tea required.
The Fever of Animals (Miles Allinson 2015) is a clever book but despite that, it drew me in through my cautious love for the surrealists and the way Allinson criss-crosses the fine lines between fiction and fact, study and practice, readers and writers.
A Guide to Berlin (Gail Jones, 2015), after Vladimir Nabokov’s so-named short story, is best for the word at its core: propinquity, attraction through proximity. The idea of speak-memory is its challenge for readers and for writers. Life story lies as unavoidable joys.
Had me at the first paragraph. Got to love an angry honest strong woman. Massud tells the story as if Nora’s done over but who knows? Artists are predators. That’s what they do. NB: Nora (Gnawer) is a fine teacher of children.
The conceptualisation and production of ‘écriture matière’ in this text is breathtaking. Eades takes readers into the ‘glittering abyss’ that includes the breathtaking entry of two boys into this world. Cixous and Irigaray as poets as well as critics. Inspired.
A slithery book that began as a poem and it reads that way. ‘Girlie reads books like a caterpillar eating its way through the leaves on a tree.’ (93). A series of hard slaps with chapters that are sometimes one short paragraph long.
