‘It hasn’t aged well. Although, I must admit I haven’t seen it.’
When I snuck into the cinemas to see Romper Stomper at fifteen years of age, I was totally overwhelmed. The skins and their lives were exhilarating and terrifying: simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The film was over before I knew it, and I felt like I’d been dragged down many of those back alleys of Footscray by the hair.
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2.
It’s the only book I’ve ever finished and then picked up to read again. This certainly does not mean it is an ‘easy’ read. For a modern reader, it’s actually pretty difficult, and I believe this is a direct result of Emily Bronte’s first-rate skills as a novelist. She is a beautiful writer, and her grasp of the English language is unsurpassed.
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1.
A wise friend of mine rejects the idea of there being such a thing, because it suggests that novels are like horses and the race makes assessment into a simple matter of comparison in a single field of endeavour.
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Certainly, this is high drama, and skilfully rendered by Mr Lewis. I have not chosen to recount it here for that reason, however. I reproduce it because the breast, probably the only breast Ambrosio has encountered – aside from his mother’s when he was an infant – appears to him as an enigma of overwhelming power.
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1.
A very literate friend of mine once described The Monk as the most boring book ever forced upon him by an educational institution. Any book that comes to take up that kind of notoriety is often contingent on timing: my friend was 19 when he encountered The Monk, and it may have become his central focus of regret in signing up to study Gothic literature.
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2.
The golden rule of commercially successful narrative art is that the writer has to push their characters into insoluble situations, and have them find their escape. Those escapes are the watermark of quality.
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The eponymous Black Rabbit is a restaurant, a ‘nightclub for grownups’, to quote protagonist Jake Friedkin. While the business is a hit, proprietor Jake (played by Jude Law) is painfully over-extended.
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Yesterday, ‘John’ Wayne Parr and I were interviewed at the 1:35:20 mark of the embedded audio clip as a warm-up for our Brisbane Writers Festival appearance, which will also be chaired by the illustrious Mr Austin.
Listen up – and enjoy!
2.
Technology, specifically the railroad and the telegraph, is shrinking the West into a place where bandits can no longer freely operate. The Bunch are trying to make one last score so they can afford to retire, but the brutality central to their existence is catching up with them.
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Theme Park at its Darkest 