There’s a friend of mine, a very successful artist, who I admire very much. I met him twenty years ago when we were working together in a dirty nightclub in South Melbourne; he was collecting glasses and I was bouncing. We both aspired to art, and he hit critical pay-dirt much earlier than I (who am I fooling – I still haven’t got there).
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Caveat:
This has been written to disturb you.
Invitation:
Summon your personal incarnation of this figure into your mind’s eye and look through it like a lens while you’re reading this.
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2.
The notion of a relationship becoming deeper and more profound as people begin to ‘transgress’ the boundaries of what a twenty-first century reader would describe as vanilla sex is also a time-worn strategy.
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1.
A Sport and a Pastime is considered – by Americans – to be an American classic. My first question, upon finishing the book, is, ‘What makes something a classic? What makes it ‘feel’ like one?’
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What’s it about?
What amounts to a terrorist cell in mid-nineteenth century Russia and its effect on a small fictional town of Dostoyevsky’s invention.
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4.
“I called Lolita a love story and the professor cut me off, saying, ‘Calling this novel a love story indicates an unconscionable misreading on your part.’
She wouldn’t even let me finish what I was trying to say. Ever since then, I haven’t dared bring it up in any of my classes.”
p.291,
My Dark Vanessa.
3.
Our relationship lasted until after I graduated. She left her husband and I’d left school, and she came over to my apartment one day and we talked about doing it properly. Continue reading
Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of ‘My Dark Vanessa.’
2.
I had an illicit relationship with a teacher that started when I was sixteen. I hadn’t thought much about it until recently, once I’d started reading Vanessa. Continue reading
‘Romance is rape by seduction’.
– Andrea Dworkin.
1.
I used to hate Andrea Dworkin. She was invoked like a saint by all those hateful, spotty little feminazis at Melbourne University, chanting and shouting and marching, projecting all kinds of resentment and hatred. They threw the word ‘men’ like it was a paper bag full of shit. Continue reading
4.
‘Wrapping my coat around me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and began taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.
At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.
The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of the vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.’
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Theme Park at its Darkest 