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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There are some novels you read that make you think, ‘Why can’t all books be like this one?’ Continue reading
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I just can’t come to a place of peace with either Jocko Willink or David Goggins. Continue reading
“Hitler, as the point of convergence for so many nostalgias, resentments and anxieties, became a historical figure.”
– Joachim Fest, Hitler
In the wake of the Sandy Hook School Shooting in 2012, President Obama gave a press conference during which he beseeched Americans to support the introduction of basic mental health screenings for gun buyers. Continue reading
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‘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.’
p.163 Continue reading
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“I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.”
P. 152
I watched my grandmother Joanna die, day by day. Continue reading
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“A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”
– The Bell Jar Page 90.
Simone De Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex that because men are encouraged to fight, they come to trust themselves and their ability to grapple with the world and its challenges. Continue reading
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‘There’s two acts of creation at work in the novel: the writer’s, and the reader’s.’
– Rodney Hall.
Some books, you read them and they go right through you like a glass of water. Other books seem to take up residence and become a part of who you are, like marrow, or muscle fibre.
I recently read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for the second time.
If you google Sylvia Plath, it’s hard to find her described in any terms other than the superlative. ‘One of the finest lyric poets of the twentieth century,’ is pretty close to the general assessment. Continue reading
At the gym – working on the gun show.
Rodney Hall is one of Australia’s greatest living writers. He has been nominated for the Miles Franklin Award seven times and if he wins this year, it’ll be the third time he’s gone home with the prize.
I have known him for eighteen years and he never fails to deliver on the subject of literature. He has been kind enough to wax lyrical at the Theme Park on matters literary and a few others that happen to intersect within his purview.
T.P: I’m guessing that if the Miles Franklin Award was predicated on biceps, you’d win that. Continue reading
Theme Park at its Darkest 