Rodney Hall, frequent guest of this blog, began a spiel on this topic when last we met. This commentary on the nature of art is so fundamental and so important, it needs to be posted somewhere: once again, I exhorted him to start his own blog and yet again, he refused. For that reason, I present his ideas here, rather than attempt to pass them off as my own.
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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
First published in Island Magazine, Issue 136.
There are two things I am driven to do: write and fight. Continue reading
Gotta love a man with an eye-patch.
J: I guess that’s what War and Peace is about. It’s about what happens when people are forced to cope with the force of history as it’s bearing down on them, which I guess is the way Tolstoy would have looked at it.
R: I’m so glad you liked War and Peace. I knew you would. When you were reading Anna Karenina, you were telling me ‘There couldn’t possibly be a better novel’. And then, there was. Continue reading
To my considerable delight, Last Exit to Brooklyn has been reissued as a cheapo Penguin classic. To my considerable surprise, it has been classified amongst the ‘Classic Crime’ series. To my considerable dismay, Anthony Burgess’ original introduction has been supplanted. The new one has been written by Irvine Welsh. Continue reading
Theme Park at its Darkest 