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.
Continue readingArchive for Rodney Hall
‘Story is Such a Lie.’
Posted in Observation, Real Men with tags C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Luis Bunuel, Mr Deasey, Rodney Hall, Ulysses on January 20, 2023 by Jarrod BoyleIn Search of Lost Time
Posted in Reading, Real Men with tags Alain De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life, In Search of Lost Time, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Rodney Hall, War and Peace on November 14, 2021 by Jarrod BoyleIn Search of Lost Time
Posted in Reading, Real Men with tags Alain De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life, In Search of Lost Time, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Rodney Hall, War and Peace on November 9, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
1.
I finished reading In Search of Lost Time a few weeks ago, and now it’s over, there is a peculiar Proust-shaped hole in my life.
Continue readingSuicidal Thoughts
Posted in poetry, Reading, Real Men with tags Ariel, Colossus, Rodney Hall, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar on September 3, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle1.
‘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.
Rodney Hall: A Stolen Season
Posted in Fiction, Reading, Real Men with tags A Stolen Season, Autumn of the Patriarch, Belize, Central America, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Saunders, James Joyce, Mayan, Miles Franklin Award, Rodney Hall, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Ulysses on July 16, 2019 by Jarrod Boyle
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
Shotgun Party
Posted in Fiction with tags Armed robbery squad, Mouthful of Stones, Rodney Hall, Victoria Police on December 28, 2011 by Jarrod Boyle
Many of the episodes in Mouthful of Stones are ‘true’. However, this doesn’t mean that all of them overtook your humble narrator. This story belongs to a very good friend who had once been a member of the now-defunct armed robbery squad. After hearing it, I inserted a first-person narrator to make it fit the shape of my design. Continue reading
Romanticism
Posted in Love letters, Pornography with tags Byron, Rodney Hall, Romanticism, Vico on August 25, 2011 by Jarrod BoyleEvery time I’m wounded, I bleed in romantic colours. Continue reading
A Genius for a Friend
Posted in Journalism, Reading with tags Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Pride and Prejudice, Rodney Hall, Stendhal, The Red and the Black on January 15, 2011 by Jarrod BoyleIt’s great to have a genius for a friend; it guarantees often exhilarating conversations. Continue reading
Rejection!
Posted in Writing with tags Bereft, Cameron Creswell, Chris Wormesley, Jean Coctaeu, Lolita, Nabokov, Peter Temple, Rodney Hall, Sam De Brito, Sophie Hamley, The Lost Boys on October 8, 2010 by Jarrod BoyleDear Jarrod,
Thank you for sending me Finding Cronos, and for giving Murdoch Books the opportunity to consider publishing your manuscript. I think the questions and themes you wanted to explore through your story do have merit, however I think the writing and structure of your manuscript still needs more work. Continue reading