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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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.
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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.
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
Aftermath/Afterword
The thought of publishing this on my blog made me sick. Continue reading
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
It’s great to have a genius for a friend; it guarantees often exhilarating conversations. Continue reading
Dear 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
Theme Park at its Darkest 