When I taught at an American college in the 1970s, my students asked if I’d mind finishing my afternoon lectures early: local TV was re-running Dark Shadows and they didn’t want to miss a minute of it. I had to have Dark Shadows explained to me, and even...
Arts & Letters
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Alan Saunders | Arts & Letters | July 2010 | Society & CultureIn discussions about contemporary Australian design, the name of the nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce is, it’s safe to say, seldom mentioned. It’s a pity, because Peirce invented the form of logical inference known as abduction. If you’re...
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Births, Deaths and Marriages: Claire McCarthy’s 'The Waiting City' and Mona Achache’s 'The Hedgehog'Luke Davies | Arts & Letters | Film | July 2010 | Society & Culture
In 2004, the UNICEF report Children on the Brink estimated that there were 35 million orphans in India and that nearly 4 million children would be added to those ranks in a single year. The report did not differentiate between children orphaned by death and those...
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Martin Krygier | Arts & Letters | Books | July 2010 | Society & CultureAarons is a name associated more than any other with communism in Australia. As Marxists used to say, that is no accident. For communism appears to have been congenital in the family; it was carried by four generations. Several Aarons family members occupied the most...
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Delia Falconer | Arts & Letters | Books | July 2010 | Society & Culture“Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!!” Bret Easton Ellis posted this Tweet in January this year, as the net began to buzz with news of reclusive author JD Salinger’s death. Ellis’ Tweet could be read as a clever...
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Robert Forster
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Arts & Letters | Books | July 2010 | Society & Culture
To read the New Musical Express (NME) in the ’70s was one of the great joys of the decade. It was an insider’s choice and the seriousness of any new acquaintance’s enthusiasm for music could be instantly gauged by whether they read it or not. The readership of the...
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Geordie Williamson | July 2010 | Society & Culture | NotedOn meeting Marie King, the heroine of Fiona McGregor’s fourth novel, I was reminded of Brett Whiteley’s painting of an ageing society hostess. His subject is impeccable at first glance – coiffed and glossy, as though time itself is being held back by dint of mascara and...
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Linda Jaivin | July 2010 | Society & Culture | NotedThe body of Crispin Salvador, a somewhat passé Filipino writer living in America, is discovered floating down the Hudson River. His student and biographer, Miguel, searches among Salvador’s effects for the manuscript of a muckraking novel that had promised to return the old...
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Shane Maloney | July 2010 | Society & Culture | EncountersWhen Douglas Mawson turned up at Robert Falcon Scott’s London office in January 1910, Scott assumed that the 27-year-old geology lecturer from Adelaide had come to enlist in his forthcoming expedition to the South Pole. Eight thousand men had already volunteered and Mawson...
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Alan Saunders
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June 2010 | Performance | Society & Culture
“I’ll stay till the wind changes,” says Mary Poppins to the Banks children after she swept in on the east wind and, overwhelming Mrs Banks, became their nanny. Well, clearly the wind has not yet changed, because Mary Poppins is everywhere these days. She’s a book, she’s a...
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