Literature, Australian football, Rugby, Cricket. Written on Ngunnawal country. Follow on twitter @qbynrob
Holding the ball is a floodwall. It valiantly holds back a sea of uncontested marks, two goal quarters, control-centric game plans, and low turnover games. Thanks to this glorious rule, possessing the football carries risk. What can be done to protect it?
Mother Night is not just for those in for a grim laugh. By focusing on an ordinary man who struggles every day with whether what he has done was excused, Vonnegut is able to makes a rather uncomical argument about the nature of good and evil in the world.
It’s no surprise narratives like this can be found throughout Australian literature, but I was taken aback by just how similar these three stories are. They represent a de-landing myth in Australian culture, a repeating plot of threat to home that I’m sure could be found elsewhere too. Frankly, what surprised me most was that they don’t even make much of an effort to be different from one another.
Comparing the warmth of a friendship with the tragedy of death, Dersu showcases the human cost of empire. The film argues that imperialism has impacts so large that they are unable to be controlled by the very actors undertaking them. By exploring the impact of the imperial project on just one relationship, between Dersu and on Captain Arsenyev, the director, Kurosawa, is able to capture the tragedy that imperialism, by its nature, creates for both of these groups of people, and their powerlessness to stop it.
The trip to California could be any struggle, any Sisyphus' rock, but the Grapes of Wrath makes the argument that in such dire straits people will endeavour to retain their dignity, that they will be adaptable in the face of struggle and retain what makes them human.
My very long time thinking about God and nihilism, while for sure, enhancing my enjoyment and understanding of the story, had another impact. It led me to be, dare I say it, a touch bored by the whole thing.
I have absolutely no idea what to say about this wonderful book, but I am going to try. I picked up Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, one of those monsters some call a ‘magnum opus’, off the internet three months ago. I’ll be totally candid, I’d been told it was hard to read, but interesting, … Continue reading Reading Gravity’s Rainbow
How do we square in our hearts good people who do bad things? How do we understand that the world’s greatest sinners, murderers and traitors and genocidal racists, can be full of love for their friends, can be generous to the needy, or willing to suffer for the good of others? The answer Brothers offers is pretty compelling: Because they failed to be brave in a moment of weakness.
In so much other fiction, and in life in general, empathy is presented as a virtue, as inherently linked with kindness, sympathy, charity, and compassion. But, to Carver, empathy can create benevolence or malevolence, for any number of reasons. He tends to present empathy as its own beast, and above all, as a method of self-exploration.
Looking back, if I were an ordinary worker in Redfern or Glebe in 1910, I would almost certainly have sided with league.
The Queanbeyan Review 