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
Looking back, if I were an ordinary worker in Redfern or Glebe in 1910, I would almost certainly have sided with league.
Pat reads Ursula Le Guin's fantasy classic. "If ever you want to delve into a world that is utterly fanatistical, but explore the lives of the people within whose struggles are so strikingly like our own, Earthsea is surely for you."
Sure, funny has an energy, but it's the structure of funny that gives that energy life. In the height of the show's success, The Marine Biologist took to the screens for the first time, and to me it typifies the character of the Seinfeld project.
The Queanbeyan Review 