Over on Online Opinion, “Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate,” Greg Barns is depressed. He says that modern Aussie books are “generally superficial, politically correct tomes” and denounces the “30-something brigade” of Aussie novelists “growing fat on Australia Council grants, state government largesse and university residencies.” He says that the Australian literary scene is […]

The ABC reports that Aussie writer, Carrie Tiffany, is shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living.
Tiffany’s book is about how people understand the land they live on. The Age reports that “Carrie Tiffany doesn’t see the landscape the same way as the rest of us.” She’s […]

Reading meme. Found this over on Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant.
Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place (parentheses) around the ones you’ve never even heard of.
The Da Vinci […]

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. The narrator’s voice in the daily tribal assemblies is not enough to relate the myth. One needs special times and places, exclusive meetings; the words […]

Roger Morris’s book FINALLY arrived today.
It looks like this…

…only it’s hardcover and has a royal blue ribbon in it, of the sort I used to tie in my hair as a schoolgirl.
I’d already read an excerpt and this review, this one and this one, too and have been quite looking forward to reading […]

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization (PETA) have some horrific video and photographic footage of how blood is taken from horses at the Refik Saydam Hygiene Center, in Turkey. A horse is forced down, legs tied, throat slashed, and blood drained from it until it expires. Once dead, it is dragged out […]

My friend Rohan drew my attention to some interesting articles at Edge.org: The World Question Center. One article in particular caused Rohan to think about the contradictions involved in our understanding of death and what happens to us after it. Jesse Bering, a psychologist at the University of Arkansas, examines this dilemma, which he has named ”Unamuno’s Paradox” after […]

I’m playing the Interactive Philosophy Quiz at The Philosopher’s Magazine. I went against Nigel the Novice and lost. Nigel the Novice knows things like the year of Dewey’s death and the year in which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published. Who remembers such things?! I’m going to try him again. I’m a philo grad. […]

In Plato’s Symposium Aristophanes gives an account of the origin of humankind by way of introducing his theory of love. He says that instead of two sexes, man and woman, there were three: man, woman, and an androgynous sex, having, as the name suggests, the double nature of both man and woman.
“… primeval man was […]

An article I wrote on Balkan documentaries in 2006 is live at the Thessaloniki Film Festival website edited by doco-filmaker extraordinaire Angelike Contis.