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Black Orpheus on Alexander Drive
Dale Lowry, 2017. We used to go on these aimless drives in Blackie’s Fairlane. We never really went anywhere – just drove through the bottle-o and then around the suburbs with a couple of six packs on board. Sometimes we’d look for skate spots, even though I was skating less and less by that point.
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McIver
When I think of Perth, I think of McIver station. A station that appears almost as central as you can get on a map of Perth, nestled beside the busy knot of the Graham Farmer Freeway interchange and one stop away from Perth Station itself. But despite its geography, everything about McIver feels peripheral. In
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Hyperlink Fiction
In the Age of Content, hyperlinks are the internet’s connective tissue. Websites that do content well employ them strategically to create an immersive network of information, with the end goal of maximising users’ time on site and, more often than not, funnelling them toward a point of sale. There’s a surprisingly sophisticated form of information
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Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ retold by me
Victorian novels are never as easy to get through as you think, for this reader anyway. There’s a ton of names to keep track of without visual aid, and the serial nature of their publication means there’s plenty of dithering subplots and characters that don’t really go anywhere. In the case of Vanity Fair, it
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Crossing the desert of William T Vollmann’s ‘Imperial’
Usually I’d use the mountain analogy for a book of this size, but the sprawl and subject matter of Imperial make the reading experience more like a long, water-less trudge across the sunbaked, treeless valley it describes. Unreliable first person testimonies. Staggeringly soporific stretches of obscure county records. Narratorial interjections from Vollmann himself, that basically
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Addicted to the Work: Richard Price’s ‘Clockers’
Like The Wire, for which it was no small source of inspiration, Clockers, Richard Price’s 1995 slab of streetwise-lit begs to be read in many ways. It’s a dense police procedural, a ghetto crime drama, a comment on race relations in the modern American city, and so on. But to me this is really a
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Jackson's Ephemera 