Many of us still venerate books. The evidence says they are not very good at what is supposed to be their primary job: putting new ideas in our heads. We are slowing developing new ways to achieve this old aim. Many of us own thousands of these. They cost too much, too many ha...

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The Sydney Book Review is my kind of book review. It's online and free. Ever since I joined the blogging revolution in 2005 it's seemed crazy to me (not to mention precious) that so many of our literary publications are locked up and sold (usually at a loss) in tiny subscripti...

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Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following WWII. He had not been in the Commu...

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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...

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[caption id="attachment_34828" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] I put in "Getting to the point" on the marvellous free graphics site Unsplash , and up came this: by salvatore ventura [/caption] Just in case people aren't sick of my extracts from SZ. I liked this. It very much...

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[spoiler alert!] As a fan of the “Hunger Games”, a dystopian trilogy where teenagers are thrown into gladiatorial games to fight till the last survivor in a world that is a blend of ancient Rome and modern America, I eagerly awaited its prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Sna...

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Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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[caption id="attachment_32229" align="alignright" width="327"] This person wrote a whole book on Jane Austen and Adam Smith without finding my essay on the same subject – or at least judging by Amazon's search facility quoting it. As the President of the Free World is known to...

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Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet, but in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and even in Africa (our cradle), m...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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Continued from Part One . The ABC and Children’s Programming - The Highs, Lows and Power-plays Part one here and part two here . The promise of the early years When ABC television first aired, on November 5, 1956, children’s programs presented a dilemma. There was no Australia...

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I've known Dennis Glover since we were both staffers in Parliament during the Hawke-Keating years (I was there in 1981, 83-4 and 1991-3 until just after the 'sweetest victory of all' in 1993 which with hindsight I wish John Hewson had won as it would have kept in-tact Australi...

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I happened upon this yesterday and thought it might be of interest to readers here. THE next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at anyrate in the sight of the outer...

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I went to see The Secret River last night - and returned from the experience underwhelmed. It tries to be a truthful depiction of one aspect of the 'frontier wars' and so it presents a bunch of Europeans setting up shop in an area that the local indigenes (surprise, surprise)...

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Curtesy of reading Susan Johnson's fine and latest novel The Landing and then following her on Twitter, I came to read this review . It's an interesting read, but I was intensely irritated with its preoccupation with the category of 'middlebrow'. It's not a question completely...

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Adam Smith put it memorably above. I'll be forever grateful for my time at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation because it has shown me the generality of that statement. Whether Smith intended it or not, it applies not just to business people of the same trade, but to p...

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OK. The Grattan Institute with all its funding is producing, as it always does, a reading list for the PM. To show the power of blogging I thought we'd do the same here. I wrote "Opposition leader" above just to offer cheap differentiation from Grattan. But whether it's for Bi...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 I have almost certainly fulminated in various asides against TED talks on this blog, and even one full on cri de coeur against retail profundification . (I promised one on business class profundification but I...

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I know I took the notion of optimising to heart as I learned it - implicitly - from my economist Dad. And there are those who might argue that the idea in economics came from the society around economists as the discipline came into being. But now it seems optimising as the he...

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Here are some headlines marking various milestones of progress and regress in the Government 2.0 agenda. As we recommended in the Cutler Report donations to the global commons are growing apace. Meanwhile it's not surprising that the Scandinavians, who are some of the most imp...

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Do countries that are already rich become even happier when they become yet richer? This was the essential question on which I entered a gentleman’s bet in 2004 with Andrew Leigh and which just recently got settled. The reason for the bet was a famous hypothesis in happiness r...

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Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are the rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before - more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. I went to see Mr Pip last night. I chec...

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I love accents. I love pretty much everything about them. I love the way in which they actually convey things - sincerity, guile, sneering, superiority and their opposites and complements - all surreptitiously; all in a way that is at the same time so compelling to our intuiti...

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Remarkable letter written from, and about, Germany by DH Lawrence in 1928. For all the beauty of his descriptions, it feels like divination rather than reportage. Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed. There is no more attempt at the bluff of geni...

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“ they exert every variety of talent on a lower ground…and may be said to live and act in a submind”...... VS Naipaul “The Air Conditioned Bubble" Writing in 1984 about the republican convention of 1984 (the triumphant beginning of Ronald Regans second term), V S Naipaul wrote...

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Warning: Enthusiasm Alert. I've just got home from seeing the Crucible by Arthur Miller at the Melbourne Theatre Company. I thought it was a very good production. I thought I wasn't going to like David Wenham much at the outset as he seemed a bit strained. But that's perhaps b...

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http://youtu.be/nuIiqKytvnU I saw a preview tonight. Incredible, fabulous stuff. Go if you can.

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It takes a lot for a seasoned partisan pro like Dennis to react like this. It means he's not 'in the tent' and that's not much fun, especially if you still work for these guys on a freelance basis - though Dennis has plenty of other clients for his writing business. In any eve...

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https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1529689205420720129 Herewith today's column in the Age and SMH . George Orwell was a stickler for plain and simple English in public discourse. He argued that one could escape some of “the worst follies of orthodoxy” by simplifying one’s lang...

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I had the good fortune to see this remarkable thing recently. And I thought as I was in the Sistine Chapel something I've thought before and have probably pontificated about here at pontification central. (Checking I find this post for instance). Why are there not more facsimi...

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I couldn’t resist buying a copy of Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller when returning from holidays. Several friends and colleagues told me it was a great book; it got great reviews; and Kahneman’s journal articles are invariably a good read, so I was curious. Its general message is...

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The 21st was supposed to be the age of flying cars, teleporters and affordable space travel, says David Graeber . But now here we are in the future still arguing about overcrowded trains and the price of petrol. David Graeber feels cheated: Where ... are the flying cars? Where...

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I've offered Troppodillians several of Constantine Cavafy's poems. They're magnificent. I haven't actually managed to elicit a comment on any of them, but perhaps they're being enjoyed anyway. I'm told they're of a different order in the original. But I wouldn't know. Here's o...

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Occasionally I get so distracted by the way someone writes that I can't concentrate on what they're saying. Here's John Howard in today's Financial Review : To adopt Shakespeare, Meryl Streep came to bury Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. This was attempted -- in the film...

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Yesterday I followed this mellifluously titled article on why the author hadn't been able to write a best selling 'ideas book'. This is what I had to do. First, I needed to have a platform. A platform is something you stand on. It makes you taller than you are. In trade publis...

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Edit - I really want opposing views. Anyone who thinks there is a strong case for a concerted push for more literacy, please give it in comments At the Lowy Interpreter Andrew Carr says "One policy guaranteed to feature in the ' Australia in the Asian Century' White Paper is t...

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Christopher Hitchens loves writing paragraphs like this. And it's fun when you come across them . How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of theocratic rage in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary formula: self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to...

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Two pieces of news. Best Australian Essays has published a 'best of the decade' book, and it pissed me off how closely they stuck to recognised 'names' in essay writing. I have a conflict of interest having had an essay in one of the annual collections. So take it as sour grap...

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Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it . And now after years of rumours , it's finally become a movie . That's odd because it's longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most...

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I was browsing in borders and came upon American Essays of the Century (ie the last one) edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Which was very tempting. I would have bought it if it wasn't $45 too. But I read the essay below - full as it is of what are now cliches of the civil rights mo...

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I confess to not having read a proper biography of Leo Tolstoy. My conception of Tolstoy the man is based, unfortunately, on the relevant chapter of Paul Johnson's notorious Intellectuals . If you haven't come across this book, it's a series of case studies (or hatchet jobs) a...

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A bit of holiday trivia for you. I came upon a form of tourism I didn't quite believe. "Travelling Gentlemen" accompanied their countrymen to the Crimean War, and set up out of cannon range from the battlefields with their wives and hounds and had a jolly good time of it. Thei...

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I appreciate that this has been posted before and nobody has to read it again, it is just for the benefit of new people and those who like to be reminded of the achievements of this remarkable man. Barzun's work represents a major and pioneering contribution to cultural studie...

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[caption id="attachment_9707" align="alignleft" width="484" caption="Pope's Odyssey as it appears on your Kindle"] [/caption] I wrote previously about two of my sub $300 IT purchases. The Livescribe continues to amaze and delight - amazed that it's not simply taken over univer...

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If you're a blogger and you venture into government whether in the bureaucracy proper or as a 'staffer' you've got a problem. You can't keep expressing yourself as candidly as you might wish for fear of breaching the relevant public service code of conduct, of having some perf...

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Alex Sloan at ABC Canberra and I have a chat on air about fortnightly usually corresponding to one of my columns. We had a chat on Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments last Thursday and I was in some trepidation that I might become rather incoherent as the ideas are q...

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New Page 1 I finally got around to seeing The Reader , and for once I'd read the book first (it helps that it's short). The film was well made. The acting was impressive, especially by young David Kross -- I was confirmed in my hypothesis that Kate Winslett deserved her Oscar...

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John Clarke, living national treasure, is on ABC radio national again. On poetica this weekend, or downloadable here .

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What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn't anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What's the point of senators making laws now? Once th...

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Some interesting pieces in The Australian Literary Review , 3 Dec, the insert that comes in the paper on the first Wednesday of the month. Richard Lansdowne wrote on the courage of Alexander Solzhenitsyn which he suggests made him the greatest writer of the 20th century. I am...

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For decades SNOOTS have been hunting down whiches and replacing them with thats . Whenever a SNOOT discovers the relative pronoun which introducing a restrictive clause, the writer responsible will drop several notches in her esteem. For a SNOOT , knowing which relative pronou...

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Declaration of interest, the artist is my spouse, but don't let that prejudice you! Kilmeny Niland has produced a prequel to the best selling Aussie Night Before Christmas. The Aussie Day Before Christmas hot off the press, following two other books earlier in the year, Two To...

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The Ships From Imagination to the Blank Page. A difficult crossing, the waters dangerous. At first sight the distance seems small, yet what a long voyage it is, and how injurious sometimes for the ships that undertake it. The first injury derives from the highly fragile nature...

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Troppo has never had a vision statement. I loathe and abhore them. Indeed I regard them as just so much recriment. Which makes me suggest that we can hold a competition for a Troppo vision statement which contains a good smattering of a bunch of archaic English words that some...

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Jacques Barzun is arguably the leading commentator on education and cultural studies in the 20th century but he has a low profile since his kind of deep but ideologically disinterested scholarship went out of fashion. Born in 1907, he turns 101 in November. His reputation achi...

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And if you tell them that Troppo sent you you can have as many books you want for free. (Note: you may be required to perform the Troppodillian secret handshake.)

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Though it's late the day, I want to recommend Opera Australia's production of Billy Budd . There are only two performances left -- tonight (Monday 13 October) and Thursday. This is indeed short notice for tonight but, for the spontaneous among you, tickets are only $60 if you...

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The Henson episode has raised some questions about the role of art and artists that Jacques Barzun addressed in his book The Use and Abuse of A rt. Barzun (1907 - ) turned 100 last year and deserves to be better known as arguably the premier scholar in cultural studies in the...

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I just clicked on Amazon's 'add to my shopping cart' and got told that four books had changed price. Usually they have gone up. Or that's been my experience. But things are a-changing as you can see from the excerpt below. Is this deflation, increasing copying, competition fro...

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From this site , via Kathy G , regarding Charlie Chaplin. They were dreadfully poor. Charlie's parents were third-string strolling players. His father died early of alcoholism; his mother was often in asylums, whether through drink or because of periodic mental illness. Whenev...

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And, in case you're intersted, the book program is broadcasting from the Clunes Booktown, some festival in which Clunes - which is near Ballarat - invites booksellers to have a big book sale in Clunes - this weekend. And there are other attractions. Listen all about it on that...

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Valid till 1 June Valid until Thursday, 1 May 2008 Borders Cashiers: For eligible book do the following: Ring item, select S1, highlight book, select S5, scan or enter coupon #, enter 25%, proceed. *Coupon offer applies to full priced non-fiction books only. "Great Price" stic...

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A fascinating review of Craig Venter's autobiography . Naturally I'm sympathetic to this guy who looks like he values scientific creativity and achievement above other things, and will improvise through the miasma of institutions that exist to further science to get what he's...

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Well books actually! But the heading above was the caption of an early Leunig cartoon - with the graphic being . . . yes, a tong sale. And remember, print the linked coupon out as many times as you like for separate book purchases.

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A while back I posted a brief endorsement of a Guy Rundle piece, which brought forth a reference to another essay by Rundle . I disagree - sometimes to the point of strong irritation with some of the things he says, especially in the last half of the piece, but I recommend it...

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If you've ever been quoted out of context by journalist you'll know what it's like to be a fictional character. As a therapist to troubled inhabitants of fictional works, I see what happens when authors abuse characters who are often finer human beings than themselves . The in...

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Things have been a little dull over the holiday period. So dull, in fact, that I've been picking through my receptionist's collection of novels. First there was that book everyone's been chattering about recently -- Ian McEwan's Atonement . The second book in her pile was Jona...

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The receptionist's fingers paused over the keyboard. The heat was making it difficult to think and the din of hundreds of amorous black cicadas wasn't helping. She wanted to show Mr Farrell how completely he'd misunderstood Ian McEwan's novel , but at the same time she didn't...

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Find out if you want to by clicking through when the word appears in this rather fun review of Christopher Hitchens. Not that Christopher is either my cup of tea or especially interesting. But he is quite fun to watch - so long as you don't devote much time to it!

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You wont get any deep insights from Ronnie . The autobiography of Ron Wood, the other Rolling Stones guitarist. What you will get is a stargazing jaunt through the best part of British Rock history. Youll also get plenty on the booze hes drunk, the coke hes used, and the women...

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Valid till 22 November.

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Black Inc's 'best of' series are in the bookshops - Essays, Short Stories, Poems. In scanning the latter of these volumes I read the poem below and bought the book. White -Water Rafting and Palliative Care for my late wife, Gloria If I had understood (when down the river you a...

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Review of Tao: On the Road and On the Run in Outlaw China by Aya Goda. Translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts. Published by Portobello Books. The painting reflects the artist, Young Number Four Son. If you want to paint, you must start by building your character. Paintin...

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Reading the Dunera News (of all things) - the Dunera is the prison ship on which my father came to Australia during World War II - I came across some fun quotes. Some I'd heard before but not recently and some I'd never heard - including one from one of my faves - Oscar Wilde....

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The Book Show picked up the theme of blogging today . I'm a complete fan of the Book Show - how they pump out 40 odd minutes of good content each day beats me. Ramona Koval is a good sort - good fun to listen to. Unfortunately, like so many MSM encounters with blogdom, it was...

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"Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush", writes former colleague Matthew Scully . Along with Gerson and John McConnell, Scully was part of the team that crafted some of George W Bush's best known speeches. In a bitchy article for the Atlantic...

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Who wrote this telegram? "1. Hang (hang without fail so the people see ) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2. Publish their names. 3. Take from them all the grain. 4. Designate hostages -- as per yesterday's telegram. Do it in such a way that for...

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Mark Davis is not a happy man. I bought his book Gangland a while back - turns out to be ten years ago - and it seemed quite interesting, and perhaps on a worthy theme. But it was strangely dissatisfying nevertheless. Now a piece in the Saturday mags edited from Davis's Overla...

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I just went to see the film Becoming Jane . Having read a couple of reviews, I didn't want to see it but I arrived at nine p.m. at the cinema determined to see a movie and it was the least bad of my options. On returning and doing a quick Google I can't find a good review of i...

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meika's book - well its cover anyway I have just been emailed by some time Troppodillian lurker, commenter and collaborator in BBO6 meika loofs samorzewski (he's pretty sparing with - but not totally against - capital letters). He finished his book a few months ago. I'm flat o...

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J. M. Coetzee reviews The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer

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I received an e-mail a while back from a very enterprising TR Rose Associates a small New York public advocacy publishing house who have published a comic in aid of the cause for giving money to caregivers in the US. Parents and Grandparents. I don't know what the arrangements...

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Did any of you catch Inga Clendinnen on the Best of Late Night Live about ten days ago? I chanced upon the repeat halfway through -- more accurately I woke up at some ungodly hour after falling asleep with the radio on -- and was at once entranced by this quirky, lucid, sensuo...

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Martin Amis arrived back in Britain to find white, middle-class demonstrators marching with " We are all Hizbullah " placards. "Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can," Amis writes , "As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: ' We don't want anyt...

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When Nicholas Gruen asked me to review The Best Australian Essays 2006 published by Black Inc (in which his essay on Adam Smith - workshopped right here at Club Troppo earlier this year - features), the first question I asked myself was a really basic one. What is an essay? No...

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I think Ken will shortly be posting a review of Best Australian Essays published by Black Inc , but as I'll be leaving Melbourne towards the end of next week I thought I'd post this here now. As a contributor I've got rights to copies at $12 a pop, so if any Troppodillians wan...

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Why is Christopher Pearson promoting a book by a Derrida scholar and an academic who writes about Indigenous issues ? Well... because it includes an entire chapter on him. Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler's new book, The War on Democracy Conservative Opinion in the Australian Pres...

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Nothing's easier to understand than a story. It's as if human beings were hardwired for narrative -- stories with beginnings, middles and ends populated by people doing things. According to cognitive scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson that's not far from the truth. Bac...

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I've admired Paul Monk's writing for a while now and have linked to a particularly good essay of his in the past. In any event, he's agreed for me to post essays of his on Troppo. Over the fold is an review essay of John Armstrong's recent book on Goethe and happiness. From th...

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I'm not much chop at reading poetry, but I was listening to a podcast of the Book Program and heard this discussion about Elizabeth Bishop. There was a marvellous reading of a poem about a Moose (would you believe). I reproduce it over the fold, though I expect I wouldn't have...

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I'm just back from the launch at the IPA - or rather re-launch for it was first published in 1980 - of The Heart of James McAuley by Peter Coleman. It was a star studded cast of launchers. Tony's Staley and Abbott did the launching but Peter Coleman was also there to respond....

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Hot off the press from Sarsparilla . Regular Sarsaparilla contributor Wendy James' novel Out of the Silence has been shortlisted in the 'First Crime Novel' category of the 2006 Ned Kelly Awards for crime fiction. How good is that ?

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I. I enjoyed myself at The Boy from Oz last Friday night. I'd have loved to see one of Peter Allen's big Broadway shows and was curious as to what all the fuss was about The Boy's great success in New York. Mind you, the reason for its success seems pretty obvious. Peter Allen...

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I've always been interested in the motives which drive people to achievements of various kinds and of the sociological and rhetorical descriptions thereof. Keynes would have described his own motives as public spirited, though I don't think he would have denied the gratificati...

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It seems that happiness research, which I wrote about recently , has been going on for a very long time. I discovered this while blog browsing late yesterday. At the excellent new arts group blog Sarsaparilla I came across a reference to an anecdote at theatre critic Alison Cr...

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I came across this review of a new book called The Economics of Attention courtesy of Economic Principles . It sounds like fun. Written by a English academic specialising in style and rhetoric (when he's not being an expert witness in legal plaigiarism cases), it's based on th...

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Yesterday I asked people to tell me what a list of books have in common. They include Enid Blighton's The Magic Faraway Tree and Milan Kundera's Unbearable lightness of being . Lance Armstrong's It's not about the Bike and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights . Now you may think t...

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I've been reading literary and movie blogs recently. Not that I'm denying that Iraq and AWB are important or anything, it's just that there's only so many times you can say the same thing before outrage fatigue begins to set in. Chekhov's Mistress is a tasty US literary blog b...

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Having read Morag Fraser's review of John Hirst's collection of essays I went hunting for the essays mentioned in the review. I found only " The Distinctiveness of Australian Democracy " which I'd put on my 'must read' list. A really interesting and in various respects contrar...

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The author of this article at Online Opinion seems to think so. And it's a vaguely intriguing idea too; after all, lots of creative people live and experience reality rather closer to the edge than most of the rest of us. But there's an almost complete absence of evidence for...

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A while back I made a note to do a brief review of Bill Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth after finishing reading it. I've not got round to it, but here goes. It's quite a good book but it's also fairly quirky and peculiar. It's nicely arranged into major parts each with...

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It's not just western cartoons causing protests abroad. In India Hindu activists are protesting against Valentine's Day. According to Asian News International Valentine's Day has become increasingly popular in India in recent years with retailers doing a brisk trade in heart-s...

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[photopress:Dr_Tropp___SuperId.jpg,full,pp_empty] Every Sunday evening I take time out of my busy schedule to help readers with their problems . As this is the internet, many of my most troubled readers are sock puppets and characters from fiction . This week a character from...

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Like a good humanist and liberal I have always been opposed to censorship, however in the 1980s I stirred up a debate in the Humanist literature, pointing out that there was a newer wave of pornography about and it was very different from the kind of harmless stuff that prompt...

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That's the title of my newest book, which is a collection of my shorter pieces--essays, short stories and a few papers I gave at conferences--which has just been released by the small Australian publisher, Altair Australia Books. Nearly all of the pieces have been published be...

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A little while back, on one of my literary posts, on nominations for the 'dullest authors', a couple of people commented on how they found Australian writers , in the main, boring and/or unreadable. I thought I'd actually give you a chance here and now to nominate those Austra...

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I love crime fiction; have loved it ever since I discovered it at the age of 12 or 13. Crime fiction, well-written, is one of the most satisfying reading experiences there is: technically, the crime story provides a superb structure; characters are usually at crisis points in...

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At the very welcome recommendation of a friend, I reread the second "Lightness and Weight" chapter in Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being on Saturday. Kundera reminded me of the truth of a metaphor Maurice Merleau-Ponty used for how our lives are shaped by remembered...

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Here's the chance for a bit of listmania--what are your top five favourite Shakespeare plays, and why? Before I list my own faves, I'd like to give you a bit of my own personal background regarding Shakespeare. As a child growing up in a French family, albeit mostly in Austral...

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"A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work." In his recent post on postmodernism and history , Chris Sheil discussed Umberto Eco's great novel The Name of the Rose . I've just dug out my copy of his Reflections on the Name of the Rose . What he writes in the fir...

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or, Bollywood Bliss I'd never seen a Bollywood film before today. I'm a longtime fan of Hong Kong cinema, particularly the work of director Tsui Hark , and this genre has well and truly become a crossover phenomenon, both in terms of style and effects in action films, and in H...

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Since, as we all now know, Troppo is home to lovers of literature, I'd urge you all to visit Catallaxy where two posts are of interest. Andrew discusses the importance of the opening line in written expression , which has led to some great examples in comments, and Jason has a...

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This will be my last entry in the Troppo literature wars, which I suspect are running out of steam with the same positions being reiterated. However, I wouldn't be doing my job as a sociologist if I didn't point out that the way that we read literary works and assess their val...

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... can be found here , for new readers. The exam will be on Friday at 9am sharp. Bring a 2B lead pencil, as your chief examiner/Grand Inquisitor, Rafe Champion , will be setting a multi-choice test. Seriously, I'd love to post more on my literary obsessions like Kit Marlowe,...

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Scott's post on Tintin inspired me to get a move on with a post I've been meaning to do for a little while--on the contrasting joys of the two great Belgian comic-strip adventures, the Tintin books and the Asterix books. Like fellow Belgian, the fabulous singer/songwriter Jacq...

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I was delighted as well as surprised to see the picture of Tintin in Mark's post below today. I had a passion for the Tintin comics when I was a child. It was John Quiggin who inadvertently re-ignited my old passion. He made a request for civil discussion . That provoked some...

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At the suggestion of sundry commenters, Troppo is pleased to present a poll on books that you read as a kid that had a great impact on you. It's quite a nice exercise in nostalgia and reflection, and seems appropriate to me because today's my birthday! Please nominate ten. If...

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I was reading the Oxford Companion to English Literature yesterday, looking up the entries for various Golden Age detective fiction writers (as I'm planning a mystery series set in the 1920's). What intrigued me was the contrast in the entries for Agatha Christie and Dorothy L...

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There've been some interesting discussions developing on the thread about Andrew Bolt's demonisation of Desperate Housewives . If I'm reading it correctly, commenters are having difficulty agreeing to a definition of what constitutes "quality" in television, and the issue of t...

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The weather's horrible at the moment here in Brisbane. Sticky, humid, and it's hard to sleep. The other day I was talking about the political climate in the Joh era , and suggesting a bit of a link (other tropical cities - like New Orleans - have shared loopy, extravagant and...

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It was Joh's 94th birthday today . Time to revisit the Dispatches from Johburg and share some random memories of my teenage years under the reign of Bjelke: - as a young public service clerk, going up to the third floor of the Treasury Building with some friends and sitting in...

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To coincide with the release of the Cabinet Papers from 1974, The Currency Lad wrote a rather acerbic post on Gough Whitlam . Some how or other (as you do in the blogosphere), I ended up debating the contribution that Islamic civilization has made with a number of commenters o...

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by commyxtion and mellyng, furst with Danes and afterward with Normans, in menye the contray longage ys apeyred, and som useth strange wlaffying, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng. That's Ranulph Higden, writing in 1352, and complaining in his Polychronicon about the...

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Coming up for air after an exhausting week in Sydney.. I was asked earlier if I had a list of recommended books for Christmas, so I thought I'd just talk about a few books I've enjoyed recently, suggest also some lesser-known classics, --and also note some books I hope I might...

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Dresden after its WWII bombing. Thus, nuclear physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer after witnessing a nuclear explosion. In Ken's post on literature and world events, Stephen astutely cited the work of W. G. Sebald . A novelist, academic and critic, Sebald was born in Wertach im Al...

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"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." - George Orwell. Ken poses the question of why there seem to be so few writers tackling big issues of the stature of George Orwell . Maybe Orwell himself had the answer in his 1946 essay P...

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Where are the great popular novels, plays and films that grapple with today's major political and ideological issues? It's a question that occurred to me while watching a talkfest on ABC TV last night, where assorted pundits mused about a list of the ten most influential books...

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Yesterday I bought, and am nearly finished(it's a real page-turner, you see!), a new and very enjoyable crime novel, The Walker, by a new Australian author, Jane R.Goodall. Set in London in 1971, with a prologue in 1967, it's a very spooky, well-written and unsettling read abo...

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One of the unpleasant things about being in the literary field is the snobbery that surrounds the definition of 'literature'. There are people who seem to think that if a novel is accessible, fun, and exciting with a gripping story and vivid characters, it's bound to be bad li...

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I think with Sophie on board we'll have to start a Troppo Literary Award! Stimulated by Sophie's post on Les Murray , I've been pondering the lack of popular or media recognition of some for our excellent emerging and young poets. This is no doubt partly explained by the econo...

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For fellow admirers of Les Murray, here's some fantastic just-breaking news: the latest international honour to be awarded to our greatest poet. I had it hot from the lips of my agent, Margaret Connolly, who is also Les' agent. Les will be awarded one of Italy's top literary h...

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I was a child who was often 'away with the fairies' --the very first book I remember reading was a Little Golden Book(in French) of three fairytales--Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast and Toads and Diamonds. Stories about once upon a time in a kingdom far far away were guaranteed...

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(Via David Tiley ) It had to happen I suppose : First, there was the novel written without using the letter "e". Now a French author has produced what he claims is the first book with no verbs. Perhaps inevitably, critics have commented unfavourably on the lack of action in Mi...

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Here's a link to an article in Christian Science Monitor proclaiming the demise of post-modernism in Eng Lit academia. Since this is a topic that has occasionally provoked useful discussion in the ozplogosphere, I thought it was worth drawing the article to readers' attention....

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Wendy James recently posted a piece called " Shlock Horror! ", about best-selling horror novelist Stephen King's being awarded a lifetime literary achievement award. By coincidence or otherwise, I'm currently reading Immortality , a work by Milan Kundera of Unbearable Lightnes...

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