Club Troppo

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 can remember sitting in an undergrad Political Sociology lecture in 1991 and hearing the acerbic Lecturer authoritatively state "Women in politics are only suited to nurturing roles, like Minister for Families or Social Welfare". I piped up, "What about Joan Kirner and Carme...

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Yesterday, when I was talking to one of my France-based sisters over the phone, she told me my 21 year old nephew Stanislas, who's been training as a helicopter combat pilot in the French Army, may well be sent off to the Ivory Coast soon as part of the 4,000 strong French tro...

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The months of October and November are sometimes referred to as suicide season in Darwin. Even when, like me, you're having too much fun to consider such a drastic solution for existential angst, the unremitting humidity still breeds rampant crutch rot while the screeching of...

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Chris Sheil has brought us a marvellous story - you read it first in the Australian blogosphere (unless you're a Guardian subscriber, of course). The Tory Shadow Minister for the Arts, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, also editor of The Spectator , has had to resign after l...

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Politics looks complicated but it's actually very simple. As an aspiring leader you are looking for people to follow you, to be inspired by your penetrating insights, to hand out how-to-vote cards for you, and - most important of all - to love you. So here's how it works. Thin...

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Journalists, academics, and educators in the United States are constantly hounded by right-to-lifers, evangelicals, and creationists demanding that their opinions on scientific topics be given the same weight as those of mainstream researchers. The latest example of this is th...

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Fantasy fiction, like crime fiction, looks set to becoming one of the dominant cultural genres, in both books and films. In books, fantasy is making huge inroads; not only was Lord of the Rings voted top book of the 20th century by a majority of readers in the English-speaking...

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Observant and long-time readers will certainly have noticed "spam" comments popping up frequently in Troppo's "most recently commented posts" sidebar. I say "observant" readers because the spam never lasts very long. I delete it as soon as I see it, and that's always within an...

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(via Chris Sheil ) Here's a passionate if profane rant about those Bible Belt Republicans whose votes may or may not have been crucial to Bush's election victory. It echoes and amplifies this passage from a MSN Slate article by Daniel Gross that I quoted at the bottom of a rec...

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One of the remarkable aspects of the high profile achieved by conservative Christians as a result of the recent US and Australian elections has been the claim that they represent a reassertion of much-needed "values" in western society. The tacit assumption inherent in that cl...

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During the election, a number of groups including the AMA noted the inattention paid by both political parties to urgent issues about the living standards, economic outcomes and health of Indigenous Australians. After the abolition of ATSIC earlier in the year (supported by La...

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I'm not sure if there's actually going to be a definitive answer to this question in this post, but I'd like at least to advance some ideas as to why so many Aussie films flop with punters, and often with critics too. First of all, there is, with several honourable exceptions,...

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Tim Blair isn't a dumb guy but you'd hardly call him an education expert . Across the internet Ayn Rand loons , von Mises enthusiasts , and even the exceedingly grumpy Phyllis Schlafly have been denouncing a teaching method called 'whole language.' Obviously it's possible to d...

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From Nietzsche's Zarathustra : State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too: and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus t...

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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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As I mentioned in my earlier posting (Screen pleasures), I did not have TV when I was growing up, as my parents found it second-rate and a waste of time, compared to films. That didn't stop us children from being quite 'au fait' with a lot of TV programmes, mostly because we'd...

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In the course of wrestling with a half-written post about the influence of neoconservative thinkers (especially Leo Strauss and Alan Bloom) on current US politics (foreshadowed here ), I've found myself being diverted onto exploring the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, not least b...

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Loquacious commenter Nick has contributed a long but interesting soliloquy on the mentality and concerns of the average American voter. However, what most struck me about his analysis was that his list of "tsunamis on the horizon" didn't include any economic factors. Nor has t...

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