READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  A scrunched, fa ding bookmark fell from a book. It was a cutting, a newspaper poem by Judith Wright entitled “Computers”. ‘Those things make me nervous/ but not for the reasons you think,’ she begins, setting up the dichotomy that our ways are not a poet’s ways. Notice her connection of ‘things’ with ‘think’. ‘Not because they’ll take away our living;/ if we really liked living/ that wouldn’t matter,/we could start living instead. You don’t need much money to live.’ She raises this matter of ‘living’, which is about the most important subject in the world, more important than computers. Notice how she introduces money from nowhere. She seems to be making a link between computers and money, one that today has become profound. Living, for Judith, is about creating, if we are to understand the next verse aright: ‘Not because they’ll write poems or paint pictures;/ no one who knows what poetry is/ or what pictures are/ could do more than laugh at that one.’ This is a confident assert...

  Publishers of Roald Dahl, the author famed for mentioning unmentionable things, are employing sensitivity readers to alter some of the unmentionable language in his children’s books. This is language deemed offensive. The unmentionable is one of the reasons readers read Roald Dahl. The publishers stand by “the irreverence and sharp-edged spirit of the original text,” so how much that changes after the sensitivity readers get to work is a fair question. ‘Fat’ and ‘ugly’ have been cut, with the result that Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”. Physical appearance is a main concern behind hundreds of changes. Then there is “Aunt Sponge who is terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” which has been changed to “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” leaving one to wonder if the sensitivity reader is not guilty of ageism, also revengism, but more to the point a co-author of the work, given the new couplet alters...

  ‘Humbug’ by John Hughes is the new multifaceted novel by the notorious Sydney rip-off merchant. Once again Hughes has successfully launched a puzzle-book of spot-the-author, without listing all the answers at the end. Whole paragraphs from famous American novels and Nobel Prize essays rub shoulders with original writings by his former students and unusual uncredited passages from people’s blogs. Asked to explain himself, Hughes replies smilingly that there is nothing to explain. He is paying homage to all the favourite creative artists that make up his patchwork quilt. Acknowledgement is superfluous, given the words are Hughes’s once a few alterations are made and, as Charles Dickens once put it, “the ink has dried.” An important aspect of his method is the technique he calls “without realising”. This involves copying sections of ‘A Christmas Carol’ without realising at the time that’s what he’s doing. This is quite an imaginative feat, completely beyond the scope of Artificial I...

  Inspired to re-read Italo Calvino, I am at present in ‘Invisible Cities’ (1972). It’s a fantasy dialogue between two 13 th -century contemporaries, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which accounts of exotic cities leave one wondering if they existed, or are all in the mind of Italo Calvino. Remarks by a critic on the jacket are a spoiler: “Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour…” It is true Marco Polo was a Venetian, that he travelled to Shangdu, and that on page 86 he says, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” But this is too literal an explanation, too final, as if the author’s intentions could be summarised. Each city described by Polo, or in Kublai’s dreams, is one of childlike impressions grounded in adult experience. The cities enjoy an existence that is only spoken about, that may have been like that then, but may not be now. Their precariousness is as valuable a quality as their bea...

This article was first published in Eureka Street online, on Thursday the 3 rd of March 2022  here:  https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/tolstoy-s-war  One of the most memorable scenes in Russian literature relates the thoughts of a man lying on the ground staring at the sky in the middle of a major European battle. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is wounded. He is placed in a situation where, instead of running, fighting, and thinking every moment might be his last, he is suddenly met with silence, grandeur, tranquillity. Instead of everything being horror, deception, and emptiness, he sees only peace and infinity, and for this he is grateful. His desire for life is affirmed.   Nor does he forget his experience when caught in a place of extreme vulnerability on a battlefield. Later, when Prince Andrei as it happens encounters the architect of Austerlitz in person, he finds Napoleon wanting, “so petty did his hero with his paltry vanity and delight in victory appear...

Martin Johnston’s novel ‘Cicada Gambit’ (1983) is probably the earliest work of fiction to use Bloomsday (the 16 th of June) as an essential element of the story. Set in Sydney, it is an integral part of the history of Bloomsday celebration in Australia.   The first mention of ‘Ulysses’ in the story is at page 41. It is a surprise appearance. The narrator talks about “narrative thread” and “Greek ideas and associations” before saying “I still cannot tell for certain whether James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ had any part to play.” Then proceeds to talk about something else, though he does speak of “the second of these episodes”, which hints at least at the idea that the book deals in episodes, just as in Joyce’s novel. The reference occurs in the second chapter, as though Johnston is starting to drop clues. We are henceforth on the lookout for Joycean cues.   Bloomsday itself is introduced two-thirds of the way through the story, at Chapter 16, ’Control of the Centre’, continuing ac...

  The debt that Aaron Shulman owes to the writings, published and unpublished, of Felicidad Blanc increases with each chapter. His adoption of the thoughts and feelings of each member of the Panero family is especially prevalent in her case, prompting the reader to ask: where did he get this emotional inside knowledge? The answer is simple: from her own writings, published and unpublished, listed in the book’s bibliographies. Shulman nowhere acknowledges that that’s what he is doing, an act of appropriation of her words that leaves one with an uneasy feeling. On the one hand, he is forthcoming about Felicidad’s own literary ambitions, while on the other he plays his own game of storyteller by using her primary source material for his own ends. This results in a literary history that at times tips into novelistic imaginings of each main character, and notably Felicidad herself. Although he ponders from time-to-time why these people behave in such truly crazy ways, it is not hard to ...