Strangely Neglected
- David Free
Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature
By David Castronovo
Continuum, 2009.
David Castronovo’s Blokes is a study of four more-or-less blokey post-war British (indeed English) writers: the poet Philip Larkin, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the playwright John Osborne, and the critic Kenneth Tynan. Castronovo is an American academic, and in some ways his American-ness – or at least his non-Britishness – shows. Read more
Good Soldiers, Bad War - on David Finkel in Iraq
- Nick Terrell
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Scribe. 287 pages. $Au 35.00.
In the final sequence of HBO’s Iraq War mini-series, Generation Kill, the troops from Bravo 21 gather around a laptop. Their deployment has come to an end and the mood is celebratory. One of their number has just finished editing together a retrospective package from the footage he’d shot on his handi-cam during the battalion’s time in theatre. Not everyone in the squad is keen, but the majority assemble excitedly. To the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s octogenarian end-time rumble, the grainy cut and paste of troops skylarking, bonding, waiting, shooting and smiling begins to play. Read more
Tom Wright on ‘The Oresteia’
- Nick Terrell
Tom Wright, Associate Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, is drawn to classical tragedy “because it is difficult” and “because it is bigger than us.” Classical tragedy asks difficult questions of our quotidian and pragmatic ideas of order, justice and accountability. Ideally, any new adaptation of the Oresteia will renew and reframe these questions.
I asked Wright why it’s important to keep these works on our stage and how he has approached Aeschylus’ trilogy. Read more
America Agonistes - Sam Lipsyte’s ‘The Ask’
- Nick Terrell
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Picador. 296 pages. $Au 29.99
“Throughout my whole life I was constantly finding my place taken, perhaps because I did not look for my place where I should have done.” Turgenev - ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’
Who, in this age of late, post or undead capitalism is more superfluous than the aspiring artist? Who promises the least likely return, the lowest work-to-profit ratio and the highest likelihood of redundancy? With their seedling talents having barely pushed through the heavy sod, yet to produce any mature, robust or arresting foliage, the aspiring artist is always on the brink of nonentity. Ignored, ambitious, over-astute of every hierarchy of success, these are figures who cherish their marginalisation as the antecedent to rich rewards, while also deeply loathing it as the material evidence of their unrequited pretension. Read more