Meanjin - on Ethics and Fiction
- Nick Terrell
Meanjin vol.68, no.4
Melbourne University Press, $AU24.99
Hello happy typewriter, what have you got waiting for us inside?
Essays galore this month, I’d pitch them to you but they pitch themselves – Ben Eltham confirms that mainstream arts festivals are touting for professional young party people with money to burn; Jane Gleeson-White shows how “words and stories shape our lives – our individual lives and the life of the collective”; Sarah Kanowski travels to Kelantan in Malaysia, to experience the sacred and ancestral shadow plays that have been banned by religious scholars in their attempt to control the promiscuity of the sea Read more
Absence of Malice
- David Free
The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years, by Clive James
Picador. 286 pages, $Au 34.99
There was a time when I’d have argued that the memoir was Clive James’s ideal form. We all know that he’s a lof of different things: poet, critic, philosopher, performer, wise man and wit. The memoirs seemed, for the first three volumes or so, to be the showcase in which all these talents could operate at once.
But in the fourth volume, North Face of Soho, things started to go slightly awry. Read more