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I like little bookshops. It reminds me of the old world and there’s something comforting about that except for the war in Algeria, Vietnam, the Cambodian genocide, Iraq, etc, etc. You know what I mean. The comfort of crawling up on mummy’s lap as a child. But independent bookshops are done like a dogs dinner….

Dickens, Orwell and Plath have been dumped from HSC English lists starting on 2027. The woke nightmare continues to roll through HSC English with the greatest writer in the English language, Charles Dickens gone, George Orwell axed and the film, Good Night and Good Luck cut. Female authors, poets and directors make up 49 per cent of creative…

This story was in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday and it gave me a chuckle. Helen Garner is an Australian writer who turned female middle class naval-gazing in to an art form. She makes Joan Didion look like a stand-up comic. Now at 81 she has written a ‘happy book’ about Australian Rules Football. Fuck…

OK. Let me make a generalisation about the themes in about 80 per cent of young (and not so young) women writers. Trauma is sensationalised, there’s a host of damaged characters predictably in their late 20s or early 30s who are seething with self-doubt. The lead character is disaffected, cynical and irreverent to the point…

Far be it from me to pollute this aspirational blog with reality but capping international students, a major slowdown in job ads, and a contraction in company profits, means we are in a recession when population growth is taken into account. I know you literary types study the finance pages but on a per capita basis,…

I’m not a big fan of the domestic drama, where there’s a maddie in the family, an absent father, a mother who has dementia, an unfulfilled love affair, and scene setting in Fitzroy, Bondi or St Kilda. I’m not a against people writing this stuff – and I blame bloody Helen Garner for starting this…

Let’s leave the sad girl novelists behind and look at Malcolm Knox’s novel The Life, which was published in 2011. It doesn’t matter that it was written by a man, or woman or a hungry Labrador. It’s a standout in Australian literary fiction. His main character, Dennis is a fat, has-been surfer who has stewed his brain…

It came to me in a dream, like John Lennon’s dream of flaming pie and a voice which said, ‘You men shall be Beatles”. My dream said sad girl novelists (see previous post) are channelling Taylor Swift. The world is ‘Tay Tay’ed’ with screaming and crying female fans in their teens and 20s, dressed in brightly…

I thought sisters were doing it for themselves. ‘I am women, hear me roar… ‘, that sort of thing.  Why are girls — or white university-educated women in their 20s and 30s — so miserable? Is it because all men are rapists and child molesters? Is it because it’s they’ve run out of SSRi’s? Is…

An ‘ordure’ is my collective noun for a group of oestrogen-driven, ageing neurotics, who ‘taught’ screenwriting at RMIT many years ago. They were older women who couldn’t teach. Students spent two hours of a three hour teaching period watching movies. Fuck me dead. They got the job because they helped my predecessor write the course….