Archive

The production of literary magazines is a collaborative effort, and small ones tend to bring together people who are united in an enthusiasm that transcends financial aspiration. Translated, this means there is no money in it. The editorial notes for the rejuvenated Blast reveal what seems to be a family affair at work: the publisher–editor is Ann Nugent, and the person responsible for design and layout is Peta Nugent. Issues 4 and 5 appeared for review, but I have concentrated here on the first of these.

The continued success and quality of the Quarterly Essay series has done much to promote the long essay as a legitimate forum for detailed, informed and accessible political discussion. That this has occurred during the Howard era suggests that all is not lost in the quest for genuine public debate. In the latest Quarterly Essay, David Marr acknowledges that, ‘[s]uppression is not systematic. There are no gulags for dissidents under Howard.’ Nevertheless, His Master’s Voice is born of, and fuelled by, exasperation. Marr makes little effort to mask his personal enmity towards John Howard. And his disgust at the manner in which the federal Coalition has governed for more than a decade is palpable: ‘Since 1996, Howard has cowed his critics, muffled the press, intimidated the ABC, gagged scientists, silenced non-government organisations, neutered Canberra’s mandarins, curtailed parliamentary scrutiny, censored the arts, banned books, criminalised protest and prosecuted whistleblowers.’

It is a treat to see ten of Laurie Clancy’s short stories collected in this volume, his third. Given their quality, it is not surprising that seven of them have already been published in magazines and anthologies. But to read them together is to see their interdependence, their thematic patterns. All deal with male experience, beginning with that of the fourteen-year-old Leo, on the brink of sexual knowledge; and moving on to stories of middle-aged men contemplating the emptiness of their lives. The collection concludes with two stories about death, one from cancer, one from AIDS.

Conversation is the raison d’être of this monumental monologue. But you might not think so if you read only the reviews. Splenetic, greensick criticism – and there has been plenty of it – insists that what Clive James has built out of a life’s voracious reading and careful noticing – his ‘notes in the margin’ – is a platform for his ego. Not so. But how ruthlessly we skin our own ...

Judith Wright and Barbara Patterson met at a gathering of the Barjai group, a Brisbane salon for young poets and artists, when Judith was almost twice Barbara’s age. Judith had not yet published her first collection, The Moving Image (1946). She read some poems and Barbara was magnetised.

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.87–54 BC) may have died young, but his limited output (only 113 poems and some fragments have survived) has immortalised him as a writer of erotic and satiric verse and savage portraits of contemporaries, so frank sometimes that, until recent decades, editions of his work were customarily heavily expurgated. Innumerable poets through the ages have kept his flame burning. Ezra Pound peppers the opening cantos with references to Catullus. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘Come, my Celia’ is a version of Catullus 5.