Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
The Magandjin Dyke Bar Project
Further south, where the winters are more bitter, the Lesbian Action Group, or LAG, is currently involved in a legal battle over whether it can exclude trans women from public events by seeking an exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act. LAG wants to hold events for ‘lesbians born female’ only, a definition that excludes trans women. Its stated position is that sex cannot be changed, and that lesbian culture is being erased by trans women.
Death and the AI maiden
When I saw my father lying dead in his hospital bed, I took a photograph. Just with my phone. It was close to hand – in fact, closer than usual, as I’d been almost frantically consulting AI during the chaotic leadup to his death. The palliative care staff had made the scene presentable. The white sheet that covered my father up to his neck was crisply tucked into the sides of the mattress and folded at the top. There was a flower – a lily – on the pristine white pillow where his head lay. I won’t show you my father himself. If you haven’t seen a dead body, you’ll probably experience one in time. Then you’ll realise that death is private.
Harmless hedonism
Arrivederci anhedonia! In this age of, well, this age, the only sensible modus operandi is harmless hedonism. Seal clubbing? Out! Knitting or binge-watching ’80s cult films? In! There are lots of gloriously wholesome hedonistic pursuits in which we can all partake. Pearl clutchers have worried about secularism for centuries. It’s not that science is the new God – after all, Trump and RFK hate science – but more that arbitrary restrictions on pedestrian human behaviour feel somewhat unnecessary.
My kingdom of dirt
Today my hygienist had to show me how to handle an electric toothbrush, placing her hand intimately around mine as she excavated the remnants of plaque. A chewable purple tablet revealed the build-up around my molars. That is a mess, she admonished, pure dirt. I couldn’t say I was offended, or even surprised. My oral health, like other parts of my life, seemed to gather mess and dirt with a familiar ease.
What’s the point of bookstores?
Arts and cultural workplaces often deliberately cultivate an allure of prestige and bourgeois elitism that protects them from scrutiny. Add to this the fact that publishing and bookshop employees are overwhelmingly white and educated with advanced degrees from prestigious universities (and those in executive or management roles even more so). This demographic is often better positioned economically to sacrifice income, work overtime or trade penalty rates in exchange for more desirable, intellectually stimulating labour.
Palestine 36
To finish with empire, we must first remember the truth of the violence that made it possible. This is what British academic Paul Gilroy believed, and that the loss of empire is the central social, political and cultural fact of British society today. But the more brutal realities of imperialism, the realities of violent death following occupation, emergency laws, judicial murder, the bloodshed accompanying deportation — horrors fundamental to the British state — are rarely captured by filmmakers for a large, multiplex audience.
Tokyo driftless
I attempt to read a Murakami book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I have only read Norwegian Wood because people who are into Murakami tend to be annoying. The book is about an unemployed househusband to whom strange things happen. I stop reading it. Since moving to Japan with my husband for his job, I have mostly read Australian fiction and Dickens. The most celebrated Japanese novels available in English tend to be about alienated people with mental health issues.
Writing is social
Since the late 1990s, the internet has housed a new form of serialised writing. One that permits instant interaction with readers. Current well-known platforms for these kinds of works include Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. While these platforms are becoming more mainstream thanks to the traditional publication and adaptation of works from them (such as The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood and Alchemised by SenLinYu), there remains significant stigma surrounding the origin of these works.
Nanu Gaamu / Google said
WRITING GIVES ME the power to transform the colonial settler narrative written for me (the racialised assumption and notion that ‘natives are unlovable and uncaring’). Writing reminds me why I shouldn’t fear my language too, in spite of the old colonial notion that ‘Islanders’ speaking their language are criminals or evil. Every Thursday at 7 pm, I sit at the dinner table with my cultural parents, ready to hear and analyse the sound theory of Kala Lagaw Ya.
The space waste
I don’t want to kill everyone’s buzz (Lightyear), but perhaps it’s time to reconsider how much money we waste on space stuff? Given the state of things on Earth, how can we justify (largely performative) space science? As someone who spends a lot of time attempting to make people care about science, this may seem like a strange hill to die on, but I’ve been struggling to quantify how useful millions of dollars of expenditure is proving to the scientific advancement of…what, exactly?
Confessions from a bookstore
What those who work outside of publishing don’t factor in is that, ultimately, bookselling is a niche form of retail work. You are working in a bookshop. The curatorial process is certainly unique, but the basic business premise of a bookshop is that it’s a place of commerce.
Inside it, trying
Savage describes her ideal world as one ‘where the value of creativity was not assessed against the metrics of excellence, institutional legibility, or professional viability’ – where artists ‘did not feel compelled, out of the threat of poverty or social disgrace, to professionalise’.
