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.
Shadow selves
This edition of Griffith Review considers all kinds of loss (and a few notable instances of its inverse). Losing something, of course, doesn’t have to
connote pain or strife: some of the essays and stories in this collection view loss as a beginning rather than an end, a shucking off of old selves or a reappraisal of old habits and ideas.
Undisclosed funds
In 2022, the American culture writer Jordan Calhoun penned a column in The Atlantic that I still think about. In his piece, Calhoun recalls the financial precarity of his college years, where he began ‘the first of many adventures being surrounded by people I felt were rich while I pretended not to be poor’: stealing food when his study allowance ran out, scanning the pages of textbooks in a bookshop when he couldn’t afford to buy his own copies. No one he knew talked openly about their income or spending habits – so as Calhoun grew older and sought to overcome his ongoing struggles with money, he turned to pop culture in the hope of gaining insight into what ‘“normal” finances’ looked like.
A stitch in time
These tensions between our inner and outer selves, and the layers of anxiety we add when we imagine other people’s (mis)perceptions of who we are because of what we’re wearing, are surely some of the most simultaneously beguiling and brutal aspects of fashion. The right outfit can drop the veil between who we believe ourselves to be and who we want to become; the wrong one can be like showing up in fancy dress and realising it’s not that kind of party.
Real monsters
The language of horror, with its ability to conjure the unthinkable, to trace the contours of our deepest fears and darkest imaginings, can lead us into those shadowy corners of the human psyche, giving us permission to peer into the gloomy space under the bed or creak open the door to the basement. It allows us to sit with the uncertainties of life.
Scrolling to the end
Our contemporary content malaise feels very recent, yet the twentieth-century media scholars Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman predicted our technological capture decades before Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates devised a neat way for their fellow Harvard students to connect online.
Safe as houses
Sometimes, if I can’t get to sleep, I imagine I’m back in the house where I grew up… I like to go back there in my mind’s eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns.
Believe it or not
Cultural critic Chuck Klosterman reminds us that ‘any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true – both objectively and subjectively – is habitually provisional.’
Joker in the pack
Status itself is a little like a riddle: a code to be cracked, a hand in which you can’t see all the cards. Unless you’re Batman, however, the stakes for solving riddles tend to be comfortingly low, whereas the pressures of deciphering status can occupy a far more consequential role in our lives (it’s all fun and games until somebody loses their cultural capital).
Getting attached
I’ll never forget the thrill of reading Philip Larkin’s 1971 poem ‘This Be the Verse’ for the first time. I must have been about twelve – the ideal age to encounter Larkin’s deliciously forthright (and famous) opening line. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’
Time plays tricks
Ten years ago, the late, great cultural theorist Mark Fisher posited that our ‘montaging of earlier eras’ had reached such fever pitch that we no longer even noticed our submersion in a sea of bygones. And sitting alongside this purported cultural inertia are our increasingly divergent attitudes towards history – the far-right impulse to romanticise the past, the far-left desire to remedy its wrongs – and how they inflect our politics.
All legs good
This edition of Griffith Review illuminates the magic and mystery of animals – those we’re lucky enough to still share the planet with, and those, like dodos and dinosaurs, who are no longer here. It celebrates the complex bonds we have with all kinds of other creatures and reminds us what’s at stake for their – and our – survival…
An idle moment
In 2008, Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala embarked on an audacious project called The Trainee. For one month, she worked as a marketing intern at the global accounting firm Deloitte. Instead of carrying out the usual responsibilities expected of this role, Takala did…nothing.
