Know thyself

Confronting fate through mythology and science

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  • Published 20250506
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook, PDF

THE FIRST TIME I left Australia, I was six years old. My parents took my sister and I to Greece, the original home of our grandparents and great-grandparents.

My first memory of this journey is seeing the Parthenon glowing in the sunset while drinking portokaláda (orange soda). We visited my great uncles and aunts and our cousins in Halkida, on the island of Evia. 

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Reluctant farewell to a trusted companion

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Natural History, basically anywhere that allowed strollers. I spent a lot of time in Barnes & Noble on 86th (which is now, depressingly, a Target). There was even special stroller parking on the kids’ level.

In fact, I didn’t really go anywhere that I couldn’t get to with the stroller. The children and I only left Manhattan a total of nine times the entire year (three times to go to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, twice to go to a Greek restaurant in Astoria that had an extremely high Zagat rating and was very good, once to go to the Bronx Zoo, once to go to Brooklyn to see what all the fuss was about, once on the train to Boston and once we hired a car to drive to Washington, DC to spend Easter with friends). That was it.

Here was the thing – the red double stroller gave me the freedom and security of knowing that I could go outside with both children, be completely prepared with all my accessories and baby/toddler supplies and everything would be okay. If I could make a plan to leave the apartment and walk there with the stroller, I would do it.

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A half-century of hatchet jobs

Non-fictionAuthors and publishers worry that bad reviews kill sales. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case, but plenty that bad reviews distress and demoralise their subjects. Many people who care about literature endow criticism, and especially negative reviews, with magical powers. They hold dear the fantasy that if critics did a better job, if they were braver soldiers, the profound structural problems that bedevil Australian literature – books rushed to press, low pay, policy indifference, plummeting reading rates, crisis in higher education, not to mention the racism and the classism – might somehow disappear. A cracking review ennobles its subject with attention and consideration, but I’ve never seen one earn an author a higher advance on their next book or buy them more time for revision, let alone shift the federal arts budget.

Stuff

FictionMarty was my algorithm. He told me which internet plan to get. He researched the best conductive wall heater. He chose my clothes every night for the next day. He gave me a list of where I could go on my lunchbreak. Sometimes his decisions were arbitrary, or mysterious to me. But I did not care. It was, yes, like being a child again. And maybe Rachel was right; maybe there was something to that, something deep in my psyche. But all desire came from that deep, dark place of infancy. Your leather penchant is my life-coach-boyfriend-boss. None of us can take the high road here.

Culture warrior

Non-fictionIt’s safe to say, then, that Star’s protagonist is not a carbon copy of Mishima, despite the novelist’s status as Japan’s first Sūpāsutā (superstar). Twenty-three and blindingly gorgeous, Rikio Mizuno, known by the anglicised monomer Richie, is a Japanese James Dean. ‘I am a speeding car that never stops,’ Richie muses, conflating the icon with the instrument of his death. ‘I’m huge, shiny and new, coming from the other side of midnight… I ride and ride and never arrive.’ Unlike Dean, Richie survives past his twenty-fourth birthday, the addition of a single year weighing on him like a death sentence. At the story’s conclusion, when Richie is confronted by the crinkled visage of a matinee idol of yesteryear, he realises that having celebrated the twenty-fourth birthday Dean was denied by his Porsche 550 Spyder, ‘Little Bastard’, he has missed his chance to, as Dean said, ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’  Anyone who has been to a gay guy’s thirtieth birthday party will recognise the sentiment.

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