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- Published 20240206
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-92-4
- Extent: 204pp
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Gutenberg babble
In his essay, ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’, British columnist James Marriott argues that the recent decline in literacy – and book-reading in particular – amounts to a civilisational crisis. That he does so on Substack, in X-friendly paragraphs that unfurl beneath headings such as ‘World without mind’, ‘The end of creativity’ and ‘The death of democracy’, is not in itself a reason to dismiss his argument. But nor is it an irrelevant detail.
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Time plays tricks
IntroductionTen 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.
Farming futures
Non-fictionThe tempo of seasonal food production gives Mildura its seductive groove. The race is on to get food to market when prices are high and before it wilts and rots. But this race is only incidentally about food and mainly about finance. When markets fail or supply chains are disrupted, harvests are bitter. Watermelons, zucchinis and lettuces are ploughed back into the ground. Grapes are left hanging on vines, sitting in coolrooms and rotting in shipping containers grounded at ports.
The kiss
FictionThe name, when it came, sounded as if it had been uttered by somebody else. The man’s look shifted from one of mild affection to puzzlement. ‘Excuse me?’ He was still smiling, but it was a different kind of grin – the type of smile people offer a stranger who begs them for spare change.
