Cirrus@Austlit

'The most astonishing and accomplished sequence in Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 arrives near the book’s end, as he describes the near-death experience that inspired his first novel, Death of a River Guide, published in 1994.' (Introduction)          

'I am looking for something to say about the short story as a category, something to distinguish it, and my mind alights on the word ‘fun’. Is it possible, I wonder, that the short story permits the author to play, to have fun, in a way that other forms do not? Do we tend to ignore this because the word ‘fun’ is difficult to fit into an aesthetic claim, because the concept itself seems to resist being aestheticised, its monosyllabic punchiness evoking childish play or adult condescension that dodges the analytical eye? It was just a bit of fun. Don’t you know how to have fun? This isn’t fun.'  (Introduction)   

'During the devastating bushfires of 2020, a few seconds of footage became emblematic of the limitations of the Australian Prime Minister. In The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, Sean Kelly recounts the moment: Morrison was visiting a bushfire-afflicted town and approached a firefighter who told him, ‘I don’t really want to shake your hand.’ ‘Morrison moved his hand to the man’s left hand and grabbed it, appearing to move it slightly, then walked on to the next person.’ This apparent Morrisonian malfunction was shocking as an instance of thoughtless disrespect, but it was, Kelly believes, congruent with his approach to public life. More recently, Australian of the Year Grace Tame was subjected to Morrison’s strategic obliviousness, when her pained expression, as the Prime Minister shook her hand and posed for a photograph at a pre-Australia Day event, was made only more conspicuous by his resolutely blank grin, the face of a man unequipped to acknowledge or negotiate anything other than total compliance. Morrison behaves like this because he takes his task to be the arranging of images that will be seen by millions of potential voters, with every action in service of selling himself to that public. Therefore, the individual before him, the firefighter or the advocate for survivors of sexual assault, is erased.' (Introduction)

'Every 30 minutes, the Twitter account Random Restaurant (@_restaurant_bot) posts a randomly selected restaurant’s name, address and four images scraped from the location’s Google listing. Some of the more elegant photos, with balanced colours, clean lines and smooth-looking, if not necessarily appealing, food, seem to be taken by representatives of the restaurant in question, but the majority are taken by diners or passers-by who have decided to upload them. These photos rarely follow any aesthetic criteria, but that does not diminish their fascination. I could spend hours wandering a gallery in which these pictures were displayed, taking slow time with them, imagining the worlds they imply, and the intersecting lives they capture.'  (Introduction)

'Child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote,

‘There is no such thing as a baby,’ meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone, but is essentially part of a relationship.

'In Mother & I, Ianto Ware frequently uses the title phrase as if the subjects are inseparable, even when another formulation might make for smoother prose, as if the three words, sufficiently repeated, might transform into a single pronoun acknowledging Ware and his mother, Dimity, as being at once entwined and distinct. Ware appears committed to this Winnicottian approach, providing a gentle redescription of motherhood as an evolving relation, a singular set of possibilities, rather than a reductive category. (Introduction)

'An essay is both diagnosis and symptom. When placed in a collection, removed from its original context, an essay shifts its weight from the first category – describing the world – to the second – now elevated by its new companions, contributing to the apparition of some grand pattern. Along with the enlargement of the author’s name, from by-line to organising principle, so must the ideas enlarge to justify the new arrangement of material.' (Introduction)

'There’s a Paul Klee sketch hanging in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled A Guardian Angel Serves a Small Breakfast. The figure hovers just above the ground, its wings spread. It holds a tray upon which breakfast items, including a kettle, are intertwined with one another, a tangle of gentle lines. Liquid pours from the kettle’s spout, even though it isn’t tilted. Emerging from the angel’s chest is a small love heart in red watercolour. There are many lessons to take from this sketch, one being that it’s good to serve someone a small breakfast.'  (Introduction)

'A collection organised around ‘the best’ of anything invites a particular kind of evaluation, a seeking of the criteria that such an elastic adjective might imply. The criteria employed for the selection of essays, fiction, and poetry appearing in The Best of The Lifted Brow, Volume Two seem to be grounded in a desire for intellectual cheekiness and a willingness to embrace creative transgression.' (Introduction)

'Writers’ festivals are strange institutions, often literature-adjacent rather than literary. Discussions tend to revolve around the idea of books rather than the books themselves: what a book means, how it was made, how the author feels about it. When we subject writers to interrogation before an audience, what is it we want from them? Too often, we act as if the book were a question and the author an answer. Such an approach is dangerous. A culture in which intellectual conversation cannot account for the complexity of literature will equally be unable to reckon with the complexity of things like language, identity, race. On Saturday, when a white Australian interviewer asked an African American writer why, given America’s vigorous policing of language and affirmative action policies, racial inequality continues to be rampant –‘I would expect that you’d find a highly racist society to have a highly racist language’ – Australia’s particular failure of cultural imagination was on display.' (Introduction)