'Intimate Antipathies is a collection of essays on the writing life, offering Luke Carman’s unique comic perspectives on writers’ festivals, residencies and conferences, the particular challenges faced by writers who grow up in contested borderlands like the suburbs of Western Sydney, and the connections between writing and dreaming, writing and mental illness, writing and the complications of family life. From his famous jeremiad against arts administrators in ‘Getting Square in a Jerking Circle’, through the psychotic attack brought on by the collapse of his marriage, to his surreal account of meeting with Gerald Murnane at a golf club in the remote Victorian village of Goroke, the essays follow the writer in his oscillations through anxiety, outrage and ecstasy – always returning to his great obsession, the home on a small mountain in Sydney’s west, where his antipathies with the real world first began to shape his imagination.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Epigraph: That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all. -Renata Adler, Speedboat (1976)
'Early into his new essay collection Intimate Antipathies, the follow-up to his NSW Premier’s Award–winning An Elegant Young Man, Luke Carman shares Gore Vidal’s theory on the two kinds of writer. The first is the true wordsmith; obsessed with mastering the art of language, their passion lies not in what they write about but how they write it. The second is the writer whose chosen vocation is a kind of belated therapy; theirs is a feverish but ultimately futile endeavour not to conquer the written word but to utilise it in the vain hope of overcoming some long-ago inflicted psychic damage.'(Introduction)
'Luke Carman, you ask? I imagine him up there on his mountain at the end of the line where it’s always the proverbial dark and stormy night, languishing in a monkish cell, tap, tap, tapping away at a block of old acrimony as he dreams up his revenges.' (Introduction)
'Early into his new essay collection Intimate Antipathies, the follow-up to his NSW Premier’s Award–winning An Elegant Young Man, Luke Carman shares Gore Vidal’s theory on the two kinds of writer. The first is the true wordsmith; obsessed with mastering the art of language, their passion lies not in what they write about but how they write it. The second is the writer whose chosen vocation is a kind of belated therapy; theirs is a feverish but ultimately futile endeavour not to conquer the written word but to utilise it in the vain hope of overcoming some long-ago inflicted psychic damage.'(Introduction)
'Luke Carman, you ask? I imagine him up there on his mountain at the end of the line where it’s always the proverbial dark and stormy night, languishing in a monkish cell, tap, tap, tapping away at a block of old acrimony as he dreams up his revenges.' (Introduction)
