This paper examines the writer’s notebook to ask: why does it persist as such an effective generative tool? Drawing primarily on the work of Michael Taussig and Roland Barthes, while focusing on the ways in which writers have themselves... more
This paper examines the writer’s notebook to ask: why does it persist as such an effective generative tool? Drawing primarily on the work of Michael Taussig and Roland Barthes, while focusing on the ways in which writers have themselves described their experience of using journals, it examines the notebook as a remarkably polyvalent and talismanic text. In its first part it explores the difference, often strongly marked by writers, between the journal and diary, arguing that it is exactly the notebook’s ‘album’-like quality of fragmentation and interchangeability, which bothered Barthes, that creates its value for writers. In its second half, it examines the different discursive or formal strands typically found within the notebook: its ‘extractive realist’ (Gibson 2009) techniques for briefly recording the ‘real’ in ways that transform it for creative use; its curation of quotes, which descends from the Renaissance commonplace book, as a means of professional self-fashioning; and its appeal as a physical object representing an enchanted promise of creativity. It concludes that the notebook’s longevity and energy derive from the constant juxtaposition of these often-contradictory elements, which create the ongoing quality of ‘something else’ that writers so often remark upon.
Pre-peer review version of essay published in Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2 (2020): 91-108. PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION. The concept of compassion, defined as suffering with, has a long history often entangled in that of the... more
Pre-peer review version of essay published in Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2 (2020): 91-108. PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION. The concept of compassion, defined as suffering with, has a long history often entangled in that of the cognate term pity. It has proven to be a changeable concept that is not only responsive to but integral to historical change itself. This is because it is a sociable emotion, but, in the sense that it expresses a desire to alleviate the suffering of another, the emotion also expresses the desire to effect change. For this reason it is a particularly timely lens through which to consider the emotional effect of climate change upon local communities, and the new emotional regime taking shape in the Anthropocene – and the dawning of the Pyrocene – beginning with Armidale, New South Wales through the drought and fire of Australia’s Black Summer of 2019–20, but extending beyond.
Personal essay on the effect of coronavirus on the one's sense of time. (Republished in Sophie Cunningham, Ed, FIRE. FLOOD. PLAGUE: AUSTRALIAN WRITERS RESPOND TO 2020, Penguin Australia, November 2020).
This article discusses the process of editing The Australian Book of the Road. It uses William Hay’s “An Australian Rip Van Winkle” as an exemplary Australian road text. With its diffuse sense of hauntedness, multiple time-warps, and... more
This article discusses the process of editing The Australian Book of the Road. It uses William Hay’s “An Australian Rip Van Winkle” as an exemplary Australian road text. With its diffuse sense of hauntedness, multiple time-warps, and eerie appropriation of northern hemisphere literary texts, Hay’s story offers a suggestive frame for reflecting on our relationship with the road in Australia and the way it is figured in our writing; to consider the road not only as a material artefact represented by our road texts but a set of cultural traditions and tropes. Its layered hauntings offer paths to unpacking of the odd sense of unease that permeates so many of these road stories. Using “road writing” (my own term) as a strategic generic category through which disparate works can be interpreted, this paper will consider them as instances of “spatial history”, following Paul Carter, opposed to more triumphalist literary traditions. It will also, finally, consider the Australian road wi...
