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Absolutely Revolting

July 2022, no. 444

St Peter’s first words to the resurrected Christ, ‘Quo vadis?’ or ‘Whither goest thou?’, capture the spirit of these reorienting times. In our July feature, senior contributors and commentators nominate key policy reforms for the Albanese government. Abroad, Ben Saul dissects the Western response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while John Zubrzycki assesses the prospects of an Indian democratic recovery. In the new mood of rapprochement, Julia Horne and Penny Russell reconsider the relationship between academics and government. New books on the historical divisions of gender and class are examined by Shannon Burns and Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Translation comes in for scrutiny with Frances Wilson’s review of Lydia Davis’s second collection of essays and Humphrey Bower’s review of Alison Croggon’s Rilke. There are reviews of new fiction by Geraldine Brooks, Michelle Cahill, and Yuri Felsen – and much, much more!

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Open Page with Susan Varga
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Custom Article Title: An interview with Susan Varga
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Susan Varga is the author of Heddy and Me, Happy Families, Broometime (co-authored with her partner Anne Coombs), Headlong, and Rupture. Her most recent book is Hard Joy (Upswell, 2022).
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Susan Varga is the author of Heddy and Me, Happy Families, Broometime (co-authored with her partner Anne Coombs), Headlong, and Rupture. Her most recent book is Hard Joy (Upswell, 2022).

 

 

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

A somnolent village in the French countryside during summer.

 

What’s your idea of hell?

A crowded restaurant, bare floors, scraping chairs, careening waiters barking off all the ingredients of every dish. Everyone shouting.

Read more: Open Page with Susan Varga

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Humphrey Bower reviews Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alison Croggon
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Article Title: ‘This terrifying beginning’
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Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies were begun in a burst of inspiration while he was staying at Duino Castle near Trieste in 1912. Walking along the battlements after receiving a difficult business letter, he heard a mysterious voice calling to him from an approaching storm. Their composition was then interrupted by a personal and artistic crisis that lasted until 1922, when he finished them in an even more astonishing afflatus which also included the gift of their companion-masterpiece, the Sonnets to Orpheus, at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland.
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Book 1 Title: Duino Elegies
Book Author: Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alison Croggon
Book 1 Biblio: Newport Street Books, $24.99 pb, 98 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/NKVZ4N
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Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies were begun in a burst of inspiration while he was staying at Duino Castle near Trieste in 1912. Walking along the battlements after receiving a difficult business letter, he heard a mysterious voice calling to him from an approaching storm. Their composition was then interrupted by a personal and artistic crisis that lasted until 1922, when he finished them in an even more astonishing afflatus which also included the gift of their companion-masterpiece, the Sonnets to Orpheus, at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland.

Read more: Humphrey Bower reviews 'Duino Elegies' by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alison Croggon

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John Hawke reviews The Beauty of Baudelaire: The poet as alternative lawgiver by Roger Pearson
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The life and work of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) must be viewed against the historical background of the crushing failure of the Paris revolution of 1848, in which soldiers massacred three thousand workers. In the elections that followed this unsuccessful working-class uprising, which Baudelaire and his fellow artists supported, the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine received 18,000 votes, while Louis Napoleon received fifteen million.
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Book 1 Title: The Beauty of Baudelaire
Book 1 Subtitle: The poet as alternative lawgiver
Book Author: Roger Pearson
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, £110 hb, 669 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/ORJgKG
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The life and work of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) must be viewed against the historical background of the crushing failure of the Paris revolution of 1848, in which soldiers massacred three thousand workers. In the elections that followed this unsuccessful working-class uprising, which Baudelaire and his fellow artists supported, the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine received 18,000 votes, while Louis Napoleon received fifteen million. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, it was an historical moment when ‘the extra-parliamentary masses of the bourgeoisie’ called upon the regime of the Second Empire ‘to destroy their speaking and writing segment, their politicians and literati’ in the interests of ‘strong government’. The new materialism of what Eric Hobsbawm terms The Age of Capital had little use for the Romantic role of the artist as ‘unacknowledged legislator’: scientific ‘progress’, economic determinants, and consumption become the ruling values of the modern world.

Read more: John Hawke reviews 'The Beauty of Baudelaire: The poet as alternative lawgiver' by Roger Pearson

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Maria Takolander reviews Rose Interior by Tracy Ryan
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Article Title: ‘A house before dawn’
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Umberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘machine’ and ‘work’ than about inviting them into a feminine world of domestic spaces and quotidian phenomena ...
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Book 1 Title: Rose Interior
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Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $24 pb, 112 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/4eYboG
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Umberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘machine’ and ‘work’ than about inviting them into a feminine world of domestic spaces and quotidian phenomena. If a reader were to conceptualise the text in the way that Eco describes, the engine for Rose Interior might be located in a poem called ‘Request’, where the poet announces her interest in whatever is

little and liminal,

won’t take much space, the odd
moment you think of ...  / or don’t,

whatever you wouldn’t look twice at ...

Read more: Maria Takolander reviews 'Rose Interior' by Tracy Ryan

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Lucy Van reviews Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
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Article Title: ‘Hold on, I’m comin’!’
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Every time I open Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, that Sam & Dave lyric ‘Hold on, I’m comin’!’, pops into my head. Is it ars poetica? Hold on: language, arranged in a holding way, might help us manage loss, though no hold will forestall it. I’m coming: the radical presence of the poetic speaker, whose ecstatic ‘now’ of speech exists in strange tension with the past, a thing lost, that full and irretrievable ‘then’. Anne Carson has written memorably of the strange telescoping of now and then in lyric poetry. This is the dilemma of the poet–lover: ‘pinned in an impossible double bind, victim of novelty and recurrence at once.’ Or, as Vuong puts it, ‘[t]he way Lil Peep says I’ll be back in the mornin’ when you know how it ends.’
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Book 1 Title: Time Is a Mother
Book Author: Ocean Vuong
Book 1 Biblio: Jonathan Cape, $24 hb, 84 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/4eYbJn
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Every time I open Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, that Sam & Dave lyric ‘Hold on, I’m comin’!’, pops into my head. Is it ars poetica? Hold on: language, arranged in a holding way, might help us manage loss, though no hold will forestall it. I’m coming: the radical presence of the poetic speaker, whose ecstatic ‘now’ of speech exists in strange tension with the past, a thing lost, that full and irretrievable ‘then’. Anne Carson has written memorably of the strange telescoping of now and then in lyric poetry. This is the dilemma of the poet–lover: ‘pinned in an impossible double bind, victim of novelty and recurrence at once.’ Or, as Vuong puts it, ‘[t]he way Lil Peep says I’ll be back in the mornin’ when you know how it ends.’

Read more: Lucy Van reviews 'Time Is a Mother' by Ocean Vuong

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