Literary Studies
La Trobe University Essay | 'Infidelity: "The Monkey’s Mask" in Poetry and Film' by David McCooey
Movies are often criticised for their lack of fidelity, for not keeping faith with their sources, especially novels, their audience, or their glorious antecedents. Infidelity is also a key plot device, especially of genre films: melodrama, comedy, crime, even the western. We keep going back to the movies partly because they don’t give us what we want. The New York poet Frank O’Hara suggests this in ‘An Image of Leda’, his breathless adaptation of the myth of Leda and the Swan as an allegory for watching films:
... (read more)Strange Journeys: The works of Gary Crew by Bernard McKenna and Sharyn Pearce
Author! Author!: Tales of Australian Literary Life edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
State of mind: it’s a simple phrase but it is one which has always interested me. ‘State of mind’ is about what? Sets of feelings? Predispositions and moods? Or perhaps more it’s a term to do with the groove which thoughts regularly follow along. A state of mind is one which makes you respond in a particular way: you tend to act in a particular way; you have recurrent feelings.
The phrase interests me because it defines a feeling so intimate – so normal and everyday. Indeed, it is so intimate that it becomes difficult to say what a state of mind is. What are its boundaries? Where does it stop? Is this mind-set just mine or is it something to do with events out there, the latest news about the economy, the extravagant telephone bill which has just arrived, the relaxed feeling of walking along a beach, a recent argument, an enjoyable dinner party? For however influential and pervasive states of mind are, they are also fluctuating, amorphous things.
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