Ha! Love it.

Looks like Paul Strand!

It’s perfectly good in its way! I like a fair bit of it. I certainly wouldn’t say Carey is a bad novelist (he isn’t), though I do kind of think he sold out but also was, like, really really good at it.

The stories are great. The novels are good within the subgenre of the 80s/90s booker-winning novel. His talent is unquestionable.

Those early stories are simply incredible and have been possibly more influential than any of the novels (which are mostly good). Glad to hear he was enjoyable in person—what a fantastic experience.

This is interesting to me because in the article he pokes fun at his younger more avant-garde self who, he imagines, would criticise the writer he became. But his younger self was the better writer!

I remember being tired but not hungover!

Yeah, that’s the bit that sounds familiar to me, too. I have come to accept that I experience most major life events in probably unhealthy dissociative states: looks like this was another one!

I honesty can’t remember the graduation speech at all but that sounds right?

There’s this: researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publicati...

I think there are plenty in genre fiction still, but fewer in lit fic if the yardstick is Mailer/Roth or even, like, Martin Amis. In Australia, Trent Dalton, Tim Winton, Robbie Arnott, Flanagan, Murnane are all well-known authors who write ‘masculine’ books, I think?

“…while Solzhenitsyn suffered in the gulag, Amerena’s characters suffer in an environment even more soul-destroying: Melbourne literary dinner parties.”
Golden.

Oh--my favourite album of the last year! You'd love it and the artist has made it available as a free download: castexotic.com/realistikstu...