I was in love again. I was in trouble
Nearly 200 years before any couple tested a relationship by trying to assemble an IKEA flat-packed Billy bookshelf, prefabricated and portable buildings - including NSW’s Legislative Council - flooded into Australia.
Shipped from the United Kingdom, Singapore and Germany in wooden crates, some of these buildings came with instructions. Others didn’t.
These portable buildings were part of a Victorian-era “love of mail-order”, according to NSW Parliament’s collections and heritage co-ordinator Wes Stowe. A catalogue advertising the building that ended up becoming NSW’s upper house included fences, warehouses, dwellings, arcades, government buildings and military barracks.
Love of mail-order’: How Australia’s earliest buildings came out of a box
A New Ballet Company Built on Guns, God, and Trump
When Doug and Ashley Benefield started the American National Ballet, it wasn’t supposed to end in death.
Theology’s Invisible Hand Commonweal
‘Learn to Swim’
The Publishing Ecosystem in the Digital Era: On John B. Thompson’s “Book Wars” LA Review of Books
Good Omens
Natasha Chahal
Something strange happens to fans when they watch football. Even more so when watching the national team. For many, as their team progresses through a tournament, superstition takes over. They have to wear the same shirt (unwashed) as last time, or be in the same place to watch the game. The weather’s the same – an omen surely? Is the match on the BBC or ITV? In the 1998 World Cup, England even had their own faith healer. But Eileen Drewery couldn’t stop them losing to Argentina on penalties in the second round and was among the reasons Glenn Hoddle got sacked as manager the following year.
Things get in your eye
The challenge of moon dust / the Österberg Collection Online Catalogue, the origins of netball and the gymslip / the soundtrack of Wipeout / an interview with J Masic/ eBay is awash with haunted dolls / generative artwork by Yann Le Gall / the dance music archive / the Moviedrome archive (both via b3ta) / save the Crystal Palace Pool / Cinemagraphs / Recovering Lazyholic, a blog / nuclear-powered rockets and robots / photographs by Brendon Burton.
We Cried a River of Laughter
Writer Marie Moïse describes her search for her roots and traces her family’s history of cross-Atlantic displacement.
In The Kathmandu Post Srizu Bajracharya has a Q & A with Nepali poet Sulochana Manandhar Dhital, in ‘The only way to be a writer is to write and write’.
Best sci-fi of the past decade ?
They've published the results of the NPR Books Summer Poll 2021, in We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade.
Crowd-sourced and hence pretty predictable, but not a bad starting-list .
'Reproductive labour in Scandinavian poetry'
At Eurozine they have an English translation of Elisabeth Friis's piece, originally published in Passage, on 'Reproductive labour in Scandinavian poetry', in the nicely titled ‘I see a similarity between myself and potatoes’.
BücherFrauen-Literaturpreis shortlist
In the UK, there's the Women's Prize for Fiction, in Australia they have the Stella Prize, "celebrating Australian women's writing" (fiction and non), and now in Germany they have the BücherFrauen-Literaturpreis, a €10,000 prize being awarded for the first time this year and honoring works by women authors which 'contribute to the equality of the sexes and the strengthening of women and girls' -- and they've now announced the shortlist for this year's prize.
Two of the five titles are translations -- both from the English.
Rosa Liksom Q & A
hlo continue their 'The State of Things'-interview series, now with Rosa Liksom: Humanity May Still Choose Another Path.
Among her responses:
Literature has removed itself from nature, and humanity itself has lost its emotions and sensuality. Stepping into their place are bare intellect and economics. The language of economics has been infused into art, and has become art's language, as well as that of literature.
New Yorker Favorites
- Can reading make you happier?
- Doomsday prep for the super-rich.
- The white darkness: a journey across Antarctica.
- Time-travelling with a dictionary.
- The assassin next door.
- The curse of the buried treasure.
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David Sedaris has contributed to The New Yorker since 1995. His new book, “A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020),” will be published in October, 2021.
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