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Non-fiction

If you’ve ever gone wandering through the nooks and crannies of a large city, loitering with intent and with all the time in the world, attending to unlikely beauties and the aspects of the marvellous that are hidden in full sight right there in the ordinary – then please read on.

Would you knowingly invite a reticent person to dinner, someone like my Oxford supervisor, or my friend who believed in sealing her lips? If you had no choice, how would you deal with such people? Sit them next to Chatty Carl or Commandeering Cathy in hope that their quiet attentiveness would mop up the attention-seeking of the other. The voluble need vessels, after all, into which to pour their words.

In 1958 when I was eight years old my parents took me to New York. I fell in love with its powers of abstraction. It became the city of my mind. In 1988 we took our son to New York. He was eight, and the same thing happened. Now, the door to his room is covered with a large map of midtown Manhattan in detailed axonometric projection. He reads books about places and technologies and is thinking of becoming an architect.

Running in a sequence of dismembered sections, the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes can be read as a kind of fragmented text. Its choked tunnels, collapsed archways, brief truncated arcades can be seen as the scattered passages, say, of some early ontological discourse.

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.

Alive in ‘Ant and Bee’

I am in the process of buying a thirty-year-old ambulance in 2004, sight unseen, and in the opinion of most people, I’ve gone crazy. Listening to Mr Bible from Homebush Motors in Sydney make his sales pitch on the phone, I think they might have a point.

In Nabatieh, the small town in the south of Lebanon my forebears and I come from, Hassiba has been the uncontested diva of Ashura.

When the Sydney Swans met the Hawthorn Football Club at the Sydney Cricket Ground in May last year, the game was a strange kind of anti-football: topsy-turvy, through the looking glass.

Carpentaria imagines the cultural mind as sovereign and in control, while freely navigating through the known country of colonialism to explore the possibilities of other worlds.

We in the American middle-class grew up in a world almost entirely devoid of smells, except for that of household cleaning products, and barely remember our childhoods at all, except for the television programmes.

By the marvels of science my skeleton had been wholly drawn out from my body and had been replaced in my body by a synthetic substitute.

After a period of loss, and much change, I began walking. Of course begin is hardly the word. Most of us start walking from early infancy, and never stop.

Keats wrote that ‘Twang dillo dee’ – which means ‘amen to nonsense’ – should be written across the backs of politicians and ‘at the end of most modern Poems’ and on all American books...

'For Aira,' writes Chris Andrews, 'professionalisation is not a historical achievement to be defended, but a kind of confinement from which it is imperative to escape...'

My life has been in the suburbs, so it is pretty hard for me to avoid houses as subjects, writes artist Noel McKenna.

Street photographer Andrew Stark has been documenting Sydney in gritty and grainy 35mm black and white for over twenty years.

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