Non-fiction Archives | Giramondo Publishing

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.

Much contemporary art is a bit too worldly for the polite lust of the connoisseur or the headache-inducing world of academic theory. By ‘worldliness’ I mean the application of common taste, acquired from looking not just at art, or texts, but at the world and everything.

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...'

Who am I? Where do I come from? The answers to these questions are dependant less upon a place and more upon an idea, an image, a dish, according to Allen S. Weiss.

'Anyone reading through my archives after my death will find detailed notes on the matters alluded to somewhat coyly just now, but no one should expect to receive after my death any message from the Other Side' writes Gerald Murnane. 'One life as a writer will have been enough.'

There are many ways to break a tongue, and there are many ways to recall its power, not only as an instrument of speech that shapes sound within its home of the mouth and palate, but as an organ involved in knowledge acquisition, sense making, flights and figment.

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

Nicholas Jose visits Lake Mungo at the turn of the millennium: 'The setting at the lunette was conducive to time travel, to feeling dwarfed and transitory, which is one version of the sublime.'

'It would be absurd to pretend that I have “read the bible”,' Helen Garner writes. 'Ten years ago I sat down with three translations and toiled my way through it, taking months. It was an experience of weird, laborious intensity. But you can’t just read the bible once.'

Tanerai (pr. ta-né-raï), or Taneraic as I call my language in English, was first written down in August 1968, when I had just turned thirteen. In my case, writing did indeed precede speech.

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

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Non-fiction

Tony Lockett in the Eighties

SlipzonesThe Politics of Pleasure in Art Writing Today

On writing Carpentaria

Karmic Traces

Under the Usual Heading (Two Dreams)

WalkingWest MacDonnell Ranges 2002

Amen to Nonsense

César Aira’s Discontinuities

Fragments of an Autobiography in a Stuffed Cabbage

The Breathing Author

Tongue Broken

Home Delivery

The Mungo Excursion

Sighs Too Deep for WordsOn Being Bad At Reading the Bible

A + B = Essence

Down South