Still Life With Cat

1.  Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behaviour. 2.  When you see someone walking by themselves, l...

Any long-time readers might remember this post from five years ago, when my dad, having blown out the candles on his 80th birthday cake, s...

Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the ...

To the best of my knowledge, the technology doesn't yet exist for blogging smells. So you'll just have to infer the scent of this ...

One knows, of course, that sequels never play like the original any more than backlash does, but the original Bad Girls of Literature post ...

This is the classiest one I've ever seen. I love the bewildered-looking woman at the end, who seems to think she has been bewitched and ...

Beit Shemesh Flash Mob Imagine what would happen to these girls and women, most of whom are identifiable in the video (and no doubt from cou...

Publishers Random House have just posted to Facebook a link to an article called '10 Legendary Bad Boys of Literature', which feat...

The item on top of the work pile at the moment is a now very battered advance proof copy of a novel called The Little Shadows by the C...

Overheard today in the shopping-centre carpark, a fragment of an exchange between the youngish parents of two little girls: HIM: ... but ...

I was lucky enough to meet John Clarke once, maybe fifteen years ago. Clive James was launching a big poetry anthology at the Melbourne Wr...

What shall I worry about today? There are a number of choices. [NB: the state of the world is an ongoing given, no surprises there.] Wil...

67 years ago tonight (thanks to Persiflage for the correction to my always-shocking arithmetic), at Adelaide's first-ever Carols by Ca...

"If one takes the normal American ambition to be the pursuit of happiness, and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly t...

To use what might be considered an unfortunate expression, I have no dog in this fight. I'm a straight woman in her late 50s with no in...

I originally wrote this as part of the comment conversation on the last post, but I'd quite like to say something positive about journal...

In which the very savvy Mr Benjamin Law takes a screen shot of SA Liberal MP Michael Pengilly's Tweet this morning in response to one fr...

... now that the standard November pile of work has been whittled down almost to a reasonable level. (And don't think I'm not gratef...

This kind of stuff -- students buying pre-written essays to memorise and then regurgitate (and I use the verb advisedly) in their HSC exam...