Author: opoudjis

God Bless New Zealand for maintaining the time-honoured traditions we’re less attached to in Australia! James Barr’s answer to What are the “Burger-ish” foods in your culture or country? I suspect every culture has their own burger/sandwich-like food: hearty, inexpensive, easy to prepare, consistent with meat in between flour/rice/corn-based bread thing. details the venerable Dead […]

The first five pages, I’d decided: nah. The tone is all bouncy and frivolous and a little Hooray Henry. The language is good, but he doesn’t have the magic he had in Heart of Darkness. Once the first storm hit the ship in the story, the ship was derailed, but the prose was set aright. […]

More cultural relativism, people. I think Adam Hartline has said it best: Vote #1 Adam Hartline’s answer to Why has booing someone off stage become a negative thing? For whom? All the polite people? The actor stares in my face and asks me a question, am I not allowed to answer him however I please? […]

I am a dunce in the visual arts. I walked through the Uffizi, and kept saying, “meh, Raphael can’t draw… Michaelangelo thinks people are made of granite when he draws… Finally, someone who gets it!” (Caravaggio) So my choice is a dunce choice. I like it a lot: sensuous, elemental, striking, visceral, driven by symbols, […]

Oh, this was good. I was in the strange position of having watched the film (SEEN: Apocalypse Now Redux) before the novella. So instead of finding the references from the film to the book, I was going the other way: “Oh! So the Russian is the Photo-Journalist! And the essay is the MA thesis!” But, […]