By Naomi Riddle — 29 March, 2021
“About an hour ago she surfaced and shook her arms and peered around and dived again and surfaced and saw someone and dived again and surfaced.” Alice Oswald, Nobody (2019) “Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.” Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad or The Poem of Force’…
By Naomi Riddle — 27 November, 2020
‘Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts, crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God. I was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter.’ Max Porter, Grief is the thing with feathers (2015) In February,…
By Naomi Riddle — 30 September, 2020
‘It was a time governed by contradictions, as in I felt nothing and I was afraid.’ Louise Glück, ‘Landscape’, Averno (2006) ‘When I say ‘I,’ when I say ‘my,’ I am behaving like a fruitfully messy lump.’ Wayne Koestenbaum, Figure It Out (2020) Two weeks ago, I injured my right knee. Now, when I…
By Naomi Riddle — 29 May, 2020
‘Quarantine didn’t just take things away; it revealed—with a harsh, unrelenting clarity—what had already been lost.’ Leslie Jamison, ‘When the world went away, we made a new one’, New York Times Magazine, (19/05/20) The world of Covid-19 is a world where Donald J. Trump rolls the dice on a re-election bid and decides 100,000…
By Naomi Riddle — 31 March, 2020
‘In this moment, we have been asked to mitigate being numerous together. Solidarity in the pandemic, for those in my position, is situated in not making things worse; this we can choose.’ Natasha Lennard, ‘After the Quarantine, the Flood’, Commune, (2020) ‘Go back to Tolstoy, forget the dystopias you got second-hand from crappy TV, say…
By Naomi Riddle — 31 January, 2020
“Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition. What we want is people in power saying the truth is not the truth.” Ali Smith, Spring (2019) “Governments which lead the masses into misery must guard against the masses’ thinking about government…
By Naomi Riddle — 29 October, 2019
‘Need I say more? The field is wide open as I thought to mention in the beginning, thinking of how I feel about the difficulty of puffing your way up a steep hill on a bike that isn’t motorised. The future is upon us and the Art of Criticism has already come into its own…
By Naomi Riddle — 27 September, 2019
‘The story of the earth—the story of its ‘symphonic synergies’ in which its parts renew each other, in which everything conspires with everything else to bring forth new life (where even death is converted back into life)—is itself on the edge of unravelling.’ Delia Falconer, ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Sydney Review of Books, (2017) ‘Although the goal—the…
By Naomi Riddle — 30 August, 2019
‘She thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences.’ Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, (7 December, 1993) Last week Diversity Arts Australia released Shifting the Balance, a report detailing the cultural diversity in leadership roles across Australia’s arts,…
By Naomi Riddle — 31 July, 2019
To consider the magazine industry over the last decade is to see an industry in distress: there is the migration from print to digital, the loss of advertisers to social media, and the power of big tech in determining who reads what. In 2018, Facebook’s decision to make non-disclosed changes to their hidden algorithm meant…