Reading the City of Literature is a snapshot of Melbourne’s literary activity over the span of a year. It’s been a while since our last Reading the City of Literature, but we are happy to say that it’s back.
So please scroll through this whole website, click, read and share!
I am like a flower. I have so many petals that make me who I am, but at the centre of all those petals is my pistil – my Aboriginality.
I can’t imagine ever getting sick of the beach. It would be like getting sick of going on holidays: impossible.
There is an invitation there to reflect on past relationships I’ve been in, with the non-Jews and the Jews. The textures of the bodies and the love that has flown between us. The passions and the hurt. The ambiguities and the incredible neuroses.
Begin at the main entrance, with the university colleges behind you. If you pause for a moment to listen, you should hear the traffic and trams in nearby streets, maybe distant yells from the two sports ovals you are sandwiched between.
The thing about a garden is—you have to be able to see—all sides—of its / cycle—Hold it—lapidarian—in your mind.
Counter to my more mindless hobbies is the attention that tending to bees inspires in me—attention that varies in its depth of focus, ranging from passive observation to meditative focus, unlike the homogenous, habitual energy I give Instagram.
On a personal level, this resonates. Who doesn’t remember, with something more than fondness, the first scene of belonging? Who would argue for rootlessness?
TIME IMMEMORIAL, two sides to every coin. Two tellers brush a tale. Broken pieces. A mirage. Here’s mine. Genesis.
I’m Tex.
I don’t say much, just enough. But this is not my story.
The package that emerged from the back of the delivery van was much larger and heavier than Gregory Buchanan was expecting.
In the city there is no place for those without a reason.
It would be a shame to slip away knowing there were visions I hadn’t seen, items I hadn’t possessed. I’m extremely aware of a fact my dad somehow hasn’t learned: life is there to be lived.
She was startled when the door burst open, pushed by a firm hand then flung inwards by the wind, and a splatter of thick raindrops blew in from the street. They were followed by the most beautiful woman Charlotte had ever seen.
I am languid in a bad way I am languid in a good way!
Verrition: an untranslatable term Césaire used to indicate a kind of sweeping. Not really: it was a term to indicate the double jouissance of licking words, over and over again.
What a tremendous gift it would have been, to have known that there were people in history who might now be called trans, people who lived as the genders they knew that they were, regardless of what society had told them.
