Notes on Memory

In her book Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch writes that 'belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated'.[1] Hirsch was positing her landmark theory that a type of memory exists that is passed down generations, even though they may have no direct …

Notes on Buying Flowers

I'm in my Mrs Dalloway era. I can't remember when I first learned about Virginia Woolf, but I do remember Kew Garden was the first of her works I read. Then I read A Room Of One's Own, and then To The Lighthouse in 2020 and Orlando in 2021. I was blown away by Woolf's …

Notes on Fragmented Existences

Patton, you Americans take watching films much too seriously. It's like going to church for you. For us, going to the cinema is just the same as going to the market to buy cabbages. In Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, by Xiaolu Guo and translated into English from Mandarin by Rebecca Morris and Pamela …

Notes on Protest Art

A couple of weeks ago, two protestors glued themselves to a Picasso painting at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. A week later, protestors threw tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London. The latter certainly made news, likely because of London's cultural capital and the renown of Van Gogh …

Notes on Unhinged Women

I've been thinking about unhinged women a lot lately. Fictional ones, of course, but sometimes I also feel myself slipping down the drain a little. Maybe it's a sign of the times we're living through, but it feels like news and politics and the world (*waves hands wildly*) just never stops. We're living in a …