30 September 2018

Gerald Murnane and the possible present


This is Nobel Prize announcements week. 

Due to a sex abuse scandal within the Swedish Academy, however, no Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded in 2018.

Earlier this year, before the cancellation announcement, a profile of Gerald Murnane and his writing featured in The New York Times Magazine. The article, by Mark Binelli, was titled 
Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?


photo by Morganna Magee for The New York Times 

Last week, The Wheeler Centre (Melbourne) published online an audio record of a conversation between Gerald Murnane and Sean O'Beirne. Heartily recommended.


Sean O'Beirne and Gerald Murnane - photo by Scott Limbrick

Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.
My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.

- the opening of The Plains (1982) by Gerald Murnane

 detail
 A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
 someone looks at something... 
         
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