Fiona McFarlane - The Night Guest

On a second read, ten years on, The Night Guest holds up - and hits a bit differently now everyone I knew then is ten years older. 

Mitski - Nothing's About to Happen to Me

Artists can and should evolve and there are still flashes of what I liked about Mitski at the start here, but overall this most recent one doesn't stand out - lacking the jagged pop slashes that made Puberty 2 and Be The Cowboy so good.

Katherine May - Wintering

Wintering as a metaphor for the cyclical periods in life when withdrawal is required, and as the experience of the season itself - the metaphor enriched by the season's different elements and the behaviours they call for, illustrated from nature and human behaviour. The best insight is the central one - that time out from the pressures of productive life is natural, shouldn't be feared or disdained, and can be done in ways that are ultimately healthy and fruitful for one's wellbeing. 

Joy Williams - The Pelican Child

I've always liked Williams' short stories much more than her novels, and in this collection of 12 - each first published in the last decade or so, I think - the gap in style has closed somewhat. By which I mean these stories - later period I suppose, compared to those previously collected in The Visiting Privilege and the distinctively themed flash/revelation fictions in Ninety-Nine Stories of God and Concerning the Future of Souls - tend to be particularly uncompromising in their direct focus on the anagogical (a word I learned from Williams' own, famous list of what a short story should be) and also on the state of environmental collapse our world is in, and in their obliqueness in every other respect ... story, character, conventional theme, progression of events. These are not stories offering comfort, or even recognisable feeling. There are dogs everywhere.

The ones I like most do tend to be those that offer at least a recognisable emotional hook, if not always a through-line. "Nettle", dwelling on a childhood loss as re-enacted through characteristically Williamsian slipping through time for repeated encounters with a deceased father ("Once, when he was older, he and his mother had gone to Florida."). "Chaunt", a brutal end-of-days dwelling. "My First Car", an enjoyably existential goof that ends with a gesture more familiar among more conventional short story-writers, the turn towards what next, but here an unpredictable surprise in both structure and tone: " 'No, I want to give it to you. It's a gift. I'll give you some eggs, too,' Marilyn said happily." "Chicken Hill", a troublingly precocious child (another Williams speciality) who may or may not actually exist, visiting an older woman whose memories and beliefs may or may not be wholly accurate.

Susan Choi - Flashlight

Flashlight exerts a pull that can feel like an undertow, and all the more so for how deliberately it's structured around secrets and absences - both of which effects are apt in light of the novel's opening and structuring scene of father (Serk) and daughter (Louisa) on the beach at night, and Serk's disappearance and presumed drowning. 

It covers a lot of ground - temporal and geographic - and is balanced with a skill and integrity that means the twists and reveals are surprises, but always in retrospect connected to what's been showed before, and the endings for its three central characters (the third being Anne, Louisa's mother) feel inevitable in their emotional timbres and broad outlines even though the specifics aren't predictable. 

There's a control to the book's events and tone that I find impressive - the damage taken by all of its characters from their childhoods onward is depicted without exploitation or cheap shock, and their limitations as adults follow naturally - so I felt I understood and empathised despite how frequently unsympathetic their actions towards each other and others are. 

And it's direct, and graceful, in painting the broader historical and social contexts that are Flashlight's co-equal subject together with its lens on individual and familial relationships and gaps - across Japan, Korea, the US and the DPRK from the second world war onwards.

Its focus on family and individual characters across multiple generations feels 'novelistic' in a way that's almost a throwback - or at least not the type of fiction I commonly read. But I was carried along by it. I liked Trust Exercise more, but this one has a charge of its own.

"Brassaï: Secret Paris" & "Watch These Hands" (Heide Museum of Modern Art)

Brassaï

I guess the idea of Paris will never not be romantic, to me or millions of others, and these from the 1930s are wholly in line with all those ideas and images - and probably part of establishing them in the first place. So many iconic places, scenes and people - famous, archetypal and otherwise. (Below, Le Pont Neuf) The ones of other artists - Picasso, Dali, more - are direct and wonderful.

Watch These Hands

From a number of Aboriginal artists during time spent at InPlace’s Garambi Baanj (Laughing Waters) Cultural Precinct relatively nearby in Eltham, plus a small number of others who seem meaningfully associated including Siri Hayes.

Jennifer Dikarr Roy, War Plane, 2006; Aunty Kim Wandin, binak (basket), 2025; Siri Hayes, Conversation piece: transforming the atmosphere, 2026; Zena Zada Cumpston with Maddison Miller, fish kills: Grand Theft Water (spectacular feats of modern engineering), 2025.

Brooke Wandin, ngurrakngurrak ngangabunhan, 2026; ochre over an Arthur Streeton (I think) screenprint; the outdoors of Heide itself visible through the translucent fabric.

Pádraig Ó Tuama - Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World

Many - most - of the poems in this wonderful collection feel to me like an arrow, travelling forward with momentum and arriving at an end that carries resolution. I don't know how much of that is Ó Tuama's tastes, and how much an element of contemporary style; most of these 50 poems were written and published in the last few years, and nearly all in this century (and out of a range of cultures, and from poets ranging from the extremely established to the seemingly emerging). And they're accessible - neither obscure nor difficult - and made more so by Ó Tuama's short, unfailingly illuminating analyses of each.

Of course, some I liked more than others, but there were none that didn't speak to me at all - which reflects that accessibility, yes, but also a generosity in the selection and in the individual poems. In several cases I was moved. Kei Miller, "Book of Genesis" (about the word let); Zaffar Kunial, "The Word" ('Whatever is matter, / must enjoy the life'); Ali Cobby Eckermann, "Kulila" (hearts can't make it up), Kathleen Flenniken, "Married Love" (this one has a classicism that reminded me of Philip Larkin). And many more.

***

Phase One

Dilruba Ahmed

For leaving the fridge open

last night, I forgive you.

For conjuring white curtains

instead of living your life.

For the seedlings that wilt, now,

in tiny pots, I forgive you.

For saying no first

but yes as an afterthought.

I forgive you for hideous visions

after childbirth, brought on by loss

of sleep. And when the baby woke

repeatedly, for your silent rebuke

in the dark, 'What's your beef?'

I forgive you for letting vines

overtake the garden. For fearing

your own propensity to love.

For losing, again, your bag

en route from San Francisco;

for the equally heedless drive back

on the caffeine-fueled return.

I forgive you for leaving

windows open in rain

and soaking library books

again. For putting forth

only revisions of yourself,

with punctuation worked over,

instead of the disordered truth,

I forgive you. For singing mostly

when the shower drowns

your voice. For so admiring

the drummer you failed to hear

the drum. In forgotten tin cans,

may forgiveness gather. Pooling

in gutters. Gushing from pipes.

A great steady rain of olives

from branches, relieved

of cruelty and petty meanness.

With it, a flurry of wings, thirteen

gray pigeons. Ointment reserved

for healers and prophets. I forgive you.

I forgive you. For feeling awkward

and nervous without reason.

For bearing Keats' empty vessel

with such calm you worried

you had, perhaps, no moral

center at all. For treating your mother

with contempt when she deserved

compassion. I forgive you. I forgive

you. I forgive you. For growing

a capacity for love that is great

but matched only, perhaps,

by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you

could then forgive others and

at last find a way to become

the love that you want in this world.

NGV International / "Bearing witness: Contemporary Asian art from the NGV Collection"

Some new acquisitions in the permanent collection that struck a chord:

Kay Sage - Other answers, 1945. The eye is drawn to the flapping sheet and the mood as a whole is dream-like, oddly posed against the geometry of structures and shadows. Shades of Tanguy, Dali, de Chirico.

Two Rineke Dijkstra pieces of teenagers on beaches - Castricum aan Zee, the Netherlands, May 28, 1992 and Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 27, 1992. She's a remarkable photographer.

Richard Estes - Ticket window, 1969. The first time I've come across Estes I'm pretty sure, and the gleaming, shadowy realism of this one's a stunner. While I'm making comparisons - Edward Hopper anyone?

Bearing witness: Contemporary Asian art from the NGV Collection

A small show and a neat one. Prilla Tania's Hello and goodbye (2007) was my favourite - six photographs in series, two rows of three with horizons aligned; all but one (I think) with the artist herself along with a mat, a side table, a cup, an Indonesian artist in dialogue with a distinctively Australian landscape. Also good: Yee I-Lann's Anak Negeri (2007), exploring the displacement of Indigenous Malaysians in a staged photo that reveals more oddities the closer one looks, and evades any simple mood or emotional texture.

"Poetry goes no further than language: A historical moment of art becoming art again" (Buxton Contemporary)

Spotlighting the work of a small collective of Chinese artists in the 1980s-90s who called themselves 'New Measurement Group' and aspired to create art that eliminated 'anti-rationalist' elements - spiritual, directly emotional and in any sense subjective - this exhibition reminded me how deep it's possible to go with art, philosophy and the intersection of the two; the work itself didn't move me at all, and probably neither was it meant to. Interspersed were the relative sweetness of Darcey Bella Arnold's responses, including her orange peels, and finally "A Pipe is not a Poem" - which resonated interestingly with several of the individual artists' works (when not working as part of the collective) holding strong surrealist elements.

"Are you lonely tonight? I'm so lonesome I could cry." (ACCA)

Or, in the words of the Akan (West African - Ghanaian) saying, 'to human is difficult'. Loneliness is a rich topic and the artists come at it from a range of perspectives - most of which felt unsurprising if I'm honest, though I enjoyed many of the pieces. Top of the pops was Kayla Mattes' "Lonely Planet" (2025-2027), a 7-metre tapestry layering the history and present day of the personal-consumer digital world. Also, the two-channel video - "Beyond the Shadows: Gideon Appah Poetic Vision" (Gideon Appah, 2025) - that cites that saying, along with much other philosophy, as human figures - stand on the beach and surf.

Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

When I read - and enjoyed - Parasol Against the Axe, the word that most came to mind was 'puzzling' and that's again true of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, a collection of stories linked by themes and motifs (keys recur) and, for reasons that aren't clear, characters ... although those glimpsed recurrences of characters, seen from different perspectives and at different points in their lives across different stories, add to the sense that the whole is something that has at least an orientation towards meaning. 

I had to take my time with these stories; mostly, I didn't feel they gave up their meanings easily or (in the case of the one about puppets, "Is Your Blood As Red As This?"), at all. Still, they're compelling. "Presence" stands out; strangely, for a story about two psychologists who come across a method of encountering their hypothetical, unborn child through a series of ghostly visitations, it feels the most naturalistic of the lot. So does " 'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea". 

Curious, but not for curiosity's sake; crisp writing, a slantwise view on the world. A lot to like, though I'm not sure I'll return to these in the way that I have done to, say, Kelly Link (with whom she's definitely in the same ballpark, vibes-wise).

"Tony Albert: Not a Souvenir" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney)

This was an impressive and engaging exhibition - political through and through, expressed in lots of ways, through the reclamation and reuse of 'Aboriginalia' and otherwise. I was drawn to the 'Blak Velvet' pieces and the stunning large-format riffs on Margaret Preston - both immediately impactful while also multi-layered and nuanced.

House of the Dragon season 3

For me it's only been in this third season that House of the Dragon has properly begun to catch my imagination - the stakes now well-enough established and the characters well-enough defined and with enough depth behind them that I feel some proper investment, especially those who've been there from the start. It helps that the war proper between the Blacks and the Greens has arrived too; Ormund is a great antagonist and Gwayne turns out to be one of the few straightforwardly likeable characters. Matt Smith continues to be excellent as Daemon - eminently 'believable' as a fantasy character - and it works that we continue to see a lot of the events effectively from Rhaenyra's perspective (even when she's not present, and even as her trajectory darkens).

(seasons 1 & 2)

Death on the Nile

The Kenneth Branagh one. Much like my recollection of Murder on the Orient Express - which doesn't seem to have made it on to extemporanea, perhaps I only watched part of it - it is full of stars, glossily shot but too artificial-looking, and somehow not as fun as it seems it should be. 

The Odyssey

Of course it's an Event - Christopher Nolan does the Odyssey. And as far as monumentality goes, it delivers. There's a density to it, bathed in shadowy blues and greys, with a thudding soundscape throughout; also I'm not sure of this but for a film that's so epic, I suspect it spends a lot of its time in moderate close-up and middle-range rather than sweeping views from a distance. 

As spectacle, The Odyssey works - it's immaculately put together. I suspect it's lacking in truly indelible images - at least none that are with me right now, a day on - but several scenes have a charge to them that I think will linger, the visit to Hades foremost among them, and in a different way the repeated blocking in dining hall. And while the voyage itself is maybe a touch too episodic-feeling - despite the dipping through different timeframes and the framing device of Odysseus gradually recalling his own story on Calypso's island - each of the crew's encounters is exciting in its own right. 

It takes the overt narrative theme of homecoming and links it to the breaching of Troy's home through the trick (the horse) that Odysseus reveals late, in what lands as an unlocking revelation, he fears undermined caused a rupture in the order of things (turning them into the feared 'people from the sea'), and the suggestion that the length of time it takes him to return home might reflect his own guilt about this, while also implicitly drawing attention - and they're filmed to suggest this reading too - to the way that the crew's successive landings are themselves invasions of others' homes. Ultimately its anchor is more psychological than thematic or mythic - for better or for worse.

The casting's good (as expected with Nolan directing) and performances range from good to good-enough - Anne Hathaway and Robert Pattinson in the first category, Matt Damon and Tom Holland in the second. There's a fair bit of charisma among the rest of the cast and the smaller players all make an impression (Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, Elliot Page as Sinon, Samantha Morton as Circe, John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Zendaya as Athena), though some don't have that much material to work with. 

All up, this Odyssey is very good even if lacking in the thrill of genuine greatness. And I wonder if it will grow with time.

Margo Price - Days of Unrest

"Can't Stand Still" is the stand out amongst these protest-themed songs but not by a big margin - Days of Unrest is an even, accomplished record, nothing extraordinary but unfussy and good.