A Sick Fantasy
Every time I am sick, I have a fantasy. It involves having other people do my work for me and that could only happen in a life far from the one I live as a hands-on, do-everything-for-myself, ordinary person. Illness does not suit a restless body like mine. In my fantasy, I live in a gothic manor house built of stone and sitting in its own rolling acreage. The boundaries are so distant that no fencing is necessary. T

TWITTERATURE
REVIEW with bonus contents list @whinjar Here we go again! Another compendium raiding trad lit for cheap laughs & hefty profits. Well, EMOE (eat my own eyeballs). Need a few lines. Actually, I needed a birthday present for my mother-in-law, so I picked up a copy of Twitterature “The World’s Greatest Books Retold through Twitter” (Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, Penguin Books, 2

Blackest Saturday
They call it Black Saturday but that is not particularly accurate. I call it Inferno Saturday because it was the day that the gates of Hell opened and in one blazing breath, a great spinning fire burst upon us, consuming everything in its way. It was only as the horror of it unfolded in the following days, that people, mute with shock, struggling with that knowledge, attempted to find words to deal with the unspeakable. There had been bush fires before. Ash Wednesday of 1983, stood out eerily in most recent memory: the aptly named first day of Lent was the very day of the catastrophe, which left huge welts of cinder on the outskirt

What’s so special about Patrick Swayze
In a world that routinely abandons genuinely critical thought in favour of populist diversion, it is easy to overlook the finer distinctions that identify the shape beneath what looks like an amorphous blob… Patrick Swayze’s ballet dancing career was finished early, cut short by injury, but he never stopped being a ballet dancer. That is what he brought to the screen, in a broadly varied career spanning three decades. That is what is

The September Issue
Fashion is evil. But I’m a very bad girl, so I went to see The September Issue and just wasted 90 minutes of my life. This documentary, about the making of the 2007 edition of the American Vogue’s annual big issue, gives no insight into the magazine’s real workings, offering instead a few personality sketches, ranging form the ludicrous to the tragic. Everyone working on the magazine is about 76 years old but looks only 67 because most of their facial muscles don’t work, the effect, I presume, of botox. The vapid comments wafting from their rigid lips are, I presume, the result of what goes on in their heads – not m