I heard back from Kill Your Darlings, who didn’t want the Facebook essay, so I’m sending it elsewhere today. I also heard back from Ironlak, who had filled the position already, but the search continues there as well. I’ve got an application in with a place called Liquid State, who deliver social-media solutions to community and health organisations.

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There’s a biopic about Tolkien out now, which we might go see later tonight because we’re child-free for the evening.

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I sent a pitch for the Facebook essay to Overland, and I pitched my essay about how reading literature has made me a better dad to Meanjin. Shoot for the stars eh – there’s always the moon to fall back on.

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I wrote to an author I used to work with at Wakefield Press, because we’re arranging for me to edit his latest poetry manuscript. You can find his work here, and Dodging the Bull is the collection of stories I edited for him at Wakefield.

It’s my first time back using WordPress again for a while, and the new backend is making me a bit woozy, but I’m sure I’ll warm to it – I’m sure it’s just as intuitive as it always was. Can’t figure out how to get the post-preview function to work Just shows ‘page not found’.

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Cory Doctorow’s second novel, For the Win, which I wrote about here, can be downloaded free.

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Kevin Rudd said on Rebel FM today that some union leader should be sacked because he was damaging the ‘corporate brand of the Labor Party’. Straight from the horse’s mouth: our government is not an entity that serves the people, but a business that serves its leaders, in pursuit of profit. SMH 😦

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I learned about something called ‘hauntology’ recently, which somewhat salves the anguish I feel when I hear shit like that from people like K Rudd. I’m drafting an essay for a literary and cultural theory subject I’ll be taking next semester, in which I hope to explore some weird combination of hauntology, the political disposition of disconnected generations, Hollywood propaganda, and the practice of primates who fling shit at visitors when they’re held in captivity.

We are a self-domesticated species, us humans, so I feel like it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to make the analogy that Hollywood propaganda is not unlike primate shit-flinging.

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I’ve also started reading a very interesting long-form essay called Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?, by the late Mark Fisher, who was an influential music writer and blogger at k-punk. So far he seems to be saying that ‘capitalist realism’, originally a play on ‘socialist realism’, is a term he has expanded to describe the belief that capitalism is the only viable economic structure we can hope for.

It’s a great essay so far, riddled with salient pop-culture references and names for ideas/feelings I’ve been living with for decades and been unable to describe, such as the above hauntology. (I think hauntology comes into it — but this may just be me conflating surrounding reading with the essay.) Here’s a link to Zero Books’ page for the book.