Sunday 27 October 2019

The Collector

Couple of things here.

New short story called The Collector. I wanted to write about a curiosity shop, mostly because it's very easy to write about curiosity shops - you can fill whole paragraphs very easily just by sitting down and listing things. It took me a while to get beyond the setting and work out what the actual story was I wanted to tell.

I've also been getting some vaguely political thinkpieces published, in the Australian journals Flood and Overland. They are:

Lost Creatures, on the WWI tank in the Queensland Museum. Patrick gets a mention in this.

Monsters of the Unknown, on the weird horny mysticism of Jordan Peterson and D. H. Lawrence.

Marx, Ramsay and the ghosts of the Western canon, on Australian conservatives' obsession with Western Civilisation and Marx' essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

 So there those are. The stuff about Marx and vampires I think is probably gameable. Dracula shows up, you can always find something to do with Dracula. Somebody put a game together where you fight Dracula and undead Napoleon in Paris during the 1848 revolution, I'll play it. I've been reading a bit of Victor Hugo as well and it all fits together.


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3 comments:

  1. Arnold K28 October 2019 at 01:50

    These are very good. You have a niche.

    Do you have any longer non-fictions?

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    Replies
    1. Matt Halton28 October 2019 at 17:02

      Thanks Arnold.

      Not yet. I just started doing it really. The people who run Flood are friends of mine so that gave me a leg up.

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  2. Anonymous4 November 2019 at 23:35

    I really liked your piece on museums. Reminded me of my grandfathers tellings of his youth in Nazi Germany, somewhere in the East part of the country that is now Poland. He was 14 and an apprentice to a blacksmith in the village. They were sent a POW as forced labour, a 19 year old chap from Britain who got caught in Dunkirk. That boy (to my grandfather he was a man, surely) from one of the great British industrial city-slums taught my granddad all he needed to know about politics: We, he said, are not enemies. It's the bosses up there who are filling their pockets over our corpses.

    My grandfather turned 91 this year and never wavered in this political beliefs.

    I once again congratulate you on your writing. Loved the blog, love your think-pieces and short stories just the same.

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