I take screenshots of images on Twitter: the sun as faint as a snuffed ember, air the texture of felt, tree

media feeds turn into art, documentary, narrative, therapy and social

he prime minister is missing, then in New York it is said, helping to expedite a real estate deal or the coming of the rapture, or so people speculate.

Climate change and its present effects haven’t receded enough for us to understa

he past sometimes has a way of illuminating the future. The first commercial locomotive j

rs make rich use of the metaphorical possibilities of landscape and understand

es they live in. But increasingly I feel a cognitive dissonance between the world around me and the world of realist fiction, in which climate change hardly exists, even as an afterthought. It’s not that I want to read only about cli

lle Juchau’s gorgeous, lyrical The World Without Us; the visionary compression of James Bradley’s classic of the genre, Clade, and the devastating Ghost Species; Jane Rawson’s hilarious and wonderful A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists and the intense melancholy of From the Wreck (one of the saddest books I have ever loved); the dislocated beauty of Jennifer Mills’ Dyschronia; Alice Robinson’s The Glad Shout, which interweaves a realist present with future climate-affected disaster to breathless and devastating effect. And Alice Bishop’s A Con

Yet if a writer set a novel in a major city surrounded by fire, and that fire and the events t

ngoing misappropriation of funds and water,

in a dystopia of sorts already (as Indigenous people have for centuries). The formerly stealthy trickle of events is rushing in like floodwater, and not only in Australia. It’s there in the aberrant weather and its effects (flood, fire, drought, collapse of ecosystems), the increasingly Orwellian words, lies and actions of

hysicist Alan Lightman (Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine)

. Terms such as ‘dystopia’ and ‘climate change’ with relation to novels do somethi

s ‘apocalypse’ and ‘end times’ began to be used easily during those months and became co

we write about it, which things will we choose to leave out, and in what vein we will write them: as comedy, as tragedy, as portent, or as bit parts in the larger body of work? If we leave its effects entirely out of our next book

It seemed like there were a thousand threads running through the season, stitching it all together, or fraying loose. A small insistent one for me was wondering how n

The smoke

Smoke haze is everywhere and it’s from everywhere. Back in Melbourne when I take the do

e head

There are two more months of summer to go, but news broadcasts have stopped me

nami of extreme events has been so relentless that each is quickly forgotten in favour of its successor.’ He lists the events. I had forgotten the Meni

Things turn political.

very day I read a ne

ut I find comfort in the shared feeling, and am startled every day by people’s words.

not poetically ‘bruised’ but as if it’s been pulverised with a club until its entire surface bleeds

n Twitter: the sun as faint as a snuffed ember, air the texture of felt, tree branches lit up like

put on a heavy jumper, wrap a shawl about my shoulders and sit at my desk. The dogs stare at me until I tuck them up, and brood.

C, passes a billboard advertising new stocks of facemasks in fashion colours.

. Sydney fills with smoke and everyone wants the best air mask. The prime minister is missing, then in New York it is said, helping to expedite a real estate deal or the coming of the rapture, or so people speculate.

hey’re ‘alert but not alarmed’. On social media there are images of bone-dry, smo

t’s not only that the air seems weird and thick, and that I feel uneasy, but al

the writers festival

dro

It’s like the apocalypse out there.’

Your bread is making me sick.

But bread is no prophet, and it was never the point. T

At the same time, it’s hard to shake this creeping sense of betrayal. T

I think: That bread can’t save you. You will die, maybe even sooner rather than later —

one’s lifestyle is being pathologized

The shift toward more stasis, less action, more inside, less outside, more ordering, less making, has been a long time coming. It’s hard to know how much I have chosen this life of constant internal work

en whose ambition of immortality extends from their professional legacies to their own physiques.

regor Ansbach, the man exalting the natural world while executing those who populate it, is in tech, because of course he is: he is Jeff Bezos is Jack Dorsey is Mark

o watch a story about nature’s dominion over man, man’s belief in his dominion over nature,

Rustic as fuck. Even if you can’t touch it, smell it, taste it, the starter is the proo

he return to old

writes Michelle Allison in The Atlantic. “

The shift toward more stasis, less action, more inside, less outside, more ordering, less making, has been a long time coming.

The body is just a machine, yes?

is Jeff Bezos is Jack Dorsey is Mark Zuckerberg

To watch a story about nature’s dominion over man, man’s belief in his dominion over nature, and death after death after death, as the same narrative unravels around me

nfortunate bangs who lives in the cabin in the woods in the German crime series Pagan Peak. “

also operate according to the delusion that I can control my body.

As uncertain as you are that that starter will turn into that bread is as uncertain as you are that your body will survive all of this

. You will die, maybe even sooner rather than later — despite the bread

Always that round pebbly brown and beige crust. Rustic as fuck

Your bread is making me sick

opprobrium