Category Quick Posts

• Achewood smell jokes

  RUNNING FROM 2001 TO 2016, more or less, Chris Onstad’s webcomic Achewood was one of the more remarkable cultural artefacts of the 2000s web. While a lot of it hasn’t aged well, there are other elements to it that remain incredibly powerful (the Michael Jackson strip from 2009 manages to sit in both columns). Roast Beef’s depression and anxiety, which are played on as subjects for jokes, are also treated far more seriously and humanely than in far ‘better’ works of literature. It’s completely internally inconsistent, surreal, some of it’s over-written, and ought to sit with the greats of Americana.

  At a fundamental level I am an immature person and have always appreciated an under-recognised part of Achewood’s running humour—jokes based on the sense of smell.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  The fart joke is one of the standards of comic writing, and should be treated as fundamental to literature as a 12-bar blues riff is to music.

  Posted 3 September 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading

  A City Plans For War (Emma Shaw Crane, Public Books):

  Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring not only the usual modernist improvements—development, growth—but also peace. Yet in postconflict Beirut, planners, developers, and architects, instead of designing for a peaceful city, plan for the war yet to come.

  It's time to let Canberra picturesquely decay (Ian Warden, Canberra Times):

  When Australians, in their endearingly muddleheaded and inarticulate way, complain that there is something “artificial” about their nation’s capital, one of the things they mean (without being able to put a muddleheaded finger on it) is that Canberra has no ruins.

  Conspiracy Theories (David Runciman, TLS):

  ...for the conspiracy theorist the absence of truth can only be explained by some sinister forces having decided to conceal it. And of course that is a conspiracy theory that many liberals find hard to resist. Why did people vote for Brexit? Because the ignorant voters were misled by nefarious forces. The same with the election of Trump. What are those forces? Take your pick...

  Posted 8 January 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Total House

  On Twitter, Trav (@Br_Tr) posted an art print of the Total House car park in Melbourne. It’s a really good looking piece of architectural art, and like all good art, it creates an emotional and intellectual response. Mine, of course, was fury.

  Posted 5 April 2018 · Author Liam Hogan

• Loneliness

  THIS MORNING, A MATCHED pair of posts about loneliness, by Amba Azaad in The New Inquiry and Chris Dillow.

  Azaad:

  Because straight white men refuse to recognize their own unpalatability, they come up with solutions to loneliness that appropriate the rhetoric of justice- and freedom-based ideologies without actually engaging in any rigorous structural analyses of their culpability in oppression. They don’t want revolutionary change but merely a polite tolerance that would make them more bearable. And this selfishness renders them incompetent to address the structures of loneliness as a social ill.

  Dillow:

  And this has been my experience too. My grammar school was on the other side of town and it played rugby, the function of which was not so much to produce rugby players as to signal to people like me that we didn’t belong. And then I went to Oxford which was chocka with charmless dullards from “nice” middle-class backgrounds*. All along there were cues that I didn’t fit in.
  Of course, the ruling class rarely gave overt outright messages of class hatred, just as Ms Hirsch rarely encountered crude racism. It likes to think of itself as open and tolerant. But this is self-regarding bullshit which rests upon a denial of the real lived experience of the tens of thousands of black, mixed-race or working-class people: Michael Henderson’s “review” in the Times is a wonderful example of this.

  Posted 30 January 2018 · Author Liam Hogan

• There are more important issues

  ONE OF THE RHETORICAL tricks I’ve noticed becoming increasingly common (though I may just have been sensitized to it) is opposition to some proposal, based on the claim that “there are more important issues to discuss”.

  John Quiggin on the ‘why won’t the x talk about y’ phenomenon.

  Posted 29 January 2018 · Author Liam Hogan

• The Para-Academic Handbook

  Specialists in all manner of things, from the humanities to the social and biological sciences, the para-academic works alongside the traditional university, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, usually a mixture of both. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our own terms, para-academics don’t seek out alternative careers in the face of an evaporated future, we just continue to do what we’ve always done: write, research, learn, think, and facilitate that process for others.

  That sounds pretty familiar to me. Read the Para-Academic Handbook immediately.

  Posted 6 November 2014 · Author Liam Hogan

• Pirates!

  What we admire in pirates—at least our fictional pirates—is that they so enjoy their villainy. They’re not sly or covert or subtle. Everything about them is over-the-top, histrionic: they glory in their infamy. While most of us drag ourselves through the daily dullness of our lives, they swagger, they pirouette, and, in the case of Captain Hook, even dance a tarantella. Like the trailblazer and the gunslinger, the pirate represents a New World ideal of freedom—a proud renegade living by his wits and his daring.

  Posted 12 September 2014 · Author Liam Hogan

• Voting for Albo

  I VOTED JUST NOW for Anthony Albanese in the Australian Labor Party’s leadership ballot.

  

  Posted 1 October 2013 · Author Liam Hogan

• Feta Margherita

  YOU WAKE UP UNDER a slowly rotating fan, the sweat pouring from your body onto the sheets of the bed you barely remember sleeping in. A tatty venetian blind casts narrow shadows across the room in sepia. One of The Doors’ songs, naturally, plays slowly, as you give a monologue describing your mental disintegration, and the progress of your terminal journey through another country’s trauma.

  Posted 29 January 2013 · Author Liam Hogan

• Fried Onion

  WHO DIDN’T TELL ME about this? Who neglected to mention the simple process, that could have delighted me so well in the years since I have been old enough to be trusted with a sharp knife and a hotplate? What horrible self-censorship stopped me ever doing this, and what shameful ignorance ever ruled the process out of bounds, non-decision, un-knowledge?

  Take half an onion, chop it very finely, toss it in a teaspoon of flour, and fry it in lots of sunflower oil.

  The recipe is that simple, if you want lovely crispy onions like burger places put on their hamburgers, like Indian places put on top of rice, like anybody would want an onion to turn into. The italics are mine for importance: this has been an honest-to-Protestant-American-come-to-Jesus-moment-cliché revelation. Open palms in the air, dancing, call-and-response, Billy Graham with fried food, genuine hallelujah-and-pass-the-chicken-salt stuff.

  Put it all over your messy-as-hell omelette. Yeeeeahhhhh.

  

  Posted 10 January 2013 · Author Liam Hogan