Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Boil 1.59

A "Russian's" impressions from the Writers' Festival


Mama

I have made it to Melbourne! The city by the bay has opened me again with greeting arms! You will be gratified to know that the City Circle Tram still runs. I spent much of my first three days here on it, scanning my Festival Program, lighting small fires and drinking a toast each tome I passed Flagstaff Station. Is Flagstaff still Cousin Fyodor’s favourite landmark in the world? I suppose a man who has never left his room cannot be choosy about such things. Tell him the station still remains closed on Sundays despite his letter writing campaign. I have made a pencil sketch for him to hang above his wife.

Tonight I will be seeing John Ralston Saul discuss the Collapse of Globalism. There are rumours that he will do so nude as a mnemonic device for the audience, like Uncle Gryshkin at Sonia’s first wedding. Let us hope the great thinker does not share Gryshkin’s Complaint. I have never seen so much untouched food in my life.

Ralston Saul argues that the idea of globalism is dead, and that nationalism has returned to fill the vacuum. We must keep this from Grandfather at all costs. His dream of selling beetroots to the Swedes is the only thing keeping him alive. That and his linked chain of colostomy bags. Can he not be convinced to remove each one as it fills? And that giving them faces does not fool anyone that they are his cats?

posted by Geist @ 3:42 pm